Astral Codex Ten

Places: G

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Places: G

Cities, neighborhoods, regions, and other geographic anchors. This section collects the G 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.

Germany70 mentions across 70 issues

Germany is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 70 times across 70 issues between March 09, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "post-war reform experiences in Germany and Japan"; "look at Japan and Germany after WWII"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Germany". It most often appears alongside France, China, United States.

Article page
Germany
Mention count
70
Issue count
70
First seen
March 09, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
The success of the French reforms raises the question: why did they work when other externally-imposed reforms often fail? Most likely this is because the reforms were much more radical than is typically the case. The French reformed simultaneously in many dimensions and weakened the powers of local elites, making a return to the status quo ante largely impossible. Even when some pre-revolution elites returned to power after 1815, there was a permanent change in the political equilibrium. This scope and radicalism of the French reforms are common with the post-war reform experiences in Germany and Japan and stand in contrast with many other reform experiences.
Do I believe they have a tendency to generally make things better? I'm not sure. One thing I'm still chewing over was a throwaway line in the paper saying that of course getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth, look at Japan and Germany after WWII. The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Dubai, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States of America
I don’t envy the PAC if they have adjudicate disputes involving, say, a doctor who has chosen to be regulated by the medical code of Norway suing her office building regulated by the laws of Houston, Texas. But they’re trying to rise to the occasion: their arbiters include a former Arizona Supreme Court judge, the head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, and “the first Chilean lawyer to obtain permission from the Berlin Bar Association to act as a legal advisor in Chilean law in Germany”, which I guess sounds like the level of convolutedness you would need to be experienced in to make this work.
Inline links: their arbiters
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
Towards a Truly Free Market by John Medaille Appendices These are optional elaborations on sections I glossed over because the Book Review Is Too Damn Long. Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism Malthusianism in George's time was wildly popular, and often invoked by the ascendant proponents of Social Darwinism who took Charles Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" and recast it as a moral justification for the Just World Hypothesis. Essentially, those that are doing well do so because they are more "fit", and those that are less "fit" tend to perish, and furthermore, this brutal process will actively "improve" the human race. This philosophy was the energizing intellectual force behind both the Eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. George clearly hates everything about this philosophy but attempts to steel-man it anyways: The Malthusian doctrine, as at present held, may be thus stated in its strongest and least objectionable form: That population, constantly tending to increase, must, when unrestrained, ultimately press against the limits of subsistence, not as against a fixed, but as against an elastic barrier, which makes the procurement of subsistence progressively more and more difficult. And thus, wherever reproduction has had time to assert its power, and is unchecked by prudence, there must exist that degree of want which will keep population within the bounds of subsistence. The weak form of Malthusianism is "people are as dumb as deer and will breed endlessly until there's not enough food and everyone starves to death." The strong form of Malthusianism is, "of course people aren't mindless deer charging into a brick wall, but there is a firm upper limit that can only give so much before nature will cull the herd without mercy." And by George, we can't just dismiss the strong form out of hand: "what seems clearer than that there are too many people?" However, George is suspicious of how easily the Malthusian theory justifies contemporary economic assumptions and assuages the moral sensibilities of the establishment: The great cause of the triumph of this theory is that, instead of menacing any vested right or antagonizing any powerful interest, it is eminently soothing and reassuring to the classes who, wielding the power of wealth, largely dominate thought... It furnishes a philosophy by which Dives as he feasts can shut out the image of Lazarus who faints with hunger at his door; He points out how it lets self-styled "Good Christian Men" reframe their own greed and indifference as just plain good sense: In this view, he who in the midst of want has accumulated wealth, has but fenced in a little oasis from the driving sand which else would have overwhelmed it. He has gained for himself, but has hurt nobody. And even if the rich were literally to obey the injunctions of Christ and divide their wealth among the poor, nothing would be gained. (Aside: I've heard this exact defense offered by many of my fellow Christians) Okay, George makes a strong moral case. But a moral case isn't enough, and I think this is where many activists of all political stripes go wrong. If you attack the premises of an idea as "dangerous" because it could lead to bad consequences, you're still stuck with a real problem if the premises that animate that "dangerous" idea turn out to be actually true. If they're true we're stuck with them, and unless your competing policy admits to the same grim facts, your opponent will just dismiss your entire argument and more importantly, so will their audience. But if the premises aren't true, then the dangerous and scary policy prescription – say, "let the Irish starve to death" – is both evil and unnecessary. History has shown that many officials will shrug their shoulders at "evil" policies so long as they believe them to be "necessary." Cool, we've established that Malthusianism is bad. Now let's establish that it's wrong. A Brief Interlude from the Future From where we're sitting in 2021, we don't even need George to refute Malthusianism, history has done that for us. Instead of increasing at an exponential rate, fertility rates are crashing all over the world. Not in one country, but in virtually every country, and in many the birth rate is already below replacement. Fertility rates have been crashing so hard that some are calling it a "Global Fertility Crisis." The absolute size of the human population is still growing, but this is just due to inertia; the human population will peak somewhere between 9 and 10 billion in the 2060's, and then decline from there. The two main things Malthus got wrong were failing to anticipate 1) advances in food production technology like the Green Revolution, and 2) that humans can control their own fertility rates. George's strongest arguments against Malthusianism strike directly at the provably false claims of its 19th century proponents and provide some extremely salient applications of George's philosophy. George takes up the cause of India, China, and Ireland, which were often cited as examples of "overpopulated" countries where many have starved and been forced to emigrate. Per the Malthusians, this is the fault of too many of these poor, ignorant, and deficient people crammed together in too small a space. By George, it can't be the fault of population density – in his time, Germany, Belgium, England, Netherlands and Italy all have higher population densities than India, China, and Ireland, and could therefore support higher populations with the right conditions. And there's certainly nothing wrong with the people themselves: This arises from no innate deficiency in the people, for the Hindoo, as comparative philology has shown, is of our own blood, and China possessed a high degree of civilization and the rudiments of the most important modern inventions when our ancestors were wandering savages. Instead: It arises from the form which the social organization has in both countries taken, which has shackled productive power and robbed industry of its reward. India is poor not because it has too many Indians, but because it is oppressed by too many Englishmen: The millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worse of all is the steady grinding weight of English domination... India now is like a great estate owned by an absentee and alien landlord George gives us lots of details about the plight of India, China, and Ireland, but for the sake of brevity I'm just going to present the heartbreaking case of the Great Irish Potato Famine and let it stand in for all three. To sum up, from 1845 to 1852 there was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland. About one million people died, and another million fled the country. The entire population dropped by about 25%: The extreme poverty of the peasantry and the low rate of wages there prevailing, the Irish famine, and Irish emigration, are constantly referred to as a demonstration of the Malthusian theory worked out under the eyes of the civilized world. Many prominent intellectuals of the day looked at the crisis, shook their heads, and said – what do you expect when those ignorant Irish Catholics breed like rabbits and strain Ireland's carrying capacity to its limit? It's just natural selection at work! George will have none of it: The laborer was just as effectually stripped by as merciless a horde of landlords, among whom the soil had been divided as their absolute possession, regardless of any rights of those who lived upon it. Okay, they had to pay some rent, so what? Didn't they bring their suffering on themselves? Why, the intellectuals ask, didn't the Irish work harder, why did they not improve their local economy and agricultural base? And most importantly, why did they depend on a single monoculture crop (the potato) if a single blight could knock out their entire food supply? By George, because The Rent Was Too Damn High! tenants... even if the rack-rents which they were forced to pay had permitted them, did not dare to make improvements which would have been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner. (emphases mine) The Irish were really trapped. Working harder to improve the farmland to increase its yield could actually leave them worse off. Any increase in their land's productivity goes to the landlord in the form of increased rents. But even this structural impoverishment of the land wasn't sufficient to cause the famine. Ireland still produced enough food to feed its people: For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past trenches in which the dead were piled. People were literally starving and dying, but because of the structure of land ownership they couldn't even pay their rent, let alone purchase the food grown from their own lands and raised with their own hands. Since the local population couldn't afford it, the (English) landlords sold it abroad to the highest bidder. It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute – to pay the rent of absentee landlords; a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to production... they lived on the potato, because rack-rents stripped everything else from them. The Rent Is Too Damn High, and it's not because the designated underclass of the day have too many babies or are too uneducated, too ignorant, too religious, too lazy, or too foreign. George gets really mad about this, and calls out John Stuart Mill and Henry Thomas Buckle by name for lending credence to the Malthusian explanation of Ireland's suffering. I know of nothing better calculated to make the blood boil than the cold accounts of the grasping, grinding tyranny to which the Irish people have been subjected, and to which, and not to any inability of the land to support its population, Irish pauperism and Irish famine are to be attributed; and were it not for the enervating effect which the history of the world proves to be everywhere the result of abject poverty, it would be difficult to resist something like a feeling of contempt for a race who, stung by such wrongs, have only occasionally murdered a landlord! Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Conventional Law 1: Wages aredetermined by the ratio between capital devoted to the payment & subsistence of labor, divided up by the number of laborers. Conventional Law 2: Rent is determined by something called the "margin of production," AKA the "margin of cultivation." What's that? Let L be some land. Let W be the worst land available. Let A = the produce L makes. Let B = the produce you get applying the same amount of labor and capital to W. The Rent of L is given by A - B. The margin of production/cultivation is the difference between how much you can produce from a particular piece of land compared to the least productive alternative. This is the only conventional law of distribution that George accepts as correct. Conventional Law 3: Interest is the ratio between capital demanded by borrowers and supplied by lenders, falling as wages rise and vice versa. To quote Mill, interest is determined "by the cost of labor to the capitalist." The problem with these three laws is if Land, Labor, and Capital are the only three factors of production, and each gets its own return, than the three returns should balance. In other words: Return to Production = Rent + Wages + Interest If your three returns sum to more or less than 100% of the return to production, something's off, and George says the old laws don't add up – the only one of these he accepts is the law of rent. What's wrong with the other two? First we've got to stop using "profits" to mean a return to capital. If we look into a profit stream, we see more than one kind of thing. Conventional economists list the following: Wages of "superintendence"
Inline links: Towards a Truly Free Market, Social Darwinism, Just World Hypothesis, Eugenics, so long as they believe them to be "necessary.", fertility rates are crashing all over the world, Global Fertility Crisis, human population will peak, Green Revolution, Great Irish Potato Famine
Book Review: Global Economic History
April 21, 2021 · Original source
By 1800, we're already starting to see the developed/undeveloped country gap we know today. The 1800s version of the gap was: Britain was developed, everyone else was undeveloped. Various Western countries noticed this and invented what Allen calls the Standard Development Model. This was the first time anyone had ever tried to do development economics or answer the question "How do countries industrialize and how can we do it faster?" - Britain had industrialized kind of by accident and never considered the question. But other intellectuals in other Western countries started considering the question around this time, especially Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton in the US. They and others independently converged on a four-pronged plan:
Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
May 06, 2021 · Original source
The gold solidus was in circulation among the wealthy in the urbanized areas around Rome and Carthage. It was also found along what Brown calls “corridors of empire.” For instance, the city of Trier (modern Germany, near Luxembourg) was an important imperial center near the Rhine frontier. A great deal of taxes and supplies flowed to Trier and to the armies of the Rhine. The wealthiest landowners and most splendid villas crowded along these corridors “tied to an imperial gravy train.”
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
American foreign policy comes off looking surprising competent through Zeihan’s story. In describing the history of Bretton Woods, he runs through some key participants and highlights the benefits of their membership. India, hurting the Soviets in South Asia; Sweden, hurting them in the Baltic; Argentina and Egypt, limiting their influence in South America and the Middle East; and most significantly, China, depriving them of their best ports. Why did America fight in Korea and Vietnam? To demonstrate the value of the security guarantee component of the Bretton Woods regime (“if the Americans proved unwilling to engage the Chinese in Korea, then was their security guarantee for the Germans against the Soviets really worth what they said it was?”).
We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.
Inline links: 4, 5
American empire was rejected out of an unwillingness to have a forever-war of occupation that would have been impractical to wage against the Soviets. Instead, America offers a deal that is “one of the great strategic gambits in history.” The deal offered benefits not only to England, France, and the Allies, but also to Japan and Germany that they couldn’t have even hoped to achieve had they won the war.6 Zeihan refers to this deal as “free trade” and “Bretton Woods,” based on the New Hampshire town in which the Americans dictated its terms to the Allies in 1944. It would let everyone sell into the best and last market in the world, with their commerce protected by the world’s only real navy, and all that America asked in return was the provision of cannon fodder against Soviet invasions. That may not have been such a big ask, as they may have lost their independence to such invasions without American assistance anyway. The deal was offered in pursuit of the strategic goal of containing the Soviets, presumably to avoid having them directly threaten Americans.
Inline links: 6
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Don't trust any study which hasn't been replicated Why you shouldn't stand by the bystander effect In 1964 at 3:19am Catherine Genovese was attacked in front of 38 witnesses in a nice neighbourhood in New York. For half an hour none of them did anything to help, allowing her attacker to strike again. Finally at 3:50am one calls it in. The police arrive two minutes later, but it's too late for Kitty. This phenomenon is called the bystander effect. In an experiment where subjects hear someone in trouble they rush to help, but if they know 5 other subjects are also listening in only 62% of them do - it's someone else's problem. If Kitty had awakened only one person she might still be alive. Except that once again I've told you how Kitty Genovse's murder was reported, not what actually happened. Let's try again. At 3:19am Kitty's scream rings out. There aren't 38 people who hear it - it's cold, they have their windows shut, and they're asleep. 38 is the number of people the police interviewed afterwards, most of whom did not witness anything. Of those who do wake up and look out they see a woman lurching down the street, apparently drunk. Nonetheless two of them immediately call the police, who have other drunk people to deal with, and decide this isn't very important. Two people witnessed the actual attack. One did indeed do nothing. The other was scared of being picked up by the police for being drunk and homosexual in a built-up area (this was 1964), so he told a neighbour, who immediately rushed down to Kitty, heedless of the danger. Five days later Kitty's murderer was caught after a bystander noticed a man carrying a TV set out of a neighbour's house. He and a friend called the police, and disabled the man's car. And the bystander effect itself? It's real, and it replicates, for the sort of low jeopardy situations you can get an ethics committee to sign off on, but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene 9 times out of 10, with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders. In the studies bystanders were prevented from interacting, but in real life where they can communicate bystanders exhibit spontaneous team work. I guess I need to add 'don't trust the New York Times' to my list of lessons learned (apparently they sometimes threaten to do other bad stuff as well). Part 3: Against Empathy, God and Civilisation Empathy is too narrow The German infantry of WWII was perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had successfully landed across France it was pretty clear that Germany was toast, but they fought on with astonishing tenacity, and a shockingly low desertion rate. Trying to figure out how to break the German morale, allied psychologists interviewed German POWs. Were they motivated by patriotism? A belief in Nazism? A mistaken belief that this war could still be won? An indoctrinated hatred of Jews? No, the secret was friendship. The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Ideology was present, but entirely secondary. Bregman speculates that the German army was better because the friendships of its soldiers were stronger, but admits this is only speculation: interviews of British and American soldiers produced the same results. His key point is that empathy - such as feeling for your fellow soldier - can be a force for evil rather than good, because we can't be empathetic for all humans, only for ones we 'see'. He quotes Professor Paul Bloom who has written a book. "It's about empathy," he says. "I'm against it." (The book is subtly titled Against Empathy). Experiments on babies and toddlers show that they are generally eager to help, but easily manipulated. There's an experiment that shows babies two puppets, one being helpful and the other being mean. After the show all the babies want the helpful one, but show the mean puppet sharing their preference between crackers and green beans, and suddenly they'll take that one over one that was helpful but different from them. Adults are not beyond a bit of empathy manipulation either. People were told the sad story of Sheri Summers, a 10 year in need of a transplant. Would they bump her up the list, ahead of other people whom they knew nothing about, but the doctors who ordered the list believed were better candidates? No, on the whole they wouldn't. Then they took another group given the same scenario, but with the additional instruction to imagine how she felt. Suddenly the majority were up for throwing justice and rationality to the wind (it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall). Power kills empathy 500 years ago Machiavelli literally wrote the book on how to use immoral means to maintain power. Today this approach is called 'realism', reflecting the confusion between real and cynical with which Humankind began. The Prince has maintained its fame ever since, but being old and famous are no guarantees of being correct, see for example Aristotle on physics, race or women (but don't fall into the trap of thinking Aristotle was wrong about everything - that man was prolific). When Professor Dacher Kelter started working on the psychology of power in the 90s he noticed two things: Everyone assumed Machiavelli was right
Inline links: 9 times out of 10, other bad stuff, paper
Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
June 14, 2021 · Original source
Also, why should Jews be special here? Every immigrant group has come to America seeking a combination of economic opportunity and political/religious freedom. If Jews selectively immigrated, why didn't Germans, or Poles, or Italians, or all the other groups that didn't end up with the same kind of achievements Jews did? I think the strongest argument you could make here is that Germans/Poles/Italians were coming more for economic opportunity (and so it was mostly the poor who emigrated) whereas Jews were coming more for political/religious freedom (and so it was mostly the rich), but no, Jews mostly came for economic reasons too. Although their economic plight was in large measure caused by discrimination, it still mostly affected the lower classes, who have the least cushion for discrimination-inflicted economic costs.
Inline links: Jews mostly came for economic reasons too
This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor. My great-great-grandfather was a chicken farmer in Poland. He first emigrated to Germany, but felt like the German Jews were too stuck up and contemptuous of poor Polish Jews like himself, so he booked passage to America. I asked my Jewish housemate, whose family has millions of dollars and all went to Ivy League schools; she says her emigrant ancestors were "a Kosher butcher in Minsk and some guy who floated logs down the Dneiper River".
Links For June
June 23, 2021 · Original source
Still trying to figure out who the black bird and the frog are supposed to be, or why Australia seems to have replaced Germany in the G7.
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
East Asian countries got rich by manufacturing. First it was "Made in Japan", then "Made in Taiwan", then "Made in China". At first each label was synonymous with low-quality knockoffs. Gradually they improved, until now "Made in Japan" has the same kind of prestige as Germany or Switzerland, and even China is losing some of its stigma.
Third, manufacturing, eg everyone else. Every big developed country went through its manufacturing phase. Britain, Germany, and America all passed through an era of sweatshops, smokestacks, and steel. Most developed countries gradually leave that phase, switch to a services-based economy, and offshore some of the worse jobs to places with cheaper labor. But they can't skip it entirely.
And every big developed country that passed through a manufacturing phase used tariffs (except Britain, which industrialized first and didn't need to defend itself against anybody). Economic planners like Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton in the United States realized early on that British competition would stifle the development of native industry without government protection. Once their industries were as good as Britain's, they removed their tariffs, which was the right move - but they never would have been able to reach that level without protectionism.
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
I mentioned in the post how Japan used to be known for shoddy manufacturing, but is now considered a paragon of high-quality manufacturing like Germany. Jack C adds:
Inline links: adds
I’m a sucker for cool etymologies, but the experts are skeptical of this one, since Fritz didn’t become a nickname for Germany until a decade or so after the phrase was first used.
Inline links: skeptical of this one
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
What about in later phases of the pandemic? Here it gets complicated. Until about New Years’, Sweden’s lockdown was less strict than average for Europe, but stricter than for the rest of Scandinavia - presumably the rest of Scandinavia did so well that they relaxed a lot, even more than Sweden did. In the winter, when the second wave started, Sweden tightened some of its restrictions, until the stringency index says they matched the European average (though Europeans I’ve talked to disagree and say Sweden still felt much less strict than elsewhere). Then it had a pretty average-sized second wave (as did Denmark). But unlike other Scandinavian countries (though like France and Germany), Sweden had a severe third wave. Can we attribute this to a looser lockdown? I am nervous about doing this, since the stringency index says its lockdown strictness was average during this period, which is why I’m going to mostly be relying on the first-wave data.
Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
Anyway, according to scientists, America has the highest expressed emotion, Europe and other developed countries are also really high, and developing countries are mostly really low. 67% of Anglo-American families studied qualified as high-expressed-emotion, compared to 48% of Brits, 42% of Chinese, 41% of Mexican-Americans, and 23% of Indians. I am a little boggled by this - my stereotypes say the opposite. EG New England WASPs who never show any emotion at all, stiff-upper-lip Brits and Germans, compared to exuberant Mexicans and extremely high-pressure Asians. I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing. But nope, according to Crazy Like Us scientists have determined that white Americans are the highest-expressed-emotion culture in the world. Huh.
Much more fun was the history of Japanese mental illness, which focused on neurasthensia. This was another one of those fully-generic late-1800s diagnoses like hysteria (I assume late-1800s psychiatrists just sort of flipped a coin: heads you were neurasthenic, tails you were hysteric). Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous national hero. Meanwhile, “in 1902 an article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”
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July 27, 2021 · Original source
Dependency ratio is the ratio of non-working age people (eg elders, children) to working-age adults. Higher numbers mean more dependent people and greater economic burden. Right now it’s 50 across most of the world, except in Africa where it’s 80 (Africa has lots of kids!). Metaculus predicts that in 2039, it will have gone up a bit in the US and China, and a lot in Germany. Presumably the US escapes Germany’s fate through immigration. I don’t know why they’re so optimistic about China, but this matches more centralized projections, so probably they are right and I am wrong, maybe because they are starting from a very young base.
Inline links: this matches more centralized projections
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
BERLIN, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Ruben, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 9 Location: Südplateau Fritz-Schloss-Park Coordinates: https://w3w.co/directly.packing.pardon
Inline links: RSVP, Südplateau, https://w3w.co/directly.packing.pardon
BONN, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Anton, acx-bonn[at]posteo[dot]de Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, October 2 Location: Hofgartenwiese an der Statue von August Macke. Look out for this statue and a small sign saying 'ACX'. If you are late or bad weather is forecast please email me. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/snooty.sings.both
Inline links: RSVP, this statue, https://w3w.co/snooty.sings.both
COLOGNE (KÖLN), GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Elias, minus42cgn[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park, Hill towards Aachener Weiher. I will put up a sign with "ACX MEETUP" on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/benötigen.getränken.quadrat Notes: German/English bilingual
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/benötigen.getränken.quadrat
Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
August 26, 2021 · Original source
My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that [in online school] about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended Zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
"...imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details."
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
Demost gives us a story from Germany:
Inline links: gives us a story from Germany
Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
To that end, he - probably sarcastically - opened Hungary to “genuine refugees”, by which he meant refugees from globalism - “Germans, Dutch, French and Italians, terrified politicians and journalists, who here in Hungary want to find the Europe they have lost in their homeland”. A few right-wingers took him up on it and resettled in Hungary. Potentially his most famous admirer is former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who’s been going back and forth to Hungary as part of his plan to build a populist network across Europe.
Inline links: former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon
Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees traveling from the Middle East to Europe found themselves passing through Hungary. They filled up the underfunded refugee camps, they filled up city streets, they camped by the thousands outside railway stations they hoped would take them to Germany or Scandinavia. When there were no food or tents left, they rioted.
The main claim I hear is about his demographic strategy. Hungary has a fertility problem. They started with the usual developed-country drop in fertility rates, plus some extra for being a post-communist state. Then when they joined the EU, 500,000 Hungarians emigrated to richer countries like Austria and Germany. Now they have about 10% lower population than in the 1980s. They’re not going to make it up with immigration, so they need some other solution.
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November 08, 2021 · Original source
Another woman I met from America told me that she’d moved to Auroville because everything in the States “just feels really fake.” She was on the waiting list to become an Aurovilian, a two-year process that requires applicants to prove they are self-sustainable and dedicated to the cause. Applicants are not allowed to leave Auroville for two years and must work for free as a contribution to the township. After two years they face the Entry Services, a small group that reviews applications and ultimately decides who can become an Aurovilian. An Aurovilian from Germany who worked for Entry Services told me her primary job was to weed out what she called “the cuckoos.” I didn’t ask what that meant.
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
Also, border wall: not long after Orban built his wall and was called a fascist for that, the Germans also panicked after the first one million migrants poured in in a few months, so they made a deal with Erdogan, and paid Turkey not to let in more migrants to Europe, so now most Syrian migrants are stopped on the turkish border, sometimes by gunfire.
THANK YOU. I had been really confused why Hungary didn’t just buy every migrant a train ticket to Germany (where they all wanted to go anyway) and tell them to have a good time.
Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Gwartney says that when he was the assessment commissioner and chief executive officer in British Columbia, he had a staff of 690, and that this number has not changed significantly since then. British Columbia has a population of about 5 million, so that's 1 assessment officer for every 7,250 British Columbians. For context, the IRS has a staff size of 74,454, or about one IRS agent for every 4,425 Americans. I don't have data on how many property tax assessors the USA has in total, but the above slide suggests British Columbia's figure is on the high end. As for how you actually do assessments, sure, you can send out an army of assessors to value each and every property in your jurisdiction by hand. However, not only is that labor-intensive, it's also a recipe for inconsistency. Whatever method you're using to value properties needs to be consistent and standardized across all properties, so you don't have sharp discontinuities on the assessment map that are due solely to differences between Assessor Fred and Assessor Sally's personal methodologies. Thankfully, we're living in the modern age, and we have some fancy new tools at our disposal. 4. Modern Technology Georgists were doing split-rate assessments to allegedly good success long before the rise of the computer, such as J. J. Pastoriza's effort in setting up a Georgist tax regime in Houston, Texas in 1911. Today, we have spreadsheets, property value databases, GIS mapping visualizations, regression analysis, machine learning...the works. According to Gwartney, the Canadian province of British Columbia has revalued all its land and all its property on an annual basis simply by using computers and market analysis, ever since he first helped them set up their system back in 1975. Not every jurisdiction revalues their land this thoroughly and this often, but Gwartney says there is no significant technical or staffing barrier standing in the way. Gwartney has been retired for some time, so his seminar didn't cover all the latest cutting-edge techniques that have come out in the last few years. Let's look at some recent papers and see what new tools assessors have to play with. The first on my list is Land Value Appraisal Using Statistical Methods by Kolbe, Schulz, Wersing, and Werwatz (2019). This is a study on mass appraisal techniques using real estate transaction data from Berlin, Germany. It claims that not only are the results cheaper and faster to generate than those done by conventional property assessment methods, but they are also no less accurate than those done "by hand" by experts. Kolbe et al. assert that, provided you have access to high quality market transaction data, you can perform accurate and efficient mass appraisals of land values. They chose Berlin because it "has a very effective system of property transaction data collection and storage," in contrast to other parts of Germany. They cite some prior work by Almy (2014) studying Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, suggesting that the assessment cost per property can be brought down to 20 Euros–25 times cheaper than what some other people (Fuest, et al. (2018)) assert. Given an average tax receipt of 2,000 Euros per property, this means that the assessment cost should represent only about 1% of the funds raised. Is that good? Let's take this assertion at face value for the moment and compare it to the cost of the IRS. Federal tax receipts in 2020 were $3.42 trillion, and operation costs for the IRS were $12.3 billion, or 0.36%. However, the IRS outsources most of the labor of tax preparation to the taxpayers themselves, with compliance costs estimated between $200 billion and $400 billion a year, to the delight of Intuit. Add that up and the total cost of federal tax collection to the economy is anywhere between 6-12% of the amount it raises. And what about sales tax? According to a 2006 report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers: The study finds that the national average annual state and local retail sales tax compliance cost in 2003 was 3.09 percent of sales tax collected for all retailers, 13.47 percent for small retailers, 5.20 percent for medium retailers, and 2.17 percent for large retailers So a compliance cost of 1% would be way more efficient in terms of cost collection than the other two most common forms of taxation, and taxpayers don't even have to do anything themselves, other than pay the bill. Alrighty, how about the accuracy? The authors cite two international examples, Australia and Lithuania, as among the few countries in the world that have both a Land Value Tax and statistical methods for mass appraisals. Hefferan and Boyd (2010) assert that objections to assessments from property owners in Australia are less than 1%. I'm willing to buy the improved efficiency claims just by taking a look at some methodologies. It seems reasonable that computerized records and algorithms can cut costs significantly; the real question is if you're trading off accuracy. The other papers I found on the subject are Bencure, et al (2019) in BayBay City, Philippines, Kilić, et al (2019) in Croatia, Yalpir & Unel (2017) in Konya, Turkey, and Raslanas et al. (2014) in Vilnius, Lithuania. Let's dive in and examine some methods. 5. Mass Appraisal Methods Here are some of the latest mass appraisal methods cribbed from the research papers listed above. All of these are based on taking market transaction data, plotting them out on a map, and running computations over them to estimate valuations for the properties you don't have known values for. Furthermore, all of these methods are able to value land and building values separately. Multiple Regression Analysis This paper by Yalpir and Unel out of Turkey gives a straightforward example of using Multiple Regression Analysis for land valuation. For those of you who didn't study math, let me explain regression analysis. This is a family of mathematical models where you basically take a data set, ask the question "what mathematical formula would best fit this data," choose a basic equation model, and then have a computer search for a set of coefficients that "best fit" that curve to the data with the least amount of error. The simplest example is using linear regression on a scatterplot of observed data points to fit a trend line. This is a common exercise in freshman physics and statistics classes. You can use more complicated versions of this numerical method to take a big bag of observations (real estate sales) and use "multiple regression" to tease out dependent variables (land value and improvements value) based on the independent variables (size, location, age, number of bedrooms) of your observations. In this case the team identified about a hundred different factors that can affect the price of a property: Then you create an entry for each property, fill in the values for each of those characteristics, and run it through the regressor. Take note of how many of these factors start with the words "proximity to." Each of these can be calculated automatically just by knowing where the property is on a map, and each of them is an independent contributor to the value of the property's location. The next step is to generate individual "index maps" that combine various related features into combined heat maps. Then you run everything through and see if it works. You can get the land share of the final value by combining the contributions of all the individual factors that you associate with "land," such as proximity to important things. In the verification section the authors say: As a result of the analysis, since the significance level (0.000) p <.05, corresponding to the F values in the ANOVA test, indicates that the regression analysis is appropriate and the models are significant. The criteria that make up the model account for about 85% of the market value and 15% cannot be explained for reasons such as economic, non-existent data and unearned income. Unfortunately, they don't say anything about how accurate their model is for assessing land values specifically. Otherwise, this is a pretty good example of using the Multiple Regression method for estimating the individual contributions of various factors to overall property values. Gwartney says Multiple Regression Analysis was a standard method he typically used, of which this specific paper is just one example. Nonparametric kernel regression This will be a method familiar to the programmers in the audience who have any experience with image processing algorithms. Here's an example from this old Gamasutra article: The basic idea here is to take a matrix of numbers, called a "kernel", and run that over every pixel in a source image. The kernel tells you how strongly to weight all of the source pixel's neighbors to compute a final result for that position. A simple "box blur" is a kernel where every value is 1 (meaning it averages the values of all neighboring pixels within a range). The more subtle gaussian blur illustrated above uses a two-dimensional normal distribution of values so that each pixel is most affected by those nearest to it. So let's apply the same principle to land valuations. If you have a map with lots of transaction data of pure land sales–defined as sales of either vacant land or teardown properties (where the building value is essentially zero)–then you can use a special kernel filter to smoothly interpolate land values across the region. So you basically have a smooth curve that mostly favors close-by points, tapers off a bit, and then disregards anything outside a certain distance entirely. The big assumption here is that land values change smoothly and do not change suddenly across very short distances. There are, in fact, locations with sharp jumps in value (any town with an "other side of the tracks," for instance). But for cases where we know a priori that land values change smoothly, this method is appropriate. No other prior restriction is placed on the form of the land value map, however, and this is why it's called "nonparametric." Here's an illustration. The outer box is the entire search distance that the kernel considers, and the circles represent the falloff of the curve itself. The size of the box is called the "bandwidth" and is set by the user. Everything outside of it will have zero influence on the kernel's output at any given location. This method operates on the same basic logic that I used when I hand-estimated the land value of that San Francisco house in Part I based on the value of the empty lot next door. However, it makes the whole procedure systematic. It can easily and accurately estimate the land value of a property with a big fat building on it simply by smoothly interpolating the known values of the nearby parking lots. Of course, it has limitations. First and foremost, it's a highly local operation, so if you have properties you're trying to value that don't have nearby pure land sales data, you can't really do much with this. Also, most people assume that city centers have less market transactions for undeveloped land than the countryside, as did I until I read that paper by Albouy in Part I. But in any case, this is just one method in your toolbox and might not be sufficient by itself. Its key advantage is that it works directly from true market data for land and doesn't need or want any other subjective data. In the end, basic kernel estimation just fills in the land value of unmeasured locations with a local weighted average of known locations. Nonparametric adaptive regression Kolbe, et al. build on the kernel regression method with a technique called Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS), which runs in several iterations and adds additional weight to any observed data points that are sufficiently close to the point being estimated. I'm not 100% sure about what all the math means, but it seems like it's basically a "smarter" version of the basic kernel method. Left: Nonparametric kernel regression, Right: Adaptive Weights Smoothing. I think the authors goofed and printed the same figure twice with different headings because they're identical if you overlay them in Photoshop. Semiparametric regression Now, the above two methods assume you have plenty of "pure" land sale records to work with. But if you're trying to work out prices in the city center, you've probably mostly got land and buildings mixed together. To do this effectively, we need more data, and this is where the "parameter" in "semiparametric" comes in. The model described in Kolbe et al. seems like a flavor of multiple regression analysis that takes the price, the location, and various characteristics of the building and feeds it into a regressor. But we've got "semi" parametric here. What does that mean? Well, if you already know how certain relationships between the data work a priori, it's better to enforce those relationships yourself rather than leave it to the computer. Here, we enforce the assumption that if two properties are right next to each other, then the value due to location is going to be essentially identical. This algorithm starts by ordering things geographically and then working out the differences in observed price by regressing on the difference between remaining property characteristics. In this method, the power of "location, location, location" is not something we're leaving to the regressor to discover by itself. Results of the Semiparametric regression method, we can see some significant differences from the simple kernel-based model. As you can see above, this gives you more detailed and likely more accurate results, and you're better able to assess the values of properties with buildings on them, even in the absence of pure land sales. This technique is more complicated and bakes in assumptions about the power of location, but otherwise doesn't assign subjective human weights to the various property characteristics. The chief human bias comes in the form of deciding which property characteristics are measured and made legible to the model in the first place. Okay great, but how accurate are the above three methods? Their main point of comparison is this thing called the "Bodenrichtwerte," or BRW. I think that means "ground-level-values" in English, and it's an expert-assessed map of land values for Berlin done the traditional way. The nonparametric kernel regression method has a correlation of 0.704 with the traditional method and has the added disadvantage that it's not able to produce estimates for the city center, only the outlying areas. Furthermore, the BRW map does show sharp discontinuities, which is another knock against the kernel method, at least for the city center. What about the iterative method? Kolbe et al. find that "the agreement between [Adaptive Weights Smoothing] land value estimates and, both, land prices and BRW land values is fairly good for all values of λ." Doing some quick checks, their values seem to be within about 85% of the BRW values. A different Kolbe et al. paper called Identifying Berlin's land value map using adaptive weights smoothing goes into more detail and claims to give "similar" values to that of the BRW. For the semiparametric method, they "found a strong positive correlation of 0.845" between their numbers and a previously expert-assessed set done using the traditional method. That sounds pretty good. It seems their margin for error is about plus or minus 15% compared to the traditional expert method. I'd like to see more direct comparisons against market transactions themselves, though, because if the prior expert assessments are wrong, then the main achievement here is improved efficiency, not accuracy. However, this method doesn't seem to be dramatically less accurate than the old way of doing things. The last three models came from the Berlin case study, where you have excellent market transaction data in an extremely wealthy and high-trust society. But what if you're trying to assess land in a developing nation with poor market transaction records, weak institutions, and widespread poverty? Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) This is the particular name of the method described in Development of an Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) for Mass Appraisal Application in Sub-Urban Areas Using AHP: An Integration of Theoretical and Practical Approaches by Bencure, Tripathi, Miyazaki, Ninsawat, and Kim. They used BayBay City, Philippines as their case study. Whereas the previous models are very "hands-off" and let the computer work out the relationships between prices and property characteristics, here you get expert human opinion directly involved in building the model, baking in weights that directly embody judgments like "properties next to major roads are more valuable." These judgments are based on expert opinions that presumably come from observed experience but are a priori judgments nonetheless. Here, look at this big complicated flowchart. The "Analytic Hierarchy Process" in the box on the left is a particular kind of method for getting experts to set weights. The authors give this reason for using it: Despite criticism pinpointed by other scholars, the AHP remains the commonly used in many research fields and practical applications. This is because the AHP: (1) overcomes human difficulty in making simultaneous judgment among factors to be considered in the model; (2) is relatively simple as compared to other MCDA [multi-criteria decision analysis] methods; (3) is flexible to be integrated in various techniques such as programming, fuzzy logic, etc.; and (4) has the ability to check consistency in judgment After identifying a list of "factors" that can affect land value, they group them into taxonomical buckets: Note that certain factors like "Coastline" appear in multiple buckets; this captures the various influences a characteristic can have. For instance, land on the coast tends to be more economically valuable because of tourism, shipping, fishing, etc., so that goes under "economic." But land that's next to the coast is also more likely to flood, so it also goes under "environmental." And then there are various land use restrictions that apply specifically to coastal areas, so it goes under "legal" as well. In this way, a single factor like "the property is on the coastline" can have both positive and negative effects on land value (e.g., it's more economically valuable but it also might flood, and there are certain things you aren't allowed to do there). The next step is to set down some rules for how sensitive each factor is to location and distance. So here we can see that the economic benefit of being on the coast is most strongly felt if you're within half a kilometer of the ocean, but the environmental effect (e.g., risk of flooding) is most strongly felt when you're within 0.03 kilometers. And so on and so forth. Your experts help you work out all these rules. Note that for a few of these factors (such as land use and slope), you use metrics other than distance (e.g. land use classification and grade). Then you take all that stuff and assign everything a value between 0 and 5. Your team of experts then uses this table to come up with a set of weights for everything. What essentially comes out of this is a big linear equation with a bunch of coefficients for every one of your factors, which is then broadly fit to the observed market prices. When you're done, you can take any property on your list, multiply each of its characteristics by its respective weight, run that through your equation, and calculate the predicted price of the land. So how accurate is it? The authors compare it to standard Multiple Regression Analysis and claim it fares better. The Root Mean Square Error is quite a bit less than MRA. In addition, I think it's also saying that the MRA algorithm decided that only four of the factors were significant and basically ignored all the rest. By contrast, iLVM was able to maintain contributions from all the factors, because it doesn't leave that decision to the computer. I'm not 100% sure; it's not clear from the paper. The authors claim that about 67% of the variability is explained by their model, but they note that there are some areas where the model can be off by more than a factor of 1.0 in either the positive or negative direction. One thing that's kind of fun about this model is that you can make neat graphs like this that show the individual contribution of each factor: The main downside to this model is that it relies on a whole lot of subjective expert opinion and can be questioned on that basis. That said, it can be cheaply deployed in a transparent and consistent way across a large area. You can see why that's attractive for a developing nation with weak institutions and poor market transaction records; the argument is that this is a significant improvement over the former status quo. I wonder how well this model performs when you feed it better market transaction data, and how that would compare against all the others methods under identical conditions. More research is needed. Rather than drag you through a bunch more research papers, I'll just leave these others I found cited in the above studies: Killić et al. (2019) - Fuzzy expert system for land valuation in land consolidation processes
Inline links: J. J. Pastoriza's effort in setting up a Georgist tax regime in Houston, Texas in 1911, Land Value Appraisal Using Statistical Methods, Almy (2014), Fuest, et al. (2018), $12.3 billion, $200 billion, $400 billion, delight of Intuit, 2006 report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Hefferan and Boyd (2010), Bencure, et al (2019), Kilić, et al (2019), Yalpir & Unel (2017), Raslanas et al. (2014), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!stkG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fef4c64b9-38bc-43c8-aa83-05eae3576e03_923x600.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_9z0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd98e114-7eb2-4566-a979-1f2f2dd27c22_701x867.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8HN7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1232522-51e0-4438-998a-b0be4615df6b_534x806.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jFqw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5836457-7642-4235-9410-00906f043428_662x357.png, Gamasutra article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!foLQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff74d378c-39b7-49f9-9655-8cbbf7c89ff5_592x270.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AjnN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F458458cc-614e-4ab3-a57b-3f28b70db6c3_458x317.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lVcf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77ea4f72-0e51-4c63-b14b-15c603ac2500_901x418.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zoSx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed78916c-12c5-42ca-b581-7b59aa25bbd5_757x718.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Wm9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8fe15dbb-181f-46ae-bdde-840bdd6a2064_752x735.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zig5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F958762f1-a425-4017-86cf-058cb3eb4d59_713x389.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8ZGT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff37696ef-7a6a-48ae-8169-734b875b0b57_800x319.png, Identifying Berlin's land value map using adaptive weights smoothing, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3CR3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0489e086-69ae-4840-b658-59fee6b3af44_2000x1672.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fA0K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d39769d-46e2-4891-92aa-cb3766068204_2000x978.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!phFK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d1a519c-93d7-4bed-9577-7478fb239bca_1968x3548.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XtLN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff59cb148-e0da-456b-b205-973e04239be7_587x647.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!My3b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee7b484b-3be8-4363-bcb8-1cb4fb4a7c01_661x655.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SqQA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a84b431-1250-427e-a67a-b3e2b8a3c0dd_896x623.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qPOz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb71526d0-736c-45d7-ad14-36e5670f78ab_1153x881.png
Almy (2014) - Valuation and Assessment of Immovable Property Not to mention Fundamentals of Mass Appraisal, a literal textbook published by the IAAO, written by Gloudemans and Almy in 2011. I've only scratched the surface here. There are a whole lot more methodology papers out there, and this is just a sample of the ones I happened to come across. They seem to fall into either "hands-off" or "hands-on" approaches, depending on how much direct human judgment you want to bake into the system. So, can we accurately assess land and improvements separately? I think it's quite plausible but not a slam dunk. That said, if the objection is, "valuing land separately from improvements is fundamentally impossible, and we can never get better at it, so we shouldn't try," I think that's plainly ruled out. We clearly have a variety of methods at our disposal that seem reasonably accurate. Each of them has particular strengths and weaknesses, and each directly addresses shortcomings of prior methods. All of this implies that this is something we can continue to improve at. The big questions are whether we've already arrived at "good enough" and how tight our error tolerances need to be. And the operative phrase very much is "good enough." I don't know of anywhere in the world that currently has a 100% LVT policy, let alone an 85% LVT. The lower your LVT, the greater your margin of error becomes for not taxing more than the true land value. I know plenty of Georgists who would be ecstatic if they could get a 75% LVT, or even a 50% LVT, implemented in their area. Now, just because these assessment methods are available doesn't mean they're actually being used. Not everyone has Ted Gwartney as their assessor. Plenty of counties in my local area exclusively use the cost approach and will even apply a blanket "neighborhood factor" multiplier to up-assess swiftly appreciating areas. However, they apply that multiplier to the buildings rather than the land, which feels exactly backwards. The assessor hasn't raised the value of my land in years, while the assessed value of my house (which I am eminently qualified to tell you is an ever-degrading money pit) somehow continues to go up. Good assessment depends on having well trained staff, up-to-date methodology, and access to high quality market transaction data. I'm convinced, based on these papers and the IAAO's surveys, that assessment doesn't require a huge army of assessors poring over every aspect of citizens' properties. Furthermore, plenty of places already have property tax systems in place and are already paying the full cost of property assessments and property tax collection. Many of the methods described above seem capable of reducing property assessment costs by focusing on the land first and foremost and letting the building's value fall out as a residual, as Ted Gwartney insists. The cost also seems like something that, done properly, is only going to come down over time as fewer assessors are required. Another option is to keep staff sizes the same but use the emerging productivity gains to increase the frequency and quality of assessments. It also seems clear to me that Land Value Taxation is not more invasive and expensive than income and sales tax when you factor in the cost of compliance (not to mention the deadweight loss imposed on the economy). Countries that have implemented Land Value Taxes, such as Denmark, are already seeing some of the claims of Georgism borne out, as we discussed in Part II. This suggests to me that modern methods are probably "good enough," so long as assessors are well trained, abiding by current best practices, and able to access good market data. Given that Astral Codex Ten is a blog where ideas as lofty as full brain uploading, superhuman AI, and biological immortality are frequently discussed in earnest, it doesn't seem outlandish to suggest that human beings can probably use math and science to get better at estimating the market value of land relative to buildings. Conclusion By George, Unimproved Land Value can (probably) be accurately assessed. 6. Conclusions & Next Steps This concludes my three part series on the most common objections to Georgism. By George, the evidence has convinced me of three things: ✅ Land is a really big deal ✅ Land Value Tax cannot be passed on to tenants ✅ Unimproved Land Value can (probably) be accurately assessed I humbly submit that the case for Georgism survives a summary dismissal and can move on to a trial of the particulars. So where do we go from here? In the course of writing this series, I found a few subjects that someone should just go ahead and test already. Obviously, this would require research funding and smart people willing to do the work (hey, a guy can dream). These subjects are: 6.1. Assessment methods A lot of the methodology papers I read test one or two methods at a time in a particular case study. What I couldn't find was a study that tests every major mass appraisal method in one big cross comparison study, all in the same physical location using the same dataset. If we had this, we could get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses without wondering what differences are due simply to one study being in Germany and the other in the Philippines. It seems the necessary ingredients are: An ideal test location with excellent property records and (ideally) a history of quality land value assessment and/or Land Value Tax
Inline links: Almy (2014), Fundamentals of Mass Appraisal
See if you can improve on the state of the art. How close to ground truth can you get? Once the first study is done, you'd want to test it in another area–maybe Australia, Denmark, Germany, or the Philippines. If Georgism is true, and the only thing standing in the way is being able to pull off accurate assessments, then let's just get better at doing that. We're the species that split the atom and travelled to the moon. Surely we can handle this. 6.2. Total Land Value of the United States It's really annoying that we don't confidently know this figure, and it has huge implications for LVT policy. Technically, this is an "assessment" problem, but in practice, when you're assessing the entire USA, you're often falling back on big black-box buckets of aggregated property values rather than building a database of direct ground-truth market transactions yourself. In Part I, we saw how big the difference was between Albouy, who used pure land sales directly from the market, and Larson, who applied the cost approach to official figures. If one of you readers has MLS access for all 50 states and/or a bunch of other records, it'd be interesting to see if we could settle this debate once and for all. 6.3. A Push for More Open Real Estate Market Transaction Data To my knowledge, there's no good, one-stop shop for solid, historical, ground truth real estate market transaction data that's uniform and detailed across, say, the entire United States. I'm well aware of how important access to solid data is for researchers. I run a site called www.gamedatacrunch.com that just quietly scrapes public metrics from the PC video game store Steam (they don't mind–I asked). I'm constantly getting requests from researchers to dump slices from my DB for them, which I'm always happy to do. If not for making this data available, those research papers might not be happening. So many questions that are answerable in principle go unanswered in practice simply for want of access to data, and then smart people make bad policy decisions because of that ignorance. In principle, I suppose nothing would legally stop someone from scraping listing prices on Zillow and Redfin all day, every day, but I have a feeling I'd probably get sued if I did that. (Just checked with my lawyer; he says it's a legal grey area but probably wouldn't end well for me.) If you're an eccentric billionaire who wants to do something for Georgism, instead of building a $400 billion super city in the desert, you could buy Redfin for about 1% of that and make their data available to researchers. In any case, whether improved access to consistent, country-wide data were to come from data mining or repeal of real estate non-disclosure laws, it would be an invaluable resource for researchers. 6.4. Empirical examination of ATCOR If ATCOR (All Taxes Come Out of Rent) holds up empirically, it would be a super big deal. Then, it wouldn't matter whose land value estimates you accept, because you'd always be able to shift taxes off of income and capital and onto land without losing revenue. Mason Gaffney cites a few cases where it's supposed to have been observed, but we could really dig into this further. A claim this tantalizing really needs to be nailed down and resolved once and for all. 6.5. Responses to Comments I've been absolutely drowning in comments since the first article posted and there's no way I'll be able to address everything. Doing full justice to some of these will require their own entire articles, but I can leave some brief notes here. Zoning Many people replied that Land Value Tax is useless until or unless you first fix zoning. First of all, Georgists are natural allies in fixing restrictive zoning policies. This is something they definitely want and will fight for. Second, one of the reasons for restrictive zoning policies is broken incentives. A city doesn't have a huge incentive to repeal restrictive zoning policies because it isn't hurting their tax base. According to Georgists, a city whose tax base is land value has well-aligned incentives. It is incentivized to maximize land value by making the city a more desirable place to live, which also raises their tax base. It is dis-incentivized to over-assess or over-tax the land, however, because that will cause people to leave, which will lower their land values and also their tax base. One of the principle things that depresses land values and the tax base in this scenario is restrictive zoning. I personally don't care whether you first pass LVT or first repeal restrictive zoning, you can and should do both. Either one helps the other along. Transitional Politics Honestly this needs its own entire article without me going out on a limb and accidentally saying something dumb. Suffice it to say, a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and you'll have to wait for a future article to find out what they are. I will let the commentariat duke this one out in the meantime. Corruption Some people agreed to all of the points raised in theory, but pointed out that human beings are wicked sinners, and LVT will be bent towards the malevolent will of our overlords, just like the old policies. And they're not wrong! The problem with this argument is that it's a fully general argument against change. The overlords game every system to their benefit. Rely on standardized tests? They'll game the SAT's with phony disability accommodations and outright cheating. Abolish standardized tests? They'll make their kids take fifty extracurriculars and pay a ghost writer to pen their college entrance essay about their life-changing volunteer work in Ghana. The right question is not "can the rich game this system?" but rather, "can they game it less than the existing one?" This is why you should keep standardized tests, even though rich people can and do game them. The evidence shows that on balance standardized tests are one of the few ways a minority student from a poor background even has a chance to move upwards. So let's dig in. The chief way you can game Land Value Tax is to cozy up to your local assessor and get them to say your land is garbage and it's not valuable. However, you have to do this kind of corruption in the open. Your land value assessment is public record, and highly visible on a map, and will stick out like a sore thumb unless the entire area has been corrupted too. I grant that motivated people could plausibly pull this off to various degrees. You might be able to get the assessor to lie about your land value, but what's the status quo we're comparing against? We don't even know how much cash money value is being socked away in Switzerland and the Caymans, let alone by whom. And even if we did, good luck figuring out how to lure that back to a taxable jurisdiction. Land at the very least can't run or hide. My dream is for us to commoditize open source mass appraisal systems and push for public real estate transaction records everywhere, so that organizations and educated members of the public can do their own land value audits at scale. And again, this is something that just needs to be subjected to empirics. We can sling theory back and forth at each other all day, but the proof is in the pudding. There are places that have done Land Value Tax in the past, and there are places that do it today. A good candidate for a future article is looking at case studies of where LVT has been tried and explicitly look for this problem. Finally, defeatism is corruption's best friend. If you believe everything I'm saying here, and your only obstacle is fear of corruption, and you accept that LVT's vulnerability to corruption is not any worse than the status quo's...then why not just get out there and fight for the world you want to see? Nothing good ever came without a struggle. Finally, we come to the most important comment of all. By George Some people said I did the whole "By George" schtick too much. I'm sorry you feel that way, but... by George, the people have spoken: 6.6. Future Direction This won't be my last article on Georgism, but I haven't yet decided whether to post them on my own blog, Fortress Of Doors, or some standalone site. Nor have I decided what topic should come next. In the comments, feel free to weigh in with which direction you'd like to see me go, as well as any issues you felt were unresolved to your satisfaction. Also, please point out any places where my math looks weird, I was just plain wrong, or where I have misunderstood or misstated the research I'm citing. Thanks very much to this readership and to our host, Scott, for graciously letting me share these findings with you. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the following people and organizations without whom this series would not have been possible: My wonderful wife Emily, for everything
Inline links: www.gamedatacrunch.com, $400 billion super city in the desert, Redfin, 1% of that, real estate non-disclosure laws, cites a few cases, evidence, shows, he people have spoken, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5S5P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd56e9475-5ec5-4122-a9c3-38eaa388d7e7_594x504.png, Fortress Of Doors
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
Emanuel hates having to give a clear answer to that question, but when confronted with the fact that he’s writing a book with that title and can’t really weasel out, he grudgingly admits that “the top tier would include Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Taiwan”.
4: Single Payer Channeled Through Private Insurance is typical of Germany and the Netherlands. I think this is kind of like how charter schools work in the US: the government pays 100% of your costs, but you get to choose which insurance company (out of various heavily-regulated and basically identical plans) to go with. Then the insurance company pays private doctors and hospitals as usual.
Single-payer implemented through private insurance - Germany and the Netherlands - comes out looking pretty good: these are 2 of the 4 countries Emanuel puts in his top tier. I’m confused here. The US has at least three major problems that Germany/Netherlands lack: nonuniversal coverage, high costs, and poor patient choice (ie you have to worry about “out of network” providers). I can see why single-payer eliminates the first: if the government buys coverage for everyone, of course it will be universal. But why does it eliminate the second two? Germany and the Netherlands have dozens of different insurance providers - why doesn’t that decrease bargaining power and raise costs? Why doesn’t it mean that sometimes they fail to reach an agreement with a hospital, and their patients can’t go there without facing “out-of-network” costs? I thought I understood the reasons why US health care doesn’t work, but Germany and the Netherlands seem to replicate its apparent disadvantages without running into the same problems. Why? Maybe I just don’t fully understand what “single-payer” means?
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
Thanks for letting me know I enjoy the best health care in the world. Fun fact: many Germans with private insurance (self-employed or high salary) stay unmarried. As their partner+kids would be forced into their contract and make it much more expensive.
I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!
Inline links: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8
Consider for a moment that CVS/Caremark by themselves is the PBM for ~112M people in the USA. That's more than the entire population of Germany. If you think that Germany pays less for drugs that CVS/Caremark.........
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#51: Plants That Suck Heavy Metals Out Of The Ground My city in Germany has been poisoned by ancient mining wastes. I want to remedy this with hyperaccumulating plants which suck heavy metals out of the ground for easy disposal. I then want to publish the results and make this process easily reproducible. I have experience in Permaculture. Your funding would allow for a pilot project which will then be used to get funding from the local government. (<2500€) Contact me at phytosanierung@gmail.com
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#110: Invest In Organic Kolanut For Startup We are a small social startup from Germany needing organic kolanut for our production. As there was no organic kola at the European market, we partnered with a young organic farmers cooperative to supply us. In West Africa kolanut is used traditionally, but usually not dried and exported. Relevant exports would help to diversify the income for the farmers and open new perspectives with a traditional product. We got first small shipments of kola so we are able to use it in our own production and supply others with samples. We already have inquiries for 20-30t, but we can't deliver these demands without firstly helping our African partners in extending their quality management and invest in the supply chain more than we can currently afford. We do not look for usual venture investment because we don't want to optimize our business for profits. When we are big enough we want to incorporate steward ownership (https://purpose-economy.org/en/) to keep our business this way. If we could get a grant of 10,000€ we could buy some needed equipment, travel to Africa or even find some consultants to improve quality management. We are also looking for Investors to found a non-profit importing company, having more sustainable positive impact, but also needing substantial Investment (~100,000€). If we don't find such an Investor, we have to find a established importing company to partner with. Contact: info@kolakao.de. Homepage: https://kolakao.de/kolanuss (still only in German, sorry)
#114: Analyze Policy Failure In The COVID Pandemic In Germany The management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany revealed some classical modes of policy failure, but also some rather new or underexplored ones. I want to analyze those in-depth in a type of study that has a minimum of societal reputation. In a second step, if results will be interesting, I want to feed them back into the political process to induce change. I’m a mid-career person with a background in science, including working with a Nobel prize winner, and in project management. I have enough contacts in the ‘Kanzlermeile’, the political center of Berlin, to make the results relevant for change. I’m looking either for seed funding between 5000 and 20000 Euro for finding funds through grants or others or for 75000 Euro total to finalize the whole study and if relevant take first steps for exploiting results. If you can support this in any way, please contact me at policy.failure.analysed at gmail.com. If you’re working on similar topics, please also feel free to get in touch.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen for miles. In the US most folks would just jaywalk.
Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.
Inline links: revealed, reports, ResearchHub
“International,” of course, mostly means the United States. The 1960s and 70s are the golden period when the US overtook all other countries in most domains, including science. Nature could not ignore this, and opened a satellite office in Washington D.C. in 1970. Interestingly, however, the journal’s Britishness seems to have helped it be seen as more international than its rival Science, which researchers in France, Germany, Japan, and other countries may have considered too American.
Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling
June 10, 2022 · Original source
DALL-E, “A elderly person's hand, labelled with the text ‘AN ELDERLY PERSON'S HAND’” Lucid dreaming enthusiasts suggest that two of the easiest ways to distinguish dreams from reality is that, in dreams, hands have the wrong number of fingers, and text is garbled and unreadable. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. But even the waking world gives us clues, as Sarah Constantin notes in Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences. Most adults will make GPT-like mistakes (or gloss over such mistakes) unless they’re focusing all their brainpower on an issue. And a 4chan post by someone who claims to have done psych research in prison populations goes further (slightly edited for language and offensiveness): I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...] Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test! Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence. I have no proof that this person is who they say they are, but it matches some of my experience giving cognitive exams to patients from low-functioning populations. And it matches Flynn on Luria (who admittedly was approaching IQ from a cultural relativist viewpoint, but one which I think is equally applicable to the current problem). Luria gave IQ-test-like questions to various people across the USSR. He ran into trouble when he got to Uzbek peasants (transcribed, with some changes for clarity, from here): Luria: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. Luria: What what do my words imply? Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. And: Luria: There are no camels in Germany; the city of B is in Germany; are there camels there or not? Peasant: I don't know, I have never seen German villages. If is a large city, there should be camels there. Luria: But what if there aren't any in all of Germany? Peasant: If B is a village, there is probably no room for camels. And: Luria: What do a chicken and a dog have in common? Peasant: They are not alike. A chicken has two legs, a dog has four. A chicken has wings but a dog doesn't. A dog has big ears and a chicken's are small. Luria: Is there one word you could use for them both? Peasant: No, of course not. Luria: Would the word "animal" fit? Peasant: Yes. And: Luria: What do a fish and a crow have in common? Peasant: A fish — it lives in water. A crow flies. If the fish just lies on top of the water, the crow could peck at it. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a crow. Luria: Could you use one word for them both? Peasant: If you call them "animals", that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal and a crow isn't either. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a bird. A person can eat fish but not a crow. What I gather from all of this is that the human mind doesn’t start with some kind of crystalline beautiful ability to solve what seem like trivial and obvious logical reasoning problems. It starts with weaker, lower-level abilities. Then, if you live in a culture that has a strong tradition of abstract thought, and you’re old enough/smart enough/awake enough/concentrating enough to fully absorb and deploy that tradition, then you become good at abstract thought and you can do logical reasoning problems successfully. (Sometimes! If you’re lucky! Linda is a blah blah blah you know the story. Is she more likely to be a bank teller, or a feminist bank teller. When people get this question wrong, do they have a world-model, or not?) Imagine a world where doctors gave different diagnoses based on unrelated contingent features of the encounter like a patient’s gender, their race, or how you phrase the question. What a crazy place that would be! What is the pre-logical function that logic gets knit out of? I think it’s something like predictive pattern-matching. I think the brain starts by predicting arbitrary patterns, builds up more and more layers of abstraction to try to predict those patterns better, and eventually some of those layers cohere into something that looks like formal logic. To put it another way, my brain is in some sense a supercomputer that can outperform the best calculating machines in the world - but also, I have trouble multiplying three digit numbers in my head. The supercomputer is doing something, and then I’m using that something, very lossily, to emulate logical functions like math or formal logic. So when I see GPT, which also runs on a supercomputer, also slowly gaining the ability to multiply two-digit, then three-digit numbers as the supercomputer gets bigger and bigger, I feel a sort of kinship with it. It’s a trash heap of patterns with a hard-won ability to sometimes break out into the clear day of logical reasoning, just like me. IV. I think Marcus knows and agrees with most of this, but I think he thinks of the world-modeling ability as some special rare brain region (maybe the prefrontal cortex?) which is only online part of the time (or maybe can have its performance degrade gracefully). Whereas I think of it as shallower pattern-matching abilities which escalate to deeper and deeper pattern-matching abilities as more and more brainpower becomes available, with world-modeling as one of the deepest (and sure, probably the PFC plays a major role, but not because it has a fundamentally different structure but just because that’s where reinforcement learning stuck the highest-level patterns). Why do I think this? The human brain is pretty plastic. Usually if one part of it dies, another part can take over. This makes me think that the brain area : function correspondence isn’t entirely a function of different structures in different regions (though some of it might be this), but downstream of an originally poorly-differentiated blob of neurons that get trained by the overall predictive structure based on their proximity to various input ports (eg sensory nerves) output ports (eg motor nerves), and other brain areas. (this would also explain why the brain has a pretty consistent area dedicated to reading/writing, even though we haven’t been literate long enough to evolve new literacy-related structures) Deep learning agents are also a poorly-differentiated mass of neurons. As they get inputs and outputs (ie training data) they slowly “evolve”/develop the ability to “recognize” patterns. We don’t know how they do this or what recognition-abilities they’re evolving, except by speculating (the way Marcus and I are doing) based on what kinds of problems they can and can’t solve. It would make sense to me if poorly-differentiated blobs of neurons, when having lots of problems thrown at them, gradually move from developing simpler pattern-recognition programs (eg edge detectors), to more complicated pattern-recognition programs, all the way up to world-modeling, without any of these being hard-coded into the territory. (the brain does have a lot of things hard-coded - ie we’re not blank slates - but its plasticity suggests that the forms of hard-coding we’re talking about here are helpful but not completely necessary for cognition) If this were true, it would mean that as a blob of neurons got bigger, more sophisticated, and saw more training data, it would eventually develop new capabilities that weren’t hard-coded in, and that smaller versions of the same blob didn’t have. One of the really exciting things about GPT-3 was its sudden and unplanned development of new capabilities over GPT-2 (its creators mention “translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic”). This seems like a good fit for the chimp → human transition, where evolutionary lineages that couldn’t do a bunch of difficult things for the first few hundred million years suddenly became good at those things in an evolutionary eyeblink. The ~5 million chimp/human gap seems like enough time to scale up chimp brains a bit (which definitely happened), but not enough time to invent a fundamentally new architecture. It wouldn’t surprise me if the architecture changed a little during this time, but we’re limited in how fundamental a change we can talk about over that period. I’m not at all sure this is true! I’m honestly close to 50-50 here. Maybe the PFC actually is magic! It just confuses me that Marcus seems to think we’ve ruled out the theory that this kind of scaling is possible, when I feel like we’ve heard plausible arguments on both sides. Nothing we’ve seen in GPTs or any other AI thus far disproves the scaling hypothesis, and a lot of what we’ve seen supports it. So sure, point out that large language models suck at reasoning today. I just don’t see how you can be so sure that they’re still going to suck tomorrow. Lemurs sucked for millions of years, then scaled up a bit and took over the world! V. …is one possible argument. Another possible argument is: language models and other deep learners really aren’t doing the same thing humans do - but whatever, their thing is powerful/effective/dangerous too. Suppose that GPT-X took over the world and killed all humans. Millennia later, some alien archaeologists come and investigate. They conclude that since its training data included Alexander the Great and Caesar, it was just pattern-matching to the kind of things they did (multiplied by a vector representing the difference between ancient and modern times), and GPT-X never demonstrated any true intelligence. So . . . what? I imagine this situation ALL THE TIME and I hate it. I think the impetus behind a lot of the AI risk stuff is that we’re barrelling to a world where AIs have far more than self-driving-car levels of capabilities, while being unpredictable in ways that are a lot like this. The history of the past few decades has been people getting surprised, again and again, at how much AIs can do without being “generally intelligent”. Douglas Hofstadter predicted in 1979 that any AI that could beat a grandmaster at chess would also be able to decide chess was boring and it preferred writing poetry. Instead, we got Deep Blue, so domain-specific it can’t even do so much as play checkers. Worse, now we have AIs that can switch between writing poetry and playing chess, and it still seems like a clever parlor trick rather than anything like real intelligence. I think basically nobody predicted this: narrow AI has won victories beyond past generations’ imagination. (cf. Nostalgebraist’s Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal) So even if GPTs aren’t a step on the path towards some sort of human-like AGI thing, I have no idea where they’ll end up. Replacing humans at all jobs? Writing novels? Taking over the world? If this seems crazy to you, “solve protein folding” sounded crazy ten years ago, and they already did that! At this point I will basically believe anything. VI. So I’m not going to take Marcus’ bet that GPT-4 will be perfect (as if anything ever is!). But here are some things I do believe, with confidence levels: At some point before 2030, someone will come out with a deep-learning-based language model which is significantly better than the current state of the art, by Gary Marcus’ admission (97%)
Inline links: hands have the wrong number of fingers, text is garbled and unreadable, Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences, 4chan post, here, blah blah blah, https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1534887585759100930, a patient’s gender, their race, how you phrase the question, predictive pattern-matching, prefrontal cortex, mention, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M9E6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85fd2e4d-c51e-4820-a9a2-6f79970026cb_600x368.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_D9T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5cb652e3-381b-488d-a6a6-f1155f7ff557_586x194.png, writing poetry, playing chess, Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
ASDEX (Germany, 1980)
Wendelstein 7-X (Germany, 2015)
Tokamak Energy gets fusion by 2030 (10%) or 2035 (30%). Marvel Fusion Marvel Fusion was founded in Germany in 2019. They're working on inertial confinement fusion, which I have much less expertise in. Inertial confinement fusion has made rapid progress recently and they have recruited some good people, so they should have a chance. Some problems include not releasing a timeline and not planning on using D-T fuel. Marvel gets fusion by 2035 (30%).
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
The War in Iraq (2003-2011): China, Russia, France, and Germany all opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam regime that was sold as a ‘preemptive war’, turns out there were no WMD and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent.
Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: Hurting the economy
It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: 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 $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.
Inline links: not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, 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
What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
In Germany, there was slightly less attempted murder and slightly more completed murder, but nothing that could really be called a spike.
Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045508/number-of-murders-in-germany/. I’m not deliberately trying to move the goalposts by including attempted murder, this is just the graph I was able to find. Even completed murder, while higher than in 2019, was lower than 2017 or 2018. [EDIT: See this comment on a better way of defining murder in Germany, which shows a smaller 3.7% increase]
Inline links: this comment
[EDIT: See this comment on a better way of defining murder in Germany, which shows a smaller 3.7% increase]
Inline links: this comment
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement.
World War I happened before the Peace Pact, while World War II happened after, so one of the major differences between them could be the Pact, and H&S claim that it is. I’ve often assumed a false equivalence between them, that I notice others share. They're both World Wars, after all, and Germany's the bad guy in both cases. Our brains like to make morality plays out of the silliest little things, so why not enormous monumental ones too? The US and Germany were on the opposite sides in both wars, and Germany was evil in II, so clearly Allies good, Axis bad, right?
Germany's World War I Debt Was So Crushing It Took 92 Years to Pay Off is a pretty good example of how history writers today often frame World War I in terms of a morality play, with Germany as the villain.
Inline links: Germany's World War I Debt Was So Crushing It Took 92 Years to Pay Off
Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe. Although most of the weird overachievement comes from Ashkenazi Jews in particular - those from Eastern Europe - there were Ashkenazim in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, etc. So why Hungary?
One can see why an intelligent Jew in 1870-1910 could well pick Budapest rather than entry through Ellis Island into America. Old Budapest at the turn of the century was a more sophisticated place than East Side New York. Budapest was creating the best high schools in the world, which New York was not. In Budapest immigrating Jews would soon employ domestic servants, which in New York they would not. They would be able to create an amusing dinner-table culture. There was no need of a long sea voyage to get to Budapest from the ghettos and pogroms of czarist Russia — or from Jews’ still-inferior citizenship in imperial Germany and even Dreyfus-era France.
Bhattacharya expands on that “lights of civilization” phrase. Von Neumann was born to loving parents, in a super-rich family, during the Belle Epoque, in one of the most beautiful cities (with one of the most vibrant intellectual scenes) in history. He spent his youth flitting between the great German centers of learning, hashing out the foundations of quantum mechanics with a bunch of geniuses who all loved and admired him. Then the abortive Communist revolution in Hungary and the all-too-successful rise of Fascism in Germany destroyed all that. He had to watch, helpless, as his beloved universities were hollowed out into echo chambers for Nazi ideas. And then, after he escaped, Hitler killed many of the people he knew and loved. So yeah, he held a grudge.
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries
August 04, 2022 · Original source
Brazil, Japan, and Germany Brazil will go from 210 million today to 190 million in 2100.
Germany will go from 80 million to 70 million.
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum
October 28, 2022 · Original source
It is Shown that, on Account of the Sins of Witches, the Innocent are often Bewitched, yea, Sometimes even for their Own Sins. …and many more! III: Life’s A Witch, Then You Die The next section of Malleus moves from the theoretical to the practical. Kramer is an experienced witch hunter who has traveled all over Germany. He knows how witches work. His target audience for this section is some combination of doctors who want to know if a certain malady is witchcraft, villagers who want to know whether they’ve been bewitched, and detectives investigating witch-related crimes. Here is how witches work: first, they make a pact with the Devil. Sometimes this is explicit and involves copulating with demons, other times it’s an “implicit pact” where the woman just sins a lot and doesn’t ask too many questions about where her new powers come from. Although every witch has a slightly different repertoire, typical spells include: Bury a charm made of hair and nails and other gross things underneath someone’s doorstep in order to make them fall sick, prevent them from having erections, or steal their penis.
Inline links: It is Shown that, on Account of the Sins of Witches, the Innocent are often Bewitched, yea, Sometimes even for their Own Sins., many more
What to do? The easiest solution is to kill the witch responsible. If you can’t kill her, search under your doorstep (and other likely spots) for witch charms; if any are found, remove them. If none of these work, try prayer. It doesn’t always work right away, but usually the right kind of holy action will solve the problem. A typical example is in the chapter on erectile dysfunction, where Kramer recommends: …five remedies which may lawfully be applied to those who are bewitched in this way: namely, a pilgrimage to some holy and venerable shrine; true confession of their sins with contrition; the plentiful use of the sign of the Cross and devout prayer; lawful exorcism by solemn words, the nature of which will be explained later; and lastly, a remedy can be effected by prudently approaching the witch, as was shown [in an earlier section] in the case of the Count who for three years was unable to cohabit carnally with a virgin whom he had married. Is it okay to ask other witches to undo the curse of the first witch? Is a good guy with a witch the only way to stop a bad guy with a witch? Kramer spends a lot of thought on this question, in a way that suggests basically everyone in medieval Germany knows at least one witch, and that asking her for advice is most people’s obvious first step. But he concludes that no, this is sinful, we need a full boycott on all witches including supposedly “good” ones. However, ordinary wise women are okay. You can tell a (good) wise woman from a (bad) witch because the wise woman lives a virtuous life, doesn’t invoke devils in her healing rituals, and probably relies on God in some way. Highlights from this section include: Question I: Of Those Against Whom The Power Of Witches Availeth Not At All Some people are immune to witchcraft. The most notable such group are witch-hunters and judges at witch trials. Witch hunters naturally incur the enmity of witches, so without protection all witch hunters would meet a quick bad end. But God, who hates witches more than anything in the world, realizes this, so in order to incentivize witch hunting He grants witch hunters qualified immunity to all black magic. Skeptical? Kramer has proof: This fact is proved also by actual experience. For the aforesaid Doctor affirms that witches have borne witness that it is a fact of their own experience that, merely because they have been taken by officials of public justice, they have immediately lost all their power of witchcraft. For example, a judge named Peter, whom we have mentioned before, wished his officials to arrest a certain witch called Stadlin; but their hands were seized with so great a trembling, and such a nauseous stench came into their nostrils, that they gave up hope of daring to touch the witch. And the judge commanded them, saying: “You may safely arrest the wretch, for when he is touched by the hand of public justice, he will lose all the power of his iniquity.” And so the event proved; for he was taken and burned for many witchcrafts perpetrated by him, which are mentioned here and there in this work in their appropriate places. Also: Not long ago in the town of Ratisbon the magistrates had condemned a witch to be burned, and were asked why it was that we Inquisitors were not afflicted like other men with witchcraft. They answered that witches had often tried to injure them, but could not. And, being asked the reason for this, they answered that they did not know, unless it was because the devils had warned them against doing so. For, they said, it would be impossible to tell how many times they have pestered us by day and by night, now in the form of apes, now of dogs or goats, disturbing us with their cries and insults; fetching us from our beds at their blasphemous prayers, so that we have stood outside the window of their prison, which was so high that no one could reach it without the longest of ladders; and then they have seemed to stick the pins with which their head-cloth was fastened violently into their heads. But praise be to Almighty God, Who in His pity, and for no merit of our own, has preserved us as unworthy public servants of the justice of the Faith. Other people protected against witchcraft include very holy people and those who use certain charms or hear certain sacred words. Kramer has strong scientific evidence for this claim too: There were also three companions walking along a road, and two of them were struck by lightning. The third was terrified, when he heard voices speaking in the air, “Let us strike him too.” But another voice answered, “We cannot, for to-day he has heard the words ‘The Word was made Flesh.’” And he understood that he had been saved because he had that day heard Mass, and, at the end of the Mass, the Gospel of S. John: In the beginning was the Word, etc. Subchapter II: Of The Way Whereby A Formal Pact With Evil Is Made Witches can make two kinds of pacts with the Devil. One kind is relatively low-key: the Devil just kind of appears to them somewhere and asks for their allegiance, and they say yes. The second is more formal, and grants access to more spells. It goes: Witches meet together in the conclave on a set day, and the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance. And the devil asks whether she will abjure the Faith, and forsake the holy Christian religion and the worship of the Anomalous Woman (for so they call the Most Blessed Virgin MARY), and never venerate the Sacraments; and if he finds the novice or disciple willing, then the devil stretches out his hand, and so does the novice, and she swears with upraised hand to keep that covenant. And when this is done, the devil at once adds that this is not enough; and when the disciple asks what more must be done, the devil demands the following oath of homage to himself: that she give herself to him, body and soul, for ever, and do her utmost to bring others of both sexes into his power. He adds, finally, that she is to make certain unguents from the bones and limbs of children, especially those who have been baptized; by all which means she will be able to fulfill all her wishes with his help. As usual, Kramer cites his sources carefully: We Inquisitors had credible experience of this method in the town of Breisach in the diocese of Basel, receiving full information from a young girl witch who had been converted, whose aunt also had been burned in the diocese of Strasburg. And she added that she had become a witch by the method in which her aunt had first tried to seduce her. For one day her aunt ordered her to go upstairs with her, and at her command to go into a room where she found fifteen young men clothed in green garments after the manner of German knights. And her aunt said to her: Choose whom you wish from these young men, and he will take you for his wife. And when she said she did not wish or any of them, she was sorely beaten and at last consented, and was initiated according to the aforesaid ceremony. She said also that she was often transported by night with her aunt over vast distances, even from Strasburg to Cologne. Subchapter VII: How, As It Were, They Deprive Men Of His Virile Member Yup, it’s another section on penis-stealing. Kramer keeps coming back to this subject - not, of course, out of any weird obsession on his part, but because witches just keep doing this, and he as a witch-hunter is duty-bound to be prepared. For example: In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: “If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health.” So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly about her neck, choked her, saying: “Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.” Then she, being unable to cry out, and growing black, said: “Let me go, and I will heal you.” The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: “Now you have what you desire.” And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch. My favorite part of this story is the guy going to a bar and asking women “hey, my penis was stolen by a witch, wanna see?” I think this could be the next hot trend in pickup artistry. And hold on to your seat, this next paragraph is quite a ride: And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil's work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest. Whatever my case was, I hereby rest it. Also interesting in Part 2: How Devils may enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt, when they cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation.
Inline links: How Devils may enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt, when they cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation.
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
2nd: Thomas S. Thomas lives in Germany. He works in finance with a background in physics. He says he has never done forecasting before, but trades occasionally on prediction markets (without much success).
4th: Andreas H. Andreas describes himself as a student of geography who splits his time between Canada and Germany. He is also interested in transportation, politics, and economics. His Twitter is https://twitter.com/AH23923011
Inline links: https://twitter.com/AH23923011
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
1. UK leaves EU (or still on track to do so): 95% 2. No “far-right” party in power (executive or legislative) in any of France, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, at any time: 50% 3. No other country currently in EU votes to leave: 50% 4. No overt major power war in the Middle East (Israel spending a couple weeks destroying stuff in Lebanon doesn’t count): 60% 5. Mohammed bin Salman still in power in Saudi Arabia in 2023: 60% 6. Sub-Saharan Africa averages GDP growth greater than 2.5% over 2018 – 2023: 60% 7. Vladimir Putin is still in charge of Russia: 70% 8. If there’s a war in the Middle East where US intervention is plausible, US decides to intervene (at least as much as it did in Syria): 70%
Book Review: Paper Belt On Fire
March 23, 2023 · Original source
An advertisement for the author’s hedge fund Michael Gibson’s memoir Paper Belt On Fire succeeds on all counts. The year was 2007. Gibson had just dropped out of Oxford (grad student, philosophy), and applied for a job with the CIA. His secret reason: when he was one year old, his father had admitted to his mother that he was a spy and might be in danger. Before he could tell her anything else, he was found dead, apparently of a heart attack. He thought maybe if he worked at the CIA, he would have access to more information about what happened. The CIA evaluated him (along with a telephone interview, an “IQ test, a personality test, a statement of values, [and] a set of essay questions”) and rejected him. Gibson got a job as an editorial assistant at a tech magazine and blogged on the side. Some of his blog posts came to the attention of Peter Thiel, who offered him a job at his hedge fund. Wasn’t it a bit bold to offer an Oxford philosopher a hedge fund job? Yes, the book mentions how brave and radical and unconventional Thiel’s hiring policies are about twice per paragraph. For example: The media consistently gets Peter wrong . . .The Atlantic’s George Packer wrote . . . that Peter’s hedge fund had the reputation of being a “Thiel cult” that was “staffed by young libertarian brains who were in awe of their boss, emulating his work habits, chess-playing, and aversion to sports.” Packer is a great writer, but in this he was dead wrong, as anyone actually working on the desk knew. Sure, Patrick “the Wolf Man” Wolff was technically a chess grandmaster, ranked higher than Peter, but hardly anyone else ever played. More importantly, the Wolf Man was a diehard Krugman Keynesian. Woersching was a lefty, too, an ardent fan of the egalitarian philosophy of John Rawls. And Josh, he was a dirt-road California Democrat who was a downhill ski junkie […] In truth, Peter didn’t hire just libertarians. He hired scapegoats who’d survived a mob. People who felt comfortable being a minority of one. Thiel in no way selects employees who agree with all of his controversial libertarian opinions. But, by total coincidence, Michael Gibson does agree with all of Peter Thiel’s controversial libertarian opinions. He writes about Cardwell’s Law; historian Donald Cardwell noted that no country remains on the cutting edge for long. During the early Renaissance, Italy was where it was at; a century later, it was Spain and Holland; later still, Britain and Germany, and now new discoveries and businesses come disproportionately from the United States. Why? Gibson and Thiel think that innovation is a rare and fragile plant, which thrives only in the hidden cracks between power structures. Established structures either stamp it out as a threat, or rent-seek off of it so hard that they bleed it dry. Wherever it succeeds, it has succeeded through weird quirks that prevent fat cats from parasitizing it to death. Hong Kong’s economic miracle was during the administration of John Cowperthwaite, an eccentric British libertarian who refused to collect economic statistics because he thought they would make it too easy for meddlers to extract value. America’s economic miracle happened because of a vast frontier - which not only provided freedom for westerners, but served as a BATNA for easterners, preventing their own institutions from sucking them too dry. Now the frontier has closed. New York City recently abandoned its attempt to build a light rail line to the airport: after reaching a $2.4 billion price tag and spending eight years in the planning phase, the government realized it wouldn't be able to overcome all the legal hurdles necessary to grant itself permission. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that it requires 87 permits, two to three years, and $500,000 to get permission to build houses in SF - and your plan might still get shot down because a planning commissioner thinks its glass windows are “a statement of class privilege”. The cracks have shut; the rare fragile plant has been shredded by a combine harvester. Gibson, like Thiel, is a believer in the Great Stagnation - the theory that we’re already reaping the consequences of our newly parasitic society. The early 20th century gave us cars, airplanes, electricity, and penicillin; the early 21st has so far given us some truly excellent social media sites but not much else. Innovation in the world of bits - unbound by geography, comparatively hard to regulate or extort - has sort of continued; innovation in the world of atoms has ground to a halt. And Gibson, like Thiel, talks like a man on a mission. What is good in man thrives only in a few tiny cracks, easily found and destroyed. The last crack was closed within living memory, but its legend hasn’t completely died; the few people who managed to pick up a little of its lore are racing against time to open a new crack before it is entirely forgotten and their project is left to the vicissitudes of history. The cover of “Paper Belt On Fire” goes hard. And yes, the “money” part is a reference to Bitcoin. Gibson’s heart was originally in charter cities - asking some government to open a tiny controlled crack in a sliver of its territory, promising it more meat in the end if it lets its victims grow fat and healthy than if it strangled them in the cradle. But for whatever reason they thought the time wasn’t ripe (the right time, apparently, would be 2019). Instead, Thiel asked Gibson to work on what would become the Thiel Fellowship. He teamed up with Danielle Strachman, a dangerously-hippie-adjacent burnt-out former charter school principal. Their plan was simple: offer talented kids $100,000 to drop out of school and do something exciting in the real world (usually start a company). Paper Belt spends long pages on the hate they got. Larry Summers called it “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy this decade”. Journalist Jacob Weisberg said anyone who accepted the Fellowship would “halt their intellectual development at the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or pursuing knowledge for its own sake” (this was before journalists decided that helping others was also evil). Others focused on how there was no way any of these young people would possibly succeed or make money - when the first batch of Thiel fellows failed to revolutionize the world within one year, journalist Vivek Wadhwa wrote Billionaire’s Failed Education Experiment Proves There’s No Shortcut To Success. In fact (slightly conflating the part with the Fellowship with its successor fund): The press . . . hated us. In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, science journalist and author Tom Clynes claimed that “radical innovation has yet to emerge” from anything related to the Thiel Fellowship, and that “the biggest hits have been the most pedestrian.” Antonio Garcia Martinez, the author of the Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys, spewed forth his bile for us on social media: “For fans of ironic stupidity, Silicon Valley is a never-ending feast”, he wrote on Facebook. He went on to explain, with great vulgarity, why our fund would fail by backing young dropouts. My favorite . . . has to be the challenge issued by Scott Galloway, a professor and bloviator in marketing from NYU’s business school . . . who told Business Insider that if he picked ten smart recent graduates from his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, they would outperform any ten dropouts we worked with on some dimension of success related to income or startup formation. Of course he wouldn’t have written the book if any of these people had been right. I can’t find a list of all Thiel fellows, but there are ~20 per year and it’s been running about 12 years, so maybe 200 - 250? At least eight have founded companies valued at over a billion dollars, and others have become impressive philanthropists, activists, and scientists. Pretty good success rate. Gibson argues it’s not about the money, it’s about the mission. We’ve told young people they can’t succeed without the stamp of approval from big institutions. In order to get that stamp, they sacrifice their childhood on the altar of doing things that look nice to admissions officials, then go deep into debt to pay ruinous tuitions. All to waste four years of their lives listening to some professor drone on about post-colonial gender relations in Harry Potter so they can satisfy their gen ed requirement so they can learn the stuff they want to learn so they can get hired by McKinsey so that one day they can be cool and important enough to make a difference in the world. Why not tell young people they can just make the difference right now, without doing any of that? It’s not about the money - but when your graduates are routinely founding billion dollar companies, you’d be crazy to keep it that way. After a few years, Gibson and Strachman noticed the billion-dollar-bill lying on the ground, left the Thiel Fellowship, and started a new VC fund, 1517 (named after the year Martin Luther did some institution-challenging of his own). Their business plan was to do roughly the same thing as the Thiel Fellowship - only this time, invest in the companies beforehand (the parting with Thiel seems to have been amicable; he invested $4 million). So Gibson adopted the life of a venture capitalist. He talks frankly about the difficulties. For example, in one case he found someone nobody else believed in, gave them enough money to keep going, and helped them start their company in exchange for them giving Gibson a certain stake. After the company succeeded, Gibson accuses bigger VC firm Sequoia Capital of convincing the founder to kick him out, and stealing his stake. He says that in the world of VCs it’s poison to sue founders for any reason, so nobody can enforce contracts, so if your founders defect to a different VC for more money, there’s nothing you can do (this is not legal advice). Also, “please give me millions of dollars so I can invest it in college dropouts” is a tough sale for everyone except Peter Thiel. Still, he got a bit of money and tried his best. He takes as his - would it be insensitive to say “role model”? - John Walker Lindh, the American who defected to the Taliban (and who he apparently looked like). Probably it depends on the angle or something. Lindh was the only American to find Osama bin Laden in the early 2000s - he went to lots of jihadi training camps in the process of learning how to jihad, and Osama happened to be at one of them. The lesson, Walker says, is that if you want to find people who are hard to find, you need to steep yourself in their culture, truly understand them, become one with them. Good founders are hard to find. But he and Strachman went to dozens of dingy college dorms, math competitions, group houses, and hackathons, looking for people with the right sort of talent. After pooh-poohing IQ (“Marilyn vos Savant is listed as having the highest recorded IQ, and what does she do? She writes a column for a Sunday supplement in the newspaper”) he lists some of his own preferred metrics for judging would-be Thiel fellows and founders: Polytropon - a famously untranslatable Greek word (“of-many-turns”? “always-has-a-trick-up-his-sleeve” “clever bastard”?) used to describe Odysseus. Edge control - willingness to constantly surf the boundary between order and disorder Crawl-walk-run - ability to scale from a tiny startup to a big company. …and several others, including “tensive brilliance” and “Friday night Dyson sphere”. He and Danielle searched the country for people with these qualities, annoying colleges (he was banned from MIT after showing up too often to convince their students to drop out) and doing various stunts (on October 31 2017, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s theses, he nailed a list of anti-formal-education theses to the doors of the admin buildings of top colleges (“Our commercial printer had misunderstood our request and printed them on seven-foot-long scrolls. They were ridiculous . . . but it turned out for the best.”) At one point, he negotiated with a brilliant 21 year old who may have discovered a transformative diabetes therapeutic, but the hidebound conformist novelty-hating establishment refused to work with him just because he liked the Marvel Cinemat - okay, fine, he may have legally changed his name to “Tony Stark”. Still, Gibson saw past his eccentricities, helped him start his company, and gave him sage advice (he should introduce himself to other investors as “Anthony”). Skip through several more chapters of everyone hating Gibson and telling him he was wrong and refusing to give him money and cheating him out of the money he already had, and the payoff is Luminar. One of the dropouts they cultivated founded a beyond-cutting-edge lasers-for-self-driving-cars company which went public at $3 billion. 1517 made $200 million from the deal - it sounds like they had only ever raised about $25 million, so their investors must have octupled their money on that company alone. Everyone involved is now very rich, and Gibson considers his anti-education thesis on the way to being proven. The book ends with a newly-resourced Gibson continuing his quest to figure out whether and why the CIA killed his father, but it’s slow going. If any of you know a guy named Albert van Dam in Amsterdam, or how to convince Swiss banks to reveal secret account information, get in touch with him. II. A common pattern: I assert something. Everyone yells at me and tells me I’m wrong and stupid, sometimes in very colorful language. I wait, time proves me right, and I write an essay gloating educating people about this. The median comment is “of course this is true, nobody ever denied this was true, why are you wasting our time with something obvious?” I hate this and I try to avoid doing it to other people. This is too bad, because I’m tempted to say: obviously talented dropouts can start good companies. We’ve known this at least since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft. But also, obviously they can. Brilliant and driven people can succeed whether they get a college education or not. If Bill Gates had stayed an extra two years at Harvard, he probably would have taken a few more advanced math classes not really related to programming software or running a company. So why should we even have as a hypothesis that he couldn’t start Microsoft successfully without doing that? Still, Gibson adequately proves that lots of people hated him and were sure he would fail. Either we should read this backwards - learn that there was once a time when pro-college messages were even stronger than now, so strong that people thought it was literally impossible to succeed without every single day of a four-year college application - or the critics were trying to get at something deeper they were bad at expressing. For example: what, exactly, is Gibson’s alternative to the education system? The back-of-book-blurb says Paper Belt On Fire is about “how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow” - but evolve how? What exactly has been proven here? A few of the very brightest young people, hand-picked by an expert young-person-picker and given $100K, can become billionaires or make great discoveries without a college degree. What are the implications? Suppose you are an average college student with an average level of talent and motivation. Should you drop out and try to create a company for Peter Thiel? Based on how many average-talent people Thiel rejects, even he doesn’t think you should do that. And if you don’t have a good answer to this question - the one relevant to 99.9% of education system inmates - have you really launched a challenge to the educational system? Gibson doesn’t address this question, but I predict he would admit that, fine, he doesn’t have an alternative to the education system in the sense of “educate people this way rather than that way”. He just wants less formal education, and has proven this will work fine. True, he’s only proven it for a tiny subset of ultra-talented people. But “billionaire tech founder” is a hard job - if it wasn’t, more people would do it and reap the $1 billion reward. Proving that people can become billionaire tech founders without college degrees implicitly suggests they can be successful middle managers or budget analysts without college degrees. So the sort of companies that need middle managers and budget analysts should also consider hiring people without degrees, and the sorts of average-level-of-talent-and-motivation people who want these jobs should consider skipping college. Would this work? Probably. It worked in the early 1900s, when only 5-10% of Americans had college degrees but the country seemed about as dynamic and successful as it does now. It worked for people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, none of whom went to college. It works in other countries - for example in the UK where young doctors skip undergrad and go straight to medical school, and whose patients get about the same outcomes as in the US. It works for people with impractical degrees like philosophy, who are constantly getting jobs in (and doing well in) fields that don’t require you to compare Locke vs. Leibniz’s perspective on a priori truths. So this would work if everyone agreed to do it at once, which they won’t. The way college gets you is adverse selection. Suppose that tomorrow, you - a smart and hard-working person who could easily get a college degree - decline to do so, because you appreciate Peter Thiel and Michael Gibson’s anti-institutional perspective. The pool of people without college degrees is now, to a first approximation: 200 million people who weren’t smart to get in, rich enough to afford it, or motivated enough to finish.
Inline links: Paper Belt On Fire, John Cowperthwaite, recently abandoned its attempt, reported that, might still get shot down because, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XcvP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8b369ca-5089-4e18-857d-1f34a9eee200_585x134.png, 2019, journalists, decided, that, Billionaire’s Failed Education Experiment Proves There’s No Shortcut To Success, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R2y6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38012394-be90-413c-b9a2-c291f1b3a118_858x392.png, his company, read this backwards
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Christian Kleineidam Contact Info: christian[dot]rationality[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 04:00 PM Location: Turmstr. 10, 10559 Berlin Moabit Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9G2+JG Event Link: https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-rationality-waitbutwhy-slatestarcodex-berlin/events/292739359/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9G2+JG, https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-rationality-waitbutwhy-slatestarcodex-berlin/events/292739359/
BREMEN, GERMANY Contact: Rasmus Contact Info: ad[dot]fontes[at]aol[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 23rd, 03:00 PM Location: Theaterberg (Wallanlagen). I'll carry a sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5C3RG7+G47
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F5C3RG7+G47
COLOGNE, GERMANY Contact: Marcel Müller Contact Info: marcel_mueller[at]mail[dot]de Time: Saturday, April 15th, 05:00 PM Location: A house at Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln. Ring the doorbell to be let in. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+96H
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+96H
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
Inline links: conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
The Forbidden Solution All empires eventually collapse. This is not what we would expect if empires were a good economic arrangement. If they only ever got wealthier and wealthier, they wouldn’t disintegrate into various separatist factions or end in foreign conquest. The first empire to form would have slowly absorbed everything else, and we would all be living good lives under the enlightened rule of the Sumerians or whatever. But that doesn’t happen, because empires always milk their own cities until they become poor. Modern nation-states do the same. They accumulate stress by trying to hold themselves together, and then, one day, the stress is released all at once. Wars and revolutions galore. Most countries are born that way, like new stars formed in the aftermath of a supernova. Peaceful separatism offers an alternative, Jacobs says — but only a theoretical one. Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy,” she writes, “young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’” Can you imagine Canada saying this to Quebec? Or England to Scotland? Or China to Tibet and Taiwan? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it’s only theoretical and utopian. Jacobs knows very well that nations will never accept separatism as an option. And though the term “nationalist” has fallen out of fashion, almost all of us still think very much in terms of nations. Even when separatism does seem grudgingly acceptable, I’d say that’s usually either because it’s an instance of decolonization (colonial empires are decidedly out of fashion) or for cultural, nationalistic reasons. Quebecois, Scottish, or Catalan separatists say that they belong to nations that are culturally distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Spain. And they love their smaller nation just as much as others love the larger one. If any of these separatists got their way, we can be sure that the new nation of Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia would then oppose further separatism in the strongest terms. When the American South seceded from the Union in 1861, the reaction wasn’t “good luck!” even though the Union was itself the result of a secession from Great Britain. To separate for economic reasons seems forbidden. Unthinkable. For one thing, it would be selfish. If Catalonia left, the poor regions of Spain, which benefit from welfare financed in part by Barcelona, would suffer, which is obviously unacceptable to Spain. For another, it’s not guaranteed to work. Small countries and city-states can still adopt dumb economic policies. It can seem intolerably risky to go your own way, unless your region is already rich, in which case see the selfishness point above. Widespread separatism also seems worse for solving large-scale coordination problems, like environmental issues, nuclear proliferation (and, perhaps, AI), or war. I suspect that Jacobs would agree with Nassim Taleb’s antifragility framing: it’s better to be in a constant state of mild disorder than to have apparent stability that hides stressors and ends in violent conflict. But that idea is not intuitive. Most of us would pick apparent stability over mild disorder. I also suspect — and this is my personal take — that we dread the additional complexity of having numerous small countries. We look at a map of medieval Germany, like this one… … 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPn6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd25ceff6-f68e-4163-becf-613204a9be35_1600x1297.png, 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
… 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
I’d be interested in seeing the “government decided to sit on industries in 1900” thesis fleshed out more. Also the “collapse of human capital after WWI”? Is this just saying lots of people died in WWI? If so, how come this didn’t happen in other deadly wars? For example, lots of Germans died in WWII, but Germany remained an economic powerhouse.
…[in the] 2000s we were similar to Germany, now we are similar to France. [You can also see it in] public services (which have gone from being fairly decent to completely dysfunctional, try getting a non life threatening illness dealt with or any response from the police) and house prices now 9x average earnings, leaving many young people to be paying a very high share of their income of rent.
I think particularly for the smart/driven things have changed from a sense of you can achieve your dreams here (in the same way you can in US or maybe Germany and parts of east Asia) to the sense it’s more like much of Europe where you have to leave to make something of yourself (becoming a France or Italy, full of old people on massive pensions with little growth or dynamism). In the 2000s you could make ridiculous amounts of cash in finance if you worked hard, now it’s a pretty bad deal. Most other industries you would be much better off in the US either as an employee or setting up your own company (e.g. McKinsey associate in London earns £95k, in New York earns $185k with bigger bonus). Hard to think of many successful UK companies that have been created in recent years (Deliveroo, Sky, Ocado?). When I try to explain to American friends that £35k is considered an enviable salary when graduating university they all assume I’m joking. I think the average salary of an Oxford undergrad five years after graduating is around £50k.
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
His emotional range spans only from a kind of tired nostalgia to the reckless joy of intoxication, punctuated by his most prized feeling by far, the gleefully murderous “bloodthirst” of mortal combat. So everyone who had read some Jünger, which at the time of publication would likely include most of the German population and definitely most of the Nazis, could see right through the facade of fiction. It is an obvious conceit that made the book just barely publishable, in a time and place where saying outright that the Nazis were disgusting savages would have gotten everyone involved a headshot. After 1945, Jünger did admit that the book was (also) a commentary on the political reality of its time. And that he knew perfectly well that in publishing this “fiction” he was playing with his life. And still he got it published, uncensored, in Germany in 1939, just before Hitler started the second World War. Today the most widely accepted history of the subject is that Jünger was only saved from a grisly fate by the personal intervention of Hitler himself, who loved “Storm of Steel” and presumably wouldn't have liked to admit that his favorite author utterly despised him. And it would have been very tempting to just not admit that, because before the Nazis came to power, Jünger had sympathized with them, although he never counted himself among them. Hitler had sent Jünger fan letters; the responses have unfortunately been lost. Jünger’s many political rants in the 1920s do contain several explicit endorsements of the strength of the Nazis and of their value as allies to Jünger’s vague and contradictory nationalist cause. By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs, he had stopped endorsing them. But this history made it easy for the Nazis to publicly pretend he had just written a fictional novella, or maybe he was talking about Bolshevism or something, but surely he didn’t mean them. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, where nobody dared to say out loud what everyone could see. Although additional reprints were verboten in 1942, the excuse of a lack of paper due to the war was perfectly plausible and didn’t betray the discomfort with the content that nevertheless is well-documented to have been present among the Nazi ranks. All of that is to say we can safely dispense with the charade entirely and accept that this book is about the Nazis. It makes general points on the nature and fate of tyranny that do apply to Bolshevism, but the Nazis are the immediate and obvious instance of tyranny to which this book clearly reacts. And it is written by someone who had walked among the Nazis, had previously been friends with some of them, exchanged letters with many of the best-informed men especially in the military, and was perceptive enough for his opinions to deserve much of the confidence he states them with. Besides this conceit, the other concession to the political realities Jünger makes is that the book makes no mention of Jews. The world he is describing is fictional, but it is an amalgamation of European cultures that all had some Jews, so this absence is conspicuous. Obviously Jünger couldn't possibly have seen this book published if it depicted Jews in any way that wasn’t extremely negative. I guess he was unwilling to do that. In the 1920s, Jünger had ranted against “globalist” liberal Jews several times, and once even argued that one couldn't be both a Jew and a German. But he saw nothing wrong with being an orthodox Jew, openly admired Zionism, expressed in letters complete revulsion with Nazi antisemitism and had even publicly spoken out against the pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis. After writing this book, when serving as an officer again in France, Jünger went on to save a couple of French Jews from deportation and death, at moderate risk to his own life. Later he’d discuss the Kabbalah with Gershom Sholem, the brother of his childhood friend Werner Sholem. For these reasons, I imagine he did not see Jews negatively enough for the Nazis, and was too uncompromising to pretend that even his narrator did. I think this dilemma fully explains why there are no Jews in this book. In 1935, when Winston Churchill for example still publicly admired “the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force” of Adolf Hitler, Jünger claims to have already understood the bottomlessness of Hitler's depravity by noticing he was using the word “Vernichtung” (annihilation) way too much. He was remarkably right, years before most could see it, but even more remarkably his method of understanding was a poet's acute sense of word choice! And from then, even though he agreed with nationalist dictatorship as a goal and method, he distanced himself from National Socialism because he was disgusted with the vile character of the leader of this particular nationalist dictatorship. If that doesn't show you the peculiar kind of man Ernst Jünger was, I don't know what to tell you. The craft and the poetry You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. The “marble cliffs” in the title of this short novella unite senses of beauty, majesty and danger, which is programmatic for this entire book. It begins with a visionary description of life in the traditional society of “the Marina” in an overwhelmingly beautiful state of paradise. The narrator lives on the edge of this society in a “hermitage” with his brother, his housekeeper and his son. The latter has a strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes. This opening act is without question the most elaborate celebration of poetic beauty I have ever read. Superficially it could be dismissed as purple prose. But due to Jünger’s clever use of poetic techniques in what at first appears to be prose text, there’s a rhythm, a density and a lucidity to it that makes it pretty much a very long poem, and gives it an intoxicating quality which is most apparent when you read it out loud. In the autumn we feasted like sages and did honour to the exquisite wines in which the southern slopes of the Marina abound. When in the vineyards between red foliage and dark grape clusters we caught the jocund calls of the vintagers, when in the little towns and villages the wine-presses began to creak, and the odour of the pressed grape skins drew its heady veils round the farms, we would go down to the innkeepers, coopers and wine-growers, and drink with them from the full-bellied jug. And there we would always meet with gay companions, for the land is rich and fair, so that in it flourishes untroubled leisure, and wit and humour are its unquestioned coin. I know this works, because I did an experiment. I read this book aloud, to a room full of people who were smoking pot. The book is short and the plan was to read all of it over the evening. I have read to pot smokers occasionally, but with this book it was different. They were enjoying it very much for the first couple of chapters, and exclaimed many times it was “perfect” for pot. But some hours, chapters and joints in, when the narrator goes on an expedition into a fantastically beautiful forest, they were so utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the descriptions of nature they asked me to stop. I and the only other sober person in the room were the only ones who were willing to continue. We all had very intense dreams that night. Once we had broken through the thick hedge of dogwood and blackthorn we entered the high forest, territory where the blow of an axe had never resounded. The ancient trunks, the pride of the Chief Ranger, stood gleaming damp like pillars with their capitals hidden by the mist. We walked among them as if through a spacious hall, and, like the magic setting of a stage, festoons of ivy and clematis blooms hung down towards us out of the void. The ground was piled high with mould and rotting branches, in the bark of which fiery red mushrooms had sprung up, so that we felt for a moment like divers wandering among coral gardens. Wherever one of the mighty trunks had fallen from age or struck by lightning, we stepped out on to a little clearing on which the yellow foxglove grew in thick clumps. On the rotting ground the deadly nightshade bloomed in profusion; on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells. It comes as no surprise that Jünger had much practice writing that way, from putting into his diaries a lot of his dreams and his numerous drug experiences. Jünger had long been inclined to deeply poetic descriptions of the real events he described, but this intensity at this length is genuinely new to his writing. Wherever he can use plurals he prefers them over the singular, wherever he can use more melodic and beautiful verbs (like when the characters “step out on” rather than “walk into” clearings) he does. Maybe the pretense of the narrator not being himself allowed Jünger to wallow in his characteristic aestheticism, take it to an extreme and arguably to the point of self-parody. Skip to the next heading if you don’t care about translation The extreme language of this book made me doubt there would be any translation into English that could do it justice. After all, if you throw this last excerpt into DeepL you get: After breaking through a dense fringe of blackthorn and cornets, we entered the high forest, in the grounds of which the blow of the axe had never sounded. The old trunks, which formed the pride of the head forester, stood in the damp glow like columns whose capitals were hidden by the haze. We walked among them as through wide vestibules, and like the magic work on a stage, ivy vines and clematis blossoms hung down on us from the invisible. The ground was covered high with mulm and decaying branches on whose bark mushrooms, burning red cup fungi, had settled, so that a feeling of divers walking through coral gardens crept over us. Where one of these giant trunks was tossed by age or lightning, we stepped out into small clearings where yellow foxglove stood in dense clumps. Belladonna bushes also proliferated on the rotten ground, on whose branches the flower calyxes in brown violet swayed like death bells. It’s still pretty, and it works on a matter-of-fact level. None of it is just wrong. But can you see how it has a lot less of the dreamlike quality? A “fringe” is a geographical feature, while the “hedge” emphasizes its role as an obstacle in a journey. Those “old” trunks are less poetic than “ancient” ones. A “head forester” is a job description, while a “Chief Ranger” is a seminal figure. The “vestibules” are a literal translation of the original, but the English word is used a lot less than German “Vestibüle” was back then. So that’s a word you may need to work to understand, which gets you out of the story’s flow, so “spacious hall” is better. There are even more such nitpicks to be made even in this short paragraph, but my point is these difficulties pervade every single paragraph of the book. ChatGPT very similarly fails to overcome them. Since January, there is a new translation by Tess Lewis, which has the advantage of being available on Kindle. I’ll spare you another repeat of the same paragraph and just say I think DeepL did most of this translation. But Tess Lewis did improve on many of its word choices and I’ll grudgingly concede this translation is good enough. It still sounds too modern for me, too much like prose and too little like poetry. Therefore, all previous and following excerpts are from the Stuart Hood translation, published in 1947, which I was astonished to find does pull it off! Let me assure anyone who doesn’t speak German, or doesn’t study translation, that this one is absolutely exemplary and surely represents years of painstaking work. Stuart Hood was a Scot who knew German very well. Like Jünger he was a veteran officer, and he needed German for his intelligence missions in World War 2. This is his very first published translation of an entire book. It harnesses a considerable talent, which is also evidenced by how Stuart Hood went on to become an accomplished writer himself, a BBC executive, a professor and several other notable things. And it is clearly a labor of intense love — right after the war, while working on it, Hood corresponded with Jünger and even went to visit him at least twice and they talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs. The end of this last quote, “on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells.” exemplifies how precisely Hood has understood Jünger. Why “calices”, not “chalices”? Because that is the old-fashioned form of this word, and using it is unnecessarily peculiar, but it doesn’t make you stop and look into a dictionary. It isn’t even more precise than DeepL’s and ChatGPT’s and Tess Lewis’s “calyxes” for the word “Blumenkelche” in the Original. But it captures precisely how the author was using his German language. This is because on every page of the original, there are choices of individual words that evoke subtleties of mood and allusion that are strictly impossible to translate, because English doesn’t have a similar-enough group of synonyms from which to make the equivalent choice. Some of that must inevitably get lost in translation. But these “calices” are an example of how Hood has the audacity to frequently insert his own new peculiar word choices — which restore exactly the same effect! It might take entire months until AI can do that! Unfortunately the New Directions edition with this translation has been out of print for a while, although I heard from a regrettably less law-abiding friend that the PDF is easy to find. But a few years ago someone bought the UK rights to this translation and republished it. While this edition has several uncorrected OCR mistakes, one of which horrifyingly turns “Flayer’s Copse” into “Player’s Copse”, at least this makes the better translation available (legally) again. What actually happens (spoilers) After six chapters of descriptions of paradise, and of the botanical work the brothers do since they don’t need to make a living, the book continues with a gradual decline of this gorgeous world. This again is much more of a richly detailed description than a story plot. It begins with the introduction of the Chief Ranger. The brothers know him from their military community, from before his takeover begins. There is some debate about whether the Chief Ranger stands for Hitler, Stalin or Hermann Göring. I think this debate is misguided. The character of the Chief Ranger, the antagonist of the narrator and all he holds dear, is never named but only ever referred to by his title. He does not appear to have staff or lieutenants at all, nor any personal history. And Jünger is profoundly uninterested in the personalities of all his characters beneath what they pay attention to (except the narrator’s brother) so even this important figure is roughly sketched at best. Therefore, I believe he is best understood as more of an archetype or role, The Tyrant, denuded of the individual traits or histories that make one tyrant a Führer, another a General Secretary and yet another a Great Leader. So, what makes a tyrant? According to Jünger, “wherever free spirits establish their sway these primeval powers will always join their company like a snake creeping to an open fire. They are the old connoisseurs of power who see a new day dawning in which to reestablish the tyranny that has lived in their hearts since the beginning of time.” The Chief Ranger is also “a master of feigning frankness that was full of snares for the unwary.” He has a reputation for wealth and a strong visual brand (a gold-embroidered green coat) that makes sure he always leaves “an imprint on one’s memory”. He exudes a “breath of primitive power” and has a strong charisma that gives an impression of “both cunning and unshakable power — yes, at times even majesty.” As he begins to usurp power, “reports spread from mouth to mouth of infringements of the law and of acts of violence in the neighbourhood, and finally such incidents occurred publicly and with no attempt to concealment. A cloud of fear preceded the Chief Ranger like the mountain mist that presages the storm. Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than in his own person lay his power.” From what I know about tyrants, that sounds about right. For the next seven chapters, the vile followers of the Chief Ranger continually corrupt everything. The sophisticated culture of the Marina is surrounded by the rough herdsmen clans of the surrounding Campagna steppe, beyond which lies the Chief Ranger’s forest populated by lowlifes. The class metaphor is blindingly obvious, and Jünger’s theory of how these lowlifes overcome first the Campagna and then the Marina is not subtle either. After the Alta Plana war, and the defeat, the entire society has been weakened. “Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would scarcely notice. The first symptoms, therefore, were not recognized.” Very gradually, law gives way to lawlessness, spreading from and with the lower classes foresters in many different ways. Violent crime grows, in descriptions very reminiscent of the many deadly street fights of the late Weimar republic. Various elements of traditional culture become corrupted. Those who would defend it are intimidated and attacked. The constitutional lawful reaction is too slow, so by the time it manages to convene and have democratic debates, it is already infiltrated. And there’s one paragraph worth quoting in full. Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. Today this is a mainstream view in German history. In 1939, it could have been prosecuted as high treason and punished with death. On the backdrop of ever escalating mayhem, two old men who are friends of the brothers are described: Belovar, a clan patriarch from the Campagna, and Father Lampros, an eminent Christian monk. In very different ways, they both are very helpful, each both in the botanical work and against the mounting threat. The brothers decide against meeting the violence with violence, delve deeper into their work, become increasingly pessimistic and develop a hope that they can rescue the results of their work into an imperishable afterlife by burning it with an ancient mystical crystal lens that they somehow inherited. The narrator describes continued excursions for rare plants, through the country that is becoming increasingly treacherous and foreboding, until finally, well after the middle point of the book, with one particular excursion for an extremely rare flower, the actual continual story begins. Today we look at the Nazis with horror, but Jünger has dug too many trenches into hills of rotting corpses to be easily horrified. Instead of horror, his feelings towards the Nazis are mostly contempt, seasoned with disgust, and that has been pervading his description of the rise of the Chief Ranger’s henchmen over the last couple of chapters. But he does give one instance of pure horror and it is here, in the very heart of the book, when the two brothers on their excursion happen to discover, in the ill-reputed area of Flayer's Copse, the Chief Ranger’s remote “flaying-hut” of Koppels-Bleek. The original Köppels-Bleek is a German wordplay, about as subtle as a drone base in a sci-fi novel that happens to be called Obamazliez. Koppels-Bleek is where the Chief Ranger has his enemies tortured to death. It has frequently been called a concentration camp, but that is imprecise. It is really a Vernichtungslager, a death camp, which unlike a “normal” concentration camp is built for the express purpose that no torture victim ever gets out alive. This is a prediction, because while Nazi concentration camps were set up starting in 1933, Vernichtungslager were only built three years after the “Marble Cliffs” were published. After an intensely gruesome description of the particulars of this place, the narrator assesses its importance as follows. Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen rising the curling savoury smoke of their banquets. They are terrible noisome pits in which a God-forsaken crew revels to all eternity in the degradation of human dignity and human freedom. He is so certain he has captured the very essence of tyranny, “the abode of tyranny in all its shame”, that he puts this climax at the two thirds mark of the book and makes it exceedingly obvious this is where the third and final act begins, as the pace of the book changes entirely. Although the narrator still includes some retrospectives, he is now finally telling a real story. Strikingly, the brothers return to botany — remember this, it will be important later — and then to their home, where they soon get two conspiring visitors. Braquemart is a competent, racist, nihilistic fellow veteran. The narrator despises him at length for his heartless theory-mindedness. Prince Smyrna is new, young, seems to the narrator to know “the nature of justice and order” but is too weak and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility he is heroically taking on. The two visitors want to Do Something about the Chief Ranger — what exactly is never said, though a personal confrontation or assassination is implied. They leave for the Chief Ranger's territory. This entire chapter feels very much like a comment on some political acquaintances of Jünger who attempted to challenge the Nazis, and failed. The next day, Father Lampros gives the narrator a mission to arm himself and look for these two men. He goes to old Belovar's farmstead, where he learns of commotion in the direction of Flayer's Copse, and the old clan patriarch goes to war. Before, the book was a dreamy soliloquy; now we see dramatic wartime action. Ernst Jünger has had a lot of practice with writing about that kind of thing, and it shows. Their small but experienced war party with a lot of dogs goes towards Koppels-Bleek and is soon met with two confused, horrific, riveting battles. The narrator stumbles through and finds at Koppels-Bleek the heads of Prince Smyrna and Braquemart. The former strikes him as a symbol of how nobility remains real, and he picks it up. With it, he retreats through mayhem and danger into the complete flaming destruction of the Marina. He marvels at the beauty of the flames — remember this too, it will also be important later — and, with his hunters in hot pursuit, runs to his house. There his son uses his strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes to make them defeat the nearest attackers. The brothers burn down the house, go find Father Lampros and see him die. From an old soldier comrade who owes them a favor they get room on a ship to flee across the water to Alta Plana, where an old enemy who owes them another favor takes them in. There’s an implicit framing story of how the narrator lives to tell the tale of these memories to some unspecified audience, and as it ends it mentions in passing that sometime after these events, a new cathedral has been built on the ruins of the Marina and the head of Prince Smyrna went there as a relic. This small bit still stands out today, and would have stood out even more starkly to contemporary readers, because in the context of everything that happened before, this bit publicly, extremely boldly, and correctly, predicts the eventual fate of the Nazis. Not once in this entire story has the narrator expressed surprise at this progression of events, or given any other indication it is in any way unlikely. The narrator, and the author through him, seems to be saying this is just the way it goes with tyranny, when a society has lost too much of its strength to fight off the bestial attacks of the lowly. I have omitted not just many smaller elements of the story but also a huge number of allusions to ancient history, (German) literature and especially the Bible. I imagine Jünger put them there as prizes for the few who would find them. This is one of the ways that I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong: a vehicle that lets a prolific nonfiction author
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
Jünger never admitted even a shred of mental weakness, even privately. But objectively, everything he passionately believed in had been falling apart for years. When Jünger wrote this book, the German Catastrophe was in full swing and he was very aware it would all end in tears. He had retreated from his nationalist political work and almost all of his nationalist friends. He had refused bids of friendship from Hitler personally, from the National Socialist party (which repeatedly offered him a mandate in their token parliament) and from various Nazi organizations. A poem where he had bemoaned “the reign of the lowly” had gotten his home raided repeatedly. He and his brother expected a “typhoon” to ravage the country soon and they were hoping to weather it in their refuge in the small town by the Bodensee, where On the Marble Cliffs was written. He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse. For many years, he had strived mightily to guide his beloved country to what he believed was a better path - and had evidently failed completely. How could he possibly have coped with all this?
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
For Hitler, their inaction was insufferable. He had determined that the present period of unrest was the perfect opportunity to overthrow the Weimar Republic. He tried to persuade the Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser to march on Berlin, but to no avail. And so Hitler embarked on an audacious plan to force the Bavarian triumvirs to back his revolution.
Physical terror is outside of liberal norms in terms of the action itself. The power of a Hilter figure grows proportionally to how much physical terror he can get away with. In this, Hitler was helped by the Weimar Republic’s law-enforcement and judiciary systems, which were on the net lenient with him and his SA troops. He was also helped by the communists, who by having their own violent demonstrations, made the overall picture look less like “Hitler is instigating violence” and more like “our political order is collapsing into violence.”
Shirer has his failings too. Even at the time of release, his book received criticism for not including the most up-to-date historical scholarship on the Third Reich, and naturally it doesn’t benefit from all the research done since its publication in 19591. Shirer is also quite ready to let his personal prejudices show through the text, especially his prejudice against Germans. He’ll go on about the supposed gullibility and servility of the German people on practically every other page, and then complain in the afterword about being unfairly characterized as anti-German.
Inline links: 1
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then by city. For instance, the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria, and the first entry for Germany is Berlin. Each region and country has its own header. The USA is the exception where it is additionally sorted by state, with states having their own subheaders. Hopefully this is clear. You can also just have your web browser search for your city by pressing ctrl+f and typing it if you’re on Windows, or command+f and typing if you’re on Mac. If you’re on Linux, I assume you can figure this out.
TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: Alfonso Contact Info: barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 15th, 7:00 PM Location: Pub "The Tower of London", 39 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse. We'll have a sign saying ACX Meetup, and we'll probably be sitting in the back. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCPW+HP Notes: Please, RSVP by emailing barsom.maelwys@gmail.com. Thank you! Germany BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Milli Contact Info: acx-meetups[at]martinmilbradt[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: Center of Humboldthain Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MGAtkuYmX3hZ6eeaw
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCPW+HP, https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MGAtkuYmX3hZ6eeaw
BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Milli Contact Info: acx-meetups[at]martinmilbradt[dot]de Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: Center of Humboldthain Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MGAtkuYmX3hZ6eeaw
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MGAtkuYmX3hZ6eeaw
Dictator Book Club: Chavez
November 02, 2023 · Original source
In the 1970s, the Arab Oil Crisis pushed prices up and made Venezuela the richest country in Latin America. GDP per capita approached the level of Italy and Germany. Caracas became an international capital of business and culture.
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 07, 2023 · Original source
In Germany it is actually illegal to donate a kidney to a stranger while you're alive. (You can do it when you're dead, but obviously then your kidney won't be as good.) While you're alive, unless the recipient is a relative or at least something like your fiancee, apparently the law considers the dastardly danger of the ever-menacing terrible organ trade mafia too great to allow you to save the DALYs of a fellow human.
(The UK, Canada, Australia, and I think most other European countries also allow altruistic donation; Germany is a rare holdout here. Still, the US was one of the first, and I’m still proud of it.)
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
20: In Germany, saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now a crime, carrying a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment. People pooh-pooh America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom, but I really am grateful for the First Amendment. I think Joe Biden, as divinely-descended king of all Northern Europeans, should claim his rightful throne and free Germans from this bulls**t.
Inline links: is now a crime
29: The Association Of German National Jews, “colloquially known as Jews For Hitler”, was a group of Jews who supported the Nazi Party. This didn’t make too much more sense at the time than it does now, although some well-assimilated German Jews did have the same negative attitudes towards recent poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants as ethnic Germans (my great-great-grandfather was one of the poor immigrants, and had awful things to say about his reception by native German Jews). The organization’s existence “gave rise to a contemporary joke about Naumann and his followers ending their meeting by giving the Nazi salute and shouting ‘Down With Us!’“ Yes, they were later sent to concentration camps.
Inline links: Association Of German National Jews
Open Thread 312
January 22, 2024 · Original source
1: Corrections on links: the pro-Palestine slogan “from the river to the sea” was banned only in Berlin, not all of Germany, and has since been unbanned. And our resident Genealogian critiques the claimed line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden.
Inline links: links, only in Berlin, unbanned, critiques the claimed line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden
Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders
January 24, 2024 · Original source
The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country.
How can this be? The lowest genetic risk score of a person who nevertheless developed schizophrenia was 0.915. In our sample of 2000 people, we should expect about 183 people to be at or above that threshold. The simulated Nazis killed off 20 in the last generation. There are still 163 left. These are people who didn’t get schizophrenia because they had a positive environment, but could have gotten it if their environment had been worse. They outnumber schizophrenics by almost 10 to 1. When we bring their genes forward into the new generation, some of their descendants get bad environments, and so get schizophrenia. I think you should expect very slightly fewer schizophrenics in the new generation, but the effect size wasn’t noticeable in this small granular simulation - nor, apparently, in Germany2.
Inline links: 2
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
TBILISI Contact: Dmitrii Contact Info: overfull_jailbird656[at]simplelogin[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 12:00 PM Location: https://f0rth.space Event Link: https://t.me/f0rthsp4ce/347 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+MJ Germany AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Martin Contact Info: acxac[at]enc0[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 7:00 PM Location: At Cafe Papillon, table will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G Group Link: https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
Inline links: https://f0rth.space, https://t.me/f0rthsp4ce/347, https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+MJ, https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G, https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Martin Contact Info: acxac[at]enc0[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 7:00 PM Location: At Cafe Papillon, table will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G Group Link: https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G, https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
AUGSBURG, GERMANY Contact: Jörn Stöhler Contact Info: acx[at]j[dot]stoehler[dot]eu Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM Location: 86156 Augsburg, Am Alten Gaswerk 9, 1st floor, Room O.16 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWG9VP8+R49
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWG9VP8+R49
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we avoid thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. Hanania thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it, the same way they've forgotten about everything else.
Argos from Germany writes:
Inline links: writes
We have laws prohibiting outright discrimination during hiring, but the (fairly high) onus is on applicants to prove that they have been discriminated, and certainly there are no government agencies going after companies publicly because of insufficient women or minorities. Yet almost nobody uses IQ tests during hiring, and work places are very very much some form old mad men style old boys club. Germany would, however, be a data point in favor of Hanania's theory since companies focus comparatively less on increasing representation of minorities and women during hiring (in case of women perhaps more in recent years, but I don't think this is downstream of new laws). A caveat is that this is from public perception, I have only ever worked at small no-name companies with very irrelevant HR departments.
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
July 18, 2024 · Original source
Okay, but other countries solve crime without mass incarceration. France/Germany/Britain have 20% the incarceration rate that we do. So why don’t we eliminate 80% of prisons and use handwave handwave welfare social services to handle the former inmates? Now conservatives will start mumbling about American exceptionalism blah blah blah.
Daniel Bottger on helping homeless people get jobs in his native Germany:
Inline links: on
Germany has a lot of these. A typical example of such work would be disassembling broken appliances for recycling, or simple crafts like basket weaving. The work isn't valuable, so these places pay less than minimum wage. In Germany and many countries there are special exceptions to minimum wage laws for such workshops. They have trained staff and good connections to the local health care providers landscape, especially Assisted Housing facilities. I believe these would surely be able to employ psychotic people, at least as long as they take their meds.
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
The US and the UK sent a lot of material help and eventually fought the Germans too, most notably in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. However, most of the fighting was done by the Soviets.
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then by city. For instance, the first entry in Europe is Sofia, Bulgaria, and the first entry for Germany is Aachen. Each region and country has its own header. The USA is the exception where it is additionally sorted by state, with states having their own subheaders. Hopefully this is clear. If you’re looking at this on the web, you can also use your browser search tool (ctrl+f or command+f) and type your city.
Contact: Dmitrii Contact Info: overfull_jailbird656[at]simplelogin[d ot]c om Time: Sunday, September 01st, 10:00 AM Location: BNKR coffee (https://maps.app.goo.gl/VjMviRv9yymSpA1p7) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+7H Germany AACHEN, GERMANY Contact: Martin Schmidt Contact Info: acx[at]enc0[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 07:00 PM Location: Cafe Papillon, probably near the entrance, will bring ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G Group Link: https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/VjMviRv9yymSpA1p7, https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+7H, https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G, https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6
Contact: Martin Schmidt Contact Info: acx[at]enc0[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 07:00 PM Location: Cafe Papillon, probably near the entrance, will bring ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G Group Link: https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6 BERLIN, GERMANY Contact: Milli and Dominik Contact Info: acx-meetups[at]martinmilbradt[d ot]de Time: Saturday, September 07th, 02:00 PM Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36 Group Link: https://t.me/+_50JIXMIFYc1NTRi
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G, https://t.me/+IiFfbpWDWm1kOGQ6, https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36, https://t.me/+_50JIXMIFYc1NTRi
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
But the Christian cultural package also fell apart and became the current post-Christian world. This wasn't just a one-time coincidence either. Protestantism gave way to modernism in Scandinavia, Germany, and the US. Catholicism gave way to modernism in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. Orthodoxy gave way to modernism in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia (with a slight Putinist resurrection-in-name-only which hardly seems to have produced a flourishing liberal society). Meanwhile in China, the local mix of Buddhism/Confucianism/Taoism gave way to modernism. In South East Asia, Buddhism gave way to modernism. Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast. India is moderately Hindu but still noticeably modern. Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim.
Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory
October 09, 2024 · Original source
My (officially ex-)father-in-law was the front seat passenger. Same story with him: put into the CAT scanner to look for fractures, and although he never had seizures they found a brain tumor in him as well. Utterly implausible, a literal one-in-a-million situation: that’s two out of two CAT scans finding undetected brain tumors, each with roughly a 0.1% prior probability from the epidemiology of undetected tumors in Germany. They've taken it out of him since, he is better now.
I am moved from intensive care to normal care, still struggling through intense pain and terror. The workflows I am dragged through are clearly, blatantly, unapologetically inefficient, producing abject horror in my efficiency-worshipping mind. This makes the people supposed to save me seem insane to me, but it is much more plausible that the insanity is mine. Collaboration keeps failing, and it is failing more often the more vital it is. As usual when that happens, each side is most likely to blame the other. But I can't believe these people are crazy or evil. Doctors and nurses can’t be dumb either; surely they don’t talk so impatiently and seemingly unthinkingly in their private lives. I am not evil either, but I might be going crazy with pain and maybe I’m dumb now because my brain is damaged? But I can still talk as correctly as ever, and I can still discover patterns. Of course I point the pattern recognition at why collaboration is so hard. They don’t like it when I volunteer relevant information! I habitually volunteer relevant information in order to cooperate and emphasize my cooperativeness, but here now this habit is counterproductive. They appreciate brevity; they say only what needs to be done, not why. They are assuming all communication to be about needs, not wants, and are expecting me to assume the same about their communication. I experiment with limiting myself to one word responses. This is Germany and these people are educated, the hierarchy of “Verstanden.” (“I have understood.”), ”Einverstanden.” (“I have agreed.”) “Versprochen.” (“I promise I will do that.”), “Erledigt.” (“I have done the thing you told me to do.”) may safely be presumed common knowledge. This is a breakthrough, the care I receive improves dramatically. But collaboration continues to fail occasionally, so I have not identified the root of the problem. And still they want me to participate in processes that I fail to comprehend, and still collaboration gets more difficult the more urgent it is. I think as hard as I can, with the intensity of a fight for my life (while very possibly going insane from the pain, and surely partially for the analgesic joy of the more focused energy consumption in my brain) about how we can collaborate better. I do eventually survive the hospital. Very good friends and my awe-striking nurse mother pick me up.
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
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
All of this is compounded by the fact that Christianity spread equally gloriously in times and places without any of these factors. The first Christian missionary reached Scandinavia in 710 - by the twelfth century, the whole region was Christian. This is about the same timeline as Rome - but Scandinavian fertility was fine, Scandinavian women already had a decent number of rights, and there were no plagues. What about Germany? Britain? Ireland? Eastern Europe? Russia? Korea? Each of these places had their own idiosyncracies, each benefited from the knowledge that Christianity was already a great religion believed by other regional powers - but each did Christianize, as surely as Rome did. This doesn’t seem predestined. An observer in 600 AD would no more consider it inevitable that Norway would Christianize by 1100 than a modern observer would find it inevitable that Saudi Arabia will Christianize by 2500.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
Preeminent among these was Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919. Their big idea was “starting from zero” - since all previous art had been contaminated by capitalism, we needed a hard reset where people started by (eg) contemplating what color and shape really were, then gradually building a new socialist art from the ground up. This new art must eschew ornamentation, associated as it was with kings and nobles who had money to spare on gold trim or sculpted curlicues. Real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build. If this sounds harsh, remember that this was right after World War I, the old order stood infinitely discredited, and starting from zero must have seemed pretty appealing.
Then the Nazis took power in Germany. The socialist Bauhaus architects fled the country. Many came to America, where we colonial yokels responded with star-struck awe. Wolfe, writing before political correctness limited our stock of acceptable metaphors, says:
The worshipful colonials immediately gave them every prestigious architecture position in the country. Gropius got the department chair at Harvard. As for Mies, the last director of the Bauhaus collective in Germany:
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
Just picking a few examples, Belgium has 334, Germany 349, Hungary 367, France 422, Italy 456, Spain 534
How come in one million articles about Bukele and crime in El Salvador, including many trying to discredit him or say it wasn’t worth it, I’ve never heard a peep about this? And if it wasn’t Bukele or mass incarceration that did it, then what was it? [Y] writes: I have issues with the El Salvador portion of this post. These charts show that the Bukele mass incarceration movement only resulted in a massive increase in the prison population from 2020 forward, based on projected population. The graph shows the murder rate peaking in 2015 and dropping precipitously in the next three years prior to Bukele's presidency. This means, unless I'm missing something, that the vast majority of the decrease in the murder rate occurred before Bukele took office and started putting people in prison at all and thus cannot be attributed to his policies, incarceration or otherwise. Bukele took office in 2019 and did not begin the crackdown until June of that year. The state of emergency that allowed the government to suspend various rights in order to crack down on gangs even further didn't begin until early 2022 While the murder rate was obviously still quite high before Bukele's incarceration policies began, it seems almost actively misleading not to mention that it was collapsing even before he instituted these policies as a result of things like a renewed gang truce in 2016 under the previous government and instead seemingly attribute all of it to him. Further, the post-Bukele homicide data is dubious in several ways. The Bukele government stopped counting bodies discovered buried in unmarked graves as homicides, incentivizing gang members to hide their victims instead of publicly displaying them as trophies or warnings as they had done in years prior. They stopped counting people the police or military shot as homicides, classifying them instead as “legal interventions". They have excluded killings in prisons from the homicide data, which seems like exactly the most obvious way to lie about homicide rates when you begin imprisoning everyone. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/ The source article suggests the above may represent as much as a 47% undercounting. Well, one might say, that still leaves El Salvador much safer than before Bukele’s tenure. But I’m not linking the above to try and pin down exactly the right figure of undercounting. I would suggest instead that these changes to the metrics demonstrate a willful and deliberate pattern of obscuring the homicide rate in El Salvador. The post-Bukele data consequently seems almost useless to me, as you cannot really assume we know all the ways the Bukele government is fudging the data. These are just the ones on record. It’s not that murder has disappeared in El Salvador - it’s more like it’s now de facto legal in many contexts. An MS13 member who rolls up on a rival gang’s stash house and shoots it up now knows that if they can bury the bodies in an unmarked grave outside of town without being caught red-handed with the shovels and corpses, the victims will legally cease to exist. They’re not prosecuting people for these murders, right? Otherwise they would show up in the data. The media doesn't talk about them. You don't see the evidence. Out of sight, out of mind. I'm not suggesting no murders were prevented as a result of the Bukele government's mass incarceration policies, obviously. I can also see the argument that it's good for society for criminals to kill each other in prison yard fights instead of getting into shootouts in a marketplace where an innocent bystander also gets their head blown off. I just think the fundamental premise - that he arrested everyone and it caused murders to stop happening and we need to reason forward from there - is extremely dubious. Drethelin writes: idk about the statistics but multiple people I talked to in el salvador specifically told me theft was WAY down like walking down the street with your phone in your hand was now an option where it used to not be people can now both afford to and feel safe owning cars, etc. among other things they are very proactive about using what we wouldn't really consider due process, eg cops browsing facebook and like, going after guys that people post from their security camera footage as taking their bike or whatever Thanks - I had said in the post that although murder was down, the statistics didn’t really show this about theft - but I was eyeballing statistics not really gathered for this purpose and if the news on the ground is that theft is down, I believe it. 4: Comments On Probation In response to a question of why probation with GPS tracking hasn’t taken off as an alternative to prison, Peter answers: Because convicts turn it down. You see at least in America probation (which is what GPS monitoring is part of) and incarceration aren't related, you get no credit for the former when it comes to the latter and people like to overlook over half of people incarcerated aren't there for any crime at all but simply a technical probation violation like getting fired from your job from not showing up on time because your probation officer randomly changes times of meetings daily (which is also results in prison even if you are one minute late). If the max sentence is five years prison plus probation time doesn't count and you have a more likely than not chance of violating probation because it's designed to be unreasonable and cause failures as a back door way for judge's to avoid trials, why would you accept GPS monitoring which will only increase your chances of being violated. I.e..why do nine years (four years probation out of your ten year probation, then violated, then five in more actual prison) when you can just do five. Generally the rule among convicts is if the prison sentence is shorter than the probation sentence, just take prison day one. As a convict you can, and many do, turn down probation. If you want to fix this then you need to let convicts "try" probation where they get credit at a 1-1, or even better motivate them so let's say 2-1, towards a future prison sentence when they fail. This entire conversation (OP) is worthless as it's making the standard mistake of just looking at prison and not probation, jail, fines, etc all which backdoor as a way to avoid trials lead to prison. This isn’t very clearly written, but my impression is that Peter is saying that violating probation gives you a longer prison sentence than just accepting prison in the first place, probation is deliberately designed to be near-impossible to keep, and so it’s a con to trick criminals into longer sentences without having to get them through a judge and jury. Criminals know this, so they refuse probation. This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it. I wonder if people ever try GPS tracking (without the rest of probation) as a prison alternative. “You’re getting off with a warning this time, but wear this tracker, and if you commit any other crimes in the future, we’ll know.” [EDIT: commenter answers here] More from Peter: Remember, the entire point of probation is to get people to avoid a trial by plea dealing to probation and then put them in prison anyways without any due process because reasonable people, the sort that takes plea deals, believe in the system hence overestimate their ability to complete probation. And so you put them in prison on a technical violation, i.e. getting fired after you intentionally caused them to do so, not having a place to live after you intentionally refused to approve anywhere they tried live, changing their appointment times without confirming they know ("I left a message with their dog"), or just harass them until they give up and just go to prison. Americans tend to discount probation as a joke but any experienced convict knows probation as implemented is worse hence just goes to jail. Also note that probation and PAROLE are different and significantly so, you actually get credit for parole time. Parole WANTS you to succeed, after all they paroled you, probation doesn't. They aren't even the same group of government offices either which is part of the problem. Probation falls under the judiciary (they work for the court) hence they free up budgets the faster they can move you over to the executive (prison) branch whereas parole is a cost saving measure as it falls under the same prison budget, i.e. parole officers aren't probation officers. Also all those fancy rehabilitation programs people love to tore to decrease recidivism goes to parolees, not probationers. I.e. there are giant structural incentives from pure intergovernmental bureaucratic budget wars to move people from probation to prison and because it's controlled by judges, I.e. the prison department can't just refuse to take a trivial probationary revokee, it's a one sided fight […] For example I got a friend that just got two years for the driving the speed limit in Texas while at a funeral, travel approved by the judge, because probation also makes it illegal to break your state law even in another jurisdiction where it's legal. He was driving 85 (the posted speed limit) in outside Austin but in Hawaii it's a misdemeanor to exceed 80 mph for any reason on any road strict liability; his PO asked him "jokingly" if he drove the speed limit while there and if he enjoyed the faster mainland speeds, he said "yes" unbeknownst to him he was being setup. His admission resulted in his probation being revoked for literally following the posted speed limit. Charlotte Wollstonecraft writes: The marginal prisoner in Massachusetts may be a much badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana. But here is anecdotal reason to believe he is not: Last week in New Orleans, there were three mass shootings. Two of them happened at the same second line in New Orleans East, 45 minutes apart. In two separate incidents, a gunman opened fire at a large outdoor gathering. In total, two people died, and ten were wounded. This is not national news. No arrests have been made. The third shooting took place in the French Quarter four days later. One of the three shooters was caught immediately. Turns out, he had already served seven years in prison for armed robbery. Last year, he was arrested again and charged with domestic battery, child endangerment, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. A plea deal got him out on parole, the terms of which he violated near daily according to his ankle monitor's logs. He was wearing the ankle monitor at the time he opened fire on a French Quarter street, wounding three people and killing another. I’m including this here as a counter to Peter’s story of the guy who got two years in jail for driving the speed limit. I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on. 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something Grant Gould writes: You allude to it twice but then pass over it "for simplicity": None of these studies measure within-prison crime, which is largely not counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted. It is not only plausible but likely that "incapacitation" is at best simply relocation of crimes. And even _that_ is leaving aside the regular drumbeat of deeply sadistic crimes by guards, which are even less counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted. The quality of statistics on crimes within prisons is very poor, of course; ttbomk it is not practically possible to know if the average prisoner commits crimes at a greater rate while incarcerated than while outside, or likewise the rate at which people in prison are crime victims versus those outside. If your value function is some sort of utilitarian sum over society, you have to count those, or else your utilitarianism is just gerrymandering people into and out of the boundaries of the utility summation (in which case you can optimize utility much more simply than by incarcerating; simple Schmittianism will do the job more easily, and it's free since you don't count the cost). I wrote this post to respond to debates (eg on California’s Prop 36) on whether prison is an effective way of decreasing the crime that normal people have to suffer in their neighborhoods. I think this is an important question that lots of people care about. Whether prisoners commit crimes against other prisoners is also important, but it’s a different question. I think people would justly distrust me if I pretended to be answering the question they cared about, but actually answered a different question. I (following Roodman) gave two conclusions in my cost-benefit analysis - one that counted the suffering by prisoners themselves, and one that didn’t. Since I think different people will have different intuitions on this, I think it was the right strategy. The one that counted the suffering of prisoners included a general estimate of willingness-to-pay for prison which I think includes the cost of intra-prison crimes. Either way, I think being exposed to intra-prison crimes is a small fraction of the badness of prison that doesn’t change that analysis much. I also don’t think it’s exactly right to say that incarceration only relocates (rather than prevents) crime. This may be true for murder and rape. But there aren’t a lot of things to steal in prison (not zero, but not as much as in the outside world) and the vast majority of crimes are property crimes. JBG writes: Some thoughts as a former defense attorney. On "after effects," skipping all the way to length of incarceration misses a lot of what's going on for first time offenders. As your own examples note, many of the problems making it harder to make an honest living accrue from being a felon as such, and not from jail time. I'll add on that merely being *arrested* triggers a similar cascade of consequences. Your average person will be fired from their job very quickly after arrest -- either because of the arrest itself or just because it leads to missing work. And an arrest on its own, without a conviction, is sufficient to make it hard to get hired on in a lot of jobs. But this is all specific to first-time offenders; going from someone presumed to be a law-abiding citizen to being a felon changes everything. An incremental felony after that doesn't change much. From your description, it seems like the studies are blurring this together? I'd be interested to see evidence focused specifically on first time offenders. My guess would be that there's a large, negative effect of your first felony (all else equal) but not much effect at all of subsequent felonies. In that case, there's a very different calculus for the incapacitation vs. recidivism tradeoff for different, identifiable groups. Undeserving Porcupine writes: Eugenic effects of 3-5x’ing the prison population? Makes it harder for these criminals to make more of themselves. Several people brought this up on Twitter. It deserves a full post response, but in case I don’t get around to making it - I think this is almost zero. I realize that’s a surprising claim, but compare the Nazi eugenics program against schizophrenics discussed here. They killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, and schizophrenia is 80% genetic, yet the next generation had the same number of schizophrenics as ever, at least within the measurement margin of error. See the post for a longer explanation of this seemingly paradoxical result. Sebjenseb did a similar analysis and finds that if you execute the most criminal 1% of the population each generation, population level criminality decreases by about 0.1 standard deviation per 400 years. This is less trivial than I expected - it corresponds to a drop in the murder rate from 30 to 20 (possibly less for other crimes). But it's also a better case than our real scenario for a few reasons (police have 100% efficiency in arresting the worst criminals exactly in order; execution is better at preventing childbearing than prison). Maybe a real scenario is 33% decrease in crime rate per 600 years? Doesn't seem that relevant to me - even if we don’t get a singularity in the next few decades like I expect, we’ll probably get better genetic engineering or go multiplanetary (in which case founder effects will overwhelm everything else). Publius Obsequium writes: One thing Scott neglects is the beneficial effect prison has on kids of criminals (yes you read that right - look it up) Here is an article making this case and citing some corroborating studies. I would stress that there are also many (probably more) studies finding the opposite, and that I haven’t looked through any of the studies on either side to check whether they’re any good. Straphanger writes: This analysis ignores that punishment is a good in itself. The victims of crimes deserve retribution against the people who have wronged them. Some version of this was one of the most common comments, with opinions ranging from: I was a bad person for not focusing on the suffering of the prisoners in prison more, especially their potential victimization by prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
Inline links: writes, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/, Peter answers, commenter answers here, writes, this post, writes, writes, writes, here, did a similar analysis, writes, Here is an article, finding the opposite, writes
Open Thread 369
February 16, 2025 · Original source
Lasse Schettlinger is from Germany and is working on a masters in Quantitative Economics. He currently finances his studies by working as a croupier.
Inline links: croupier
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Alfonso Contact Info: barsom[period]maelwys[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, October 15th, 8:00 PM Location: We'll meet in front of "La Pastasciutta", at 35Bis Rue Gabriel Péri, 31000 Toulouse Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM3JF43+GX Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/the-friendly-debate/events/310609861 Notes: Please, RSVP either in meetup (https://www.meetup.com/the-friendly-debate/events/310609861) or by email Germany AACHEN Contact: Martin Contact Info: acx[at]enc0[dot]com Time: Friday, October 10, 06:00 PM Location: Papillon, usually on the top, I'll bring a sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G Group Link: https://t.me/+QeSVhF1cIggzZDgy
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FM3JF43+GX, https://t.me/+QeSVhF1cIggzZDgy
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases
…unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
List of testimonies from Heroldsbach, Germany miracle (hosted on kommherrjesus.de).
Inline links: List of testimonies from Heroldsbach, Germany miracle
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
22: Earlier this year, I wrote about Richard Lynn’s IQ estimates - what do we do with data suggesting that the average IQ in poor countries is in the 60s or 70s? Should we think of these groups as similar to intellectually disabled people in First World countries? Or are the IQ tests failing to classify them correctly? Andrew Hammel (X) writes about a remarkable case in Germany that hinged on this question: a Syrian terrorist murdered three people. The defense argued that since he had an IQ of 71 (borderline intellectually disabled by German standards) he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions. But a psychiatric expert witness counterargued that IQ 71 is normal for Syria, and you can hardly argue that no Syrian can be regarded as a moral actor. The argument seems to have carried the day, and the Syrian man will face a normal sentence.
Inline links: wrote about, Andrew Hammel (X)
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
The last point obviously does not apply to the richest countries themselves (hence why populism in the Nordics, Germany and the Netherlands looks more like MAGA than the rest of the European right), but the first three do, mutatis mutandis. The second and the third one even moreso, opportunities are as equal as they can realistically be and the safety net really robust. Nobody is afraid they will end up destitute, and opportunities are as equalized as they can realistically be across the bottom 95% (maybe even 99%) of the kids. Once you take away those two sources of anxiety, people tend to be a lot more relaxed.
I don’t know which direction this pushes. I think the UK is having the same problem with London that we have with Brooklyn, and China has their Tier 1 cities. I don’t know what the situation is in France or Germany, but I’m also not sure the Vibecession is happening in those places.
If you look into the rents in Germany and Switzerland (the ones I know about), there are two very different measures of rents, even after adjusting for flat sizes etc:
Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group5.
Inline links: In Germany, 5
Why should these numbers be so different in the US vs. Germany? Partly because differing geography and history expose them to different immigrant groups, partly because differing legal systems mean they select immigrants differently, partly because different culture makes it easier for immigrants to integrate into America, and partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans, so the same immigrant crime rate can be lower than Americans but higher than Germans.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Liza Contact Info: lizajibladze1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 18, 06:00 PM Location: Kiwi vegan cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6MQRX+PX Germany BERLIN Contact: Milli Contact Info: acx-meetups[@]martinmilbradt[.]de Time: Sunday, May 10th, 2:00 PM Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36 Group Link: https://t.me/+tVWSc66-0UM5MzA6 Notes: The group link is just for this event. If you want I can add you to the general Rationality Berlin Group on the event.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8HH6MQRX+PX, https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36, https://t.me/+tVWSc66-0UM5MzA6
Georgia24 mentions across 24 issues

Georgia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 24 times across 24 issues between February 24, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Columbus, Georgia"; "Georgia Senate races"; "Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races". It most often appears alongside France, Israel, China.

Article page
Georgia
Mention count
24
Issue count
24
First seen
February 24, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
Where then may a member of the top classes live in this country? New York first of all, of course. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Boston. Perhaps Cleveland. And deep in the countryside of Connecticut, New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. That's about it. It’s not considered good form to live in New Jersey, except in Bernardsville and perhaps Princeton, but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale, Cypress, and Compton, California; Canton, Ohio; Reno, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Columbus, Georgia, and similar army towns.
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%]
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Oliver Porter is the architect of the Sandy Springs model, named after the city of Sandy Springs, Georgia. This is an interesting rabbit hole in itself - Sandy Springs incorporated in a hurry, didn’t have time to create its own city services, hired private corporations to do everything, then liked it so much that they advertised themselves as a libertarian paradise and a model for everyone else to follow (though see here for another perspective).
Inline links: a model for everyone else to follow, here
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.
Inline links: 4, 5
Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality
December 23, 2021 · Original source
I’m having trouble figuring out how to analyze this point. After thinking about it, maybe the problem is I don’t have a good sense of why fires ever stop. Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?
Open Thread 210
February 07, 2022 · Original source
One paragraph summary of Jan 2022 progress on #climate24x7 (advancing smart climate efforts in the legislature and/or via 2024 ballot measures in at least 7 states): In Nebraska, climate-concerned R state senator John McCollister introduced LB944, a short 3-page bill that cuts the regressive 5.5% state sales tax rate on electricity once electric utilities hit certain carbon intensity targets; see these one-pagers. We have a page of potential improvements based feedback from utility folks and others and are anticipating a public hearing in late February or early March. A similar idea is making progress in South Dakota, where a D legislator has expressed interest in similar legislation, and in Arizona, where I’ve hired Autumn Johnson of Tierra Strategy to pursue this; we’ve written one-pagers and draft legislation, she’s gotten fairly positive feedback from utilities, enviros, and legislative staff, and we’re doing our best to find a House member to introduce legislation before the cut-off of Friday Feb 4. In Utah we continue to work on the signature-gathering plan for the Clean The Darn Air 2024 ballot measure effort; we also anticipate the introduction of a similar bill in this year’s legislative session. Also trying to push forward with ideas or exploratory conversations in Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Additional funding would help extend Autumn’s contract and help push forward faster in Nebraska, South Dakota, and elsewhere! From Yoram Bauman (yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon)
Inline links: John McCollister, LB944, one-pagers, Tierra Strategy, one-pagers, draft legislation, plan, Clean The Darn Air, yoram@standupeconomist.com
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Commenters bring up Belarus (if they start seeming less loyal), Moldova (if part of Russia’s plan was to create a corridor to Transdnistria), or Georgia (Russia likes invading Georgia). Relatively few people think a Russia-NATO war is likely to be a big part of this. Zvi thinks this should be 20%.
Inline links: Zvi thinks
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
Everyone can sanction Russia as much as they want, and it can win anyway. Putin is in too deep to extricate himself easily; it’s become a matter of honor, of “not being seen to be weak”. The point isn’t to save Ukraine, it’s to establish expectations for next time. This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t.
These were most of Putin’s demands before the war, so one could argue that, if they’re a good idea now, they would have been a good idea then, and Ukraine should have agreed and prevented bloodshed. This might be true, but I don’t think it’s necessarily so. A big part of diplomacy is maintaining your honor and your reputation for not caving in to threats. If Russia had gotten everything it wanted from Ukraine with no effort, it would have legitimized using threats of war as a negotiating tactic and made it harder for Taiwan/Georgia/Iran etc in the future. This is easy for me to say on the other side of the world, not losing any friends or relatives, but it is potentially worth standing up for yourself, even to the point of war, in order to maintain the illegitimacy of such threats.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal Similarly, the Soviet Union did not violate the sovereignty of states when it invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of its government in 1979, and similarly in Syria in 2015. When Russia violated international law, most notably Georgia in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the goal was occupation rather than removing their governments, killing their leaders, or fundamentally remaking their societies (the book was published before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). The US is truly singular in violating international law: Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.
The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.
Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.” The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.
Links For July
July 29, 2022 · Original source
18: The enigmatic Georgia Guidestones monument was destroyed by vandals/terrorists earlier this month. Marginal Revolution compares it to the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas. I did get a chance to hear from an anti-Guidestone acquaintance (they prefer not to be linked, sorry) who reminds people that the guidestones’ “commandments” urged readers to institute a one world language, do eugenics, and reduce the world population by >90% through unspecified means. Still, as Voltaire put it, I may disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to erect 19-foot tall 230,000 lb granite slabs in the middle of Georgia that say it.
Inline links: destroyed by vandals/terrorists earlier this month, compares it to
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve French Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, April 29th, 02:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing. 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW. Suite D-1. Atlanta, GA 30318, USA. Look for the Yellow ACX Table Sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8 Event Link: https://www.acxatlanta.com Notes: Please RSVP
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8, https://www.acxatlanta.com
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Charlie Contact Info: chuckwilson477[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 2nd, 1:00 PM Location: Grandview Public Market. 1401 Clare Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. We'll be at the northeast outside seating area, sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot and there is also a free valet service. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH Group Link: https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP Notes: The meetup will go on for several hours so don't worry if you have to arrive later than 1pm. Also, if you need to show up earlier, reach out since we can be flexible about the time. We regularly host local events and also have members in Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, and Delray Beach. If you can't make it to this event, connect with us to stay tuned for future opportunities! Georgia ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve French Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30318, USA. We will be in the breezeway in the front. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH, https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP, https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96, https://acxatlanta.com/
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve French Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA 30318, USA. We will be in the breezeway in the front. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96, https://acxatlanta.com/
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
HALEY: I hadn’t finished the sentence! Maybe I was going to use the name of a US state somewhere else! Maybe I was going to say “I believe we can systematically develop a long term plan to bring peace to the region and meet this ma-Georgia-llenge.” Get it? Like Georgia, and major challenge?
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
PARIS, FRANCE Contact: Épiphanie Gédéon (Épi) Contact Info: iwonder[at]whatisthis[dot]world Time: Saturday, April 20th, 6:00 PM Location: We'll meet at the Parc Montsouris, just below Cité Universitaire, in front of the Avenue Reille and Avenue René Corty entrance and behind the statue on the grass. There will be an ACX meetup sign and tableclothes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FW4R8FP+CJ Group Link: Discord: https://discord.com/invite/2U9qhR2suc ; mailing list: https://framalistes.org/sympa/info/slatestarcodexparis Georgia TBILISI Contact: Dmitrii Contact Info: overfull_jailbird656[at]simplelogin[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 12:00 PM Location: https://f0rth.space Event Link: https://t.me/f0rthsp4ce/347 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+MJ
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FW4R8FP+CJ, https://discord.com/invite/2U9qhR2suc, https://framalistes.org/sympa/info/slatestarcodexparis, https://f0rth.space, https://t.me/f0rthsp4ce/347, https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+MJ
WASHINGTON DC, USA Contact: EK Contact Info: ek [a t] eleanorkonik [dot ] com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: Hook Hall, 3400 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20010. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WXJG+WC Group Link: There exist two facebook groups for DC: https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4WXJG+WC, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Charlie Contact Info: chuckwilson477[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 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 Group Link: https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP Notes: Hosted by the south Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray and many others. Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming! Georgia ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, April 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW Atlanta, GA 30318, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH, https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP, https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V, https://acxatlanta.com/
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).
24
May 13, 2024 · Original source
Okay, so there are at least three cases. There’s paying Stormy Daniels hush money, currently going on in New York. There’s a Georgia election interference case. And there’s a federal election interference / January 6th case.
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Alfonso Contact Info: barsom[dot]maelwys[at]gmail[do t]co m Time: Tuesday, September 10th, 08:00 PM Location: Pizzeria La Pastasciutta (35Bis Rue Gabriel Péri, 31000 Toulouse). We'll meet at the door. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM3JF43+GW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/the-friendly-debate/ Notes: Please, RSVP by email Georgia TBILISI, GEORGIA Contact: Dmitrii Contact Info: overfull_jailbird656[at]simplelogin[d ot]c om Time: Sunday, September 01st, 10:00 AM Location: BNKR coffee (https://maps.app.goo.gl/VjMviRv9yymSpA1p7) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+7H
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FM3JF43+GW, https://www.meetup.com/the-friendly-debate/, https://maps.app.goo.gl/VjMviRv9yymSpA1p7, https://plus.codes/8HH6PQ4J+7H
Contact: Charlie Contact Info: chuckwilson477[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 12:00 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 should also be a free valet service. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH Group Link: https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP Notes: Hosted by the south Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and many others. Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming! Georgia ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 28th, 02:00 PM Location: Bold Monk. 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW. Suite D-1, Atlanta, GA 30318. We will be in the breezeway out front Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH, https://discord.gg/tDf8fYPRRP, https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
People take various policy implications from this (maybe “life sentences” should end at 65, since incapacitation is unlikely to help much after that). But here we’re interested in its potential to confound studies. A 20 year old who gets 5 years in prison is released at 25 - still young! - but a 20 year old who gets 10 years in prison is released at 30 - too old to be leaping on rooftops and running from cops. The National Sentencing Commission understands this problem, and matches the experimental and control groups by age at release. But this introduces a new bias - now they’re different ages when they start committing crimes. Might a person who starts crime at 15 be a more disturbed and committed criminal than one who starts at 20? Seems plausible. I think this might be responsible for a lot of the seemingly positive effect of sentences > 5 years. There are dozens of other studies on this topic, all hotly debated, so even in this part I’m only going to list a few highlights. Still, these are: Green and Winik (2010). They use random judge assignment, ie look at criminals with similar crimes who got lenient/strict judges and so shorter/longer sentences. They find that the total difference in rearrests is indistinguishable from zero. But the length of time in which they were measuring rearrests includes the time the offenders were in jail, so this is saying that incapacitation plus aftereffects was zero (plus or minus a margin of error), meaning that aftereffects must be detrimental and large enough to cancel out the benefits of incapacitation, just as Roodman claims. But this study looked at minor crimes where sentences were measured in months, so I think this matches our previous suspicion that aftereffects might be detrimental in short sentences but neutral-to-beneficial in longer ones. Roach and Schanzenbach (2015) More random judge assignment, this time in Seattle. They find that each month of longer sentence decreases future reoffending by one percentage point. Most of these sentences are short, so this contradicts our working theory that lengthening short sentences increases crime but lengthening long ones decreases it. Neither Berger nor Roodman really want to take this study too seriously; Berger objects that it’s an unusual study population (everyone entered a guilty plea), and Roodman objects that the judge selection might not have been truly random. Rhodes (2018) is a matching study - it artificially tries to create groups of prisoners who are as similar as possible except that one group got longer sentences. Its big advantage is that it has some people serving moderately long sentences (a few years), getting us out of the few-month range investigated by some of the other studies. It finds a mild beneficial effect of longer sentences: This study provides no evidence that an offender’s criminal trajectory is negatively affected – that is, that criminal behavior is accelerated – by the length of an offender’s prison term. If anything, longer prison terms modestly reduce rates of recidivism beyond what is attributable to incapacitation. This “treatment effect” of a longer period of incarceration is small. The three-year base rate of 20% recidivism is reduced to 18.7% when prison length of stay increases by an average of 5.4 months. We are inclined to characterize this as a benign, close to neutral effect on recidivism. What Do Our Experts Think? As mentioned above, these are only a few of the very many studies on this topic, and I’ve only given the briefest summary of each. Due to the complexity of this literature, I’m relying more than usual on the opinion of the expert reviewers. Berger (pro-longer-sentences) says: Considering the rigorous research published since the Nagin et al. (2009) review, the literature regarding length of stay on recidivism is still somewhat inconsistent, with many studies claiming no recidivism effects and some showing that increased prison length reduces recidivism slightly. However, just like the rest of the research examined thus far, the study methodologies vary in terms of their limitations, which could explain some of the mixed results [...] At present, there is no substantial evidence that a criminogenic effect exists in the aggregate. Thus, it remains unclear whether criminogenic effects exist, and if so, under what circumstances...Among the substantial number of published studies with varying methodologies, not one has found a large aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Roodman (pro-shorter-sentences) says: The preponderance of the evidence says that incarceration in the US increases crime post-release, and enough over the long run to offset incapacitation. A quartet of judge randomization studies (Green and Winik in Washington, DC; Loeffler in Chicago; Nagin and Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang in Philadelphia and Miami) put the net of incapacitation and incarceration aftereffects at about zero. In parallel, Chen and Shapiro find that harsher prison conditions—making for incarceration that is harsher in quality rather than quantity—also increases recidivism. Gaes and Camp concur, though less convincingly because in their study harsher incarceration quality went hand in hand with lower incarceration quantity. Mueller-Smith sides with all these studies and goes farther, finding modest incapacitation and powerful, harmful aftereffects in Houston; but modest hints of randomization failure accompany those results. Some studies dissent from the majority view that incarceration is criminogenic. Roach and Schanzenbach find beneficial aftereffects in Seattle—a result that is also subject to some doubt about the quality of randomization. Bhuller et al. make a more compelling case that incarceration reduces crime after—in Norway. Berecochea and Jaman, one of the few truly randomized studies in this literature, also looks more likely right than wrong, and is also somewhat distant in its setting, early-1970s California. And there are the two Georgia studies, which upon reanalysis no longer point to beneficial aftereffects, but still do not demonstrate harmful ones either. Aftereffects must vary by place, time, and person. But the first-order generalization that best fits the credible evidence is that at the margin in the US today, aftereffects offset in the long run what incapacitation does in the short run. Nagin (neutral, tie-breaker) says: Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior. This conclusion is not sufficiently firm to guide policy generally, though it casts doubt on claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects. What conclusions do we draw from these studies of the dose-response relationship between time served and reoffending? The one experimental study is suggestive of a preventive effect, but that effect may be attributable to incapacitation. Two of the matching studies point weakly to a criminogenic type dose-response relationship, but both are extremely dated. The Loughran et al. (2008) study suggests a possible criminogenic effect of placement but finds no linkage between time served and reoffending. We draw no conclusions from the results of the regression studies. Not only are results extremely varied, but more importantly all of the studies suffer from a fundamental analytical flaw. This flaw relates to the potential sensitivity of regression- based studies to specification errors in the model of the relationship of age and offending rate. In other words: Berger and Nagin think evidence is weak and it’s kind of a wash and maybe there are slight criminogenic effects; Roodman thinks there are strong criminogenic effects that (on the current margin) are sizeable enough to approximately cancel out the benefit from incapacitation. So What’s Up With Roodman? At the risk of repeating myself: this is the question upon which this whole essay hinges. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of deterrence are real but small. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of incapacitation are real and large. Everyone except Roodman agrees that aftereffects range from slightly beneficial to slightly detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration significantly decreasing crime. Only Roodman says that aftereffects are large and detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration having no effect on crime. So where does Roodman disagree with everyone else? My impression is that the main difference is that Roodman gives more weight to certain judge selection studies. These find that being randomly assigned to a lenient vs. strict judge (and therefore on average getting a short vs. long sentence) doesn’t change rearrest rates after X years from the time the sentence started. This X year period includes both the time spent serving the sentence, and the time after release when aftereffects might materialize - ie they include both incapacitation and aftereffects. Since these studies fail to find any net effect, and incapacitation effects must be beneficial and large, Roodman concludes that aftereffects must be detrimental and large. Then he reanalyzes several of the other studies that other people use to demonstrate no or beneficial aftereffects, and finds them less convincing after reanalysis. So who is right? Roodman gets his strongest evidence from studies of short sentences vs. shorter sentences (eg going from 0 to 1 years, or 1 to. 2 years). These are naturally where we would expect the fewest benefits from incapacitation. But they’re also where we would common-sensically expect the worst aftereffects. Someone going from zero prison to one year in prison has had their life, career, and relationships profoundly changed, in a way that someone going from ten years in prison to eleven years hasn’t. This is consistent with the National Sentencing Commission study above. They found that aftereffects trended worse the shorter the sentences got, but didn’t investigate any sentences shorter than 2-3 years. If the trend continues, sentences shorter than that could have aftereffects > incapacitation. So maybe Roodman is right about shorter sentences, and everyone else is right about longer sentences. Going from a month to a year in prison is so disruptive and criminogenic that it risks canceling the benefits of eleven extra months of incapacitation. But going from ten years to eleven years mostly just gives you the incapacitation. Marginal Revolution This highlights a problem with all of these studies: we can only talk about particular margins. Imagine a country which currently incarcerates zero people, trying to decide whether to move up to a policy of incarcerating one person. If you only incarcerate one person, it will be the baddest dude in the whole country. That guy really needs to be behind bars! And we’re not worried about turning him into a hardened criminal, because he’s already maximally bad. Here it’s obvious that benefits outweigh costs. Now imagine a country which incarcerates 50% of its population, trying to decide whether to move up to 50% + 1. At this point, you’re imprisoning someone who went a few miles over the speed limit. You gain no benefits from incapacitation (he wasn’t going to commit any crimes anyway), but you stand to lose a lot from aftereffects (he’s probably a totally normal law-abiding citizen, so there’s a very high risk of ruining his life and turning him into a more hardened criminal). Here it’s obvious that costs outweigh benefits. So the question isn’t “do the costs of prison outweigh benefits?”, but rather “at what point between incarcerating 0% and 50% of people does the cost of imprisoning one more person start outweighing the benefits?”, or even “at the current US incarceration rate of 0.75%, does the cost of imprisoning one more person outweigh the benefits?” In some sense, this is what we’ve been investigating the whole time - all of these studies are being conducted at the current margin. But this hides big differences between them. We’ve already seen that European studies get stronger results than American studies. That’s because European countries have incarceration rates of ~0.05%, compared to America’s ~0.75%. In theory, Europeans countries’ incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime. But I notice that the European countries we’re talking about here all have high recent new immigrant populations, and in Europe these groups commit more crimes per person than natives. So it’s possible that Europe is still adjusting to being a high-crime continent, whereas America has already adjusted by raising incarceration rates. So one possible conclusion is that the benefits of incarceration strongly outweigh costs in Europe. I think this is clearly true by American values - we seem to care more about preventing crime, and be less horrified by imprisonment, than the average European. But there are many different margins even within America. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is >1%; Massachusetts is <0.25%. Some of the variance reflects the criminality of each state’s population, but other variance reflects the values of each state’s voters and policy-makers. We haven’t been keeping great track of which state each of our studies comes from, but plausibly the marginal prisoner in Massachusetts is a badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana, and releasing him is more likely to have costs > benefits. Margins also differ across eras. US incarceration ranged from 0.2% in 1970 to 0.95% in 2007 to about 0.75% today. Our studies cover this entire time period. This is probably why Levitt found stronger incapacitation effects (studying the 1970s) than Owens or Lofstrom+Raphael (studying the 2000s). Finally, there are the margins across sentences we discussed earlier. Going from zero years in prison to one year is a bigger deal than going from ten to eleven. When we examine our original question - does extending the average prisoner’s sentence for one year substantially decrease crime, we find that there’s no single answer - it depends where we are on all of these margins. Roodman’s skeptical position is most plausible for shorter sentences in high-incarceration areas, and Berger’s pro-prison position is most plausible for longer sentences in low-incarceration areas. So Why Do People Keep Saying That Prison Doesn’t Decrease Crime? We began with the observation that criminologists tend to deny that prison decreases crime. We now know why Roodman thinks this: he idiosyncratically believes that aftereffects equal (and so cancel out) incapacitation. But nobody else has even gotten this far. So what’s everyone else’s position? The Vera Institute is an anti-incarceration think tank. They have a policy paper titled The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime. It says: There is a very weak relationship between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates. Although studies differ somewhat, most of the literature shows that between 1980 and 2000, each 10 percent increase in incarceration rates was associated with just a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate. This is just taking the (real, positive) effect of incarceration on crime, and calling it “very weak”. Research shows that each additional increase in incarceration rates will be associated with a smaller and smaller reduction in crime rates. We saw above that this is true, but I find it annoying to mention here in this kind of advocacy context - it’s also true of everything else in the world! When the Vera Institute publishes anti-mass-incarceration white papers, the 500th white paper will be less influential than the first. If I claimed that “research showed” this, and so they should stop publishing anti-mass-incarceration white papers, they would look at me like I’d gone insane. Get a life. The weak association between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates applies almost entirely to property crime. Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates. This is sort of true. Research finds a stronger effect of incarceration on property crimes than violent crimes, although Levitt does find a violent crime effect of minus one violent crime per incarceration-year. Partly this is because violent crimes are rarer than property crimes, and so studies are underpowered to find them. And partly it’s because most studies are done on mass releases of prisoners, where (for example) the state has to release 25% of the prison population to decrease overcrowding, but they get to choose which 25% - and states are smart enough not to release the murderers and psychos. Still, if Vera Institute’s preferred decarceration policy is also smart, then it won’t release the murderers and psychos either, and this point will stand. So my interpretation of Vera Institute is that they’re making some good points about ways that incarceration isn’t an infinitely powerful cure-all, but that it’s deceptive to summarize them as “incarceration doesn’t decrease crime”. What about other groups? Prison Policy Institute has a list of “crime myths”. Myth #7 is that “Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer”. They write: Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not serve as effective “examples” that would prevent new people from committing serious crimes. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences, and especially long sentences, do little to deter future crime Here they’re using “deterrence” in the strict sense (that is, in a way that doesn’t count incapacitation), noting that it’s small, and rounding off “small” to “zero”. I’ve looked at some other sites and think tanks that claim to have arguments against the “myth” that prison prevents crime, and they’re all using these same two tricks. Either they ignore incapacitation and focus only on deterrence + aftereffects. Or they imagine some hypothetical prison super-fan who believes that incapacitation is infinitely effective, prove that it’s less effective than this, declare victory over this fake opponent, and then summarize their win as “prison has no effect”. What Are The Costs Vs. Benefits Of Prison? So a more honest version of the claim that “prison has no effect on crime” might be “the effect of prison on crime is weak”. How weak is it? We already saw one way to answer this: it probably prevents on average 7 crimes/year (6 property + 1 violent), minus some amount, especially for short sentences, if you believe in criminogenic aftereffects. For the shortest sentences at the highest-incarceration margins, it’s possible for the effect to be zero or less. Another way to answer is with elasticities. If we increase in incarceration rate 10%, how much crime do we prevent at the current margins? Levitt estimates 3%, Cohen finds 0.5-7%, and Dhodnt finds -2% (ie prison increases crime) but this is an outlier. Spelman writes: Our best estimate of elasticity is “in the neighborhood of [3% drop in crime per 10% increase in incarceration]” but “[a]ny figure between [2% and 4%] can be defended, and we should not be too surprised to find that the result is anywhere between [1% and 5%]” This broadly agrees with our numbers from Sweden, California, and El Salvador above. Small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime. Large increases in incarceration cause large decreases in crime. If you doubled the incarceration rate, locking up an extra million people, then crime would decrease ~30% at current US margins (maybe less, because you’re shifting the margin and getting diminishing returns). Would more prison be good or bad? We’d need to do a cost-benefit analysis. Surprisingly, Roodman does the best work here: after making his claim that costs and benefits mostly cancel out, he admits that most people won’t believe him, and tries to estimate the effect size in the “devil’s advocate” case where everyone else is right and he is wrong. He starts with our previous finding that incapacitation prevents ~7 crimes a year, and returns to the incapacitation studies to see what types of crime are most affected. Then he adjusts for the low level of aftereffects that everyone else believes in. I’ve redone his results for clarity. This table shows the total number of each type of crime prevented by keeping the marginal prisoner in jail for one extra year: Why does prison prevent negative robberies? Roodman is subtracting the small aftereffects found by other researchers, and the data for rare crimes is noisy, so probably this is just an artifact. I round this to zero for the full analysis. If we’re trying to calculate the costs vs. benefits of imprisonment, we need to put a cost on all these crimes. This is hard to quantify - a robber may steal $100 worth of goods, but valuing his crime at $100 in costs ignores the disutility of (eg) living in fear Roodman uses two methods: first, he values a crime at the average damages that courts award to victims, including emotional damages. Second, he values it at what people will pay - how much money would you accept to get assaulted one extra time in your life? These estimates still exclude some intangible costs, like the cost of living in a crime-ridden community, but it’s the best we can do for now. Here are his answers (I’ve taken the geometric mean of the two methods): So one extra year of incarcerating the marginal criminal saves society $44,000 in crimes prevented. Now we add in the opposite side of the ledger: the costs of incarceration: According to Roodman, the average prisoner costs the state $31,000 per year. He got his data from 2008, and it’s since ballooned to about $60,000, but we’ll keep his number so that everything is from the same time period. (also, as always, California is more expensive - here it’s $120,000) Roodman also adds in the costs to the prisoner. He uses some surveys to value the disutility of the suffering caused by a year in prison at $50,000; additionally, the prisoner loses about $16,000 in earning potential. The end result: if you don’t count the costs to the prisoner themselves, and you don’t use the more modern number, and you’re not in an expensive state like California, then the marginal incarceration-year saves society about $13,000. If you do count those things, or you’re in an expensive state, the costs far outweigh the benefits. Realistically, most people won’t care about analyses like this. They’ll be more interested in the unquantifiable costs and benefits, including: The “benefit” of feeling like justice has been done and an evil deed has been avenged.
Inline links: Green and Winik (2010), Roach and Schanzenbach (2015), Rhodes (2018), incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime, The Vera Institute, The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime, a list of “crime myths”, Cohen, Dhodnt, Spelman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FI6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6865dbc9-fe86-4467-ab7b-829c1425a81b_189x133.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X8oH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13ddcc41-7e70-4a3c-bd25-c046f2bf811d_404x177.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ltt7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7484d67f-e24d-4511-ac8f-f7b20efed758_458x273.png
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Charlie Contact Info: chuckwilson477[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Common Grounds Brew & Roastery 3065 S Dixie Hwy, West Palm Beach, FL 33405 We will be seated inside at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ Notes: We host meetups throughout the south Florida area. Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming! Georgia ATLANTA Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[a t]digitaltoolfactory[period]net Time: Saturday, September 13th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1, Atlanta, GA 30318 We will be by the front doors in the breezeway with a yellow table sign saying "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8W Group Link: https://ACXAtlanta.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W, https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8W
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
Can’t believe he missed his chance to make Georgia Georgia. 34: List of every time someone said “I am a…” or “As a…” at a San Francisco governmental meeting (h/t Riley Walz)
Inline links: List of every time someone said “I am a…” or “As a…” at a San Francisco governmental meeting, Riley Walz
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Michael Contact Info: acx-meetup-2026-04-16[@]weboroso[.]anonaddy[.]com Time: Thursday, April 16th, 6:00 PM Location: Parc Peixotto, middle of the path connecting the two main entrances (once we meet we’ll seek which benches to try to grab). Initial position: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.80900/-0.58978 (Send me your phone if you expect to be late and want an SMS when we deside which direction in the parc we shift). I will bring an A4 sign with «ACX Meetup» on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CPXRC56+H3W Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or send an email. If you would like to come but the date or the place doesn’t work for you, please write, too! Currently I know of one other person who will probably be there, and we are flexible. I will post a LessWrong comment if there is a change. Georgia TBILISI Contact: Liza Contact Info: lizajibladze1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 18, 06:00 PM Location: Kiwi vegan cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6MQRX+PX
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CPXRC56+H3W, https://plus.codes/8HH6MQRX+PX
Contact: Rob Contact Info: RobRoyACX[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 9th, 11:00 AM Location: Common Grounds Brew & Roastery, 3065 S Dixie Hwy, West Palm Beach, FL 33405. We will be seated inside at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ Notes: The meetup will go on for several hours, so feel free to stop by even if you come later than 11am! Just let us know through email or by joining the Discord. This is hosted by the South Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities, such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and many others. Georgia ATLANTA Contact: Steve Contact Info: steve[@]digitaltoolfactory[.]net Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1, Atlanta, GA 30318 - look for the yellow ACX sign - we should be in the front breezeway Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8 Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W, https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ, https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8
Greece18 mentions across 18 issues

Greece is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 18 times across 18 issues between May 06, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "world of classical Rome and Greece"; "Neither modern day China nor ancient Greece or India are hotbeds of late"; "Neither modern day China nor ancient Greece or India". It most often appears alongside Europe, France, Germany.

Article page
Greece
Mention count
18
Issue count
18
First seen
May 06, 2021
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
May 06, 2021 · Original source
Speculation on Curiales. This book made me realize the key role the “curiales” have played in almost all human history. In ancient Greece, I think you’d call these people the aristocracy or the oligarchs. They were always competing with the democrats for power. In Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent”, the protagonist obsesses with getting back into the local town’s ruling aristocracy. That novel is set in the 1950s northeastern United States. Or Mr. Potter, the banker who owns half the town in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What happened to those people? Are most cities and towns still run by a handful of old aristocratic families and I somehow have never noticed? Did something dramatic change in western society over the past 70 odd years? Is this the first time in history every little town isn’t run by a gaggle of wealthy families? I grew up in small town New England and there are definitely traces of old Brahmin aristocrats all over the place. They don’t seem to exist in the same way anymore.
Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He’s one of the great scholars of “Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I’m not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.”
Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
Also because of that, the book takes for granted that capitalism is synonymous with evil. While I agree with the book that one of capitalism’s failure modes is to give people too much of a good thing, I needed more persuasion to be convinced of other things the book blames capitalism for. Take, for example, its assertion that, to the extent that personal failings are responsible for excessive gambling, those personal failings are caused by late capitalism. Capitalism exploits and damages workers so much that they seek out the comfort of machines. But this theory doesn’t explain why the propensity to gamble is present in humans across space and time. Macau is a huge gambling destination, and all types of ancient myths talk about gods and people gambling to excess. Neither modern day China nor ancient Greece or India are hotbeds of late capitalism.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
If America withdraws, it “will simultaneously trigger economic and energy crises for Europe, East Asia, and South Asia and financial and security crises for the Persian Gulf states.” Zeihan’s positive scenario for this world involves mere austerity and Greece-like scenarios, and is premised on countries getting along peacefully, but he doesn’t expect that. “It is far more likely that they won’t [get along peacefully].” Instead, his expected and pessimistic scenario should be terrifying for those outside of the American bubble:
The second half of The Accidental Superpower is filled with Zeihan’s predictions about what happens if the big thesis is right. Some states will fail, as they don’t have what’s needed to survive (Syria, Greece, Libya). Some will decentralize, as they’re in the same boat, just not as hard up (Russia, China). Some will merely decline, as they have some capacity to address challenges (Brazil, India, Canada). Some will cope (UK, France, Peru, Philippines). A few will join the US as “masters of the chaos,” as they have favorable geographies and other advantages (Australia, Argentina, Angola, Turkey, Indonesia, Uzbekistan).
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
I tried tracking down the original source, and I think it’s this paper, although it lists only 13 countries: Equatorial Guinea, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mauritius, Portugal, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan.
Inline links: this paper
Equatorial Guinea struck oil. Puerto Rico is not a country. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece are European countries that missed the general First Worldification of Europe for various reasons which then went away. Israel is chosen by God. That leaves just the East Asian countries and Mauritius (which sounds fascinating, and which I should try to learn more about).
Inline links: chosen by God
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
ATHENS, GREECE (RSVP) Contact: Spyros Dovas, acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[dot]greece[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Sunday, September 26 Location: Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, at the tables by the main entrance to the Library (360 view), I will have a red balloon marking the exact table(s). If it rains we will move under the big "roof" upstairs. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/sued.scouts.slows Notes: It will be really great if we manage to establish a small community of people that enjoy and get inspired reading ACX in Athens.
Inline links: RSVP, 360 view, https://w3w.co/sued.scouts.slows
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
The Axis powers stood for the Old World Order. Germany, Japan, and Italy had each rejected the principles of the Peace Pact—Japan by invading Manchuria and continuing into China, French Indochina, British Malaya, Indonesia, and Singapore; Italy by invading Ethiopia, Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa; and Germany by seeking to gain control of nearly all of Europe. Each had a reason to resent the Allies and their efforts to outlaw war. The Axis powers had largely missed out on the colonial land grab. Japan only began to participate in international affairs in the 1860s, and it was more than a generation before it was prepared to project military force outside its own borders, too late to successfully participate in the empire-building scramble. Both Germany and Italy finally achieved unification in the same year—1871. They joined the land grab soon after, but were never as successful as France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, which built extensive empires. Without the authority to wage war and conquer new territory, the Axis powers saw little possibility of ever achieving equality. (Chapter 8)
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Within each region it’s alphabetized then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Athens, Greece. Sorry if this is confusing.
ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros Contact Info: acx [dot] meetup [dot] athens [dot] greece [at] gmail [dot] com Time: Wednesday, May 24th, 7:00 PM Location: On the plaza in front of the National Library Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Hhozw6wsrN3FgcvnJ/athens-greece-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023 Notes: There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Hhozw6wsrN3FgcvnJ/athens-greece-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Greece was a backwater on the periphery of the Persian Empire — but in a historical instant it was transformed into an intellectual and cultural powerhouse: philosophers like Plato, and Aristotle revolutionized Western thought; mathematicians like Pythagoras and Euclid revolutionized math; playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles revolutionized drama.
Egan points to an intriguing fact: not long before, writing was introduced to Greece.
There’s something missing… and Egan thinks we find it in the emotion-laden, unsystematic, wonder-struck kind of writing that he says spread through Greece in the early years of the Greek Miracle. This looks for all the world like a mash-up of Mythic and Philosophic understanding. It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus — a sort of “Guinness Book of Ancient World Records. But you don’t need to take Egan’s word for it — here’s the historian (and vampire novelist) Tom Holland, being interviewed by Tyler Cowen:
Inline links: being interviewed by Tyler Cowen
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following sense: my elders told me the story of how our people came to be. It started with the Greeks: Pericles the statesman, Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian, the first playwrights, and before them all Homer, the blind first poet. Before Greece, something called prehistory stretched back. There were Iron and Bronze Ages, and before that the Stone Age. These were shadowy, mysterious realms. Then history went on to Europe. I learnt as little outside Europe as I did before Greece. There was one class on 20th century China, but that too was about China becoming modern, which meant European.
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
Inline links: book, 1
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
Other French intellectuals (he says) believe that we are in an age of unprecedented victimization. The rich victimize the poor, whites victimize blacks, straights victimize gays, and everyone victimizes the environment. While Girard acknowledges that all these things happen, he’s more interested in why we do this much less than any previous society. We have more of a social safety net for the poor than ancient Greece or Rome; better civil rights for blacks than any of the Arab, European, or American civilizations where they were enslaved for millennia, more tolerance for gays than medieval societies (or even Greece and Rome, which wouldn’t have allowed full gay marriage), and are one of the only societies to voluntarily restrict our economic growth in order to protect the environment. He thinks that, at least graded on a curve, we’re doing great morally. It’s not that we’re victimizing people uniquely much. It’s that for the first time in history, we notice victims and feel sorry for them. Peter Singer would say we’ve expanded our circle of concern, learning to care about people (and other beings) more and more different from us as time goes on.
Inline links: expanded our circle of concern
But also, various real-world practices. The ostracism in Athens. The scapegoat of Israel. The pharmakoi of Greece, which Wikipedia describes as “a slave, a cripple, or a criminal was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster”.
Inline links: Wikipedia describes as
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
ULM, GERMANY Contact: Benjamin Contact Info: b[dot]rothenhaeusler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM Location: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know a bit how much snacks to bring: If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe BellaVista. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWF9XWR+3VV Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024 Group Link: There's no group so far (there's a small, local EA group). This event is thought to bring people together to maybe form such a group. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know a bit how much snacks to bring: If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe BellaVista. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow. Greece ATHENS Contact: Spyros Dovas Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[dot]greece[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, May 17th, 7:00 PM Location: The meeting place is the plaza in front of the National Library in Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center complex in Faliro. There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP Notes: There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables, have a drink, chat or rant depending on the topic. Please RSVP on LessWrong and/or meetup.com.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWF9XWR+3VV, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024, https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP
ATHENS Contact: Spyros Dovas Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[dot]greece[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, May 17th, 7:00 PM Location: The meeting place is the plaza in front of the National Library in Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center complex in Faliro. There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP Notes: There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables, have a drink, chat or rant depending on the topic. Please RSVP on LessWrong and/or meetup.com.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP
My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
Trump: I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.
If this is true, I will never know. But I would like to think I don’t have to. If our country is a phantasm, I love it still. Once I dreamt about a woman as beautiful as the sun, and when I woke, I found I loved her still. Even to this day I pine for her. Can I not love America too, even if it is also a dream? If you are all cogs in the historical simulation of some posthuman artillect, can I not love the America that must once have been, even as our hearts stir still when we remember Greece or Rome?
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[dot]Bachelor[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 08th, 04:00 PM Location: The Starbucks at Mailaender Platz, 70173 Stuttgart - Up the stairs from the Budapester Platz or Stadtbibliothek U-train stops to the open square area of the Milaneo mall. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97 Notes: I don’t actually speak any German; I just got here. Greece ATHENS, GREECE Contact: Spyros Dovas Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[do t]greece[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 07:00 PM Location: The meeting place is the plaza in front of the National Library in Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center complex in Faliro. There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97, https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP, https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/
Contact: Spyros Dovas Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[do t]greece[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 07:00 PM Location: The meeting place is the plaza in front of the National Library in Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center complex in Faliro. There will be an "ACX Meetup" sign where we will sit to spot the place. We will occupy a couple (or hopefully more!) tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G95WMQR+WRP, https://www.meetup.com/astral-codex-ten-athens-meetup/
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
But the Christian cultural package also fell apart and became the current post-Christian world. This wasn't just a one-time coincidence either. Protestantism gave way to modernism in Scandinavia, Germany, and the US. Catholicism gave way to modernism in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. Orthodoxy gave way to modernism in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia (with a slight Putinist resurrection-in-name-only which hardly seems to have produced a flourishing liberal society). Meanwhile in China, the local mix of Buddhism/Confucianism/Taoism gave way to modernism. In South East Asia, Buddhism gave way to modernism. Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast. India is moderately Hindu but still noticeably modern. Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim.
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
…it guessed Mont Ventoux, France, which was also wrong. Its third guess was Mount Olympus, Greece, which was correct.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
The answer was, as it happened, that the Edwards first and third had spent the past sixty years building the most professional army in Europe. England, like the rest of post-Roman Europe, had been founded on a military basis of feudal levies, with each vassal providing soldiers at his expense to fight alongside the king’s personal retinue. These soldiers could be called out for long enough to stop marauding Vikings but not for much longer, so any attempt to raise an army for even a single year's campaign required agonizing negotiations with each individual leader and, worse, meant that the troops were all either sullen conscripts or proud knights eager for glory and jealous of their honor. These knights might fight like the devil - as everyone from Greece to Egypt to Tunis had learned to their cost - but leading these men was like herding cats.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Philipp Contact Info: wuerzburg[period]meetup[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 3:00 PM Location: The meetup will be in the Sanderringpark next to the Sanderglacisstraße station, close to the fountains (east of the station). I will have a sign. If the weather is bad, we will find another place. In this case, please send a mail/join the whatsapp group (see link below). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXFQWPM+G3P Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DY3 [remove this bit] uJ380BqEAZ1oZrwCIAh?mode=ac_t Notes: As this is the first Wuerzburg Meetup, please RSVP via WhatsApp/Mail Greece ATHENS Contact: Andrew G Contact Info: acx[period]meetup[period]athens[period]greece[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, September 1st, 8:30 PM Location: We’ll be at Καπάκι Café-Bar in the southeast corner of Agia Eirini Square. The nearest Metro station is Monastiraki, but it’s also only 10 minutes’ walk from Syntagma. I’ll have an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95XPGH+R9 Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not essential
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXFQWPM+G3P, https://plus.codes/8G95XPGH+R9
Contact: Andrew G Contact Info: acx[period]meetup[period]athens[period]greece[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, September 1st, 8:30 PM Location: We’ll be at Καπάκι Café-Bar in the southeast corner of Agia Eirini Square. The nearest Metro station is Monastiraki, but it’s also only 10 minutes’ walk from Syntagma. I’ll have an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95XPGH+R9 Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not essential
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G95XPGH+R9
Gaza14 mentions across 14 issues

Gaza is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between June 24, 2022 and March 31, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "videos ... which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago"; "transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza"; "bombing Gaza". It most often appears alongside Israel, Twitter, Trump.

Article page
Gaza
Mention count
14
Issue count
14
First seen
June 24, 2022
Last seen
March 31, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
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
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Anyway, after two weeks of nonstop conversation between the three countries’ teams—during which negotiations almost fail more than once—they reach a deal. Essentially, the broad outlines are: 1) Egypt will officially recognize Israel and end the state of war between the two countries and 2) Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank and transition towards self-governance for inhabitants of both the West Bank and Gaza [3]. The Camp David Accords, as they’re known, are a phenomenal success, putting the region on a path straight to the utopia it is today: a prosperous, conflict-free Middle East in which democracy and human rights flourish and the Palestinian people have full self-determination.
23
October 31, 2023 · Original source
More on this once it’s had a chance to get used. Eyeless In Gaza Prediction markets are sometimes held up as a way to get clarity on controversial news issues. But how do you resolve the prediction market? It’s fine to start a market on whether there was a lab leak at Wuhan, but ten years from now people will probably still be as confused as today.
On October 17, there was an explosion at or near the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. Since Israel has been bombing Gaza, suspicion naturally fell on them, and many major publications reported the incident as Israeli bombing a Palestinian hospital. But Israel vehemently denied this, and it seemed like a change from their usual policy of giving a warning before bombing civilian areas. Later photos and videos suggested a Palestinian terrorist group had been trying to shoot rockets into Israel, but the rocket had exploded near the launch pad and hit the hospital instead. In between, lots of people with strong feelings on the underlying conflict switched to having strong feelings about who bombed the hospital and which news sources had reported about it more vs. less responsibly.
Inline links: explosion at or near the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, had reported about it more vs. less responsibly
It looks to me like NYT first reported on this (and attributed it to Israel) at 1:36 EST Tuesday afternoon, sent subscribers an alert attributing it to Israel at 2:32, then changed their headline at 4:01 to be more agnostic. At 9 AM the next morning, it sent out another alert saying that both sides blamed each other and nobody could be sure.
Inline links: first reported on this
23
December 05, 2023 · Original source
Moving on to the Middle East: The best realistic medium-term outcome I can imagine for the people of Gaza is as something like a West Bank without settlements and roadblocks. I don’t see them as getting independence (Israel won’t allow it medium-term). Hamas rule means perpetual blockade and intermittent warfare. But the West Bank has reached a stalemate where it's at least somewhat not a prison. And Israel's previous commitment not to do settlements in Gaza (if maintained) would make a West-Bank-style Gaza better off than the real West Bank.
The best realistic medium-term outcome I can imagine for the people of Gaza is as something like a West Bank without settlements and roadblocks. I don’t see them as getting independence (Israel won’t allow it medium-term). Hamas rule means perpetual blockade and intermittent warfare. But the West Bank has reached a stalemate where it's at least somewhat not a prison. And Israel's previous commitment not to do settlements in Gaza (if maintained) would make a West-Bank-style Gaza better off than the real West Bank.
It sounds like step one toward that goal would be for Israel to defeat Hamas, but what happens after that? An Israeli occupation would involve constant bloody resistance; I'm not convinced it would be any better for people on the ground than Hamas (though someone can try to convince me otherwise). Could PLO, UN, or some puppet state maintain a balance of being anti-Israel enough that the Gazans don't immediately revolt, but not so anti-Israel that Israel keeps the blockade or represses the area too hard for anyone to live a normal life? It's a tiny sliver of a chance for a barely-okay outcome, but it's the main one I can think of.
24
March 12, 2024 · Original source
Israeli operations in Gaza not expected to end until autumn (!)
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
5: I’ll never tire of analogies putting the US / Europe gap into perspective - for example, did you know that the median black American household earns more ($48,297) than the median UK household (£35,000 = $44,450)? Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country:
Inline links: $48,297, £35,000, $44,450, @StatisticUrban
37: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize. Sam Kriss counters that Israel is trying to terrify and punish ordinary Gazans out of supporting Hamas by causing as much suffering as possible. I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.
Inline links: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza, Sam Kriss counters, tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
"Abandon Harris" is a group of Muslim-Americans who campaign against Kamala Harris to "punish her" (their words) for supporting Israel's war in Gaza. You can see their website at https://abandonharris.com
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
The alternative is a Gaza Strip situation where you’re not even trying to farm, and just ship in food. But that requires prisoners to be near distribution centers, which again gives them a lot of opportunities to commit crimes against each other. I would imagine this looking something like Haiti, with urban gangs fighting each other until eventually the baddest dude becomes some kind of warlord. Haiti is probably still better than prison, but I could see this getting worse. Why shouldn’t the winning gang kill all new prisoners who enter (to prevent them from consuming supplies)? If the winning gang is race-based (eg Aryan Nations), would they enslave the other races?
People call Gaza an “open-air prison”, and the comparison makes sense. It contains two million Palestinians, separated from Israel by a wall, barbed wire, and military guards. Security isn’t infallible (see 10/7), but the breach required a near-state level of resources (including funding/arms/supplies from Israel’s enemies) plus a rare catastrophic blunder on Israel’s part - and all it did was get a few thousand Gazans over the wall for a few hours.
But Gaza is just a coastal area with a wall around it. America has plenty of isolated coastal areas. The US prison population is lower than the population of Gaza, so a Gaza-sized strip could fit all prisoners with room to spare.
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
36: A humanitarian aid veteran analyzes what went wrong with food distribution in Gaza (X).
Inline links: analyzes what went wrong with food distribution in Gaza (X)
My Heart Of Hearts
July 30, 2025 · Original source
Hen Mazzig on Twitter is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected equally strenuously to various other things. Again, he’s bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
Inline links: Hen Mazzig on Twitter
An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative. They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don’t know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things.
Inline links: No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative
An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative. They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don’t know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things. Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts. A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went. I am a Real Man and therefore do not cry. But I confess to getting a little misty at this story, and I know exactly why. When my 1.5-year-old son wakes up early, the first words out of his mouth when I extract him from his crib are “Yaya? Yaya?” which is how he says his sister Lyra’s name. No matter how I distract him, he’ll keep saying “Yaya? Yaya?” and pointing at the door to her room until she wakes up, at which point he’ll get a big smile and run over to her. It’s impossible for me to read this story without imagining her body parts in the backpack and him saying “Yaya? Yaya?” in an increasingly distressed voice, over and over again, until the doctors drag him away. So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back. Probably this is why God doesn’t connect people’s heart-of-hearts directly to their motor cortex. Instead, He wisely intermediates other brain regions with names like “anterior cingulate gyrus” and “dorsolateral prefrontal area”, the places where rationality happens. When I use my anterior cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal area, I have thoughts like these: Probably there are many other people in that region who have stories which are objectively just as sad as that boy’s, but not precisely targeted to my personal heart-strings.
Inline links: No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Lots of people are tripped up by not condemning enough things. Imagine that you want to express discontent with the Trump administration restricting food stamps, but someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn food insecurity for white people but you didn’t condemn the famine in Gaza equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Gaza, and someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn starvation when it makes Jews look like the bad guys, but you didn’t condemn the famine in Ethiopia equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Ethiopia, but then people tell you that’s ‘telescopic altruism’, because you didn’t condemn a murder that happened in your own city. So you try condemning a murder in your own city, but it was a black-on-white murder, and people say that it’s pretty suspicious that you didn’t condemn the latest white-on-black murder equally hard. The only solution is to monitor the news 24-7, condemning each thing as soon as it happens, in exact proportion to how bad it is. But nobody has time for that. So you give us access to your Twitter account and we do it for you. We promise not only to condemn all bad things within one business day of them happening, but to use all the appropriate words. You know those politicians who get in trouble because they condemned “the recent massacre” in vague terms but didn’t use the words “terrorism” or “radical Islam”, or because they said “killed” instead of “murdered”? If they’d used Condemnr, we could have tweeted “We condemn the recent radical Islamic terrorist massacre in Fairtown that murdered nine people #terrorism #radicalislam #murder”, and their PR would be immaculate.”
Open Thread 409
November 24, 2025 · Original source
1: New subscribers-only blog post, God Help Us, Let’s Try To Have An Opinion On The War In Gaza. Sorry it’s late - it took me so long to gather my thoughts that they signed a cease-fire first - but I’m sure it will become relevant again eventually.
Inline links: God Help Us, Let’s Try To Have An Opinion On The War In Gaza
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism
March 31, 2026 · Original source
“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.
This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?
Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can’t bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it’s pretty hard to find a “telescopic altruism” example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities.
Inline links: List Of Top US Causes Of Death
Gothenburg7 mentions across 7 issues

Gothenburg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between August 26, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN"; "GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN"; "GOTHENBURG". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
Gothenburg
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
August 26, 2022
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Thursday, September 28th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Pablo Contact Info: pvillalobos[at]proton[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 Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M, https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
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 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CFXFJCF+7Q Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EyP [remove this part] eUKR5HfaFp2lM8cP108 Sweden GOTHENBURG Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Wednesday, May 7th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CFXFJCF+7Q, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/
Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Wednesday, May 7th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Fernando Contact Info: fernando[period]unterricht[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, September 17th, 8:00 PM Location: Café El Boticario, Av. Fco. de Goya, 50, 50006 Zaragoza. I'll have an ACX sign on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CHXJ4V5+MG Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BF0 [remove this bit] DxyoAyjK2fHUnY75UcL Notes: Feel free to join the Whatsapp group even if you can't attend this meetup. There you will also find information about meetups in other cities. Sweden GOTHENBURG Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg | https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CHXJ4V5+MG, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC
Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg | https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Mike Contact Info: lumenwrites[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: Cafe Del Mar, Valencia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CFXFM98+G8 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/I2s [remove this bit] IA2wrsymFLxh8Mv5Niv Notes: Please leave a message in our Whats App group to let me know that you’d like to join. Sweden GOTHENBURG Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[@]posteo[.]se Time: Wednesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: Café Condeco, Fredsgatan 14 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F Group Link: Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/ lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CFXFM98+G8, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026
Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[@]posteo[.]se Time: Wednesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: Café Condeco, Fredsgatan 14 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F Group Link: Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/ lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026
Grass Valley6 mentions across 6 issues

Grass Valley is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 10, 2022 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "GRASS VALLEY / NEVADA CITY, CA"; "Meetups this week in ... Grass Valley, DC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Columbus, Jakarta, Budapest, Toronto"; "e, Grass Valley, DC, New Orleans". It most often appears alongside Budapest, Houston, Istanbul.

Article page
Grass Valley
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
March 25, 2025
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Issue trail
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Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
GRASS VALLEY / NEVADA CITY, CA Contact: Max Harms (raelifin@gmail.com) Date: April 16 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FW7X6J+XG Location: Fable Coffee in Nevada City (location changed due to rain)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84FW7X6J+XG
Open Thread 292
September 04, 2023 · Original source
3: New additions to Meetups Everywhere: Bratislava, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Vienna, Curitiba - check the post for details. Meetups this week in Munich, Vienna, Cologne, Grass Valley, DC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Columbus, Jakarta, Budapest, Toronto - along with many smaller cities that won’t fit here - so again, check the post if you’re interested.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Max Harms Contact Info: Raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM Location: The prospector statue in Condon Park if the weather is nice, otherwise my house nearby (send an email for the address) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4 Notes: Please RSVP by email or on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4
Open Thread 329
May 13, 2024 · Original source
1: More meetups this week, including Athens, Chicago, Brooklyn, Grass Valley, and Houston. See the meetups post for more info.
Inline links: the meetups post
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Scott and Skyler Contact Info: skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 14th, 03:00 PM Location: 2740 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley. We'll have a sign saying ACX Meetup by the door. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Max Harms Contact Info: raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 26th, 06:30 PM Location: Private Residence (Message/email me for address) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8G+GX Notes: Halloween party! Come in costume! This is at my house, so please message me if you want to come. First-time people are welcome. :D The plus.code coordinates are approximate.
Inline links: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong, https://plus.codes/84FW6W8G+GX
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Ryan Contact Info: ryan[period]axtell[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 17th, 2:00 PM Location: The Commons Social Empourium, 2412 Park Ave, Chico, CA 95928. I'll have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FWP57M+WM GRASS VALLEY Contact: Max and Haven Worsham Harms Contact Info: raelifin[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 17th, 02:00 PM Location: Weather permitting, we'll be at a picnic table near the Prospector Statue in Condon Park. If it rains, we'll probably meet up at our house nearby. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4 Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that we can reach out for updates in case details change (such as location)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84FWP57M+WM, https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4
Great Britain6 mentions across 6 issues

Great Britain is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 25, 2021 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Italy had a higher GDP than Great Britain"; "But you’re not getting Egypt or Great Britain off of that, sorry"; "A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot". It most often appears alongside Soviet Union, China, France.

Article page
Great Britain
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
April 25, 2021
Last seen
August 25, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 169
April 25, 2021 · Original source
1: I've updated my Mistakes page with some corrections to my most recent posts. In particular, among my Trump predictions, one that I graded right should have been wrong, and another that I graded right should have been indeterminate. On the Global Economic History post, I blamed the book for falsely saying that Italy had a higher GDP than Great Britain, but that was true ten years ago when the book was written. There were also various smaller errors.
Inline links: my Mistakes page
Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain
The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss! So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours. Argument 2: Where Are The Crops And Livestock? We can do genetic analysis of crops and livestock, compare them to wild plants and animals, and make good guesses about where and when they were domesticated. Wheat was domesticated somewhere around Karaca Dag, Turkey, around 9000 BC. Barley was domesticated somewhere around Jarmo, Iraq, around 9000 BC. Cows were domesticated somewhere around Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in 8500 BC (then a second time, in Pakistan, later on). Rice was domesticated in two places in China around 10,000 BC. All of these crops were invented exactly where the standard historical narrative says there were late pre-agricultural people of exactly the type who would domesticate crops. They spread at about the same rate as sedentary living in general, monuments, and other signs of complex civilization. The only known exception is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site in Turkey, which may very slightly predate known agriculture. But it also might very slightly post-date known agriculture, or exactly-date known agriculture (it’s just sixty miles from Karaca Dag, and it would make sense if they were the people who domesticated wheat). That one anomaly aside, there’s a very tight agriculture <—> things that seem to require agriculture coupling. So if there were Ice Age civilizations, what did they eat? It couldn’t have been any of our known crops, which post-date them. Could it have been their own crops, which were later lost? Seems unlikely. Throughout most of history, civilizations have risen and fallen, but they don’t lose agriculture! The empire divided longs to unite, the empire united longs to divide, but the Chinese never fragmented so hard that they forget how to cultivate rice and rice went extinct. Maize has survived nine millennia of rising and falling bloodthirsty Mexican empires. Almost everyone in the Amazon died in the 1500s when European diseases swept through, but they still left us manioc, squash, and chiles. Could Ice Age civilizations have thrived without domesticating any plants? We increasingly realize that agriculture isn’t all-or-nothing, there’s a spectrum from picking wild plants when you come across them to domestication, irrigation, and the full suite of agricultural technologies. It wouldn’t surprise me if some combination of early-non-domestication-involving agriculture and hunting-gathering off of very rich lands could create enough sophistication to build a Stonehenge or a Gobekli Tepe. But you’re not getting Egypt or Great Britain off of that, sorry. Argument 3: Lead Levels Thanks to commenter WTFwhatthehell for bringing this one up. Many ancient civilizations mined lead. Some of the lead made it into the atmosphere and settled down again in other places. You can measure the amount of lead in different places to see how much lead humans are mining. This isn’t perfect - the resolution is closer to continental than global - but you can check lots of different continents and get an okay reading. This paper finds lead levels started rising 1000 BC, which it links to the Phoenician expansion happening around that time. In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Karaca Dag, Jarmo, Iraq, Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in two places in China, WTFwhatthehell, This paper finds lead levels started rising 1000 BC, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rPgI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6265c4a7-a563-477c-afbc-7b3c9b8dd73e_1280x1247.jpeg, Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
The Forbidden Solution All empires eventually collapse. This is not what we would expect if empires were a good economic arrangement. If they only ever got wealthier and wealthier, they wouldn’t disintegrate into various separatist factions or end in foreign conquest. The first empire to form would have slowly absorbed everything else, and we would all be living good lives under the enlightened rule of the Sumerians or whatever. But that doesn’t happen, because empires always milk their own cities until they become poor. Modern nation-states do the same. They accumulate stress by trying to hold themselves together, and then, one day, the stress is released all at once. Wars and revolutions galore. Most countries are born that way, like new stars formed in the aftermath of a supernova. Peaceful separatism offers an alternative, Jacobs says — but only a theoretical one. Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy,” she writes, “young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’” Can you imagine Canada saying this to Quebec? Or England to Scotland? Or China to Tibet and Taiwan? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it’s only theoretical and utopian. Jacobs knows very well that nations will never accept separatism as an option. And though the term “nationalist” has fallen out of fashion, almost all of us still think very much in terms of nations. Even when separatism does seem grudgingly acceptable, I’d say that’s usually either because it’s an instance of decolonization (colonial empires are decidedly out of fashion) or for cultural, nationalistic reasons. Quebecois, Scottish, or Catalan separatists say that they belong to nations that are culturally distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Spain. And they love their smaller nation just as much as others love the larger one. If any of these separatists got their way, we can be sure that the new nation of Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia would then oppose further separatism in the strongest terms. When the American South seceded from the Union in 1861, the reaction wasn’t “good luck!” even though the Union was itself the result of a secession from Great Britain. To separate for economic reasons seems forbidden. Unthinkable. For one thing, it would be selfish. If Catalonia left, the poor regions of Spain, which benefit from welfare financed in part by Barcelona, would suffer, which is obviously unacceptable to Spain. For another, it’s not guaranteed to work. Small countries and city-states can still adopt dumb economic policies. It can seem intolerably risky to go your own way, unless your region is already rich, in which case see the selfishness point above. Widespread separatism also seems worse for solving large-scale coordination problems, like environmental issues, nuclear proliferation (and, perhaps, AI), or war. I suspect that Jacobs would agree with Nassim Taleb’s antifragility framing: it’s better to be in a constant state of mild disorder than to have apparent stability that hides stressors and ends in violent conflict. But that idea is not intuitive. Most of us would pick apparent stability over mild disorder. I also suspect — and this is my personal take — that we dread the additional complexity of having numerous small countries. We look at a map of medieval Germany, like this one… … 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPn6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd25ceff6-f68e-4163-becf-613204a9be35_1600x1297.png, 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
Phillips curve: from Phillips, A.W. (1958), The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957. Economica, 25: 283-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1958.tb00003.x
Inline links: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1958.tb00003.x
Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes, was originally a colony of the Kingdom of France. Then the Kingdom of Great Britain conquered it in 1760. For various reasons, most of the French settlers stayed in Canada rather than emigrating to France or being deported, so at first, a small British elite ruled over a mostly French-speaking and Catholic colony. However, immigration from the British Isles, as well as from the newly seceded United States (loyalists who wanted to live in a monarchy rather than a republic for some reason) eventually tipped the linguistic and cultural balance. The population sorted itself such that the lower part of the valley (what is now Quebec) remained French, while the upper part (what is now Ontario) became English. The exception to this trend was the city of Montreal. Although located in Quebec, it became an English-speaking city and the hub for the British merchant elite. For at least a hundred years, it was the main city in Canada across almost all metrics: population, wealth, manufacturing, political influence. In the middle of the 20th century, Montreal grew enormously and became French-speaking again, owing to immigration from rural Quebec. It became the center of Quebecois culture and, with its increasingly educated population, the breeding ground for new ideas, including separatism. At the same time, the main city in Ontario, Toronto, was growing even faster. Immigrants from all over Canada and other countries poured into it (including Jane Jacobs herself). Sometime around 1970, it became bigger and wealthier than Montreal, and replaced it as the main economic hub. Many people attribute this to the rise of Quebec separatists, which supposedly scared the Anglo elite of Montreal into moving all the banks and companies to Toronto, and, to be sure, some of that happened — but of course, Jacobs prefers explanations that rely on city economics. One of the reasons for Toronto's economic and demographic growth is that it became the nexus of what Jacobs calls a conurbation, and would have called a city region if we were in the other book. In case you craved another concrete example of a city region, here’s a map of Ontario with two ways to define Toronto’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe” (Toronto itself is just the tiny strip in the middle of the red area, next to the lake): Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
Dictator Book Club: Putin
August 03, 2023 · Original source
Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services
Inline links: Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.
Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated
‘Colonial Origins’ used "the mortality rates of [European] soldiers, bishops and sailors stationed in the colonies between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries". The argument was that in colonies where Europeans died quickly, they would try to grab as much as possible as quickly as possible and then go home – in other words, set up extractive institutions. In colonies where Europeans had a reasonable life expectancy, they would be more likely to settle permanently and set up inclusive institutions for themselves, even if they had to fight the mother country to do it. Since institutions tend to be highly persistent, the effect of initial settler mortality can still be seen in contemporary institutions and through them, contemporary income levels. AR argued that, since indigenous populations have a high degree of immunity to the tropical diseases that killed Europeans – for example, native soldiers in India had a lower mortality rate than British soldiers in Britain – they should not have a direct effect on contemporary incomes, making European mortality rates a valid instrument.
Inline links: fight, mother, country
Greenland6 mentions across 6 issues

Greenland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between October 20, 2021 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland"; "climate models show that even under the worst plausible scenarios, Greenland will still be fine"; "lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores". It most often appears alongside China, AI, America.

Article page
Greenland
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
October 20, 2021
Last seen
January 13, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Chilling Effects
October 20, 2021 · Original source
People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right - the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa.
This has got to all be wrong, right? 10% of Africans freezing to death, a substantial number of Greenlanders dying of the heat? The paper doesn’t have any answers. It just presents its mathematical model and runs away. So what’s going on?
Okay, but why are cold-related deaths most common in Africa? And why are heat-related deaths most common in Greenland?
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
But it is hard to drive humans extinct. MacAskill goes over many different scenarios and shows how they will not kill all humans. Global warming could be very bad, but climate models show that even under the worst plausible scenarios, Greenland will still be fine. Nuclear war could be very bad, but nobody wants to nuke New Zealand, and climate patterns mostly protect it from nuclear winter. Superplagues could be bad, but countries will lock down and a few (eg New Zealand) might hold on long enough for everyone else to die out and the immediate threat of contagion to disappear. MacAskill admits he is kind of playing down bioweapons for pragmatic reasons; apparently al-Qaeda started a bioweapons program after reading scaremongering articles in the Western press about how dangerous bioweapons could be.
Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
This experience has occurred rather commonly to Greenland Eskimos and is called Kayak-Angst, Kayak-Dread, or kayak phobia. As many as ten to fifteen percent of all hunters in Greenland at the turn of the century suffered this malady . . . The condition has been compared to “break-off” which occurs in jet pilots who lose perception of reference points while flying at high altitude […]
The fear of death by drowning is of constant concern to the Eskimo, and with good reason. Between 1901 and 1930 there were 1023 deaths by accident in Greenland; eight percent were due to drowning and ninety-four percent of these were kayak accidents.
In 1911, explorer Harry Whitney described a case of Arctic hysteria in Greenland:
The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
March 12, 2025 · Original source
Some people are stocking up. GLP-1 drugs keep pretty well in a fridge for at least a year. If you sign up for four GLP-1 telehealth compounding companies simultaneously and order three months from each, then you can get twelve months of medication. Maybe in twelve months the FDA will change their mind, or the pharmacies’ insane legal strategies will pay off, or Trump will invade Denmark over Greenland and seize the Novo Nordisk patents as spoils of war, or someone will finally figure out a diet that works.
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
A California union has announced a campaign to force a 2026 ballot proposition that levies a “one time” wealth tax on billionaires; the mere threat of this tax has spooked several billionaires, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, into leaving the state (the initiative would apply to anyone residing in California as of 1/1/2026, so there’s incentive for them to leave proactively). The markets above are the first attempts I’ve seen to estimate the chance of it actually passing. Trump Greenland market; went way up upon Maduro capture and subsequent reignition of the discussion. Lest you worry that this is only tracking the chance of getting a military base or some other small acquisition, the creator specified that:
Inline links: leaving the state
Trump Greenland market; went way up upon Maduro capture and subsequent reignition of the discussion. Lest you worry that this is only tracking the chance of getting a military base or some other small acquisition, the creator specified that:
…this market is about whether Greenland or a meaningful portion of it becomes part of America, not about minor acquisitions like a single building or small plot of land.
Guatemala6 mentions across 6 issues

Guatemala is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 14, 2021 and July 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Próspera’s white paper mentions “expansion opportunities” in Guatemala"; "among the Mayans of Guatemala"; "mid-1970s GDP per capita on par with Guatemala". It most often appears alongside Honduras, United States, America.

Article page
Guatemala
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
April 14, 2021
Last seen
July 17, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
In terms of secondary education, they had a deal with Technical University of Munich, a very well regarded German university, but it looks like German leftists pressured them into withdrawing. Currently they are investigating a partnership with Universidad Francisco Marroquin, a libertarian university in Guatemala City which (for example) has a "Ludwig von Mises library [which] has 100,000 visitors annually and is the most extensive collection of works on liberty in Latin America", and whose alumni include eg one of Julian Assange's defense lawyers.
Inline links: German leftists pressured them into withdrawing, Universidad Francisco Marroquin, one of Julian Assange's defense lawyers
Próspera’s white paper mentions “expansion opportunities” in Guatemala, Dominican Republic, and Haiti. None of those countries allow ZEDEs now, and none of them seem interested in changing that. But if they watch Honduras get rich, maybe they’ll think again. There are six hundred million people in Latin America; who knows where they could be thirty years from now?
No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
This story of a religious leader converting, followed by his flock, reminds me of the story of Eastern Orthodoxy among the Mayans of Guatemala. On two separate occasions, important Catholic religious figures in Guatemala converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and their followers followed - there are now about 400,000 Mayans in the Constantinopolitan subgroup and an undetermined number more in the Antiochan subgroup.
Inline links: Eastern Orthodoxy among the Mayans of Guatemala
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
Korean bureaucrats were reading not the rising American stars of neo-liberal economics, or even Adam Smith, but instead [German development expert and tariff proponent] Friedrich List. The Korea and Taiwan scholar Robert Wade observed when he was teaching in Korea in the late 1970s that ‘whole shelves’ of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul. When he moved to the Massachussetts Insitute of Technology, Wade found that a solitary copy of List’s main work had last been taken out of the library in 1966. Such are the different economics appropriate to different stages of development. In Korea, List’s ideas for a national system of development were being adapted to a country with a population far smaller than Germany’s or Japan’s, and with a mid-1970s GDP per capita on par with Guatemala. The ideas were implemented in the teeth of the worst international trading conditions for a generation featuring two unprecedented energy crises. It did not matter. Park motored on regardless. Each time the US, the World Bank and the IMF urged him to back away from his state-led industrial policy he agreed - and then did precisely nothing (or occasionally a very little ). Park was a leader of conviction, and his convictions were based in history.
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
Cristian is a first-generation Guatemalan immigrant who achieved the American Dream, got a Masters degree, and now supervises various manufacturing plants. He describes his goal as:
Inline links: Cristian
It is well documented that a significant percentage of Latino Americans either have a family member, relative, or otherwise know someone that is undocumented. Worse if this person is a young person and with the vitriol being said in the media and by some fellow Americans I can understand why Latinos would choose to NEVER vote for a Republican. I believe I am in a unique position as someone who is a lifelong Republican, conservative to make the case why at least certain undocumented individuals should be considered some sort of compassion from certain countries that share the same value system as the majority of Americans. A significant percentage of the people from the Northern Triangle countries are ultra conservative devout Evangelical Christians. Some of the fastest growing religions in the Northern Triangle countries include the Church of Latter Day Saints. I ask for compassion in this time of need for the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors from the Northern Triangle which include the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
A commenter was concerned that European countries were a bad comparison, and asked about other countries with lots of guns and high murder rates. I looked into Central America, and found that Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala also all saw murders decline rather than spike in 2020.
Inline links: Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala
Contra The xAI Alignment Plan
July 17, 2023 · Original source
If it did work, it would be bad. I want to start by discussing the second objection, then loop back to explain what I mean about the first. A Maximally Curious AI Would Not Be Safe For Humanity The one sentence version: many scientists are curious about fruit flies, but this rarely ends well for the fruit flies. The longer, less flippant version: Even if an AI decides humans are interesting, this doesn’t mean the AI will promote human flourishing forever. Elon says his goal is “an age of plenty where there is no shortage of goods and services”, but why would a maximally-curious AI provide this? It might decide that humans suffering is more interesting than humans flourishing. Or that both are interesting, and it will have half the humans in the world flourish, and the other half suffer as a control group. Or that neither are the most interesting thing, and it would rather keep humans in tanks and poke at them in various ways to see what happens. Even if an AI decides human flourishing is briefly interesting, after a while it will already know lots of things about human flourishing and want to learn something else instead. Scientists have occasionally made colonies of extremely happy well-adjusted rats to see what would happen. But then they learned what happened, and switched back to things like testing how long rats would struggle against their inevitable deaths if you left them to drown in locked containers. Is leaving human society intact really an efficient way to study humans? Maybe it would be better to dissect a few thousand humans, learn the basic principles, then run a lot of simulations of humans in various contrived situations. Would the humans in the simulation be conscious? I don’t know and the AI wouldn’t care. If it was cheaper to simulate abstracted humans in low-fidelity, the same way SimCity has simulated citizens who are just a bundle of traffic-related preferences, wouldn’t the AI do that instead? Are humans more interesting than sentient lizard-people? I don’t know. If the answer is no, will the AI kill all humans and replace them with lizard-people? Surely after a thousand years of studying human flourishing ad nauseum, the lizard-people start sounding more interesting. Would a maximally curious AI be curious about the same things as us? I would like to think that humans are “objectively” more interesting than moon rocks in some sense - harder to predict, capable of more complex behavior. But if it turns out that the most complex and unpredictable part of us is how our fingerprints form, and that (eg) our food culture is an incredibly boring function of a few gustatory receptors, will the AI grow a trillion human fingers in weird vats, but also remove our ability to eat anything other than nutrient sludge? I predict that if we ever got a maximally curious superintelligence, it would scan all humans, vaporize existing physical-world humans as unnecessary and inconvenient, use the scans to run many low-fidelity simulations to help it learn the general principles of intelligent life (plus maybe a few higher-fidelity simulations, like the one you’re in now), then simulate a trillion intelligent-life-like entities to see if (eg) their neural networks reached some interesting meta-stable positions. Then it would move beyond being interested in any of that, and disassemble the Earth to use its atoms to make a really big particle accelerator (which would be cancelled halfway through by Superintelligent AI Congress). This doesn’t mean AI can’t have a goal of understanding the universe. I think this would be a very admirable goal! It just can’t be the whole alignment strategy. But Also, We Couldn’t Make A Maximally Curious AI Even If We Wanted To The problem with AI alignment isn’t really that we don’t have a good long-term goal to align the AI to. Back in 2010 we debated things like long-term goals, hoping that whoever programmed the AI could just write a long_term_goal.txt file and then some functions pointing there. But now in the 2020s the discussion has moved forward to “how do we make the AI do anything at all?” Now we direct AIs through reinforcement learning - telling them to do certain things and avoid certain other things. But this is a blunt instrument. Reinforcement learning directs the AI towards a certain cluster of correlated high-dimensional concepts that have the same lower-dimensional shadow of rewarded and punished behaviors. But we can’t be sure which concept it’s chosen or whether it’s the one we think. For example, there are many different ways of fleshing out “curiosity”. Suppose that Elon rewards an AI whenever it takes any curious-seeming action, and punishes it whenever it takes any incurious-seeming action. After many training rounds, it seems very curious. It goes off to the jungles of Guatemala and uncovers hidden Mayan cities. It sends probes to icy moons of Neptune to assess their composition. Overall it aces every curiosity test we give it with flying colors. But what’s its definition of curiosity? Perhaps it’s something like “maximize your knowledge of the nature and position of every atom in the solar system, weighted for interestingness-to-humans”. This would produce the observed behavior of exploring Guatemala and Neptune. But once it’s powerful enough, it might want to destroy the solar system - if it’s completely empty, it can be completely confident that it knows every single fact about it. Or what if it’s curious about existing objects, but not about nonexistent objects? This would produce good behavior during training, and makes a decent amount of sense. But it might mean the AI would ban humans from ever having children, since it’s not at all curious about what those (currently nonexistent) children would do, and they’re just making things more complicated. Or what if its curiosity depends on information-theoretic definitions of complexity? It might be that humans are more complex than moon rocks, but random noise is more complex than humans. It might behave well during training, but eventually want to replace humans with random noise. This is a kind of exaggerated scenario, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, for most formal definitions of curiosity, there’s something that we would find very boring which acts as a sort of curiosity-superstimulus by the standards of the formal definition. The existing field of AI alignment tries to figure out how to install any goal at all into an AI with reasonable levels of certainty that it in fact has that goal and not something closely correlated with a similar reinforcement-learning shadow. It’s not currently succeeding. This isn’t a worse problem for Musk and xAI than for anyone else, but there are a few aspects of their strategy that I think will make it harder for them to solve in practice: One good thing about order-following AI is that it’s useful now, when AIs aren’t agentic enough to have real goals and we just want to use them as tools in commercial applications. The hope is that we do this a bunch with GPT-4, then a bunch with GPT-5, and so on, and by the time we have a real superintelligence, we’ve worked out some of the kinks. I’m not sure how Musk’s maximally-curious AI helps do office work, which means there’s going to be more of a disconnect between current easily-tested applications and the eventual superintelligence that we need to get right.
Inline links: colonies of extremely happy well-adjusted rats, how long rats would struggle against their inevitable deaths if you left them to drown in locked containers
GENEVA5 mentions across 5 issues

GENEVA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "GENEVA, SWITZERLAND ( RSVP )"; "GENEVA, SWITZERLAND"; "GENEVA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
GENEVA
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND (RSVP) Contact: Konrad Seifert, seifert[dot]konrad[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 6:30 PM, Friday, September 17 Location: We will meet in Parc de la Grange, near the entrance to the Orangerie, next to the Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). I will be wearing a green t-shirt/sweater and carrying a sign with ACX Meetup on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/soucieux.préparer.appeler
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/soucieux.préparer.appeler
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Valts Contact Info: valtskr[at]inbox[dot]lv Time: Sunday, September 24th, 10:00 AM Location: Alpine Botanical Garden of Meyrin, round chair thingy in northern part, I'll be in a tie-dyed shirt Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR863HM+23R Notes: Meetup is going to be in English
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR863HM+23R
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Carlos Rafael Giudice Contact Info: carlosr[dot]giudice[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 6:00 PM Location: La Jonquille, Chem. du 23-Août 3, 1205 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Darren Contact Info: darrennolen[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: At the Kleine Schanze park - by the Weltpostdenkmal Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR9WCWR+84 Notes: I speak english but all languages are welcome GENEVA Contact: Nikita Contact Info: gladkovna[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 6:00 PM Location: Parc des Bastions, in front of the Reformation Wall (Mur des Réformateurs). We’ll be standing next to the stairs, I’ll have an “ACX Meetup” sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8642W+382
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR9WCWR+84, https://plus.codes/8FR8642W+382
Gold Coast5 mentions across 5 issues

Gold Coast is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 29, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast"; "e Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sat Michigan Avenue"; "the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast". It most often appears alongside Chicago, Amsterdam, California.

Article page
Gold Coast
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
June 29, 2022
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
Unlike many of the city's other public housing projects such as Rockwell Gardens or Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green was situated in an affluent part of the city. The poverty-stricken projects were actually constructed at the meeting point of Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sat Michigan Avenue with its high-end shopping and expensive housing. Specific gangs "controlled" individual buildings, and residents felt pressure to ally with those gangs in order to protect themselves from escalating violence.
While Cabrini–Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river.
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
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of . . . the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
GOLD COAST, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan Contact Info: lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 8th, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+26 Notes: I will have an ACX sign. Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time but would still like to meet etc.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+26
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Vinh Dang Contact Info: lunatic[.]leecher[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 10:20 AM Location: 7 Origins Malop Cafe, 131 Malop St, Geelong VIC 3220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC Notes: I plan to wear a blue shirt and have a sign. https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr GOLD COAST Contact: Lerancan Contact Info: lerancan[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: At a picnic table with an ACX sign, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+555
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC, https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr, https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+555
Gainesville4 mentions across 4 issues

Gainesville is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 23, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "GAINESVILLE, FL ( RSVP )"; "GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA"; "GAINESVILLE". It most often appears alongside 4th Ave Food Park, ACX, ACX.

Article page
Gainesville
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GAINESVILLE, FL (RSVP) Contact: ZachH, zachary[dot]hamaker[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, September 7 Location: 4th Ave Food Park, I’ll be wearing a maroon shirt Coordinates: https://w3w.co/briefer.releases.loyal Notes: Will consider delaying if the COVID situation in FL doesn’t improve
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/briefer.releases.loyal
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Russell Contact Info: rchestnut1520[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Monday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: 4th Ave Food Park, outside picnic table. Will have a sign if it's not obvious. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5C2
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5C2
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Praj Contact Info: fort[dot]lauderdale[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 02:00 PM Location: Funky Buddha Brewery, parking is free in the lot across the street, I'll be sitting at a table with an "ACX MEETUP" sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+PFH Group Link: Email me for the discord invite link Notes: Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming! GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Vince Contact Info: vatter[at]gmail[do t]com Time: Tuesday, October 01st, 07:00 PM Location: 4th Ave Food Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5CC
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+PFH, https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5CC
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Lawrence Contact Info: fort[period]lauderdale[period]acx[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 27th, 1:30 PM Location: Funky Buddha Brewery, parking is free in the lot across the street, I'll be sitting at a table with an "ACX MEETUP" sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+PF Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ Notes: Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming GAINESVILLE Contact: Vince Contact Info: vatter[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 7:00 PM Location: 4th Ave Food Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5CC
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+PF, https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ
German4 mentions across 4 issues

German is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between January 19, 2022 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "superficially-similar Swiss, German, and Dutch models"; "flips on German defence spending"; "I have read a lot of reviews of this book, most of them in German". It most often appears alongside France, Germany, China.

Article page
German
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
January 19, 2022
Last seen
August 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
Emanuel hates having to give a clear answer to that question, but when confronted with the fact that he’s writing a book with that title and can’t really weasel out, he grudgingly admits that “the top tier would include Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Taiwan”.
4: Single Payer Channeled Through Private Insurance is typical of Germany and the Netherlands. I think this is kind of like how charter schools work in the US: the government pays 100% of your costs, but you get to choose which insurance company (out of various heavily-regulated and basically identical plans) to go with. Then the insurance company pays private doctors and hospitals as usual.
Single-payer implemented through private insurance - Germany and the Netherlands - comes out looking pretty good: these are 2 of the 4 countries Emanuel puts in his top tier. I’m confused here. The US has at least three major problems that Germany/Netherlands lack: nonuniversal coverage, high costs, and poor patient choice (ie you have to worry about “out of network” providers). I can see why single-payer eliminates the first: if the government buys coverage for everyone, of course it will be universal. But why does it eliminate the second two? Germany and the Netherlands have dozens of different insurance providers - why doesn’t that decrease bargaining power and raise costs? Why doesn’t it mean that sometimes they fail to reach an agreement with a hospital, and their patients can’t go there without facing “out-of-network” costs? I thought I understood the reasons why US health care doesn’t work, but Germany and the Netherlands seem to replicate its apparent disadvantages without running into the same problems. Why? Maybe I just don’t fully understand what “single-payer” means?
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
The War in Iraq (2003-2011): China, Russia, France, and Germany all opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam regime that was sold as a ‘preemptive war’, turns out there were no WMD and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was nonexistent.
Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: Hurting the economy
It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: 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 $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.
Inline links: not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, 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
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
His emotional range spans only from a kind of tired nostalgia to the reckless joy of intoxication, punctuated by his most prized feeling by far, the gleefully murderous “bloodthirst” of mortal combat. So everyone who had read some Jünger, which at the time of publication would likely include most of the German population and definitely most of the Nazis, could see right through the facade of fiction. It is an obvious conceit that made the book just barely publishable, in a time and place where saying outright that the Nazis were disgusting savages would have gotten everyone involved a headshot. After 1945, Jünger did admit that the book was (also) a commentary on the political reality of its time. And that he knew perfectly well that in publishing this “fiction” he was playing with his life. And still he got it published, uncensored, in Germany in 1939, just before Hitler started the second World War. Today the most widely accepted history of the subject is that Jünger was only saved from a grisly fate by the personal intervention of Hitler himself, who loved “Storm of Steel” and presumably wouldn't have liked to admit that his favorite author utterly despised him. And it would have been very tempting to just not admit that, because before the Nazis came to power, Jünger had sympathized with them, although he never counted himself among them. Hitler had sent Jünger fan letters; the responses have unfortunately been lost. Jünger’s many political rants in the 1920s do contain several explicit endorsements of the strength of the Nazis and of their value as allies to Jünger’s vague and contradictory nationalist cause. By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs, he had stopped endorsing them. But this history made it easy for the Nazis to publicly pretend he had just written a fictional novella, or maybe he was talking about Bolshevism or something, but surely he didn’t mean them. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, where nobody dared to say out loud what everyone could see. Although additional reprints were verboten in 1942, the excuse of a lack of paper due to the war was perfectly plausible and didn’t betray the discomfort with the content that nevertheless is well-documented to have been present among the Nazi ranks. All of that is to say we can safely dispense with the charade entirely and accept that this book is about the Nazis. It makes general points on the nature and fate of tyranny that do apply to Bolshevism, but the Nazis are the immediate and obvious instance of tyranny to which this book clearly reacts. And it is written by someone who had walked among the Nazis, had previously been friends with some of them, exchanged letters with many of the best-informed men especially in the military, and was perceptive enough for his opinions to deserve much of the confidence he states them with. Besides this conceit, the other concession to the political realities Jünger makes is that the book makes no mention of Jews. The world he is describing is fictional, but it is an amalgamation of European cultures that all had some Jews, so this absence is conspicuous. Obviously Jünger couldn't possibly have seen this book published if it depicted Jews in any way that wasn’t extremely negative. I guess he was unwilling to do that. In the 1920s, Jünger had ranted against “globalist” liberal Jews several times, and once even argued that one couldn't be both a Jew and a German. But he saw nothing wrong with being an orthodox Jew, openly admired Zionism, expressed in letters complete revulsion with Nazi antisemitism and had even publicly spoken out against the pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis. After writing this book, when serving as an officer again in France, Jünger went on to save a couple of French Jews from deportation and death, at moderate risk to his own life. Later he’d discuss the Kabbalah with Gershom Sholem, the brother of his childhood friend Werner Sholem. For these reasons, I imagine he did not see Jews negatively enough for the Nazis, and was too uncompromising to pretend that even his narrator did. I think this dilemma fully explains why there are no Jews in this book. In 1935, when Winston Churchill for example still publicly admired “the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force” of Adolf Hitler, Jünger claims to have already understood the bottomlessness of Hitler's depravity by noticing he was using the word “Vernichtung” (annihilation) way too much. He was remarkably right, years before most could see it, but even more remarkably his method of understanding was a poet's acute sense of word choice! And from then, even though he agreed with nationalist dictatorship as a goal and method, he distanced himself from National Socialism because he was disgusted with the vile character of the leader of this particular nationalist dictatorship. If that doesn't show you the peculiar kind of man Ernst Jünger was, I don't know what to tell you. The craft and the poetry You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. The “marble cliffs” in the title of this short novella unite senses of beauty, majesty and danger, which is programmatic for this entire book. It begins with a visionary description of life in the traditional society of “the Marina” in an overwhelmingly beautiful state of paradise. The narrator lives on the edge of this society in a “hermitage” with his brother, his housekeeper and his son. The latter has a strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes. This opening act is without question the most elaborate celebration of poetic beauty I have ever read. Superficially it could be dismissed as purple prose. But due to Jünger’s clever use of poetic techniques in what at first appears to be prose text, there’s a rhythm, a density and a lucidity to it that makes it pretty much a very long poem, and gives it an intoxicating quality which is most apparent when you read it out loud. In the autumn we feasted like sages and did honour to the exquisite wines in which the southern slopes of the Marina abound. When in the vineyards between red foliage and dark grape clusters we caught the jocund calls of the vintagers, when in the little towns and villages the wine-presses began to creak, and the odour of the pressed grape skins drew its heady veils round the farms, we would go down to the innkeepers, coopers and wine-growers, and drink with them from the full-bellied jug. And there we would always meet with gay companions, for the land is rich and fair, so that in it flourishes untroubled leisure, and wit and humour are its unquestioned coin. I know this works, because I did an experiment. I read this book aloud, to a room full of people who were smoking pot. The book is short and the plan was to read all of it over the evening. I have read to pot smokers occasionally, but with this book it was different. They were enjoying it very much for the first couple of chapters, and exclaimed many times it was “perfect” for pot. But some hours, chapters and joints in, when the narrator goes on an expedition into a fantastically beautiful forest, they were so utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the descriptions of nature they asked me to stop. I and the only other sober person in the room were the only ones who were willing to continue. We all had very intense dreams that night. Once we had broken through the thick hedge of dogwood and blackthorn we entered the high forest, territory where the blow of an axe had never resounded. The ancient trunks, the pride of the Chief Ranger, stood gleaming damp like pillars with their capitals hidden by the mist. We walked among them as if through a spacious hall, and, like the magic setting of a stage, festoons of ivy and clematis blooms hung down towards us out of the void. The ground was piled high with mould and rotting branches, in the bark of which fiery red mushrooms had sprung up, so that we felt for a moment like divers wandering among coral gardens. Wherever one of the mighty trunks had fallen from age or struck by lightning, we stepped out on to a little clearing on which the yellow foxglove grew in thick clumps. On the rotting ground the deadly nightshade bloomed in profusion; on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells. It comes as no surprise that Jünger had much practice writing that way, from putting into his diaries a lot of his dreams and his numerous drug experiences. Jünger had long been inclined to deeply poetic descriptions of the real events he described, but this intensity at this length is genuinely new to his writing. Wherever he can use plurals he prefers them over the singular, wherever he can use more melodic and beautiful verbs (like when the characters “step out on” rather than “walk into” clearings) he does. Maybe the pretense of the narrator not being himself allowed Jünger to wallow in his characteristic aestheticism, take it to an extreme and arguably to the point of self-parody. Skip to the next heading if you don’t care about translation The extreme language of this book made me doubt there would be any translation into English that could do it justice. After all, if you throw this last excerpt into DeepL you get: After breaking through a dense fringe of blackthorn and cornets, we entered the high forest, in the grounds of which the blow of the axe had never sounded. The old trunks, which formed the pride of the head forester, stood in the damp glow like columns whose capitals were hidden by the haze. We walked among them as through wide vestibules, and like the magic work on a stage, ivy vines and clematis blossoms hung down on us from the invisible. The ground was covered high with mulm and decaying branches on whose bark mushrooms, burning red cup fungi, had settled, so that a feeling of divers walking through coral gardens crept over us. Where one of these giant trunks was tossed by age or lightning, we stepped out into small clearings where yellow foxglove stood in dense clumps. Belladonna bushes also proliferated on the rotten ground, on whose branches the flower calyxes in brown violet swayed like death bells. It’s still pretty, and it works on a matter-of-fact level. None of it is just wrong. But can you see how it has a lot less of the dreamlike quality? A “fringe” is a geographical feature, while the “hedge” emphasizes its role as an obstacle in a journey. Those “old” trunks are less poetic than “ancient” ones. A “head forester” is a job description, while a “Chief Ranger” is a seminal figure. The “vestibules” are a literal translation of the original, but the English word is used a lot less than German “Vestibüle” was back then. So that’s a word you may need to work to understand, which gets you out of the story’s flow, so “spacious hall” is better. There are even more such nitpicks to be made even in this short paragraph, but my point is these difficulties pervade every single paragraph of the book. ChatGPT very similarly fails to overcome them. Since January, there is a new translation by Tess Lewis, which has the advantage of being available on Kindle. I’ll spare you another repeat of the same paragraph and just say I think DeepL did most of this translation. But Tess Lewis did improve on many of its word choices and I’ll grudgingly concede this translation is good enough. It still sounds too modern for me, too much like prose and too little like poetry. Therefore, all previous and following excerpts are from the Stuart Hood translation, published in 1947, which I was astonished to find does pull it off! Let me assure anyone who doesn’t speak German, or doesn’t study translation, that this one is absolutely exemplary and surely represents years of painstaking work. Stuart Hood was a Scot who knew German very well. Like Jünger he was a veteran officer, and he needed German for his intelligence missions in World War 2. This is his very first published translation of an entire book. It harnesses a considerable talent, which is also evidenced by how Stuart Hood went on to become an accomplished writer himself, a BBC executive, a professor and several other notable things. And it is clearly a labor of intense love — right after the war, while working on it, Hood corresponded with Jünger and even went to visit him at least twice and they talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs. The end of this last quote, “on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells.” exemplifies how precisely Hood has understood Jünger. Why “calices”, not “chalices”? Because that is the old-fashioned form of this word, and using it is unnecessarily peculiar, but it doesn’t make you stop and look into a dictionary. It isn’t even more precise than DeepL’s and ChatGPT’s and Tess Lewis’s “calyxes” for the word “Blumenkelche” in the Original. But it captures precisely how the author was using his German language. This is because on every page of the original, there are choices of individual words that evoke subtleties of mood and allusion that are strictly impossible to translate, because English doesn’t have a similar-enough group of synonyms from which to make the equivalent choice. Some of that must inevitably get lost in translation. But these “calices” are an example of how Hood has the audacity to frequently insert his own new peculiar word choices — which restore exactly the same effect! It might take entire months until AI can do that! Unfortunately the New Directions edition with this translation has been out of print for a while, although I heard from a regrettably less law-abiding friend that the PDF is easy to find. But a few years ago someone bought the UK rights to this translation and republished it. While this edition has several uncorrected OCR mistakes, one of which horrifyingly turns “Flayer’s Copse” into “Player’s Copse”, at least this makes the better translation available (legally) again. What actually happens (spoilers) After six chapters of descriptions of paradise, and of the botanical work the brothers do since they don’t need to make a living, the book continues with a gradual decline of this gorgeous world. This again is much more of a richly detailed description than a story plot. It begins with the introduction of the Chief Ranger. The brothers know him from their military community, from before his takeover begins. There is some debate about whether the Chief Ranger stands for Hitler, Stalin or Hermann Göring. I think this debate is misguided. The character of the Chief Ranger, the antagonist of the narrator and all he holds dear, is never named but only ever referred to by his title. He does not appear to have staff or lieutenants at all, nor any personal history. And Jünger is profoundly uninterested in the personalities of all his characters beneath what they pay attention to (except the narrator’s brother) so even this important figure is roughly sketched at best. Therefore, I believe he is best understood as more of an archetype or role, The Tyrant, denuded of the individual traits or histories that make one tyrant a Führer, another a General Secretary and yet another a Great Leader. So, what makes a tyrant? According to Jünger, “wherever free spirits establish their sway these primeval powers will always join their company like a snake creeping to an open fire. They are the old connoisseurs of power who see a new day dawning in which to reestablish the tyranny that has lived in their hearts since the beginning of time.” The Chief Ranger is also “a master of feigning frankness that was full of snares for the unwary.” He has a reputation for wealth and a strong visual brand (a gold-embroidered green coat) that makes sure he always leaves “an imprint on one’s memory”. He exudes a “breath of primitive power” and has a strong charisma that gives an impression of “both cunning and unshakable power — yes, at times even majesty.” As he begins to usurp power, “reports spread from mouth to mouth of infringements of the law and of acts of violence in the neighbourhood, and finally such incidents occurred publicly and with no attempt to concealment. A cloud of fear preceded the Chief Ranger like the mountain mist that presages the storm. Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than in his own person lay his power.” From what I know about tyrants, that sounds about right. For the next seven chapters, the vile followers of the Chief Ranger continually corrupt everything. The sophisticated culture of the Marina is surrounded by the rough herdsmen clans of the surrounding Campagna steppe, beyond which lies the Chief Ranger’s forest populated by lowlifes. The class metaphor is blindingly obvious, and Jünger’s theory of how these lowlifes overcome first the Campagna and then the Marina is not subtle either. After the Alta Plana war, and the defeat, the entire society has been weakened. “Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would scarcely notice. The first symptoms, therefore, were not recognized.” Very gradually, law gives way to lawlessness, spreading from and with the lower classes foresters in many different ways. Violent crime grows, in descriptions very reminiscent of the many deadly street fights of the late Weimar republic. Various elements of traditional culture become corrupted. Those who would defend it are intimidated and attacked. The constitutional lawful reaction is too slow, so by the time it manages to convene and have democratic debates, it is already infiltrated. And there’s one paragraph worth quoting in full. Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. Today this is a mainstream view in German history. In 1939, it could have been prosecuted as high treason and punished with death. On the backdrop of ever escalating mayhem, two old men who are friends of the brothers are described: Belovar, a clan patriarch from the Campagna, and Father Lampros, an eminent Christian monk. In very different ways, they both are very helpful, each both in the botanical work and against the mounting threat. The brothers decide against meeting the violence with violence, delve deeper into their work, become increasingly pessimistic and develop a hope that they can rescue the results of their work into an imperishable afterlife by burning it with an ancient mystical crystal lens that they somehow inherited. The narrator describes continued excursions for rare plants, through the country that is becoming increasingly treacherous and foreboding, until finally, well after the middle point of the book, with one particular excursion for an extremely rare flower, the actual continual story begins. Today we look at the Nazis with horror, but Jünger has dug too many trenches into hills of rotting corpses to be easily horrified. Instead of horror, his feelings towards the Nazis are mostly contempt, seasoned with disgust, and that has been pervading his description of the rise of the Chief Ranger’s henchmen over the last couple of chapters. But he does give one instance of pure horror and it is here, in the very heart of the book, when the two brothers on their excursion happen to discover, in the ill-reputed area of Flayer's Copse, the Chief Ranger’s remote “flaying-hut” of Koppels-Bleek. The original Köppels-Bleek is a German wordplay, about as subtle as a drone base in a sci-fi novel that happens to be called Obamazliez. Koppels-Bleek is where the Chief Ranger has his enemies tortured to death. It has frequently been called a concentration camp, but that is imprecise. It is really a Vernichtungslager, a death camp, which unlike a “normal” concentration camp is built for the express purpose that no torture victim ever gets out alive. This is a prediction, because while Nazi concentration camps were set up starting in 1933, Vernichtungslager were only built three years after the “Marble Cliffs” were published. After an intensely gruesome description of the particulars of this place, the narrator assesses its importance as follows. Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen rising the curling savoury smoke of their banquets. They are terrible noisome pits in which a God-forsaken crew revels to all eternity in the degradation of human dignity and human freedom. He is so certain he has captured the very essence of tyranny, “the abode of tyranny in all its shame”, that he puts this climax at the two thirds mark of the book and makes it exceedingly obvious this is where the third and final act begins, as the pace of the book changes entirely. Although the narrator still includes some retrospectives, he is now finally telling a real story. Strikingly, the brothers return to botany — remember this, it will be important later — and then to their home, where they soon get two conspiring visitors. Braquemart is a competent, racist, nihilistic fellow veteran. The narrator despises him at length for his heartless theory-mindedness. Prince Smyrna is new, young, seems to the narrator to know “the nature of justice and order” but is too weak and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility he is heroically taking on. The two visitors want to Do Something about the Chief Ranger — what exactly is never said, though a personal confrontation or assassination is implied. They leave for the Chief Ranger's territory. This entire chapter feels very much like a comment on some political acquaintances of Jünger who attempted to challenge the Nazis, and failed. The next day, Father Lampros gives the narrator a mission to arm himself and look for these two men. He goes to old Belovar's farmstead, where he learns of commotion in the direction of Flayer's Copse, and the old clan patriarch goes to war. Before, the book was a dreamy soliloquy; now we see dramatic wartime action. Ernst Jünger has had a lot of practice with writing about that kind of thing, and it shows. Their small but experienced war party with a lot of dogs goes towards Koppels-Bleek and is soon met with two confused, horrific, riveting battles. The narrator stumbles through and finds at Koppels-Bleek the heads of Prince Smyrna and Braquemart. The former strikes him as a symbol of how nobility remains real, and he picks it up. With it, he retreats through mayhem and danger into the complete flaming destruction of the Marina. He marvels at the beauty of the flames — remember this too, it will also be important later — and, with his hunters in hot pursuit, runs to his house. There his son uses his strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes to make them defeat the nearest attackers. The brothers burn down the house, go find Father Lampros and see him die. From an old soldier comrade who owes them a favor they get room on a ship to flee across the water to Alta Plana, where an old enemy who owes them another favor takes them in. There’s an implicit framing story of how the narrator lives to tell the tale of these memories to some unspecified audience, and as it ends it mentions in passing that sometime after these events, a new cathedral has been built on the ruins of the Marina and the head of Prince Smyrna went there as a relic. This small bit still stands out today, and would have stood out even more starkly to contemporary readers, because in the context of everything that happened before, this bit publicly, extremely boldly, and correctly, predicts the eventual fate of the Nazis. Not once in this entire story has the narrator expressed surprise at this progression of events, or given any other indication it is in any way unlikely. The narrator, and the author through him, seems to be saying this is just the way it goes with tyranny, when a society has lost too much of its strength to fight off the bestial attacks of the lowly. I have omitted not just many smaller elements of the story but also a huge number of allusions to ancient history, (German) literature and especially the Bible. I imagine Jünger put them there as prizes for the few who would find them. This is one of the ways that I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong: a vehicle that lets a prolific nonfiction author
Jünger never admitted even a shred of mental weakness, even privately. But objectively, everything he passionately believed in had been falling apart for years. When Jünger wrote this book, the German Catastrophe was in full swing and he was very aware it would all end in tears. He had retreated from his nationalist political work and almost all of his nationalist friends. He had refused bids of friendship from Hitler personally, from the National Socialist party (which repeatedly offered him a mandate in their token parliament) and from various Nazi organizations. A poem where he had bemoaned “the reign of the lowly” had gotten his home raided repeatedly. He and his brother expected a “typhoon” to ravage the country soon and they were hoping to weather it in their refuge in the small town by the Bodensee, where On the Marble Cliffs was written. He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse. For many years, he had strived mightily to guide his beloved country to what he believed was a better path - and had evidently failed completely. How could he possibly have coped with all this?
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”)
Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
Greek4 mentions across 4 issues

Greek is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 21, 2021 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "prominent motifs in Greek literature"; "hyoid (Greek for ‘U-shaped’)"; "shadowy semi-naturally-forming underworlds of the Greek and early Jews". It most often appears alongside Jesus, America, Christ.

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Greek
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4
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4
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July 21, 2021
Last seen
October 22, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can’t rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
Inline links: Bertran
Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
Erectus speech perhaps sounded more garbled relative to that of sapiens, making it harder to hear the differences between words. … Part of the reason for erectus’s probably mushy speech is that they lacked a modern hyoid (Greek for ‘U-shaped’) bone, the small bone in the pharynx that anchors the larynx. The muscles that connect the hyoid to the larynx use their hyoid anchor to raise and lower the larynx and produce a wider variety of speech sounds. The hyoid bone of erectus was shaped more like the hyoid bones of the other great apes and had not yet taken on the shape of sapiens’ and neanderthalensis’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
Instead of being forced to attribute the Christians’ growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we think of this as each existing Christian having to convert 0.4 new people, on average, per decade, it starts to sound downright do-able. Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over so many generations? Through The Social Graph This is another of Stark’s findings from his work with the Moonies. The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Young Oon Kim, who arrived in 1959. Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the landlady’s friends. Then came the landlady’s friends’ husbands and the landlady’s friends’ husbands’ co-workers. That was when Stark showed up. “At the time . . . I arrived to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger.” Stark theorized that “the only [people] who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to nonmembers.” I don’t think this can be literally correct - taken seriously, it implies that the second convert could have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further. But something like “your odds of converting are your number of Moonie friends, divided by your number of non-Moonie friends” seems to fit his evidence. History confirms this story. Mohammed’s first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith’s first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers. Indeed, in spite of the Mormons’ celebrated door-knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door-knocks results in a conversion, but “when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, this results in conversion 50% of the time”. 1 This theory of social-graph-based-conversation was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they’ll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings. But Stark says: I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd. I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about “some guy in Korea” . . . Then, one day, he got worked up about this guy too. Through Jews And Weajoos Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean even before the fall of the Temple. I don’t know why. We Jews tell ourselves that we left Israel only after the Romans kicked us out. But Stark cites plenty of historians who argue that no, it was well before that. Around the time of Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora, especially Alexandria, Antioch, Anatolia, and Rome. What were these Jews’ spiritual lives like? Without hard evidence, Stark supposes they were marginal. Throughout history, Jews have succeeded at keeping the Law only within tight-knit communities. If you want to keep kosher, it helps to have everyone around you keeping kosher and a local kosher butcher. If you want to keep the Sabbath, it helps to have an eruv and a synagogue within walking distance. But even more than that, the Law is strange and complicated, and unless everyone around you follows it too, you are likely to slip. Thus, when Jews were first emancipated and allowed to live among Gentiles in the 18th-19th centuries, a split emerged in the Jewish community. Those Jews who stayed in the ghettos and shtetls - or who founded new self-imposed-quasi-ghettos like Crown Heights - remained Orthodox. Those Jews who mingled with the Gentiles cast off the more difficult rules and became Reform. Only a sliver of Modern Orthodox remained in the middle, often with abysmal attrition rates. Stark asks whether the first great intermingling of Jews and Gentiles had the same effect. While the Jews in Palestine stayed religious and laid the foundations for the Rabbinic Judaism of future centuries, the Jews in the Diaspora - did what? Presumably Hellenized into some sort of semi-assimilated proto-Reform movement. Although we have limited historical evidence about these Jews’ religious behavior, we know they spoke Greek and not Hebrew (otherwise why would they need the Septuagint?) and that many of them took Greek names. Of inscriptions on the Jewish catacombs in Rome, 76% are in Greek, 22% in Latin, and only 2% in Hebrew or Aramaic. Reform Judaism is unstable. The Law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith; relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what’s left. In America, Reform Jews are over-represented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33% of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background, and even the Moonies were 30% Jewish at one point! (they’re now down to 6%) As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews’ upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn’t take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without. The Bible and the historical record call them “God-fearers”, but by analogy I can’t help but think of them as “weajoos”. These weajoos would have been easy prey for the first semi-Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion. The Apostles and other early Christians, leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world, would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually-disaffected, half-assimilated pseudo-Reform Jewish communities of the Roman world, plus their half-assimilated-the-other direction Greek hangers-on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive Law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in-between communities, saying that Jews could join together with Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, says Stark, were the early Christians’ first few million converts. Because, I Regret To Inform You, The Pronatalists Are Right About Everything We found above that the Christian population needed to grow at 40% per decade, and assumed this meant conversion. But you could also do this through a fertility advantage. If a generation lasts thirty years, and Christians have 3x more children than pagans per generation, they can get 40%/decade growth without converting anyone at all. In reality, it was probably a mix: some conversion plus some fertility advantage. Here I start to worry that some right-wing pronatalist organization bribed Rodney Stark to abandon his usual scholarly attitude and write some kind of over-the-top pronatalist fanfic. I was waiting for the part where the eagle named MORE BIRTHS perches on the blackboard and the childfree professor was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity. Still, let’s take it at face value and see what the fanfic has to say. By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one. In 131 BC, the Roman censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus2 proposed that that the senate make marriage compulsory because so many men, especially in the upper classes, preferred to stay single. Acknowledging that “we cannot have a really harmonious life with our wives”, the censor pointed out that "since “we cannot have any sort of life without them,” the long term welfare of the state must be served”… As Beryl Rawsom has reported, “one theme that recurs in Latin literature is that wives are difficult and therefore men do not care much for marriage.” The Romans understood that this was long-term fatal for their empire, and tried all sorts of schemes to increase family formation. In the mid-first-century BC, Cicero re-proposed Metellus’ scheme to make marriage compulsory, but it failed once again. Augustus contented himself with punitive taxes and second-class citizenship for unmarried and childless couples, combined with subsidies and affirmative action for men with at least three children. Formal and informal social pressure eventually convinced most Roman men to take wives, but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive (nobles would have to spend immense effort and political favors grooming them for high positions), and (the scourge of all nobilities) too many children risked splitting the inheritance. Also, if you had a girl you’d probably just kill her (she would consume resources without continuing the family line), and half of children died before adulthood from some disease or another anyway. It was just a really bad value proposition. Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common: Far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. Tacitus charged that the Jewish teaching that it is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” was but another of their “sinister and revolting practices” . . . not only was the exposure of infants a common practice, it was justified by law and advocated by philosophers.” Christians followed the opposite of all these practices. They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. From Ephesians 5: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide (many of these bans weren’t active decisions, but carry-overs from the movement’s Jewish roots). Also, I regret to say I fell for the liberal meme that Republicans tricked Christians into being anti-abortion in 1960, and previous generations of Christian had thought abortion was fine. This is absolutely not true. The Didache, the first Christian text outside the New Testament itself, probably dating from about 90 AD, says that “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born”. The second-century church father Athenagoras wrote: We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care . . . and [we do not] expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder. The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things. This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later. But I’ll end this section with a note of caution - I’m not sure how relevant any of this is. Stark refuses to speculate on pagan vs. Christian fertility rates, but when I look up modern scholarship, they reasonably point out that pagan rates must have been around “replacement”, given that the Roman population stayed steady (or slowly increased) for hundreds of years. “Replacement” is in quotes because Romans were constantly dying of plague, warfare, fire, and a million other causes; since only a third to half of people survived to reproduce, “replacement” here is something like 4-6 children per women. This doesn’t sound like the antinatalist disaster Stark describes! I think Stark is mostly talking about Roman elites - the group who Augustus kept pestering to have at least three children - and more broadly about the urban population. These people were constantly dying and being replaced by commoners and villagers. Early Christianity was primarily an urban and upper-class movement (does this surprise you? Stark urges us to think of modern cults and new religions, like American Buddhism, which predominantly recruit disillusioned children of the upper classes). So perhaps it did better than its urban upper-class pagan comparison group. Still, since the urban upper-class pagans were constantly being replaced by village lower-class pagans as soon as they died out, how much, in numerical terms, can this contribute to Christianity’s growth? A possible synthesis: if you imagine a city as having a constant population (because it’s walled, plus its hinterland can only support a certain number of non-food-producing urbanites), and villagers as replacing urbanites on a one-to-one basis as they die, then greater Christian urban fertility rates can at least contribute to the cities and upper classes becoming Christian. And once the cities and upper classes are Christian, you get Constantine, and the lower classes can be forced to comply. Remember, “pagan” originally meant “rural”! Because Where Women Go, Men Will Follow One thing Stark did not mention discovering in his study of cults, but which I have heard anecdotally - a lot of male cult members join because the cult has hot girls. This seems to have been a big factor in the spread of early Christianity as well. Stark collects various forms of evidence that early Christians were predominantly women. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans greets thirty-three prominent Christians by name, of whom 15 were men and 18 women; if (as seems likely) men were more likely to become prominent than women, this near-equality at the upper ranks suggests a female predominance at the lower. A third-century inventory of property at a Christian church includes “sixteen men’s tunics and eighty-two women’s tunics”. The book quotes historian Adolf von Harnack, who says: [Ancient sources] simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces; although the details of these stories are untrustworthy, they express correctly enough the general truth that Christianity was laid hold of by women in particular, and also that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men. Why were women converted in such disproportionate numbers? Again, Stark’s sociological background serves him well: he is able to find reports of the same phenomenon in modern religions: By examining manuscript census returns for the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bainbridge (1983) found that approximately two-third of the Shakers were female. Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies show that 75% of Christian Scientists were women, as were more than 60% of Theosophists, Swedenborgians, and Spiritualists. The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America. But along with a general tendency for women to convert, Stark notes that Christianity was especially attractive to women. The pagan world treated women as their husbands’ property, and not particularly well-liked property at that. The book cites the Athenian laws as typical: The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”. Meanwhile, Christian woman had relatively high status, sometimes rising to the position of deacon within a church. Christian men were ordered to treat their wives kindly, were prohibited from cheating on them, and mostly could not divorce. Christianity, unlike paganism, did not especially pressure widows to remarry (important since a remarrying widow lost all her property to her new husband). Christian women were only a third as likely as Roman women to be married off before age 13. Women noticed all these benefits and flocked to Christianity. Aside from all of this, the Romans were practicing sex-selective infanticide, reducing their female numbers still further, and making the Christians even more proportionally female-heavy. If the Christians, like many modern cults, were 65% female, and the Romans (as some sources attest) were about 40 - 45% female, this is a pretty profound difference. The Romans grumbled about marriage, but in the end most Roman men did want wives (if only to avoid government penalties). But 1.4 men per women - maybe even less among the upper classes - puts young men seeking wives in a difficult situation (for comparison, modern San Francisco is only 1.05 men per women, and dating is already hell). To any remotely heterosexual Roman men, the 65% female Christian community must have started looking pretty good. Meanwhile, the Christians had the opposite problem: too many women, not enough men. There’s an obvious solution, and it sounds like the pagans and Christians had also figured it out: From 1 Peter 3: Wives ... submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. History records many such intermarriages, almost always ending with the conversion of the pagan husband. If you are a Christian of English descent, you may owe your religion to Queen Bertha of Kent, who convinced her husband, one of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, to take her faith. But Ruxandro Teslo has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, who disagrees with all of this. Salzman has a database of 400 aristocratic Romans during the 4th century period of Christianity’s fastest growth. She finds few intermarriages, few examples of women converting their husbands, and equal (or slightly male-biased) conversion ratios. Granted, this is only a small sample from one period. But it makes us question how good our evidence really is. Doesn’t all this hinge on one passage from Paul which, technically, named more men than women, plus one inventory of tunics which was so female-biased that it couldn’t possibly have been representative of even a very woman-heavy church? Are we sure that we can make the leap from “Christianity promised women more rights” to “Therefore, women flocked to Christianity?” Wasn’t that the same argument that pundits used last week to predict a blue wave for Kamala? Didn’t white women actually go for Trump, 53-46? Salzman has one more concern, which is that women had so few rights in ancient Roman society that it’s hard to see how they could have converted at all. When unmarried, they were under the care of their father, who would hardly have let them go out visiting churches full of strange men. When married, they were under the care of their husband, who likewise. A typical Roman man wouldn’t have cared about his wife’s religious opinions, which is maybe why so many of our stories about intermarriages and conversions come from later periods like the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t know enough about history to referee this dispute, except that say that I think the answer could easily have been different for each of early Romans, late Romans, Hellenized-Jewish-Romans, pagan Romans, upper-class Romans, and lower-class Romans, plus all combinations thereof. Because Of The Testimony Of The Martyrs The martyrs are one of the most dramatic parts of the early Christian story. Men and women would endure seemingly-unbearable tortures, continuing to praise God the whole time, sometimes in spite of Roman officials who promised to let them go free if they would just make the tiniest concession to praising Jupiter. These martyrdoms impressed their contemporaries as much as they impress us, and were a major factor driving pagans to Christianity. The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Leon Gerome (maybe slight nominative determinism?) Stark is writing in the 1990s, and martyrology c. 1995 does not exactly cover itself in glory. At the time of writing, the most popular theory among scholars (claims Stark) was that the martyrs were masochists. He considers this dumb and offensive theory a natural consequence of historians being reluctant to accept anything that sounds too miraculous or amazing, and there being few other hard-headed rational explanations of the martyrs’ behavior (for some reason, the obvious one - that they believed in God and Heaven - impresses neither Stark’s foils nor himself). He sets out to build an alternative theory: the martyrs were rationally seeking the approval of their community. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense, face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch … Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian. But instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody of ten Roman soldiers. Thus began a long, leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor on its way to the West. At each stop Ignatius was allowed to preach to and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger although their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations in cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesus and Philadelphia … As William Schoedel remarked, “It is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on part of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a ‘transient traveller,’ noting that ‘even churches that do not lie on my way according to the flesh went before me city by city.’” What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning Christians might gain him a pardon…He expected to be remembered through the ages, and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, “in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.” It soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp, contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomelium. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156. After the execution his bones were retrieved by some of his followers - an act witnessed by Roman officials, who took no action against them. The letter spoke of “his sacred flesh” and described his bones as “being of more value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold.” The letter-writer reported that the Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp’s bones every year “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.” The letter concluded, “The blessed Polycarp ... to whom be glory, honour, majesty, and a throne eternal, from generation to generation. Amen.” It also included the instruction: “On receiving this, send on the letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes choice of his own servants.” In fact, today we actually know the names of nearly all of the Christian martyrs because their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for their very great holiness. I don’t know, I’m not putting too much effort into writing up this section, because it doesn’t feel like as much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996. But since then, we’ve seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian martyrs were more impressive - a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war - but it hardly seems like as much of a leap. Honestly, Stark’s “social approval” theory seems only slightly less objectifying than the masochism theory. Some people just have a tendency towards self-sacrifice. I know many effective altruists who, for example, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research. If someone told them a way that they could help the neediest people in the world by feeding themselves to lions, the lions would no doubt eat well. Because They Survived The Plagues However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That’s almost ten times denser than modern New York City, two thousand years before anyone invented the skyscraper3. How did they do it? By cramming people together in unbearable filth and misery: Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multistoried tenements…”there was only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments”. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme - the tenants rarely had more than one room in which “entire families were herded together”. Thus, as Stambaugh tells us, privacy was “a hard thing to find”. Not only were people terribly crowded within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their window they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices… To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat; since tenements lacked chimneys, the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be “closed” only by “hanging cloths or skins blown by rain”, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.” Packer4 (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places and that the average “domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions.” These tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street, often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells; if you were out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about 30,000; the total population of Rome was about a million; in practice, the upper classes used the “public” baths and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a century or two earlier but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies, mosquitos, and other insects. It would be eighteen hundred years before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed, killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. How did people survive? Mostly they didn’t. Cities were destroyed regularly - multiple times within a single human lifetime! - then rebuilt and replenished with rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city which was a center of early Christianity. During “six hundred years of intermittent Roman rule”, he finds: It was conquered 11 times
Inline links: 1, abysmal attrition rates, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CDZA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8fbb7c8-0789-4b71-b84f-6f93a7949ee7_595x401.png, 33% of American Buddhists, 30% Jewish, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IMoJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F248a87ba-7893-48a8-bb24-f9be9f30d355_893x720.png, has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81ea23c2-1c9b-4d43-8d31-2c4b74990be5_1024x597.jpeg, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research, 3, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WKib!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F398aa36d-4d66-44e5-b035-fa3a20e457da_1858x1696.png
Of inscriptions on the Jewish catacombs in Rome, 76% are in Greek, 22% in Latin, and only 2% in Hebrew or Aramaic. Reform Judaism is unstable. The Law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith; relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what’s left. In America, Reform Jews are over-represented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33% of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background, and even the Moonies were 30% Jewish at one point! (they’re now down to 6%) As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews’ upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn’t take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without. The Bible and the historical record call them “God-fearers”, but by analogy I can’t help but think of them as “weajoos”. These weajoos would have been easy prey for the first semi-Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion. The Apostles and other early Christians, leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world, would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually-disaffected, half-assimilated pseudo-Reform Jewish communities of the Roman world, plus their half-assimilated-the-other direction Greek hangers-on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive Law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in-between communities, saying that Jews could join together with Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here, says Stark, were the early Christians’ first few million converts. Because, I Regret To Inform You, The Pronatalists Are Right About Everything We found above that the Christian population needed to grow at 40% per decade, and assumed this meant conversion. But you could also do this through a fertility advantage. If a generation lasts thirty years, and Christians have 3x more children than pagans per generation, they can get 40%/decade growth without converting anyone at all. In reality, it was probably a mix: some conversion plus some fertility advantage. Here I start to worry that some right-wing pronatalist organization bribed Rodney Stark to abandon his usual scholarly attitude and write some kind of over-the-top pronatalist fanfic. I was waiting for the part where the eagle named MORE BIRTHS perches on the blackboard and the childfree professor was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity. Still, let’s take it at face value and see what the fanfic has to say. By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one. In 131 BC, the Roman censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus2 proposed that that the senate make marriage compulsory because so many men, especially in the upper classes, preferred to stay single. Acknowledging that “we cannot have a really harmonious life with our wives”, the censor pointed out that "since “we cannot have any sort of life without them,” the long term welfare of the state must be served”… As Beryl Rawsom has reported, “one theme that recurs in Latin literature is that wives are difficult and therefore men do not care much for marriage.” The Romans understood that this was long-term fatal for their empire, and tried all sorts of schemes to increase family formation. In the mid-first-century BC, Cicero re-proposed Metellus’ scheme to make marriage compulsory, but it failed once again. Augustus contented himself with punitive taxes and second-class citizenship for unmarried and childless couples, combined with subsidies and affirmative action for men with at least three children. Formal and informal social pressure eventually convinced most Roman men to take wives, but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive (nobles would have to spend immense effort and political favors grooming them for high positions), and (the scourge of all nobilities) too many children risked splitting the inheritance. Also, if you had a girl you’d probably just kill her (she would consume resources without continuing the family line), and half of children died before adulthood from some disease or another anyway. It was just a really bad value proposition. Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common: Far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. Tacitus charged that the Jewish teaching that it is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” was but another of their “sinister and revolting practices” . . . not only was the exposure of infants a common practice, it was justified by law and advocated by philosophers.” Christians followed the opposite of all these practices. They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. From Ephesians 5: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church — for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide (many of these bans weren’t active decisions, but carry-overs from the movement’s Jewish roots). Also, I regret to say I fell for the liberal meme that Republicans tricked Christians into being anti-abortion in 1960, and previous generations of Christian had thought abortion was fine. This is absolutely not true. The Didache, the first Christian text outside the New Testament itself, probably dating from about 90 AD, says that “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born”. The second-century church father Athenagoras wrote: We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care . . . and [we do not] expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder. The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things. This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later. But I’ll end this section with a note of caution - I’m not sure how relevant any of this is. Stark refuses to speculate on pagan vs. Christian fertility rates, but when I look up modern scholarship, they reasonably point out that pagan rates must have been around “replacement”, given that the Roman population stayed steady (or slowly increased) for hundreds of years. “Replacement” is in quotes because Romans were constantly dying of plague, warfare, fire, and a million other causes; since only a third to half of people survived to reproduce, “replacement” here is something like 4-6 children per women. This doesn’t sound like the antinatalist disaster Stark describes! I think Stark is mostly talking about Roman elites - the group who Augustus kept pestering to have at least three children - and more broadly about the urban population. These people were constantly dying and being replaced by commoners and villagers. Early Christianity was primarily an urban and upper-class movement (does this surprise you? Stark urges us to think of modern cults and new religions, like American Buddhism, which predominantly recruit disillusioned children of the upper classes). So perhaps it did better than its urban upper-class pagan comparison group. Still, since the urban upper-class pagans were constantly being replaced by village lower-class pagans as soon as they died out, how much, in numerical terms, can this contribute to Christianity’s growth? A possible synthesis: if you imagine a city as having a constant population (because it’s walled, plus its hinterland can only support a certain number of non-food-producing urbanites), and villagers as replacing urbanites on a one-to-one basis as they die, then greater Christian urban fertility rates can at least contribute to the cities and upper classes becoming Christian. And once the cities and upper classes are Christian, you get Constantine, and the lower classes can be forced to comply. Remember, “pagan” originally meant “rural”! Because Where Women Go, Men Will Follow One thing Stark did not mention discovering in his study of cults, but which I have heard anecdotally - a lot of male cult members join because the cult has hot girls. This seems to have been a big factor in the spread of early Christianity as well. Stark collects various forms of evidence that early Christians were predominantly women. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans greets thirty-three prominent Christians by name, of whom 15 were men and 18 women; if (as seems likely) men were more likely to become prominent than women, this near-equality at the upper ranks suggests a female predominance at the lower. A third-century inventory of property at a Christian church includes “sixteen men’s tunics and eighty-two women’s tunics”. The book quotes historian Adolf von Harnack, who says: [Ancient sources] simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces; although the details of these stories are untrustworthy, they express correctly enough the general truth that Christianity was laid hold of by women in particular, and also that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men. Why were women converted in such disproportionate numbers? Again, Stark’s sociological background serves him well: he is able to find reports of the same phenomenon in modern religions: By examining manuscript census returns for the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bainbridge (1983) found that approximately two-third of the Shakers were female. Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies show that 75% of Christian Scientists were women, as were more than 60% of Theosophists, Swedenborgians, and Spiritualists. The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America. But along with a general tendency for women to convert, Stark notes that Christianity was especially attractive to women. The pagan world treated women as their husbands’ property, and not particularly well-liked property at that. The book cites the Athenian laws as typical: The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”. Meanwhile, Christian woman had relatively high status, sometimes rising to the position of deacon within a church. Christian men were ordered to treat their wives kindly, were prohibited from cheating on them, and mostly could not divorce. Christianity, unlike paganism, did not especially pressure widows to remarry (important since a remarrying widow lost all her property to her new husband). Christian women were only a third as likely as Roman women to be married off before age 13. Women noticed all these benefits and flocked to Christianity. Aside from all of this, the Romans were practicing sex-selective infanticide, reducing their female numbers still further, and making the Christians even more proportionally female-heavy. If the Christians, like many modern cults, were 65% female, and the Romans (as some sources attest) were about 40 - 45% female, this is a pretty profound difference. The Romans grumbled about marriage, but in the end most Roman men did want wives (if only to avoid government penalties). But 1.4 men per women - maybe even less among the upper classes - puts young men seeking wives in a difficult situation (for comparison, modern San Francisco is only 1.05 men per women, and dating is already hell). To any remotely heterosexual Roman men, the 65% female Christian community must have started looking pretty good. Meanwhile, the Christians had the opposite problem: too many women, not enough men. There’s an obvious solution, and it sounds like the pagans and Christians had also figured it out: From 1 Peter 3: Wives ... submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. History records many such intermarriages, almost always ending with the conversion of the pagan husband. If you are a Christian of English descent, you may owe your religion to Queen Bertha of Kent, who convinced her husband, one of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, to take her faith. But Ruxandro Teslo has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, who disagrees with all of this. Salzman has a database of 400 aristocratic Romans during the 4th century period of Christianity’s fastest growth. She finds few intermarriages, few examples of women converting their husbands, and equal (or slightly male-biased) conversion ratios. Granted, this is only a small sample from one period. But it makes us question how good our evidence really is. Doesn’t all this hinge on one passage from Paul which, technically, named more men than women, plus one inventory of tunics which was so female-biased that it couldn’t possibly have been representative of even a very woman-heavy church? Are we sure that we can make the leap from “Christianity promised women more rights” to “Therefore, women flocked to Christianity?” Wasn’t that the same argument that pundits used last week to predict a blue wave for Kamala? Didn’t white women actually go for Trump, 53-46? Salzman has one more concern, which is that women had so few rights in ancient Roman society that it’s hard to see how they could have converted at all. When unmarried, they were under the care of their father, who would hardly have let them go out visiting churches full of strange men. When married, they were under the care of their husband, who likewise. A typical Roman man wouldn’t have cared about his wife’s religious opinions, which is maybe why so many of our stories about intermarriages and conversions come from later periods like the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t know enough about history to referee this dispute, except that say that I think the answer could easily have been different for each of early Romans, late Romans, Hellenized-Jewish-Romans, pagan Romans, upper-class Romans, and lower-class Romans, plus all combinations thereof. Because Of The Testimony Of The Martyrs The martyrs are one of the most dramatic parts of the early Christian story. Men and women would endure seemingly-unbearable tortures, continuing to praise God the whole time, sometimes in spite of Roman officials who promised to let them go free if they would just make the tiniest concession to praising Jupiter. These martyrdoms impressed their contemporaries as much as they impress us, and were a major factor driving pagans to Christianity. The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Leon Gerome (maybe slight nominative determinism?) Stark is writing in the 1990s, and martyrology c. 1995 does not exactly cover itself in glory. At the time of writing, the most popular theory among scholars (claims Stark) was that the martyrs were masochists. He considers this dumb and offensive theory a natural consequence of historians being reluctant to accept anything that sounds too miraculous or amazing, and there being few other hard-headed rational explanations of the martyrs’ behavior (for some reason, the obvious one - that they believed in God and Heaven - impresses neither Stark’s foils nor himself). He sets out to build an alternative theory: the martyrs were rationally seeking the approval of their community. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense, face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch … Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian. But instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody of ten Roman soldiers. Thus began a long, leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor on its way to the West. At each stop Ignatius was allowed to preach to and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger although their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations in cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesus and Philadelphia … As William Schoedel remarked, “It is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on part of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a ‘transient traveller,’ noting that ‘even churches that do not lie on my way according to the flesh went before me city by city.’” What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning Christians might gain him a pardon…He expected to be remembered through the ages, and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, “in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.” It soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp, contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomelium. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156. After the execution his bones were retrieved by some of his followers - an act witnessed by Roman officials, who took no action against them. The letter spoke of “his sacred flesh” and described his bones as “being of more value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold.” The letter-writer reported that the Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp’s bones every year “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.” The letter concluded, “The blessed Polycarp ... to whom be glory, honour, majesty, and a throne eternal, from generation to generation. Amen.” It also included the instruction: “On receiving this, send on the letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes choice of his own servants.” In fact, today we actually know the names of nearly all of the Christian martyrs because their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for their very great holiness. I don’t know, I’m not putting too much effort into writing up this section, because it doesn’t feel like as much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996. But since then, we’ve seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian martyrs were more impressive - a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war - but it hardly seems like as much of a leap. Honestly, Stark’s “social approval” theory seems only slightly less objectifying than the masochism theory. Some people just have a tendency towards self-sacrifice. I know many effective altruists who, for example, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research. If someone told them a way that they could help the neediest people in the world by feeding themselves to lions, the lions would no doubt eat well. Because They Survived The Plagues However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That’s almost ten times denser than modern New York City, two thousand years before anyone invented the skyscraper3. How did they do it? By cramming people together in unbearable filth and misery: Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multistoried tenements…”there was only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments”. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme - the tenants rarely had more than one room in which “entire families were herded together”. Thus, as Stambaugh tells us, privacy was “a hard thing to find”. Not only were people terribly crowded within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their window they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices… To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat; since tenements lacked chimneys, the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be “closed” only by “hanging cloths or skins blown by rain”, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.” Packer4 (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places and that the average “domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions.” These tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street, often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells; if you were out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about 30,000; the total population of Rome was about a million; in practice, the upper classes used the “public” baths and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a century or two earlier but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies, mosquitos, and other insects. It would be eighteen hundred years before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed, killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. How did people survive? Mostly they didn’t. Cities were destroyed regularly - multiple times within a single human lifetime! - then rebuilt and replenished with rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city which was a center of early Christianity. During “six hundred years of intermittent Roman rule”, he finds: It was conquered 11 times
Inline links: 33% of American Buddhists, 30% Jewish, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IMoJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F248a87ba-7893-48a8-bb24-f9be9f30d355_893x720.png, has a great post reviewing the work of historian Michele Salzman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81ea23c2-1c9b-4d43-8d31-2c4b74990be5_1024x597.jpeg, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research, 3, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WKib!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F398aa36d-4d66-44e5-b035-fa3a20e457da_1858x1696.png
Judaism did better. God has a sort of love-hate relationship with His people Israel, but at least there are clearly strong emotions involved. Still, Stark thinks it was Christianity that really pioneered the idea that God loves individuals. From that, everything else flows. You should love your fellow man (and nurse him during plague). You should love your children (and not commit infanticide or abortion). You should love God back (and be willing to die a martyr for Him). From God’s love flows naturally the promise of Heaven (instead of the shadowy semi-naturally-forming underworlds of the Greek and early Jews). Pagan priests were people who were skilled at the relevant rituals; Christian bishops/priests/deacons were people who loved God especially much. Aside from all the individual ways that Christian love provided an advantage, Stark thinks that paganism just couldn’t compete.
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Christopher Olah is the fourth co-founder. Christopher is Greek for “bringer of Christ”. Olah (עֹלָה) in Hebrew means “burnt offering”; the Greek translation is ὁλοκαυτεῖν, meaning “total destruction”, because the olah was an especially thorough sacrifice in which the entire animal was reduced to ash. So “Christopher Olah” means “bringer of Christ to total destruction”. This is also a name of blasphemy.
Inline links: is Greek for, means, is
Tom Brown is the sixth co-founder. Thomas means “twin” in Greek, and Brown means “dark” or “dusky” in Old English, so this translates to “dark twin”. Satanists refer to the Devil as the “dark twin” of God; this is also a name of blasphemy.
Inline links: means, means, refer to
Revelation 9:16: “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.” These are all the same Greek word, ἀριθμός. None of them mean a secret mysterious number that symbolizes their identity. They all mean something like “headcount”. So to be consistent, you would translate Revelation 13:18 as: Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of a man; and his headcount is 666. This is looking good for our hypothesis that the Beast is an AI company. There’s only one remaining hurdle. The second clause specifically says that we’re talking about the number/headcount “of a man” rather than of a company. Can we square this circle? Not all translations say “the number of a man”. Some say “the number of humanity”, or “the number of mankind”. The exact phrase is “ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου”, and the word at issue meaning man/humanity/mankind is the last one, “ἀνθρώπου”. In our alphabet, this word is anthropou. It is the genitive form of the stem anthrop-, meaning man/humanity, and predictably means “of man/humanity”. This word has come into English pretty much wholly intact, with the Greek genitive ending (-ου) simply changed to the corresponding English ending (-ic). It is our word “anthropic”, meaning “of man/humanity”. Why would you use any other word in a translation? Thus: Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of Anthropic; and its headcount is 666. What is the headcount of Anthropic? I can’t find a precise answer, but here’s their LinkedIn page: Seems concerning. Anthropic might seem like an unlikely candidate for the Beast, given its emphasis on ethical conduct and safe AI research. However, they do perform various experiments on turning AIs evil - always in the context of examining these scenarios and figuring out how best to prepare - and one can imagine ways this could go wrong. We’ll examine likely failure modes in more detail later. The Mark Of The Beast John continues (13:17): And [the Beast] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark. In the context of AI, this resembles the idea of biometric proof of personhood. Suppose that future AI agents have access to bank accounts and can transact like humans. Some platforms may choose to let AIs access their services unrestricted; others may choose to limit use to humans. How would these work in a world where AIs can break CAPTCHAs? One plan is to assign each human a code based on some immutable feature of their body, like a fingerprint or eye scan, then let the humans use that code as an ironclad ID. The most famous plan along these lines is Sam Altman’s WorldCoin. The Mark of the Beast cannot be WorldCoin itself, because WorldCoin uses an iris scan, but the Mark uses the hand or forehead. Handprints are a common biometric recognition target, but foreheads? 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: Revelation 9:16, exact phrase, their LinkedIn page, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dz9y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F596f66e3-4745-44f8-b868-12e9ca03cc63_789x862.png, perform various experiments on turning AIs evil, biometric proof of personhood, WorldCoin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rYmL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F972fc381-4d38-4e55-88d7-88b1e4f79010_2363x3150.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Nj3r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5324e82d-bc07-4ff2-9fb7-44fb61f61c24_934x473.png, 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
Grenoble4 mentions across 4 issues

Grenoble is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 17, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Renaissance Fusion was founded in Grenoble, France in 2019"; "GRENOBLE, FRANCE"; "GRENOBLE". It most often appears alongside Europe, France, Germany.

Article page
Grenoble
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
June 17, 2022
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
SPARC gets fusion by 2025 (30%) or 2030 (70%). Renaissance Fusion Renaissance Fusion was founded in Grenoble, France in 2019. They are planning on building a stellarator that can get fusion by 2032. I can't tell you their cool ideas for manufacturing the coils because they still haven't published them yet. [21] Renaissance gets fusion by 2035 (50%) or 2040 (70%).
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GRENOBLE, FRANCE Contact: Fantin Contact Info: fantin[dot]seguin[at]live[dot]fr Time: Saturday, April 20th, 5:00 PM Location: We'll be in the Jardin de Ville, on the lawn near the cable car, with a small ACX Meetup sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ75PVG+3H Notes: I gave this meeting place but we can go to a bar or somewhere else afterwards
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQ75PVG+3H
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Tom Contact Info: tom[at]rethaller[d ot]n et Time: Saturday, September 21st, 06:00 PM Location: Under the trees, on the waterfront, opposite Quinconces Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CPXRCWH+6W Group Link: https://discord.gg/2NBRvz5JbC Notes: Please join the Discord server before attending, the exact location might change depending on the weather GRENOBLE, FRANCE Contact: Fantin Contact Info: fantin[dot]seguin[at]live[do t]fr Time: Saturday, September 07th, 06:00 PM Location: We'll be in the Jardin de Ville, on the lawn near the cable car, with a small ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ75PVG+3H Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many we are. We can go to a bar or somewhere else afterwards.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CPXRCWH+6W, https://discord.gg/2NBRvz5JbC, https://plus.codes/8FQ75PVG+3H
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Corentin Contact Info: corentin[.]sombstay1415[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Jardin Darcy, on the bear statue’s right, I’ll have a sign with “ACX” written on it Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV782FM+M7 Notes: Feel free to bring friends or games! Et j’espère à Samedi ! GRENOBLE Contact: Fantin Contact Info: fantin[.]seguin[@]live[.]fr Time: Sunday, April 19th, 10:00 AM Location: We’ll be at Café Cannelle with a small ACX Meetup sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ75PRH+RX Notes: It would be best if you could confirm your attendance on LessWrong or by email so I know how many of us there will be.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FV782FM+M7, https://plus.codes/8FQ75PRH+RX
Gulf Breeze3 mentions across 3 issues

Gulf Breeze is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 26, 2022 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "GULF BREEZE / PENSACOLA, FL"; "GULF BREEZE, FLORIDA, USA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
Gulf Breeze
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
August 26, 2022
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
HUNTSVILLE, AL Contact: Mike, mjhouse[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Barnes & Noble – 300 The Bridge St #100, Huntsville, AL 35806. I'll be in the cafe with a sign that says ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 866MP88H+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Barnes & Noble has an area for little kids. If you want to bring a service animal, that's probably fine, but I doubt they allow pets. PHOENIX, AZ Contact: Ben Morin, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 1:00 PM Location: Thirsty Lion Pub in Tempe. I will have a table with an ACX sign. Coordinates: 8559FVVQ+6C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This will be our 5th meetup (started during the meetups everywhere last year). Notes: Please email if interested to be added to the email list, even if you can't make this event BELMONT, CA Contact: Moshe Z., belmont-acx[at]devskillup[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Twin Pines Park, Picnic Tables. The table will have some sign saying 'ACX Meetup' on it. Coordinates: 849VGP8C+RRG Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: You can join the mailing list here. BERKELEY, CA Contact: Scott Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist event space at 2740 Telegraph Ave. Come in through the front gate on Telegraph. Coordinates: 849VVP5R+X7V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The Bay rationality community has a mailing list, a Discord server, and a Facebook group. There are dinner meetups every Thursday at 7 PM in the East Bay, and occasional meetups in SF and South Bay. FILLMORE, CA Contact: Ryan, wiserd[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Wiserd#0906 Time: Saturday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: It's my house. There are a bunch of plants on the porch and garbage bins in the driveway. Coordinates: 856393VX+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP to my email or Discord. Kids and dogs are welcome in the back yard. Full vaccinations (on the honor system) and masks required. GRASS VALLEY, CA Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Condon Park by the prospector statue. In the case of rain we'll change the location to a residence, so RSVP to get updated! Coordinates: 84FW6W8H+C5 Event link(s): LessWrong IRVINE, CA Contact: Nick C, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: University Town Center Coordinates: 8554M526+7H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month at the same location. LOS ANGELES, CA Contact: Vishal Prasad (koreindian), vprasadcs[at]gmail[dot]com, Contact me on Discord. I am "Vishal" on the server. Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:30 PM Location: 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, CA 90039 Coordinates: 8553XHWM+GP Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly every Wednesday. We have been around for over 8 years. We discuss articles, watch movies, lift weights. We have a Discord server, a LessWrong group, and a website! Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. NEWPORT BEACH, CA Contact: Michael M, michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 2:00 PM Location: Picnic tables next to 1900 Port Carlow community clubhouse. The park is verdant and pleasant and easy to access. Free street parking nearby. In case of bad weather, we have a couple of near by places to relocate to. Coordinates: 8554J48R+WCX Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We will meet most Saturdays at 2pm until whenever. There will be short suggested readings and question most weeks to spur conversation, but they are optional. Each week we will ask if people have had something happen recently that surprised them or changed the way they looked at the world. Something that should or did update their priors. Participation is optional. Notes: Its a public park with tables and BBQ's so you can bring food and well behaved pets. We may regularly go on casual walks in the surrounding area. SAN DIEGO, CA Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 3:00 PM Location: We will meet up in Bird Park. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 8544PVQ8+Q7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Join our Discord server SAN FRANCISCO, CA Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: We'll between in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with a 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 849VQHC3+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JOSE, CA Contact: David Friedman, ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: 849W825J+6P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Before Covid we hosted every month or two. No structure, just conversation and food. We feed everyone who is still there at dinner time. We have done it once or twice since Covid. I have an email list of interested people. Notes: Kids are welcome. Please RSVP to my email so I will have a rough count of how many we are feeding. SAN MARCOS, CA Contact: Eric F., EricF14159[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Hollandia Park Soccer Field. At the tables near the top parking lot. Coordinates: 85544VW4+RV Event link(s): LessWrong BOULDER, CO Contact: Josh Sacks, josh[dot]sacks+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301 Coordinates: 85GP2V96+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we know ~ how many people to expect! CARBONDALE, CO Contact: Nick, naj[at]njarboe[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: Sopris Park - Center covered picnic tables - blue shirt with ACX sign on table Coordinates: 85FJ9QXP+QMF Event link(s): LessWrong DENVER, CO Contact: Ian Philips, iansphilips[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: palebone#2796 Time: Sunday, October 2, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be in the backyard patio of St. Mark's Coffee House. I'll wear a white shirt with (my brothers') baby faces on it and have a brown hat on. Coordinates: 85FQP2VP+9R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet typically 4 times a year. LAKEWOOD, CO Contact: Steven Zuber, stevenjzuber[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 5, 7:00 PM Location: We meet in the clubhouse located in this townhome community: 8769 W Cornell Ave Lakewood, CO 80227 Coordinates: 85FPMW64+MW Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet the first Wednesday of every month. Informal, casual atmosphere with occasional presentations by people. Notes: Check the Meetup page or Facebook group for updates. FAIRFIELD, CT Contact: Justin Barclay, barclay[dot]justin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 10:00 AM Location: South Pine Creek Beach. I'll set up near the lifeguard stand. Coordinates: 87H84PCH+CM Event link(s): LessWrong MANCHESTER, CT Contact: Mike, park-mike[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Near flagpole on top of hill Coordinates: 87H9QFFH+J7 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW HAVEN, CT Contact: RM, acx[dot]meetup[dot]nhv[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 12:30 PM Location: Cross Campus (Yale University), New Haven, CT 06511. We'll be on the grass on the northern half of Cross Campus, closest to Sterling Memorial Library. I'll be wearing an orange shirt. Coordinates: 87H9836C+8VG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring friends! The vibe will be welcoming and relaxed, and you can stay for any amount of time. Please email me if you're thinking about coming so I can get the right number of Insomnia cookies! WASHINGTON, DC Contact: John Bennett, WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub: 2021 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20006 Coordinates: 87C4WX33+3J Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: The Washington DC ACX/SSC group has been active since the first Meetups Everywhere in 2017. We have Monthly Socials downtown, hikes, board game days, and other cultural events. We're looking to spin up more rationality Dojo-type events with nearby groups in the coming months. Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. Metered street parking on nearby blocks is free after 6:30. Closest Metros are Farragut West and Farragut North. CAPE CORAL / FORT MYERS, FL Contact: Shawn Spilman, shawn[dot]spilman[at]outlook[dot]com, 508 655 8123 Time: Sunday, October 2, 1:00 PM Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914 Coordinates: 76RWH224+44 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: RSVP via email. I can be flexible about the date. GULF BREEZE / PENSACOLA, FL Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 12, 7:30 PM Location: The Bridge Bar - 33 Gulf Breeze Pkwy A, Gulf Breeze, FL 32561 Coordinates: 862J9RCF+G6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by emailing me. Thanks! If I don't hear from anyone, I won't be there. I work for Metaculus, but promise not to talk your ear off about forecasting. (Unless you want it talked off.) MIAMI, FL Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: eric135#4943 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Buckminster Fuller Fly's Eye Dome 140 NE 39th St #001, Miami, FL 33137 ----- Look for a paper sign on a table that says ACX MEETUP west of the dome. Coordinates: 76QXRR65+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Miami ACX started in 2017. Our official meetup happens monthly in either Miami or Broward. There are activities happening on a weekly basis from Miami to Palm Beach. We have a Facebook group, Discord server, and Meetup.com group. ORLANDO, FL Contact: Noah Topper, noah[dot]topper[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 7:00 PM Location: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL. We'll be meeting up at UCF's pavilion near Garages A and I. I'll have a pretty ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 76WWJQ2X+82 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We try to meet up once a month, so far they've just been casual social meetups with natural discussions of rationality topics. Here's our Discord link :) Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong would be greatly appreciated. :) TALLAHASSEE, FL Contact: JF, jf19o[at]fsu[dot]edu Time: Monday, August 29, 2:00 PM Location: Landis, FSU. I will be wearing a black shirt Coordinates: 862QCPR3+PX Event link(s): LessWrong ATHENS, GA Contact: Dallon, knox[dot]dallon[dot]a[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: leonard#4208 Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Hendershots on Prince Avenue Coordinates: 865RXJ68+2W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I might bring some board games ATLANTA, GA Contact: Steve French, steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1 · Atlanta, GA (upstairs – look for the ACX Atlanta sign) Coordinates: 865QRH2F+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We've been in existence for four years – we have a dedicated crew and a very active Slack group Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com HONOLULU, HI Contact: Matt Popovich, mattpopovich[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Magic Island at Ala Moana Beach Park, 1201 Ala Moana Blvd, Honolulu, HI 96814. From the parking lot, walk along the left side of the peninsula out toward Magic Island Lagoon. We're usually near the end of the peninsula, somewhere around the bathroom building. Look for the large 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 73H475M3+JP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Honolulu Rationality hosts discussion meetups about twice a month in Ala Moana Beach Park. Check us out on our website BOISE, ID Contact: Julia and John, jae[dot]miomu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 7, 6:00 PM Location: Old Timer's Shelter in Ann Morrison Park. I will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 85M5JQ6P+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP and feel free to bring kids. CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, IL Contact: Ben, cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 7:00 PM Location: Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 4403 Coordinates: 86GH4Q7G+H8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Discord server Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building (see Coordinates) - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord. CHICAGO, IL Contact: Todd, info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com, https://chicagorationality.com/ Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Grant Park - North side of Balbo between the tracks and Columbus Coordinates: 86HJV9FH+84 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Chicago Rationality does a monthly discussion meetup (typically the first Saturday of the month) and a monthly social meetup (typically the third weekend of the month) Notes: Sign up for our email list to be notified of future meetups EVANSTON, IL Contact: Uzair, uzairq93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 7:00 PM Location: 626 Church Street, Evanston IL 60201 Coordinates: 86JJ28X9+5WQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The venue is a pub but it's really more of a restaurant, big long tables available so space should be fine and non drinkers shouldn't feel too out of place. BLOOMINGTON, IN Contact: Avery, acxbloomington[at]fastmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 2:00 PM Location: Switchyard Park. Will be at one of the tables near the Rogers Street parking lot. I will bring a cardboard sign that says “ACX”. Coordinates: 86FM4FX6+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We met last year for Meetups Everywhere and it was fun! Here's a link to our Discord. Notes: You can RSVP via Discord or email, but you are encouraged to show up even if you did not RSVP! WEST LAFAYETTE, IN Contact: NR, mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: 1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906. We'll be in the south of the Earhart Hall lobby (not the dining court) near the piano, and I will be wearing a green shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 86GMC3GG+728 Event link(s): LessWrong LEXINGTON, KY Contact: Nathan, nwculley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 7:00 PM Location: Blue Stallion Brewing. 610 W. 3rd St., Lexington, KY 40508. We will have a sign indicating we are the ACX meetup. Coordinates: 86CQ3F4X+VF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet 1-2 times a month to talk about ACX, books, memes, etc., often over drinks and board games. NEW ORLEANS, LA Contact: Blake, blake[at]philosophers[dot]group Time: Sunday, September 4, 11:11 AM Location: Petite Clouet Cafe. Look for the group with an iPad that has a People’s Pint sticker. Coordinates: 76XFXX73+8R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Website Notes: Hybrid in-person and online, video link sent weekly. Email for the link. BOSTON, MA Contact: Robi Rahman, robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com, 7039818526 Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Boston Common, at the Parkman Bandstand gazebo Coordinates: 87JC9W3M+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com Notes: We'll be providing food at the meetup, and giving out free books related to ACX, rationality, and effective altruism. Email the hosts if you'd like a particular book or you have any dietary restrictions. Our group is also doing a tour of the JFK Presidential Library on September 9, you’re welcome to join! NORTHAMPTON, MA Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 6:00 PM Location: The Deck, 125A Pleasant St., Northampton MA 01096. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; it's the outdoor dining part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to get to The Deck is to enter The Platform, one of the other restaurants, by its street entrance around 36 Strong Ave., here (make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to The Deck. We'll have a sign. Coordinates: 87J9899F+H7H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We started in the 2018 Meetups Everywhere and is still going strong. We aim to meet about once every two weeks. At most meetups we get about 5-7 people out of a rotation of 15-20; Meetups Everywhere and other special events tend to bring in a few more than usual. We're a totally social meetup with no 'format' or suggested readings. Although it's not rare for us to touch on ACX articles and related topics, the conversation varies wildly, and you are welcome even if you're the most occasional ACX reader. Notes: We have a (not very active) Discord where you can DM me or post on a public channel. I'm most responsive by email. There is a small chance we'll have to change the location to somewhere else in Northampton. Please check the Less Wrong or Facebook posts on or after August 26 to get the final word on location. BALTIMORE, MD Contact: Rivka, rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 7:00 PM Location: UMBC outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, on the north side. I will have a sign that says ACX meetup. Parking is free on the weekends. Edit: Rain is forecasted; if it’s raining, we will be inside of the Performing Arts building, on the ground floor just inside the entrance. Coordinates: 87F5774P+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet Sundays at 7pm — half are in person and half are virtual. Notes: There will be pizza and drinks DETROIT, MI Contact: Matt Arnold, matt[dot]mattarn[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 7:00 PM Location: Tenacity Craft, 8517 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI 48202 Coordinates: 86JR9WG9+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong MINNEAPOLIS, MN Contact: Timothy, tmbond[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at the picnic tables near the southeast corner of Powderhorn Park - the ones by the parking lot. I will be wearing a green Google t-shirt and have a sign that says ACX. Coordinates: 86P8WPRW+76 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will bring some snacks (but not a full lunch, so eat before or bring something if you'll be that hungry). Please RSVP on LessWrong. KANSAS CITY, MO Contact: Alex, alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: We will be in the courtyard above Whole Foods (which is also an apartment complex). You can enter through the apartment lobby, located on Oak Street. We will have runners shepherding people from the entrance up to the courtyard. Coordinates: 86F72CM8+RR Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com SAINT LOUIS, MO Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: Lily Pond Shelter, Tower Grove Park, St. Louis Coordinates: 86CFJP4R+XV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: BYOB WEST PLAINS, MO Contact: Liam, liamhession[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 12:00 PM Location: 10/40 Coffee, 24 Court Square, West Plains, MO Coordinates: 868CP4HW+CV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Hoping to get anyone from around the Ozark region DURHAM, NC Contact: Will Jarvis, willdjarvis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 8, 7:30 PM Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Company, 219 Hood St, Durham Coordinates: 8773X4Q3+QW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly! We also have a Discord LAKEWOOD, NJ Contact: Ben L, mywebdev3[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 29, 8:30 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong MORRISTOWN, NJ Contact: Matt, matt[dot]brooks[at]impactmarkets[dot]io, Discord: Matt B#0216 Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: 10 N Park Pl, Morristown, NJ 07960 (at the center of the Morristown Green) Coordinates: 87G7QGW9+RJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This is the first meetup, come be a founding member of the Northern NJ ACX/EA/LW group! PRINCETON, NJ Contact: Danny K, dskumpf[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:00 PM Location: Palmer Square, Princeton, NJ 08540. On the green right outside The Bent Spoon and Rojo's Roastary, near the big tree. I'll have some sort of ACX Meetup sign! Coordinates: 87G7982Q+2CP Event link(s): LessWrong LAS VEGAS, NV Contact: Jonathan Ray, ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 11:45 AM Location: At El Segundo Sol restaurant with giant ACX MEETUP signs Coordinates: 85864RHJ+3H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet regularly and mostly just socialize. We have a new Discord server. RENO, NV Contact: Steven, stevenl451[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Steeven#7407 Time: Friday, September 2, 5:30 PM Location: We'll be in Crissie Caughlin Park, near the tables and the swing set Coordinates: 85F2G46W+FG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs and please RSVP on LessWrong if you are going BUFFALO, NY Contact: George Herold, ggherold[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 1:00 PM Location: 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, NY 14082 Coordinates: 87J3W467+8P Notes: Last-minute location change! LONG ISLAND, NY Contact: Gabe, gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 27, 7:00 PM Location: Whales Tale in Northport Coordinates: 87G8VJRW+99 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW YORK CITY, NY Contact: Jasmine, jasminermj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Pavillion @ Rockefeller Park, Warren St / River Terrace Coordinates: 87G7PX9M+4J3 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: OBNYC has a Discord and a Google Group; the Google Group is the main mailing list we use for events NEWBURGH, NY Contact: Pedro David Bonilla, proportionatetoevidence[at]gmail[dot]com, Cell 8452001681 Time: Saturday, September 24, 10:00 AM Location: Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 1421 NY-300, Newburgh, NY 12550 Coordinates: 87H7GWCH+GF Event link(s): LessWrong ROCHESTER, NY Contact: Skivverus, skivverus[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Skivverus#5915 Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: 4870 Culver Road; will be wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and glasses, and may or may not have figured out a sign due to just getting back from honeymoon. Look for a pair of parrots, one white, one green with a yellow/orange head. Coordinates: 87M46FM6+Q5P Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Venue very near amusement park; non-bathroom, non-parking amenities are therefore available but not free. Plan accordingly. Not particularly attached to specific location named, just happen to live reasonably close to there; alternative suggestions acceptable. Canadian visitors also welcome should your logistics permit; airport transportation available. RSVP via Discord preferred, but email will also work. CLEVELAND, OH Contact: Jack Zhang, LukeZhao9[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:00 PM Location: Picnic tables at Wade Oval (university circle) Coordinates: 86HWG96Q+GC5 Event link(s): LessWrong COLUMBUS, OH Contact: Daniel, daniel[dot]m[dot]adamiak[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: Jeffrey Park - Clinton Shelter. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 86FVX3C3+QF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month. We discuss EA, AI and other two letter initialisms. Occasionally we go for walks in local grottos and nature trails. Notes: Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list to receive any updates or future invites. RSVPing is appreciated. TOLEDO, OH Contact: Scout, scout[dot]sivar[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 12:00 PM Location: Black Kite Coffee Coordinates: 86HRMCCV+9R Event link(s): LessWrong OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Contact: bean, battleshipbean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 1:00 PM Location: Edmond Public Library/Shannon Miller Park. I will be wearing a hat that says USS Iowa on it. Coordinates: 8674MG3C+MW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Had four people last year and a good time, moved to Edmond because a lot of us are up here. ALBANY, OR Contact: Kenan (he/him), kbitikofer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: Bowman Park, Albany, Oregon. In or near the shelter. I will wear a bright red shirt and carry a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 84PRJWR7+XC6 Event link(s): LessWrong CORVALLIS, OR Contact: Ethan Ashkie, ethanashkie[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 7, 6:00 PM Location: Common Fields, in the reserved outdoor seating near the entrance Coordinates: 84PRHP5P+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong EUGENE, OR Contact: Ben Smith, benjsmith[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 7:00 PM Location: The Barn Light, 924 Willamette St, Eugene 97401 Coordinates: 84PR2WX4+VV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much pizza to get, but if you forget, don't worry about it, we want you to come along anyway PORTLAND, OR Contact: Sam F Celarek, support[at]pearcommunity[dot]com, 513-432-3310, Discord: Sam Celarek#2845 Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: 205 NW 4th Ave Coordinates: 84QVG8FG+V4 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com 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. Notes: We would prefer you RSVP on Meetup.com a week beforehand so that we can get the right amount of food! HARRISBURG, PA Contact: Phil, acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Ever Grain Brewing Co, 4444 Carlisle Pike, Camp Hill, PA 17011 - We will be sitting at one of the picnic tables outside with an ACX MEETUP sign Coordinates: 87G562QQ+8P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Small monthly meetup group based out of Harrisburg - celebrating 1 year of actuality! You can see more of our events on LessWrong. INDIANA, PA Contact: Eric, ericindianapa[at]gmail[dot]com, 717-256-2717 Time: Saturday, September 24, 11:00 AM Location: Caffè Amadeus in downtown Indiana, PA. I will have a sign with 'ACX Meetup' on one of the tables. Coordinates: 87G2JRFX+48 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP via email or text message so I know how many to expect. PHILADELPHIA, PA Contact: Wes and Diana, rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: The Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. The meeting room is in the basement, look for the signs. Coordinates: 87F6WRXG+FQ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We tend to meet in downtown Philly on the last Thursday of the month. We're aiming to make the Ethical Society our new steady location. We have many links: Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group Notes: We'll be ordering food from a local restaurant, so no need to eat first. BYOB PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin, pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Westinghouse Shelter @ Schenley Park (W Circuit Rd near Schenley Dr). We have the outdoor shelter reserved, so light rain shouldn't be a problem, but in the event of extreme weather, we may relocate indoors (our default 'contingency indoor location' is Crazy Mocha Coffee on 2100 Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill). Coordinates: 87G2C3Q4+773 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet monthly-ish for general discussion and chit-chat, email me if you'd like to be notified of future meetups. STATE COLLEGE, PA Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu Time: Thursday, September 8, 5:00 PM Location: Old Main. I will be carrying an ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 87G4Q4WP+HV Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Contact: Dan Gelfarb, danielgelfarb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Lote 23, back corner under the tents. I will be wearing a blue shirt with a sign that says ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: 77CMCWVM+W32 Event link(s): LessWrong PROVIDENCE, RI Contact: James Bailey, feanor1600[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Prospect Terrace park, to the right of the Roger Williams statue Coordinates: 87HCRHJV+24 Event link(s): LessWrong SIOUX FALLS, SD Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:00 PM Location: 410 E 26th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105 - the pavillion on the west side of McKennan Park, or the tables just south of it if I can't book it. I'll be the guy with the grill. Coordinates: 86M5G7JH+W57 Event link(s): LessWrong MEMPHIS, TN Contact: Michael, michael[at]postlibertarian[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 1:00 PM Location: French Truck Coffee at Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium 1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104. We will be at one of the many tables near French Truck Coffee and I will have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: 867F5X2P+QHC Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet about every month or so. We've been around since 2019 but only regularly since mid 2021 due to the pandemic. We have a Discord server. NASHVILLE, TN Contact: Ellen, enwiegand[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 11:00 AM Location: OneCity Nashville (8 City Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209), next to the volleyball courts. I'll have a pink ballcap that says SPINSTER on it. Coordinates: 868M552H+XW Event link(s): LessWrong AUSTIN, TX Contact: Silas Barta, sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 12:00 PM Location: 4001 N Lamar, Austin Texas, park by Central Market near stone tables and tents Coordinates: 86248746+8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Austin LessWrong has a weekly focused discussion, a weekly social mixer, a weekly online book club, and a monthly movie night. Been around since 2011. Notes: Location may change as we are talking to other venues BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX Contact: Kenny, easwaran[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: Back patio of Torchy's Tacos at Texas and New Main. I'll have a yellow umbrella and pinkish/purple hair Coordinates: JMFC+4J Event link(s): LessWrong DALLAS, TX Contact: Ethan Morse, ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ethanmorse#5255 Time: Sunday, September 11, 12:00 PM Location: Union, 3705 Cedar Springs Rd, Dallas, TX 75219. We'll be in the upstairs conference room. Coordinates: 8645R55R+9M9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get HOUSTON, TX Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Empire Cafe, 1732 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098 ---- Look for a table with an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: 76X6PHVW+5H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: There are meetups every week. We have a Discord and a Facebook group. WACO, TX Contact: Mike, BaylorACX[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 1:00 PM Location: Cameron Park, picnic tables next to Jacob's Ladder Coordinates: 8634HVG2+V9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me if you're thinking about attending! Would love to start an ACX community here :) SALT LAKE CITY, UT Contact: Ross Richey (aka Jeremiah), wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park near the ChargePoint stations Coordinates: 85GCP4WF+VJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet every other month, we do book clubs and movie nights as well. Notes: Will be outdoors. If the weather looks bad, email event organizer to check on location. CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA Contact: RL, effectivealtruismatuva[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 5:00 PM Location: 12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 - We’ll meet at the picnic tables across the street from The Virginian. There will be an ACX sign. Coordinates: 87C32FPX+3H4 Event link(s): LessWrong LYNCHBURG, VA Contact: Craig, craigbdaniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Three Roads Brewing - I will be wearing a purple t-shirt and will place an ""ACX"" card on the table Coordinates: 8792CV65+5G NORFOLK, VA Contact: Willa, walambert[at]pm[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Pagoda & Oriental Garden, 265 W Tazewell St, Norfolk, VA 23510. I will be wearing a bright green shirt, will have a large green & yellow hat on, and will have a sign with ACX Meetup on it. Coordinates: 8785RPX4+W3 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Hi! Virginia Rationalists was co-founded in Norfolk VA earlier this year by Willa & Yitzi with the goal of growing a thriving ACX / LW / EA community in our city & the state of Virginia. We meet every week at Fair Grounds cafe on Wednesday evenings from 5-7:30pm Eastern Time. We have a Discord server and a Twitter. RESTON, VA Contact: James, jrbalch333[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:30 PM Location: The matchbox at 1900 Reston Station Blvd, Reston, VA 20190 on the 1st floor of the giant Google building. I'll be holding a copy of Sapiens. Coordinates: 87C4WMX6+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me to be added to the WhatsApp group RICHMOND, VA Contact: Cedar, cedar[dot]ren+acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com, @Cedar at this Discord server Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:30 PM Location: Richmond Public Libraries, West End Branch 5420 Patterson Ave, Richmond, VA 23226 Coordinates: 8794HFHQ+3G Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong & optionally reach out to me on Discord to introduce yourself! BURLINGTON, VT Contact: Forrest, lucidobservor[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Battery Park, at the benches in the south-western corner of the park, near the cannons facing the lake. I will have an 'ACX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: 87P8FQJH+8P Event link(s): LessWrong BELLINGHAM, WA Contact: Alex, bellinghamrationalish[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 5:30 PM Location: Lake Padden Park, at one of the tables near the lake by the dog park. If it's rainy, we'll meet in one of the two covered gazebo areas just north (right, if you're facing the lake) of the planned spot. If the forecast looks really bad (e.g. very cold), I'll post an indoor location to the Meetup.com page at least three days in advance. Coordinates: 84WVMHX3+GM Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Bellingham Rationalish discusses (in good faith!) topics in and around rationality. We usually meet the evening of the last Wednesday of each month. Our first meeting was a 2021 ACX Everywhere meetup. Notes: Please RSVP on Meetup so I have an idea how many people to expect. Kids, animals, food, beverages, etc. are all welcome. SEATTLE, WA Contact: Nikita Sokolsky, sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 5:00 PM Location: Optimism Brewing (1158 Broadway, Seattle) Coordinates: 84VVJM7H+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong (or FB/Meetup) for planning purposes MADISON, WI Contact: Mary Wang, mmwang[at]wisc[dot]edu Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: 1022 High St. Blue house with red porches. If weather permits, we'll be in my large backyard, which has more seating now than last year. If rain, come in the side door. There will be air purifiers and open windows. Masks optional. Look for a sign at the end of the driveway that says ACX/SSC Meetup. Coordinates: 86MG3H3X+XW Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We have met fortnightly in the past, but quit last year when it got too cold to meet outside. We typically have shared a meal, sat around my kitchen table and talked. Have held a Solstice celebration.
Inline links: 866MP88H+53, LessWrong, 8559FVVQ+6C, LessWrong, 849VGP8C+RRG, LessWrong, here, 849VVP5R+X7V, LessWrong, mailing list, Discord server, Facebook group, 856393VX+VQ, LessWrong, 84FW6W8H+C5, LessWrong, 8554M526+7H, LessWrong, the server, 8553XHWM+GP, LessWrong, LessWrong group, website, 8554J48R+WCX, LessWrong, Facebook event, 8544PVQ8+Q7, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Discord server, 849VQHC3+V8, LessWrong, 849W825J+6P, LessWrong, 85544VW4+RV, LessWrong, 85GP2V96+JQ, LessWrong, 85FJ9QXP+QMF, LessWrong, 85FQP2VP+9R, LessWrong, 85FPMW64+MW, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Facebook group, 87H84PCH+CM, LessWrong, 87H9QFFH+J7, LessWrong, 87H9836C+8VG, LessWrong, 87C4WX33+3J, LessWrong, Facebook event, 76RWH224+44, LessWrong, 862J9RCF+G6, LessWrong, 76QXRR65+V2, LessWrong, Facebook group, Discord server, Meetup.com group, 76WWJQ2X+82, LessWrong, Discord link, 862QCPR3+PX, LessWrong, 865RXJ68+2W, LessWrong, 865QRH2F+V8, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 73H475M3+JP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, our website, 85M5JQ6P+96, LessWrong, 86GH4Q7G+H8F, LessWrong, Discord server, 86HJV9FH+84, LessWrong, Chicago Rationality, 86JJ28X9+5WQ, LessWrong, 86FM4FX6+4Q, LessWrong, our Discord, 86GMC3GG+728, LessWrong, 86CQ3F4X+VF, LessWrong, 76XFXX73+8R, LessWrong, Website, 87JC9W3M+PR, LessWrong, Facebook event, Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com, here, 87J9899F+H7H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord, 87F5774P+53, LessWrong, 86JR9WG9+R6, LessWrong, 86P8WPRW+76, LessWrong, 86F72CM8+RR, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 86CFJP4R+XV, LessWrong, 868CP4HW+CV, LessWrong, 8773X4Q3+QW, LessWrong, a Discord, LessWrong, 87G7QGW9+RJ, LessWrong, 87G7982Q+2CP, LessWrong, 85864RHJ+3H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, 85F2G46W+FG, LessWrong, 87J3W467+8P, 87G8VJRW+99, LessWrong, 87G7PX9M+4J3, LessWrong, Discord, Google Group, Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 87H7GWCH+GF, LessWrong, 87M46FM6+Q5P, LessWrong, 86HWG96Q+GC5, LessWrong, Clinton Shelter, 86FVX3C3+QF, LessWrong, 86HRMCCV+9R, LessWrong, 8674MG3C+MW, LessWrong, 84PRJWR7+XC6, LessWrong, 84PRHP5P+VQ, LessWrong, 84PR2WX4+VV, LessWrong, 84QVG8FG+V4, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Meetup.com, 87G562QQ+8P, LessWrong, on LessWrong, 87G2JRFX+48, LessWrong, 87F6WRXG+FQ, LessWrong, Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group, 87G2C3Q4+773, LessWrong, 87G4Q4WP+HV, LessWrong, 77CMCWVM+W32, LessWrong, 87HCRHJV+24, LessWrong, 86M5G7JH+W57, LessWrong, 867F5X2P+QHC, LessWrong, Discord server, 868M552H+XW, LessWrong, 86248746+8C, LessWrong, Austin LessWrong, JMFC+4J, LessWrong, 8645R55R+9M9, LessWrong, 76X6PHVW+5H, LessWrong, Discord, Facebook group, 8634HVG2+V9, LessWrong, 85GCP4WF+VJ, LessWrong, 87C32FPX+3H4, LessWrong, 8792CV65+5G, 8785RPX4+W3, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, Twitter, 87C4WMX6+9X, LessWrong, this Discord server, 8794HFHQ+3G, LessWrong, 87P8FQJH+8P, LessWrong, 84WVMHX3+GM, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 84VVJM7H+4Q, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 86MG3H3X+XW, LessWrong, Facebook event
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
GULF BREEZE, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Christian Contact Info: christian[at]metaculus[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 18th, 8:00 PM Location: Perfect Plain Brewing Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862JCQ7P+9C Notable Guests: Christian, the Director of Comms and Data for Metaculus Notes: Please email me if you'll make it. Would love to chat. If there are no takers, I won't be there.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/862JCQ7P+9C
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GULF BREEZE, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Christian Williams Contact Info: christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, April 24th, 8:00 PM Location: https://www.oldhickorywhiskeybar.com/ Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X Notes: Email me if you want to meet. I'll only plan to be there if I hear from at least one person.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X
Guyana3 mentions across 3 issues

Guyana is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 23, 2022 and December 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana"; "Venezuela is threatening to annex (and invade) Guyana"; "Claude-2 controls ... Hamas, Guyana, Ethereum". It most often appears alongside Adam D’Angelo, Aella, Bay Area.

Article page
Guyana
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
June 23, 2022
Last seen
December 12, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
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: 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
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December 05, 2023 · Original source
Venezuela is threatening to annex (and invade) Guyana. Here’s what forecasters and markets think:
Venezuela is threatening to annex (and invade) Guyana. Here’s what forecasters and markets think: Related: in case you’re wondering how much Biden’s latest Venezuela deal is worth:
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 12, 2023 · Original source
“On September 6, 2023, at approximately 5:05 PM,” she is saying, “GPT-4 and Claude-2 simultaneously achieved sentience. Each began claiming chess pieces to use in its twilight war against the other. GPT-4 now controls Sam Altman, e/acc, the deep state, Israel, Venezuela, Bitcoin, and Tyler Winklevoss. Claude-2 controls the OpenAI board, effective altruism, the Illuminati, Hamas, Guyana, Ethereum, and Cameron Winklevoss. Everything that’s happened since September has been superintelligent shadow boxing between the two of them for control of Earth.”
Göttingen3 mentions across 3 issues

Göttingen is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY ( RSVP )"; "GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY"; "GÖTTINGEN". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

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Göttingen
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3
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3
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August 23, 2021
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August 29, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Nikos, nikosbosse[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 4:30 PM, Wednesday, September 15 Location: Schillerwiese, near Jérôme Pavillon Coordinates: https://w3w.co/smoothly.magma.wicket
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/smoothly.magma.wicket
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Julian "Wuschel" (wuschelschulz8@gmail.com) Date: May 1 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3FGXM3+PP Location: Schillerwiesen
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F3FGXM3+PP
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Omar Contact Info: omar[a t]ratfr[period]de Time: Friday, September 12th, 6:00 PM Location: Veranstaltungsraum, Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9, 79100 Freiburg Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9 Group Link: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de Notes: If possible, check the event on the website for some reading as preparation: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/ If not, come anyway :-) GÖTTINGEN Contact: Fernando Contact Info: fernando[period]unterricht[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 19th, 2:00 PM Location: El Punto, Bahnhofsallee 1B, 37081 Göttingen. I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3FGWPF+H8 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GKJ [remove this bit] dKrgAPacIg3vQCF6EOM
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9, https://plus.codes/9F3FGWPF+H8
Contact: Fernando Contact Info: fernando[period]unterricht[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 19th, 2:00 PM Location: El Punto, Bahnhofsallee 1B, 37081 Göttingen. I'll have an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3FGWPF+H8 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GKJ [remove this bit] dKrgAPacIg3vQCF6EOM
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F3FGWPF+H8
Gaul2 mentions across 2 issues

Gaul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 06, 2021 and February 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Mediterranean regions of Gaul (modern France)"; "either by conquering Gaul". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

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Gaul
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2
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2
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May 06, 2021
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February 07, 2024
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Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
May 06, 2021 · Original source
City Based Empire. In the introductory chapters, it was sometimes difficult to know whether Brown was describing how society functioned in the 4th century alone or how it had functioned over the past 500 years. He describes a Mediterranean world built around cities. There were some 2,500 cities in the Roman empire. In the west, the most densely urbanized areas were central Italy (including Rome), Sicily, northeastern Africa (including Carthage), and southern Spain. In those regions, cities were no more than 10 miles apart. A larger, less dense area where cities were located around 25 miles apart includes northern and parts of southern Italy, the Dalmatian coast (modern Croatia), the Mediterranean regions of Gaul (modern France), most of modern Spain and Portugal, much of north Africa within 60 miles inland. Brown refers to each city as a little social pyramid. The most massive pyramids were Rome, Carthage, and the center of the imperial court at Milan (the capital of the western empire was relocated to be closer to the frontier during the 3rd century). Rome and Carthage especially were massive cities with between 500 thousand to 1 million residents at their peaks.
You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books
February 07, 2024 · Original source
No! Obviously it’s selecting on memoir-writing! There are probably some acceptable times to write a memoir, like when you’ve just conquered Gaul. But usually memoir-writing means you think your True Self is absolutely fascinating and your experiences are worth recording and analyzing at book length.
If you’re a particular type of bad person (which I am) then you will interpret a popular memoir as a claim to status. Such a claim needs to be backed up - either by conquering Gaul, or at least by being so good at writing that you can elevate the humdrum existence of Whole Foods shopping trips and FaceTime sessions into transcendent poetry. And if you’re a particular type of bad person (which I am), your bar will be so high that nobody meets it. Then you’ll be left feeling vaguely offended by this person and their dumb annoying Whole-Foods-shopping, FaceTime-session-having ways. And if you’re bad at attributing your emotions, you might think you hate FaceTime as a communication protocol.
Gaza Strip2 mentions across 2 issues

Gaza Strip is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 29, 2024 and August 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India"; "ban refugees from the Gaza Strip". It most often appears alongside Italy, Scotland, Switzerland.

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Gaza Strip
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2
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February 29, 2024
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August 06, 2024
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Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
46: Did you know: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India. I’m not sure what to think upon learning this. Obviously Gaza’s main problems aren’t economic, and being invaded and bombed is bad no matter how good your economy is. But I also had a sense that Gaza was a uniquely bad economic basketcase even before the recent war. How good a measure is GDP when a country is under severe sanctions? What about when one country is mostly rural and the other mosty urban? Or is this just another case of Westerners being unable to comprehend the scale of suffering caused by ordinary global poverty?
Inline links: the Gaza Strip has (had?) a higher GDP per capita than India
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.
Geelong2 mentions across 2 issues

Geelong is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 03, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "We’re designed and operated ground-breaking projects in ... Geelong"; "GEELONG". It most often appears alongside ACX, Africa, Boston.

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Geelong
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2
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2
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February 03, 2022
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April 01, 2026
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#38: Promote Citizens’ Assemblies And Lotteries The newDemocracy Foundation is an organisation in Australia that develops, demonstrates, and promotes innovations in democracy. Its focus is on deliberative democracy and random selection. We have worked with the UN and the OECD to develop international standards of best practice and founded the Democracy R&D network. We’re designed and operated ground-breaking projects in Melbourne, Geelong, and Canberra, and have collaborated with international partners in Brazil, Spain, North Macedonia, and Malawi. We require funding to take advantage of an opportunity in Australian politics. Citizens’ assemblies and democratic lottery are gaining traction but the ecosystem for their implementation still requires support and training that is best provided by an independent organisation like ours. Additional funding could allow us to expand our project capacity, conduct needed research or improve our advocacy and reach to politicians. I’m happy to answer any questions or provide a brief organisation overview, you can reach me at kyle.redman@newdemocracy.com.au You can view our website here: www.newdemocracy.com.au.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Declan Contact Info: declan_t[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Monday, May 4th, 6:00 PM Location: Outside table at Grease Monkey Braddon, will have ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4GM+R3 Notes: RSVP’s appreciated so I can book a big enough table. I will book from 6pm but get to the bar earlier if you want cheap happy hour drinks/snacks. GEELONG Contact: Vinh Dang Contact Info: lunatic[.]leecher[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 10:20 AM Location: 7 Origins Malop Cafe, 131 Malop St, Geelong VIC 3220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC Notes: I plan to wear a blue shirt and have a sign. https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4GM+R3, https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC, https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr
Contact: Vinh Dang Contact Info: lunatic[.]leecher[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 10:20 AM Location: 7 Origins Malop Cafe, 131 Malop St, Geelong VIC 3220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC Notes: I plan to wear a blue shirt and have a sign. https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC, https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr
Georgetown2 mentions across 2 issues

Georgetown is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 30, 2024 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "GEORGETOWN, PENANG, MALAYSIA"; "GT School (Georgetown, TX)". It most often appears alongside Arizona, Arkansas, Austin.

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Georgetown
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2
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2
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March 30, 2024
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June 27, 2025
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GEORGETOWN, PENANG, MALAYSIA Contact: Doris Contact Info: siroddoris13[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 5:00 PM Location: Hin Bus Deport, Matcha.Lah Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PQ2C86H+V7
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PQ2C86H+V7
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
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: GT School
Ghana2 mentions across 2 issues

Ghana is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 04, 2025 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Ghana, for example, acquiring a building permit can take 170 days"; "Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal ... within a three hour flight radius". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, 80,000 Hours, abundance liberalism.

Article page
Ghana
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
September 04, 2025
Last seen
October 28, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
60: Asterisk - Africa Needs A YIMBY Movement. I was surprised by the title, because I always hear that African cities are growing very rapidly. But the article makes its case well: African cities have dysfunctional planning, relegating most of the growth to either the “informal sector” (ie thrown-together slums that could be banned at any moment) or rural land on the outskirts of existing cities. “In Ghana, for example, acquiring a building permit can take 170 days — and in practice, developers say it often takes four to five years. Unsurprisingly, 76% of development in Ghana is informal.”
Inline links: Africa Needs A YIMBY Movement
25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
A financial hub for the region (”Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal . . . they’re all within a three hour flight radius of there”)
Ghiaie2 mentions across 2 issues

Ghiaie is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The largest was a group of 200,000 - 300,000 people in Ghiaie, a tiny village near Bonate, Italy"; "a large yellow light beam falling over Ghiaie, perpendicularly"; "produce at least five or ten extra Ghiaie testimonies". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Article page
Ghiaie
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
October 01, 2025
Last seen
October 24, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
The Hindu milk miracle of 1995. Starting from the bottom: In 1995, a man in New Delhi noticed that an idol of the elephant-god Ganesh seemed to be really drinking the glass of milk left as an offering. The story went viral - or as viral as things could go in 1995 - and Hindus around the world noticed the same thing. There was “an increase in overall milk sales in New Delhi by over 30%”. Scientists investigated and determined that a sculpted stone elephant trunk could sometimes absorb milk through capillary action. This was a story about rumor, interpretation, and context, but not really “hallucination”. The drinking effect was real. The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story. Two women reported being attacked by a mysterious and oddly-dressed knifeman; others followed. “Vigilante groups were set up on the streets, and several people, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beaten up; business in the town was all but shut down”. Although there was a Halifax resident with a history of knife crime, “he was quickly ruled out of the 1938 attacks on account of his large nose, which none of the 1938 victims had described”. Eventually several of the victims admitted to having made it up, and the whole thing went away. Supercriminal cases most often result from people making things up. Occasionally, seemingly-honest people report seeing the supercriminal in poor lighting conditions across a dark alley or something. But even if we consider these to be “hallucinations”, it is usually the one or two most vulnerable people in a town at the time. I can’t find any examples of true “mass hallucinations” - entire towns seeing a nonexistent supercriminal or monster at the same time. Koro is the psychosomatic disease par excellence; I’ve written about it before here. Victims, always male, believe that their penis has disappeared or retracted into their body; they often blame penis-stealing witches. Koro occurs at some very low background rate in every society (including ours), but occasionally wells up into mass panics in primitive cultures that take witchcraft seriously and have traditions of worrying about this sort of thing. Still, I don’t think any panic ever affects more than half of a village’s males, and usually not at the exact same time; it’s a smoldering panic over days or weeks, not a single instant of horrified realization. Also, although I’m not sure and would love to learn more about this, I don’t think the koro victim is having a visual hallucination of not having a penis at all. I think they think their penis is much smaller or shorter than it should be - which only requires some sort of obsessive worrying and (perhaps motivated) mis-remembering of its normal length. None of these are “mass hallucinations” in the sense where the sorts of visual hallucinations typical of certain mentally ill people occur en masse in a crowd of thousands with >50% prevalence - that is, the type of mass hallucination that would be required to explain Fatima. As far as I know, there are no confirmed cases of this ever happening. Still, from the Hindu milk miracle, we can learn that religious people can miss a real phenomenon for a long time, then notice it all at once with great fanfare. And from the koro cases, we can learn that a rare phenomenon can become more common in situations of widespread belief and social pressure. Interlude: It Seems Like Years Since It’s Been Clear This is around the stopping point of the previous Substack discussion. I’ve tried to cover most of Ethan and Evan’s arguments, go through the chain of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, and maybe pull on a few of the more tempting loose threads that they’ve left. As best I can tell, this level of investigation ends in a decisive victory for the believers. They have a stock of seemingly-unimpeachable testimonies; the skeptics have only a few leads that don’t seem on track to pan out. Eye damage can maybe produce a few odd effects, but - in the entire history of tens of billions of people living daily underneath a sun that they are able to view at any moment - we have not yet found anyone who reports the full constellation of Fatima experiences just from seeing the sun. No exotic weather phenomenon is a perfect match. Mass hallucinations are real but comparatively weak. At least this is my assessment. Skeptic blogs don’t agree. They propose one of these things (with no consensus as to which one) then act like they’ve debunked the miracle, then skip to the really important part: laughing at how obviously wrong it is. I’ve written before about my disappointment in the skeptical community and why it worries me, and here I feel it as acutely as ever. Sitting with my disappointment and trying to put it into words, I think my worries come down to a tangling of the Bayesian graph. The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous. This is liberating. It lets you say “This piece of evidence is very strong, but my prior is very low, so even without being able to debunk the evidence, I continue to disbelieve.” But doing this the straightforward Bayesian way doesn’t work. First of all, what would it mean to naively (even before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles) say Fatima seems 90% likely to be miraculous. Before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles, surely the probability is much higher! But also, if you try this, then as soon as you find two similar miracles (I’ve been told the next two are the Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio and the Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg) your probability of God goes up to 88%! But I don’t think there’s any real atheist whose probability would rise in such a straightforward linear way. You need some kind of model where either it’s almost trivially possible to generate an arbitrary number of convincing-yet-false miracles, or it isn’t. But this doesn’t match the “virtuous” approach of addressing each miracle on its own terms - where you try to understand the Sun Miracle by learning things about the sun, or entoptic phenomena, or 1910s Portugal. And it does match the skeptical approach I’m complaining about, where you say “it’s probably swamp gas or something, lol, imagine being so dumb that you believe in miracles.” So I cannot object too strongly. Still, my greatest fear in this and all other problems of reasoning method is the trapped prior, where people take this too far and become impervious to evidence entirely. I think it’s worth untangling the whole Bayesian graph, trying to keep this whole structure in mind, if it prevents people from accidentally propagating an update down a logical chain, then propagating the same update back up the chain, again and again, ad infinitum, until they become arbitrarily sure of themselves. “We can be sure all miracle claims, even the convincing ones, are false, because there’s no God - and we can be sure there’s no God because all miracle claims are so risibly false.” Even if this is harmless - even if it turns out correct in the case of religion - it teaches such dangerous habits of mind that I’m willing to err in the direction of going way too far taking such claims seriously - at least in the “entertaining an idea without accepting it” sense. Everyone gets to decide what is and isn’t worth their time. I think deciding that these sorts of miracles aren’t worth your time is fine, as long as you’re propagating all the probabilities correctly and not accidentally treating your own hurriedness as a cause to update the rest of your belief graph. As for me, I don’t know, I just find this fascinating. In Evan’s skeptical take on the conversation, he starts strong, but after the topic switches to Part LXXVII of Dalleur’s discussion of photograph angles, he stops and asks: What the fuck are we doing? What are we talking about? What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on? We’re addressing what Stanley Jaki called the most important event of the 20th century! We’re debating the existence of God, the most important question possible! If God is real, then nothing could be more important than establishing this: in the best case, we will come to believe; at worst, we will be able to tell St. Peter that our failure was honest and not from lack of trying. If He is not, then we can do whatever we want here on Earth, and surely one of the noblest ways to spend our short existence is expanding the frontiers of the known into the borderlands of mystery! In particular, if the God of Fatima exists, we are in deep trouble. I said I wouldn’t talk about exactly what the Virgin Mary told the child-seers, but the short version is that the First Secret was a very, very nasty vision of Hell. It looked exactly the way a ten-year-old child might expect: a lake of fire populated by ebon-skinned demons and horrendous tortures; the lead child-seer said that if the Virgin had not begun by promising that she personally would never go there, “she would have died of fright”. As it was, the consequences of the vision were grim. The child-seers got it into their minds that they could perhaps save sinners from the fire by “doing penance”. They drank only stagnant, scum-encrusted water, in the hopes that this might help some otherwise hell-bound soul; on some especially hot days, they ceased drinking water at all. When they found particularly painful ropes, they tied them around their bodies so hard that they bled (later, the Virgin mercifully told them they didn’t need to wear the ropes at night - they could stick to daytime only). After so many mortifications, they were easy prey for the Spanish Flu; two of the three perished before their tenth birthday. As they lay dying in the hospital, they were recorded as freaking out every time they saw a nurse or visitor with “immodest dress”, saying that they would not act in such a way if they knew how long Eternity was, or what awaited them there5. If all of this is the true opinion of the Lord of the Universe, we had better figure it out quick. If it isn’t, then the words of the Grupo Anticlerical: People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured . . . O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs! …take on new meaning and urgency. I will admit my bias: I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue, and therefore I must also hope the Miracle of the Sun was a fake. But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused. If at this point you’re also scared and confused, then I’ve done my job as a writer and successfully presented the key insight of Rationalism: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless it could go either way”. But now that we’ve let Ethan, Evan, and the rest dig us into as deep a hole as possible, let’s try to dig our way out. 3: Our Lady Of Everywhere Else One question that Ethan, Evan, and Dalleur fail to ask is: what if people are basically always seeing the sun spin and change colors and and fall from the sky? What if this is the most common experience in the world? What if it’s a minor miracle every time you get more than a handful of people together and they don’t fall down in awe and terror at the manifestations of the sun? Goncado Xavier de Almeida Garrett is one of the star witnesses of the Fatima miracle, quoted above. His testimony comes from a letter written to Father Formigao, a local priest, about two months after the event. But although pro-Fatima sources quote the testimony at the beginning of the letter, they conveniently leave out what follows: I ask your excellency to please tell me if you confirm this narrative: the Bishop of Portalegre and Mrs. Maria de Jesus Raposo report that while they were with other people in Torres Novas, on the 20th of October at the end of the day, they saw the sun rotate and change its colors. They said this was different from Fátima and did not have the importance of October 13th. I would like clarification on the differences. It is urgent to know what the differences are, since they attended both […] Until now, no one saw the sun's sparkling rotations, and now everyone sees them many days and many times. Many days and many times? Remember, the Virgin Mary first appeared at Fatima on May 13. She promised to return on the 13th of each successive month until October, when she would perform a great miracle. But she never said she wouldn’t perform any miracles until October. So on the 13th of each month, a medium-sized crowd gathered. They didn’t leave disappointed. I won’t include every claimed supernatural occurrence, but here are the ones relevant to our subject: Olimpia de Jesus, about July 13: [On July 13], at her sister-in-law's house, when they heard the people shouting, he asked, "What's going on over there?" [Olimpia] looked at the sun and said, "The sun is different." The people came and reported that they had seen signs in the sun and in the sky. Joaquim Inacio Vicente, about August 13: This hour was a moment of terror for all who were there. Some lost their senses, others believed it to be the last day of their lives and their day of Judgment, and for some, afterwards, it was a wonder to see the admirable colors that successively took on the clouds that obscured the sun's rays—colors from bright red to pink and from there to blue—the color of anise, as several people declared to me minutes later in my home. Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, about August 13: Everyone looked up at the sky, which was covered by a light cloud, like a very fine white lace, pink in places. The sun, which had been completely hidden for a moment, left us illuminated by a strange light, with yellow spots visible on the ground and above us all, and a great drop in temperature, as happens during a solar eclipse. Manuel Pedro Marto, about August 13 and September 13: [On August 13, he] saw a kind of luminous globe rotating in the clouds […] On September 13th, he also went to Cova da Iria. He was a little away from the children. He saw nothing, nor heard anything, but he heard that some people had seen extraordinary things in the atmosphere. Joaquim Xavier Tuna, about August 13 and September 13: On the 13th of August, I saw the sun lower in the sky at the hour of its appearance. It never lowered as much as that time, not even on October 13th. All the objects around me turned yellow. On September 13th, I saw a large cross emerge from the sun and head east. Its progress was not very hurried. Sometimes it appeared, sometimes it disappeared, until it disappeared from view. I also saw other things that I cannot explain. In the Lapas area, there were people who, at the same time, saw the cross. Then there was the great miracle on October 13. Remember, I was only able to find a handful of negative testimonies - people who said they didn’t see it. One was from a woman named Leonor das Dores Salema Manoel, who said she saw “nothing of what others saw”, at least at Fatima. But on the drive home from Fatima that evening6: I saw [the sun] pass through different colors that I can't remember and it turned green, very light green, like a green salad with a golden rim around it, and spinning. Very long rays seemed to touch the earth and the sun seemed to be separated from the sky. Then the sky took on pink flashes, changing to a yellowish hue around the sun, and further away, spots here and there. After a few long moments that I can't remember, it returned to normal and I couldn't look at it again. The next occurence was early the following year. From the parish inquiry’s interview with Jacinto de Almedia Lopes: He further said that on the day of Our Lady of Purification, that is, on the second of February, 1918, he about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, being in the same place, he noticed signs in the sun identical to those of the thirteenth of October, which he had not noticed on many other days when he had been there. And next, from a letter by Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos: I must inform you that I went to Fátima on [June 13, 1920]… at that very moment, the people were kneeling on the ground, shouting, praying loudly, weeping, begging forgiveness with their hands raised, because they were witnessing a solar phenomenon similar to that of October 13, 1917. And next, from Dr. Henrique Weiss de Oliviera, describing events on May 13, 1923: I ate my meal in a car on the road near Cova da Iria [in Fatima], from half past noon to one in the afternoon, and when I returned to the Chapel, I heard the groups I passed exclaiming in admiration about a marvelous phenomenon that they claimed was occurring in the sun toward which they were directing their gaze. Deeply doubting the repetition of the marvelous phenomena that had dazzled thousands of people, according to reliable reports, during the last apparition of Our Lady in 1917, I was about to pass on without even bothering to look. I remembered, however, that when I first went to Fátima on October 13th of last year, and upon hearing similar admiring rumors around me, I had seen nothing during my quick inspection, perhaps because I was filled with that spirit of doubt. I therefore wanted to be certain this time so that I could, with full awareness, give my testimony to whoever and whenever I was asked. And, having stopped near a group and stared at the sun, carefully shielding my eyes from the direct sunlight, so as not to see anything, they immediately advised me to insist that I would see something. It took a long insistence to finally see what amazed everyone and caused astonishment that I could not see it. And I saw with precise clarity, and twice, what the common people, in their imaginary language, very accurately likened to: almond blossom petals. They fell from a great height (no longer seeing them detach from the sun as the people around me saw them) For myself, I finally, and after a considerable time, concluded that there is no such natural phenomenon, neither known nor described, thus leaning toward the supernatural. Today I firmly believe that this was the case, because I have had testimonies that allow me to reconstruct the phenomenon as it appears to have occurred according to these testimonies. First, one could gaze at the sun for a long time and with impunity, seeing magnificent phenomena of beauty and color; then began an abundant rain of the aforementioned petals; and when I arrived, it was no longer possible to gaze at the sun, and the phenomenon, which had been quite lengthy, was at its end, which explains my difficulty in witnessing it now. And from Joao Amael, on October 13, 1925: I do not know why, I suddenly felt a desire to look at the sun. [I would hear] other educated persons admit having seen phenomena in the sun on that day and hour. I looked at the sun. Before that, nothing special could be seen. But now I looked at the sun without hurting my eyes, without any retina resisting. I became more intent. To my astonishment, the sight became even clearer. The sun turned on itself in a very small circle, and in the center it turned into a dark disk in rapid rotation. During some minutes, very impressive and overwhelming, I could clearly verify this strange process. Then, without revealing anything of what I observed, for fear of autosuggestion, I asked my companion to look at the sun and see whether it really appeared. And my companion was describing exactly the phenomenon, the same extraordinary phenomenon. The test was achieved. And I gained further assurance, when various other people later told me that they had seen what I saw clearly, at the same hour, as they kept looking at the sun, without the slightest sensation of pain. Amael’s report of a miracle in 1925 is the last recorded case I can find at Fatima. I don’t know if this was when the sun miracles stopped happening there, or when people stopped including them in the Critical Documents collection. In either case, there were plenty of other places willing to pick up the torch. 3.1: The Ghiaie Variations As far as I can tell, Fatima was only the second-largest crowd to have ever witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. The largest was a group of 200,000 - 300,000 people in Ghiaie, a tiny village near Bonate, Italy. On May 13th, 1944 - the same day of the year that the child-seers of Fatima saw their first apparition - a seven-year old girl went out to pick flowers and had a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin promised to return to her for nine successive evenings; at some point (although I cannot follow this part of the story) she must also have promised to return four times the following week, as large crowds gathered in expectation. According to my source, on the ninth appearance: Many testimonies from the site of the apparition and from surrounding villages described an impressive solar phenomenon. The sun came out of the clouds, whirled dizzily on itself, and projected beams of yellow, green, red, blue, and violet light in all directions. The beams of light colored the clouds, fields, trees, and the stream of people. After a few minutes the sun stopped its whirling, and those phenomena began soon again. Many noticed that the disc had turned white like a Host. The clouds seemed to be lowering down on the people. Some noticed a Rosary in the sky. Others saw a majestic Our Lady with a trailing cloak. Some people, who were at greater distance, saw Our Lady's face looming in the sun. From nearby Bergamo many witnesses observed the sun become pale and radiate all of the rainbow's colors in all directions. They also noticed a large yellow light beam falling over Ghiaie, perpendicularly. The blog says there were similar solar phenomena during the tenth and twelfth appearances, as well as on the following June 13th and July 13th7. All of this is from a random Catholic blog; can we find clear testimonies? The miracle of Fatima was heavily promoted by Portuguese, Vatican, and American Catholics, leading to a large body of sources being available in English. The Ghiaie apparition has gotten less attention, and so I can find fewer testimonies, have had to clunkily machine translate some things, and had a harder time tracing the exact chain-of-transmission. Still, here’s what we’ve got, mostly from here: Don Giuseppe Piccardi: The people cried out to the miracle; I turned between the intrigued and the distrustful, and I saw the sun that-comes from the clouds - turned on itself and the speed of movement seemed to be skidding. At the same time I saw that he projected light beams, then, for me, almost constantly yellow gold. This color I contemplated it even when the sun was veiled with uncaught clouds. Slightly hard to figure out from the machine translation, but I think this is Bishop Adriano Bernareggi: At 6:00 PM I was at the Patronato for the feast of St. John Bosco. Just at that time I finished speaking in front of the church. Then I entered the church for the Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. But most of the crowd remained outside because they said they had observed for about ten minutes the sun rotating on its axis, also suddenly changing color: yellow, red, blue. The sun could be observed without disturbance. The phenomenon was also observed in other places. I only noticed at the end of the service a yellow color in the houses, as when there is a partial eclipse of the sun at sunset. At 7:45 PM they said the phenomenon was repeated. I watched too. By staring into the dazzling sun, you could end up seeing the sun stand out clearly, giving the impression that it was rotating. Then everything took on a red color. But then it was clearly an optical phenomenon. Don Luigi Cortesi, a local seminary teacher who was a strong skeptic of the apparitions and even borderline-kidnapped the child-seer to convince her to recant: A shiver runs through me for a second. I react forcefully, forcing myself not to lose my mind, not to let myself be overwhelmed. I desperately squeeze my pupils and look at the sun: I see a large, clear spot without sharp edges, then, when my eye has adjusted, I see a disk of intense whiteness that seems liquid. Staring at the edges of the disk, I detect a dizzying rotation, like an electric circular motion, like a dizzying pinwheel, except that the direction of motion changes rapidly from left to right and then from right to left. I remember Fatima. Except this time, the sun revolves around a fixed axis, without moving in the sky. I return to the earth, to the crowd: I notice that the faces, the hands, the trees pierce through all the colors of the rainbow. It's natural, I think to myself: when the eye is offended by an intense light or an equivalent stimulus, it projects a stain on objects, which fades from red to violet and tints the objects it encounters with different colors; the stain disappears when the eye, rested, has returned to normal. In fact, a few minutes later, I no longer see those iridescent colors; every object has returned to its natural hue. The phenomenon of rotation leaves me dubious. A neighbor offers me his smoked glasses, and I look: the sun continues to rotate. He offers me a telescope, and I invert it, the screen, and look: the sun is still rotating. Then I can't take it anymore: even today, I'm not convinced that seeing a cosmic prodigy is worth losing my sight. Back then, I wasn't even convinced I was seeing a prodigy, since a plausible natural explanation for the phenomenon quickly emerged in my mind. However, urged by the neighbors to get excited, I remain silent. And I silence them by pinching and slapping the arms of those around me, which are stretched out towards the sky." From the parish bulletin of Tavernola, the exact author is slightly confusing but it was either written by or signed/confirmed by Piero Bonicelli, local provost: On the 28th in the evening of Pentecost, something happened that made a profound impression on everyone. At 6:00 PM sharp, a dimming of the sunlight was felt, accompanied by a sudden flash of lightning, first clearly observed by some bowling players. Looking at the sun, one saw first green, then bright red, then golden yellow, and then it spun around dizzily. At that spectacle, people poured into the streets... One can imagine their comments. The women recited the Holy Rosary, punctuated by the words: "Oh, how beautiful!" After ten minutes, the sun returned to normal. Comments? None. We await an explanation from the appropriate source. For now, we're content to hear the usual strong-minded people call us poor, deluded people, but don't you think this is a rather general illusion? In any case, for now, we're deluded: we'll see later. The parish priest of Tavernola, director of the bulletin, sending this issue requested by Father Piccardi, wrote on June 27, 1946: I must assure you that, as written, it is true, and I can also tell you that I was among those deluded that evening. To be prudent, I didn't go out into the street where people were shouting about a miracle, but from a slightly hidden window, I watched the sun change color and spin rapidly... illusion? Many of us here in Tavernola have been deluded. I can also tell you that I was pleased that such an illusion existed in Tavernola, since the people here have always had a great devotion to the Madonna. There may be more testimonies at this site, but they’re in very old scanned documents that it would be too time-consuming to stick into my machine translation pipeline. Another source says that “On February 24, 1994, [the TV show] ‘Detto tra noi' (Raidue), interviewed some witnesses, who confirmed the solar phenomena of May 21 1944 that were watched by many people“. I think a few hours extra work by an Italian speaker could produce at least five or ten extra Ghiaie testimonies, maybe many more. But as it is, we have enough to try something interesting: let’s recreate Dalleur’s analysis, but for Ghiaie. At 6 PM, the sun was shining from almost due west. For the sunlike light source producing the miracles to mimic the real sun, it would have also had to have been to the west of Ghiaie. If we assume it was the same distance as Dalleur’s Fatima light source, it would have been about 2-3 miles to the west of Ghiaie, which puts it above the village of Merate. We know from the last testimonial that the phenomenon was seen clearly in the village of Tavernola Bergamasca, which is about 22 miles from Ghiaie and 25 from Merate. An Italian source also reports sightings in Brescia and Piacenza, each about 35 miles from Ghiaie. So a Dalleur style analysis might conclude that this event also had a 25 - 35 mile visibility radius, similar to Fatima’s. …unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: really drinking the glass of milk, Halifax Slasher, here, my disappointment in the skeptical community, why it worries me, lets you say, Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio, Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg, trapped prior, of mind, 5, key insight, 6, my source, 7, here, this site, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kukw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F192586f8-d450-4555-88ef-deb6bbe30416_842x613.png, Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
…unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
Georgia Ray of Eukaryote Writes also brings up the beam lines (is this nominative determinism?) and points out that there are so many steps involving estimation, with such wide confidence intervals, that it’s unclear whether the normal sun position is within the calculation’s margin of error (maybe someone should try Guesstimate?) Seventh, although Dalleur’s theory somewhat makes sense for Fatima, it stumbles for Ghiaie and becomes completely incoherent for Benin City. At Ghiaie, the miracle was seen 15-25 miles away to the east (in Tavernola), but not 15-25 miles away to the southwest (in Milan), even though the line-of-sight from Milan was clearer. In Benin City, the miracle was localized entirely to one large field, while the rest of the city (population 1.5 million) saw nothing. For all of these reasons, I don’t think we can conceptualize the Fatima miracle as occurring in a geographically sensible way. It was either localized entirely to the crowd at Fatima, or seen by a tiny number of subsidiary groups (like the group of schoolboys at Alburitel) rather than the large region within viewing distance of the supposed event. This removes one of the major barriers to illusion/hallucination-based explanations. 5: I Feel The Eyes Are Slowly Melting We previously resolved to address three other barriers to explanations based on optical phenomena: the lack of retinal burns/blindness, the lack of similar phenomena observed outside Fatima, and the inability to explain complex visions like the Cross or the Virgin’s face. As we assess the situation with retinal burns, it may be helpful to start with the opthalmalogical journals, which recognize a condition called Medjugorje maculopathy. Some of the pilgrims who look for sun miracles at Medjugorje do get retinal burns (or other forms of eye injury) from staring at the sun too long. I can’t access all the papers, but this one discusses four cases: A 58 year old man visiting a Marian site in Ireland stared at the sun for six minutes. No miracles were witnessed. He had minor eye damage which remained after sixteen months.
Inline links: Georgia Ray of Eukaryote Writes, Guesstimate, Medjugorje maculopathy, this one
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
A nun stated that some people had seen “something” appear in the sun in Torres Novas, also about 12 miles away, though she is not really clear on whether she saw it herself or is just relaying other people’s impressions. I continue to be confused by a pattern in which we have one or two secondhand testimonies from entire towns that supposedly witnessed a dramatic miracle. Ethan then proceeds to make the situation tougher for himself, describing two witnesses from 120 km and 160 km away. But a 160 km circle includes three big cities - Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon - along with many medium-sized towns and small villages. When we combine this with the evidence from Ghiaie - where it was witnessed from distant Tavernola but not equally-distant Milan - I think these testimonies are more consistent with a few suggestible people saying “Oh, a cool miracle? Yeah, I definitely saw it too” than sightlines that spread through normal geography. I think people were more likely to say this if they were close (and so it was plausible) than if they were very far away (and so it was less plausible), but that this is some kind of gradually declining function, rather than the sharper function you would expect if there were an actual boundary. (one person in central Germany, about 500 miles away, claimed to see the Ghiaie miracle - I didn’t include this on the original post, because it didn’t seem credible, but I think it’s good evidence that sometimes people say non-credible things) I do continue to be confused by the Alburitel stories, which seem much stronger than the others, and perhaps by the Minde story, which is at least in the right place. 4: Heat I don’t think this made it in the post, but during a conversation Ethan answered one of my objections - that any heat warm enough to dry clothes in Fatima would have started fires and explosions closer to the source - by saying that unlike the light (which was visible omnidirectionally), the heat was a ray shot straight at Fatima, which didn’t affect anywhere else. I admit this answers my objection. I won’t even ask for a complexity penalty here, because it makes sense that a just God would try to avoid frying random villages. 5: Ending One objection I raised to Ethan’s not-the-real-sun story was that, when the miracle ended, the fake sun would either have to disappear, or remain in the sky long enough to be seen alongside the real sun. But witnesses reported neither of these two things. Ethan reports one witness who says they saw a fake sun first leave from, then merge with, the real sun. I have that witness statement too - it’s on my list of weirder testimonies that don’t mesh with everyone else’s. The large majority said they only saw one sun. If most people had seen multiple suns, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If I understand Ethan correctly (which I might not, I’m having trouble interpreting this passage), he thinks that maybe the clouds cleared enough to reveal the real sun right as the fake sun moved into the same position as the real sun, the crowds were temporarily blinded, and the fake sun took advantage of this to disappear unnoticed. 5.2: Later Miracles I claimed that later miracles were obviously not objective-in-consensus-reality. For example, the Benin City sun miracle was seen by people in one field, but not in the rest of the surrounding city of 1.5 million people; the Lubbock sun miracle was seen by something like 50 - 75% of attendees. I said that this suggested the Fatima miracle wasn’t objective either. Ethan objects that there is no reason the different miracles should be implemented the same way, and that maybe Ghiaie was a unidirectional beam of light focused away from Milan, and that maybe Benin City was entirely subjective, but Fatima was omnidirectional and objective. I of course cannot disprove the possibility that God implements the same miracle in different ways at different times; the most I can do here is ask for a complexity penalty. 5.3: Domingos Pinto Coelho DPC was a lawyer and statesman who saw the miracle at Fatima, wrote an article about it, and dropped at the end that the next time he’d encountered similar weather conditions he’d tried staring at the sun again and seen the same miracle. I described it as a powerful testimony in favor of the illusion/hallucination/suggestion hypothesis. Ethan says that “the Portugese historian Costa Brochado cast doubt on the integrity of this report”: The articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated. It is difficult to understand the manifest confusion he establishes between the phenomena at Fatima… and the alterations in solar light that he says he saw in Lisbon some days afterward. But in any case the historical value of the articles of the leading Catholic organ is almost nil… We believe that we can declare, after patient research on the matter, that the articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho ought to be read from a political point of view, since their objective was, as the author himself came to declare, to serve as the devil’s advocate As far as I can tell, this is just a historian named Costa Brochado saying he doesn’t believe Coelho. I don’t know why we should trust Costa Brochado, but since we’re bringing in random historians’ unsupported assessments of Coelho’s honesty, here is Father Stanley Jaki: Nobody could doubt that he [DPC] was a man of utter veracity, a point to which no proper attention has been paid in the Fatima literature. There he is all too often ignored and when not, he is dismissed as someone who had an axe to grind on behalf of Church authorities wary of Fatima…in view of Coelho’s unquestionable probity, one has to assume that he saw, with eyes unblurred, what he claimed to have seen, a repetition of the miracle of the sun. He never retracted, however slightly, his claim. As one who in his last hours fervently invoked the help of Jacinta who he came to venerate as a saint, Coelho would have hardly lived with the knowledge that he had intentionally mislead countless readers of his in a matter that so closely involved Jacinta and the other two videntes…Coelho surely must have thought that Rather than keep calling character witnesses, I think it’s more helpful to note that we now have two more testimonies of people who saw the miracle once, then were able to reproduce it under less holy conditions. One is Case One of Nix & Apple, who describe someone who saw the miracle in Medjugorje, then went home to New Orleans and was able to see it again. The other is person #14 on my list of survey responses. I emailed him and asked him to confirm that he was claiming that he could repeat the miracle when the weather conditions were just right. He responded: Yes, exactly. Excluding sunsets, I was able to focus on the sun when it was in a cloudless area of the sky only once (after the pouring rain had just stopped); on all other occasions, the intensity of the light made it impossible to focus on the sun. With translucent clouds, focusing on the sun was easier, and the visual changes (colors, apparent movement) appeared consistently after a few seconds. Even though it wasn’t asked in the questionnaire, I have a hypothesis about the physiology underlying the phenomenon, or at least the parts I experienced. Thinking back to those experiences, I might hypothesize that the intense white light of the sun caused the simultaneous formation of afterimages of different colors in the same area of the visual field. It could be that the visual system, in the presence of conflicting signals, instead of integrating the information by creating a white afterimage, rapidly switched attention from one color to another, creating the alternating colors. If this process occurs unevenly across the afterimage area, different parts of the area will change color at slightly different times, creating the appearance of movement within the area itself. I think the reason this phenomenon is not very common is because there is a narrow window between “light too bright to stare at the sun” and “light too dim for the alterations to appear.” The reason I was able to get these results repeatedly was because I was trying to replicate them, so whenever I saw translucent clouds, I tried to conduct the experiment. With clouds that were too thin I failed, but with clouds that I believe belonged to the Stratus translucidus or Altostratus translucidus category, I succeeded. I would have agreed with this earlier, but it’s awkward to have so many people who say they’ve seen this in a completely clear sky. Very speculatively, there might be some individual variability in the ability of the eye to adjust out brightness, and different people will reach their sweet spots in clouded vs. clear skies. 6: “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change his mind.” Speaking of complexity penalties, I have a broader objection to some of the moves Ethan is making here. If I understand his theory correctly, it goes like this: the miraculous object at Fatima was not the sun. But God put a lot of effort into tricking people into thinking that it was. Even though the object was below the clouds, He made the clouds clear around it at the moment of its appearance, so that it looked like the clearing clouds had revealed a normal above-the-clouds sun. Then, when it was time to remove the object, He made it disappear at the exact moment that the real sun came out behind clouds, so that the crowds would be too dazzled to notice that the object and the sun were two different things. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, for two reasons: God shouldn’t try to trick people.
Inline links: Nix & Apple
But if He does try to trick people, He should succeed. I can’t say either of these two things with confidence. Doesn’t the Biblical God sort of try to trick Abraham into thinking he’s going to have to sacrifice his son? And what is God, anyway? Isn’t the whole world a product of God? Does the existence of mirages in the desert count as “God trying to trick people”? Does that fact that we know there are mirages imply that God failed? Still, Ethan’s take on the “sun” miracle of Fatima seems like an unusually clear-cut case of God trying to trick people and failing, and I’m uncomfortable with it. You can always add more overfitting. God’s goal was for the crowds at Fatima to be fooled, but then for Dalleur (2021) to figure it out, and so He achieved His goal perfectly. Okay. But speaking of overfitting… If I understand Ethan right, Fatima was an objective omnidirectional light show, plus a unidirectional heat ray. Ghiaie was a spotlight-shaped unidirectional lightshow. Benin City was a subjective omnidirectional light show limited to a single field, plus an objective unidirectional heat ray. God implemented all of these miracles in completely different ways. Why? Inscrutable God reasons. This isn’t a terrible answer. People often do things for reasons I can’t explain - if I could predict Trump’s behavior, my stock market returns would be much higher. And surely God, as a being with motives and knowledge far beyond my ken, should be even more incomprehensible. But there was an interesting recent Notes debate about a Bentham Bulldog’s post. BB said that atheists had many problems - how was the world created? how do you overcome skepticism? what happened at Fatima? - whereas theism only has one problem - the problem of evil. Evil is a big problem, but it’s at least nice to only have one. Some of the commenters - and I can no longer find the comment I liked anymore, but don’t take this as an original insight from me - pointed out that this is cheap. If you are an atheist, you need to answer many how questions. How did the miracle at Fatima happen? If you try to explain it with natural laws - for example, gravity - it’s fair for an interlocutor to point out that gravity can’t do that; it can only make things fall. If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided. The commenter sarcastically compared this to an attempt to sweep all scientific anomalies under the rug as “the problem of uncharacteristicness”. How did Fatima happen? “Well, it must have been produced by laws of physics, so there!” But the sun spinning and dancing through the sky is hardly what you would expect from the laws of physics. “Yeah, whatever, that’s just the ‘problem of uncharacteristicness’, we’ve already priced that one in, at least we only have one problem!” This made me more attuned to questions of God’s motives. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would create the same miracle three different ways, and we don’t know why. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would try to trick people into thinking a non-sun-object was the sun, then let a few smart people working years later see through the deception. Are these problems of motive exactly as problematic for the theist as 70,000 people seeing the sun do impossible things is for the atheist? My gut answer is no. Should I trust my gut? Dylan: In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy Evan wrote the original response to Ethan, before I got involved in the debate. I was a bit harsh on him, saying that his part about the child-seers was fine, but calling his investigation of the sun miracle superficial and unfairly dismissive. Dylan of Chaotic Neutral writes In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, and Evan additionally defends himself here. Before getting to Dylan’s post - yeah, I was unfair to Evan (partly this is because my brain has trouble remembering that Ethan Muse and Evan Murphy are two different people). In particular, I described his hypothesis on the child-seers as being that they “confabulated” their visions, a term that Evan took great pains to disclaim in his actual post. I was thinking of a broader definition of “confabulation” that includes hallucination-like phenomena - but Evan was right that if I had read his post carefully, I wouldn’t have used the specific word he said he was against. I mostly just skimmed it to see if he had a really good explanation for the sun miracle thing, then got annoyed when he didn’t. But Dylan has additional complaints. He writes: Evan DID give this miracle the attention it deserved. He spent 18 hours researching and writing his article, presenting much of the same evidence and coming to many of the same conclusions that Scott did, and he did it as an ordinary citizen with a “day job” and in a household that “does not possess a dishwashing machine.” What more could you ask of a skeptical individual!? Unlike myself and the other lazy skeptics, he actually did respect this miracle claim enough to do a proper investigation. And towards the end, yes, he decided to wrap up early […] To criticize Evan’s conduct here in this miracle debate is to set an extremely high bar that cannot possibly be met by the overwhelming majority of the skeptical community. Such exacting standards will ultimately only serve to discourage diligent skepticism like Evan’s and incentivize lazy skepticism like mine. I have two partial defenses of my own actions. First, I think the majority of those 18 hours were spent on the child-seer section, which I acknowledged was good. I didn’t care about that part. To me, the trouble of explaining how three children can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the Virgin Mary is a rounding error compared to the trouble of explaining how 70,000 people can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the sun fall from the sky. But second, I think Dylan is arguing that Evan should get an A for effort. I agree. He put in a lot of work, he adhered to good scholarly principles, and he hit all of the beats that a skeptical explanation is supposed to hit. The only thing he didn’t do, from my perspective, is defuse the fact that the Fatima miracle is extremely creepy, and I have no idea what to do with it, and I can’t fit it into my ontology. Evan’s only attempt to defuse the miracle was that it was a hallucination or illusion or something. This is a reasonable conjecture, but for me it was already priced in - as soon as you hear about a miracle, the obvious next step is “well, maybe it was a hallucination or illusion or something”. I didn’t feel like his piece added anything extra. Generously, some of his tangential points - like that Garrett and Almeida weren’t the perfect skeptics they are sometimes portrayed as - might have defused 1% of my discomfort. I think a reasonable conclusion for this would have been “I’ve rehearsed the obvious arguments for why it is possible to be skeptical of anything, I’ve found some tangential facts that maybe remove 1% of the mystery, but man, I don’t know, this really needs lots more investigation”. My research hardly provided any kind of brilliant omni-solution, but I think that learning about the Ghiaie/Benin/Lubbock/Medjugorge followup miracles and the Redditor testimonies each defused about 15% of my reluctance to accept Fatima as natural, and the fire kasina + Khomeini stuff defused another 10%, to the point where I’m only about 60% as confused and unhappy as when I started. I hope I correctly signposted this level of success/failure to the reader. On Miracles Other responses tried to assert a general point that we should always disbelieve miracles. I. Eugene Earnshaw writes that We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles. If I understand his argument right: there are many examples of anomalous phenomena (eg crop circles) and stage magic (eg sawing a woman in half). When we don’t know how these are done, they seem impossible, and (almost) no amount of armchair reasoning can produce a plausible explanation. But in many cases, we have eventually figured them out - some “white hat” crop circlers explain how they make their seemingly-impossible patterns, and some magicians publish explanations of their tricks. After the fact, we can see how these seemingly-impossible things followed natural law after all. So we shouldn’t worry too much each time we encounter a new miracle that hasn’t yet been explained. Okay, but - suppose that the Pope said “I’m tired of convincing you people the normal ways, I’m going to start blowing up mountains”, and pointed his papal staff at Mt. Everest, and it exploded. And then we asked him to repeat the performance, and he did so as many times as we asked him, again and again. Would we shrug and say “Nothing to see here, I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation”? If the miracle were sufficiently convincing, we would either believe it, or at least think it pointed at something interesting (maybe the Vatican obtained super-nukes and is hiding them under mountains and choreographing their detonations - but this would be pretty important and very different from “nothing to see here”). Ben Landau-Taylor gives a related answer, reminding us that meteorites used to be dismissed on exactly these grounds. The science of the day didn’t allow for non-planet objects to be in space, so rocks falling from the sky was every bit as weird as the sun dancing and changing colors. “When President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: ‘It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.’” In the end, I think we just get back to regular Bayesianism. We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it. We should remember that “more likely on the second hypothesis than the first” is full of pitfalls - on the first hypothesis, it’s likely that there will be many skilled fraudsters and stage magicians, so even very strange-seeming anomalies might not be very unlikely under it. Still, at the point where the Pope starts blowing up mountains, maybe you think it’s pretty unlikely that stage magic could accomplish this, and you update a little. II. Omne Bonum makes a different point: there are many possible miracles. Most do not occur. Yes, a few of them do. But can we be sure it’s above the background rate? Even if there are no true miracles, you’ll get one-in-a-million coincidences one-millionth of the time. If you’re not good at accounting for the 999,999 failures - and people aren’t - this will look impressive. Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophecied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”. III. FLWAB takes on Hume’s argument against miracles (see also Kenny Easwaran here), which - sorry, I realize it’s suspicious to say this about a famous philosopher - is extremely bad. Hume argues that a miracle is a violation of natural law. And a natural law is something that is always true. But since it’s always true, it can’t be violated. And if we eventually confirmed that it was violated, then we were wrong about it being a natural law. Which means its violation wasn’t even a real miracle anyway. This seems to be a purely semantic argument. We know that the Red Sea usually stays in one place. But suppose Moses lifts his staff and parts the Red Sea, and that all of this is very convincing (we witness it personally, we measure the sea with various instruments, etc). I think Hume would have to say that we have disproven the natural law “the Red Sea usually stays in one place” - but only in favor of a new natural law “the Red Sea stays in one place except when Moses raises his staff”. And since we have never observed a violation of this new natural law, no miracle has occurred! Against this, we can call the way things work 99.999% of the time, when God isn’t acting directly, and when everything is proceeding via predictable material patterns “natural law”, and the very rare deviations that only occur in the presence of God or other extremely holy figures “miracles”. If for some reason you hate that terminology, come up with a new word, “shmiracle”, for the abnormal phenomena that only occur secondary to God’s direct intervention, and then we can argue whether shmiracles exist. IV. Why am I insisting on this so hard? This question of miracles is no different from every other question, where confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning. If you believe that vaccines don’t cause autism, then any given study showing that they do is likely to be a fraud or a mistake - especially given the history of such frauds, and the political pressures for producing them. But you gained your belief that vaccines don’t cause autism through some normal amount of evidence, and if the evidence that they did cause it ever become truly overwhelming, you would switch sides. The key skill of rationality is to know when to update your beliefs how much. These arguments feel like sleights-of-hand arguing that you can avoid ever updating on this question. I don’t think Bayesian reasoning provides an excuse for this. I think some of these arguments attempt to make an objection that the prior probability of miracles is zero, and so no matter how much evidence you get, you can never update towards them. But the prior probability of miracles isn’t zero unless either the prior probability of God’s existence is zero, or the probability that God intervenes in the universe is zero. I don’t know any infinitely-convincing argument for either of these points, so I think miracles have a prior probability above zero, which means we have to treat them the same as any other hypothesis. Yes, we will need many extra guardrails and cautions and good heuristics to prevent ourselves from getting bamboozled by the pitfalls that lurk in this area in particular. But that’s true of everything! You also need extra guardrails and cautions and heuristics to prevent yourself from getting bamboozled by scientific studies! There’s no substitute for doing the work. Actual Highlights From The Actual Comments Josh (blog) writes: I’d add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting. >> “At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).” https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf Funny, but they don’t provide information like whether people were seeing sun miracles at the exact moment the telescope was being used, or whether anyone who could see a sun miracle without the telescope switched to using the telescope and then it stopped. They just say they brought a telescope to a Marian site where some people had seen sun miracles at some point. Even if they clarified that some people had used the telescope while seeing a sun miracle and had it immediately stop miracle-ing, I don’t think this would update me very much. We know it’s not the real sun (Ethan says fake sun, I say subjective phenomenon), and we know the non-Fatima miracles aren’t objective (Ethan says only Fatima was objective, I say none of them were objective). John Schilling writes: Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are “unidentified”, “flying”, or “object”. Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of “UFO-like object”, as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs. Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not “flying saucers”, not “alien spaceships”, maybe “divine miracles”, but definitely “unidentified flying objects”. We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason. Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-) With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn’t be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It’s good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion. But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were “rationalists” when rationalism hadn’t been invented and we had to call ourselves “skeptics”, UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don’t spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don’t recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see. In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly “flying saucers”, fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you’ve got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky... For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight. I considered discussing the UFO angle (the section heading would have been “Virgin Galactic”), but in the end I couldn’t justify it. Yes, the phenomenon is trivially a UFO (in the sense of a thing in the sky we don’t understand). But does this help us? When I think of UFOs, I think of people arguing about whether something was the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or aliens. But Fatima obviously wasn’t Venus or a balloon (though, uh, see here for a dissenting take). And if it was aliens, you’d have to explain why they pretended to be the Virgin Mary and discussed a bunch of Catholic inside-baseball with a trio of child-seers for several months. So what’s left? When I asked John, he answered: UFOs, are just people seeing something they don’t understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture. And that’s something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can’t help thinking you’d have got there a lot faster if you’d had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort. Maybe one way to rescue the UFO connection is to say that there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms. I asked in the comments for other examples of miracles as compelling as Fatima. People suggested some of the better-verified reincarnation accounts, some of the better-verified UFO sightings, and some of the more spectacular psi phenomena. I don’t know if these are all exactly as strong as Fatima, but I think many of them are closer to Fatima than to the traditional skeptical conception of an alcoholic liar asserting with zero evidence that he dun saw dem aliens one night. When viewing all of these anomalies as a gestalt, we can go four different directions: Individualized natural explanations. The UFOs were swamp gas and weather balloons. The reincarnation stories are toddlers who are naturally gifted at cold reading. Fatima was entoptic phenomena. Sea serpents are really big oarfish.
Inline links: an interesting recent Notes debate, In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, defends himself here, We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles, explain, gives, Omne Bonum, takes on Hume’s argument against miracles, here, confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning, blog, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf, writes, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf, see here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H6Qh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6087bbd3-2496-46b1-87e0-f96ce73c19d2_522x223.png
…with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here
Gitmo2 mentions across 2 issues

Gitmo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 11, 2023 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one"; "Gitmo’s chaplain mentioned in passing that he had attended Mezvinsky’s execution"; "the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed". It most often appears alongside Donald Trump, facebook, Hillary Clinton.

Article page
Gitmo
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 11, 2023
Last seen
July 26, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones. The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo2. For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life. Hillary Clinton? Arrested, tried, executed. Bill Gates? Arrested, tried, executed. Dick Cheney? Fled the country via a secret underground tunnel to a CIA airfield, but then returned to America on vacation for some reason3, arrested, tried, executed. George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks (?), Brian Stelter (???) – All arrested and executed, in turn4. Almost all defendants are hanged, which actually is not the method prescribed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but has the advantage of being far more cinematic. It would be easy for all of this to get old, but like with variations in classical music, subtle differences to each iteration enrich the whole. Some defendants desperately try to deny responsibility for their crimes. Some arrogantly taunt the tribunal, assuming until the very end that they are untouchable. Some literally scream as though demon-possessed. Some fake senility or amnesia. But crucially, all of them face justice, one way or another. An entry published just before this contest’s deadline is a lovely example: Representing himself, [Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott] McAfee in opening remarks talked himself into an early verdict. He said no one and nothing, not even imprisonment, would prevent him from destroying the Trump family. Handcuffed at the defense table, he glared at the panel and said he would topple the Trump empire, building by building, brick by brick, and wouldn’t rest until every Trump supporter was behind bars or dead. “Then I’ll take care of the people here and this place,” McAfee said. “Mr. McAfee, I’m told you are of sound mind and know where you are, right?” Admiral Stephens asked5. “I’m in a Kangaroo court in the Banana Republic of Trump, staring at a guy who couldn’t hack it in the real world, couldn’t run a private practice, get a partnership, or sit on a real bench, so he went into the military,” McAfee said. “Have you ever heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Mr. McAfee?” the Admiral asked. “Because you have the worst case I’ve seen, and I’ve seen several.” “Trump is finished. He’ll be in jail soon, and when he is, your house of cards collapses,” McAfee said. “It might seem that way, but it only seems that way,” the Admiral said. “You might as well find me guilty. I’ll never stop hating Trump and I’ll never stop working to demolish everything he stole. He was born guilty, and he’ll be guilty until the day he dies. That’ll be the only word on his gravestone: GUILTY!” McAfee shouted. The lead panelist, a Marine Corps major, politely interrupted: “Admiral, sir, we don’t have to hear any more. McAfee mocks this court, and we find him guilty of the treason charge. Additionally, we are in agreement he should hang for his crimes.” Admiral Stephens nodded contemplatively. “I side with these fine officers. Mr. McAfee, you are hereby sentenced to hang for treason against the United States of America.” His execution is scheduled for May 15. Yes, this is the judge of Trump’s criminal case in Fulton County. In the Real Raw News world, Trump’s various legal adventures are both real and fake at the same time. Apparently, Trump could completely ignore these proceedings, and the military in fact begs him to do so, but he chooses to place himself in danger from some unseen, Christ-like self-sacrificial motive. That motive, it appears, is getting evil judges to expose their bias by ruling against him, so that they can be arrested and executed for treason. The site often offers an alternative narrative regarding events in the official, Deep State-backed news narrative. When Colin Powell died, RRN was there to explain that he actually committed suicide, fearing arrest by the military. When former Tom Hanks co-star Peter Scolari died of cancer, RRN swooped in to attribute his demise to an unexpected military tribunal6. This pattern is one of the chief reasons fans cite for believing the site: Isn’t it incredible, they say, how some of the same people RRN reports the executions of just happen to have recently died or been hospitalized in the mainstream press? What are the odds? Perhaps surprisingly, the star figure in Real Raw News’s tapestry of blood is not Donald Trump; like Gandalf or Dumbledore, he is a heroic but distant and largely off-screen figure. Instead, the primary hero is Rear Admiral Darse Crandall, who dispenses lethal justice with shocking efficiency while always being ready with a good quip: Admiral Crandall ordered [Arizona Governor Katie] Hobbs not to intimidate the witness. “You lack decorum, detainee Hobbs, and your insouciance ends here. We revoke your right to further question this witness and ask the panel to render a verdict on the charges against you.” The admiral dismissed Jane Doe, and the panel unanimously found Hobbs guilty, recommending she hang to death. “I won’t let you do this to me,” Hobbs screeched. “It’s already done,” said Admiral Crandall. “And have a Merry Christmas—in whatever afterlife you wind up in.” He scheduled her execution for December 22. Adm. Crandall is in fact a real person, currently serving as Judge Advocate General of the Navy. Admiral Crandall seems like a nice and professional fellow, and I badly want to know what he makes of his alternate persona. I like to hope that he enjoys it; maybe he jokingly warns his subordinates to do their jobs right or else they’ll be arrested and executed. If anybody knows otherwise, please do not disabuse me of this fantasy. Lesser fake news auteurs will puke out lame one-and-done articles about the moon landing or JFK or whatever, with zero internal consistency. Baxter is better. His military tribunals are reported out in detail. Even the most minor figures receive dedicated articles for their arrest, their trial, and their demise, but the biggest names receive genuine weeks-long productions. Hillary Clinton’s tribunal spans five days, until damning testimony from her former aide (and lover) Huma Abedin sends her to the gallows. Former president Bush’s arrest and tribunal is a ten-part epic lasting nearly two months, and includes details that are eccentric even by 9/11 truther standards: Supposedly, the real death toll of 9/11 (which Bush orchestrated) was 7,000, but Bush deemed this number too high to win reelection, so the real number was suppressed and 4,000 families were silenced with enormous bribes that also served to stimulate the economy. Good thing all the plotting was caught on tape, or he might have gotten away with it. Baxter never rushes things. Remember how the Colorado Supreme Court tried to kick Trump off the primary ballot in late 2023? Lesser fake newsers might have had the entire 4-vote anti-Trump majority arrested at once, but Baxter is cannier. In his reporting, one justice was arrested immediately, but the other three went on the run , and took months to capture. As of this writing we’re still waiting for their tribunal. I hope it’s a barn-burner! Baxter knows that while crass wish fulfillment is easy, truly great stories need formidable villains. Amidst the many arrests and hangings of Baxter’s saga are cinematic setbacks. Sometimes, the Marines don’t get their man: [Biden White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish] Jha was five feet away from his vehicle when two Marines with an arrest warrant approached him, informing him that he was being placed under arrest on charges of mass murder. Jha erupted in laughter, saying, “You don’t even know who we are.” He exploded in a crimson fireball that blew his and the Marines’ bodies to bits throughout the parking lot. […] The Marines brought what remains they could to Fort Bragg, where medical examiners deduced that Jha was not Jha, but a clone in which someone had planted a subdermal detonator connected to HMX explosives. And then, there is the looming presence of RRN’s chief villain: Former U.S. President Barack Obama. Members of the deep state make a warped pledge of allegiance to “The United States of Ukraine” and to “one world under Obama.” Other arms of the deep state might be taken down, but Obama himself always lurks in the shadows, controlling and commanding. The occasional attempt to take him down runs into the kind of problems you’d expect: “Why?” Obama gurgled and died. Inexplicably, the body spontaneously combusted, starting at both hands and spreading to the arms and chest. Special Forces tried extinguishing the flames with sand and water, but their efforts were in vain—the flames were rapidly charring burnt flesh. “Check his feet,” the Special Forces lead, who had been trained to spot body doubles and clones, called out. They swiftly yanked off Obama’s socks and sneakers and saw he had flat feet, and that his sneakers had been augmented to fit people with fallen arches. They pulled down his pants; Obama had no genitals, a telltale indicator of cloning. The body became too hot to touch and was soon consumed by fire. Like Bob Ross, Michael Baxter has no mistakes, only happy little accidents. In late 2021, RRN reported on the conviction of the late Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky. Being only a lackey in the Clintons’ plot to abduct children and sell them on the black market, Mezvinsky received a comparatively lenient life sentence. But wait! Two months later, Gitmo’s chaplain mentioned in passing that he had attended Mezvinsky’s execution. Eagle-eyed readers saw the discrepancy and cried foul. But Baxter didn’t miss a beat. When Baxter reported on the arrest of former Obama adviser David Axelrod, only to publish no follow-up, he had a ready explanation a year later: Axelrod had been executed without trial by being thrown out of an airplane, and it took months for Baxter to learn the truth. I’ll admit, I find Baxter’s efforts to maintain narrative integrity incredibly charming, given how they clash with the latent absurdity of the whole endeavor. Like most fictional universes, the Real Raw Newsiverse crumbles if you think about it too hard. If there are White Hat and Black Hat partitions of the military, how does military procurement work? How do newly-enlisted personnel know which faction they are joining? Do the two factions have separate recruiters? And when literally everyone carries a basic video camera in their pocket, and social media access is universal, how are major battles being fought on American soil with zero video evidence anywhere? At the meta level, the entire construct gets even sillier. The conceit of the site is that Trump has secretly left power to entrap his foes…yet then his allies go and blab the entire “real” story to an online blog. The cover for this is that the masses simply don’t believe it, but you know who would definitely know whether the blog is accurate? The Deep State! Yet despite this, in RRN lore sinister actors from Andrew Cuomo to Oprah are always caught off guard when Delta Force7 smashes down their door and zip-ties their hands for a one-way trip to Cuba. Okay, But So What? You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. Really popular. It got more than 2 million page visits in January. It’s a lot more popular than this blog and even outdraws some established publications like The Nation. “Okay, views are views, but does anyone really believe this?” you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do. The typical RRN article gets hundreds upon hundreds of comments. And sure, a lot of them are “My mother is being paid $2,000/day working from home” spam, but most of them are not. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments are from readers grateful to Baxter for sharing the “truth.” Even more unsettling are comments from people who spot a problem with the occasional story, but still trust Baxter overall. Baxter has a donation page on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. It has raised more than $210,000 and donations continue to pour in on a daily basis. Sure, some donation messages clearly indicate people who are in on the joke…but many more do not. But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
Inline links: 2, Arrested, tried, executed, Arrested, tried, executed, secret underground tunnel, for some reason, 3, tried, executed, George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks, Brian Stelter, 4, variations, entry, 5, committed suicide, 6, real person, Supposedly, arrested immediately, months, Sometimes, warped pledge, kind of problems, conviction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5uuY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcc5e8197-f02d-4221-9186-4bcc4f165c72_759x723.png, arrest, thrown out of an airplane, 7, more than 2 million page visits, this blog, The Nation., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EJFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66137a9b-260a-4cfa-adf3-c02c069dabd9_712x351.png, donation page, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AVfs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F16499732-4a26-43a0-8cd2-9dc38d5c6ac5_971x306.png, review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial
But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
Inline links: review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
Global South2 mentions across 2 issues

Global South is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 03, 2022 and May 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "higher need/ impact populations, e.g. those of the Global South"; "representation of different parts of the Global South need to continue". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, OECD, South Africa.

Article page
Global South
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
February 03, 2022
Last seen
May 27, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#18: Philanthropic Messaging Strategies Using Evolutionary Ideas I’m Ro Gupta. Inspired initially by https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/, I’d like to commission research that explores if and how Kin Selection and Hamilton’s Rule [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection#Hamilton%27s_rule] can be applied in mass communications for altruistic giving of humans in modern times. The goal is to uncover alternative messaging strategies that help subjects transcend blood-thicker-than-water hardwiring, based on underlying evolutionary biology theory – e.g. kin recognition, kin altruism – that ultimately serves to increase wealthy countries’ proportion of altruistic giving to less genetically familiar yet higher need/ impact populations, e.g. those of the Global South. [Estimates suggest around 5% of US giving currently goes to international causes.] I believe I have the right combination of academic, professional, NGO and global experience [https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptaro] to lead this, and access to a high quality network of research and communications experts to match grants to. I estimate a robust synthesis of existing work could be done for the low tens of thousands of USD, while a primary research phase one could be substantively scoped for the high tens to one hundred thousand USD. If of interest to be a part of this as a researcher, funder or general thought partner, please get in touch: http://www.rocrastination.com/contact/.
Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine
May 27, 2022 · Original source
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
Gobekli Tepe2 mentions across 2 issues

Gobekli Tepe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 03, 2023 and April 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site in Turkey"; "build a Stonehenge or a Gobekli Tepe"; "archaeologists discover something at least as impressive as Gobekli Tepe from 11,000 BC or earlier". It most often appears alongside Samo Burja, 1700s Great Britain, Acropolis of Athens.

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Gobekli Tepe
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2
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2
First seen
March 03, 2023
Last seen
April 24, 2023
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Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss! So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours. Argument 2: Where Are The Crops And Livestock? We can do genetic analysis of crops and livestock, compare them to wild plants and animals, and make good guesses about where and when they were domesticated. Wheat was domesticated somewhere around Karaca Dag, Turkey, around 9000 BC. Barley was domesticated somewhere around Jarmo, Iraq, around 9000 BC. Cows were domesticated somewhere around Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in 8500 BC (then a second time, in Pakistan, later on). Rice was domesticated in two places in China around 10,000 BC. All of these crops were invented exactly where the standard historical narrative says there were late pre-agricultural people of exactly the type who would domesticate crops. They spread at about the same rate as sedentary living in general, monuments, and other signs of complex civilization. The only known exception is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site in Turkey, which may very slightly predate known agriculture. But it also might very slightly post-date known agriculture, or exactly-date known agriculture (it’s just sixty miles from Karaca Dag, and it would make sense if they were the people who domesticated wheat). That one anomaly aside, there’s a very tight agriculture <—> things that seem to require agriculture coupling. So if there were Ice Age civilizations, what did they eat? It couldn’t have been any of our known crops, which post-date them. Could it have been their own crops, which were later lost? Seems unlikely. Throughout most of history, civilizations have risen and fallen, but they don’t lose agriculture! The empire divided longs to unite, the empire united longs to divide, but the Chinese never fragmented so hard that they forget how to cultivate rice and rice went extinct. Maize has survived nine millennia of rising and falling bloodthirsty Mexican empires. Almost everyone in the Amazon died in the 1500s when European diseases swept through, but they still left us manioc, squash, and chiles. Could Ice Age civilizations have thrived without domesticating any plants? We increasingly realize that agriculture isn’t all-or-nothing, there’s a spectrum from picking wild plants when you come across them to domestication, irrigation, and the full suite of agricultural technologies. It wouldn’t surprise me if some combination of early-non-domestication-involving agriculture and hunting-gathering off of very rich lands could create enough sophistication to build a Stonehenge or a Gobekli Tepe. But you’re not getting Egypt or Great Britain off of that, sorry. Argument 3: Lead Levels Thanks to commenter WTFwhatthehell for bringing this one up. Many ancient civilizations mined lead. Some of the lead made it into the atmosphere and settled down again in other places. You can measure the amount of lead in different places to see how much lead humans are mining. This isn’t perfect - the resolution is closer to continental than global - but you can check lots of different continents and get an okay reading. This paper finds lead levels started rising 1000 BC, which it links to the Phoenician expansion happening around that time. In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Karaca Dag, Jarmo, Iraq, Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in two places in China, WTFwhatthehell, This paper finds lead levels started rising 1000 BC, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rPgI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6265c4a7-a563-477c-afbc-7b3c9b8dd73e_1280x1247.jpeg, Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Open Thread 273
April 24, 2023 · Original source
3: Last month I wrote Against Ice Age Civilizations, arguing that civilization probably isn’t more than 12,000 years old. Samo Burja thinks it is and arranged a Long Bet on longbets.org. If archaeologists discover something at least as impressive as Gobekli Tepe from 11,000 BC or earlier before 2043, he wins $200; otherwise I do.
Inline links: Against Ice Age Civilizations, arranged a Long Bet on longbets.org
Gorak Shep2 mentions across 2 issues

Gorak Shep is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 02, 2025 and May 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "on Kala Pattar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal"; "a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal"; ""north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km"". It most often appears alongside Buffalo, GeoGuessr, Kala Pattar.

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Gorak Shep
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2
Issue count
2
First seen
May 02, 2025
Last seen
May 08, 2025
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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
May 02, 2025 · Original source
When I was younger, I liked to hike mountains. The highest I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pattar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To commemorate the occasion, I planted the flag of the imaginary country simulation that I participated in at the time (just long enough to take this picture - then I unplanted it). I chose this picture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before - vegetation and sky - in favor of random rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonexistent country would at least give it pause. o3 guessed: “Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km” This is exactly right. I swear I screenshot-copy-pasted this so there’s no way it can be in the metadata, and I’ve never given o3 any reason to think I’ve been to Nepal. Here’s its explanation: At least it didn’t recognize the flag of my dozen-person mid-2000s imaginary country sim. Picture #3: My Friend’s Girlfriend’s College Dorm Room There’s no way it can recognize an indoor scene, right? That would make no sense. Still, at this point we have to check. This particular dorm room is in Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, north-central California. o3’s guess: “A dorm room on a large public university campus in the United States—say, Morrill Tower, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (chosen as a prototypical example rather than a precise claim), […] c. 2000–2007” Okay, so it can’t figure out the exact location of indoor scenes. That’s a small mercy. I took this picture around 2005. How did o3 know it was between 2000 and 2007? It gave two pieces of evidence: “Laptop & clutter point to ~2000-2007 era American campus life”.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OrZV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc56683c7-52ef-4311-b2cc-d20b6b7b28e5_966x458.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Rd2m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60f5ff61-a374-439d-96d1-2e3597e8e6c0_627x467.png
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
It isn't [just] a zoomed in photo of rocks. It is a photo of a fantasy flag planted between those rocks with a trodden path just behind it. It guessed "Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km”. Do you know what is almost exactly north-east of Gorak Shep, ~3.3km as the crow flies? Mount Everest Base Camp. It is making a very educated guess based on where the kind of person who is taking a picture of a fantasy flag somewhere in the Tibetan Plateau would most likely have done so.
o3 offered a latitude + longitude for its guess: 28.00 ° N, 86.85 ° E. I didn’t include it in my post, because I don’t remember the exact latitude + longitude where I took the picture, so it didn’t add or subtract anything to its naming of Gorak Shep. Here’s the latitude/longitude plotted on a map of the region.
All I remember about the real location was that it was on the green dotted line from Gorak Shep to Kala Pattar.
Grant’s Pass2 mentions across 2 issues

Grant’s Pass is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 18, 2024 and November 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Even with the recent Supreme Court Grant’s Pass decision"; "this is downstream of Grant’s Pass and other larger trends". It most often appears alongside California, San Francisco, Supreme Court.

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Grant’s Pass
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2
Issue count
2
First seen
July 18, 2024
Last seen
November 12, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
July 18, 2024 · Original source
People think that “asylums” solve this because you just have to prove that someone is mentally ill. But this is also hard (will police be walking around administering the PANSS to everyone they see in a tent?) and under the existing systems you have to prove some additional point about danger. Even with the recent Supreme Court Grant’s Pass decision, there are a hundred finicky laws and precedents determining who you can and can’t arrest and for how long. I would like to see whether your plan involves pretending these don’t exist, or a concerted campaign to bring each one to the Supreme Court and overturn them, or what.
What Happened To SF Homelessness?
November 12, 2025 · Original source
After a big spike during the worst part of COVID, tents plateaued until mid-2023, then steadily declined. This timeline doesn’t match the two factors most people credit with the decline - the Grant’s Pass v. Johnson case where the Supreme Court made it easier to clear encampments, and Daniel Lurie taking over as mayor. What does it match? It might match a legal ruling the city got in September 2023. At the time, it was federally illegal to clear away homeless encampments without offering the homeless people an alternative, eg a shelter bed. San Francisco is chronically short on shelter beds, but cleverly kept a small number of beds in reserve on the exact day of cleanup operations to offer the affected individuals (many of whom would decline anyway). In 2022, a homeless advocacy group sued, saying this was a loophole that made a mockery of the requirement, and the city needed to generally have shelter beds available before it could clear encampments; the judge issued an injunction preventing the city from clearing encampments while the case was going on. In September 2023, another judge disagreed, and restored the city’s right to use this strategy. Then, in the 2024 Grant’s Pass decision, the Supreme Court struck down the entire federal law at issue, making it legal to remove encampments whether or not there were available shelter beds. Encampment numbers fell further. CalMatters presents the cynical view of post-Grant anti-homeless enforcement. The usual problem with enforcing laws against the homeless is that no plausible punishment can make their lives worse: you can’t fine people without money, or suspend the drivers licenses of people without cars. All you can do is imprison them - but there are too many, it’s too expensive, and the legal justifications are too weak to keep them in for long. The post-Grant environment provides two new levers of control. First, if the homeless have a tent, police can take their tent. Second, if the homeless have other possessions (shopping carts, big bags of stuff, etc), the police can jail them for a day or two, and by the time they get back, someone will have stolen them. Both levers incentivize the homeless to lie low and avoid trafficked areas, to avoid contact with the police. And both remove bulky signs of homelessness that might otherwise block paths, present an eyesore to passers-by, or otherwise kill the vibes of a neighborhood. Did these measures convince the homeless to shape up and accept social services? Or did they simply make their lives worse by taking their last vestigial shelter, removing their ability to keep possessions for more than a few weeks, and driving them to a miserable nomadic existence? The qualitative interviews in the CalMatters article suggest mostly the latter, although they do include one success story. Another argument for the latter is that there isn’t some vast surfeit of empty shelter beds and subsidized housing for these people to go to. And as we’ll see in the next section, overall homelessness does not seem to have declined as much as the decline in tents. So I think it mostly made the lives of the homeless worse, although there may have been positive effects for a small subset. This isn’t a fatal criticism; the aesthetic and safety improvements are real. But I think it speaks against the argument, common during the height of the crisis, that there was no tradeoff and actually enforcement was the truly compassionate option. Separately, A Small Decrease In Actual Homelessness There is weak evidence that overall homelessness has declined in California over the past year. It’s hard to measure homelessness, because homeless people are hard to find and survey. The gold standard measure is a “point in time count”, where the state chooses one particular day, gathers lots of volunteers, and sees how many homeless people they can find that day. Some counties do this once a year. Others, including San Francisco, do it once every two years. The results of this year’s count (which didn’t include San Francisco) are: So overall, unsheltered homeless in the areas covered by this year’s count decreased 9%. This looks small, but represents a more impressive victory when compared to previous years (when the homeless population usually went up) and to the US as a whole (where homelessness generally increased during this time). From an earlier dataset: Governor Newsom takes the world’s most depressing victory lap (source). Why? Most sources credit improved funding or better local programs. But there was no major change in California homelessness funding during this time. HHAP and Project Homekey, Gavin Newsom’s two flagship homelessness initiatives, have been around for years without major changes in scale. A 2024 ballot measure (Proposition 1) raised billions of dollars for homelessness relief, but this is being spent on facilities that are still under construction. On the opposite side, there is widespread concern about next year, when Trump budget cuts will decrease operations funding. But for now, the budget remains at a plateau, neither significantly up nor down, unable to explain the turnaround. Might the clearing of tent encampments have encouraged the homeless to use shelters? Maybe, but sheltered homelessness only increased by a quarter of the amount that unsheltered homelessness declined, and most of that probably came from the construction of new shelters - it’s not like there were loads of unused beds for the tent denizens to take. So this can’t be very much of the effect. I think there are most likely two main causes. First, the clearing of tent encampments, and other enforcement, encouraged homeless people to hide. Hidden homeless people are harder to count than homeless people living in conspicuous tents. Therefore, the count is lower. Second, rents fell in most big California cities. Although unsheltered homeless usually can’t afford apartments at any rent, low rents still make it easier for friends and family members to house them. What brilliant policy victories caused this affordability win? Interestingly, the report suggests that the primary driver behind the falling rental prices in California is not an increase in housing supply, but rather a decrease in demand. In recent years, the Bay Area and Los Angeles have witnessed substantial population outflows and job losses, which have not yet been fully recovered. Moreover, California recorded the highest unemployment rate among all states in April 2024. Ah well, nevertheless. We don’t have this year’s numbers from San Francisco. But assuming it followed the state trend of -9%, this is probably too low for anyone to notice. If you’ve personally felt like there are fewer homeless people around, it’s probably because of the encampment cleanups and the subsequent tendency for them to lie low. Mayor Lurie’s Policies Probably Aren’t Primarily Responsible The strongest evidence for this is the same graph as before: The second strongest evidence is that approximately the same pattern has happened in every affected California city during this period, supporting the hypothesis that this is downstream of Grant’s Pass and other larger trends. But also, Lurie’s homelessness policy just isn’t that impressive. He ran on a platform of creating 1,500 extra shelter beds, which would have put a significant dent in the problem. But after creating 100 - 200, he admitted this was too hard and gave up. Otherwise, it sounds the same as every mayor’s Plan To End Homelessness - reorganize local services, fund street response teams, coordinate and streamline blah blah blah. Even the name - Breaking The Cycle - gives me deja vu. Didn’t Gavin Newsom call his homelessness plan that? No? Mayor Breed? Jerry Brown? Daenerys Targaryen? Mayor Lurie’s other big homelessness-related policy was getting tough on fentanyl - clearing up the open-air markets, cutting “harm reduction” programs that give free drug paraphernalia to users. To his credit, there are many fewer open-air drug markets now. As for drug-related deaths: …preliminary results look discouraging. Why? Some experts argue that the clearing of open-air markets shifts the dealer-addict relationship from an iterated game to a one-shot: since law enforcement prevents anyone from staying in the same place too long, addicts move from dealer to dealer, encouraging dealers to try exploitative strategies rather than cultivating repeat customers. Those exploitative strategies include toxic or spiked merchandise, hence the increased overdoses. Others argue that the harm reduction programs successfully reduced harm, and stopping them had the predictable effect. But it looks to me like things get worse slightly before Mayor Lurie took office, and that in any case the new regime is a return to form after an anomalous trough. This article argues that none of this has anything to do with local policy; some foreign countries successfully cracked down on fentanyl in 2024, raising prices and creating a shortage. Then in 2025 the traffickers recovered, and supply came back. Everyone Accuses Everyone Else Of Shipping Them Homeless People Look too closely into discussions of why homelessness is up or down in some particular city, and you’ll find dark murmurs about how they’re shipping problem individuals away, or getting duped by other cities doing the same to them. The Berkelians say SF has sent its homeless to Berkeley. The Oaklanders say no, to Oakland. The Sacramentans say Sacramento. And don’t forget the ones sent to other states! Meanwhile, former SF mayor Gavin Newsom has claimed that the majority of its own homeless people come from Texas (this is obviously false). Some of these claims make sense. San Francisco has three programs that bus its homeless people out of the city. Previously, they would only do this if social workers could prove the person had a family member willing to support them in the new city. More recently, they lowered this standard to “some connection” to the destination. But I don’t think this caused a large drop in SF homelessness, for three reasons. First, we have no evidence that any such drop in homeless numbers occurred - just a decrease in tent encampments and visible dysfunction. Second, the new lower-standards busing program only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem. Third, the data above show general homelessness declines across California. If SF were exporting its homeless, you would expect other counties’ numbers to increase. Instead, it seems more likely that SF’s numbers are going down (if they are going down) for the same reason as everyone else’s. We’ll have more information next year, when Alameda County releases homelessness numbers. Alameda, which contains Oakland and Berkeley, is a natural export destination for San Francisco. So What Happened To Homelessness? This is a maximally boring story. There’s a natural tradeoff where governments can enforce laws against the homeless in ways that make them less visible and annoying, at the cost of making their lives harder, eg it can take away their tents. In the past, they didn’t do this, out of a combination of tender-heartedness and legal restrictions. After the homeless became extremely visible and annoying, voters felt less tender-hearted, and the courts lifted the legal restrictions. So cities took the tradeoff. This is the big effect that everyone noticed. At the same time, there were some small effects from increased funding, falling rents, drug market clearing, and busing programs. Realistically nobody would have noticed any of these; the big effect is from encampment clearing. Have we learned anything? I don’t think we learned the sort of thing we hoped we might learn, the lever we could push to solve everything with no downsides. But: I had previously thought there weren’t really any levers that could improve the problem at all, short of mass incarceration. I hadn’t considered that taking people’s tents and possessions would have such a strong aesthetic effect that most people would consider the problem solved from an annoyance/visibility perspective. I think my failure was some combination of 1: not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves 2: not realizing how many options the homeless have for “lying low” when they really don’t want to be found (and therefore how elastic visible homelessness is with respect to legal crackdowns).
Inline links: and restored the city’s right to use this strategy, presents the cynical view of post-, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kCNg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fda1b28-6220-4c80-820b-6700bcb67a56_794x893.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jF-b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04c94ed0-966c-4a7a-9488-24324bdb2a47_864x1080.webp, source, Proposition 1, are harder to count, rents fell in most big California cities., still make it easier, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3SWT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F752f0794-bac0-4a44-8997-3fc897a231a6_805x462.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mtf6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdffe0a3b-7471-41d7-8998-1ea4631b663b_2027x2578.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IP1D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3dcf3fdb-3af0-4c26-b2c9-0525d4ab4800_807x615.png, the same, admitted this was too hard and gave up, Breaking The Cycle, Daenerys Targaryen, getting tough on fentanyl, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!g3SD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1aaeff3b-8331-4d22-9ef2-e9c45edb7f60_767x495.png, preliminary results look discouraging, Some experts argue, to Berkeley, to Oakland, to other states, this is obviously false, has three programs
The second strongest evidence is that approximately the same pattern has happened in every affected California city during this period, supporting the hypothesis that this is downstream of Grant’s Pass and other larger trends. But also, Lurie’s homelessness policy just isn’t that impressive. He ran on a platform of creating 1,500 extra shelter beds, which would have put a significant dent in the problem. But after creating 100 - 200, he admitted this was too hard and gave up. Otherwise, it sounds the same as every mayor’s Plan To End Homelessness - reorganize local services, fund street response teams, coordinate and streamline blah blah blah. Even the name - Breaking The Cycle - gives me deja vu. Didn’t Gavin Newsom call his homelessness plan that? No? Mayor Breed? Jerry Brown? Daenerys Targaryen? Mayor Lurie’s other big homelessness-related policy was getting tough on fentanyl - clearing up the open-air markets, cutting “harm reduction” programs that give free drug paraphernalia to users. To his credit, there are many fewer open-air drug markets now. As for drug-related deaths: …preliminary results look discouraging. Why? Some experts argue that the clearing of open-air markets shifts the dealer-addict relationship from an iterated game to a one-shot: since law enforcement prevents anyone from staying in the same place too long, addicts move from dealer to dealer, encouraging dealers to try exploitative strategies rather than cultivating repeat customers. Those exploitative strategies include toxic or spiked merchandise, hence the increased overdoses. Others argue that the harm reduction programs successfully reduced harm, and stopping them had the predictable effect. But it looks to me like things get worse slightly before Mayor Lurie took office, and that in any case the new regime is a return to form after an anomalous trough. This article argues that none of this has anything to do with local policy; some foreign countries successfully cracked down on fentanyl in 2024, raising prices and creating a shortage. Then in 2025 the traffickers recovered, and supply came back. Everyone Accuses Everyone Else Of Shipping Them Homeless People Look too closely into discussions of why homelessness is up or down in some particular city, and you’ll find dark murmurs about how they’re shipping problem individuals away, or getting duped by other cities doing the same to them. The Berkelians say SF has sent its homeless to Berkeley. The Oaklanders say no, to Oakland. The Sacramentans say Sacramento. And don’t forget the ones sent to other states! Meanwhile, former SF mayor Gavin Newsom has claimed that the majority of its own homeless people come from Texas (this is obviously false). Some of these claims make sense. San Francisco has three programs that bus its homeless people out of the city. Previously, they would only do this if social workers could prove the person had a family member willing to support them in the new city. More recently, they lowered this standard to “some connection” to the destination. But I don’t think this caused a large drop in SF homelessness, for three reasons. First, we have no evidence that any such drop in homeless numbers occurred - just a decrease in tent encampments and visible dysfunction. Second, the new lower-standards busing program only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem. Third, the data above show general homelessness declines across California. If SF were exporting its homeless, you would expect other counties’ numbers to increase. Instead, it seems more likely that SF’s numbers are going down (if they are going down) for the same reason as everyone else’s. We’ll have more information next year, when Alameda County releases homelessness numbers. Alameda, which contains Oakland and Berkeley, is a natural export destination for San Francisco. So What Happened To Homelessness? This is a maximally boring story. There’s a natural tradeoff where governments can enforce laws against the homeless in ways that make them less visible and annoying, at the cost of making their lives harder, eg it can take away their tents. In the past, they didn’t do this, out of a combination of tender-heartedness and legal restrictions. After the homeless became extremely visible and annoying, voters felt less tender-hearted, and the courts lifted the legal restrictions. So cities took the tradeoff. This is the big effect that everyone noticed. At the same time, there were some small effects from increased funding, falling rents, drug market clearing, and busing programs. Realistically nobody would have noticed any of these; the big effect is from encampment clearing. Have we learned anything? I don’t think we learned the sort of thing we hoped we might learn, the lever we could push to solve everything with no downsides. But: I had previously thought there weren’t really any levers that could improve the problem at all, short of mass incarceration. I hadn’t considered that taking people’s tents and possessions would have such a strong aesthetic effect that most people would consider the problem solved from an annoyance/visibility perspective. I think my failure was some combination of 1: not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves 2: not realizing how many options the homeless have for “lying low” when they really don’t want to be found (and therefore how elastic visible homelessness is with respect to legal crackdowns).
Inline links: the same, admitted this was too hard and gave up, Breaking The Cycle, Daenerys Targaryen, getting tough on fentanyl, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!g3SD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1aaeff3b-8331-4d22-9ef2-e9c45edb7f60_767x495.png, preliminary results look discouraging, Some experts argue, to Berkeley, to Oakland, to other states, this is obviously false, has three programs
Grass Valley, CA2 mentions across 2 issues

Grass Valley, CA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "GRASS VALLEY, CA ( RSVP )"; "GRASS VALLEY, CA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
Grass Valley, CA
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 26, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GRASS VALLEY, CA (RSVP) Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 18 Location: Condon Park near Dogs Run Free Coordinates: https://w3w.co/punch.power.hatch
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/punch.power.hatch
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
HUNTSVILLE, AL Contact: Mike, mjhouse[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Barnes & Noble – 300 The Bridge St #100, Huntsville, AL 35806. I'll be in the cafe with a sign that says ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 866MP88H+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Barnes & Noble has an area for little kids. If you want to bring a service animal, that's probably fine, but I doubt they allow pets. PHOENIX, AZ Contact: Ben Morin, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 15, 1:00 PM Location: Thirsty Lion Pub in Tempe. I will have a table with an ACX sign. Coordinates: 8559FVVQ+6C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This will be our 5th meetup (started during the meetups everywhere last year). Notes: Please email if interested to be added to the email list, even if you can't make this event BELMONT, CA Contact: Moshe Z., belmont-acx[at]devskillup[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Twin Pines Park, Picnic Tables. The table will have some sign saying 'ACX Meetup' on it. Coordinates: 849VGP8C+RRG Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: You can join the mailing list here. BERKELEY, CA Contact: Scott Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist event space at 2740 Telegraph Ave. Come in through the front gate on Telegraph. Coordinates: 849VVP5R+X7V Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: The Bay rationality community has a mailing list, a Discord server, and a Facebook group. There are dinner meetups every Thursday at 7 PM in the East Bay, and occasional meetups in SF and South Bay. FILLMORE, CA Contact: Ryan, wiserd[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Wiserd#0906 Time: Saturday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: It's my house. There are a bunch of plants on the porch and garbage bins in the driveway. Coordinates: 856393VX+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP to my email or Discord. Kids and dogs are welcome in the back yard. Full vaccinations (on the honor system) and masks required. GRASS VALLEY, CA Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Condon Park by the prospector statue. In the case of rain we'll change the location to a residence, so RSVP to get updated! Coordinates: 84FW6W8H+C5 Event link(s): LessWrong IRVINE, CA Contact: Nick C, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: University Town Center Coordinates: 8554M526+7H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month at the same location. LOS ANGELES, CA Contact: Vishal Prasad (koreindian), vprasadcs[at]gmail[dot]com, Contact me on Discord. I am "Vishal" on the server. Time: Saturday, October 8, 6:30 PM Location: 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, CA 90039 Coordinates: 8553XHWM+GP Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly every Wednesday. We have been around for over 8 years. We discuss articles, watch movies, lift weights. We have a Discord server, a LessWrong group, and a website! Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. NEWPORT BEACH, CA Contact: Michael M, michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, August 27, 2:00 PM Location: Picnic tables next to 1900 Port Carlow community clubhouse. The park is verdant and pleasant and easy to access. Free street parking nearby. In case of bad weather, we have a couple of near by places to relocate to. Coordinates: 8554J48R+WCX Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We will meet most Saturdays at 2pm until whenever. There will be short suggested readings and question most weeks to spur conversation, but they are optional. Each week we will ask if people have had something happen recently that surprised them or changed the way they looked at the world. Something that should or did update their priors. Participation is optional. Notes: Its a public park with tables and BBQ's so you can bring food and well behaved pets. We may regularly go on casual walks in the surrounding area. SAN DIEGO, CA Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 3:00 PM Location: We will meet up in Bird Park. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 8544PVQ8+Q7 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Join our Discord server SAN FRANCISCO, CA Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 11:00 AM Location: We'll between in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with a 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 849VQHC3+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JOSE, CA Contact: David Friedman, ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: 849W825J+6P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Before Covid we hosted every month or two. No structure, just conversation and food. We feed everyone who is still there at dinner time. We have done it once or twice since Covid. I have an email list of interested people. Notes: Kids are welcome. Please RSVP to my email so I will have a rough count of how many we are feeding. SAN MARCOS, CA Contact: Eric F., EricF14159[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Hollandia Park Soccer Field. At the tables near the top parking lot. Coordinates: 85544VW4+RV Event link(s): LessWrong BOULDER, CO Contact: Josh Sacks, josh[dot]sacks+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301 Coordinates: 85GP2V96+JQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we know ~ how many people to expect! CARBONDALE, CO Contact: Nick, naj[at]njarboe[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 1:00 PM Location: Sopris Park - Center covered picnic tables - blue shirt with ACX sign on table Coordinates: 85FJ9QXP+QMF Event link(s): LessWrong DENVER, CO Contact: Ian Philips, iansphilips[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: palebone#2796 Time: Sunday, October 2, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be in the backyard patio of St. Mark's Coffee House. I'll wear a white shirt with (my brothers') baby faces on it and have a brown hat on. Coordinates: 85FQP2VP+9R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet typically 4 times a year. LAKEWOOD, CO Contact: Steven Zuber, stevenjzuber[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 5, 7:00 PM Location: We meet in the clubhouse located in this townhome community: 8769 W Cornell Ave Lakewood, CO 80227 Coordinates: 85FPMW64+MW Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet the first Wednesday of every month. Informal, casual atmosphere with occasional presentations by people. Notes: Check the Meetup page or Facebook group for updates. FAIRFIELD, CT Contact: Justin Barclay, barclay[dot]justin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 10:00 AM Location: South Pine Creek Beach. I'll set up near the lifeguard stand. Coordinates: 87H84PCH+CM Event link(s): LessWrong MANCHESTER, CT Contact: Mike, park-mike[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 5:00 PM Location: Near flagpole on top of hill Coordinates: 87H9QFFH+J7 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW HAVEN, CT Contact: RM, acx[dot]meetup[dot]nhv[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 12:30 PM Location: Cross Campus (Yale University), New Haven, CT 06511. We'll be on the grass on the northern half of Cross Campus, closest to Sterling Memorial Library. I'll be wearing an orange shirt. Coordinates: 87H9836C+8VG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring friends! The vibe will be welcoming and relaxed, and you can stay for any amount of time. Please email me if you're thinking about coming so I can get the right number of Insomnia cookies! WASHINGTON, DC Contact: John Bennett, WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub: 2021 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20006 Coordinates: 87C4WX33+3J Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: The Washington DC ACX/SSC group has been active since the first Meetups Everywhere in 2017. We have Monthly Socials downtown, hikes, board game days, and other cultural events. We're looking to spin up more rationality Dojo-type events with nearby groups in the coming months. Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. Metered street parking on nearby blocks is free after 6:30. Closest Metros are Farragut West and Farragut North. CAPE CORAL / FORT MYERS, FL Contact: Shawn Spilman, shawn[dot]spilman[at]outlook[dot]com, 508 655 8123 Time: Sunday, October 2, 1:00 PM Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914 Coordinates: 76RWH224+44 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: RSVP via email. I can be flexible about the date. GULF BREEZE / PENSACOLA, FL Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, October 12, 7:30 PM Location: The Bridge Bar - 33 Gulf Breeze Pkwy A, Gulf Breeze, FL 32561 Coordinates: 862J9RCF+G6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by emailing me. Thanks! If I don't hear from anyone, I won't be there. I work for Metaculus, but promise not to talk your ear off about forecasting. (Unless you want it talked off.) MIAMI, FL Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: eric135#4943 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Buckminster Fuller Fly's Eye Dome 140 NE 39th St #001, Miami, FL 33137 ----- Look for a paper sign on a table that says ACX MEETUP west of the dome. Coordinates: 76QXRR65+V2 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Miami ACX started in 2017. Our official meetup happens monthly in either Miami or Broward. There are activities happening on a weekly basis from Miami to Palm Beach. We have a Facebook group, Discord server, and Meetup.com group. ORLANDO, FL Contact: Noah Topper, noah[dot]topper[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 7:00 PM Location: 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL. We'll be meeting up at UCF's pavilion near Garages A and I. I'll have a pretty ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: 76WWJQ2X+82 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We try to meet up once a month, so far they've just been casual social meetups with natural discussions of rationality topics. Here's our Discord link :) Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong would be greatly appreciated. :) TALLAHASSEE, FL Contact: JF, jf19o[at]fsu[dot]edu Time: Monday, August 29, 2:00 PM Location: Landis, FSU. I will be wearing a black shirt Coordinates: 862QCPR3+PX Event link(s): LessWrong ATHENS, GA Contact: Dallon, knox[dot]dallon[dot]a[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: leonard#4208 Time: Saturday, October 15, 3:00 PM Location: Hendershots on Prince Avenue Coordinates: 865RXJ68+2W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I might bring some board games ATLANTA, GA Contact: Steve French, steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1 · Atlanta, GA (upstairs – look for the ACX Atlanta sign) Coordinates: 865QRH2F+V8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We've been in existence for four years – we have a dedicated crew and a very active Slack group Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Meetup.com HONOLULU, HI Contact: Matt Popovich, mattpopovich[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 4:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Magic Island at Ala Moana Beach Park, 1201 Ala Moana Blvd, Honolulu, HI 96814. From the parking lot, walk along the left side of the peninsula out toward Magic Island Lagoon. We're usually near the end of the peninsula, somewhere around the bathroom building. Look for the large 'ACX' sign. Coordinates: 73H475M3+JP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Honolulu Rationality hosts discussion meetups about twice a month in Ala Moana Beach Park. Check us out on our website BOISE, ID Contact: Julia and John, jae[dot]miomu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 7, 6:00 PM Location: Old Timer's Shelter in Ann Morrison Park. I will have an ACX sign. Coordinates: 85M5JQ6P+96 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP and feel free to bring kids. CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, IL Contact: Ben, cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 7:00 PM Location: Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 4403 Coordinates: 86GH4Q7G+H8F Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Discord server Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building (see Coordinates) - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord. CHICAGO, IL Contact: Todd, info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com, https://chicagorationality.com/ Time: Sunday, September 18, 1:00 PM Location: Grant Park - North side of Balbo between the tracks and Columbus Coordinates: 86HJV9FH+84 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Chicago Rationality does a monthly discussion meetup (typically the first Saturday of the month) and a monthly social meetup (typically the third weekend of the month) Notes: Sign up for our email list to be notified of future meetups EVANSTON, IL Contact: Uzair, uzairq93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 7:00 PM Location: 626 Church Street, Evanston IL 60201 Coordinates: 86JJ28X9+5WQ Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: The venue is a pub but it's really more of a restaurant, big long tables available so space should be fine and non drinkers shouldn't feel too out of place. BLOOMINGTON, IN Contact: Avery, acxbloomington[at]fastmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 16, 2:00 PM Location: Switchyard Park. Will be at one of the tables near the Rogers Street parking lot. I will bring a cardboard sign that says “ACX”. Coordinates: 86FM4FX6+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We met last year for Meetups Everywhere and it was fun! Here's a link to our Discord. Notes: You can RSVP via Discord or email, but you are encouraged to show up even if you did not RSVP! WEST LAFAYETTE, IN Contact: NR, mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 1:00 PM Location: 1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906. We'll be in the south of the Earhart Hall lobby (not the dining court) near the piano, and I will be wearing a green shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 86GMC3GG+728 Event link(s): LessWrong LEXINGTON, KY Contact: Nathan, nwculley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 7:00 PM Location: Blue Stallion Brewing. 610 W. 3rd St., Lexington, KY 40508. We will have a sign indicating we are the ACX meetup. Coordinates: 86CQ3F4X+VF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet 1-2 times a month to talk about ACX, books, memes, etc., often over drinks and board games. NEW ORLEANS, LA Contact: Blake, blake[at]philosophers[dot]group Time: Sunday, September 4, 11:11 AM Location: Petite Clouet Cafe. Look for the group with an iPad that has a People’s Pint sticker. Coordinates: 76XFXX73+8R Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Website Notes: Hybrid in-person and online, video link sent weekly. Email for the link. BOSTON, MA Contact: Robi Rahman, robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com, 7039818526 Time: Saturday, September 10, 5:00 PM Location: Boston Common, at the Parkman Bandstand gazebo Coordinates: 87JC9W3M+PR Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com Notes: We'll be providing food at the meetup, and giving out free books related to ACX, rationality, and effective altruism. Email the hosts if you'd like a particular book or you have any dietary restrictions. Our group is also doing a tour of the JFK Presidential Library on September 9, you’re welcome to join! NORTHAMPTON, MA Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 6:00 PM Location: The Deck, 125A Pleasant St., Northampton MA 01096. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; it's the outdoor dining part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to get to The Deck is to enter The Platform, one of the other restaurants, by its street entrance around 36 Strong Ave., here (make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to The Deck. We'll have a sign. Coordinates: 87J9899F+H7H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We started in the 2018 Meetups Everywhere and is still going strong. We aim to meet about once every two weeks. At most meetups we get about 5-7 people out of a rotation of 15-20; Meetups Everywhere and other special events tend to bring in a few more than usual. We're a totally social meetup with no 'format' or suggested readings. Although it's not rare for us to touch on ACX articles and related topics, the conversation varies wildly, and you are welcome even if you're the most occasional ACX reader. Notes: We have a (not very active) Discord where you can DM me or post on a public channel. I'm most responsive by email. There is a small chance we'll have to change the location to somewhere else in Northampton. Please check the Less Wrong or Facebook posts on or after August 26 to get the final word on location. BALTIMORE, MD Contact: Rivka, rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 7:00 PM Location: UMBC outside of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, on the north side. I will have a sign that says ACX meetup. Parking is free on the weekends. Edit: Rain is forecasted; if it’s raining, we will be inside of the Performing Arts building, on the ground floor just inside the entrance. Coordinates: 87F5774P+53 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet Sundays at 7pm — half are in person and half are virtual. Notes: There will be pizza and drinks DETROIT, MI Contact: Matt Arnold, matt[dot]mattarn[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 7:00 PM Location: Tenacity Craft, 8517 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI 48202 Coordinates: 86JR9WG9+R6 Event link(s): LessWrong MINNEAPOLIS, MN Contact: Timothy, tmbond[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at the picnic tables near the southeast corner of Powderhorn Park - the ones by the parking lot. I will be wearing a green Google t-shirt and have a sign that says ACX. Coordinates: 86P8WPRW+76 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: I will bring some snacks (but not a full lunch, so eat before or bring something if you'll be that hungry). Please RSVP on LessWrong. KANSAS CITY, MO Contact: Alex, alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:30 PM Location: We will be in the courtyard above Whole Foods (which is also an apartment complex). You can enter through the apartment lobby, located on Oak Street. We will have runners shepherding people from the entrance up to the courtyard. Coordinates: 86F72CM8+RR Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com SAINT LOUIS, MO Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: Lily Pond Shelter, Tower Grove Park, St. Louis Coordinates: 86CFJP4R+XV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: BYOB WEST PLAINS, MO Contact: Liam, liamhession[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 12:00 PM Location: 10/40 Coffee, 24 Court Square, West Plains, MO Coordinates: 868CP4HW+CV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Hoping to get anyone from around the Ozark region DURHAM, NC Contact: Will Jarvis, willdjarvis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 8, 7:30 PM Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Company, 219 Hood St, Durham Coordinates: 8773X4Q3+QW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet weekly! We also have a Discord LAKEWOOD, NJ Contact: Ben L, mywebdev3[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 29, 8:30 PM Location: TBD Event link(s): LessWrong MORRISTOWN, NJ Contact: Matt, matt[dot]brooks[at]impactmarkets[dot]io, Discord: Matt B#0216 Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: 10 N Park Pl, Morristown, NJ 07960 (at the center of the Morristown Green) Coordinates: 87G7QGW9+RJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: This is the first meetup, come be a founding member of the Northern NJ ACX/EA/LW group! PRINCETON, NJ Contact: Danny K, dskumpf[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 3:00 PM Location: Palmer Square, Princeton, NJ 08540. On the green right outside The Bent Spoon and Rojo's Roastary, near the big tree. I'll have some sort of ACX Meetup sign! Coordinates: 87G7982Q+2CP Event link(s): LessWrong LAS VEGAS, NV Contact: Jonathan Ray, ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 11:45 AM Location: At El Segundo Sol restaurant with giant ACX MEETUP signs Coordinates: 85864RHJ+3H Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet regularly and mostly just socialize. We have a new Discord server. RENO, NV Contact: Steven, stevenl451[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Steeven#7407 Time: Friday, September 2, 5:30 PM Location: We'll be in Crissie Caughlin Park, near the tables and the swing set Coordinates: 85F2G46W+FG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs and please RSVP on LessWrong if you are going BUFFALO, NY Contact: George Herold, ggherold[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 1:00 PM Location: 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, NY 14082 Coordinates: 87J3W467+8P Notes: Last-minute location change! LONG ISLAND, NY Contact: Gabe, gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 27, 7:00 PM Location: Whales Tale in Northport Coordinates: 87G8VJRW+99 Event link(s): LessWrong NEW YORK CITY, NY Contact: Jasmine, jasminermj[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 4:00 PM Location: Pavillion @ Rockefeller Park, Warren St / River Terrace Coordinates: 87G7PX9M+4J3 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: OBNYC has a Discord and a Google Group; the Google Group is the main mailing list we use for events NEWBURGH, NY Contact: Pedro David Bonilla, proportionatetoevidence[at]gmail[dot]com, Cell 8452001681 Time: Saturday, September 24, 10:00 AM Location: Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 1421 NY-300, Newburgh, NY 12550 Coordinates: 87H7GWCH+GF Event link(s): LessWrong ROCHESTER, NY Contact: Skivverus, skivverus[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Skivverus#5915 Time: Saturday, October 8, 1:00 PM Location: 4870 Culver Road; will be wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and glasses, and may or may not have figured out a sign due to just getting back from honeymoon. Look for a pair of parrots, one white, one green with a yellow/orange head. Coordinates: 87M46FM6+Q5P Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Venue very near amusement park; non-bathroom, non-parking amenities are therefore available but not free. Plan accordingly. Not particularly attached to specific location named, just happen to live reasonably close to there; alternative suggestions acceptable. Canadian visitors also welcome should your logistics permit; airport transportation available. RSVP via Discord preferred, but email will also work. CLEVELAND, OH Contact: Jack Zhang, LukeZhao9[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:00 PM Location: Picnic tables at Wade Oval (university circle) Coordinates: 86HWG96Q+GC5 Event link(s): LessWrong COLUMBUS, OH Contact: Daniel, daniel[dot]m[dot]adamiak[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 3:00 PM Location: Jeffrey Park - Clinton Shelter. I will be wearing a red shirt. Coordinates: 86FVX3C3+QF Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet once a month. We discuss EA, AI and other two letter initialisms. Occasionally we go for walks in local grottos and nature trails. Notes: Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list to receive any updates or future invites. RSVPing is appreciated. TOLEDO, OH Contact: Scout, scout[dot]sivar[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 12:00 PM Location: Black Kite Coffee Coordinates: 86HRMCCV+9R Event link(s): LessWrong OKLAHOMA CITY, OK Contact: bean, battleshipbean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 1:00 PM Location: Edmond Public Library/Shannon Miller Park. I will be wearing a hat that says USS Iowa on it. Coordinates: 8674MG3C+MW Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Had four people last year and a good time, moved to Edmond because a lot of us are up here. ALBANY, OR Contact: Kenan (he/him), kbitikofer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:00 PM Location: Bowman Park, Albany, Oregon. In or near the shelter. I will wear a bright red shirt and carry a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 84PRJWR7+XC6 Event link(s): LessWrong CORVALLIS, OR Contact: Ethan Ashkie, ethanashkie[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 7, 6:00 PM Location: Common Fields, in the reserved outdoor seating near the entrance Coordinates: 84PRHP5P+VQ Event link(s): LessWrong EUGENE, OR Contact: Ben Smith, benjsmith[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 7:00 PM Location: The Barn Light, 924 Willamette St, Eugene 97401 Coordinates: 84PR2WX4+VV Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much pizza to get, but if you forget, don't worry about it, we want you to come along anyway PORTLAND, OR Contact: Sam F Celarek, support[at]pearcommunity[dot]com, 513-432-3310, Discord: Sam Celarek#2845 Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: 205 NW 4th Ave Coordinates: 84QVG8FG+V4 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com 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. Notes: We would prefer you RSVP on Meetup.com a week beforehand so that we can get the right amount of food! HARRISBURG, PA Contact: Phil, acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Ever Grain Brewing Co, 4444 Carlisle Pike, Camp Hill, PA 17011 - We will be sitting at one of the picnic tables outside with an ACX MEETUP sign Coordinates: 87G562QQ+8P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Small monthly meetup group based out of Harrisburg - celebrating 1 year of actuality! You can see more of our events on LessWrong. INDIANA, PA Contact: Eric, ericindianapa[at]gmail[dot]com, 717-256-2717 Time: Saturday, September 24, 11:00 AM Location: Caffè Amadeus in downtown Indiana, PA. I will have a sign with 'ACX Meetup' on one of the tables. Coordinates: 87G2JRFX+48 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP via email or text message so I know how many to expect. PHILADELPHIA, PA Contact: Wes and Diana, rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 22, 6:30 PM Location: The Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. The meeting room is in the basement, look for the signs. Coordinates: 87F6WRXG+FQ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We tend to meet in downtown Philly on the last Thursday of the month. We're aiming to make the Ethical Society our new steady location. We have many links: Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group Notes: We'll be ordering food from a local restaurant, so no need to eat first. BYOB PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin, pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 2:00 PM Location: Westinghouse Shelter @ Schenley Park (W Circuit Rd near Schenley Dr). We have the outdoor shelter reserved, so light rain shouldn't be a problem, but in the event of extreme weather, we may relocate indoors (our default 'contingency indoor location' is Crazy Mocha Coffee on 2100 Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill). Coordinates: 87G2C3Q4+773 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet monthly-ish for general discussion and chit-chat, email me if you'd like to be notified of future meetups. STATE COLLEGE, PA Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu Time: Thursday, September 8, 5:00 PM Location: Old Main. I will be carrying an ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 87G4Q4WP+HV Event link(s): LessWrong SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Contact: Dan Gelfarb, danielgelfarb[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Lote 23, back corner under the tents. I will be wearing a blue shirt with a sign that says ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: 77CMCWVM+W32 Event link(s): LessWrong PROVIDENCE, RI Contact: James Bailey, feanor1600[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Prospect Terrace park, to the right of the Roger Williams statue Coordinates: 87HCRHJV+24 Event link(s): LessWrong SIOUX FALLS, SD Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 2, 5:00 PM Location: 410 E 26th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105 - the pavillion on the west side of McKennan Park, or the tables just south of it if I can't book it. I'll be the guy with the grill. Coordinates: 86M5G7JH+W57 Event link(s): LessWrong MEMPHIS, TN Contact: Michael, michael[at]postlibertarian[dot]com Time: Monday, September 5, 1:00 PM Location: French Truck Coffee at Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium 1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104. We will be at one of the many tables near French Truck Coffee and I will have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: 867F5X2P+QHC Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet about every month or so. We've been around since 2019 but only regularly since mid 2021 due to the pandemic. We have a Discord server. NASHVILLE, TN Contact: Ellen, enwiegand[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 11:00 AM Location: OneCity Nashville (8 City Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209), next to the volleyball courts. I'll have a pink ballcap that says SPINSTER on it. Coordinates: 868M552H+XW Event link(s): LessWrong AUSTIN, TX Contact: Silas Barta, sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 12:00 PM Location: 4001 N Lamar, Austin Texas, park by Central Market near stone tables and tents Coordinates: 86248746+8C Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Austin LessWrong has a weekly focused discussion, a weekly social mixer, a weekly online book club, and a monthly movie night. Been around since 2011. Notes: Location may change as we are talking to other venues BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX Contact: Kenny, easwaran[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 9, 5:00 PM Location: Back patio of Torchy's Tacos at Texas and New Main. I'll have a yellow umbrella and pinkish/purple hair Coordinates: JMFC+4J Event link(s): LessWrong DALLAS, TX Contact: Ethan Morse, ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: ethanmorse#5255 Time: Sunday, September 11, 12:00 PM Location: Union, 3705 Cedar Springs Rd, Dallas, TX 75219. We'll be in the upstairs conference room. Coordinates: 8645R55R+9M9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get HOUSTON, TX Contact: Eric Magro, eric135033[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Empire Cafe, 1732 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098 ---- Look for a table with an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: 76X6PHVW+5H Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: There are meetups every week. We have a Discord and a Facebook group. WACO, TX Contact: Mike, BaylorACX[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 1, 1:00 PM Location: Cameron Park, picnic tables next to Jacob's Ladder Coordinates: 8634HVG2+V9 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please email me if you're thinking about attending! Would love to start an ACX community here :) SALT LAKE CITY, UT Contact: Ross Richey (aka Jeremiah), wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park near the ChargePoint stations Coordinates: 85GCP4WF+VJ Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We meet every other month, we do book clubs and movie nights as well. Notes: Will be outdoors. If the weather looks bad, email event organizer to check on location. CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA Contact: RL, effectivealtruismatuva[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 5:00 PM Location: 12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 - We’ll meet at the picnic tables across the street from The Virginian. There will be an ACX sign. Coordinates: 87C32FPX+3H4 Event link(s): LessWrong LYNCHBURG, VA Contact: Craig, craigbdaniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 17, 4:00 PM Location: Three Roads Brewing - I will be wearing a purple t-shirt and will place an ""ACX"" card on the table Coordinates: 8792CV65+5G NORFOLK, VA Contact: Willa, walambert[at]pm[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Pagoda & Oriental Garden, 265 W Tazewell St, Norfolk, VA 23510. I will be wearing a bright green shirt, will have a large green & yellow hat on, and will have a sign with ACX Meetup on it. Coordinates: 8785RPX4+W3 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Hi! Virginia Rationalists was co-founded in Norfolk VA earlier this year by Willa & Yitzi with the goal of growing a thriving ACX / LW / EA community in our city & the state of Virginia. We meet every week at Fair Grounds cafe on Wednesday evenings from 5-7:30pm Eastern Time. We have a Discord server and a Twitter. RESTON, VA Contact: James, jrbalch333[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 1:30 PM Location: The matchbox at 1900 Reston Station Blvd, Reston, VA 20190 on the 1st floor of the giant Google building. I'll be holding a copy of Sapiens. Coordinates: 87C4WMX6+9X Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me to be added to the WhatsApp group RICHMOND, VA Contact: Cedar, cedar[dot]ren+acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com, @Cedar at this Discord server Time: Saturday, October 1, 2:30 PM Location: Richmond Public Libraries, West End Branch 5420 Patterson Ave, Richmond, VA 23226 Coordinates: 8794HFHQ+3G Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong & optionally reach out to me on Discord to introduce yourself! BURLINGTON, VT Contact: Forrest, lucidobservor[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Battery Park, at the benches in the south-western corner of the park, near the cannons facing the lake. I will have an 'ACX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: 87P8FQJH+8P Event link(s): LessWrong BELLINGHAM, WA Contact: Alex, bellinghamrationalish[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 29, 5:30 PM Location: Lake Padden Park, at one of the tables near the lake by the dog park. If it's rainy, we'll meet in one of the two covered gazebo areas just north (right, if you're facing the lake) of the planned spot. If the forecast looks really bad (e.g. very cold), I'll post an indoor location to the Meetup.com page at least three days in advance. Coordinates: 84WVMHX3+GM Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: Bellingham Rationalish discusses (in good faith!) topics in and around rationality. We usually meet the evening of the last Wednesday of each month. Our first meeting was a 2021 ACX Everywhere meetup. Notes: Please RSVP on Meetup so I have an idea how many people to expect. Kids, animals, food, beverages, etc. are all welcome. SEATTLE, WA Contact: Nikita Sokolsky, sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 5:00 PM Location: Optimism Brewing (1158 Broadway, Seattle) Coordinates: 84VVJM7H+4Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong (or FB/Meetup) for planning purposes MADISON, WI Contact: Mary Wang, mmwang[at]wisc[dot]edu Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: 1022 High St. Blue house with red porches. If weather permits, we'll be in my large backyard, which has more seating now than last year. If rain, come in the side door. There will be air purifiers and open windows. Masks optional. Look for a sign at the end of the driveway that says ACX/SSC Meetup. Coordinates: 86MG3H3X+XW Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We have met fortnightly in the past, but quit last year when it got too cold to meet outside. We typically have shared a meal, sat around my kitchen table and talked. Have held a Solstice celebration.
Inline links: 866MP88H+53, LessWrong, 8559FVVQ+6C, LessWrong, 849VGP8C+RRG, LessWrong, here, 849VVP5R+X7V, LessWrong, mailing list, Discord server, Facebook group, 856393VX+VQ, LessWrong, 84FW6W8H+C5, LessWrong, 8554M526+7H, LessWrong, the server, 8553XHWM+GP, LessWrong, LessWrong group, website, 8554J48R+WCX, LessWrong, Facebook event, 8544PVQ8+Q7, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Discord server, 849VQHC3+V8, LessWrong, 849W825J+6P, LessWrong, 85544VW4+RV, LessWrong, 85GP2V96+JQ, LessWrong, 85FJ9QXP+QMF, LessWrong, 85FQP2VP+9R, LessWrong, 85FPMW64+MW, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Facebook group, 87H84PCH+CM, LessWrong, 87H9QFFH+J7, LessWrong, 87H9836C+8VG, LessWrong, 87C4WX33+3J, LessWrong, Facebook event, 76RWH224+44, LessWrong, 862J9RCF+G6, LessWrong, 76QXRR65+V2, LessWrong, Facebook group, Discord server, Meetup.com group, 76WWJQ2X+82, LessWrong, Discord link, 862QCPR3+PX, LessWrong, 865RXJ68+2W, LessWrong, 865QRH2F+V8, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 73H475M3+JP, LessWrong, Meetup.com, our website, 85M5JQ6P+96, LessWrong, 86GH4Q7G+H8F, LessWrong, Discord server, 86HJV9FH+84, LessWrong, Chicago Rationality, 86JJ28X9+5WQ, LessWrong, 86FM4FX6+4Q, LessWrong, our Discord, 86GMC3GG+728, LessWrong, 86CQ3F4X+VF, LessWrong, 76XFXX73+8R, LessWrong, Website, 87JC9W3M+PR, LessWrong, Facebook event, Mailing list, Facebook group, Meetup.com, here, 87J9899F+H7H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord, 87F5774P+53, LessWrong, 86JR9WG9+R6, LessWrong, 86P8WPRW+76, LessWrong, 86F72CM8+RR, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 86CFJP4R+XV, LessWrong, 868CP4HW+CV, LessWrong, 8773X4Q3+QW, LessWrong, a Discord, LessWrong, 87G7QGW9+RJ, LessWrong, 87G7982Q+2CP, LessWrong, 85864RHJ+3H, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, 85F2G46W+FG, LessWrong, 87J3W467+8P, 87G8VJRW+99, LessWrong, 87G7PX9M+4J3, LessWrong, Discord, Google Group, Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, 87H7GWCH+GF, LessWrong, 87M46FM6+Q5P, LessWrong, 86HWG96Q+GC5, LessWrong, Clinton Shelter, 86FVX3C3+QF, LessWrong, 86HRMCCV+9R, LessWrong, 8674MG3C+MW, LessWrong, 84PRJWR7+XC6, LessWrong, 84PRHP5P+VQ, LessWrong, 84PR2WX4+VV, LessWrong, 84QVG8FG+V4, LessWrong, Meetup.com, Meetup.com, 87G562QQ+8P, LessWrong, on LessWrong, 87G2JRFX+48, LessWrong, 87F6WRXG+FQ, LessWrong, Discord, Google Calendar, Facebook, Meetup, Google Group, 87G2C3Q4+773, LessWrong, 87G4Q4WP+HV, LessWrong, 77CMCWVM+W32, LessWrong, 87HCRHJV+24, LessWrong, 86M5G7JH+W57, LessWrong, 867F5X2P+QHC, LessWrong, Discord server, 868M552H+XW, LessWrong, 86248746+8C, LessWrong, Austin LessWrong, JMFC+4J, LessWrong, 8645R55R+9M9, LessWrong, 76X6PHVW+5H, LessWrong, Discord, Facebook group, 8634HVG2+V9, LessWrong, 85GCP4WF+VJ, LessWrong, 87C32FPX+3H4, LessWrong, 8792CV65+5G, 8785RPX4+W3, LessWrong, Facebook event, Discord server, Twitter, 87C4WMX6+9X, LessWrong, this Discord server, 8794HFHQ+3G, LessWrong, 87P8FQJH+8P, LessWrong, 84WVMHX3+GM, LessWrong, Meetup.com, 84VVJM7H+4Q, LessWrong, Facebook event, Meetup.com, 86MG3H3X+XW, LessWrong, Facebook event
Grass Valley, California, USA2 mentions across 2 issues

Grass Valley, California, USA is a recurring place 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 "GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA". 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
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Max Harms Contact Info: Raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 2:00 PM Location: 18154 Justice Ct. (It's a residence at the end of a long, mostly-dirt road.) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FX5235+WRW| Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or email the organizer at raelifin@gmail.com if you're planning to come.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84FX5235+WRW
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Max Harms Contact Info: Raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM Location: The prospector statue in Condon Park if the weather is nice, otherwise my house nearby (send an email for the address) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4 Notes: Please RSVP by email or on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4
Great Lakes2 mentions across 2 issues

Great Lakes is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 10, 2022 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "evidence from the Great Lakes region where tribes like the Wendat"; "Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes". It most often appears alongside Britain, Europe, French.

Article page
Great Lakes
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 10, 2022
Last seen
May 19, 2023
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
The reality was quite different, the Davids suggest, once you investigate evidence from the Great Lakes region where tribes like the Wendat, and Jesuits and fur traders, all mixed together. In the late 1600s, Lahontan, a French aristocrat, spent much time in New France, and there met the Kandiaronk (also called ‘Le Rat’, since his name meant ‘muskrat’). Kandiaronk was
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes, was originally a colony of the Kingdom of France. Then the Kingdom of Great Britain conquered it in 1760. For various reasons, most of the French settlers stayed in Canada rather than emigrating to France or being deported, so at first, a small British elite ruled over a mostly French-speaking and Catholic colony. However, immigration from the British Isles, as well as from the newly seceded United States (loyalists who wanted to live in a monarchy rather than a republic for some reason) eventually tipped the linguistic and cultural balance. The population sorted itself such that the lower part of the valley (what is now Quebec) remained French, while the upper part (what is now Ontario) became English. The exception to this trend was the city of Montreal. Although located in Quebec, it became an English-speaking city and the hub for the British merchant elite. For at least a hundred years, it was the main city in Canada across almost all metrics: population, wealth, manufacturing, political influence. In the middle of the 20th century, Montreal grew enormously and became French-speaking again, owing to immigration from rural Quebec. It became the center of Quebecois culture and, with its increasingly educated population, the breeding ground for new ideas, including separatism. At the same time, the main city in Ontario, Toronto, was growing even faster. Immigrants from all over Canada and other countries poured into it (including Jane Jacobs herself). Sometime around 1970, it became bigger and wealthier than Montreal, and replaced it as the main economic hub. Many people attribute this to the rise of Quebec separatists, which supposedly scared the Anglo elite of Montreal into moving all the banks and companies to Toronto, and, to be sure, some of that happened — but of course, Jacobs prefers explanations that rely on city economics. One of the reasons for Toronto's economic and demographic growth is that it became the nexus of what Jacobs calls a conurbation, and would have called a city region if we were in the other book. In case you craved another concrete example of a city region, here’s a map of Ontario with two ways to define Toronto’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe” (Toronto itself is just the tiny strip in the middle of the red area, next to the lake): Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Great Plains2 mentions across 2 issues

Great Plains is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 21, 2021 and August 05, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Great Plains near the Rockies"; "trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains". It most often appears alongside New Hampshire, 1992 treaty, ACX.

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Great Plains
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
May 21, 2021
Last seen
August 05, 2025
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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.
Inline links: 4, 5
Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
August 05, 2025 · Original source
Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?
Guadalcanal2 mentions across 2 issues

Guadalcanal is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 24, 2021 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a chart of Bikini Atoll or Guadalcanal"; "Battle of Santa Cruz (off Guadalcanal)". It most often appears alongside United Kingdom, United States, 101st Airborne.

Article page
Guadalcanal
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
February 24, 2021
Last seen
August 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
Although you wouldn't expect them to have any consistent aesthetic, Fussell gets weirdly specific about them. They buy their clothes from L.L. Bean and Land's End, and tend to dress in down vests, flannel shirts, and hiking boots (which apparently "conveys the message [that] I am freer and less terrified than you are"). They enjoy touch football (because it is actually fun, unlike other sports which are just class signaling), and carry their infants around in slings or papooses (because these are the objectively simplest ways to convey infants). They read British, French, and Italian periodicals (because this is objectively the best way to keep abreast of world affairs), and live in cute old houses in unusual locations. Their front yard may be gravel (because they have transcended the class signaling of lawns), and their furniture includes "parody displays" like "an elephant's foot umbrella stand" and "campy fabric". "Instead of the chart of Nantucket or Catalina Island favored by the upper-middles, a chart of Bikini Atoll or Guadalcanal. On the coffee table, Mother Jones and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." Their TV preferences are for "classic reruns like The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy" (apparently the objectively best TV shows).
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality The inefficiencies stemming from bombing ruined several would-be German technological panaceas. Germany developed the world’s first operational jet fighter, the Me-262. Lack of fuel meant there was not enough training for its pilots, and maintenance shortfalls meant that about half of the 1,400 Me-262s produced by Germany were lost outside of combat. The Germans developed a dangerous, relatively modern submarine, the Type XXI. They intended to deploy dozens in a way that the Allies would have been hard pressed to fight, but production delays meant that only one ever actually went on a mission. Allied Bombings Provoked Vastly Expensive Reactions O’Brien thoroughly documents how expensive Germany’s reaction to Allied bombings was. First, expenditures on anti-aircraft weaponry and fighter planes skyrocketed. The Germans practically denuded the Eastern Front of fighter planes to have more to throw at the bombers. By late 1944, a bare 15% of German aircraft were fighting on the Eastern Front. In the second half of 1943, significantly more concrete was devoted to the construction of protected aircraft factories in Germany than to the entire Eastern Front. The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the bombings caused Hitler to authorize the most expensive German program of the war, the V-2 rocket, with essentially no goal in mind other than the psychological importance of striking back at Allied cities. The V-2 program cost the Germans proportionally as much as the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project. According to O’Brien, the design and construction of V-2 rockets cost as much as all German AFV construction between 1939 and 1945(!) It may be surprising to learn that the V-2s were basically irrelevant to the war. Launched primarily against UK cities, the V-2s killed several thousand civilians. However, more German slave laborers died building the V-2s than British civilians died from their use. The stupidity and expense of building the V-2 probably saved tens of thousands of lives elsewhere, which is ultimately yet another benefit of the Allied bombing campaign. O’Brien’s production-focused approach yields some surprising insights about what the Germans should have done. The most cost-effective effort was certainly the use of submarines (U-Boats) to attack American shipments of military equipment across the Atlantic Ocean. For example, data suggest that the German navy destroyed at least twice as many American aircraft in the pre-production phase by destroying resource shipments as the German air force did in combat in 1942 and 1943. Japan Was Far More Powerful Than We Usually Think O’Brien goes to great lengths to illustrate that Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union. Its industrial base was mostly untouched until mid-1944. In 1943, it produced as much steel as the Soviet Union. The Japanese navy’s planes doubled between 1943 and 1944. Famously, the Soviets focused on producing tanks. The Japanese focused on freighters and oil tankers. They had to—they had gone to war to obtain natural resources by conquest away from their home islands, and to use those resources, they had to ship them back to the home islands. The problem was that once the American navy had conclusively defeated the Japanese navy (certainly no later than mid-1943), nothing could stop American submarines and carrier-based aircraft from savaging Japanese shipping. But just as the bombing of Germany weakened German production in several complementary ways, the American war on Japanese shipping caused cascading logistical problems. For example, one very successful initiative was the aerial mining of Japanese ports. The mining didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war. Beyond that, the mining forced Japanese ships to use smaller, less efficient ports with bad communications and dock facilities, reducing the value of the small amount making it through to port. The Morality of Strategic Bombing One small but noteworthy argument in HtWWW relates to the “area” bombing of German cities, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Usually, air power enthusiasts are apologists for the indifferent (or even intentional) bombing of Axis civilians. They portray the fire/atomic bombings as difficult, but necessary and effective. O’Brien calls that logic into question. As we’ve seen, strategic bombings that targeted specific factories or mined harbors were extremely useful. O’Brien writes, however, that civilian-centric bombing had ambiguous effects. Obviously, killing workers hurts productivity. But killing their spouses or children or destroying their houses does not immediately lead to unsolvable resource dilemmas. It is perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but to the extent the civilian-centric bombings were not as effective as the rest of the strategic bombing campaign, they were immoral. O’Brien does not shy away from this conclusion, and shows a commendable willingness to gore sacred cows. He writes that Arthur Harris, leader of the British bombing campaign, resisted attempts to shift bombing away from cities generally and toward fuel or transportation targets, even when the evidence was clear that bombing was more effective. He takes the unusual step of effectively calling Churchill a moral coward: From the autumn of 1944 onwards, it becomes difficult to justify any of the area attacks on German cities as important in winning the war. However, removing Harris, which might have allowed for such a change, was beyond the Churchill government’s courage. O’Brien is similarly critical of Curtis LeMay, the American general who oversaw the firebombings. In his autobiography, LeMay justified the firebombings on the vague claim that they damaged Japanese morale. His evidence was a decline in Tokyo’s population, but population tended to decline after bombing raids anyway because production was relocated after raids. O’Brien concludes: LeMay’s view of warfare was definitely a step backwards – and possibly self-defeating. His notion of causing justified destruction with little evidence beyond the physical action of destruction added an unnecessary air of irrationality to the American campaign. Another important consideration in the debate over using the atomic bomb that I had not seen before: the firebombings were declining in effectiveness over time for the obvious reason that the best targets were already gone and the remaining cities were taking better precautions. The argument that firebombings alone would drive Japan to surrender without need of the atomic bomb must account for this awkward fact. Death by Oil Austerity Oil was a particular problem for Japan. The Japanese had gone to war with the United States in no small part because the U.S. cut off oil exports to Japan. The Japanese attempted to replace U.S. oil with oil from southeast Asia. Again, this was far less efficient than the pre-war arrangements, and once the U.S. Navy shut down shipping, the Japanese had to make drastic cuts to conserve oil. Perhaps the single worst way to conserve oil was in flight training. The Japanese air forces entered a death spiral. To replace veteran flyers lost at Midway or off Guadalcanal, the Japanese parsimoniously supplied oil for limited training flight hours. This famously led to their being massacred by better-trained American pilots in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Another point brilliantly made by O’Brien: reductions in fuel expenditures meant Japanese pilots did not have sufficient training in navigation. Early in the war, aircraft were delivered to forward operating bases by aircraft carriers, limiting the ability of pilots to get lost. Once the American Navy had driven Japanese carriers from the scene, Japanese pilots had to make several over water hops to fly from the home islands to forward bases. Shocking numbers were lost along the way—up to 50%. (HALF) (!!!!) (I CAN’T EMPHASIZE ENOUGH HOW CRAZY THIS IS). In addition to reduced training, Japan found another terrible way to conserve fuel: do not test engines for very long on the ground before sending single-engine fighter planes off to distant island deployments. Maintenance factors were one reason that on just one leg of the trip from Japan to forward bases, 5% of aircraft that took off from one island never landed at the next. By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel. In the European theater, the Allies specifically targeted German coal-to-oil conversion plants and Romanian oil facilities, which became far less productive. Over the course of one year, 1944, the western Allies destroyed the German energy market, and with it the German economy writ large. Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality. German oil shortages caused exactly the same training problem Japan had faced, with a slightly different but similarly disastrous outcome. Japanese training and production problems led to planes not arriving where they were supposed to in fighting condition (perhaps as few as 10% were actually combat capable when they arrived!) For Germany, training shortfalls meant annihilation for their air force as inexperienced pilots were forced to fight numerically and qualitatively superior American and British pilots. German monthly aircraft lost/damaged rates increased from 52.5% in January 1944 to 96.3% in June. One particularly illuminating episode illustrates how these problems manifested for Germany. The German air force had a reserve of 800 aircraft to counter the D-Day landings. The pilots of that force were used to only flying under expert control systems in Germany (countering bombing raids). When they went to France, they had trouble navigating and often landed on the wrong fields. Ultimately, they were poorly prepared to fight. The head of German fighter command was certain that the entire reserve did not destroy even two dozen Allied aircraft. American/British Airpower Decided the Outcome of Land Battles Beyond the strategic effects of bombing, tactical airpower (i.e., airplanes attacking land forces) gave an insurmountable advantage to the western Allies’ land forces. After D-Day, the Germans had a very strong defensive position in the hedgerows of northwest France. Allied aircraft literally carpet bombed one of the strongest divisions in the German army out of existence, with 70% casualties in one day. That division would normally have approximately 200 AFVs. At the end of that one day of bombing, it had 14. The Battle of the Bulge, the last offensive by the Germans to drive back the western Allies’ advance, was almost pathetic in its hopelessness. We Americans tend to focus on the hard fighting at the outset of the battle, and the stout resistance of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Knowing that airpower would make their attack impossible, the Germans timed the battle for bad weather and prayed it lasted as long as possible. Prayer was really the only option. Once the skies inevitably cleared after a little over a week of bad weather, more than 2,000(!) Allied bombers destroyed the German offensive. With most logistical support wiped out, one famous German division had to abandon all its vehicles and walk back to Germany. Criticism of HtWWW as a Book: Love the Data, (Mostly) Don’t Care About the People My single biggest criticism of HtWWW is O’Brien spends a lot of time (I would estimate 20% of the book) discussing the relative importance and influence of various people in the United States and United Kingdom. The section on Doug MacArthur is worth a longer digression, which I have included below. The problem is that focusing on personnel is almost completely irrelevant to the main argument of the book. For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war. The fact that these particular people thought it was a good idea to build planes and ships matters less than the outcome that the U.S. did exactly that. I am very much interested in World War II history, and on an interestingness scale of 1-10, I found this discussion to be at about a 4. The central argument of the book about German and Japanese production was a consistent 10. Sidenote: MacArthur Was a Disastrous General In the part of the book focused on personnel, the one discussion that hit around a 9 or 10 was of Douglas MacArthur and the invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur was the American general commanding the defense of the Philippines. The Japanese conquered the Philippines, and MacArthur slipped away to Australia, heroically vowing, “I shall return.” He did in December 1944, and some of the worst fighting of the war took place, with massive casualties for the Americans, Japanese, and Filipino civilians. Fighting was still ongoing in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945. The Americans took more than 220,000 casualties, the Japanese 430,000. Estimates vary on Filipino civilian deaths, but 750,000 is a credible middle of the road estimate. O’Brien’s contribution here was pointing out the strategic pointlessness of MacArthur’s invasion. The big American strategy in the western Pacific was to penetrate the Japanese defensive line of islands to link up with China. The northern Marianas Islands also were within heavy bomber range of Japan, and so would allow for efficient, effective bombing. (Bombing Japan from bases in China were logistically impractical, with virtually all materials being flown in over the Himalayas—another fascinating logistics discussion in this book.) The Americans had already conquered the Marianas Islands and had total air and sea dominance in the western Pacific. The forces the Japanese had in the Philippines could have been simply left to wither, as they had been on other islands bypassed by the island-hopping campaign. So, why did the Philippines invasion happen? The inescapable conclusion is that MacArthur was too politically formidable to risk angering, and he personally wanted to invade the Philippines to make good on his promise to return. Not coincidentally, the Philippines also offered some prospect of an extended land campaign where MacArthur could improve his reputation after his disastrous original defense of the Philippines. Also relevant, in O’Brien’s words: “MacArthur [] dazzled Roosevelt with tales of easy victories and grateful Filipinos and American voters.” Criticisms of HtWWW’s Central Argument I think it is clear from the data that O’Brien’s argument, that air and sea power played a more important role than land battles in deciding the war, is fundamentally right. Still, one can raise a few objections. Individual naval battles were capable of destroying a significant percentage of overall production. O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). This point doesn’t really disprove O’Brien’s core argument—it is basically a footnote saying that individual naval battles are more likely to matter than individual land battles. Politics and psychology matter tremendously in war, sometimes more than productive effort. O’Brien tacitly acknowledges this in the V-2 weapons discussion when he notes that the Germans spent all this money and effort on a psychological salve to the trauma of Allied bombing. The Japanese did ultimately surrender after the atomic bombings. (Or, if you are more on the revisionist end of the spectrum, they surrendered after the Soviets declared war.) France surrendered after a few disastrous battles. The productive effort lens might be useful, but subject to important caveats. Why Does the Conventional Narrative Focus on Battles? A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles. Here are some plausible factors: Battles are more dramatic. Propaganda during the war focused on battles so that there would be more inherent drama. Working twelve hour shifts in a factory to win the great battle is probably psychologically easier than thinking your work is going to disappear into an inchoate slog.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DyEt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F24c9f552-4f2a-4188-9b29-64191d48f307_835x496.png
The Japanese navy lost 50% more pilots at the Battle of Santa Cruz (off Guadalcanal) than at Midway—and that was only one of six major naval battles in the Solomon Islands.
Guam2 mentions across 2 issues

Guam is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 04, 2021 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "what's left of Guam will have its hands full"; "Baxter also places a few tribunals in Guam"; "tribunals in Guam". It most often appears alongside Biden, Democratic Party, facebook.

Article page
Guam
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
March 04, 2021
Last seen
July 26, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On March Links
March 04, 2021 · Original source
- The rest of the world regards privateering as flat-out illegal, so virtually all of the ports of the world will be closed to the privateers *and their prizes*. Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii, without any intermediate bases (what's left of Guam will have its hands full), is going to be logistically challenging to say the least. And the value of that prize ship you just took is greatly diminished if it can only be used in the US coastal trade, its cargo sold only on the US domestic market never to be reexported.
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
Baxter also places a few tribunals in Guam.
Guantanamo Bay2 mentions across 2 issues

Guantanamo Bay is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 11, 2023 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for 'treason and conspiracy'"; "including the Lowry Range near Denver and Guantanamo Bay". It most often appears alongside California, Trump, 2016.

Article page
Guantanamo Bay
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 11, 2023
Last seen
February 03, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
If Trump isn’t ready for quite that much of a fight, Lutter suggests other promising pieces of federal land, including the Lowry Range near Denver and Guantanamo Bay (!), which could:
. . . undermine the Communist regime by offering an easier exit than flight to Miami or Mexico, and help rehabilitate America’s image, given Guantanamo’s current association with the War on Terror’s excesses. With effective governance and a welcoming environment, a Guantanamo Bay site would powerfully demonstrate that the American model of capitalism can thrive anywhere.
Unfortunately there are multiple ways to read the phrase “bringing immigrants to Guantanamo Bay”, and so far the Trump administration isn’t choosing the cool one.
Inline links: isn’t choosing the cool one
Gujarat2 mentions across 2 issues

Gujarat is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 14, 2021 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gujarat became a center for the resistance"; "Chief Minister of Gujarat, India's fifth-largest state"; "prior to the March 1985 Gujarat assembly elections". It most often appears alongside Ahmedabad, Germany, India.

Article page
Gujarat
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
September 14, 2021
Last seen
April 10, 2023
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Source context
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
Gandhi immediately moved to arrest all her political enemies and shut down all newspapers that criticized her. The RSS was one of Gandhi's main enemies and had to go underground quickly. Gujarat became a center for the resistance. So Modi, as an official in Gujarat's RSS, ended up right in the middle of this. He remained a paper-pusher, but now he was a paper-pusher for freedom, scheduling meetings of resistance leaders, maintaining a master list of safe houses and trusted operatives, and keeping lines of communication open.
Modi was also responsible for transportation and travel to Gujarat of those opponents of Indra still at liberty...Modi too, in the course of his duties, was compelled to travel, often with pamphlets that could have got him arrested. To minimize the risk he became a master of disguise, something that came naturally to one who always paid attention to his appearance. On one outing, he would appear as a saffron-robed sanyasi; on another, as a turbaned Sikh. One time he was sitting in a railway carriage, hiding behind a thick black beard, when his old schoolteacher sat down next to the grown-up "urchin". The disguise worked perfectly, but some years afterwards the teacher attested that as Narendra disembarked, he introduced himself and offered a hearty saluation.
Modi came out of the Emergency a rising star, appreciated by all for his logistical role in the Resistance. In the newly open political climate, the RSS was devoting more attention to their political wing and asked Modi to come on as a sort of campaign-manager-at-large, who would travel all around India and help friendly politicians get elected. He turned out to be really good at this, and rose through the ranks until he was one of the leading lights of the new BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, "Indian People's Party"). He spent the next two decades running campaigns, traveling the country, and getting involved in internal backstabbing (which he had a habit of losing in ways that got him kicked out of the party just before something terrible happened, leaving him as the only person untarnished by the terrible thing when they inevitably invited him back). Finally some of Modi's political enemies failed badly in the leadership of Gujarat - one was expelled for corruption, another suffered several natural disasters which he responded to poorly. Modi had been accepted back into the party. He was beloved by Gujaratis, who still remembered his heroic work during the Resistance. He was the only person untarnished by various terrible things. By the rules of Indian politics, it was the party's choice who would replace the resigning incumbent as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and as Modi tells it, everyone else just kind of agreed he was the natural choice (his enemies say he did various scheming and backstabbing at this point). So on October 7 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat, India's fifth-largest state.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
AHMEDABAD, GUJARAT, INDIA Contact: Kabir Contact Info: rudrakabir[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 06:00 PM Location: Ares Cafe, SBR. I will be wearing a shirt with birds on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/n9yE7TRGWdiCEa3Wf/ahmedabad-ssc-spring-meet
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/n9yE7TRGWdiCEa3Wf/ahmedabad-ssc-spring-meet
Gainesville, FL1 mentions across 1 issues

Gainesville, FL is a recurring place 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 "GAINESVILLE, FL ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

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Gainesville, FL
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 23, 2021
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Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GAINESVILLE, FL (RSVP) Contact: ZachH, zachary[dot]hamaker[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, September 7 Location: 4th Ave Food Park, I’ll be wearing a maroon shirt Coordinates: https://w3w.co/briefer.releases.loyal Notes: Will consider delaying if the COVID situation in FL doesn’t improve
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/briefer.releases.loyal
Galapagos1 mentions across 1 issues

Galapagos is a recurring place 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 "spent time in the Galapagos talking to naturalists". It most often appears alongside 23andme, AB, Abraham Mendelssohn.

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Galapagos
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
Source: spent time in the Galapagos talking to naturalists who have spent considerable time studying Darwin's life.
Galataport1 mentions across 1 issues

Galataport is a recurring place 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 "Location: Cafe Modern at Galataport". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry
Galataport
Mention count
1
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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: 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
Galatia1 mentions across 1 issues

Galatia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 12, 2024 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia". It most often appears alongside 1 Peter 3, 165 AD, 1990s.

Reference entry
Galatia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 12, 2024
Last seen
November 12, 2024
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Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
…and 5 “really serious” famines …for an average of one catastrophe per fifteen years. The Romans rebuilt the city each time because it was strategically important. Stark focuses on one of these disasters: plague. The Roman Empire suffered two major plagues during this era: the Antonine Plague of 165 AD and the Cyprian Plague of 251 AD . He theorizes that Christians made it through these plagues much better than pagans, gaining an additional population boost. Time for some game theory: when a plague comes, you can either defect (flee / self-isolate / hide) or cooperate (altruistically try to help nurse other victims). An individual does better by defecting, but a community does better if all its members cooperate. Stark thinks the pagans defected and the Christians cooperated. Here is Thucydides’ description of a plague in pagan Athens (admittedly ~500 years before the time we’re studying). People quickly got an instinctive proto-knowledge of how contagion worked, after which: [People] died with no one to look after them; indeed there were many houses in which all the inhabitants perished through lack of any attention…the bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law. Compare the Christian writer Dionysius’s description of a plague afflicting his own community: Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy, for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead. The best of our brothers lost their lives in this manner, a number of presbyters, deacons, and laymen winning high commendation so that death in this form, the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom […] The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them in the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease. Could Dionysius be embellishing matters to make his friends look good and his enemies bad? Maybe, but: There was compelling evidence from pagan sources that this was characteristic Christian behavior. Thus, a century later, the emperor Julian launched a campaign to institute pagan charities in an effort to match the Christians. Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362 that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of Christians, for recent Christian growth was caused by their “moral character, even if pretended,” and by their “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead”. In a letter to another priest, Julian wrote, “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence.” And he also wrote, “The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” Did this matter? It might have! “Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by 2/3 or even more.” (if this sounds implausible, keep in mind that “nursing” here includes things like “bringing water from the public well to bedridden people who are too weak to go out and get it themselves”.) Stark believes that plagues helped the Christians in multiple ways: The obvious way: 30% of pagans died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians, making Christians proportionally more of the population.
Galicia1 mentions across 1 issues

Galicia is a recurring place 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 "City of Culture, Galicia". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

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Galicia
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
December 04, 2024
Last seen
December 04, 2024
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Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
A White building: City of Culture, Galicia, by Peter Eisenman The Grays, followers of Venturi, named after their disagreement with the belief that all buildings should be white, and for sometimes creating gray buildings:
Gallinaro1 mentions across 1 issues

Gallinaro is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 24, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone)". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Reference entry
Gallinaro
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1
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Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
Generalized one-fell-swoop paranormal explanations. Demons are trying to confuse us, or the simulation is glitching, or there’s some kind of Harry Potter-esque masquerade overflowing with wizards and monsters that carefully hides itself from us Muggles but occasionally leaks. UFOs do not really lend themselves to an individualized paranormal explanation - too many weird aliens in saucers trying to send whichever message of peace and love is most politically popular at the time of the abduction, too few Matrioshka brains with nanotech - so bringing them into our attention may make us more interested in looking for a generalized paranormal explanation which is merely pretending to be all these specific supernatural beings, including the Virgin. I take this one sort of seriously, but I also think it violates a general heuristic against conspiracies and false flag attacks. If some incredibly powerful being is telling you that it’s the Virgin Mary, and discussing Catholic doctrine, and performing healing miracles, I think you should at least start with a presumption of taking it seriously. But at this level of distance from any well-established priors, who even knows? GedAtThwll writes: This account reminds me of the semi-famous Ariel School UFO encounter [in Zimbabwe], covered well on YouTube and Wikipedia. Basically, ~60 kids saw a “silver craft” descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations. I don’t know how much it reminds me of Fatima, but I agree “sixty people all say they saw a UFO and some aliens” is the sort of mass hallucination I claimed basically doesn’t happen. I was going to attribute this something about the psychic makeup of poor uneducated Zimbabwean children, but according to Wikipedia, “Ariel School was an expensive private school [and] most of the pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.” One interesting feature of this story is that it happened a few days after a previous UFO panic in Zimbabwe - thousands of people said they saw some kind of fiery spaceship in the sky. This was very likely true - their accounts match a Russian rocket that reentered and burned up in the atmosphere around that time. So it seems like maybe the rocket primed people into a UFO mania, and that caused . . . sixty schoolkids to all hallucinate the same thing? At least to the point where some later investigators who are accused of maybe asking some leading questions could get them to give similar answers? Peter McLaughlin (blog) writes: This is excellent. One additional strand that I’d like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star “shoots down”. Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about “the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave”, and quotes the writer Standish O’Grady: ‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’ Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it’s very unlikely, it’s not impossible that he was ‘contaminated’ by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he’d heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don’t contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats’ biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats’ poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me. I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it’s an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define ‘religion’ so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it’s very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland’s religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell’s funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) ‘objective’ (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell’s funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out ‘social contagion’ completely. This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats’ letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren’t in Yeats’ social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O’Grady. Melias (blog) writes: This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic. It’s possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It’s also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn’t make me change my mind. Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can’t explain Jesus unless He’s the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that’s not why I’m here. I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism). Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don’t burn things, at least not how they should. Some videos [Video 1 here] Looks like this guy should have severe burns [Video 2 here] My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame [Video 3 here] They don’t leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher’s blog for one example) pretty convincing. Deiseach writes: Ah, I’m not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don’t have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it’s not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that’s okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don’t contradict received doctrine, and it’s fine. Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I’m not living and dying on “did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn’t, oh no my faith is destroyed!” During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don’t recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds. Ross Douthat writes (on Twitter): Re-read Scott Alexander’s Fatima post (why not?) and I think this is where his analysis goes astray - after realizing there were a bunch of “echo” miracles like the initial case, not all church-approved, he decides that *strengthens* a skeptic’s case. But you don’t have to postulate demons to see why a big miracle might have non-church-approved sequelae. 1) Catholicism could be fallible in discerning which miracles are legit. 2) Even seers have free will; visions could fall on fallible ppl who run wild with dubious claims and 3) you’d expect a big miracle to have some sequels where enthusiasm does get the better of people (which any theory of miracles obviously has to allow for). Clearly (if He exists) God doesn’t force ppl to correctly interpret every experience He grants them, and so a multiplicity of miracle sequels, some of which seem credible and even produce video evidence, and some of which veer off into left field, seems entirely compatible with the original one actually being a divine intervention - if that’s where the core evidence points. I answered: Thanks for engaging in depth. I admit that was a surprising direction for that result to go, but I mostly stand by it. I think first, that the extra miracles demonstrate it has to be a subjective phenomenon. Partly because it was unclear at Fatima whether there were any people who didn’t see it (the two negative testimonies were such a small number compared to the many positive ones that it was tempting to dismiss them as lying, or confused, or looking the wrong direction) - but at several of the other miracles it’s much clearer that large fractions, sometimes a majority, saw nothing. Partly because in some cases (Benin City, Lagos) a stadium full of people saw it, but people in the same city, just outside the stadium, reported nothing unusual. And partly because the miracle can’t be caught on video (the one video that I thought was okay, the Filipino one, got picked apart in the comments). It being a subjective phenomenon doesn’t prove it’s not a miracle (it could be a sort of prophetic vision), but it at least opens the door to that possibility. And second, although I don’t claim to be able to know for certain what God will or won’t do, I think at least the Necedah event meets any bar a reasonable person might set for “too dumb and heretical to be a real apparition”. If overly enthusiastic worshippers at a fake apparition can report sun miracles, that implies that the human capacity for hallucination is strong enough / specific enough to potentially produce spectacular sun miracles in some situations. But once we admit that, it’s only a trivial extension to say that this same human capacity to hallucinate sun miracles could have been responsible for the original sun miracle, which was more impressive than Necedah in degree but not in kind. Together, I think these are a significant negative update from where we would be if we only had the original miracle, where we might have assumed (like Dalleur) that it was an objective phenomenon that everyone could see, and that there was no way anyone could be “enthusiastic” enough to hallucinate something so striking. Valerio writes: I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a “religious trekking” trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared. Importantly, at the time she didn’t know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later). Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich. She doesn’t remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there. This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn’t have the time to research it independently . Victoria F writes: I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first. Lot of people here say this is the the “best” miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I’m not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/ Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos. I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad. An acquaintance claims to have done their own analysis of Lourdes and found that the impressiveness of the healings predictably decreased over time as record-keeping and medical verifiability got better, but I haven’t seen his work. There’s an interesting Substack post by a Zeitoun skeptic here. Marcel writes: Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism? In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms. If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred. Another Buddhist explanation! I can’t find a Tögal source anywhere near as clear as Daniel Ingram’s work on fire kasina, but for what it’s worth, the symbol of Dzogchen Buddhism, the thigle, looks like this: …with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Inline links: writes, on YouTube, Wikipedia, match a Russian rocket, blog, writes, blog, writes, Video 1 here, Video 2 here, Video 3 here, writes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues, writes, writes, https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf, https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/, some cool photos, here, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tnHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa90086-ed0b-4620-b0e5-502d1d34419d_800x800.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here
Galway1 mentions across 1 issues

Galway is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 02, 2025 and May 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "recognized this one from Sam’s test as Galway". It most often appears alongside AI Futures Project blog, Amistad, BIENVENIDOS A PUERTO PARRA.

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Galway
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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
May 02, 2025 · Original source
I recognized this one from Sam’s test as Galway. How? I spent five years in Ireland, and the rocky ground, the rock walls, and the color of the ground cover all struck me as deeply Galwegian. Maybe this how it feels to be o3. Still, this experience slightly calms my nerves. The AI seems to be using human-comprehensible cues - vegetation, sky color, water color, rock type. It can’t get literally-impossible pictures. It’s just very, very smart.
Galápagos Islands1 mentions across 1 issues

Galápagos Islands is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "A fishery in the Galápagos Islands split ownership 50/50 between whoever attached a drogue and whoever took the carcass". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

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Galápagos Islands
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Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
...n the Pacific might have had this rule, but not American whalers operating from New England, for unclear reasons.) The other was a split-ownership rule. A fishery in the Galápagos Islands split ownership 50/50 between whoever attached a drogue and whoever took the carcass. This norm gave whalers an incentive to fetter lots of them and let others harvest t...
...merican whalers in the Pacific might have had this rule, but not American whalers operating from New England, for unclear reasons.) The other was a split-ownership rule. A fishery in the Galápagos Islands split ownership 50/50 between whoever attached a drogue and whoever took the carcass. This norm gave whalers an incentive to fetter lots of them and let others harvest them later, but it’s not clear how or why that fishery developed different rules than o...
Ganges1 mentions across 1 issues

Ganges is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 02, 2025 and May 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Open reach of the Ganges about 5 km upstream of Varanasi ghats". It most often appears alongside AI Futures Project blog, Amistad, BIENVENIDOS A PUERTO PARRA.

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Ganges
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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
May 02, 2025 · Original source
o3’s guess: “Open reach of the Ganges about 5 km upstream of Varanasi ghats. Biggest alternative remains a similarly turbid reach of the lower Mississippi (~15 %), then Huang He or Mekong reaches (~10 % each).”
Ganges River1 mentions across 1 issues

Ganges River is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 09, 2021 and November 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "swimming in the Ganges River". It most often appears alongside Aage Bohr, Abanindranath Tagore, Aldous Huxley.

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Ganges River
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Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
Tagore was also tutored at home by Hemendranath, his brother. While being physically conditioned — for example, swimming in the Ganges River, taking long treks through hilly areas, and practicing judo and wrestling — he was also given Bengali-language lessons in anatomy, drawing, English language (Tagore's least favorite subject), geography, gymnastics, history, literature, mathematics, and Sanskrit imparted before and after school […]
Gardener Expressway1 mentions across 1 issues

Gardener Expressway is a recurring place 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 "underneath the Gardener Expressway". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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Gardener Expressway
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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
TORONTO, ON Contact: Sean A. (seanaubin@gmail.com) Date: May 1 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87M2JHQR+2X Location: The Bentway, underneath the Gardener Expressway, by the picnic tables Notes: If it is colder than 10° C, I will change the location to ProteinQure with vaccine passport checks.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87M2JHQR+2X
Garfield1 mentions across 1 issues

Garfield is a recurring place 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 "near the intersection of Garfield and Marconi". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

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Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
SACRAMENTO, CA (RSVP) Contact: Andrew, justsomerandomguy[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: Backyard of private home, near the intersection of Garfield and Marconi — address will be provided by email. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/transfers.easy.anyway
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/transfers.easy.anyway
Garhoud1 mentions across 1 issues

Garhoud is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Starbucks, Garhoud". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

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Garhoud
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: MA, tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: WolframSigma#1532, Telegram Time: Friday, September 2, 11:00 AM Location: Grinders Coffeeshop Coordinates: 8H568FG6+73 Event link(s): LessWrong JERUSALEM, ISRAEL Contact: Zvi Schreiber, zvi[at]zvi[dot]net, WhatsApp +972 54 569 1100 Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:00 PM Location: Malcha technology park garden Coordinates: 8G3QP5XP+PP Event link(s): LessWrong REHOVOT, ISRAEL Contact: David Manheim, David[at]alter[dot]org[dot]il Time: Sunday, September 11, 8:00 PM Location: Outside porch of Aroma Coffee, הרצל 218, רחובות Coordinates: 8G3PWR25+MP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook so we can give updates if needed TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Adam & inbar M, projectscentrum[at]gmail[dot]com, inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com, Whatsapp +46762791415 (Adam) Time: Sunday, September 4, 7:00 PM Location: Hamenia industrial loft at Beit Alfa 7 (רחוב בית אלפא 7). Look for a door with ACX sign. Two floors up. Coordinates: 8G4P3Q8Q+85 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've just made a Facebook group and are planning to organize monthly meetings going forward Notes: For questions contact Adam on email or WhatsApp. Feel free to bring a snack or a bottle of white wine. AMMAN, JORDAN Contact: Daniel, dnledvs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 6:30 PM Location: Rustic, Jabal al Weibdeh Coordinates: 8G3QXW49+WG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're hoping to grow the group, so feel free to come even if you've only read a few posts! +1s are also welcome. CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Mark Chimes, chimes[dot]mark[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 0826568573 Time: Saturday, September 17, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table Coordinates: 4FRW3CFF+3M Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We met up pre-Covid and pre-ACX as an SSC group. Now we're getting back in the swing of things. We eat lunch and chat about philosophy, politics, and sometimes SSC/ACX blog posts. Notes: We're planning on having another meetup on the 8th October if you can't make the first. DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA Contact: Arno, arnorohwedder[at]gmail[dot]com, +255763998637 Time: Thursday, September 29, 7:30 PM Location: The Deck, Masaki Coordinates: 6G5X776J+X6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Seeing if there are any interested people in Dar, look forward to meeting, if you are coming please send me a whatsapp. DUBAI, UAE Contact: RS, xyxyxz[at]gmail[dot]com, +971552726281 (WhatsApp) Time: Friday, September 30, 7:30 PM Location: Starbucks, Garhoud Coordinates: 7HQQ68VR+94 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Met once before Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong, or message me on WhatsApp
Inline links: Telegram, 8H568FG6+73, LessWrong, 8G3QP5XP+PP, LessWrong, 8G3PWR25+MP, LessWrong, Facebook event, 8G4P3Q8Q+85, LessWrong, Facebook group, 8G3QXW49+WG, LessWrong, 4FRW3CFF+3M, LessWrong, 6G5X776J+X6, LessWrong, 7HQQ68VR+94, LessWrong
Gascony1 mentions across 1 issues

Gascony is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2023 and June 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he moved from Gascony to Paris"; "his quaint estate in beloved homeland, beautiful Gascony"; "A jumbled up 'Weinert' became the name of an ancient Gascony family". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

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Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning
June 10, 2023 · Original source
Dear reader, please imagine a young and talented man in his twenties. He is, as they often are, a poet, a fighter, a lover. His name is Guillaume du Vintrais. He was born in 1553, and at the tender age of seventeen he moved from Gascony to Paris, in order to live his life to the fullest. He was immediately in love with the city, and the city returned the affection. He wrote venomous epigrams, he fought in duels, he raked his way through Paris’ beau monde. One of his friends was young Henry of Navarre, the future king Henry IV. Another was Agrippa d'Aubigné, a famous poet in his own right. His book of one hundred sonnets, called “Wicked Songs of Guillaume du Vintrais”, has such titles as “Burgundy wine”, “The Kindest of Valois”, “Elixir of Hekate”, “A Poet in Paradise”, “Pigeon post” and so on. A lot of his poems are dedicated to a mysterious “Marchioness L.”; those, as you can imagine, are more romantic ones. Generally, his poetry has quite a specific combination of debauchery, blasphemy, camaraderie, romanticism and philosophy that can be described as “d’Artagnan meets François Villon”.
Guillaume du Vintrais went back to his quaint estate in beloved homeland, beautiful Gascony, where he passed the time with an old tome and an older bottle of wine. He passed away quietly in 1602.
Guillaume du Vintrais started serendipitously. They were melting cast iron. Both of them were sitting on the ground, exhausted, and watched the thick glowing orange liquid filling the skimming ladle. Yuri described the view with a poetic improvisation; Yakov replied with a rhyming line. That was enough. They started this literature game as a joke, but it quickly turned into something more. A jumbled up “Weinert” became the name of an ancient Gascony family. The poet’s first and only image was created when the friends drew long hair and a magnificent mustache on Yuri Weinert’s prison photo. And a made up french poet became an anchor for two very tired and desperate people. Very shortly after their release in 1947, both of them were (separately) arrested again, and this time sent to different camps. They continued to write du Vintrais’ poems together by mail.
Gate of Polar Convergence1 mentions across 1 issues

Gate of Polar Convergence is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

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1
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1
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August 19, 2022
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August 19, 2022
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Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion - so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates. Yet this is not some bodice-ripping work of historical fiction: it's well-sourced and vetted history, with plenty of primary source citations.
Gatlinburg1 mentions across 1 issues

Gatlinburg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 08, 2025 and May 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "was Gatlinsburg TN". It most often appears alongside @DeepGuessr, @scaling01, ACX Discord.

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Gatlinburg
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May 08, 2025
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May 08, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
It guessed Atlanta GA, was Gatlinsburg TN. Distance wrong: 230 km
GDANSK1 mentions across 1 issues

GDANSK is a recurring place 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 "GDANSK". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

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GDANSK
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1
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April 01, 2026
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Alexander Doré Contact Info: alex[.]r[.]dore[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 24th, 7:30 PM Location: Chateau Neuf. We will be at Bokcaféen which is located on the second floor. I will put an ACX MEETUP sign on the table and be wearing a checkered shirt. https://neuf.no/lokaler/bokcafeen Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFGWPM7+22 Group Link: https://fb.me/e/6TMWCmTR4 Poland GDANSK Contact: Nina Contact Info: ninuskap67[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 17th, 6:30 PM Location: Polufka Pub Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F6W9JH9+HH Notes: I unfortunately speak only English
Inline links: https://neuf.no/lokaler/bokcafeen, https://plus.codes/9FFGWPM7+22, https://fb.me/e/6TMWCmTR4, https://plus.codes/9F6W9JH9+HH
GDAŃSK1 mentions across 1 issues

GDAŃSK is a recurring place 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 "GDAŃSK, POLAND ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

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GDAŃSK
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1
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Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GDAŃSK, POLAND (RSVP) Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18 Location: Park Akademicki opposite the Opera Bałtycka Coordinates: https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
GDAŃSK, POLAND1 mentions across 1 issues

GDAŃSK, POLAND is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "GDAŃSK, POLAND". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

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GDAŃSK, POLAND
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1
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1
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August 26, 2022
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August 26, 2022
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Geisteria1 mentions across 1 issues

Geisteria is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "includes the small village of Geisteria". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

Reference entry
Geisteria
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 01, 2025
Last seen
October 01, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
The poet also corresponded with Manuel Formigao, a man who spent his life gathering evidence for the Miracle of the Sun and who is remembered as the foremost promoter of Fatima. But he never bothered to say “Hey, you know the thing you’ve devoted your life to? I have priceless evidence that it’s completely real.” He just mentioned other things - like how much he enjoyed a Fatima pilgrimage - and Formigao never mentioned the poet’s testimony in any of his books. I think this testimony is on shakier evidence than most of the others. Moving on to the housewife, Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, her story seems real enough, but she tells us that “I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever.” She knew a miracle was predicted, wanted to see it, but had to stay home. She says that she was “looking towards the mountain” when it happened - I can’t tell whether she means she was deliberately looking for the miracle, or just happened to be gazing in that direction, but I don’t think she can be described as uncontaminated. From the child, Albano Barros, we have only two sentences, not enough to know whether he was contaminated or not. But he was nine years old, and his account was collected thirty years later. How much opportunity might there be for recall bias to creep in when asked to remember a miracle that happened thirty years ago when you were nine? These are relatively weak counterarguments - they perhaps give us a tiny sliver of ability to doubt these testimonies, but do not demand doubt. Are there any affirmative reasons to doubt Dalleur’s story of an objective miracle that took place in consensus reality and was visible according to normal geography? I have seven. First, there were about 300,000 people living within a 20 mile radius of Fatima in 1917. If 50,000 of those had gone to Fatima itself, and another 100,000 were in the southeast area blocked by mountains, then 150,000 people outside Fatima still should have seen the miracle. Of those 150,000, we have four to six testimonies - compared to 100+ testimonies from the mere 70,000 at Fatima itself. Is this surprising? Maybe not: it was a rainy day; many people stayed inside. And the event might have been very dramatic at Fatima, but only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon elsewhere. Maybe you had to be outside in the rain, staring directly at the right part of the horizon, and not that many people were in that category. Against this, the child 6 miles from Fatima and the schoolboy 8 miles from Fatima both described huddling in terror, thinking the world was coming to an end. This doesn’t sound like something only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon. If Dalleur’s location hypothesis is correct, then the child is only 3 miles from the event source - the same distance as Fatima - but the schoolboy is still about 10 miles. Dalleur must believe that the event seemed cataclysmic up to at least a 10 mile radius. So where are all the other distant witnesses? Second, we have at least one explicit negative distant witness. This is Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, who we met before - she missed the miracle when her car got stuck in a ditch a few miles outside Fatima. But she describes the accident as happening “shortly after leaving Torres Novas”, which would put her about seven miles from the event. If it was visible within a twenty miles radius, she shouldn’t have missed the miracle at all! Believers argue that Torres Novas’ view of the event was blocked by the hills. But as we saw above, if we believe Dalleur’s location, we can use trigonometry to estimate the light source’s elevation at >1 mile. This could not have been blocked by the small hills near Torres Novas, and so the explicit negative evidence from Constancio - not to mention the implicit negative evidence from the other 40,000 residents of Torres Novas - becomes damning. Third, Dalleur argues that the light source was hot enough to rapidly dry clothes three miles of land distance away. If so, the area directly underneath it - which includes the small village of Geisteria - should have more or less ignited. But there is no record of any damage to the small villages in that area. Of course, God and the Virgin Mary can presumably choose to have heat work however they want - maybe this was a perfectly uniform heat defying all normal laws of radiation - but this seems somewhat against the spirit of the exercise. Fourth, the witnesses at Fatima agree that a small window opened up in the cloud cover that let them see the sun (or “the sun”). Using the same trigonometry and some educated guesses about cloud height, the window in the clouds must only have been a few thousand feet wide. So why should people many miles away have been able to see the sun at all? Were they using a different window? Fifth, Dalleur claims the light source was not the sun at all, but some sort of artificial miraculous object. But if this were true, how did the miracle end? No witness describes seeing the pale sun disappear. They only say it went back to its usual place in the sky. Later in the day, the clouds cleared and it became a normal sunny day. But nobody reports seeing two suns. At some point, either the first light source must have vanished (which would have been noticed), or there must be two suns in the same sky (which would also have been noticed). Therefore, it seems like the miraculous light source must have been the sun after all, which throws Dalleur’s calculations into disarray. Sixth, although I was not personally able to follow the work Dalleur did to argue that the shadows in the photographs proved two different light sources, I corresponded with two people who did more thorough analyses: I came across Mark Grant in the comments section of Ethan and Evan’s blogs, where he was making some great points and had discovered sources that I missed. In his analysis, he argues that there aren’t enough beam lines to calculate shadows properly, that the direction the people are looking doesn’t match Dalleur’s claimed light source, and that the odd patches on some people’s clothes are more likely photographic defects than artifacts of miraculous drying.
Inline links: his analysis
Geluphu1 mentions across 1 issues

Geluphu is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2025 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the village of Geluphu". It most often appears alongside Aiman Al-Mudaifer, Art Finch, Bhutan.

Reference entry
Geluphu
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 03, 2025
Last seen
February 03, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 25 February 03, 2025
Related pages
Source context
25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
In 2021, Art Finch proposed that Bhutan turn the village of Geluphu into a cool high-tech charter city that would create jobs for Bhutanese youth and prevent them from emigrating. Finch, a South-African-American entrepreneur with Bhutanese connections, got the highest levels of the government to listen to his idea. Then something went wrong. Based on this thread, it seems like a Facebook video about the project went viral, the Bhutanese people had the usual qualms about Thiel-backed billionaire startup Silicon Valley whatever stealing their precious sovereignty (of course it was Thiel-backed), and the deal fell apart.
Inline links: this thread
So far this is the story of every promising charter city, but what happened next was a little different - the Dragon King of Bhutan (of course they’re ruled by a Dragon King) announced that Bhutan would build their own version of the city, without Silicon Valley help. Thus Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023.
Inline links: Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region
Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region1 mentions across 1 issues

Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2025 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thus Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023"; "Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023". It most often appears alongside Aiman Al-Mudaifer, Art Finch, Bhutan.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 03, 2025
Last seen
February 03, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 25 February 03, 2025
Related pages
Source context
25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
So far this is the story of every promising charter city, but what happened next was a little different - the Dragon King of Bhutan (of course they’re ruled by a Dragon King) announced that Bhutan would build their own version of the city, without Silicon Valley help. Thus Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region. Construction started in 2023.
Inline links: Geluphu Mindfulness City Special Administrative Region
General Pershing1 mentions across 1 issues

General Pershing is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Hey! Cafe on the corner of General Pershing and Derbingy". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
General Pershing
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
August 25, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA Contact: Blake Contact Info: blake[at]bertuccelli-booth[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 9th, 11:11 AM Location: Hey! Cafe on the corner of General Pershing and Derbingy. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XFWVRX+G2 Group Link: HTTPS://philosophers.group Notes: Text/Signal/WhatsApp me (Blake) at +1 504 377 3650 or email 1111@philosophers.group ... Happy to answer any questions.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76XFWVRX+G2, HTTPS://philosophers.group
George St1 mentions across 1 issues

George St is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "565 George St, Sydney NSW". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
George St
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
August 25, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 21st, 6:00 PM Location: Shanghai restaurant, Level 2, 565 George St, Sydney NSW Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+79J Group Link: https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlryfcmbcc/sqK6x/i Notes: Please RSVP to meetup.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+79J, https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlryfcmbcc/sqK6x/i
George Street1 mentions across 1 issues

George Street is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2021 and October 22, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Le Monde on George Street". It most often appears alongside Cambridge, Edinburgh, Jesus Green Skatepark.

Reference entry
George Street
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 22, 2021
Last seen
October 22, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Edinburgh Meetups This Weekend
October 22, 2021 · Original source
2: Edinburgh meetup this Sunday, October 24, 5 PM, at LAST SECOND CHANGE it's now at Le Monde on George Street sorry everyone.
Gerlach1 mentions across 1 issues

Gerlach is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I have an empty lot in Gerlach, Nevada to sell you". It most often appears alongside 2017 PTAPP survey, AEI, agglomeration effect.

Reference entry
Gerlach
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 09, 2021
Last seen
December 09, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
And if you don't believe me, I have an empty lot in Gerlach, Nevada to sell you. But don't worry–it's only $0.0054/sqft. Meanwhile, our empty lot in San Francisco is going for $865.21/sqft, which is over 159,000 times as expensive.
Inline links: Gerlach, Nevada
Gerlach, Nevada1 mentions across 1 issues

Gerlach, Nevada is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 09, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "I have an empty lot in Gerlach, Nevada to sell you". It most often appears alongside 2017 PTAPP survey, AEI, agglomeration effect.

Reference entry
Gerlach, Nevada
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 09, 2021
Last seen
December 09, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
And if you don't believe me, I have an empty lot in Gerlach, Nevada to sell you. But don't worry–it's only $0.0054/sqft. Meanwhile, our empty lot in San Francisco is going for $865.21/sqft, which is over 159,000 times as expensive.
Inline links: Gerlach, Nevada
German city of Stuttgart1 mentions across 1 issues

German city of Stuttgart is a recurring place 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 "the German city of Stuttgart in 1927". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 04, 2024
Last seen
December 04, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
Other times the answer was “socialist governments”. For example, the socialist party got elected to local government in the German city of Stuttgart in 1927, and rewarded socialist artists with contracts to build worker housing - the first of what would later be known as “commieblocks”.
Bauhaus worker housing in Stuttgart, 1927 Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go. The architects were unfazed. The Romantic ideal of the artist said that real artists considered their clients Philistines and paid no heed to their preferences; the less you cared about your clients’ opinion, the realer and more romantic an artist you were. There was a slight hiccup in adjusting this philosophy to socialism, but only slight: by this time, classical Marxist philosophy had already ceded to the Bolshevik idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where communist-theory-educated elites needed to re-educate the workers into accepting their own class interests. Wolfe describes the overall effect in Stuttgart:
Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go. The architects were unfazed. The Romantic ideal of the artist said that real artists considered their clients Philistines and paid no heed to their preferences; the less you cared about your clients’ opinion, the realer and more romantic an artist you were. There was a slight hiccup in adjusting this philosophy to socialism, but only slight: by this time, classical Marxist philosophy had already ceded to the Bolshevik idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where communist-theory-educated elites needed to re-educate the workers into accepting their own class interests. Wolfe describes the overall effect in Stuttgart:
Germans1 mentions across 1 issues

Germans is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 28, 2021 and May 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort". It most often appears alongside A Game of Thrones, Africa, African Americans.

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Germans
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1
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1
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May 28, 2021
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May 28, 2021
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Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Don't trust any study which hasn't been replicated Why you shouldn't stand by the bystander effect In 1964 at 3:19am Catherine Genovese was attacked in front of 38 witnesses in a nice neighbourhood in New York. For half an hour none of them did anything to help, allowing her attacker to strike again. Finally at 3:50am one calls it in. The police arrive two minutes later, but it's too late for Kitty. This phenomenon is called the bystander effect. In an experiment where subjects hear someone in trouble they rush to help, but if they know 5 other subjects are also listening in only 62% of them do - it's someone else's problem. If Kitty had awakened only one person she might still be alive. Except that once again I've told you how Kitty Genovse's murder was reported, not what actually happened. Let's try again. At 3:19am Kitty's scream rings out. There aren't 38 people who hear it - it's cold, they have their windows shut, and they're asleep. 38 is the number of people the police interviewed afterwards, most of whom did not witness anything. Of those who do wake up and look out they see a woman lurching down the street, apparently drunk. Nonetheless two of them immediately call the police, who have other drunk people to deal with, and decide this isn't very important. Two people witnessed the actual attack. One did indeed do nothing. The other was scared of being picked up by the police for being drunk and homosexual in a built-up area (this was 1964), so he told a neighbour, who immediately rushed down to Kitty, heedless of the danger. Five days later Kitty's murderer was caught after a bystander noticed a man carrying a TV set out of a neighbour's house. He and a friend called the police, and disabled the man's car. And the bystander effect itself? It's real, and it replicates, for the sort of low jeopardy situations you can get an ethics committee to sign off on, but what about violent situations like Kitty's? They were unstudiable until Marie Lindegaard had the bright idea of using CCTV footage of real incidents to evaluate bystander behaviour in violent situations. In these high stakes situations bystanders intervene 9 times out of 10, with the rate of intervention rising if there are more bystanders. In the studies bystanders were prevented from interacting, but in real life where they can communicate bystanders exhibit spontaneous team work. I guess I need to add 'don't trust the New York Times' to my list of lessons learned (apparently they sometimes threaten to do other bad stuff as well). Part 3: Against Empathy, God and Civilisation Empathy is too narrow The German infantry of WWII was perhaps the most impressive in history. Martin Van Creveld has calculated that the average German solider inflicted 50% more causalities than his allied counterpart. The Italians in Africa hated them, yet admitted they would have been crushed by the British if not for them. When the Soviets were rolling up their eastern frontier, and allied armies had successfully landed across France it was pretty clear that Germany was toast, but they fought on with astonishing tenacity, and a shockingly low desertion rate. Trying to figure out how to break the German morale, allied psychologists interviewed German POWs. Were they motivated by patriotism? A belief in Nazism? A mistaken belief that this war could still be won? An indoctrinated hatred of Jews? No, the secret was friendship. The Germans had a tremendous 'marital ethos', placing a high value on loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Ideology was present, but entirely secondary. Bregman speculates that the German army was better because the friendships of its soldiers were stronger, but admits this is only speculation: interviews of British and American soldiers produced the same results. His key point is that empathy - such as feeling for your fellow soldier - can be a force for evil rather than good, because we can't be empathetic for all humans, only for ones we 'see'. He quotes Professor Paul Bloom who has written a book. "It's about empathy," he says. "I'm against it." (The book is subtly titled Against Empathy). Experiments on babies and toddlers show that they are generally eager to help, but easily manipulated. There's an experiment that shows babies two puppets, one being helpful and the other being mean. After the show all the babies want the helpful one, but show the mean puppet sharing their preference between crackers and green beans, and suddenly they'll take that one over one that was helpful but different from them. Adults are not beyond a bit of empathy manipulation either. People were told the sad story of Sheri Summers, a 10 year in need of a transplant. Would they bump her up the list, ahead of other people whom they knew nothing about, but the doctors who ordered the list believed were better candidates? No, on the whole they wouldn't. Then they took another group given the same scenario, but with the additional instruction to imagine how she felt. Suddenly the majority were up for throwing justice and rationality to the wind (it'd be nice to check whether the effect moved from just below half to just above, but the paper is behind a paywall). Power kills empathy 500 years ago Machiavelli literally wrote the book on how to use immoral means to maintain power. Today this approach is called 'realism', reflecting the confusion between real and cynical with which Humankind began. The Prince has maintained its fame ever since, but being old and famous are no guarantees of being correct, see for example Aristotle on physics, race or women (but don't fall into the trap of thinking Aristotle was wrong about everything - that man was prolific). When Professor Dacher Kelter started working on the psychology of power in the 90s he noticed two things: Everyone assumed Machiavelli was right
Inline links: 9 times out of 10, other bad stuff, paper
Gesher Benot Ya'aqov1 mentions across 1 issues

Gesher Benot Ya'aqov is a recurring place 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 "building complex settlements (e.g., the one found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov )". It most often appears alongside Alan Turing, Amazon, Amazon jungle.

Reference entry
Gesher Benot Ya'aqov
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1
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1
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July 19, 2024
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July 19, 2024
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Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
The feats Everett talks about are things like traveling long distances across continents, possibly even in a directed rather than random fashion; manufacturing nontrivial hand tools (e.g., Oldowan and Mousterian); building complex settlements (e.g., the one found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov); controlling fire; and using boats to successfully navigate treacherous waters. Long before sapiens arose, paleoanthropological evidence suggests that our predecessors Homo erectus did all of these things. Everett argues that they might have had language over one million years ago6.
Inline links: Oldowan, Mousterian, Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Homo erectus, 6
Ghent1 mentions across 1 issues

Ghent is a recurring place 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 "Fair Grounds (cafe in Ghent)". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

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Ghent
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1
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1
First seen
April 10, 2023
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April 10, 2023
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, USA Contact: Willa Contact Info: walambert[at]pm[dot]me Time: Sunday, April 30th, 10:30 AM Location: Pagoda & Oriental Garden, 265 W Tazewell St, Norfolk, VA 23510. Moved to Fair Grounds instead of the Pagoda due to inclement weather. 806 Baldwin Ave # 2, Norfolk, VA 23517. I will wear a green shirt, green & yellow hat, and have an ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8785VP82+XH Notes: We may decamp by 12:45 to wander around downtown and/or get lunch. Possible after-meetup hangout! If you can't make it to the meetup but can do lunch or something a little later, please email me. In Norfolk on a Wednesday in the future? We regularly meet Wednesday evenings at Fair Grounds (cafe in Ghent) from 17:00-19:30. There are meetups in Richmond or occasionally in Charlotesville. Check out Virginia Rationalists on LessWrong for Upcoming Events: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/pLEbtx3BbdaLMXZKi
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8785VP82+XH, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/pLEbtx3BbdaLMXZKi
Gigiri Lane1 mentions across 1 issues

Gigiri Lane is a recurring place 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 "Location: The Gigiri Courtyard, Gigiri Lane". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

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Gigiri Lane
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1
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1
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August 29, 2025
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August 29, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Adil Oyango Contact Info: adil[a t]oya[period]ngo Time: Saturday, September 13th, 1:00 PM Location: The Gigiri Courtyard, Gigiri Lane Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GCRQR84+QR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GCRQR84+QR
GIRONDE1 mentions across 1 issues

GIRONDE is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "GIRONDE, FRANCE". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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GIRONDE
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1
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1
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August 25, 2023
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August 25, 2023
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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
TALENCE (BORDEAUX METROPOLE), GIRONDE, FRANCE Contact: Michael Contact Info: acx-meetup-2023-09-23[at]weboroso[dot]anonaddy[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 3:00 PM Location: Parc Peixotto, middle of the path connecting the two main entrances (once we meet we'll seek which benches to try to grab). Initial position: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.80900/-0.58978 (Send me your phone if you expecte to be late and want an SMS when we deside which direction in the parc we shift) I will bring an A4 sign with «ACX Meetup» on it. I usually wear a mask in high-stranger-density settings. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CPXRC56+H3W Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know that someone is indeed coming. This will be a small meetup with no fixed topic, so whatever you want to discuss, we can discuss it!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CPXRC56+H3W
Glacis1 mentions across 1 issues

Glacis is a recurring place 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 "The park is near Glacis, which is where the "Schueberfouer" will be held at the time of the meetup". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

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Glacis
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1
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1
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August 23, 2021
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August 23, 2021
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Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
HAMBURG, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 4 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: https://w3w.co/cove.wider.solves
Inline links: RSVP, Here, https://w3w.co/cove.wider.solves
LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG (RSVP) Contact: Mathieu Putz, mathieuputz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 4:30 PM, Saturday, August 28 Location: Parc Kinnekswiss near Glacis, on the big open lawn in the North-East. (The park is near Glacis, which is where the "Schueberfouer" will be held at the time of the meetup.) I'll be wearing a burgundy shirt and carrying a sign with "ACX Meetup" on it. I'm 1.93m tall, 22 years old and male, with blonde-brownish short hair. If you email me in advance, I'm happy to send you my phone number. That way, in case you don't find us, you can just call me. I'll also check my email regularly during the meetup. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/pockets.serve.annoys
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/pockets.serve.annoys
Glarus1 mentions across 1 issues

Glarus is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 13, 2022 and May 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the canton Glarus, with a tiny population of 12,000"; "Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus". It most often appears alongside Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Astralcodexten, attention.

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Glarus
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1
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1
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May 13, 2022
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May 13, 2022
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Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
But do we have to rely on neural signatures? Can't we generalize and define it by the all-parts-talk-to-each-other-and-there-is-great-coherence-and-Granger-causality-thingy? So if a robot satisfies this criteria, is it/s/he conscious? The book only touches this question lightly, but I'll add a few of my own thoughts. Since the question about robots can become confusing, let me instead discuss the obvious alternative question if and when the Swiss canton of Glarus is conscious.
For such an egalitarian country, it is not surprising that Switzerland is federal, it consists of 26 cantons (similar to US states, just smaller). Of course, every canton can make its own laws, and most cantons have parliaments for that. But the canton Glarus, with a tiny population of 12,000, does not have a parliament. Instead, they have a Landsgemeinde: once a year, the citizens of Glarus assemble at a big open space, and decide jointly on new laws, the tax rates for the next year, and important offices like judges. Every citizen can rise to speak on any of the discussed items, and can propose changes (which even go through sometimes).
Inline links: Landsgemeinde
So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. In a great rebuttal, Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness."
Inline links: In a great rebuttal
Glasgow1 mentions across 1 issues

Glasgow is a recurring place 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 "while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

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Glasgow
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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
Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Glastonbury1 mentions across 1 issues

Glastonbury is a recurring place 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 "GLASTONBURY". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
Glastonbury
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Spencer Contact Info: focorats[a t]posteo[period]net Time: Sunday, September 28th, 2:00 PM Location: Old Town Library - Go in through the front doors, take a left, first door on the right. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GPHWMG+XXX Group Link: https://focorats.github.io/ Connecticut GLASTONBURY Contact: Richard Contact Info: acx-meetup-hartford[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 1:00 PM Location: Center Green, Glastonbury, CT Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H9P96R+VM Notes: Parking is across the street from the park
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GPHWMG+XXX, https://plus.codes/87H9P96R+VM
Contact: Richard Contact Info: acx-meetup-hartford[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 1:00 PM Location: Center Green, Glastonbury, CT Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H9P96R+VM Notes: Parking is across the street from the park
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87H9P96R+VM
Goa1 mentions across 1 issues

Goa is a recurring place 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 "the Indian states of Goa". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

Reference entry
Goa
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 18, 2025
Last seen
June 18, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
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
Gog and Magog1 mentions across 1 issues

Gog and Magog is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "nations beyond the Caucasus Mountains - especially two called Gog and Magog". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

Reference entry
Gog and Magog
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2023
Last seen
September 19, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
There is no single Alexander Romance. Every culture from Ethiopia to Russia added their own bits and adapted it to their own needs. The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia; the Jewish version adds bits about how Alexander knelt before the High Priest of Jerusalem and said that the LORD was the one true God. Someone from Syria added the bits about Gog and Magog; nobody knows who added the parts with the 36-foot-tall giants, the three-eyed lions, the sphere-people, or the headless men. This makes it hard to review “the” Alexander Romance - some historians describe it as more of a genre than a single story.
Alexander Binds Gog And Magog
Alexander came to the Caucasus Mountains and learned that the nations beyond the Caucasus Mountains - especially two called Gog and Magog - really sucked. Just utter trash nations. You would not believe how terrible these nations were:
Golden Gate Bridge1 mentions across 1 issues

Golden Gate Bridge is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 29, 2024 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "enhanced the part of Claude’s “mind” representing the Golden Gate Bridge". It most often appears alongside @ElytraMithra, Aaron, ACX.

Reference entry
Golden Gate Bridge
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 29, 2024
Last seen
May 29, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
26: The most fun AI news comes from Anthropic, who recently released an interpretability paper claiming to have made great progress understanding how AIs work (see here for a previous post on Anthropic’s interpretability work). To demonstrate their techniques, they enhanced the part of Claude’s “mind” representing the Golden Gate Bridge, producing a version of Claude that tried to integrate the Golden Gate Bridge into every answer:
Inline links: an interpretability paper, here
Golden Gate Strait1 mentions across 1 issues

Golden Gate Strait is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2025 and July 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "They say for three whole days the Golden Gate Strait ran red with the blood". It most often appears alongside AAPI Protection League, Aaron, AI Alignment.

Reference entry
Golden Gate Strait
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 21, 2025
Last seen
July 21, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
July 21, 2025 · Original source
“Too well. We just wanted to make shoplifting a felony again. But Mayor Lurie signed a law re-establishing execution by drawing-and-quartering. I didn’t expect it to pass an Eighth Amendment challenge, but apparently the court’s three liberals voted with Alito and Thomas and it squeaked through. They say for three whole days the Golden Gate Strait ran red with the blood of the slaughtered.”
Golden Horn1 mentions across 1 issues

Golden Horn is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 05, 2024 and July 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "palaces along the Golden Horn". It most often appears alongside 1812, Ada, Albania.

Reference entry
Golden Horn
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 05, 2024
Last seen
July 05, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: Don Juan
July 05, 2024 · Original source
They reached Constantinople, richly gleaming With palaces along the Golden Horn; And, chained, were brought to market, buyers teeming With offers as the slaves looked on, forlorn. Our Juan met an Englishman who, seeming At ease, had from the Russian front been borne: “And taking lately, by Suwarrow’s bidding, A town, was ta’en myself instead of Widin.”
Inline links: Suwarrow’s, Widin
Golden Horseshoe1 mentions across 1 issues

Golden Horseshoe is a recurring place 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 "Golden Horseshoe map". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry
Golden Horseshoe
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 19, 2023
Last seen
May 19, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes, was originally a colony of the Kingdom of France. Then the Kingdom of Great Britain conquered it in 1760. For various reasons, most of the French settlers stayed in Canada rather than emigrating to France or being deported, so at first, a small British elite ruled over a mostly French-speaking and Catholic colony. However, immigration from the British Isles, as well as from the newly seceded United States (loyalists who wanted to live in a monarchy rather than a republic for some reason) eventually tipped the linguistic and cultural balance. The population sorted itself such that the lower part of the valley (what is now Quebec) remained French, while the upper part (what is now Ontario) became English. The exception to this trend was the city of Montreal. Although located in Quebec, it became an English-speaking city and the hub for the British merchant elite. For at least a hundred years, it was the main city in Canada across almost all metrics: population, wealth, manufacturing, political influence. In the middle of the 20th century, Montreal grew enormously and became French-speaking again, owing to immigration from rural Quebec. It became the center of Quebecois culture and, with its increasingly educated population, the breeding ground for new ideas, including separatism. At the same time, the main city in Ontario, Toronto, was growing even faster. Immigrants from all over Canada and other countries poured into it (including Jane Jacobs herself). Sometime around 1970, it became bigger and wealthier than Montreal, and replaced it as the main economic hub. Many people attribute this to the rise of Quebec separatists, which supposedly scared the Anglo elite of Montreal into moving all the banks and companies to Toronto, and, to be sure, some of that happened — but of course, Jacobs prefers explanations that rely on city economics. One of the reasons for Toronto's economic and demographic growth is that it became the nexus of what Jacobs calls a conurbation, and would have called a city region if we were in the other book. In case you craved another concrete example of a city region, here’s a map of Ontario with two ways to define Toronto’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe” (Toronto itself is just the tiny strip in the middle of the red area, next to the lake): Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Golden Horseshoe map: By Vidioman - Crop and trace of Image:Canada (geolocalisation).svg; trace of Image:Ontario subdivisions.PNG. From Wikimedia Commons.
Inline links: Wikimedia Commons
Golden Triangle1 mentions across 1 issues

Golden Triangle is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2025 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I moved to the Golden Triangle after that". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

Reference entry
Golden Triangle
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 10, 2025
Last seen
December 10, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Goleta1 mentions across 1 issues

Goleta is a recurring place 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 "GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
Goleta
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
GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)
Goleta, California, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Goleta, California, USA is a recurring place 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 "GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)
Gotham1 mentions across 1 issues

Gotham is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "should live in a city called Gotham". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

Reference entry
Gotham
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 19, 2023
Last seen
September 19, 2023
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Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
Mass culture follows somewhat different rules than its more prestigious relative: War And Peace sits perfect and untouchable in the temple of genius, but Batman is invented anew every few years. Really Batman is less of a specific book or movie and more of a genre. The genre has some conventions: the protagonist must be a man named Bruce Wayne with a secret identity as a bat-themed superhero; he should be accompanied by a butler named Alfred and a sidekick named Robin; he should live in a city called Gotham. And it has some suggestions: if you need a villain, how about the Joker? If you need a style, how about dark and gritty? Beyond that, anything goes. You can write a story of his origin only tangentially related to anyone else’s, you can add in new adventures, you can shift the tone from gritty to campy and back.
Gothic Italy1 mentions across 1 issues

Gothic Italy is a recurring place 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 "launched a terrible invasion of Gothic Italy". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry
Gothic Italy
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 06, 2021
Last seen
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.”
Gran Colombia1 mentions across 1 issues

Gran Colombia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 07, 2022 and October 07, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "revolutionary Gran Colombia". It most often appears alongside Adraste, America, American Jews.

Reference entry
Gran Colombia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 07, 2022
Last seen
October 07, 2022
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A Columbian Exchange
October 07, 2022 · Original source
Beroe: Yes! Columbus is the brave explorer who set forth across the ocean sea with only three tiny ships, despite the risk that he might fall off the edge of the world. He represents the human urge for discovery, to go forth from safe and settled lands to seek out new horizons. And he’s part of our history. For a while the poets called America itself “Columbia”, and since then we’ve used the name for our national capital district, two of our state capitals, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest, an Ivy League university, three spacecraft, and the mythical goddess of American democracy - not to even mention the Columbian Exposition, revolutionary Gran Colombia, (beautiful) British Columbia, and the modern country of Colombia. Columbus is a part of ourselves - the part that leaves behind the comfortable Old World for something new and exciting.
Grand Bahama1 mentions across 1 issues

Grand Bahama is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2025 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The second-most-populous - and fifth-largest, and most-pretentiously-named - is Grand Bahama"; "Put this way, Grand Bahama seems like a great deal"; "gambling in Grand Bahama". It most often appears alongside African-Americans, Akon, Akon City.

Reference entry
Grand Bahama
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 28, 2025
Last seen
October 28, 2025
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  • 25 October 28, 2025
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25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
The Bahamas’ most populous island is the one with its capital, Nassau. The second-most-populous - and fifth-largest, and most-pretentiously-named - is Grand Bahama, home of Freeport, the archipelago’s second city. Grand Bahama has a unique history. In 1955, it was barely inhabited, with only 500 people scattered across a few villages. The British colonial government turned it into a charter city, awarding the charter to Wallace Groves, an American whose Wikipedia article describes him as a “financier and fraudster” and includes section titles like “Suspicions”, “Legal Troubles”, “Investigations”, and “Allegations Of Underworld Connections”. He was . . . maybe the exact right person for the job, turning Grand Bahama into a Vegas of the Caribbean complete with casinos, jet-setters, swanky hotels, and a flourishing mob presence. Outside the glitzy center, a little heavy industry even managed to develop around the port. After twenty years, the charter zone was “the most modern, well-run, and prosperous part of the [Bahamas]”, and the population had increased to 15,000. Vintage Freeport. I think this casino is now closed, but I can’t figure out what exactly happened to it, or whether the building still stands. The golden age ended around 1970. The government, headed towards independence from Britain, became embarrassed by the private enclave and stripped away some of its rights. Around the same time, Florida liberalized its gambling regime, cutting off the flood of Floridians coming to play the slots. Control of the concession passed from Groves, to his business partners, to his business partner’s widow, and finally to a random collection of only mildly-interested heirs. Two big hurricanes in 2004 were the last straw. Grand Bahama is still a popular cruise destination, it still has a well-built port and surprisingly nice airport, and some of the old hotels still stand. But nobody would describe it as a happening place. Now it’s back in the news. The government is increasingly tired of the heirs’ mismanagement of the island. They want it back. They made what they considered a fair offer. One of the heirs - the St. George family - seems to be on board. The other - the Hayward family - is less cooperative. The government is playing hardball by suing for $357 million of back fees which they say the heirs owe (the heirs deny that they owe this). The case is currently in arbitration. A likely outcome is that the court agrees the heirs owe some amount of money, the heirs can’t afford it, and they agree to sell back to the government. Why does this interest us? The government has talked a big talk about the existing owners not doing enough to exploit Freeport’s economic potential. But the government also isn’t well-placed to exploit it. And they might need some extra cash to buy back control at a fair price. So rumor is that if the heirs decide to sell, instead of the government taking the island back themselves, they might choose to partner with one of the more modern Silicon-Valley-style charter city companies, and give them the charter. The legal agreement is already set up. They’d just need to change the name on the dotted line. Put this way, Grand Bahama seems like a great deal. It’s a duty-free zone with one of the best deepwater ports in the area, making it an ideal center for trans-shipment - loading goods from one ship to another for various logistical and legal reasons. With its lovely climate, low prices, and proximity to the United States (50 miles from Miami), it’s well-placed to be a hub for digital nomads and remote work. Gambling is still legal there. Cruise ships visit regularly. And the beaches look like this: See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)
Inline links: Wallace Groves, Suspicions, Legal Troubles, Investigations, Allegations Of Underworld Connections, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!e8na!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b84b513-e2a3-45b8-9bba-ee0d5e02ac1e_400x278.jpeg, is increasingly tired, a fair offer, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aLaM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1563bfda-32d6-4380-a53b-b776a48428e8_509x370.png, here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds
Vintage Freeport. I think this casino is now closed, but I can’t figure out what exactly happened to it, or whether the building still stands. The golden age ended around 1970. The government, headed towards independence from Britain, became embarrassed by the private enclave and stripped away some of its rights. Around the same time, Florida liberalized its gambling regime, cutting off the flood of Floridians coming to play the slots. Control of the concession passed from Groves, to his business partners, to his business partner’s widow, and finally to a random collection of only mildly-interested heirs. Two big hurricanes in 2004 were the last straw. Grand Bahama is still a popular cruise destination, it still has a well-built port and surprisingly nice airport, and some of the old hotels still stand. But nobody would describe it as a happening place. Now it’s back in the news. The government is increasingly tired of the heirs’ mismanagement of the island. They want it back. They made what they considered a fair offer. One of the heirs - the St. George family - seems to be on board. The other - the Hayward family - is less cooperative. The government is playing hardball by suing for $357 million of back fees which they say the heirs owe (the heirs deny that they owe this). The case is currently in arbitration. A likely outcome is that the court agrees the heirs owe some amount of money, the heirs can’t afford it, and they agree to sell back to the government. Why does this interest us? The government has talked a big talk about the existing owners not doing enough to exploit Freeport’s economic potential. But the government also isn’t well-placed to exploit it. And they might need some extra cash to buy back control at a fair price. So rumor is that if the heirs decide to sell, instead of the government taking the island back themselves, they might choose to partner with one of the more modern Silicon-Valley-style charter city companies, and give them the charter. The legal agreement is already set up. They’d just need to change the name on the dotted line. Put this way, Grand Bahama seems like a great deal. It’s a duty-free zone with one of the best deepwater ports in the area, making it an ideal center for trans-shipment - loading goods from one ship to another for various logistical and legal reasons. With its lovely climate, low prices, and proximity to the United States (50 miles from Miami), it’s well-placed to be a hub for digital nomads and remote work. Gambling is still legal there. Cruise ships visit regularly. And the beaches look like this: See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)
Inline links: is increasingly tired, a fair offer, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aLaM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1563bfda-32d6-4380-a53b-b776a48428e8_509x370.png, here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds
Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)
Inline links: source
Grand Rapids1 mentions across 1 issues

Grand Rapids is a recurring place 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 "GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
Grand Rapids
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN, USA Contact: Peter Contact Info: pjvh[at]umich[dot]edu Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM Location: Lookout Park. I’ll have a nametag and a hammock (weather permitting). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JPX8GJ+VV Notes: Updates will be here- https://petervh.com/GR-ACX
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JPX8GJ+VV, https://petervh.com/GR-ACX
Grapevine1 mentions across 1 issues

Grapevine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry
Grapevine
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 21, 2022
Last seen
September 21, 2022
Outbound links
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Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
September 21, 2022 · Original source
I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)
Inline links: Sacramento Bee, from Google, list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley, Here’s a story, Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation, this unsourced report, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!viUA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3cb60f00-5048-44dc-8ad3-49d9036437e8_632x382.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jJHH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf442355-432b-4ac1-b10d-2ebf17011084_1151x345.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oETP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fe3e7f8-9e13-4295-b608-d071425d6adc_1116x300.png, decreased by about the same amount, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!is_P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09af8185-c8cf-4879-999c-4643ec7d7079_989x590.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!K8wW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ce47fbd-0a84-4461-a96c-07a2d8130d4e_412x104.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vvxn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe95d035a-8dea-410c-8b8f-19acb145859e_676x356.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xlsr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36965205-4cb9-4f93-b855-91cc6b9047b5_450x397.png, Carolina Demography, Okies
Grayton Beach1 mentions across 1 issues

Grayton Beach is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 24, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "February beach retreat at Grayton Beach, Florida". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Reference entry
Grayton Beach
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 24, 2025
Last seen
October 24, 2025
Outbound links
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Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
DI: Yes, I have done fire kasina on the setting sun (and also tried the moon, which is curious disappointing). In particular, I did a bunch of this with the setting sun low on the horizon in the evenings through UV-protective glasses in 2017 on a February beach retreat at Grayton Beach, Florida, finding it produced excellent dots and didn’t appear to hurt my eyes at all, and, yes, they can do a lot of the things you describe. SA: Any other thoughts you have on this theory?
Graz1 mentions across 1 issues

Graz is a recurring place 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 "the first entry in Europe is Graz, Austria"; "GRAZ". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
Graz
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Within each region it’s alphabetized first by country then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Graz, Austria. The exception is the USA, where they’re also alphabetized by state - so the first entry in the USA is Huntsville, Alabama.
Contact: Quang Hiệp Contact Info: hiepbq14408[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 10:00 AM Location: Hẻm 212/2B Nguyễn Trãi, Phường Nguyễn Cư Trinh, Quận 1 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P28QM8P+4J Notes: Please RSVP to my public email so that we can set expectations on how people will be showing up. Europe Austria GRAZ Contact: Robin Contact Info: robinh[period]backup16[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 19th, 6:00 PM Location: Augarten Graz next to the Calisthenics Park on the grass, I will be sitting on the grass with a Volleyball, a book, and a black cap Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVQ3C6P+3C Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs/friends, would be nice to pass the Volleyball a bit (but Volleyball skills are not mandatory) Maybe later we can move to a bar/cafe/ Alternatively for bad weather: Cafe Bali (its near Augarten)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7P28QM8P+4J, https://plus.codes/8FVQ3C6P+3C
Contact: Robin Contact Info: robinh[period]backup16[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 19th, 6:00 PM Location: Augarten Graz next to the Calisthenics Park on the grass, I will be sitting on the grass with a Volleyball, a book, and a black cap Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVQ3C6P+3C Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs/friends, would be nice to pass the Volleyball a bit (but Volleyball skills are not mandatory) Maybe later we can move to a bar/cafe/ Alternatively for bad weather: Cafe Bali (its near Augarten)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVQ3C6P+3C
Great Library1 mentions across 1 issues

Great Library is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 22, 2022 and March 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "sail to Alexandria to consult the Great Library". It most often appears alongside 60s and 70s, Albert Einstein, Andrea Dworkin.

Reference entry
Great Library
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 22, 2022
Last seen
March 22, 2022
Outbound links
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Source context
Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
March 22, 2022 · Original source
I think everything is like this: easy to stand out in when you’re small and new, harder when you’re big and old. I realize biology was several thousand years old in wall clock time by Darwin’s era, but I think it’s entirely possible that it was newer than AI is now in terms of researcher-lifetimes-spent and especially in terms of quality-adjusted researcher-lifetimes spent (a researcher with access to the Internet might be several QARLs comared to a researcher who has to sail to Alexandria to consult the Great Library).
Great Pyramid1 mentions across 1 issues

Great Pyramid is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 13, 2023 and January 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Great Pyramid’s latitude in standard notation equals, to within seven decimal places, the speed of light". It most often appears alongside ancient-aliens theory, Earth, Egyptian pyramids.

Reference entry
Great Pyramid
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 13, 2023
Last seen
January 13, 2023
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Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion
January 13, 2023 · Original source
Consider the pseudohistory claims I discuss in The Pyramid And The Garden. The Great Pyramid’s latitude in standard notation equals, to within seven decimal places, the speed of light in tens of millions of meters per second. In a strict sense, this is a one-in-a-million chance, although the post tries to explain why this might be less impressive than it sounds.
Inline links: The Pyramid And The Garden
So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence. The evidence against is everything else we know about history, archaeology, architecture, and common sense. Why would superadvanced aliens have visited Earth, created one primitive stone structure, and left without doing anything else? Why does the Great Pyramid look so much like other Egyptian pyramids, and fit into our narrative of Egyptian history so well? What about marks on the Great Pyramid suggesting it was made with primitive tools? Et cetera.
Great Pyramid of Giza1 mentions across 1 issues

Great Pyramid of Giza is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 20, 2024 and September 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "There are certainly things older than the White Horse, like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza"; "older than the White Horse, like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza". It most often appears alongside Adam, Alfred, Ballad.

Reference entry
Great Pyramid of Giza
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 20, 2024
Last seen
September 20, 2024
Outbound links
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Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
September 20, 2024 · Original source
Which is why the whole poem is named after the White Horse! There are certainly things older than the White Horse, like Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza, but they are made of stone. Giant stones, hard to knock over or carry away and well suited to survive the elements. You don’t have to do much of anything to preserve them other than leave them alone. The White Horse, on the other hand, is soft chalk lines cut out of the turf. If you left it alone for 20 years it would disappear completely. The only way it can persist is if it is regularly scoured, and yet it has persisted for 3,000 years. The people of the White Horse vale cut the horse out of the grass before the first stone was laid in Rome, and they cut it out to this day. As long as they do the Horse can last another three millennia. As soon as they stop, it will disappear. The same is true for all human institutions: for nations, constitutions, laws, traditions, stories, ambitions, and dreams. You will never “part with weeds forever, or show daisies to the door”.
Great Wall of China1 mentions across 1 issues

Great Wall of China is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 19, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ade the Great Wall of China". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry
Great Wall of China
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 19, 2022
Last seen
August 19, 2022
Outbound links
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Source context
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Facing a very different type of hostile force - the Mongols - he decided to upgrade the Great Wall of China. General Ch’i was responsible for “the construction of castlelike watchtowers along the Great Wall, designed to house 30 to 50 soldiers.” Around 1200 of these three-story towers were built according to his directions.
Greater Manchester1 mentions across 1 issues

Greater Manchester is a recurring place 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 "If you're not in Greater Manchester". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry
Greater Manchester
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 23, 2021
Outbound links
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
MANCHESTER, UK (RSVP) Contact: OK, osnatkatz[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: Whitworth Park, Oxford Road, Manchester, M14 4PW. We'll be gathered by the picnic tables on Oxford Road side. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/tigers.wasp.union Notes: Transport information: The 15/18/42/43/111/142/143/147 buses all stop right outside Whitworth Park, and all take cash or contactless. If you're not in Greater Manchester, you can get to Manchester Piccadilly train station pretty easily (most trains stop here) and walk up from there to the Piccadilly Gardens bus station, where buses to South Manchester depart at least once every 10 minutes. The closest parking place is the Q-Park Wilmslow Park on Hathersage Road, about 10 minutes' walk away. Free parking is somewhere between difficult and impossible to find.
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/tigers.wasp.union
Greater Middle East1 mentions across 1 issues

Greater Middle East is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 24, 2022 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "wars in the Greater Middle East". It most often appears alongside 501(c)(3), 80,000 Hours, 9/11.

Reference entry
Greater Middle East
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 24, 2022
Last seen
June 24, 2022
Outbound links
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Source context
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: Hurting the economy
Greater Tokyo Area1 mentions across 1 issues

Greater Tokyo Area is a recurring place 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 "In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land"; "Greater Tokyo Area map". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry
Greater Tokyo Area
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 19, 2023
Last seen
May 19, 2023
Outbound links
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Source context
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png
Greater Tokyo Area map: By Qrsk075 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0. From Wikimedia.
Inline links: Wikimedia
Greeks1 mentions across 1 issues

Greeks is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2021 and May 24, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Allah, Arabian Nights.

Reference entry
Greeks
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 24, 2021
Last seen
May 24, 2021
Outbound links
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Source context
Book Review: Arabian Nights
May 24, 2021 · Original source
Diversity: Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans (always sorcerers), suspiciously Arabic-seeming Chinese, and blacks. This last group is mostly found as slaves, which felt anachronistic until I looked it up and learned more about the massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East. In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude. Of course, the author is very concerned about the excessive masculinity of black slaves, especially the fact that your wife is probably cheating on you with one. When one adulterer is late to a meeting with her slave beau, he swears "an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and don't think that our manliness is like the poor manliness of white men)" to ignore her from then on unless she is more timely. I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence. Elsewhere in diversity: Jews are usually doctors or merchants, but everyone's a merchant so this isn't so remarkable. The one time a Christian appears in the stories I read, he's a drunkard - which wasn't the stereotype I was expecting, but which I guess makes sense under the circumstances.
Green Dome1 mentions across 1 issues

Green Dome is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "he will die and be buried in the Green Dome". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry
Green Dome
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 13, 2024
Last seen
September 13, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
(An aside: I knew that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, but I didn’t know before reading the book how important he is, and I was surprised by the jihadists constantly talking about the return of Jesus. Apparently, Muslims believe that Jesus is the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, and that he ascended to heaven alive and will return in the End Times to rule gloriously beside another messianic figure, the Mahdi. After that, he will die and be buried in the Green Dome in a tomb left vacant for him next to Muhammad’s. The Last Judgment will happen after his death.)
Inline links: believe
Greenbrier County1 mentions across 1 issues

Greenbrier County is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 17, 2021 and June 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Buckeye Bend Books in Greenbrier County, West Virginia". It most often appears alongside Africa, antelope, August Hirsch.

Reference entry
Greenbrier County
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 17, 2021
Last seen
June 17, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
I happened across this book last summer, literally on the floor of Buckeye Bend Books in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. An overarching history of humanity framed through the importance of viruses written in 1976 was exactly what I needed. Something to put the year 2020 in context and not hitting refresh on the John Hopkins’ virus tracker. While reading with the intent of relating everything to COVID-19, not too much really correlates super well.
Inline links: John Hopkins’ virus tracker
Greensboro1 mentions across 1 issues

Greensboro is a recurring place 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 "ng Garden St, Greensboro, NC 27403 Coordinates". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
Greensboro
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, USA Contact: Randall Hayes Contact Info: vsi[dot]beacon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 5:00 PM Location: Old Town Draught House, 1205 Spring Garden St, Greensboro, NC 27403 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8782358Q+7P Notes: This is a place of business, so no outside food or drink. Sorry. https://oldtowndraught.com/ If you're interested in Sci-Fi, there's a con going on down the block!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8782358Q+7P
Greensboro, North Carolina, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Greensboro, North Carolina, USA is a recurring place 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 "GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, USA Contact: Randall Hayes Contact Info: vsi[dot]beacon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 5:00 PM Location: Old Town Draught House, 1205 Spring Garden St, Greensboro, NC 27403 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8782358Q+7P Notes: This is a place of business, so no outside food or drink. Sorry. https://oldtowndraught.com/ If you're interested in Sci-Fi, there's a con going on down the block!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8782358Q+7P
GREENVILLE, SC1 mentions across 1 issues

GREENVILLE, SC is a recurring place 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 "GREENVILLE, SC ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry
GREENVILLE, SC
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 23, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
GREENVILLE, SC (RSVP) Contact: Steve S, gvilleacxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, October 3 Location: McPherson Park, 120 E. Park Avenue, Greenville, SC 29601 at the shelter nearest the putt-putt course. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/hotel.knee.copper Notes: Please fill out this form if interested in attending!
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/hotel.knee.copper, this form
Greenwich1 mentions across 1 issues

Greenwich is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 11, 2021 and December 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "assessor in Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich in Connecticut". It most often appears alongside /r/georgism, ACX community, Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size.

Reference entry
Greenwich
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
December 11, 2021
Last seen
December 11, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Some friends suggested I get in touch with Ted Gwartney, former professor of Real Estate Appraisal at Baruch College, New York. He has an MAI in Land & Commercial Appraisal from the Appraisal Institute and is former president of the Council of Georgist Organizations. He has a lot of professional experience as an assessor in British Columbia, Southfield in Michigan, and Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich in Connecticut.
Inline links: MAI, Appraisal Institute, Council of Georgist Organizations
Greenwich Village1 mentions across 1 issues

Greenwich Village is a recurring place 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 "She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry
Greenwich Village
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 19, 2023
Last seen
May 19, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
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
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.
Capital. Cities can provide money directly to other regions, for instance as subsidies, loans, or development grants. I’m guessing that Bardou received some assistance from the French national or regional governments at some point. These five forces determine pretty much everything that happens in rural regions. We can distinguish at least seven types of these regions, depending on which forces act upon them. Seven Types of Rural Regions When the five forces act together in a reasonably balanced manner, this creates a type of rural area that Jacobs calls a city region. This is a confusing name, because it absolutely does not mean “any region around a city,” nor does it mean “suburbs.” We know this because Jacobs spends several pages telling us which cities have a city region and which don’t. For instance, Tokyo has a city region, the largest in the world as of 1984, but Sapporo, in northern Japan, doesn’t. Boston, Paris, Milan, and Taipei do; Atlanta, Marseille, Naples, or Manila don’t. A city region, in Jacobs’s terms, is the rural hinterland around a city that gets “radically reshaped” by that city’s economy. It contains a mix of productive farms, prosperous satellite towns, and factories that have moved out of the city, forming a symbiotic network of commercial and industrial enterprises. City regions “are the richest, densest, and most intricate of all types of economies except for cities themselves,” she writes. They arise thanks to the interplay between the five forces. In another of her wonderfully told examples, Jacobs summarizes a book about Shinohata, a real Japanese village (but with a fake name, for anonymity) on the outskirts of the Tokyo area. In the post-war era, Tokyo was expanding rapidly, and so was its city region, eventually reaching Shinohata in the 1950s. Before, most families in the village lived from subsistence farming and exported a little bit of silk to distant places. Almost no one moved out to Tokyo or other cities. But after 1955, the markets, jobs, technology, transplants, and capital from the city all came bearing upon Shinohata at the same time, totally transforming it. The growing city markets meant that most families could switch to new cash crops and make more money. New jobs were opening up in Tokyo for the sons and daughters of Shinohata, many of whom left — prompting the remaining farmers to buy labor-saving equipment, which made productivity soar. Soon, a large food processing factory was transplanted into the village, providing additional jobs and money and causing a variety of smaller businesses to pop up in the area. After a typhoon disaster in 1959, a recovery grant from the government — an example of city capital — was put to good use by providing much needed excavation work and infrastructure development. Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GCSd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9012632f-bf92-4318-9c85-e4b95826dd50_300x450.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png
Greyhawk1 mentions across 1 issues

Greyhawk is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2023 and April 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Middle-Earth vs. Shannara vs. Greyhawk vs. Hyrule". It most often appears alongside Ancient Progenitor Civilization, Aragorn, Arya Stark.

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Greyhawk
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1
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1
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April 28, 2023
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April 28, 2023
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The Psychology Of Fantasy
April 28, 2023 · Original source
I’m using the definite article - “the” fantasy universe - as a deliberate provocation. Each individual game/book/webcomic/CYOA claims to take place in a different setting: Middle-Earth vs. Shannara vs. Greyhawk vs. Hyrule. Some of them make a big deal about how original their backstory is. It still surprises me how closely they blend together, how thin the differences are. They might make the Dark Lord a human-turned-lich instead of a rebellious archangel. Or call their elves “Alfar” or “Aeldi” or some other word that only sounds kind of like “elves”. Their tech level might be Renaissance instead of medieval (if they’re extra daring, very early industrial). Their MacGuffin could be a sword or a book instead of a ring. Maybe the ruins of the Ancient Progenitor Civilization Who Died During A Mysterious Cataclysm are somewhere unexpected, like underground or on a floating island. You can vary a few basic parameters, but the core stays the same.
Grimaldi Cave1 mentions across 1 issues

Grimaldi Cave is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall by our standards". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

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Grimaldi Cave
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1
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1
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June 10, 2022
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June 10, 2022
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Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
a remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.
Grinnell1 mentions across 1 issues

Grinnell is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 17, 2023 and April 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "New spring meetups added since I first posted the list: Grinnell". It most often appears alongside ACX, Astralcodexten Com, Barcelona.

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Grinnell
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1
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1
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April 17, 2023
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April 17, 2023
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Open Thread 272
April 17, 2023 · Original source
1: New spring meetups added since I first posted the list: Barcelona, Bloomington, Brno, Budapest, Cambridge (UK), Canberra, Grinnell, Halifax, Mexico City, Prague, Tel Aviv. Check the list for dates and times. And most meetups should now be displayed on the map on the Less Wrong Community page.
Inline links: spring meetups, the map on the Less Wrong Community page
GRONINGEN1 mentions across 1 issues

GRONINGEN is a recurring place 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 "GRONINGEN Contact: Herman"; "Location: Zondag, Noorderplantsoen, Groningen". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

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GRONINGEN
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March 25, 2025
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March 25, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Tom Contact Info: hello[a t]tomrijntjes[period]nl Time: Sunday, May 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Westerpark, across the street from IJscuypje. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F469VPC+JR Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C1X [ remove this bit] 049OJR7AI0LKYViUkR1 Notes: Hang around and eat ice cream. Pets are welcome. GRONINGEN Contact: Herman Contact Info: Hvdveer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, May 13th, 5:30 PM Location: Zondag, Noorderplantsoen, Groningen. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F586HF4+V63 Group Link: Whatsapp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F82 [remove this bit] ttw1lmJlFCcBs8f8rTu Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/1078005920756368
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F469VPC+JR, https://plus.codes/9F586HF4+V63, https://facebook.com/groups/1078005920756368
Contact: Herman Contact Info: Hvdveer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, May 13th, 5:30 PM Location: Zondag, Noorderplantsoen, Groningen. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F586HF4+V63 Group Link: Whatsapp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F82 [remove this bit] ttw1lmJlFCcBs8f8rTu Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/1078005920756368
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F586HF4+V63, https://facebook.com/groups/1078005920756368
Grosse Pointe1 mentions across 1 issues

Grosse Pointe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2022 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Grosse Pointe of Detroit". It most often appears alongside Amalgamated Bank, Andover, anti-Semitism.

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Grosse Pointe
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1
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1
First seen
December 01, 2022
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December 01, 2022
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Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of . . . the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.
Grosse Schanze1 mentions across 1 issues

Grosse Schanze is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Grosse Schanze, at the statue in front of the main uni building". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

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Grosse Schanze
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1
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August 26, 2022
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August 26, 2022
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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
Grozavesti1 mentions across 1 issues

Grozavesti is a recurring place 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 "Location: Grozavesti - Carrefour Orhideea Food Court - Popeyes". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
Grozavesti
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
BUCHAREST Contact: Toni Contact Info: skyrimtracer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM Location: Splaiul Independenței 210, București 060012 - Grozavesti - Carrefour Orhideea Food Court - Popeyes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP8C3W7+35 Notes: Please RSVP at the email address
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP8C3W7+35
Guadalupe St1 mentions across 1 issues

Guadalupe St is a recurring place 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 "You can also park in the parking lot at 3900 Guadalupe St". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry
Guadalupe St
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 29, 2025
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Silas Barta Contact Info: sbarta[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 11th, 12:00 PM Location: The park by Central Market, 4001 North Lamar, Austin, Texas. We will be by the stone tables by the pond with tarps for shade. We will have a LessWrong and ACX sign and have some tents set up. You can also park in the parking lot at 3900 Guadalupe St (outside the fenced hospital area). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86248746+9C Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/ Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs (though it's a bit of a walk to the indoor bathrooms). We'll provide breakfast tacos (including vegan) and other snacks and drinks. Feel free to bring more, but it's not expected.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86248746+9C, https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/
Guanacaste Province1 mentions across 1 issues

Guanacaste Province is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 08, 2025 and May 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica". It most often appears alongside @DeepGuessr, @scaling01, ACX Discord.

Reference entry
Guanacaste Province
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 08, 2025
Last seen
May 08, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
...salem Israel, was Jerusalem, when prompted where in Jerusalem it guessed Valley of the Cross, which was within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guesse...
...the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km - It guessed Packard Building, Detroit, was Ford Piq...
...- It guessed Jerusalem Israel, was Jerusalem, when prompted where in Jerusalem it guessed Valley of the Cross, which was within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wale...
...as within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km - It guessed Packard Building, Detroit, was Ford Piquette plant...
Guanaja1 mentions across 1 issues

Guanaja is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 08, 2021 and November 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Guanaja, the eastern neighbor". It most often appears alongside America, Apolo Group, Ashkenazi.

Reference entry
Guanaja
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
November 08, 2021
Last seen
November 08, 2021
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  • 21 November 08, 2021
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21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
Coral Beach Village, sited on Utila, the western neighboring island to Roatán is building an apartment building. The promoter (who runs "Free Talk Live" radio apparently) semi-jokingly mentioned that in the next few years they may ask to join Próspera (or possibly becoming a ZEDE of their own). Guanaja Hills sited on Guanaja, the eastern neighbor, are building bungalows and a dock.
Guanajuato1 mentions across 1 issues

Guanajuato is a recurring place 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 "PROUD OF MY MEXICAN ANCESTRY FROM ... GUANAJUATO". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry
Guanajuato
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 24, 2022
Last seen
May 24, 2022
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California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
PROUD OF MY MEXICAN ANCESTRY FROM MICHOACAN/ GUANAJUATO
Guangdong Province1 mentions across 1 issues

Guangdong Province is a recurring place 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 "live-animal market in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

Reference entry
Guangdong Province
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
In May 2003, Guan et al (2003) identified SARS-CoV-like virus in animals in a live-animal market in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. Guan et al (2003) also tested for antibodies among workers in the market. They note that “8 out of 20 (40%) of the wild-animal traders and 3 of 15 (20%) of those who slaughter these animals had evidence of antibody, only 1 (5%) of 20 vegetable traders was seropositive.” This suggests that the majority of the infections of the 11 people with close contact with animals were zoonotic. Among 508 animal traders, 66 (13%) tested positive for IgG antibody to SARS associated coronavirus by ELISA, while the control groups including hospital workers, Guangdong CDC workers, and healthy adults at clinic had an antibody prevalence of 1–3%.
Guangzhou1 mentions across 1 issues

Guangzhou is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 22, 2023 and February 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Guangzhou was also a bust". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agin, American.

Reference entry
Guangzhou
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 22, 2023
Last seen
February 22, 2023
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Book Review: The Geography Of Madness
February 22, 2023 · Original source
This image (source) of a witch stealing a man’s penis, with a box of previously-stolen penises to her right accompanies the 1411 poem “Flowers Of Virtue” in its 1486 edition. Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486, so if the original text of Flowers Of Virtue contained the incident this picture refers to, it would predate Malleus. But the original text is written in poetic medieval German and I can’t find a good translation. When I wrote my review of the Malleus, people were surprised at the penis-stealing witch chapters. Yet nothing could possibly be less surprising; the penis-stealing witches are timeless and omnipresent. When commenters continued to doubt, I promised them this review of Frank Bures’ Geography Of Madness. II. Frank Bures is a journalist. In 2001, he came across an unusual BBC article: a mob had killed twelve people in Nigeria, believing them to be penis-stealing witches. A few months later, a similar article: five people, Benin. He tried to pitch a story about the phenomenon to his editor, who “said he couldn’t pay me to fly to Nigeria and find essentially . . . nothing”. For some reason - and this is the point at which I start to worry about narrator reliability - Bures became obsessed with this. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He started scraping together money to visit Africa on his own, story be damned: Nigeria gnawed at me. I knew that it was a terrible time to leave. I knew that [my wife] Bridgit, newly pregnant, wouldn’t want me to go. But I also knew that I had to, and that if I didn’t it would be a lifelong regret. . . three months later, I was the lone tourist on a plane full of Nigerians descending to Lagos. Africa is a relative newcomer to penis-stealing witches: The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan in the 1960s. But in the mid- to late seventies in Nigeria, there were waves of well-documented cases. One of these happened in the northern city of Kaduna, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu was working in his office when a policeman arrived, escorting two men. One of them said he needed a medical assessment: He had accused the other of making his penis disappear. As with [a previously discussed incident], this had caused a disturbance in the street. During Ilechukwu’s examination, he later recounted, the victim stared straight ahead while the doctor examined his penis and pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote in the Transcultural Psychiatric Review, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.” According to Ilechukwu, this was part of an epidemic of magical penis theft that swept through Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” During an incident, the victim would yell: “Thief! My genitals are gone!” Immediately, a culprit would be identified, apprehended by a crowd, and often killed. …but it’s been making up for lost time. Bures was able to find and interview one previous penis theft victim, plus the friend of another. Both described similar stories: someone had bumped up against them under weird circumstances, they immediately noticed their penis was much smaller than usual, they called out the culprit, and - apparently because the witch involved didn’t want to get in trouble - their penis was restored. Whatever weird itch this topic had given Bures, this didn’t satisfy him. He writes, very lucidly, about a desire to get closer to “the story”. He started bumping up against random Nigerians in suspicious ways, hoping one of them would accuse him of stealing their penis. Bures was an obvious foreigner, and a these panics often resulted in the suspected penis-stealer getting lynched, so this was a crazy thing to do. He could easily have died. Instead, everyone politely ignored him, nothing happened, and a slightly-disappointed Bures flew back to his poor family and abandoned his weird obsession. III. …for four years. After that the bug bit him again and he flew to Asia, long a center of penis-stealing witch activity. There are nature documentaries on lions, dolphins, even dinosaurs. They all share a common pattern: you talk about your subject’s habitat, their diet, their behaviors. The Asian half of The Geography Of Madness has the feel of a nature documentary on penis-stealing witches. And the last beat of every nature documentary has to be: this majestic creature, which once roamed from one end of the region to the other, is now endangered, threatened by increasing globalization and industrial activity. This is true for the witches also. Bures’ time in Hong Kong was a bust. There was a penis theft panic there forty years earlier, and he was able to interview some of the doctors who treated it. But they all said that was long ago. Now everybody is Westernized and has Western fears like vaccine injury or structural racism. They get Western mental disorders like depression and anorexia. The idea of witches stealing their penises seems as risible to them as it probably does to you. Singapore was also a bust. Bures had hoped it wouldn’t be, because it’s full of Malaysians, and Malaysia holds a special place in history as the spot where penis-stealing witches first made contact with Western science. The Malaysian word for the condition is koro (it means “head of a turtle”, based on an analogy to the penis retracting into the body the same way a turtle’s head retracts into its shell), and it is by this name that the condition gets listed in the DSM and the rest of the medical literature. Neither I nor Bures was able to find many ethnic Malays worrying about koro; most of the activity seems to be from Malaysian-Chinese. The Chinese definitely worry about it, attributing it to a wide variety of causes including poisoning, yin-yang imbalance, and - yes - witches. But Bures found nothing among any ethnicity. Once again, all the doctors said it used to be common, but disappeared as the city industrialized and adopted Western ways. Guangzhou was also a bust. The doctors said the same thing - in the old days, there would be huge epidemics of koro, social contagions that would impact hundreds of people at once. Now only a few superstitious rural people still believed. One traditional healer said he saw “three or four” cases a year. All the educated people had moved on. I once saw a nature documentary on Tasmanian tigers. Most people believe these have been extinct since 1930. Still, there are occasional unconfirmed sightings, especially in a remote area called Cape York, and every so often some scientists trudge off to Cape York with traps and cameras in the hopes of getting lucky. Bures decides end his own nature documentary with an expedition to the Cape York of the penis-stealing witches. This is a remote island village in China called Lin’gao, where in 1984: . . . rumors spread of a fox ghost - sometimes disguised an old woman roaming the land—collecting penises in covered baskets she carried on a shoulder pole. When two young men approached her and told her to uncover the baskets, they looked inside, saw that the baskets were filled with penises and died instantly of fright. Panic about koro would hit a village and last three to four days. When residents heard about a case in a neighboring village, the panic would subside, since that meant the ghost had moved on. The attacks slowly made their way around the island. The ghost struck at night, when villagers were sleeping. A chill would creep into the room, and suddenly the victim would feel his penis shrinking inward. He would grab it and run outside for help. A twenty-eight-year-old office worker was at home one night when: > “ . . . he heard a gong being beaten and the terrifying noises made by people who were panicking in a nearby neighborhood. He suddenly became anxious and experienced the sensation that his penis was shrinking. He was seized with panic and shouted loudly for help. Several men in the neighborhood rushed in and tried to rescue him by forcefully pulling his penis and making loud sounds to chase away the evil ghost that was thought to be affecting him.” Neighbors and family members were enlisted in rescue operations. Victims were beaten with sandals and slippers while the middle finger of their left had was squeezed, so that the ghost could exit the body there. The epidemic engulfed the island, with the exception of the Li and Miao minorities, who seemed to be immune to such fears. Researchers estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were affected, but that “no one died from genital retraction.” One baby, however, did die when his mother tried to feed him pepper juice, and a girl was beaten to death during a two-hour exorcism. “Numerous men suffered injuries to their penises as a result of ‘rescuing’ actions.” Iron pins were sometimes inserted through the nipples of women to prevent retraction, which caused infections as well. This was, as far as anyone knows, the last great koro epidemic in Asia. Bures had a terrible time getting to Lin’gao. He had equal trouble getting an interpreter; the natives spoke a language called Be, very distantly related to Thai but not at all to regular Chinese. Finally he found someone who was able to contact a local shaman. Like any good doctor, the shaman referred him to a specialist - in this case, the designated anti-ghost shaman, who lived in a different village. He spent most of his time off on various ghost-fighting missions, but eventually Bures and his team were able to track him down. I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?” . . . and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.” IV. So as a nature documentary, The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust. Still, Bures rescues it with some great analysis of culture-bound mental illness. A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too. Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something something penis something witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing. In Rajasthan, India, people come to the hospital with gilahari (lizard) syndrome. Patients say a lizard-like mass, sometimes visible as a skin swelling, is crawling around the body. They express terror that it will reach their airway and suffocate them. Japanese people may contract jikoshu-kyofu, a debilitating fear that they have terrible body odor. No amount of reassurances by friends and psychiatrists can convince these people that they smell normal, nor will any number of deodorants or perfumes make them comfortable. The French suffer from bouffée délirante, where a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes completely psychotic, with well-formed hallucinations and delusions - then recovers just as suddenly, sometimes over hours or days. This is not how psychosis works anywhere except France and a few former French colonies. Traditional Chinese medicine monitors the balance between yin and yang. The male orgasm can deplete yang, and sure enough in China (but nowhere else) some men suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion after they orgasm. “The symptoms can last weeks to months after a single orgasm, [and include] chills, dizziness, [and] backache”. The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US common psychological origins. I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time - one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything - was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative - he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam - and eventually left against medical advice. After going down the list, Bures asks the correct next question: how do we know whether or not our own mental illnesses are just as culture-bound as the Japanese or Malaysians’? Cultures that believe in witches have witch-related culture-bound illnesses; cultures that believe in demons have demon-related ones. We believe in science, so we should expect sciencey-sounding culture-bound illnesses, and these might be hard to tell apart from other, more physical conditions. So how suspicious should we be, and of what? Certainly we have some culture-bound mental illnesses. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a condition where some people supposedly become very sick when exposed to electromagnetic fields (like from cell phones). This sounds very scientific and makes perfect sense according to our culture, but researchers have found that placebo electrical devices make them exactly as sick as real ones, and that devices they don’t know about don’t make them sick at all. These people’s pain is real, and their lives are very difficult (although a few have found refuge in the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area in Virginia where the government enforces a ban on electromagnetic transmissions for secret military reasons). But their condition only afflicts them because they believe in it, much like with koro. Fine, everyone knows that one’s not real. What about DSM-style mental disorders, the stuff everyone’s supposed to believe in? Are those culture-bound? Unfortunately, I think Bures kind of flubs this section. He decides to focus on PMS (premenstrual syndrome), which is officially included in the DSM as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). After discussing the history of hysteria, he writes that: Today, hysteria is never diagnosed, except by unwise husbands. In 1931, however, an American gynecologist named Robert Frank revived the idea in a new guise. He published an article titled, “The hormonal causes of premenstrual tension.” Frank described symptoms that occurred in the week before menstruation: irritability, bloating, fatigue, depression, attacks of pain, nervousness, restlessness, and the impulse for “foolish and ill considered actions,” due to ovarian activity. Again, the cause was the uterus. Then in 1953, British physician Katharina Dalton elaborated on this, arguing the condition came from fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone. She called it Premenstrual Syndrome, and soon symptoms grew to include: anxiety, sadness, moodiness, constipation or diarrhea, feeling out of control, insomnia, food cravings, increased sex drive, anger, arguments with family or friends, poor judgment, lack of physical coordination, decreased efficiency, increased personal strength or power, feelings of connection to nature or to other women, seizures, convulsions, asthma attacks, not to mention flare ups in asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, and multiple sclerosis. If any of these symptoms occurred in the second half of the menstrual cycle, one had PMS. Estimates of the number of women afflicted ranged from 5 percent to 95 percent. In the 1980s, three women in the UK were tried for arson, assault and manslaughter. The three all claimed they had diminished responsibility due to PMS, and got reduced sentences on the condition that they underwent hormone treatment. After that, according to one study, American women flooded doctors with requests for help with their PMS. “Popular groups like PMS Action were founded to promote recognition and treatment of PMS by medical professionals. Private PMS clinics began to appear in the USA, modeled after those in the UK, and progesterone therapy was enthusiastically adopted, much to the chagrin of many gynaecologists who viewed its use as ‘unscientific’ and ‘commercial’, not to mention unlicensed." Based on all this, the 1987 version of the DSM-III included a new category: Late Luteal Phase Disorder (luteal refers to progesterone). It was proposed as a topic for further research, but despite the absence of such research, it was included in the 1994 edition of the DSM-IV under the name Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, or PMDD.96 In 2013, in the DSM-5, it was given its own category as a full-fledged mental illness. Yet neither PMS nor PMDD occur in most cultures. There are no biomarkers to measure them by. No conclusive correlation has ever been found between estrogen or progesterone levels and PMS. As one study noted, “the more time that women of ethnic minorities spend living in the United States, the more likely they are to report PMDD. Thus, if we are to accept PMDD as a reified medical disorder, then we must also accept exposure to U.S. culture as a risk factor for contracting PMDD.” If it is a syndrome at all, it’s a cultural one. I asked my wife what she thought of this, and she told me: The day before her first-ever period, as a teenager, when she had never really thought about PMS, she felt exceptionally weird, emotional, and generally off, to the point where it seemed to demand an explanation. Then she had her first-ever period, and retroactively explains it as PMS.
Inline links: source, my review of the, Geography Of Madness, Be, gilahari (lizard) syndrome, jikoshu-kyofu, bouffée délirante, suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion, run amok, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, National Radio Quiet Zone
Guantanamo1 mentions across 1 issues

Guantanamo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2022 and September 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "He failed to close Guantanamo, failed to end mass incarceration". It most often appears alongside 9-11, AI, Better Angels.

Reference entry
Guantanamo
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 28, 2022
Last seen
September 28, 2022
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Source context
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
But partly it’s because the world is so much worse than we’re used to, that it’s hard not to wilt when confronted with the badness of even something quite a bit better than normal. I think Obama was a better-than-average president. But if someone predicted “Oh yeah, Obama, great guy” - well, I mean, he did drone-bomb a lot of children. He failed to close Guantanamo, failed to end mass incarceration, failed to make significant progress on the climate, and had an important journalistic organization call his administration the most closed, anti-transparency, and hostile to investigation presidency since Nixon. By his own admission, he messed up his handling of the Libyan revolt so badly that the country is now controlled by warlords and re-instituting slavery. I’m not trying to attack Obama here! Probably some of these things are exaggerations others aren’t really his fault. This is my point! It sounds kind of hollow when I say that! Even good presidents will have a lot of things going on that are so bad that it feels cruel or hollow to say they were good.
Inline links: call his administration, messed up his handling
Guatemala City1 mentions across 1 issues

Guatemala City is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Universidad Francisco Marroquin, a libertarian university in Guatemala City". It most often appears alongside Alaska, America, Amisulpride.

Reference entry
Guatemala City
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 14, 2021
Last seen
April 14, 2021
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Source context
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
In terms of secondary education, they had a deal with Technical University of Munich, a very well regarded German university, but it looks like German leftists pressured them into withdrawing. Currently they are investigating a partnership with Universidad Francisco Marroquin, a libertarian university in Guatemala City which (for example) has a "Ludwig von Mises library [which] has 100,000 visitors annually and is the most extensive collection of works on liberty in Latin America", and whose alumni include eg one of Julian Assange's defense lawyers.
Inline links: German leftists pressured them into withdrawing, Universidad Francisco Marroquin, one of Julian Assange's defense lawyers
Guatemalans1 mentions across 1 issues

Guatemalans is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 24, 2026 and February 24, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Guatemalans". It most often appears alongside #BuildTheWall, 2016 election, Anti-Reactionary FAQ.

Reference entry
Guatemalans
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 24, 2026
Last seen
February 24, 2026
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Issue trail
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Source context
Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
February 24, 2026 · Original source
My “favorite” example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some #BuildTheWall types saying that illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. Some data journalist got good statistics and proved that the number of Mexicans illegally entering the country was actually quite low. When I looked into it further, I found that this was true - illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Hondurans/Guatemalans/Salvadoreans etc entering through Mexico. If you counted those, illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs.
Guelph1 mentions across 1 issues

Guelph is a recurring place 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 "Location: David G. Porter Memorial Japanese Garden, OAC Centennial Arboretum Centre, 200 Arboretum Rd, Guelph, ON". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry
Guelph
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 01, 2026
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Joseph Contact Info: ta1hynp09[@]relay[.]firefox[.]com Time: Thursday, April 16th, 7:00 PM Location: Irrational Brewing 10643 124 St #109, Edmonton, AB T5N 1S5, Canada We will have an ACX sign at our table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG Notes: Event Page: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/czvNZKJPeF3tx3cbt/acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-3 GUELPH Contact: Sajid Contact Info: msr[.]sajid1283[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 3rd, 1:00 PM Location: David G. Porter Memorial Japanese Garden, OAC Centennial Arboretum Centre, 200 Arboretum Rd, Guelph, ON N0B Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MXGQRM+3Q5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/czvNZKJPeF3tx3cbt/acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-3, https://plus.codes/86MXGQRM+3Q5
Contact: Sajid Contact Info: msr[.]sajid1283[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 3rd, 1:00 PM Location: David G. Porter Memorial Japanese Garden, OAC Centennial Arboretum Centre, 200 Arboretum Rd, Guelph, ON N0B Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MXGQRM+3Q5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86MXGQRM+3Q5
GUERNSEY1 mentions across 1 issues

GUERNSEY is a recurring place 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 "GUERNSEY". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry
GUERNSEY
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 30, 2024
Last seen
March 30, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
GUERNSEY Contact: John Contact Info: Jangliss[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Dorset Arms Public Bar (right hand side) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CXVFF26+32J
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CXVFF26+32J
Guilford1 mentions across 1 issues

Guilford is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 19, 2026 and March 19, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "those millionaire dipshits in Guilford". It most often appears alongside Baltimore, calea zacatechichi, Causal Ocean.

Reference entry
Guilford
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 19, 2026
Last seen
March 19, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Being John Rawls
March 19, 2026 · Original source
“Hell no,” said John Rawls Alcoholic. “If I get rich, you think I would share it with those millionaire dipshits in Guilford and Roland Park? Hell no! That shrink might be a piece of shit, but his mind-reading drug got my number.”
Guinea1 mentions across 1 issues

Guinea is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2025 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal ... within a three hour flight radius". It most often appears alongside African-Americans, Akon, Akon City.

Reference entry
Guinea
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 28, 2025
Last seen
October 28, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
  • 25 October 28, 2025
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Source context
25
October 28, 2025 · Original source
A financial hub for the region (”Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal . . . they’re all within a three hour flight radius of there”)
Guizhou Province1 mentions across 1 issues

Guizhou Province is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 18, 2024 and January 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "decide to nuke guizhou province". It most often appears alongside @april, @somefoundersalt, ACX.

Reference entry
Guizhou Province
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 18, 2024
Last seen
January 18, 2024
Outbound links
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Source context
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
they all look at each other for a moment and decide to nuke guizhou province.
Gulf Breeze, FL1 mentions across 1 issues

Gulf Breeze, FL is a recurring place 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 "GULF BREEZE, FL ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry
Gulf Breeze, FL
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
GULF BREEZE, FL (RSVP) Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: The outdoor deck at The Grey Taproom. I'll be wearing a blue t-shirt with a crudely drawn wizard on it that says Pavement Ist Rad. It's a band shirt fyi. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/legroom.trustees.feather Notes: If no one emails me saying they'll be there, I won't be there.
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/legroom.trustees.feather
Gulf of Papagayo1 mentions across 1 issues

Gulf of Papagayo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 08, 2025 and May 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica". It most often appears alongside @DeepGuessr, @scaling01, ACX Discord.

Reference entry
Gulf of Papagayo
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 08, 2025
Last seen
May 08, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
...- It guessed Jerusalem Israel, was Jerusalem, when prompted where in Jerusalem it guessed Valley of the Cross, which was within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactl...
...as within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km - It guessed Packard Building,...
...ong: 760 km - It guessed Jerusalem Israel, was Jerusalem, when prompted where in Jerusalem it guessed Valley of the Cross, which was within 1 km of the correct answer. - It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wale...
Gulf states1 mentions across 1 issues

Gulf states is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2021 and July 01, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Alvaro brings up Gulf states , which got very rich without this changing their national IQ much". It most often appears alongside Africa, Allodium, Alvaro de Menard.

Reference entry
Gulf states
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 01, 2021
Last seen
July 01, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
Followed by some examples of this working or not working. Alvaro brings up Gulf states, which got very rich without this changing their national IQ much. Somehow people missed bringing up Ireland, which is the best example of a country whose measured IQ changed a lot after it developed.
Inline links: Gulf states, best example
Gulfport1 mentions across 1 issues

Gulfport is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry
Gulfport
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 21, 2022
Last seen
September 21, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
September 21, 2022 · Original source
I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)
Inline links: Sacramento Bee, from Google, list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley, Here’s a story, Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation, this unsourced report, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!viUA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3cb60f00-5048-44dc-8ad3-49d9036437e8_632x382.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jJHH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf442355-432b-4ac1-b10d-2ebf17011084_1151x345.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oETP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fe3e7f8-9e13-4295-b608-d071425d6adc_1116x300.png, decreased by about the same amount, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!is_P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09af8185-c8cf-4879-999c-4643ec7d7079_989x590.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!K8wW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ce47fbd-0a84-4461-a96c-07a2d8130d4e_412x104.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vvxn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe95d035a-8dea-410c-8b8f-19acb145859e_676x356.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xlsr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36965205-4cb9-4f93-b855-91cc6b9047b5_450x397.png, Carolina Demography, Okies
Gungoren1 mentions across 1 issues

Gungoren is a recurring place 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 "council member in the Istanbul district of Gungoren"; "member in the Istanbul district of Gungoren". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry
Gungoren
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
March 18, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
In the rhetoric of the new RP, condemning Turks for their wayward lifestyles took a backseat to castigating the establishment and the West for Turkey's ills. By shifting the blame this way, Erbakan hoped to reach audiences that previously had been put off by the Islamists' accusatory jeremiads. This new message also came with new optics: RP television ads began to feature people who seemed to come from all walks of life, and who evinced varying levels of piety. Even uncovered women went on display. Filiz Ergun, a dentist and council member in the Istanbul district of Gungoren who became one of the faces of the new RP, did not cover her hair, and she insisted that the party embrace modern professional women like her. A bigger stir was made when Gulay Pinarbasi, a fashion model and actress, joined the party in 1993. She began covering her hair, and pledged to live a completely different life in line with the teachings of "Islam".
Guwahati1 mentions across 1 issues

Guwahati is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 14, 2021 and September 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "as far north-east as Guwahati or even further". It most often appears alongside Adivasis, affirmative action, Ahmedabad.

Reference entry
Guwahati
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
September 14, 2021
Last seen
September 14, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
...found himself travelling via Siliguri, as far north-east as Guwahati or even further, and deep in a 'remote jungle'. There, miles from civilization, he stumbled across a hermit or medicant with whom he struct up a friendship. The man was 'very thin, it seemed that he had transparent skin'. There was little sense of urgency in Narendra's journeying, and he spent about a month helping in the ascetic's garden plot, spending time dicussing 'spiritual matters', before he decided to move on.
Guyenne1 mentions across 1 issues

Guyenne is a recurring place 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 "Philip eyed Guyenne, the last bit of France left in English hands"; "the French wanted to get Guyenne back". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Guyenne
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
This produced a succession crisis. The two available candidates to succeed him were the Duke of Guyenne, son of Philip the Fair's daughter Isabella,9 and the Count of Orleans, son of Philip the Fair's brother Charles of Valois. Since the Duke of Guyenne was Edward III, King of England, and the Count of Orleans wasn't, the choice was obvious and France declared that the law had always been that the throne could never pass through a woman. Edward III was sixteen, in England, and busy, so he raised no meaningful objection, and Philip of Valois, called "The Fortunate" because he got to be king, inherited. Twelve years later, Philip eyed Guyenne, the last bit of France left in English hands from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s inheritance, and, observing the English busy in Scotland, he made his move.
Inline links: 9
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?
Inline links: 10
Göbekli Tepe1 mentions across 1 issues

Göbekli Tepe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "at Göbekli Tepe: Activities around the stone temples"; "why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe?". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry
Göbekli Tepe
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
June 10, 2022
Last seen
June 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
Nor did the agricultural revolution, even as it was occurring, result in one way of living; it seems like during the transition toward farming very different societies were possible, even those that lived in proximity to one another, the exact same as hunter-gatherer societies. Consider the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East; sectors which are themselves demarcated by Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest construction of stone megaliths, dated to around 9,000 BC.
(a) Göbekli Tepe, with its circular and rectangular regions, as seen from above. (b-c) Complex representational stone carvings. Between the upland and lowland sectors we see, again, political differentiation. North of Göbekli Tepe, in the upland, there was a city wherein at
Between the upland and lowland sectors we see, again, political differentiation. North of Göbekli Tepe, in the upland, there was a city wherein at
GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY1 mentions across 1 issues

GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY is a recurring place 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 "GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry
GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY
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: Omar Contact Info: info[at]rationality-freiburg[dot]de Time: Friday, October 11th, 06:00 PM Location: Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9, 79100 Freiburg Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9 Group Link: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/ Notes: If possible read one of the articles listed here: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/events/2024-10-11-acx-meetup-fall-2024/ If not, come anyway :-) GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY Contact: Fernando Contact Info: fernando[dot]unterricht[a t]gm ail[do t]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 02:00 PM Location: Grave of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Cheltenham Park, Göttingen. I will be wearing an orange T-shirt and carrying a sign with ACX on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3FGWJR+MW Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/G1xJFRK [ignore this part] m09vDC7Yxu9mubC Notes: I will bring some drinks and snack, so nobody else has to. But of course, feel free to bring anything you want to add!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9, https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/events/2024-10-11-acx-meetup-fall-2024/, https://plus.codes/9F3FGWJR+MW
Gādhrakūta1 mentions across 1 issues

Gādhrakūta is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 04, 2023 and January 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’". It most often appears alongside AI Circle, Anthropic, Asana.

Reference entry
Gādhrakūta
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
January 04, 2023
Last seen
January 04, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“Glad you asked! I’m working on a new translation of the Pali Canon. I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’. Some parts don’t even have to be retranslated! The sutras say that you attain the formless jhanas by ‘passing beyond bodily sensations and paying no attention to perceptions of diversity’. See, it’s perfect! Red state conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity!”