Astral Codex Ten

Places: I

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Places: I

Cities, neighborhoods, regions, and other geographic anchors. This section collects the I slice of the category index.

Reference Index

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India71 mentions across 71 issues

India is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 71 times across 71 issues between February 28, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "It should have been India. A couple of studies suggest seropositivity numbers of 20%+"; "colonial oppression in India"; "colonial oppression in ... India". It most often appears alongside China, Scott, Germany.

Article page
India
Mention count
71
Issue count
71
First seen
February 28, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 161
February 28, 2021 · Original source
1: On my predictions thread, I included a prediction that expert consensus would be that the US had the highest unofficial coronavirus death toll of any country. I graded it true. Commenters made a strong case that I was wrong, and it should have been India. A couple of studies (see eg here) suggest seropositivity numbers of 20%+. This is pretty similar to the US’ percentage, but India has three times as many people. Among known cases, India’s case fatality rate is half the US’; if the same pattern holds among missed cases, India probably has 1.5x the US’ death toll (it would be better to use excess mortality numbers, but I can’t find this). This would mean the official Johns Hopkins numbers for the India:US case ratio are off by a factor of four, and probably the same is true for lots of other Third World countries. I’m adding this to my Mistakes Page.
Inline links: Commenters made, here, US’ percentage
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
By making possible the division & specialization of labor (you dig bait, I'll catch fish) Capital is a force multiplier that supercharges the productive power of labor. It doesn't supply labor with raw materials (nature does), nor does it provide for the maintenance of workers (who eat bread by the sweat of their own brow). George says this is why capital isn't a limit on industry. ...okay, George grants that capital may limit the form of industry. You can't plow without a plow or milk without a cow. George also grants that the lack of specialized tools can greatly limit productivity because you don't get the benefit of the force-multiplying effect of capital. Um... aren't you contradicting yourself here, Mr. George? You spent all this time hammering home your doctrine of wages to prove that capital doesn't limit industry, but you just said its absence can limit both the form and the productivity of labor! Time to unpack what we mean by "limit" and be super clear about it from now on: But to say that capital may limit the form of industry or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing from saying that capital limits industry. Okay, what do you mean? For the dictum of the current political economy that "capital limits industry," means not that capital limits the form of labor or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the exertion of labor. Okay, I think I see what he's saying. The existing school of thought says that because capital provides labor with both materials and maintenance, therefore if capital dries up, labor productivity must go down because workers will have nothing to work on, and nothing to eat or wear. Labor is thus "limited" by capital, for without it is literally and metaphorically starved for capital. But George says no – the only way capital actually "limits" productivity in real life is in the degrees by which it force-multiplies labor's productivity and unlocks certain forms of labor in the tech tree. The kind of "limit" George objects to is the idea that you need capital just to get any work done at all, or that without capital to sustain it, labor will shrivel up. Instead, capital is rocket fuel that labor supplies to itself by investing a portion of its wages. And yet, with all the awesome slots we've unlocked on the tech tree, and barrels and barrels of rocket fuel to fire up eager laborers, we still find our economy sinking into mysterious depressions. Something is gumming up the works, but it's not a simple scarcity of capital: the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution Or as G.K. Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This might seem like a pedantic distinction – misallocated capital could be said to be "scarce" capital – but they're not the same thing at all. As Francis Bacon said in 1625: Riches were like [Manure]: When it lay, upon an heape, it gave but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit. Because the prevailing theories of George's time are based on incorrect ideas about the relation between wages and capital, "all remedies, whether proposed by professors of political economy or workingmen, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by the increase of capital or the restriction of the number of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be condemned." In short, more investment, more protectionism, and more efficiency programs can't, won't, and haven't fixed poverty and industrial depressions because they all proceed from false premises. Having finally beaten the nexus of wages, capital, and labor into a bloody pulp, George turns his eyes towards another leading theory for why everything is terrible: the specter of overpopulation. II. Population and Subsistence The entire second book might as well be titled "Why Malthus is Dumb and Wrong and Bad." It's dedicated to dunking on Malthusianism, a philosophy that ascribes economic crises to the exponential growth of the human population, which must necessarily end in catastrophe. according to Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. George attacks Malthusian ideas not just because they're wrong, but because they make it easier to accept the prevailing theory of wages (as more capital is allocated, laborers will keep popping up like weeds to gobble it up, so wages must eternally stagnate). George draws a straight line between these faulty ideas and holocausts and genocides – specifically citing how colonial oppression in China, India, and Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds. One million people died in the English-engineered Irish potato famine alone, and when you add in those who fled the entire population declined by 25% percent. And this isn't a tenuous link either – George directly connects the completely avoidable famine to his favorite bugbear, private landownership and extortionate rent. Given that Malthusianism is now widely discredited I'm just going to skip this chapter, but if you want to hear George in all his righteous fury, check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism III. The Laws of Distribution When society produces wealth, who gets different shares of it, and why? Let's start by beating some words to death. By George, we're told that there are three factors in production: Land, Labor, and Capital. For each of these terms there must be a "law of distribution" that explains how each gets compensated for its part in production. The reward you get from production by owning Land is called Rent. The reward you get from production by supplying Labor is called Wages. The reward you get from production by supplying Capital is called ... um, what? We're looking for a term that clearly expresses the return to capital alone and nothing else. The closest thing we have is Interest, and that's probably good enough. George gives the common definition of interest as "the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, except such as may be involved in the security." This is pretty close to what we want – something that expresses the sole return to capital without mixing in anything else. But ... what about Profits? Profits is "almost synonymous" with revenue, assuming you have some left after you deduct expenses. It means a gain in money or wealth, but the trouble is this gain is a mix of rent, wages, and "compensations for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital." What we want is a term that means the return to capital alone, totally separate from the return to laborers and landowners. To talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. George spends a few pages talking about how everyone from Adam Smith on down got confused about this (spoiler: it's tied up with thinking wages are drawn from capital), before presenting his model for how it all works. If you want to see him knock that stuff down, see Appendix B (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Here's George's model for how it all works: Land is"all natural opportunities or forces" and its return is rent Labor is "all human exertion" and its return is wages Capital is"all wealth used to produce more wealth" and its return is interest George says the false assumption at the root of the old theories is in thinking of "capital as the prime factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor as its agent or tool." George makes the following assertions: "Labor can be exerted only upon land"
Inline links: Francis Bacon said in 1625, Malthusianism, English-engineered Irish potato famine, Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism, Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution
Will solve all our problems once and for all Why the Remedy is Just George asks, "what constitutes the rightful basis of property?" What gives you the right to say "this is mine?" George asserts as self-evident the principle that a person is entitled to the fruits of their labor. What you make on your own time with your own resources, is yours to do with as you please – use it, give it away, trade it, destroy it. You don't harm anyone else doing so. It follows that neither I nor anyone else am entitled to the product of your labor. If we're both independent hunter-gatherers, and you pick some berries from a bush, I don't have any fundamental right to demand them from you. If you improve land in some way, you're entitled to own and use that, of course. That's the product of your labor. But to claim exclusive and permanent ownership of the land itself – from which all wealth springs and without which labor is impossible – is to demand the product of other's labor. So to invoke the sanctity of private property to defend private land ownership is self-refuting. But what about the right of "I was here first?" Well, George points out that in most cases someone was there before you were, too (and often they were removed by force). Just because you arrived one second, one minute, one year, or one decade before someone else doesn't give you some fundamental right to exclude others from access to nature's free gifts. (Note: this doesn't give people the right to just come in your house and rifle through your underwear drawer at any time of day, we'll get to that). And what about native populations? Isn't this just an excuse for colonialists to come in and steal their land by denying their claim of being on the land first? By George, no – this is a good time to point out that many Native Americans already had a roughly Georgist understanding of land – treating it as common property, and it was precisely the colonialists' conception of land as private property that was the mechanism by which the indigenous population was expelled and their lands seized. The English first practiced this on their own people – once upon a time wide swaths of land in England were held in common until the government privatized those lands and gave them out to well-connected gentry in a process called Enclosure. If you've ever heard of the Luddites, you should know they weren't merely rebelling against the march of technology, they were also fighting against the forcible seizure of their lands by industrialists, who far from being salt-of-the-earth free-enterprise entrepreneurs, were in actual fact crony capitalists stealing the people's land with the aid of anti-free-market subsidies and armed thugs, all supported by Big Government™. As a practical matter though, if you want to impose a Georgist policy, that only applies to territory your state has authority over. Indian reservations in the United States are supposed to be sovereign enclaves with their own jurisdiction. Native Americans should decide for themselves whether they want to adopt any particular policy. The other reason the remedy is just, is that private ownership of land leads to serfdom. The essence of slavery is that it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. George points out that even though Slavery was abolished, the Southern landowners just changed the brand name to "sharecropping" and were able to continue to extract tremendous wealth from "free" Black Americans in the form of rent. Okay, but excluding evil Southern plantation owners, don't landlords deserve compensation for their work? What about Ms. Nguyen, the nice lady who manages your apartment block and went the extra mile for you when your A/C went out last summer? I like Ms. Nguyen too, but let's contrast her with Mr. Slumlord, who owns the apartment block next door that's superficially identical, but who won't help you when your A/C goes out in the middle of summer. Ms. Nguyen charges higher "rent" for her much better maintained units because part of that "rent" is actually her justly compensated wages for her labor in managing them, as well as interest from returns on the capital she's invested in their ongoing improvement and maintenance. She also collects a good bit of true Georgian rent because she is, after all, a landlord. Mr. Slumlord puts in as little work as he can get away with and invests as little capital into maintenance as will keep the state off his back. His return is almost entirely rent. And the only reason he can charge rent in the first place is because of the valuable location – value the community produced, not him. And that's the real injustice of land rent – the community produces the value, but the landlord charges rent to access it. Practical Application of the Remedy Okay, land as common property, rent must die, I'm sold. How do we actually do it? George proposes a land value tax, or LVT. Note I didn't say property tax. Property tax is a tax on the value of a piece of land and it's improvements. So if you're a homeowner, when you pay property tax, you pay tax for both the value of your house and the lot it's sitting on. With land value tax you only pay tax on the "ground rent", which is the value of your land, but not the improvements. What's an improvement? By George, a little green house is an improvement. A fancy red hotel is an improvement. A garage, a sidewalk, a public park, a Starbucks, a hotdog stand, are all improvements. Installing a bunch of dikes in the Netherlands and dumping landfill into the seabed to turn wet land into dry is an improvement. All improvements come from labor, and optionally capital, and so its fair for those factors to take their return. If I "rent" you my hotdog stand (but not the lot it sits on) my return would be classified as interest in George's framework because the hotdog stand isn't land, it's capital – the stored-up fruits of my labor that I'm using to get more wealth. (Modified from source, CC BY 2.0, author: Philip Taylor) The problem with our current system is that when anyone in the community builds improvements, it makes adjoining land more valuable, and then those adjoining landlords jack up the rent. This makes things worse for everybody but the landlords. George's insight is that extra value from my improvement "spills over" from my land and is soaked up by the ground rent of your land. So under a land value tax, we can correct for the perverse economic incentives, distortions, and oppressions that come from land rent, without having to actually take your land from you. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land — only to confiscate rent. You also are 100% the owner of the improvements on your land, which won't be taxed. This is why Georgism doesn't mean people have the right to barge into your house in the middle of the night even though land is "held in common." Your house is still private property, but the value of the land it sits on is common property. What if I plant some nice trees, and invest in some landscaping to stop erosion? Where's the line between "improvements" and "ground rent?" In most cases it's pretty straightforward to separately assess the value of a plot from the value of what sits on it (modern property tax assessors do this already), but George grants that in some edge cases with the passage of time at least some improvements will be subsumed into the land value and that's okay: But it will be said: There are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title to the improvements become blended with the title to the land; the individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Okay, ground rent bad. How much should we tax it? By George, One Hundred Percent. Take the rent the tenant has to pay each month, calculate the portion attributable to the value of the unimproved land itself, and send it to the taxing agency. Effects of the Remedy Wow! 100% tax rate on ground rent! Can we really do that? In practice Georgists often talk about rates closer to 85+% given real-world limitations in assessment, but the point is to hit it as hard as you possibly can. Get close enough and you still have good effects. Won't land taxes jack up land prices? No, actually - in fact it will do the opposite, because such a tax is laser-calibrated to eliminate speculation, which makes up the bulk of inflated land values, and thus rent. Tax land for the full ground rent and you make real estate more affordable, not less. Won't it enable an all-powerful centralized nanny state? Quite the opposite – land value assessment is a fundamentally bottom-up, localized task, so it naturally empowers local municipalities at the expense of distant central authorities. Also, income taxes, wealth taxes, investment taxes, etc, require an ever-vigilant centralized bureaucracy peeking into every aspect of an individual's life to catch tax evaders, who have every incentive to hide their assets or even just flee. Perversely, the IRS currently audits the poor at the same rate as the top 1%, even though higher earners are responsible for withholding the vast majority of tax money in fraud. Land can't move or hide, and nowadays we have tools like GIS to make it even easier to assess. Under land value tax, nobody needs to pry into your personal life or impose burdensome accounting rules on your small business that actually entrench the power of giant corporations (who have entire departments devoted to serving up the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich). A Brief Interlude From the Future Today land value tax is widely considered to be the only tax that doesn't suffer from Deadweight Loss. Deadweight Loss is the lost economic activity or value caused by some policy. It's often summarized by the phrase "If you want less of something, tax it." Look at this chart, for example: (source, CC BY-SA 2.5, author: SilverStar) The place where the demand curve (red) and supply curve (blue) meet is the equilibrium point that the market naturally tends towards. But if we impose a price control lower than what the market will bear, the yellow area of the curve shows economic activity that can't happen. If you put price controls on gasoline, for instance, you'll get shortages because there's more demand than supply, and supply can't profitably rise to meet the extra bit of demand that's willing to pay a little more. But here's how things look with a land value tax, notice that the supply curve is vertical – that's weird, what does that mean? (source, CC BY-SA 3.0, author: Explodicle) A vertical supply curve means no matter what the price of land is, the same amount will always be supplied. This is because you can't make land – the supply is effectively fixed. Remember, the Netherlands doesn't count because the sea bed is land, and filling it in is just an improvement to land that already existed. And even if we granted "The Netherlands occasionally makes land" for the sake of argument, the amount of land "created" in this way is pretty darn negligible in the grand scheme of the economy, and almost exclusively the domain of governments or state-owned actors. The supply of land being fixed has some really interesting properties. By contrast, consider oil, the supply of which is not fixed. If we tax oil, some of the more marginal wells will be too expensive to operate and make a profit, so producers shut those down and the supply of oil decreases. Deadweight loss comes from a producer's ability to change the amount of product they supply in response to price signals. You'll notice the above graph of land tax has no deadweight loss at all! Since nobody produces land, it's the one thing you can tax without getting less of it. This drives out speculators entirely. Speculators can no longer distort rents by bidding up the price of land and holding it out of use, and can no longer compete with those who actually intend to use the land. This restores the proper balance of land, labor, and capital. Now if you work harder, or invest more capital, you can actually expect to see an increasing return without it all being gobbled up by ever-increasing rent. If you think about it this way, land value tax has negative deadweight loss, because it eliminates the speculative distortion that is the unearned privilege of landownership. Okay, but won't the landlords just pass the land tax on to their tenants? By George, no. Rent is a price, and price is governed by supply and demand. Supply of land is fixed, so land value tax has no effect on supply. What about demand? Except in cases where it causes the economy to boom (a good thing), land value tax won't increase land value – what it always does, however, is reduce the demand for land by speculators. If it costs nothing to hold on to land, of course I'm going to want to grab some and HODL. If the rent I could hope to gain is taxed away, I won't bother. Consider the case of oil again, where a tax reduces the supply. Reduced supply, given unchanged demand, causes a rise in price. And you'll find the increase in price tracks very closely with the amount of tax. Land value tax is just about the only kind of tax that can't be passed off to someone else. For more on deadweight loss and the land value tax, see Welfare Economics of the Land Value Tax by BlueRepublik. So does this mean there can never be profitable landlords ever again? Of course not – they just have to earn their living honestly like everyone else. Remember, we don't tax the improvements, just the "ground rent." So Ms. Nguyen still gets paid for all her honest work and judicious investments, but Mr. Slumlord doesn't make a dime until he gets off his lazy butt and does something productive. This is really important, because aside from speculation, the principal cause of land value increase is the productivity of your neighbors. An empty lot in the middle of nowhere is worthless, but an otherwise identical empty lot in the middle of New York city is priceless. As they say in real estate - "location, location, location." The reason location is valuable is because of the activity and contributions of the community, and yet the landlord claims the right to seize it all as rent. Modern economists have some interesting things to say about George's ideas, too. In 1977 Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated that land rents have a tendency to almost perfectly equal the value of investment in public goods. He called this the Henry George Theorem. Milton Friedman famously called land value tax the "Least Worst" tax. But one of my all-time favorite endorsements will always be that one time the economist Ramin Shokrizade unwittingly re-derived land value tax from first principles to (successfully!) fix recessions in EVE Online. Okay, so we tax all the ground rent. It will remove the speculative component of the rent (because there will no longer be any incentive to jack the prices up artificially), but it won't drive the price down to zero. That's because 100% LVT is only achievable on a frictionless plane populated by spherical cows; here in the real world you'll be left with a small sliver of land value. And of course regardless of the LVT rate, houses and buildings will still have a price. And that's fine. Land in Times Square will still be a lot more valuable than land in Podunk, Saskatchewan, but both will approach the same price as the LVT rate gets closer to 100%. This encourages people to actually make use of valuable land rather than holding it out of use, blighting the urban core and forcing development to sprawl out for miles in every direction, leading to worse transportation and more pollution. But... doesn't this mean that if people aren't putting land to productive use, they'll eventually be pressured to sell it off to someone who will? George sees this as a good thing. Without land value tax you get situations where somebody can anticipate that an empty lot will become valuable in the future, buy it, HODL forever, lobby against future development that would depress their property values, and now you have the Bay Area's housing crisis. Or buy an apartment block, do the absolute minimum the tenants will tolerate without killing you, constantly jack up the rent as the city grows, and you get slums. As BlueRepublik observes in No, Georgism is Still Sane: If you look at the commercial blight in New York City (http://www.vacantnewyork.com/) 90%+ is from landlords refusing to lease out to small businesses, waiting for a larger bank or big business to pay a higher rent bill. This causes property values of nearby businesses to drop, equity value to drop, and businesses to move out from the city center, increasing urban sprawl and urban blight. It’s a massive drain on personal wealth, and is very highly linked with poverty and higher crime rates. It’s also not a great model for having a stable social fabric. In a fit of performance art, a Georgist by the name of Fay Lewis once famously bought an empty lot and stuck a big sign on it to demonstrate the principle in action: Okay, but isn't building too much stuff bad for the environment? Won't this encourage over-development? By George, no. What's bad for the environment is sprawl, which the current system encourages and which the land tax would directly attack. If you want dense, walkable cities that don't depend on cars to get around, you should eliminate land speculation. A stronger objection to land value tax is when it's not some shifty speculator or a genocidal English landlord who suffers the brunt of it, but, say, this guy: The premise of Pixar's movie Up is that Carl Fredricksen, a lovably grumpy pensioner, is the last holdout standing in the way of developers bulldozing the rest of his neighborhood in the name of Progress™. He refuses to sell because he can't bear to part with the house which for him is tied up with all the cherished memories of his departed wife. This isn't just sentimental fiction, this is something that really does happen. Isn't Georgism just going to price the poor Carl Fredricksens out of their homes so that someone with a more """productive""" use can have it instead? There's several good response to this. For starters, if you're worried about kindly old people losing their homes, that's a thing that's happening already, and most of the time it's because The Rent Is Too Damn High, and our existing system is net worse on this score. We are currently facing an unprecedented crisis of evictions in tandem with the COVID pandemic, and it's not like things were peachy before. And even though homelessness seems to be declining in the US overall, it's getting worse in the most prosperous cities, exactly as George predicted. Okay, maybe it's better for renters, but what about people who own their homes, like Carl? Isn't it unfair to stick them with land taxes that might kick them out? What if they're retired? Remember, let's not confuse land tax with land confiscation, Here's George (emphases mine): I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. Okay, but you have to admit that even if the state isn't confiscating everybody's land, if you can't pay your land taxes you have no choice but to sell your land, right? Isn't this morally unjust to the Carl Fredricksens of the world? First, it's not a given that Mr. Fredricksen will be worse off on net: he already pays income and sales taxes, capital gains on any investments, as well as property tax which taxes both land value and the value of his house. As speculators leave the real estate market the land tax that replaces his property tax drop will drop, and his house is an improvement that goes entirely untaxed. Also, if the speculators holding onto all the most valuable real estate in the downtown districts are forced to give it up, there won't be as much competition for land and so there's a good chance developers won't be interested in trying to buy up land in a bedroom community in the first place. BlueRepublik further points out that LVT can be used to fund a Universal Basic Income, which should soften the blow considerably: Keep in mind also that the Georgist Land Value Tax is pair with a "Citizen's Dividend" or what we see as UBI, so that it's not the government claiming land rent, rather the land rent is taxed and split up equally for all men. But as a matter of political practicality, in the rare event that after all that Mr. Fredricksen still somehow finds himself in the hole after LVT is applied, Nate Blair suggests a deferment option to grandfather the Carls of the world through the transition: The LVT gets assessed annually for everyone, but owner occupiers (businesses and homeowners) can apply to defer the sum of those payments until they sell or transfer the land. Government can charge a nominal interest. A final point of modern application of land value taxes is to level the playing field between different areas by eliminating "cost of living" discrepancies that arise entirely from speculative rent. This is pretty relevant given the "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley right now in response to increased remote work as a direct consequence of the COVID pandemic. Back to George. Great, we've taxed ground rent at 100% and eliminated speculation and all other manner of social ills. Now what do we do with the money? Lots of things! For one, you can get rid of some other taxes. Back in George's day it was even argued that a 100% land value tax on ground rents should be the only tax – the "Single Tax," replacing all other tariffs, duties, and other taxes (keep in mind this was in the late 1800's and Federal income tax wasn't introduced until the 16th amendment in 1913). Remember, all these other taxes have deadweight loss. Income tax is a tax on labor, and so taxing it means we really do get less productive labor. The portion of property tax that targets improvements punishes you for investing in improvements, and sales tax is just straight up regressive, hitting the poor harder than the rich. There's some argument today about whether the "Single Tax" would be enough to fund the modern US budget, with some Georgists saying it would be sufficient and others saying we would still need some other taxes but could at least significantly offset what we already have. But by George, another thing we could do is just give all the money back to the people, as BlueRepublik mentioned above. This could be used as a straightforward Universal Basic Income – what George calls a Citizen's Dividend, or what Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend. It could also be used for the funding of public goods. George doesn't see this as an act of charity on the state's behalf – the value of the land has its origin in the productive labors of the entire community, so it's a simple act of justice to give the returns to those who actually produced the value, which is society at large. Another effect George asserts is that once land is no longer monopolized, labor is no longer forced into one-sided competition, so wages start to go up. Even better, laborers now have far more opportunity to go into business for themselves, which spurs innovation and investment. So to sum up, if we tax the ever loving hell out of ground rent, George says we'll see the following benefits: Make housing much more affordable
Inline links: treating it as common property, Enclosure, Luddites, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N5h2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F01d73228-7c8a-4e35-9d3b-a90ba99d62bc_400x200.png, land value tax, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0zK_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7aea36c2-328c-4231-b50f-f4eed87e1c53_500x375.png, source, Philip Taylor, property tax assessors do this already, audits the poor at the same rate as the top 1%, GIS, Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich, Deadweight Loss, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MSUe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e01d1dd-61fa-4c1b-8f90-6669f2c20d81_632x632.png, source, SilverStar, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WZ7g!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F730bd7b8-6dbf-4e23-a799-91187ec8b9ed_520x520.png, source, Welfare Economics of the Land Value Tax, Henry George Theorem, to (successfully!) fix recessions in EVE Online, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZKi0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fd890f3-35ce-415d-a461-2e507eff4ed9_680x709.png, No, Georgism is Still Sane, http://www.vacantnewyork.com/, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gVc9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0eccd663-f37b-44b6-ba75-469069befa34_1863x1268.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mVYl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80f4b70f-b472-47b0-b46d-e74b3190ddfd_536x554.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G2qa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa948c9cc-5271-4b71-8c74-de55e126f16a_640x360.png, really does happen, crisis of evictions, getting worse in the most prosperous cities, "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley, Citizen's Dividend, the Freedom Dividend
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
Soon the world was flooded with cheap British goods, and everywhere else's manufacturing industries collapsed. In 1600, India, the Middle East, and Africa all had their native traditions of manufacturing. These might not have been giant factories, but people were making textiles, iron, tools, weapons, etc at various levels of sophistication. They all disappeared as Britain outcompeted them: "In Bihar [India], the share of the work force in manufacturing dropped from 22% around 1810 to 9% in 1901." These regions switched back to farming, especially growing crops that British people wanted.
These places didn't adopt the new British technology. Sometimes this was for simple reasons: Britain tried to keep it secret, some of these places were British colonies banned from competing with the mother country, some of these places (eg Spain) had stupid policies. But the book focuses on the idea that these places' wages were too low to make the machinery competitive. I was pretty boggled by this: either wages were so low that the machines weren't necessary (in which case these places can outcompete Britain), or these places were being outcompeted by Britain (in which case they would be incentivized to adopt the new machines, which they should be able to do better than Britain given how cheap the operators' wages would be). The book does a poor job explaining what's going on here, but my impression is that Britain had more of the know-how, network effects, and industrial base to make the machines work, and it would have been more difficult and expensive to try to create them in India. The cheap Indian labor meant it wasn't profitable to do this once you added in all the other costs. This will become important later.
And how does globalization fit into this picture? New parts of existing countries are able to develop relatively quickly - for example, when the US took California from Mexico, it eventually converged to US (not Mexican) standards of living. If a New California were to rise out of the Pacific Ocean just west of the regular one, and Americans were to colonize it, I would expect it to also converge to normal US standards of living eventually. Why? In 2021, New California has nothing, and (eg) India has much more than nothing. How come we are more certain that New California will soon get First World living standards than that India will? If the answer is something like “because American companies can expand to New California and trade with other Americans without tariffs”, doesn’t that mean that if India invites US companies in, lowers tariffs, and has good institutions - then they too can quickly converge to US standards of living? But isn’t that the opposite of GED:VSI’s thesis? I’m not saying they’re wrong - I assume development economists know what they’re talking about - but it confuses me and this book didn’t give me a great answer.
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
The fact that Vogt’s first entry into the public sphere is rallying the public against anti-malaria measures leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does for any of Mann’s Effective Altruist aligned readers. It would be one thing if Vogt were concerned about the detrimental impact of malaria on humans AND the detrimental impact of malaria prevention methods on bird life. But in subsequent chapters of Vogt’s biography, Mann goes out of his way to show that Vogt’s influences and contemporary members of the environmentalist milieu – for example, Madison Grant, co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, organizer of the United States national park system, and author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler – were, to put in mildly, extremely uninterested in the wellbeing of all humankind. Instead, they were obsessed by fears of an unchecked Malthusian population explosion, race mixing, and a resultant societal degeneration that could only be stopped by halting (read: starving out) population growth. Which people deserved to live in harmony with nature in the ensuing pastoral utopia and which would be relegated to the dustbin of history was not an exercise they left to the reader. Mann writes that Vogt, like his buddies, was "loudly scornful of the ‘unchecked spawning’ and ‘untrammeled copulation’ of ‘backward populations’ – people in India, he sneered, breed with ‘the irresponsibility of codfish.’"
Inline links: Madison Grant
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
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 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?”).
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).
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
The solution was actually announced two thousand years ago, by a man named Jesus. "Turn the other cheek" he said, even to your enemies. This approach has been dismissed as naive, but the truth is it's how Gandhi won India her freedom, how Martin Luther King won rights for African Americans, and how Mandela ended apartheid. Turning the other cheek works, it's just really hard to do.
Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Orwell served for five years an an imperial policeman in Burma(now Myanmar), and so isn’t speaking from some vague antipathy towards asian customs here. He saw such sights everyday for years on end, and it’s no suprise that he would question their essential usefulness. But as brutal as the practice sounds, I find myself questioning his conclusion. Parts of India are punishingly hot, and many of the cities are large and spread out. It makes perfect sense to me that in a time before the wide spread use of cars, another cheap means of transportation would arise to meet the needs of the upper and middle class(because the rides are so cheap, they are not just a privilege of rulers)who want to avoid trudging miles across a large city in the middle of summer. To imply that rickshaws should be banned or phased out because they afford only “a small amount of convenience” strikes me as overreaching at best, and outright authoritarian at worst. But I find Orwell’s basic argument much more compelling when applied to his own situation:
Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
Yellow River Basin The Han Dynasty never made it very far south towards the Yangtze. Political and military obstacles were relatively unimportant, and the climate and land meant longer and more productive growing seasons for agriculture. The Yangtze also has more predictable and manageable flood plains. Yangtze Valley is prettier too. Why not extend civilization southward? In McNeill’s words “for in moving southward and into better farming regions, Chinese pioneers were also climbing a rather steep disease gradient!” The climatic gradient is steep, like New England to Florida, in a shorter geographic distance. For a Chinese peasant, the mutually tolerable accommodation with the state and with the microparasites of the Yellow River Valley was maintainable. But more microparasitic intensity made the balance unmaintainable. The Han Dynasty and Confucianism really only worked at a certain latitude. By the way, guess which major Chinese city is on the Yangtze? (You can look back at the map.) In contrast to the Ganges Valley in India, with a civilization and farming starting around 600 BC but remained unstable and never consolidated. The Ganges Valley is hugely productive agriculturally but also warmer and wetter than China’s southern Yangtze Valley. “Classical Indian civilization thus took form under climatic and (presumed) disease conditions that the early Chinese found too much to bear.” It took a long time for China to populate the Yangtze River basin- biological accommodation to a microparasitic climate will take a long time. By that time, around 1200 AD, there is also evidence the Sung Dynasty was a less powerful and less demanding macroparasite. “To achieve such a mass population [100 million by A.D.1200] two things were needed: a suitable microparasistic accommodation to the ecological conditions of the Yangtze Valley and regions farther south, and a regulated macroparasitism that left enough of their product with the Chinese peasants so that they could sustain a substantial rate of natural increase over several generations.” Epistemic Status: A convincing narrative with zero evidence McNeill explicitly and regularly reminds the reader that this overarching thesis has little to no evidence. But it does have lots of examples. It’s the same problem that most overarching histories of humanity face: lack of documentation. Except this time it’s lack of documentation 10,000 years ago of something we discovered existed 300 years ago and is invisible without a microscope. In some way, though, this complete lack of documentation makes his case stronger- the invisible forces are stronger than the visible ones. We all kind of knew the narrative that the Spanish decimated the Aztecs and Mayans with help of smallpox. I just never extended that logic towards humanity’s escape from Africa, the march of civilizations into the countryside, and what type of social structures worked best at certain ‘disease gradient’ latitudes. The documentation of the conquistadors was almost adequate to infer disease as a massive influence. But earlier medical records and writings lack such detail. When McNeill contrasts this force of microparasitism balancing with and against the adequately vague force of macroparasitism, it’s hard not to nod your head and agree. McNeill provides as much detail and admits lack of detail as possible. The book is about on fifth footnotes. But the most convincing arguments for his narrative is the sum of parts that make up the narrative. I’m going to just list a few more examples that fit his framework because they are all interesting and also paint a more convincing picture of the importance microparasitism played in human history. The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion. The moment the city folk come in contact with tribes, smaller towns, anyone in the countryside they also bring the city folk diseases. This makes civilization expansion fundamentally easier.
Inline links: Yangtze Valley is prettier too
India’s caste system is a relic of living in a high disease gradient area and cohabitating between city folk, farmers, and others. The ‘untouchables’ makes a lot of sense in that framework.
The idea of disease gradients is interesting in the geographic variabilities of COVID-19. India has ten times less of a death rate than the United States, to which a Mayo Clinic Professor recently pondered “cross reactive immunity from prior corona virus and other infections” as a main reason. Another interesting parallel to ponder is how humans have had such trouble adapting to microparasites because they were invisible and how that mirrors some of today’s issues of how our society deals with COVID-19.
Inline links: pondered
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda, even if the farce that is the Philippine reform programme continues. Given this, can the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand do anything else to improve their economic performance? Most obviously they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work as a vehicle for effective industrial policy. There is no reason why the four core economies of ASEAN (and indeed Vietnam, the important economy omitted from this book) could not run an effective manufacturing infant industry policy in what is a market of 500 million people. But there is no sign of this happening. Rather than raising barriers and promoting exports to nurture local manufacturing enterprise, ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements with industrially more developed states, including China. There is very little cohesion, or substantive dialogue, between the political leaders of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. And the considerable influence of the offshore financial centre of Singapore in ASEAN is developmentally deeply unhelpful. It is as if Switzerland or Monaco had been granted a seat at the table when post-war European industrial policy was being planned in the 1950s. South-east Asia remains a beacon for what not to do if you want economic transformation. Allow landlordism and scale farming despite the presence of vast numbers of underemployed peasants capable of growing more. Do not worry too much about export-oriented manufacturing, which can happily be undertaken by multinational enterprises. Leave entrepreneurs to their own devices. And proceed quickly to deregulated banking, stock markets and international capital flows, the true symbols of a modern state. That is how its politicians constructed the south-east Asian region’s relative failure.
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
2.) There are some countries which are increasingly skipping directly to service export. However, an industrializing country has a huge internal market for industrial goods (roads, bridges, telecommunication infrastructure, etc) which in turn creates a construction/manufacturing boom even when the primary export paying for the imported machinery is (for example) software development services. This is the case in some of the wealthier Indian provinces. But on the whole, manufacturing is still a pretty good bet.
I also agree with your point about the asymmetry of 'free trade'. The US tolerated a number of these countries being highly protectionist while also importing their goods here- developing countries get a special dispensation. Arguably the US still does with China, incredibly! And even India, which is now approaching being the world's 5th largest economy. I'm not sure that this combination of 'we tariff foreigners but they accept our goods pretty freely' can necessarily be replicated.
India is probably the best counter-example to what Studwell is talking about.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
BANGALORE, INDIA (RSVP) Contact: Nihal M, m[dot]nihalmohan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: ONLINE (due to COVID)
Inline links: RSVP
MUMBAI, INDIA (RSVP) Contact: Nitin Nair, nairnitin2424[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: BMC Park, Mindspace Landscape Garden, Malad West. Outside the main entrance/gate. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/contents.anthems.foresight
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/contents.anthems.foresight
NEW DELHI, INDIA (RSVP) Contact: SK, nevakanezzar[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 6:00 PM, Thursday, September 9 Location: Regional Park near NFC market. Straight up the path towards the back where the little hill is. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/haunt.defeat.knocking
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/haunt.defeat.knocking
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
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.
Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist.
This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to:
Inline links: he wanted to
Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
13: Latest salvo in the “was colonialism good/bad for economic development?” debate - areas of India that were under direct British colonial rule have 39% less nighttime illumination (a common proxy for developedness) than areas that maintained more local autonomy. Although there are probably confounders in terms of which areas the British directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case than weaken it - the British annexed the most productive areas, and a subanalysis based on areas where annexation/non-annexation depended on quirks of royals dying shows stronger effects than the original finding. [EDIT: See this comment for skepticism]
Inline links: have 39% less nighttime illumination, this comment
21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
Econ Americas interviewed (44-minute video) Guillermo Peña, [Orqueida ZEDE]'s Technical Secretary. He summarizes Honduras's recent political and economic history (and seems to believe things are getting better). Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares. While all three opposition parties are opposed to ZEDEs, Pena is pretty optimistic that the ZEDEs won’t be shut down, at least immediately, if the opposition wins the November election (see 35:25). Auroville, India I recently learned about this place, and it’s pretty crazy:
Inline links: interviewed
The story is: in the 1910s, a nice Jewish girl moved to India to find herself and fell in with a guru named Sri Aurobindo. Fast forward twenty years and she is calling herself “The Mother” and running what an uncharitable observer might consider maybe sort of kind of a cult.
Inline links: nice Jewish girl, Sri Aurobindo
(source) Thus, Auroville. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Auroville as a “charter city”, but it does have a charter, which says:
Inline links: source
Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
It’s always a bad sign when your study features in an image with “NUMEROUS IMPOSSIBLE NUMBERS” in red at the top. I think his point is that if you have 21 people, it’s impossible to have 50% of them have headache, because that would be 10.5. If 10 people have a headache, it would be 47.6%; if 11, 52%. So something is clearly wrong here. Seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look. I’m going to be slightly uncomfortable with this study without rejecting it entirely, and move on. Ravakirti et al: Here we’re in Eastern India - not exactly Bangladesh again, but a stone’s throw away from it. In this RCT patients were randomized into an ivermectin group (57) and a placebo group (58). Primary outcome was negative PCR on day 6, because doing it on day 7 like everyone else would be too easy. As with several other groups, this was a bad move; too few people had it to make a good comparison; it was 13% of intervention vs. 18% of placebo, p = 0.3. Secondary outcomes were also pretty boring, except for the most important: 4 people in the placebo group died, compared to 0 in ivermectin (p = 0.045). On the one hand, this is one outcome of many, reaching the barest significance threshold. Another fluke? Still, there are no real problems with this study, and nobody has anything to say against it. Let’s add this one to the scale as another very small and noisy piece of real evidence in ivermectin’s favor. Bukhari et al: Now we’re in Pakistan. 50 patients were randomized to low-dose ivermectin, another 50 got standard of care including vitamin D. There was no placebo, but primary outcome was number of days to reach negative PCR, which it seems hard for placebo to affect much, so I don’t care. 5 controls and 9 ivermectin patients left the hospital against medical advice and could not be followed up, which is bad but not necessarily study-ruining. They never measured their supposed primary outcome of “days to reach negative PCR” directly, but they did measure how many people had negative PCR on various days, and ivermectin had a clear advantage - for example, on day 7, it was 37/50 for IVR and only 20/50 for control. Even if we assume all the lost-to-followup patients had maximally bad-for-the-hypothesis results, that’s still a positive finding. Nobody else has much to say about this one, certainly no accusations that they’ve found anything suspicious. Keep. Mohan et al: India. RCT. 40 patients got low-dose ivermectin, 40 high-dose ivermectin, and 45 placebo. Primary outcomes were time to negative PCR, and viral load on day 5. In the results, they seem to have reinterpreted “time to negative PCR” as the subtly different “percent with negative PCR on some specific day”. High-dose ivermectin did best (47.5% negative on day 5) and placebo worst (31% negative), but it was insignificant (p = 0.3). There was no difference in viral load. All groups took about the same amount of time for symptoms to resolve. More placebo patients had failed to recover by the end of the study (6) than ivermectin patients (2), but this didn’t reach statistical significance (p = 0.4). Overall a well-done, boring, negative study, although ivermectin proponents will correctly point out that, like basically every other study we have looked at, the trend was in favor of ivermectin and this could potentially end up looking impressive in a meta-analysis. Biber et al: This is an RCT from Israel. 47 patients got ivermectin and 42 placebo. Primary endpoint was viral load on day 6. I am having trouble finding out what happened with this; as far as I can tell it was a negative result and they buried it in favor of more interesting things. In a "multivariable logistic regression model, the adjusted odds ratio of negative SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR negative test" favored ivermectin over placebo (p = 0.03 for day 6, p = 0.01 for day 8), but this seems like the kind of thing you do when your primary outcome is boring and you’re angry. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is not a fan: He notes that the study excluded people with high viral load, but the preregistration didn’t say they would do that. Looking more closely, he finds they did that because, if you included these people, the study got no positive results. So probably they did the study, found no positive results, re-ran it with various subsets of patients until they did get a positive result, and then claimed to have “excluded” patients who weren’t in the subset that worked. I’m going to toss this one. Elalfy et al: What even is this? Where am I? As best I can tell, this is some kind of Egyptian trial. It might or might not be an RCT; it says stuff like “Patients were self-allocated to the treatment groups; the first 3 days of the week for the intervention arm while the other 3 days for symptomatic treatment”. Were they self-allocated in the sense that they got to choose? Doesn’t that mean it’s not random? Aren’t there seven days in a week? These are among the many questions that Elalfy et al do not answer for us. The control group (which they seem to think can also be called “the white group”) took zinc, paracetamol, and maybe azithromycin. The intervention group took zinc, nitazoxanide, ribavirin, and ivermectin. There were very large demographic differences between the groups of the sort which make the study unusable, which they mention and then ignore. From there, they follow this normal and totally comprehensible flowchart: There is no primary outcome assigned, but viral clearance rates on day seven were 58% in the yellow group compared to 0% in the white group, which I guess is a strong positive result. This table… …looks very impressive, in terms of the experimental group doing better than the control, except that they don’t specify whether it was before the trial or after it, and at least one online commentator thinks it might have been before, in which case it’s only impressive how thoroughly they failed to randomize their groups. Overall I don’t feel bad throwing this study out. I hope it one day succeeds in returning to its home planet. Lopez-Medina et al: Colombian RCT. 200 patients took ivermectin, another 200 took placebo. They originally worried the placebo might taste different than real ivermectin, then solved this by replacing it with a different placebo, which is a pretty high level of conscientiousness. Primary outcome was originally percent of patients whose symptoms worsened by two points, as rated on a complicated symptom scale when a researcher asked them over the phone. Halfway through the study, they realized nobody was worsening that much, so they changed the primary outcome to time until symptoms got better, as measured by the scale. In the ivermectin group, symptoms improved that much after 10 days; in the placebo group, after 12, p = 0.53. By the end of the study, symptoms had improved in 82% of ivermectin users and 79% of controls, also insignificant. 4 patients in the ivermectin group needed to be hospitalized compared to 6 in the placebo group, again insignificant. This study is bigger than most of the other RCTs, and more polished in terms of how many spelling errors, photographs of computer screens, etc, it contains. It was published in JAMA, one of the most prestigious US medical journals, as opposed to the crappy nth-tier journals most of the others have been in. When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. Ivermectin proponents make some good arguments against it. In order to get as big as it did, Lopez-Medina had to compromise on rigor. Its outcome is how people self-score their symptoms on a hokey scale in a phone interview, instead of viral load or PCR results or anything like that. Still, this is basically what we want, right? In the end, we want people to feel better and less sick, not to get good scores on PCR tests. Also, it changed its primary outcome halfway through; isn’t that bad? I think maybe not; the reason we want a preregistered primary outcome is so that you don’t change halfway through to whatever outcome shows the results you want. The researchers in this study did a good job explaining why they changed their outcome, the change makes sense, and their original outcome would also have shown ivermectin not working (albeit less accurately and effectively). I don’t know of any evidence that they knew (or suspected) final results when switching to this new outcome, and it seems like the most reasonable new outcome to switch to. Finally, their original placebo tasted different from ivermectin (though they switched halfway through). This is one of the few studies where I actually care about placebo, because people are self-rating their symptoms. But realistically most of these people don’t know what ivermectin is supposed to taste like. Also, they did a re-analysis and found there was no difference between the people who got the old placebo and the new one. I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work. Also, the warning itself irritates me, and includes paragraphs like: RCTs have a fundamental bias against finding an effect for interventions that are widely available — patients that believe they need treatment are more likely to decline participation and take the intervention [Yeh], i.e., RCTs are more likely to enroll low-risk participants that do not need treatment to recover (this does not apply to the typical pharmaceutical trial of a new drug that is otherwise unavailable). This trial was run in a community where ivermectin was available OTC and very widely known and used. Nobody else worries about this, and there are a million biases that non-randomized studies have that would be super-relevant when discussing those, but somehow when they’re pro-ivermectin the site forgets to be this thorough. I think a better pro-ivermectin response to this study is to point out that all the trends support ivermectin. Symptoms took 10 days to resolve in the ivermectin group vs. 12 in placebo; 4 ivermectin patients were hospitalized vs. 6 placebo patients, etc. Just say that this was an unusually noisy trial because of the self-report methodology, and you’re confident that these small differences will add up to significance when you put them into a meta-analysis. Roy et al: We’re back in East India, and back to non-randomized trials. 56 patients were retrospectively examined; some had been given ivermectin + doxycycline, others hydroxychloroquine, other azithromycin, and others symptomatic treatment only. We don’t get any meaningful information about how this worked, but we are told that they did not differ in “clinical well-being reporting onset timing”. Whatever. Chahla et al: The first of many Argentine trials. 110 patients received medium-dose ivermectin; 144 were kept as a control (no placebo). This was “cluster randomized”, which means they randomize different health centers to either give the experimental drug or not. This is worse than regular randomization, because there could be differences between these health centers (eg one might have better doctors who otherwise give better treatment, one might be in the poor part of town and have sicker patients, etc). They checked to see if there were any differences between the groups, and it sure looks like there were (the experimental group had twice as many obese people as the controls), but as per them, these differences were not statistically significant. Note that if this did make a difference, it would presumably make ivermectin look worse, not better. The primary outcome was given as “increase discharge from outpatient care with COVID-19 mild disease”. This favored the treatment; only 2/110 patients in the ivermectin group failed to be discharged, compared to 20 patients in the control group. But, uh, these were at different medical centers. Can’t different medical centers just have different discharge policies? One discharges you as soon as you seem to be getting better, the other waits to really make sure? This is an utterly crap endpoint to do a cluster randomized controlled trial on. If you’re going to do cRCT, which is never a great idea, you should be using some extremely objective endpoint that doctors and clinic administrators can’t possibly affect, like viral load according to some third-party laboratory, using the same third-party laboratory for both clinics. This is such a bad idea that I can’t help worrying I’m missing or misunderstanding something. If not, this is dumb and bad and should be ignored. Mourya et al: We’re back in India. This is a nonrandomized study comparing 50 patients given ivermectin to 50 patients given hydroxychloroquine. No primary outcome was named, but they focus on PCR negativity. Only 6% of patients in the hydroxychloroquine group were negative, compared to 90% of patients in the ivermectin group! On what day did they do the test? Uh, kind of random, and they admit that “in [the hydroxychloroquine group], mean time difference from the date of initiation of treatment and second test was significantly longer (7.24±2.75 days) as compared to 5.22±1.21 days in [the ivermectin group] (p=0.021).” Since they assessed these groups at different times, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from them getting different results. Except that as far as I can tell this should handicap ivermectin, making it especially impressive that it did better. But also, the ivermectin group was made mostly of people who had been asymptomatic at the beginning (70%), and the hydroxychloroquine group had almost no asymptomatic cases (8%) . They were giving the ivermectin to healthy people and the hydroxychloroquine to sick people! They admit deep in the discussion that this “may be a confounding factor”. So basically they got totally different groups of people, tested them at totally different times, and the two sets of test results differed. So what? So this is why normal people do RCTs instead of whatever the heck this is, that’s what. Loue et al: …this one isn’t going to be an RCT either. Loue tells a story about a cluster of COVID cases at the French nursing home where he works. He asked people if they wanted to try ivermectin; 10 did and 15 didn’t. 1 ivermectin patient died, compared to 5 non-ivermectin patients. The non-ivermectin group looked a bit sicker than the ivermectin group in the inevitable Table 1, though it’s hard to tell. One interesting possible confounder (not mentioned, but I’m imagining it) is that demented patients probably couldn’t consent to ivermectin and ended up in the control group. This is another case of “I’m not going to trust anything that isn’t an RCT”. Merino et al: Another (sigh) non-RCT. Mexico City tried a public health program where if you called a hotline and said you had COVID, they sent you an emergency kit with various useful supplies. One of those supplies was ivermectin tablets. 18,074 people got the kit (and presumably some appreciable fraction took the ivermectin, though there’s no way to prove that). Their control group is people from before they started giving out the kits, people from after they stopped giving out the kits, and people who didn’t want the kits. There are differences in who got COVID early in the epidemic vs. later, and in people who did opt for medical kits vs. didn’t. To correct these, the researchers tried to adjust for confounders, something which - as I keep trying to hammer home again and again - never works. They found that using the kit led to a 75% or so reduction in hospitalization, though they were unable to separate out the ivermectin from the other things in the kit (paracetamol and aspirin), or from the placebo effect of having a kit and feeling like you had already gotten some treatment (if I understand right, the decision to go to the hospital was left entirely to the patient). I think this study is a moderate point in favor of giving people kits in order to prevent hospital overcrowding, but I’m not willing to accept that it tells us much about ivermectin in particular. Faisal et al: This one was published in The Professional Medical Journal (mispelled as “Profesional Medical Journal” in its URL), so you know it’s going to be good! It describes itself as “a cross-sectional study”, but later says it “randomized patients into two groups”, which would make it an RCT - I think they might just be using the term “cross-sectional” different from the standard American usage. A hospital in Pakistan got 50 patients on ivermectin + azithromycin, and another 50 on azithromycin alone. Primary outcome was not mentioned, and the data were presented confusingly, but a typical result is that only 4% of the ivermectin group had symptoms lasting more than 10 days, whereas 16% of the control group did, p < 0.01. They do a really weird thing where they compare how long it took symptoms to resolve between IVM and control groups within each bin. That is, if I’m understanding correctly, they ask “of the people who took between 3-5 days for symptoms to resolve, did they resolve faster for IVM or control?”. This is an utterly bizarre analysis to perform, although it doesn’t affect the fact that their other results still seem to favor ivermectin. Maybe I’m confused about what’s going on here. I’ve mostly been letting people off easy on no placebo, but I as far as I can tell (not very far) this paper seems to be going off whether patients reported continuing to have symptoms to the hospital doing the study, and I think that is potentially susceptible to placebo effects. Additionally, there’s no preregistration, and even though they talk a lot about doing PCR tests they don’t present the results. This is by no means the worst study here but I still think it’s pretty low quality and I don’t trust it. Aref et al: This one is published in the International Journal Of Nanomedicine, even though I’m pretty sure that isn’t a real thing. In this case the “nanomedicine” is a new nasal spray version of ivermectin which is so confusing I cannot for the life of me figure out what dose they are giving these patients. This Egyptian study gives 57 patients intranasal ivermectin plus hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, oseltamavir, and some vitamins; another 57 patients get all that stuff except the ivermectin. Primary outcome is not stated, but they look at various symptoms, all of which look better in the ivermectin group: 95% of ivermectin patients got negative PCRs at some time point, compared to 75% of controls, p = 0.004. I am pretty suspicious of this study, not least because it comes from Egypt which has an awful reputation for fake studies, and it returns extreme results that I wouldn’t expect even if ivermectin was actually a wonder drug. But I cannot find any particular thing wrong with it, nor did anyone else I looked at, so I will grudgingly let it stand. Krolewiecki et al: Another Argentine study. This one is a real RCT. 30 patients received ivermectin, 15 were the control group (no placebo, again). Primary outcome was difference in viral load on day 5. The trend favored ivermectin but it was not statistically significant, although they were able to make it statistically significant if they looked at a subset of higher-IVM-plasma-concentration patients. They did not find any difference in clinical outcomes. A pro-ivermectin person could point out that in the subgroup with the highest ivermectin concentrations, the drug seemed to work. A skeptic could point out that this is exactly the kind of subgroup slicing that you are not supposed to do without pre-registering it, which I don’t think this team did. I agree with the skeptic. Vallejos et al: Another Argentine study. It’s big (250 people in each arm). It’s an RCT. It tries to define a primary outcome (“Primary outcome: the trial ended when the last patient who was included achieved the end of study visit”), but that’s not what “primary outcome” means, and they don’t offer an alternative. Other outcomes: no difference in PCR on days 3 or 12. Hospitalization is nonsignificantly better in the ivermectin group (14 vs. 21, p = 0.2), but death is nonsigificantly better in the placebo group (3 vs. 4, p = 0.7). This isn’t even the kind of nonsignificant that might contribute to an exciting meta-analysis later. This is just a pure null result. I cannot find any problem with this study, and neither can anyone else I checked. This is the biggest RCT we’ve seen so far, so we should take it seriously. TOGETHER Trial: Speaking of big RCTs… This one hasn’t been published yet. There’s a video of a talk about it, but I am not going to watch it, because it is a video, so I am getting information secondhand from eg here. Apparently, it compares 677 people (!) randomized to ivermectin to 678 people randomized to placebo. 86 ivermectin patients ended up in the hospital compared to 95 placebo patients, p-value not significant. This was a really big professional trial done by bigshot researchers from a major Canadian university, and the medical establishment is taking it much more seriously than any of these others. When it comes out, it will probably get published in a top journal. When discussing Lopez-Medina, I wrote: When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. This is the other one. Not coincidentally, it’s also the other trial that ivmmeta.com has a warning letter underneath telling you to disregard. Their main concern is that instead of truly randomizing patients to ivermectin vs. placebo, they did a time-dependent randomization that meant during some weeks more patients were getting one or the other. This is a problem because the trial takes place in Brazil, where different variants were more common at different times. Here’s their image: On the one hand, I have immense contempt for ivmmeta for letting all those other awful studies pass and then pulling out all the stops to try to nitpick this one. I have no idea if their proposed randomization failure really happened. And no doubt the reason they’re even able to investigate this is that this study is really careful and transparent - most of them don’t tell you anything about their randomization method. I would be shocked if other studies don’t have all these problems and worse. On the other hand, the point isn’t to be fair, it’s to be right. And this is a potential confounder. Not a huge one. But a potential one. I guess all we can do is try to bound the damage. Even if the confounding is 100% real and bad, there’s no way to make this study consistent with the crazy super-pro-ivermectin results of studies like Espitia-Hernandez and Aref. And even if we deny any confounding, we see the same slight pro-ivermectin trend - 86 hospitalizations vs. 95 - that we’ve seen in so many other studies. Nothing is going to make me believe that this isn’t in the top 33% of studies we’ve been looking at, so let’s add it as grist for the meta-analysis (though maybe not quite as much grist as its vast size indicates) and move on, angrily. Buonfrate et al: An Italian RCT. Patients were randomized into low-dose ivermectin (32), placebo (29), or high-dose ivermectin (32). Primary outcome was viral load on day 7. There was no significant difference (average of 2 in ivermectin groups, 2.2 in placebo group). They admit that they failed to reach the planned sample size, but did a calculation to show that even if they had, the trial could not have returned a positive result. Clinically, an average of 2 patients were hospitalized in each of the ivermectin arms, compared to 0 in the placebo arm - which bucks our previously-very-constant pro-ivermectin trend. Mayer et al: Not an RCT. Patients in an Argentine province were offered the opportunity to try ivermectin; 3266 said yes and become the experimental group, 17966 said no and became the control group. There were many obvious differences between the groups, but they all seemed to handicap ivermectin. There was a nonsignificant trend toward less hospitalization and significantly less mortality (1.5% vs. 2.1%, p = 0.03). While looking into this study, I learned the term “immortal time bias”. This means a period in between selection for the study and the beginning of study recording where patient outcomes are not counted. I think the problem here is that if you signed up for the system on Day X, and if you got sick before they could give you ivermectin, you were in the control group. See this Twitter thread, I have not confirmed everything he says. This only hardens my resolve to stay away from non-RCTs. Borody et al: Our last paper! …is it a paper? I can’t find it published anywhere. It mostly seems to be on news sites. Doesn’t look peer-reviewed. And it starts with “Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views”. Whatever. 600 Australians were treated with ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc. The article compares this to an “equivalent control group” made of “contemporary infected subjects in Australia obtained from published Covid Tracking Data”; this is not how you control group, @#!% you. Then it gets excited about the fact that most patients had better symptoms at the end of the ten-day study period than the beginning (untreated COVID resolves in about ten days). Why are these people wasting my time with this? Let’s move on. The Analysis If we remove all fraudulent and methodologically unsound studies from the table above, we end up with this: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who investigated many of the studies above for fraud, tried a similar exercise. I learned about his halfway through, couldn’t help seeing it briefly, but tried to avoid remembering it or using it when generating mine (also, I did take the result of his fraud investigations into account), so they should be considered not quite independent efforts. His looks like this: He nixed Chowdhury, Babaloba, Ghauri, Faisal, and Aref, but kept Szenta Fonseca, Biber (?), and Mayer. There was correlation of 0.45, which I guess is okay. I asked him about his decision-making, and he listed a combination of serious statistical errors and small red flags adding up. I was pretty uncomfortable with most of these studies myself, so I will err on the side of severity, and remove all studies that either I or Meyerowitz-Katz disliked. We end up with the following short list: We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them. …but honestly this table still looks pretty good for ivermectin, doesn’t it? Still lots of big green boxes. Meyerowitz-Katz accuses ivmmeta of cherry-picking what statistic to use for their forest plot. That is, if a study measures ten outcomes, they sometimes take the most pro-ivermectin outcome. Ivmmeta.com counters that they used a consistent and reasonable (if complicated) process for choosing their outcome of focus, that being: If studies report multiple kinds of effects then the most serious outcome is used in calculations for that study. For example, if effects for mortality and cases are both reported, the effect for mortality is used, this may be different to the effect that a study focused on. If symptomatic results are reported at multiple times, we used the latest time, for example if mortality results are provided at 14 days and 28 days, the results at 28 days are used. Mortality alone is preferred over combined outcomes. Outcomes with zero events in both arms were not used (the next most serious outcome is used — no studies were excluded). For example, in low-risk populations with no mortality, a reduction in mortality with treatment is not possible, however a reduction in hospitalization, for example, is still valuable. Clinical outcome is considered more important than PCR testing status. When basically all patients recover in both treatment and control groups, preference for viral clearance and recovery is given to results mid-recovery where available (after most or all patients have recovered there is no room for an effective treatment to do better). If only individual symptom data is available, the most serious symptom has priority, for example difficulty breathing or low SpO2 is more important than cough. I’m having trouble judging this, partly because Meyerowitz-Katz says ivmmeta has corrected some earlier mistakes, and partly because there really is some reasonable debate over how to judge studies with lots of complicated endpoints. By this point I had completely forgotten what ivmmeta did, so I independently coded all 11 remaining studies following something in between my best understanding of their procedure and what I considered common sense. The only exception was that when the most severe outcome was measured in something other than patients (ie average number of virus copies per patient), I defaulted to one that was measured in patients instead, to keep everything with the same denominator. My results mostly matched ivmmeta’s, with one or two exceptions that I think are within the scope of argument or related to my minor deviations from their protocol. Placebo vs. ivermectin groups sometimes differed in size, which I’ve adjusted for and rounded off. Probably I’m forgetting some reason I can’t just do simple summary statistics to this, but whatever. It is p = 0.15, not significant. This is maybe unfair, because there aren’t a lot of deaths in the sample, so by focusing on death rather than more common outcomes we’re pointlessly throwing away sample size. What happens if I unprincipledly pick whatever I think the most reasonable outcome to use from each study is? I’ve chosen “most reasonable” as a balance between “is the most severe” and “has a lot of data points”: Now it’s p = 0.04, seemingly significant, but I had to make some unprincipled decisions to get there. I don’t think I specifically replaced negative findings with positive ones, but I can’t prove that even to myself, let alone to you. [UPDATE 5/31/22: A reader writes in to tell me that the t-test I used above is overly simplistic. A Dersimonian-Laird test is more appropriate for meta-analysis, and would have given 0.03 and 0.005 on the first and second analysis, where I got 0.15 and 0.04. This significantly strengthens the apparent benefit of ivermectin from ‘debatable’ to ‘clear’. I discuss some reasons below why I am not convinced by this apparent benefit.] (how come I’m finding a bunch of things on the edge of significance, but the original ivmmeta site found a lot of extremely significant things? Because they combined ratios, such that “one death in placebo, zero in ivermectin” looked like a nigh-infinite benefit for ivermectin, whereas I’m combining raw numbers. Possibly my way is statistically illegitimate for some reason, but I’m just trying to get a rough estimate of how convinced to be) So we are stuck somewhere between “nonsignificant trend in favor” and “maybe-significant trend in favor, after throwing out some best practices”. This is normally where I would compare my results to those of other meta-analyses made by real professionals. But when I look at them, they all include studies later found to be fake, like Elgazzar, and unsurprisingly come up with wildly positive conclusions. There are about six in this category. One of them later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar and still found strong efficacy for ivermectin, but they still included Niaee and some other dubious studies. The only meta-analysis that doesn’t make these mistakes is Popp (a Cochrane review), which is from before Elgazzar was found to be fraudulent, but coincidentally excludes it for other reasons. It also excludes a lot of good studies like Mahmud and Ravakirti because they give patients other things like HCQ and azithromycin - I chose to include them, because I don’t think they either work or have especially bad side effects, so they’re basically placebo - but Cochrane is always harsh like this. They end up with a point estimate where ivermectin cuts mortality by 40% - but say the confidence intervals are too wide to draw any conclusion. I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance. Except that everyone is still focusing on deaths and hospitalizations just because they’re flashy. Mahmud et al, which everyone agrees is a great study, found that ivermectin decreased days until clinical recovery, p = 0.003? So what do you do? This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters. I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up. In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading. … … … … … The Synthesis Hopefully you learned something interesting about yourself there. But my answer is: worms! As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc. Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: Ravakirti et al:, Bukhari et al:, Mohan et al:, Biber et al:, the preregistration, Elalfy et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!B_IH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d3559ee-a058-44cc-9b38-09b78a0f5035_1352x1070.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9mI_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbffceed7-c84a-45c1-abfe-1fb2706dc383_483x674.png, Lopez-Medina et al:, Roy et al:, Chahla et al:, Mourya et al:, Loue et al:, Table 1, Merino et al:, never works, Faisal et al:, Aref et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-FoK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6de79b6-091b-4c13-b7be-715c9bb194a7_986x810.jpeg, Krolewiecki et al:, Vallejos et al:, TOGETHER Trial:, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7X0m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1f65fd44-58b9-4489-a934-02a5a7330499_706x768.png, Buonfrate et al:, Mayer et al:, immortal time bias, this Twitter thread, Borody et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wpjs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d8a451b-b1fc-44e5-ae67-b1506e491762_914x657.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DOjA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F17d5827a-38da-4a99-beb3-c3018df5c633_920x604.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GX1n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc692fec8-a450-4579-b337-c72bec060970_912x298.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YcH4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff36db98e-e653-44da-906c-20312b1689a3_468x205.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jbcL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd189a844-daf2-4199-bb2e-830d4fc64415_468x206.png, later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar, Popp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2B6r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F505c5ac4-3fe8-47a4-8505-dab80601b44d_416x198.png, Avi Bitterman, David Boulware, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWWh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac9e4f34-f9cc-40f2-9d83-da4e7178fad7_772x330.png, source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
…looks very impressive, in terms of the experimental group doing better than the control, except that they don’t specify whether it was before the trial or after it, and at least one online commentator thinks it might have been before, in which case it’s only impressive how thoroughly they failed to randomize their groups. Overall I don’t feel bad throwing this study out. I hope it one day succeeds in returning to its home planet. Lopez-Medina et al: Colombian RCT. 200 patients took ivermectin, another 200 took placebo. They originally worried the placebo might taste different than real ivermectin, then solved this by replacing it with a different placebo, which is a pretty high level of conscientiousness. Primary outcome was originally percent of patients whose symptoms worsened by two points, as rated on a complicated symptom scale when a researcher asked them over the phone. Halfway through the study, they realized nobody was worsening that much, so they changed the primary outcome to time until symptoms got better, as measured by the scale. In the ivermectin group, symptoms improved that much after 10 days; in the placebo group, after 12, p = 0.53. By the end of the study, symptoms had improved in 82% of ivermectin users and 79% of controls, also insignificant. 4 patients in the ivermectin group needed to be hospitalized compared to 6 in the placebo group, again insignificant. This study is bigger than most of the other RCTs, and more polished in terms of how many spelling errors, photographs of computer screens, etc, it contains. It was published in JAMA, one of the most prestigious US medical journals, as opposed to the crappy nth-tier journals most of the others have been in. When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. Ivermectin proponents make some good arguments against it. In order to get as big as it did, Lopez-Medina had to compromise on rigor. Its outcome is how people self-score their symptoms on a hokey scale in a phone interview, instead of viral load or PCR results or anything like that. Still, this is basically what we want, right? In the end, we want people to feel better and less sick, not to get good scores on PCR tests. Also, it changed its primary outcome halfway through; isn’t that bad? I think maybe not; the reason we want a preregistered primary outcome is so that you don’t change halfway through to whatever outcome shows the results you want. The researchers in this study did a good job explaining why they changed their outcome, the change makes sense, and their original outcome would also have shown ivermectin not working (albeit less accurately and effectively). I don’t know of any evidence that they knew (or suspected) final results when switching to this new outcome, and it seems like the most reasonable new outcome to switch to. Finally, their original placebo tasted different from ivermectin (though they switched halfway through). This is one of the few studies where I actually care about placebo, because people are self-rating their symptoms. But realistically most of these people don’t know what ivermectin is supposed to taste like. Also, they did a re-analysis and found there was no difference between the people who got the old placebo and the new one. I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work. Also, the warning itself irritates me, and includes paragraphs like: RCTs have a fundamental bias against finding an effect for interventions that are widely available — patients that believe they need treatment are more likely to decline participation and take the intervention [Yeh], i.e., RCTs are more likely to enroll low-risk participants that do not need treatment to recover (this does not apply to the typical pharmaceutical trial of a new drug that is otherwise unavailable). This trial was run in a community where ivermectin was available OTC and very widely known and used. Nobody else worries about this, and there are a million biases that non-randomized studies have that would be super-relevant when discussing those, but somehow when they’re pro-ivermectin the site forgets to be this thorough. I think a better pro-ivermectin response to this study is to point out that all the trends support ivermectin. Symptoms took 10 days to resolve in the ivermectin group vs. 12 in placebo; 4 ivermectin patients were hospitalized vs. 6 placebo patients, etc. Just say that this was an unusually noisy trial because of the self-report methodology, and you’re confident that these small differences will add up to significance when you put them into a meta-analysis. Roy et al: We’re back in East India, and back to non-randomized trials. 56 patients were retrospectively examined; some had been given ivermectin + doxycycline, others hydroxychloroquine, other azithromycin, and others symptomatic treatment only. We don’t get any meaningful information about how this worked, but we are told that they did not differ in “clinical well-being reporting onset timing”. Whatever. Chahla et al: The first of many Argentine trials. 110 patients received medium-dose ivermectin; 144 were kept as a control (no placebo). This was “cluster randomized”, which means they randomize different health centers to either give the experimental drug or not. This is worse than regular randomization, because there could be differences between these health centers (eg one might have better doctors who otherwise give better treatment, one might be in the poor part of town and have sicker patients, etc). They checked to see if there were any differences between the groups, and it sure looks like there were (the experimental group had twice as many obese people as the controls), but as per them, these differences were not statistically significant. Note that if this did make a difference, it would presumably make ivermectin look worse, not better. The primary outcome was given as “increase discharge from outpatient care with COVID-19 mild disease”. This favored the treatment; only 2/110 patients in the ivermectin group failed to be discharged, compared to 20 patients in the control group. But, uh, these were at different medical centers. Can’t different medical centers just have different discharge policies? One discharges you as soon as you seem to be getting better, the other waits to really make sure? This is an utterly crap endpoint to do a cluster randomized controlled trial on. If you’re going to do cRCT, which is never a great idea, you should be using some extremely objective endpoint that doctors and clinic administrators can’t possibly affect, like viral load according to some third-party laboratory, using the same third-party laboratory for both clinics. This is such a bad idea that I can’t help worrying I’m missing or misunderstanding something. If not, this is dumb and bad and should be ignored. Mourya et al: We’re back in India. This is a nonrandomized study comparing 50 patients given ivermectin to 50 patients given hydroxychloroquine. No primary outcome was named, but they focus on PCR negativity. Only 6% of patients in the hydroxychloroquine group were negative, compared to 90% of patients in the ivermectin group! On what day did they do the test? Uh, kind of random, and they admit that “in [the hydroxychloroquine group], mean time difference from the date of initiation of treatment and second test was significantly longer (7.24±2.75 days) as compared to 5.22±1.21 days in [the ivermectin group] (p=0.021).” Since they assessed these groups at different times, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from them getting different results. Except that as far as I can tell this should handicap ivermectin, making it especially impressive that it did better. But also, the ivermectin group was made mostly of people who had been asymptomatic at the beginning (70%), and the hydroxychloroquine group had almost no asymptomatic cases (8%) . They were giving the ivermectin to healthy people and the hydroxychloroquine to sick people! They admit deep in the discussion that this “may be a confounding factor”. So basically they got totally different groups of people, tested them at totally different times, and the two sets of test results differed. So what? So this is why normal people do RCTs instead of whatever the heck this is, that’s what. Loue et al: …this one isn’t going to be an RCT either. Loue tells a story about a cluster of COVID cases at the French nursing home where he works. He asked people if they wanted to try ivermectin; 10 did and 15 didn’t. 1 ivermectin patient died, compared to 5 non-ivermectin patients. The non-ivermectin group looked a bit sicker than the ivermectin group in the inevitable Table 1, though it’s hard to tell. One interesting possible confounder (not mentioned, but I’m imagining it) is that demented patients probably couldn’t consent to ivermectin and ended up in the control group. This is another case of “I’m not going to trust anything that isn’t an RCT”. Merino et al: Another (sigh) non-RCT. Mexico City tried a public health program where if you called a hotline and said you had COVID, they sent you an emergency kit with various useful supplies. One of those supplies was ivermectin tablets. 18,074 people got the kit (and presumably some appreciable fraction took the ivermectin, though there’s no way to prove that). Their control group is people from before they started giving out the kits, people from after they stopped giving out the kits, and people who didn’t want the kits. There are differences in who got COVID early in the epidemic vs. later, and in people who did opt for medical kits vs. didn’t. To correct these, the researchers tried to adjust for confounders, something which - as I keep trying to hammer home again and again - never works. They found that using the kit led to a 75% or so reduction in hospitalization, though they were unable to separate out the ivermectin from the other things in the kit (paracetamol and aspirin), or from the placebo effect of having a kit and feeling like you had already gotten some treatment (if I understand right, the decision to go to the hospital was left entirely to the patient). I think this study is a moderate point in favor of giving people kits in order to prevent hospital overcrowding, but I’m not willing to accept that it tells us much about ivermectin in particular. Faisal et al: This one was published in The Professional Medical Journal (mispelled as “Profesional Medical Journal” in its URL), so you know it’s going to be good! It describes itself as “a cross-sectional study”, but later says it “randomized patients into two groups”, which would make it an RCT - I think they might just be using the term “cross-sectional” different from the standard American usage. A hospital in Pakistan got 50 patients on ivermectin + azithromycin, and another 50 on azithromycin alone. Primary outcome was not mentioned, and the data were presented confusingly, but a typical result is that only 4% of the ivermectin group had symptoms lasting more than 10 days, whereas 16% of the control group did, p < 0.01. They do a really weird thing where they compare how long it took symptoms to resolve between IVM and control groups within each bin. That is, if I’m understanding correctly, they ask “of the people who took between 3-5 days for symptoms to resolve, did they resolve faster for IVM or control?”. This is an utterly bizarre analysis to perform, although it doesn’t affect the fact that their other results still seem to favor ivermectin. Maybe I’m confused about what’s going on here. I’ve mostly been letting people off easy on no placebo, but I as far as I can tell (not very far) this paper seems to be going off whether patients reported continuing to have symptoms to the hospital doing the study, and I think that is potentially susceptible to placebo effects. Additionally, there’s no preregistration, and even though they talk a lot about doing PCR tests they don’t present the results. This is by no means the worst study here but I still think it’s pretty low quality and I don’t trust it. Aref et al: This one is published in the International Journal Of Nanomedicine, even though I’m pretty sure that isn’t a real thing. In this case the “nanomedicine” is a new nasal spray version of ivermectin which is so confusing I cannot for the life of me figure out what dose they are giving these patients. This Egyptian study gives 57 patients intranasal ivermectin plus hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, oseltamavir, and some vitamins; another 57 patients get all that stuff except the ivermectin. Primary outcome is not stated, but they look at various symptoms, all of which look better in the ivermectin group: 95% of ivermectin patients got negative PCRs at some time point, compared to 75% of controls, p = 0.004. I am pretty suspicious of this study, not least because it comes from Egypt which has an awful reputation for fake studies, and it returns extreme results that I wouldn’t expect even if ivermectin was actually a wonder drug. But I cannot find any particular thing wrong with it, nor did anyone else I looked at, so I will grudgingly let it stand. Krolewiecki et al: Another Argentine study. This one is a real RCT. 30 patients received ivermectin, 15 were the control group (no placebo, again). Primary outcome was difference in viral load on day 5. The trend favored ivermectin but it was not statistically significant, although they were able to make it statistically significant if they looked at a subset of higher-IVM-plasma-concentration patients. They did not find any difference in clinical outcomes. A pro-ivermectin person could point out that in the subgroup with the highest ivermectin concentrations, the drug seemed to work. A skeptic could point out that this is exactly the kind of subgroup slicing that you are not supposed to do without pre-registering it, which I don’t think this team did. I agree with the skeptic. Vallejos et al: Another Argentine study. It’s big (250 people in each arm). It’s an RCT. It tries to define a primary outcome (“Primary outcome: the trial ended when the last patient who was included achieved the end of study visit”), but that’s not what “primary outcome” means, and they don’t offer an alternative. Other outcomes: no difference in PCR on days 3 or 12. Hospitalization is nonsignificantly better in the ivermectin group (14 vs. 21, p = 0.2), but death is nonsigificantly better in the placebo group (3 vs. 4, p = 0.7). This isn’t even the kind of nonsignificant that might contribute to an exciting meta-analysis later. This is just a pure null result. I cannot find any problem with this study, and neither can anyone else I checked. This is the biggest RCT we’ve seen so far, so we should take it seriously. TOGETHER Trial: Speaking of big RCTs… This one hasn’t been published yet. There’s a video of a talk about it, but I am not going to watch it, because it is a video, so I am getting information secondhand from eg here. Apparently, it compares 677 people (!) randomized to ivermectin to 678 people randomized to placebo. 86 ivermectin patients ended up in the hospital compared to 95 placebo patients, p-value not significant. This was a really big professional trial done by bigshot researchers from a major Canadian university, and the medical establishment is taking it much more seriously than any of these others. When it comes out, it will probably get published in a top journal. When discussing Lopez-Medina, I wrote: When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. This is the other one. Not coincidentally, it’s also the other trial that ivmmeta.com has a warning letter underneath telling you to disregard. Their main concern is that instead of truly randomizing patients to ivermectin vs. placebo, they did a time-dependent randomization that meant during some weeks more patients were getting one or the other. This is a problem because the trial takes place in Brazil, where different variants were more common at different times. Here’s their image: On the one hand, I have immense contempt for ivmmeta for letting all those other awful studies pass and then pulling out all the stops to try to nitpick this one. I have no idea if their proposed randomization failure really happened. And no doubt the reason they’re even able to investigate this is that this study is really careful and transparent - most of them don’t tell you anything about their randomization method. I would be shocked if other studies don’t have all these problems and worse. On the other hand, the point isn’t to be fair, it’s to be right. And this is a potential confounder. Not a huge one. But a potential one. I guess all we can do is try to bound the damage. Even if the confounding is 100% real and bad, there’s no way to make this study consistent with the crazy super-pro-ivermectin results of studies like Espitia-Hernandez and Aref. And even if we deny any confounding, we see the same slight pro-ivermectin trend - 86 hospitalizations vs. 95 - that we’ve seen in so many other studies. Nothing is going to make me believe that this isn’t in the top 33% of studies we’ve been looking at, so let’s add it as grist for the meta-analysis (though maybe not quite as much grist as its vast size indicates) and move on, angrily. Buonfrate et al: An Italian RCT. Patients were randomized into low-dose ivermectin (32), placebo (29), or high-dose ivermectin (32). Primary outcome was viral load on day 7. There was no significant difference (average of 2 in ivermectin groups, 2.2 in placebo group). They admit that they failed to reach the planned sample size, but did a calculation to show that even if they had, the trial could not have returned a positive result. Clinically, an average of 2 patients were hospitalized in each of the ivermectin arms, compared to 0 in the placebo arm - which bucks our previously-very-constant pro-ivermectin trend. Mayer et al: Not an RCT. Patients in an Argentine province were offered the opportunity to try ivermectin; 3266 said yes and become the experimental group, 17966 said no and became the control group. There were many obvious differences between the groups, but they all seemed to handicap ivermectin. There was a nonsignificant trend toward less hospitalization and significantly less mortality (1.5% vs. 2.1%, p = 0.03). While looking into this study, I learned the term “immortal time bias”. This means a period in between selection for the study and the beginning of study recording where patient outcomes are not counted. I think the problem here is that if you signed up for the system on Day X, and if you got sick before they could give you ivermectin, you were in the control group. See this Twitter thread, I have not confirmed everything he says. This only hardens my resolve to stay away from non-RCTs. Borody et al: Our last paper! …is it a paper? I can’t find it published anywhere. It mostly seems to be on news sites. Doesn’t look peer-reviewed. And it starts with “Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views”. Whatever. 600 Australians were treated with ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc. The article compares this to an “equivalent control group” made of “contemporary infected subjects in Australia obtained from published Covid Tracking Data”; this is not how you control group, @#!% you. Then it gets excited about the fact that most patients had better symptoms at the end of the ten-day study period than the beginning (untreated COVID resolves in about ten days). Why are these people wasting my time with this? Let’s move on. The Analysis If we remove all fraudulent and methodologically unsound studies from the table above, we end up with this: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who investigated many of the studies above for fraud, tried a similar exercise. I learned about his halfway through, couldn’t help seeing it briefly, but tried to avoid remembering it or using it when generating mine (also, I did take the result of his fraud investigations into account), so they should be considered not quite independent efforts. His looks like this: He nixed Chowdhury, Babaloba, Ghauri, Faisal, and Aref, but kept Szenta Fonseca, Biber (?), and Mayer. There was correlation of 0.45, which I guess is okay. I asked him about his decision-making, and he listed a combination of serious statistical errors and small red flags adding up. I was pretty uncomfortable with most of these studies myself, so I will err on the side of severity, and remove all studies that either I or Meyerowitz-Katz disliked. We end up with the following short list: We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them. …but honestly this table still looks pretty good for ivermectin, doesn’t it? Still lots of big green boxes. Meyerowitz-Katz accuses ivmmeta of cherry-picking what statistic to use for their forest plot. That is, if a study measures ten outcomes, they sometimes take the most pro-ivermectin outcome. Ivmmeta.com counters that they used a consistent and reasonable (if complicated) process for choosing their outcome of focus, that being: If studies report multiple kinds of effects then the most serious outcome is used in calculations for that study. For example, if effects for mortality and cases are both reported, the effect for mortality is used, this may be different to the effect that a study focused on. If symptomatic results are reported at multiple times, we used the latest time, for example if mortality results are provided at 14 days and 28 days, the results at 28 days are used. Mortality alone is preferred over combined outcomes. Outcomes with zero events in both arms were not used (the next most serious outcome is used — no studies were excluded). For example, in low-risk populations with no mortality, a reduction in mortality with treatment is not possible, however a reduction in hospitalization, for example, is still valuable. Clinical outcome is considered more important than PCR testing status. When basically all patients recover in both treatment and control groups, preference for viral clearance and recovery is given to results mid-recovery where available (after most or all patients have recovered there is no room for an effective treatment to do better). If only individual symptom data is available, the most serious symptom has priority, for example difficulty breathing or low SpO2 is more important than cough. I’m having trouble judging this, partly because Meyerowitz-Katz says ivmmeta has corrected some earlier mistakes, and partly because there really is some reasonable debate over how to judge studies with lots of complicated endpoints. By this point I had completely forgotten what ivmmeta did, so I independently coded all 11 remaining studies following something in between my best understanding of their procedure and what I considered common sense. The only exception was that when the most severe outcome was measured in something other than patients (ie average number of virus copies per patient), I defaulted to one that was measured in patients instead, to keep everything with the same denominator. My results mostly matched ivmmeta’s, with one or two exceptions that I think are within the scope of argument or related to my minor deviations from their protocol. Placebo vs. ivermectin groups sometimes differed in size, which I’ve adjusted for and rounded off. Probably I’m forgetting some reason I can’t just do simple summary statistics to this, but whatever. It is p = 0.15, not significant. This is maybe unfair, because there aren’t a lot of deaths in the sample, so by focusing on death rather than more common outcomes we’re pointlessly throwing away sample size. What happens if I unprincipledly pick whatever I think the most reasonable outcome to use from each study is? I’ve chosen “most reasonable” as a balance between “is the most severe” and “has a lot of data points”: Now it’s p = 0.04, seemingly significant, but I had to make some unprincipled decisions to get there. I don’t think I specifically replaced negative findings with positive ones, but I can’t prove that even to myself, let alone to you. [UPDATE 5/31/22: A reader writes in to tell me that the t-test I used above is overly simplistic. A Dersimonian-Laird test is more appropriate for meta-analysis, and would have given 0.03 and 0.005 on the first and second analysis, where I got 0.15 and 0.04. This significantly strengthens the apparent benefit of ivermectin from ‘debatable’ to ‘clear’. I discuss some reasons below why I am not convinced by this apparent benefit.] (how come I’m finding a bunch of things on the edge of significance, but the original ivmmeta site found a lot of extremely significant things? Because they combined ratios, such that “one death in placebo, zero in ivermectin” looked like a nigh-infinite benefit for ivermectin, whereas I’m combining raw numbers. Possibly my way is statistically illegitimate for some reason, but I’m just trying to get a rough estimate of how convinced to be) So we are stuck somewhere between “nonsignificant trend in favor” and “maybe-significant trend in favor, after throwing out some best practices”. This is normally where I would compare my results to those of other meta-analyses made by real professionals. But when I look at them, they all include studies later found to be fake, like Elgazzar, and unsurprisingly come up with wildly positive conclusions. There are about six in this category. One of them later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar and still found strong efficacy for ivermectin, but they still included Niaee and some other dubious studies. The only meta-analysis that doesn’t make these mistakes is Popp (a Cochrane review), which is from before Elgazzar was found to be fraudulent, but coincidentally excludes it for other reasons. It also excludes a lot of good studies like Mahmud and Ravakirti because they give patients other things like HCQ and azithromycin - I chose to include them, because I don’t think they either work or have especially bad side effects, so they’re basically placebo - but Cochrane is always harsh like this. They end up with a point estimate where ivermectin cuts mortality by 40% - but say the confidence intervals are too wide to draw any conclusion. I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance. Except that everyone is still focusing on deaths and hospitalizations just because they’re flashy. Mahmud et al, which everyone agrees is a great study, found that ivermectin decreased days until clinical recovery, p = 0.003? So what do you do? This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters. I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up. In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading. … … … … … The Synthesis Hopefully you learned something interesting about yourself there. But my answer is: worms! As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc. Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: Lopez-Medina et al:, Roy et al:, Chahla et al:, Mourya et al:, Loue et al:, Table 1, Merino et al:, never works, Faisal et al:, Aref et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-FoK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6de79b6-091b-4c13-b7be-715c9bb194a7_986x810.jpeg, Krolewiecki et al:, Vallejos et al:, TOGETHER Trial:, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7X0m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1f65fd44-58b9-4489-a934-02a5a7330499_706x768.png, Buonfrate et al:, Mayer et al:, immortal time bias, this Twitter thread, Borody et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wpjs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d8a451b-b1fc-44e5-ae67-b1506e491762_914x657.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DOjA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F17d5827a-38da-4a99-beb3-c3018df5c633_920x604.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GX1n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc692fec8-a450-4579-b337-c72bec060970_912x298.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YcH4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff36db98e-e653-44da-906c-20312b1689a3_468x205.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jbcL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd189a844-daf2-4199-bb2e-830d4fc64415_468x206.png, later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar, Popp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2B6r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F505c5ac4-3fe8-47a4-8505-dab80601b44d_416x198.png, Avi Bitterman, David Boulware, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWWh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac9e4f34-f9cc-40f2-9d83-da4e7178fad7_772x330.png, source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them. …but honestly this table still looks pretty good for ivermectin, doesn’t it? Still lots of big green boxes. Meyerowitz-Katz accuses ivmmeta of cherry-picking what statistic to use for their forest plot. That is, if a study measures ten outcomes, they sometimes take the most pro-ivermectin outcome. Ivmmeta.com counters that they used a consistent and reasonable (if complicated) process for choosing their outcome of focus, that being: If studies report multiple kinds of effects then the most serious outcome is used in calculations for that study. For example, if effects for mortality and cases are both reported, the effect for mortality is used, this may be different to the effect that a study focused on. If symptomatic results are reported at multiple times, we used the latest time, for example if mortality results are provided at 14 days and 28 days, the results at 28 days are used. Mortality alone is preferred over combined outcomes. Outcomes with zero events in both arms were not used (the next most serious outcome is used — no studies were excluded). For example, in low-risk populations with no mortality, a reduction in mortality with treatment is not possible, however a reduction in hospitalization, for example, is still valuable. Clinical outcome is considered more important than PCR testing status. When basically all patients recover in both treatment and control groups, preference for viral clearance and recovery is given to results mid-recovery where available (after most or all patients have recovered there is no room for an effective treatment to do better). If only individual symptom data is available, the most serious symptom has priority, for example difficulty breathing or low SpO2 is more important than cough. I’m having trouble judging this, partly because Meyerowitz-Katz says ivmmeta has corrected some earlier mistakes, and partly because there really is some reasonable debate over how to judge studies with lots of complicated endpoints. By this point I had completely forgotten what ivmmeta did, so I independently coded all 11 remaining studies following something in between my best understanding of their procedure and what I considered common sense. The only exception was that when the most severe outcome was measured in something other than patients (ie average number of virus copies per patient), I defaulted to one that was measured in patients instead, to keep everything with the same denominator. My results mostly matched ivmmeta’s, with one or two exceptions that I think are within the scope of argument or related to my minor deviations from their protocol. Placebo vs. ivermectin groups sometimes differed in size, which I’ve adjusted for and rounded off. Probably I’m forgetting some reason I can’t just do simple summary statistics to this, but whatever. It is p = 0.15, not significant. This is maybe unfair, because there aren’t a lot of deaths in the sample, so by focusing on death rather than more common outcomes we’re pointlessly throwing away sample size. What happens if I unprincipledly pick whatever I think the most reasonable outcome to use from each study is? I’ve chosen “most reasonable” as a balance between “is the most severe” and “has a lot of data points”: Now it’s p = 0.04, seemingly significant, but I had to make some unprincipled decisions to get there. I don’t think I specifically replaced negative findings with positive ones, but I can’t prove that even to myself, let alone to you. [UPDATE 5/31/22: A reader writes in to tell me that the t-test I used above is overly simplistic. A Dersimonian-Laird test is more appropriate for meta-analysis, and would have given 0.03 and 0.005 on the first and second analysis, where I got 0.15 and 0.04. This significantly strengthens the apparent benefit of ivermectin from ‘debatable’ to ‘clear’. I discuss some reasons below why I am not convinced by this apparent benefit.] (how come I’m finding a bunch of things on the edge of significance, but the original ivmmeta site found a lot of extremely significant things? Because they combined ratios, such that “one death in placebo, zero in ivermectin” looked like a nigh-infinite benefit for ivermectin, whereas I’m combining raw numbers. Possibly my way is statistically illegitimate for some reason, but I’m just trying to get a rough estimate of how convinced to be) So we are stuck somewhere between “nonsignificant trend in favor” and “maybe-significant trend in favor, after throwing out some best practices”. This is normally where I would compare my results to those of other meta-analyses made by real professionals. But when I look at them, they all include studies later found to be fake, like Elgazzar, and unsurprisingly come up with wildly positive conclusions. There are about six in this category. One of them later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar and still found strong efficacy for ivermectin, but they still included Niaee and some other dubious studies. The only meta-analysis that doesn’t make these mistakes is Popp (a Cochrane review), which is from before Elgazzar was found to be fraudulent, but coincidentally excludes it for other reasons. It also excludes a lot of good studies like Mahmud and Ravakirti because they give patients other things like HCQ and azithromycin - I chose to include them, because I don’t think they either work or have especially bad side effects, so they’re basically placebo - but Cochrane is always harsh like this. They end up with a point estimate where ivermectin cuts mortality by 40% - but say the confidence intervals are too wide to draw any conclusion. I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance. Except that everyone is still focusing on deaths and hospitalizations just because they’re flashy. Mahmud et al, which everyone agrees is a great study, found that ivermectin decreased days until clinical recovery, p = 0.003? So what do you do? This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters. I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up. In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading. … … … … … The Synthesis Hopefully you learned something interesting about yourself there. But my answer is: worms! As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc. Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YcH4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff36db98e-e653-44da-906c-20312b1689a3_468x205.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jbcL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd189a844-daf2-4199-bb2e-830d4fc64415_468x206.png, later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar, Popp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2B6r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F505c5ac4-3fe8-47a4-8505-dab80601b44d_416x198.png, Avi Bitterman, David Boulware, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWWh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac9e4f34-f9cc-40f2-9d83-da4e7178fad7_772x330.png, source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
The only two Indian physicists to win a Nobel Prize (CV Raman and Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar) came from the same family (Raman was Chandrasekhar's paternal uncle)
One of Charles [Hinton]'s descendants is Geoffrey Hinton who won a Turing Award a couple of years ago. He is also a descendant of George Boole and George Everest (Surveyor General of India) after whom the mountain is named. He is not descended from the jungle gym guy. The jungle gym guy had two crazy Communist children who were big fans of Mao.
Highlights From The Comments On Ivermectin
November 23, 2021 · Original source
But even strongyloides itself isn’t actually that uncommon. In Bangladesh, where some of the best positive trials come from, seroprevalence is 5-22%. And in Ravakirti, one of the studies in East India (which I assume is similar), got corticosteroids.
Inline links: 5-22
I agree. Scott needs to factor in regional prevalence. Trials are run in more sophisticated cities, where prevalence of worms would be far less than the outskirts. I live in Chennai, India, and prevalence of worms would be orders of magnitude away from a randomly picked village in India.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
3: In the 19th century, a group of Tibeto-Burman-speaking former headhunters along the India/Burma border declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh (one of the Ten Lost Tribes) and converted en masse to Judaism. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted their claim and expedited immigration paperwork for several thousand of them.
Inline links: declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh
12: In 1799, British-American fugitive William Bowles fled to Florida, moved in with the local Indians, became their chief, led a series of raids on the US, and declared independence as the State Of Muskogee (he was defeated by a US/Spanish alliance in 1803).
Inline links: State Of Muskogee
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
COVID 23. Fewer than 10K daily average official COVID cases in US in December 2021: 30% 24. Fewer than 50K daily average COVID cases worldwide in December 2021: 1% 25. Greater than 66% of US population vaccinated against COVID: 50% 26. India's official case count is higher than US: 50% 27. Vitamin D is not generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70% 28. Something else not currently used becomes first-line treatment for COVID: 40% 29. Some new variant not currently known is greater than 25% of cases: 50% 30. Some new variant where no existing vaccine is more than 50% effective: 40% 31. US approves AstraZeneca vaccine: 20% 32. Most people I see in the local grocery store aren't wearing a mask: 60%
COMMUNITY 33. Major rationalist org leaves Bay Area: 60% 34. MIRI relocates to Washington State: 20% 35. MIRI relocates to New England: 20% 36. MIRI relocates somewhere else: 20% 37. Less Wrong team relocates: 30% 38. No new residents at our housing cluster: 40% 39. No current residents leave our housing cluster: 60% 40. [friend] goes back to Indiana: 40% 41. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 50% 42. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 30% 43. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 20% 44. [friend] has gotten [job]: 50% 45. [friend] has recovered their health: 70% 46. [friend] has gotten egg freezing: 30% 47. [friend] is pregnant: 70% 48. [friends] are still together: 50% 49. [friend] is still at [job]: 80% 50. [friend] is in college: 60% 51. [friends] live in [house]: 30% 52. [other friends] live in [house]: 30% 53. At least 7 days my house is orange or worse on PurpleAir.com because of fires: 80%
Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
COVID 22. Fewer than 10K daily average official COVID cases in US in December 2022: 20% 23. Fewer than 50K daily average COVID cases worldwide in December 2022: 1% 24. >66% US population fully vaccinated (by current standards) against COVID: 70% 25. India's official case count is higher than US: 5% 26. Medical establishment reverses course and officially says any of Vitamin D, HCQ, or ivermectin is actually effective against COVID: 1% 27: FDA approves a COVID indication for fluvoxamine: 60% 28. Some new variant not currently known is greater than 25% of cases: 60% 29. Most people I see in the local grocery store 12/31/22 are wearing masks: 60% 30. Masks still required on domestic flights: 60% 31. CDC recommends that triple-vaxxed people get at least one more vax: 70% 32. China has fewer than 100,000 COVID cases this year (official estimate): 30%
COMMUNITY 33. [redacted]: 80% 34. No new (non-baby) residents at our housing cluster: 80% 35. No current residents leave our housing cluster: 80% 36. [friend] stays in Indiana: 90% 37. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 30% 38. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 30% 39. [friend] is in a primary relationship: 20% 40. [friend] is dating [friend]: 60% 41. [friend] has [job]: 30% 42. [friend] has published at least one issue of their EA journal: 95% 43. [friend]still works at [job]: 30% 44. [friend] is pregnant (or has given birth): 80% 45. [friend] is pregnant (or has given birth): 70% 46. [friend] is pregnant (or has given birth): 40% 47. [friend] is still working at [job]: 80% 48. [friend] gets engaged: 40% 49. [friend] takes on additional medical work beyond his job for the Board: 50%
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#42: Publish Books On Architecture I am an architect based in India trying to build a research-based design practice. I am seeking funding of 4000$ to finish self-publishing two e-books on the Amazon marketplace that will form part of my PhD application in December 2022. The costs will cover printing of test dummies, sending a few copies to prospective guides, mentors and pay for miscellaneous fees. A validated writing practice is a desired application requirement that I am trying to full fill with the exercise. The theme of the work is to show how patronage has changed knowledge production of architecture across the four generations that have practiced, are practicing in the country. An attempt to fund the project is to prove the hypothesis that the creative economy is the only way ahead for architectural practices if necessary policy guidelines are not implemented for a sustainable future for the profession. If funded process of getting an admission and transition the research done to further work on architectural imagination may also be easier. I have complied a reading list of almost an entirety of Indian architectural design books from 1985 - 2019, around 100/125, that enables the project. These will be uploaded on my Instagram account starting here. Contents and introduction to the first book is accessed here https://isaacmathew.substack.com/p/daily-sentences-2111072039. Isaac Mathew 2201240945 . Contact me at isaac@spatialresearch.net
Inline links: here
#65: Test The Ethics Of Foreign Interventions In India I am a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia researching the demand for (and ethics of) foreign intervention in India. Charities and researchers rarely measure what the people think about their interventions, and even more rarely does that measurement truly reflect people's preferences. Moreover, many consider foreign intervention (even NGOs' development programs) as a form of colonialism unwanted by the locals. To remedy that, I will contact local politicians in India -- as if I were working for an NGO -- and ask whether they would like to sign up their communities for different kinds of interventions provided by different institutions. To make sure I can test a few interventions with a large enough sample size, I need 15,000 USD in extra funding. The funding will mainly go towards hiring and training phone surveyors and conducting complementary data collection on the characteristics of those local politicians. [Contact me at deivisangeli@gmail.com]
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#82: Create AGI I’m Sainadh Chityala and I’m developing a general purpose machine learning architecture that could potentially make any device intelligent. I have chosen a radically different approach to get this done, that is by developing a self-driving car in India. A self-driving car ML pipeline is the closest to the brain’s physiology than any other that humans are working on. An architecture of this sort could reduce the resources, time and effort for projects that involve massive R&D like in the case of Development of Rockets and New Treatments by automating and emulating everything. Basically everything would eventually become an application of this. This architecture paves the way towards a post scarcity world. My goal with this is to develop AGI (Which might seem too much but who knows). [Contact me at sainadh.chityala@gmail.com]
#89: A Wiki For Rebuilding Civilization After Disaster My name is Jehan, I've created the site Wikiciv.org as a guide to rebuilding civilization in case of global catastrophe. Its editing is crowdsourced like Wikipedia because a project this large is far too much for one person, or even a team. Technologies and raw materials are linked so both upstream and downstream technologies are easily accessible. There are other projects with similar goals, but they are 1) Not publicly accessible 2) The wrong scale. Books such as "The Knowledge" and "How to Invent Everything" are too cursory to be a practical guide for recreating critical technologies like steel, fertilizer and antibiotics. Meanwhile the "Manual for Civilization" from the Long Now Foundation is 3500 paper books in one corner of San Franciso. Wikiciv fully open and available for database downloads. Distributed backups are encouraged to ensure resiliency during a disaster. WikiCiv could be be helpful even for regional supply-chain disruptions. For example during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were critical oxygen shortages in India. It turns out that a reasonable oxygen generator can be made from zeolite and an air compressor. Wikiciv aims to be a single, interconnected database of "from scratch" manufacturing instructions for situations like these. It is the eventual goal of Wikiciv to be accepted as a Wikimedia Foundation project (like Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage etc). The better Wikiciv becomes, the more likely this is. Get in touch at admin@wikiciv.org
#92: Do Gay Rights In India Reduce Discrimination? I’m looking for funding for research that will test whether the expansion of the legal rights of gay people in India reduces discrimination by coordinating a shift in the social norms surrounding anti-gay behaviour. Using the Supreme Court ruling in 2018 that decriminalised homosexuality across India, I will use an RCT to measure the effect of exposing individuals who are not already aware of this law to the information that homosexuality is legal. I will measure how this information impacts participants’ anti-gay behaviours and sentiment. Being told about the law is likely to act as a signal to people that being homophobic is no longer socially acceptable. Even if the information doesn’t change their private attitudes, they may therefore be more likely to act kindly towards gay people when their actions are visible to others. Relatedly, they may be more prone to positive communication about gay people, e.g., they may share less anti-gay news stories on social media. This reduction in anti-gay narratives could in turn help the longer-term process of positive social change. If you’re interested in this project, please email me at dmbwebb@gmail.com!
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 06, 2022 · Original source
As for the second paragraph, I’m imagining some situation like - India is mostly Hindu. But some subregion of India is mostly Muslim. But some guy in that subregion is a Hindu. Perhaps the subregion is sad being ruled by Hindus, but that guy is happy. If we let the subregion get independence, the majority will be happy, but that one Hindu will be sad.
Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)? Maybe (counterfactual) India is very liberal and both Hindus and Muslims in that subregion have lots of rights, but if the region were allowed to secede it would become a Muslim fundamentalist state that oppressed its minorities.
I’m mostly willing to bite these bullets. The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours. This rule can’t be absolute and permanent - European colonization of the US was basically this, and nobody thinks we should give it back to the Indians now - but it should exist enough to prevent exploitation. I think this rule would cover ISIS and South Africa too.
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Faiz (faiz_abbas@protonmail.com) Date: April 24 Time: 4:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street, near MG road Group info: Bangalore SSC has been meeting monthly since 2018
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, Bangalore SSC
ERNAKULAM, INDIA Contact: Mathai Kuriakose (mkmathai@yahoo.com) Date: April 30 Time: 4:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6JXRX7HG+V2 Location: Broadway walkway near rainbow bridge
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6JXRX7HG+V2
KOLKATA (CALCUTTA), INDIA Contact: Sayan Sarkar (7rat13 AT gmail DOT com) Date: April 23 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7MJCG98V+28 Location: Starbucks, Acropolis Mall (open to suggestions) Notes: RSVP mandatory!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7MJCG98V+28
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them are immigrants. Immigrants believe in the American Dream. Maybe they’re the only people who still do. Back in Mexico or India or wherever, they heard that America was a magical place where ordinary people governed themselves and anyone could get ahead. Then they came to America and it met their expectations in some ways, and didn’t quite measure up in others. And they thought “Wait a second, I’m in a democracy now, it’s my job to fix this!” And so they bought their flag pin and their red-white-and-blue striped tie, subscribed to web hosting for $3.99/month, painted “[NAME] for Governor” on their beat-up old truck, and went off to the crusade.
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
Figure 8: Construction at ITER as of May 2021. ITER We can now answer some of our earlier questions. The reason why progress has stalled is because we did as much as we could do on medium experiments. No country has been willing to provide enough money to build its own large experiment. So the fusion community has been gathering money from all around the world for decades for a single project [13]. ITER is supported by Europe (EU + UK + Switzerland), the US (which withdrew in 1999 and rejoined in 2003 [14]), Russia, Japan, China, South Korea, and India. Figure 9: There are three people in this diagram. Can you find them? ITER is designed to get Q=10. Despite getting 10 times as much energy from fusion as we put into the plasma, ITER is not designed to get engineering breakeven. ITER is designed as an experiment, not as a power plant. There will be tons of measuring devices pointed inwards. There are four different ways to heat the plasma and drive the current. This all allows you to learn more, but it requires extra power and lowers the overall plant efficiency. ITER will be followed by a demonstration power plant, named DEMO [15]. A fully optimized power plant should be able to reach engineering breakeven as long as Q>5. This is why I chose Q=5 as my criterion for ‘getting fusion’. ITER is also testing multiple designs for the tritium breeding blanket. Tritium is expensive and radioactive, so you want to produce it on site. The D-T fusion reaction produces a neutron, which we want to absorb, so we can use it to produce tritium. ‘Breeding' is when we use a neutron to produce a more useful isotope. It is a ‘blanket' because it surrounds the entire plasma, keeping the neutrons from going anywhere else. The best reaction to produce tritium involves lithium-6: 36Li +01n 24He +13T . This reaction also releases energy, which increases the power produced by about 25%. The tritium breeding blanket needs to make this reaction occur as much as possible, to efficiently carry the heat away so it can be used to generate electricity, and to provide a way to extract the tritium produced. ITER is scheduled to begin their first experiments in 2025. Part of why I think that we are about to make rapid progress again is because we are finally getting a large experiment. There have been problems with ITER staying on schedule and under budget. This isn't surprising for a collaboration between governments representing over half the world's population. In 2014, ITER got a new director, recalculated its expected cost, and underwent a major restructuring. Since then, ITER has largely stuck to this schedule and budget. Recently, there has been a 6 month delay because the French nuclear agency did what nuclear regulatory agencies do best, but this has been the longest delay since 2014. It is still possible for ITER to fail. The biggest risk involves disruptions. Sometimes, the plasma in a tokamak becomes unstable and all of the plasma hits the wall at once. This could melt some extremely expensive equipment and take years to repair. If ITER cannot get disruptions under control, then it would be a failed experiment. This is especially challenging because pushing for higher Q makes disruptions more likely. ITER is planning on being extremely cautious: Experiments begin in 2025, but it won't operate at full capacity until 2035. ITER has been the focus of the fusion community now for decades. The Future of Fusion Energy similarly makes ITER the centerpiece of the book. Things. Have. Changed. ITER by itself is not enough to justify the high level of confidence I express at the start. When Parisi & Ball finished writing this book in April 2018, ITER was basically the only game in town. Since then, Things. Have. Changed. Historically, private fusion companies were almost entirely jokes or frauds. They make outlandish claims, use completely different designs so they can't build on the progress of Figure 3, and they can be safely ignored. For example, Lockheed Martin [16] claims that it will take them five years to build a prototype of a fusion power plant that will fit in a truck. They have yet to publish evidence that they have produced a fully ionized plasma. Maybe they're just being secretive, but their design has solid components in the plasma. That won't work. A new generation of private companies have surged into fusion. Leading the charge is Commonwealth Fusion Systems and their tokamak SPARC [17]. Recent advances in high temperature superconductors have been a game changer. They can produce a much stronger magnetic field which allows for better confinement in a smaller experiment. We should now be able to get Q=10 in a medium experiment, which costs ten times less than ITER [18] and is within the reach of private venture capital. Figure 10: Finding the person here is much easier. When the Department of Energy decided to close the third largest plasma experiment in the US, the MIT group which ran it found itself adrift. They founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2018 with a goal of getting fusion within 10 years [19]. Since then, they have built the first ever high temperature superconducting coil in 2019, released their engineering plans for SPARC in 2020, began construction in 2021, and plan on finishing construction in 2025. Commonwealth Fusion had just been founded when Parisi & Ball wrote in 2018. Now they're leading the race to fusion. Several other startups are following SPARC's strategy of using stronger magnetic fields to get fusion in a smaller experiment. They use a variety of designs. Alternative Designs To understand how the alternative designs are different, we need to make sure we understand the basic strategy for getting fusion in a tokamak. Let's run through it again: (A) We want to get lots of fusion reactions … … so we want a large triple product (density * temperature * confinement time). (B) The fusion plasma is too hot to touch solid objects … … so we put it in a magnetic bottle shaped like a doughnut. (C) The particles drift outwards, leaving the bottle … … so we twist the magnetic field with a current in the plasma. I will start with the alternatives that are most similar to a tokamak. For each one, I will list the best experiments that currently exist, where they're located, and the year they began operation. Tokamaks have been better researched than any other strategy. There are currently 10 medium tokamaks: T-10 (Russia, 1975)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RLSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d89bbdd-da25-4297-afd6-871f116f2355_1600x783.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!n_7L!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80bdc472-0b30-4841-8b08-9527c70f16f4_820x369.jpeg
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
When he slams Kant and Bentham in a really silly bit of the book where he goes on a tangent about how they were autistic (complete with a really laughable graphic that adds nothing to the text), he slams them for “reducing” morality to just one thing. When he belabours a metaphor about taste receptors, he very much seems to be analogising to normative morality, not psychological description. When he describes his time in India and the affect it had on his approach to morality, he’s seemingly talking about normative morality, not descriptions of how intuition works or where it comes from.
Haidt mentions that, after spending a while in India eating with his right hand and wiping his ass with his left, he could start to see why you might consider the right hand sacred and the left hand profane, and want to handle communal objects of religious significance with the right hand. Then, given the chirality of hands, you want this to be a shared norm. We will leave unexamined, as Haidt does, why you can’t just wash your hands, and how much this sucks for left-handed people and just take it as read that this broadly works as a co-ordination norm.
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Posterior: Both hypotheses seem viable and a thorough, open investigation is needed. Conclusion 2: Evaluating claims from experts and institutions There was a lesson I took away from this book that I’m not exactly sure how to feel about. Reading through the history of the investigation into the pandemic’s origins, it’s notable that many of the breakthroughs were made by either complete amateurs, or by scientists in fields outside of virology working in their free time. For example, one of the main characters in this story is The Seeker, an anonymous Twitter user, later revealed to be a former science teacher in India with no formal research experience. Again and again, amateur internet researchers like The Seeker caught things that the professional virology community missed or ignored, including the origins of RaTG13 and the eight other coronavirus samples from the Mojiang mine. I don’t really know how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s pretty cool that science is now open source in a way that lets random, curious people comb through data to make interesting discoveries. But on the other hand, what the hell is going on if some random Twitter users are consistently correcting world-renowned virology institutes on various mistakes and omissions? This is especially frustrating when the random guy on the internet turns out to be right. When people talk about “trusting the experts”, I think they mean trusting people with technical expertise over people without technical expertise. This makes sense a lot of the time. Probably almost all the time. If you need your car fixed, have a weird rash on your skin, or have a leaking pipe in your house, you consult a mechanic, a dermatologist, or a plumber because they have the technical expertise you need on those issues. You don’t ask a random guy on Twitter for help. But what if you have a question about investment banking on Wall Street, and how it should be regulated. Should you put the question to a bunch of investment bankers? After all, they do have the most technical expertise on this subject, right? They probably know more about investment banking than you or me, or a lot of the people pushing for more financial regulations. Now we’ve run into an issue: they do have technical expertise, but it’s bundled together and intertwined with a bunch of incentives that could lead to biased judgment, so we can’t take what they’re saying as some pure, objective truth. Of course, their technical expertise is still valuable, so we shouldn’t necessarily throw out everything they say either. The proper response is to listen to what they’re saying and weigh the information accordingly after considering the incentives they’re facing, and possible biases. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that scientific institutions, though probably not as bad as Wall Street, are still made up of human beings who are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, including group think, confirmation bias, and the good ol’ Not Wanting To Be Wrong. So what should we do about this? Well, the easy option is to just become an insane person, like Alex Jones, and assume the experts are lying all the time about everything. This strategy has the advantage of letting us feel edgy and rebellious, but it’s not very helpful if we actually want to figure these issues out. On the other hand, if we want to seriously try to discern truth from expert claims on controversial topics, that’s a messy challenge that involves considering their technical expertise, as well as potential biases they might have, as well as our own potential biases. Conclusion 3: Some optimism about science I know this has probably been a bit of a depressing post to read, but my final conclusion is actually one of optimism about the state of science. What differentiates science from other ways of knowing is its self-correction mechanisms. It’s all about changing our minds and reevaluating our beliefs based on new evidence and clearer understanding of things. This is basically what we’ve seen in the way the scientific community has changed positions on the lab leak hypothesis. Harsh critics might refer to this as a “flip flop”, or point out that the lab leak hypothesis never should have been dismissed in the first place, but I see it as a commendable error correction. What’s even cooler is that much of this reevaluation was the result of amateurs and semi-amateurs making discoveries based on freely accessible genomic sequence data, and open source online sequence analysis tools. Plus the fact that, despite their lack of official credentials, their analysis was taken seriously (eventually), when it became evident that they were making good points. This is a credit to the scientific community. Further sources to check out Natural Origins Proponents The most comprehensive post I’ve found making the case for natural origins is Philipp Markolin’s Substack post, which attempts to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question. Definitely recommend.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DmBD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc3f437a1-b9a0-4e0a-9f6b-87872bf32576_1210x1190.png, The most comprehensive post I’ve found making the case for natural origins is Philipp Markolin’s Substack post
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries
August 04, 2022 · Original source
India and China
India will go from 1.3 billion today, to a peak of 1.8 billion in 2060, before declining back to 1.6 billion in 2100.
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
Imagine you are a wise counselor, and you have the opportunity to spend your life advising one country. Whichever country you advise will become much richer and happier (and for whatever reason, you can’t choose your own homeland). You might think: “If I help Andorra, it will only benefit a few thousand people. If I help Lithuania, it will only benefit a few million people. But if I help India, it will benefit over a billion people. So I will devote my life to helping India.” Then you learn about the future, a country with 50 quadrillion people. Seems like a big deal.
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
There are also a few studies that just ask this question directly; apparently 16% of Americans say their lives contain more suffering than happiness, 44% say even, and 40% say more happiness than suffering; nine percent wish they were never born. A replication in India found similar numbers.
Based on all of this, I think if we trust this methodology about 10% of people live net negative lives today, which means the neutral point where the Repugnant Conclusion would force us to is at about the tenth percentile of the population. This doesn’t quite make sense, because you would think the tenth percentile of America and the tenth percentile of India are very different; there could be positional effects going on here, or it could be that India has some other advantages counterbalancing its poverty (better at family/community/religion?) and so tenth-percentile Indians and Americans are about equally happy.
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
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
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10) Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd.
Inline links: at her blog here, book
Growth Teams continues to look for more funding. See their website here or get in touch at founders@growth-teams.org. They are planning to expand in Sub-Saharan Africa and India soon.
Inline links: here, founders@growth-teams.org
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).
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
She reminded me that yesterday she was unusually grumpy, so much so that she had apologized to me for it and tried to come up with explanations - and then later yesterday she had her period. Meanwhile, Bures’ counterargument is - what? That it sounds kind of sexist to accuse female hormones of making women overly emotional? Hasn’t he ever heard of stereotype accuracy? That people asked their doctors to be treated for it more often after they knew it was considered a medical condition, and was treatable? That seems to have a much simpler explanation! That there are no biomarkers? There are inconsistent biomarkers that work sometimes but not other times, just like for schizophrenia, epilepsy, cancer, and half the other conditions in medicine. That these conditions don’t occur in most cultures? From here: A World Health Organization (WHO) study on menstruation (1981) surveyed 5,322 women from Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. . . The majority of women in all cultures report some premenstrual physical discomfort in addition to negative mood changes, however fewer women report mood change than physical change. The main cross-cultural difference was in the prevalence of specific symptoms. Immigrants to the United States report more PMDD the longer they’re here? True (source), but it’s a matter of degree, and seems more true of the PMDD diagnosis than specific symptoms. The diagnosis requires impairment, which is subjective. I imagine an immigrant from a culture where mental disorders are unthinkable - something that only happens to a few psychos in asylums - and where you work 12-hour days in sweatshops. Someone asks her “hey, has this mental disorder ever prevented you from working?”, and she says no, because obviously you grit your teeth and work through the symptoms. And I imagine an American seeing the same question and saying “Yeah, I did decide I had to take a couple of sick days because of that.” I’m not saying this definitely happened, just that it’s a possibility. Meanwhile, this entire area of study is a mess. The “PMDD is culture-bound” hypothesis was originally invented by feminist scholars trying to argue that the diagnosis was a sexist attempt to pathologize women as overemotional and untrustworthy (this is also where Bures got his “it’s just hysteria by a different name” idea). See for example here and here, the second of which says that “the feminist argument is that if women are angry/distressed, it is for good reason, not due to pathology”. Bures somehow swallowed and repeated this, and then some feminists on Vox wrote an article attacking him as a “male writer” who was denying women’s lived experiences of PMS and stereotyping them as stupid and gullible. Neither side has an argument beyond “I can think of a reason it would be sexist for people to disagree with me” and neither side will acknowledge that the other side is also feminists basing their argument entirely on how it would be sexist to disagree with them. Everything in every area of social science has been like this for at least the past twenty years. But also, this highlights the difficulties with declaring something culture-bound. How do you know if something’s culture-bound, vs. people don’t notice it or mention it if they don’t have a name for it? How do you know if something’s culture-bound vs. some cultures consider it too embarrassing or taboo to think about? How do you know if something’s culture-bound, vs. people will go to doctors about it if they think doctors can treat it, and otherwise they won’t? I’ll discuss these questions more later, but I want to finish Bures’ argument. He gestures at a few other possible candidates for culture-bound mental disorders, including repetitive strain injury and chronic pain. But he quickly moves on to a long section that tries to establish the reality of “voodoo death”, ie the thing where if you believe you are going to die hard enough, you actually die. I think most arguments for voodoo death are pretty bad, and I didn’t find Bures’ convincing. But bonus points for referencing a study claiming that chronically stressed people only die at higher rates if they believe chronic stress is bad for them, and if not then they don’t (this is not really how I interpret the abstract, but I haven’t looked closely) Is it weird to stay on the crazy train long enough to agree that cultural effects are strong enough to make you think witches are stealing your penis, and then get off it once people start talking about voodoo death? I think no - these are very different situations. Believing in koro can make you hallucinate that your penis is shrunken or gone, but no belief, however strong, can (directly) remove your penis itself. Culture → beliefs is fine; culture → reality is a step I’m not willing to take. V. Since I rejected Bures’ PMDD example, I want to digress to what I think is a stronger argument: anorexia, which Ethan Watters discusses in his book Crazy Like Us. Anorexia was mostly unknown in the West, until becoming “trendy” in the mid-1800s. During that period, doctors reported high prevalence of anorexia among “hysterics”, but the fad ended after about ten or twenty years, and it went back to being basically unknown. In 1983, famous singer Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, thrusting it back into the national news, and suddenly lots of people (in the West) were anorexic again. Meanwhile, foreign doctors who trained in the West went back to their home countries, searched far and wide for it, and found almost nothing. The few cases they did see didn’t resemble the typical Western version at all - for example, one Hong Kong psychiatrist was able to find a woman who refused to eat out of grief when a boyfriend left her, but she didn’t think she was fat, or feel any cultural pressure to be thinner. The absence of anorexia abroad was especially surprising since anorexics tend to end up in the hospital with extremely noticeable malnutrition that doesn’t really mimic anything else. It’s not really possible to hide severe anorexia the way you can hide severe depression. In 1994, Hong Kong got its own Karen Carpenter - a young girl died of anorexia, setting off a national panic and many public awareness campaigns. Near-instantly, anorexia rates shot up to the same level as the West, with the appropriate number of people presenting to hospital ERs with severe malnutrition. This story raises a lot of questions. For example: where did the first anorexics (Karen Carpenter, the girl in Hong Kong) come from? Why anorexia and not something else? And how come knowing about anorexia makes it spread so quickly? VI. Past this point I’m using this review to discuss my own thoughts, not Bures’ or Watters’. “Culture-bound” is less all-or-nothing than you’d think. Look hard enough, and you’ll find people having “culture-bound syndromes” from cultures they’ve never heard of. Ntouros et al in Thessaloniki describe “koro-like symptoms in two Greek men”. One, a paranoid schizophrenic: . . . reported for the first time a sensation that his penis retracts into the abdomen and a fear that it will subsequently be lost. This would be accompanied by anxiety and sadness pertaining only to the loss itself. He would then proceed to search manually for his penis and masturbate. No pleasure was gained by masturbation, but the anxiety would be lifted. Romero et al describe a case of koro in "an intellectually disabled Caucasian patient" in Spain. They write that "although it is widely regarded as an epidemic in South-east Asia, there are some isolated cases in other cultures as well." Wilson and Agin describe a 29 year old white male from New York, "not exposed to the Chinese culture”, who went to the doctor with a five month history of worrying that his genitals were retracting into his body: Sometimes, he would manually reaffirm the presence of his genitals. Occasionally he would, in private, remove his garments and visually confirm the presence of his genitals. On one occasion, while taking the train home from work, he experienced an acute exacerbation of these symptoms. His pain increased from 3/10 to 10/10, and he felt as if his genitals had fully retracted within his belly. Upon reaching his hometown, he immediately went to the local hospital emergency room where examinations for inguinal hernia, urinary tract infection, proctitis, prostatitis, and testicular disorders proved negative. He improved significantly on the anti-anxiety medication desipramine. Chowdhury surveys the evidence on koro and divides the condition into two types: culture-bound and non-culture-bound. The culture-bound type usually goes in large epidemics, hundreds to thousands of people, in koro-believing parts of Africa and Asia; the victims were usually previously psychologically normal. The non-culture-bound type hits a few scattered individuals, is not contagious, and can happen anywhere - Greece, Spain, America. Some patients are psychologically normal, but there are a disproportionate number of schizophrenics, drug users, brain damage victims, and other previously-mentally-ill people. Other culture-bound illnesses seem to be like this too. Running amok has been big in Malaysia for 300 years. The Columbine shooters seem to have been autocthonous American cases, equivalent to that one New Yorker who got koro - before their fame inscribed amok onto the US collective consciousness the same way Karen Carpenter’s inscribed anorexia. Japan’s jikoshu-kyofu affects occasional victims in the US under the name olfactory reference syndrome. Watters admits there were a tiny handful of unusual anorexia cases in Hong Kong before Westernization. And even that Indian there’s-a-lizard-in-my-skin condition differs only in species from delusional parasitosis. Delusional parasitosis - the false belief that you are infested with parasites and can feel them crawling in your skin - is actually an especially interesting case. Two groups are disproportionately represented among patients: menopausal women and cocaine addicts. Relatedly, two biological conditions that can sometimes cause weird skin sensations that feel like crawling insects are . . . menopause and cocaine use. So there’s no mystery here. But, also represented among delusional parasitosis patients are the roommates and family members of these people. The index case hallucinates insects for a well-understood biological reason; their close contacts hallucinate insects through social contagion. So a unified theory of these conditions might be: Some people have the condition for a normal biological or psychiatric reason. For example, someone might believe a lizard is crawling under their skin because they use cocaine, which causes hallucinatory crawling sensations. Or someone might believe their penis is missing because they’re schizophrenic, which makes them naturally hallucination-prone.
Inline links: stereotype accuracy, inconsistent biomarkers that work sometimes but not other times, here, source, here, here, and then some feminists on Vox wrote an article, chronic pain, are pretty bad, a study, Ethan Watters discusses in his book, Ntouros et al, Romero et al, Wilson and Agin, surveys the evidence, olfactory reference syndrome, delusional parasitosis
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
BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal M Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 7th, 04:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea, church Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mkgmobxKDwntMNneL/bengaluru-lw-acx-social-meetups-meetups-everywhere-spring
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mkgmobxKDwntMNneL/bengaluru-lw-acx-social-meetups-meetups-everywhere-spring
DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi Contact Info: suryansh[at]firstbelief[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 21st, 04:30 PM Location: Altogether Experimental, Saket. https://maps.app.goo.gl/bauZmakWdTQ6QLwB7 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JWVG59X+75 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/38trvhGajHKCJLGsM/acx-meetup-in-delhi-1 Notes: Please join the WhatsApp group using this link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jph8xQOprnK1mA7DBKkWOS
Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/bauZmakWdTQ6QLwB7, https://plus.codes/7JWVG59X+75, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/38trvhGajHKCJLGsM/acx-meetup-in-delhi-1, https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jph8xQOprnK1mA7DBKkWOS
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Population Bomb calls for a multi-pronged solution to a coming overpopulation crisis. One prong was coercive mass sterilization. Ehrlich particularly recommended this for India, a country at the forefront of rising populations.
When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, [Chandrasekhar, an Indian official who shared Ehrlich’s views] should have encouraged the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.
Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of people. The broader Democratic Party and environmentalist movement were completely on board.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
… 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
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
From trivial to rich: the trick What could an intellectually rich elementary school curriculum look like, if we built it on kids’ cognitive strengths? He gives us one suggestion to help us do this: ask where each discipline came from in the first place. What was math before it was math, for example — or science before it was science? Q: How on Earth could that help? That’ll become clear later, when we finally uncover what Egan thinks “education” actually is, and see what job he wants us to give schools. For now, take it as a tantalizing hint… or, y’know, just ignore it. Elementary literature & language What was literature before it was literature? Before people invented writing, they had rich oral traditions: they told simple stories, recited poems, and shared proverbs. Egan suggests that these bits of oral tradition should form the backbone of the elementary literature curriculum. Q: What sorts of stories? As many as we can, and from as many diverse cultures as possible! Folktales are wonderful, as are myths. Think the Aboriginal story of “The Rainbow Serpent”, episodes from the Sumerian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the Egyptian story of Osiris & Isis, the Greek story of Orpheus & Eurydice, the Chinese Legend of the White Snake, the Japanese Tale of Amaterasu and Susanoo, the Ashanti tales of Anansi, the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, the English legend of King Arthur, the Maori myth of Maui and the Sun, the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, selections from the Indian Mahabharata, the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, the Inca legend of the Sun and Moon, the Iroquois Myth of the Flying Head (a real thing! look it up!), and the Ojibwe story of Turtle Island. Q: That was a lot of examples. Are you going to keep giving so many? I’ve got a [mumble mumble mumble] to get to. Sorry about that. Sometimes, though, I feel that a limitation of reading Educated Mind is that, in trying to keep his book to a manageable size, Egan skimped on examples in some places that it matters. It’s easy to read his occasional example and assume he intends that it hold some central place in the curriculum — when all he wants to do is display how rich and diverse the curriculum could be. (Also: good God, I didn’t even include an example from Norse mythology!) So from now on, just assume that every category could be filled with oodles of examples. Q: What sorts of poems? Lots of poems, first of all. We shouldn’t steer toward “fancy” poems — rather, we should find poems that appeal to kids immediately — think Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, or Ogden Nash… that sort of thing. In a biting essay, Egan suggests these poets like these appeal to kids precisely because they leverage kids’ cognitive strengths: “we should find, and encourage saying and singing and shouting aloud verse with strong narrative forms, thumping rhymes and rhythms, the most vivid images, fun with metaphors, and a rollicking story.” Q: Why proverbs? Proverbs stick in your mind almost effortlessly. (“All’s fair in love and war!” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!” “You can’t judge a book by its cover!”) They’re also useful; they capture general truths. Kids can apply them to all sorts of situations, but also discuss them — to what extent are they wise or foolish? (I remember my surprise when I realized that they couldn’t all be true — because you can’t follow “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” at the same time! I’m embarrassed to say that I think I only realized this when I was in college.) Elementary science What was science before it was science? Egan suggests: being immersed in the natural world. We might, he writes, encourage elementary students to “adopt” some feature of the natural world — a patch of grass, a cat, a branch, a stream — and simply observe it at length. To do this, we can use the cognitive strength of reverie. Q: Oh, do you mean like kids sometimes do in science class nowadays — describe a thing to a partner, make notes, draw it, and label its parts? No, the exact opposite! That’s all about squeezing the experience into words and forms that we understand. What we want “is less an attempt to know about nature as to know it in some participatory way, to know it as something we are an intimate part of, not set off from”. Q: That sounds a little… “woo” to me. It did to me, too… until I remembered my childhood climbing tree. I didn’t much like to go outside as a child, but I had this one tree that I’d climb up and read for hours and hours. If I close my eyes I can bring to mind the precise texture of its bark, the roughness of its broken-off branches, the coolness of its leaves, the always-surprising solidness of its trunk… I’m bigger now, but I think if I were back in my parent’s yard, I could still navigate its limbs with my eyes closed. I have, at this point in my life, read a fair number of books about trees, but I’d be surprised if all of them together more than equaled the amount I learned from that tree — my tree. Elementary math What was math before it was math? Egan suggests: counting and logic. We might, then, use rhythms, metaphors, stories, and jokes to help kids become fond of these. Q: Counting is pretty… basic. Could it really be improved? Beware of “the curse of knowledge”: Steven Pinker’s phrase for forgetting that something was once difficult! Egan suggests we should spend time helping kids count wonderfully. We can start early with counting rhymes. (“One, two, buckle my shoe! Three, four, out the door! Five, six…”) But we can also help kids use their fingers as metaphors. There are some pretty cool ways of using your hands as an abacus — and did you know that you can count up to 1,023 using just your fingers on both hands, and a knowledge of binary? Q: Logic — I’m intrigued! Aristotelian, or Boolean? Neither, for the time being — Piaget was presumably onto something when he found that young children couldn’t reason abstractly, but he was looking at logic in a vacuum. When we put logic into the context of stories, we find that kids can deal with logic just fine. There’s an entire worldwide network of educators, in fact, called Philosophy for Children, who have written whole books about how to do this, and Egan loves it all. Sometimes they read stories and ask simple questions: “What is friendship?” or “What does it mean to be brave?” They also pose ethical questions: “Is it ever right to spill a secret?” And they pose paradoxes: “Can you step in the same river twice?” Q: You mentioned “jokes” a moment ago. Care to elaborate? Egan thinks that, to help kids get good at math, you should tell kids jokes. Q: That’s… new. I think so, too — but he backs it up pretty well. To be funny, jokes (or at least most kid jokes) rely on a leap in logic: Why can’t you trust an atom? They make up everything. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo-hoo? Don’t cry, it’s just a joke! To understand the joke, kids have to follow the logic — spotting patterns, making connections, and tracking what their audience expects a word to mean. That’s a lot of cognitive lifting. And Egan goes further, suggesting that we grit our teeth and create methods to help kids invent their own jokes, no matter how horrible they’ll be at first. (The things we do for learning…) Q: Wait wait wait! What about addition facts, and multiplication tables, and fractions? Egan emphasizes that his methods are designed to be add-ons to the standard math curriculum. In general, he’s a don’t-blow-up-the-system sort of guy, and if something seems especially weird, you should probably assume it’s an add-on to the regular curriculum rather than a replacement, even if I forget to say so. Elementary arts What was art before it was art? Egan suggests we pop our heads into Paleolithic caves for our inspiration. Whatever the specific meaning of all those charcoal elk and aurochs and mammoths (communication with the spirit world? art for art’s sake? a way to impress babes?), Egan thinks it obvious that they were also an attempt to capture an intense experience that would be difficult to express in words alone. What did it feel like to be near an aurochs, or a saber-toothed tiger? “The arts help us,” Egan writes, “to hear and see afresh, to force our perceptions and sensations to experience again the immediacy and vividness of the world”. If we follow this, then, we don’t want to help kids build “art skills” so they can draw like an adult — rather, we want to help them amass a repository of diverse aesthetic feelings that they’ll want to express. We should provide them with a riot of experiences. Q: That couldn’t be more opaque. Examples, please! Egan writes that we should have children learn to whistle, sing, and click their tongue; we should help them emulate the ways a skunk or a hawk or a stick bug might move through a space. We should expose them to scores of different temperatures and materials. In music, we should help them love Beethoven, yes, but also the Beatles; Tchaikovsky, yes, but also Tuvan throat singers, and also John Cage, whale song, and bird song. Q: That’s a lot of experiences, but what would they be doing? An interesting aspect of Egan’s view of education is that he doesn’t seem to think we should push kids right to the “doing” phase. He wants to help kids cultivate an affective relationship with the world. In any case, he writes that as students get more experienced, we should prompt them to move from merely enjoying these experiences to trying to systematically shape similar experiences. And drawing, painting, and playing music could easily be folded into other parts of the curriculum. Elementary social studies What was social studies before it was social studies? Well. Remember how, just a moment ago, I wrote that you could assume that you should probably assume that Kieran isn’t in favor of junking the curriculum as it currently stands? He suggests we very carefully pick up the elementary social studies curriculum, place it into a trash can, and set the whole mess on fire. He isn’t worried about much of importance being lost. (Remember that the “expanding horizons” model is, to him, the original sin of 20th century educational reform, and he repeatedly quotes student surveys showing that “social studies” regularly wins the title of “most boring subject”.) In its place, he suggests we put history — which, he hints, we should think of as the centerpiece of the elementary curriculum. So the real question is what was history before it was history? His answer, surprisingly, is myth. Q: Egan wants us to teach myths as if they were history? Not at all. What he suggests, though, is that we look at how myths operate as narratives — so we can design an intellectually vivid history curriculum. And myths really are special: each is built on at least one binary (like weak vs. strong, or lies vs. truth, or so on), and uses that to tell the story of the big picture of the world. They’re so powerful that people can understand it, remember it, and love it — even if that thing never happened. We should take that power, Egan says, and apply it to things that really did happen. Q: So what history does he think kids should learn in elementary school? The great struggles of humanity from across the whole. Flippin’. World. We’re still talking about young children, so these should be done as simple stories. The goal isn’t to make them history PhD’s, so we needn’t even try to put them in any sort of order. Egan suggests that, in first grade, we pick a single binary like “freedom against oppression” and tell kids a welter of stories, again from as many cultures as possible, and as many times in history as possible. Q: Can you give examples? Oh, all right — in first grade we can tell kids the stories of the war of the Greek city-states against the Persian empire, and the slave uprising of Spartacus against the Romans. We can tell them about the plight of Jews in medieval Europe, and of the unsuccessful Sepoy Rebellion in India against the British. We can tell the stories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and about the Chinese Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. We can tell them the story of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman returning to the South to rescue her kinsmen, the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges facing threats to integrate her elementary school, and the story of how the Mau-Mau uprising led to modern-day Kenya. We can tell the stories of Mexican-American union organizer Cesar Chavez and of Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt to advocate for female literacy. The world does not lack for stories of oppression and liberation that can capture the attention of a six-year-old. Q: That’s… huh. What stories might they hear in second and third grade? Egan gives examples, but I won’t list them here. He suggests we use a similar approach for each, except that we swap out the binary each year. He thinks “the struggle for security against danger” would work well for year two, and “the struggle for knowledge against ignorance” would work well for year three. (That year could have a lot of overlap with the science curriculum.) Q: Anything else, for history? Yes — they should get a sense of Big History. They should get some simple stories about the ice age, the Cenozoic, the age of dinosaurs, the Paleozoic, the origins of our solar system, and the Big Bang. (Because if the ancient Norse can tell their story of the beginning of the universe, by gum, we can tell ours, too.) To sum up Egan argues that the problem of early schooling is that it’s trivial — and it’s trivial because the dominant theories of educational psychology see children as lesser versions of adults. What else would we teach them, except dumbed-down versions of what adults learn? But children have certain cognitive strengths that schools aren’t making systematic use of. If we rebuild elementary schools on those strengths, we could turn schooling upside down. We could stop seeing the curriculum as a bag of information to impart, and start seeing it as a set of great stories to tell — and invite kids into. Kids could experience (both intellectually and emotionally) the great struggles of humanity and see that they can join in them. Students could experience the story of education as the beginning of a very real adventure. Egan’s elementary school: some skeptical questions Q: I’m not sure I’m understanding what you mean by “mental images”. Care to explain? It’s an interesting fact of human cognition that just a few words can whip up a complex mental experience. Egan doesn’t just mean what we might call “visual imagery” — the ability to hold, say, the image of a bespectacled, spat-wearing duck in your mind without seeing a photograph. He’s also including what psychologists call auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, and tactile imagery. Q: How could all of that be helpful in schools? Humanity has a built-in VR system, and we’re not using it! Egan invites us to pretend we’re teaching a class about the humble earthworm. We might list off facts — “earthworms are so many centimeters long, move through soil by means of their something-or-other muscles…” but he suggests we can evoke images, say, “of what it would be like to slither and push through the soil, hesitantly exploring in one direction then another, looking for easier passages, contracting and expanding our sequence of muscles segment by segment, and sensing moisture, scents, grubs, or whatever”. Those facts are now felt by the student; the knowledge has become part of them. And just a few words can spark a complex mental experience, one going beyond literal images to include imagined sounds, smells, tastes, and more. These experiences can feel real and stick with us. (That these mental images are so easy to evoke, and so meaningfully felt, feels something like the proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.) Q: How could metaphors be helpful? It really is interesting that so much of the “constructivist” turn in psychology — that is, the notion that children don’t absorb knowledge, but construct it — has continued to focus on logics-mathematical reasoning, when there’s been mounting evidence for decades that metaphors are more central. It’s not just that we use metaphors to better understand things we already know, we also use them to grasp new knowledge. What’s more, psychologists have devised tests to measure the skill at metaphor-making, and have given them to people of different ages. What they found was that eleven-year-olds make more metaphors (and higher quality metaphors) than do undergraduates — and that four-year-olds have both groups beat. Again, hundred dollar bills on the sidewalk. Q: Your talk of “binaries” has me worried — binaries like good/evil and male/female are the source of so many of our most pernicious stereotypes! Isn’t the purpose of education to get us beyond stuff like this? Yes, it is! Education is supposed to complicate our understanding — but that means we’ve gotta start somewhere, and binaries provide us a natural starting place. As an uncontroversial example, think about temperature. We all begin as babies by perceiving two temperatures — hot and cold. Later, we add on intermediate categories — warm and cool. (Note that the human body is the assumed mid-point to temperature. Binaries often work like this; “big” and “small” mean “bigger or smaller than me”, “nasty” and “kind” mean “nastier or kinder than I am, except when my brother is really asking for it”, and so on.) A good story (and an Egan-inspired elementary curriculum is, in a sense, nothing but good stories) will go further, and transform the binary. Toy Story is grounded in the binary of abandonment/belonging: at the beginning, the toy cowboy Woody belongs to his owner, and has his affection. Then a rival comes who threatens his belonging. In trying to get back to belonging, Woody is entirely lost — and to save the day, he has to come to a deeper understanding of what belonging means. Now, all lessons can’t be Pixar movies. But the good stories (especially in literature and history) will challenge and subvert the binaries they begin with. Q: I see the pattern of Egan drawing from “as many cultures as possible”. Why so many? Is this a political correctness thing? If it helps to think of it as such, then, sure! I don’t think Egan would have had a problem with that. But his ultimate reason for including so much diversity goes deeper. For Egan, including such world-wide diversity isn’t optional, and the answer to why is bound up in his definition of education. (Keep reading.) His answer also insists that we, whenever possible, also include stories from the Bible and Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey). Q: Mmm, stories from the Bible aren’t going to fly in my local school! So be it! Egan doesn’t spend much time obsessing over the practicalities of… His interest is in describing what an ideal education might look like, if it were possible. Every lesson, every classroom, and every school is necessarily a compromise. Q: You make a big deal of poems. But isn’t poetry dead? An interesting contrast can be made to classical education, which also has kids read a lot of poems — they see knowing great poems as one of the marks of an educated person; again, for an academicist, it’s the information that transforms. Egan begs to disagree. Poems are important because they’re a wonderful way to train their cognitive strengths, like rhythm (poems are language fueling by thumping). We want to help kids learn to use this tool better, and a great way to do that is to help them recite poems that they’ve learned by heart. Q: “Learn by heart” — is that code for “memorize”?! It is! Egan is actually quite big on memorization — he points out that all the knowledge in the world can do nothing for a person once they’ve forgotten it. He didn’t, however, appreciate the academicist focus on memorizing without understanding (or at least enjoyment). Q: I’m still worried about the science curriculum, as you’re describing it. Can you allay my fears? Honestly, while I feel there’s something profoundly right to how Egan is describing early experiences of nature, I feel the same way. Note that there’s more science coming in the social studies curriculum. But if that’s still not enough, one could bring down aspects of the middle school science stage. Q: Anything else that Egan suggests we do in elementary school literature and language? He suggests that we help kids learn a second language! This is so obviously true (why do American schools typically wait until kids lose the ability to naturally absorb languages to start teaching languages?) he doesn’t belabor it, though. Q: You had mentioned that Egan’s vision seems more internal-focused. Should we be worried about that? While I strongly suspect that his curriculum would make kids more creative in any way you’d like to measure it, Egan wasn’t particularly interested in “creativity” — he was more about helping kids find the world interesting. I get the sense that he thinks kids will do things with minimal prompting once they’re loaded up with complex internal experiences. Q: I think I’m beginning to understand Egan — is he basically saying “make learning fun”? “Fun”, applied to education, is a dangerous word. Egan worries about the dangers of an emotionally unserious curriculum producing emotionally stunted adults. That doesn’t mean we need to tell students only “serious” stories — only that we treat the world honestly. “Disney-esque sentimentality is the exact emotional equivalent to intellectual contempt”. Q: But aren't some of these stories too dark for children who have themselves experienced oppression and disaster? Egan argues that these stories may be especially helpful to them — they can help them understand their struggles better, and give voice to them. Q: At the very start of this, you promised us “rationality”… but I’m not seeing rationality here! All this talk of “adventure” almost seems to go the opposite direction. What gives? Wait for it. But for a hint right now — Egan is fond of citing his fellow educational theorist Jerome Bruner, who claimed “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”. Bruner was criticized for that; his critics charged that he was ignoring learning differences and socio-economic realities. Egan thinks he was profoundly right. Part 3: A new kind of middle school What’s the matter with middle school? What was middle school like for you? In math, I recall a jumble of barely-related topics. In literature, I remember reading great literature — Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet — only in their dumbed-down summary formats. In social studies, I remember teachers proclaiming on the first day of class that unlike all of our previous history classes, this class wouldn’t be about names and dates… and then going on to memorize names and dates. And in science, I remember being forced to dissect a frog only to discover that frogs are — you guessed it — made of slimy frog parts. Your mileage may vary, but for a lot of us, middle school feels like getting booted out of the (in retrospect) Eden of elementary school, and like marking time before the serious studying of high school. It feels meaningless. In my favorite of his books, Egan calls so much middle school curricula “human deserts”, noting “we have created a system in which the importance of human emotions for meaning seems barely noticed”. Why so meaningless? If our dominant approaches to educational psychology fundamentally misinterpret younger children, Egan suggests, they basically throw up their hands when faced with pre-teens and teenagers. Mainstream schools begin to introduce vocational training to help lighten the load, and Maria Montessori famously suggests that adolescents should be sent to go run a farm. Egan is sympathetic to those responses, but points out that they don’t do much to lighten the load that the academic curriculum often becomes at this age. This feeling of meaninglessness, he argues, is utterly tragic — it comes just when a hunger for meaning blossoms in adolescents! We can see that hunger for meaning in their lives outside the classroom, where their interests ramp up into veritable obsessions. What are adolescents obsessed with? What might we see, if we become Jane Goodalls of early adolescence? First, teens are obsessed with gossip. The motivations of others — why did he do that? and what was he THINKING? — are hypothesized and talked to death. Second, that they’re pulled toward idealism. Many feel a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and feel a romantic urge to make it a better place. They’re often lured into simplistic beliefs that promise to help them do that. Third, they love extremes: they want to find limits, and test them. Obviously, this can show up as risky behavior, but we can also see it in their love for the bizarre — note adolescents’ fascination in things like aliens, cryptids, and ghosts. (Egan loves pointing out that The Guinness Book of World Records is a perennial bestseller among kids at this age. How else would they find out who had the world’s longest fingernails?) Fourth, they gravitate toward heroes — people who push the edges of those limits. By celebrating heroes, they can vicariously share in their transcendence. Look for the posts hanging up in a teenager’s bedroom to guess what boundaries they feel most hemmed in by: athletes push against physical limits; a death metal guitarist might push against authority and conventional morality. An activist or entrepreneur might push against our dulled morality or our sense of what’s possible. Finally, we might spot teens taking up hobbies and making collections. Hobbies can be a way to identify yourself as part of a group against the rest of the world (“I’m the sort of person who goes bird-watching!”), and collections can be a way to climb the status ladder inside the community. Egan points out that a collection can also be a way to feel like you have control over what you’re discovering is a very big and complex world of detailed information (“I’ve spotted every one of the fifty most common birds of Texas — even the black-capped vireo!”) Egan’s insight is that these obsessions give teenagers a sense of meaning, and that we can use them as tools to make middle schools that overflow with meaning. From meaningless to meaning-soaked Again, Egan sketches out a new kind of curriculum subject-by-subject. Before, his trick was to ask where the subject first evolved out of; now, it’s to ask who first discovered or created the specific content we’re teaching. “All knowledge”, he writes, “is human knowledge. Everything we know is knowable through the lives of its inventors, discoverers, or users, and we can have access to that knowledge through the hopes, fears, or intentions that drove them”. Middle school math Who first discovered the concepts students learn in math? The answer, of course, is a wide diversity of curious men and women living across the world over the last few thousand years. Egan says: bring those people into how we teach math. If we used gossip and heroes to help students find it meaningful, what kind of math would result? When we teach the Pythagorean theorem, we should give a sense of who Pythagoras was — a cult-founder who worshiped numbers to find God, whose followers (according to a piece of ancient gossip) murdered one of their members who discovered irrational numbers! Q: Well, sure, that works for Pythagoras, but he’s a known nut job; surely most math doesn’t come from such interesting roots? When we teach the Cartesian coordinate system, students should meet Rene Descartes, the Calvinist French polymath who saw the possibility that math could decipher the world, if only we could unite algebra and geometry… and invented the xy-plane to do exactly that. When we teach scientific notation, we should call our students’ attention to the importance of the number zero, and tell them the story of the Pope who tried to introduce Arabic numerals to Christian Europe and may have been assassinated because of it. When we teach algebra, we should ask students why “algebra” is Arabic for “the fixing of bones”, and tell the story of what Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was up to. We could do this all day. Literally everything students learn in school was first invented or discovered by some interesting person who was struggling to accomplish something hard. To learn is to connect with those people, whether we know it or not. Egan says: help kids know it. Math has been dehumanized: re-humanize it. Q: So the math curriculum needs to become a history of math curriculum, and math teachers need to become history teachers? No, the content needn’t change. But with surprisingly little work, we can bring in the gossipy stories of heroes, and their obsessions can spread to students. Middle school science Who first discovered the things students learn about in science? If you’re thinking “scientists”, you’re only partially right. Most of the big-picture ideas that we now think of as “science” were discovered before the word “scientist” was invented, or the discipline was professionalized. Frequently, they were hatched by true amateurs, working in their free time, hungry to unlock the secrets of nature. We can use gossip and heroes to spread their obsessions to students just as we taught math, but Egan points out two twists. The first is that the content itself can take on heroic qualities: everything is impressive, when you look at it in a certain light. In an interview, Egan once said: “My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact. We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull. The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating”. What would even the most boring subjects look like, if we emphasized their heroic qualities? Well: What’s a tooth? Bone, wrapped in rock, surrounding tiny cells that your body feeds with blood. What’s a bar of chocolate? A crystal of jellyfish-shaped fat molecules stacked together; when you put it in your mouth you shake them apart into a writhing confusion. What’s the air around you? The bottom of a 10-mile-deep ocean; when you put your tongue over a soda straw and your Pepsi stops leaking out, it’s not because a “vacuum” is “sucking” it up, but because that ocean is squeezing it into your face. Again, we could do this all day! And in middle school science, we can. Everything in the world is wonderful; we can help students see this again and again. The second twist is that science is a subject rich in extremes. Here Egan introduces a concept that we’ll see crop up again: “15-minute segments”. To help us fit as much wonder as possible into a school day, he suggests we supplement the usual school subjects with a few quick lessons. To infuse science with extremes, he suggests we add on three: “human & natural records”, “extremes of animals & plants”, and “cosmology”. Middle school history Who first made the things students learn about in history? Why, the historical characters themselves! Since we’ve given kids a grounding in history in elementary school, now we can build on that, going through many of the same events as before, but in more depth, and more vividly. We’ll leverage the interest with other people’s inner lives to tell stories focusing on the perspectives of the people who made history — zooming in, when possible, on scandalous details. We’ll leverage the tool of idealism to choose historical characters who chafed against their surroundings, and understand what they were trying to accomplish. What was their vision of the world? What did they hope for, and what did they fear? Q: Isn’t the “great man” approach to history out of fashion? Egan’s approach doesn’t say that “great men” made history — it’s just leveraging gossip to help kids see history as something meaningful that can expand their own possibilities. “Early adolescence is commonly a time of intense and vivid emotional life, and also a time of deepest boredom and depression… [We] can give shape to the intermediate curriculum and offer the students a world that is rich, complex, varied, and as intense and vivid as their own emotional lives”. We also should add on another “15-minute segment” just to pump in as many biographies as possible, and from people who don’t always fit into the normal history curriculum. Call it “Brief Lives”, and throw in anyone who’s struggled to push some limit — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jesse Owen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the students’ great-aunts, whoever. As students get older, this can transition to “People and Their Ideas”. Here, we’d focus less on the details of the person’s life, and use it as a backdrop to showing how meaningful some of history’s most important ideas could be. Think Aristotle and syllogisms, Edward Said and orientalism, Confucius and propriety, Cornel West and race, Buddha on the four noble truths, Muhammad and the five pillars, Karl Marx and communism, Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature, John Locke and natural rights, Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism, Thomas Aquinas on the sacraments, Martin Luther on faith, Voltaire on the freedom of speech… you get the idea. Q: Can you really get a profound understanding of utilitarianism in 15 minutes? Yes! The point of this segment isn’t to develop a systematic understanding of any one idea, it’s to introduce students to the exciting possibilities of human thought. (As a bonus, this might make them less likely to fall for the first ideology that they encounter later in life.) Diversity is important for this — as it is with culture. Throughout this, we should also be trying to expose students to as much cultural diversity as possible, because in high school, we’ll be trying to make sense of our society, and it’s impossible to do that unless we have something to compare it against. Middle school literature & language You might think that this subject would be easy — that middle school literature is already filled with “strong and clear narratives”, that it deals with “transcendent human qualities such as courage, love, and persistence”, that it focuses on “extremes of human experience”, that it examines “something strange and exotic”. You’d be right! Egan’s pretty happy with a bog-standard middle school literature curriculum, done well. In this part of the book, his spends most of his limited space suggesting three rather odd activities which could also be useful — especially for increasing students’ awareness of language, so they can use it better. The first is etymology — not, however, memorizing lists of roots, but in being told the entertaining backstories of specific words. Take the word “berserk”, for example — we now use it to mean something relatively mild (“if my mom catches me coming home late, she’ll go berserk”), but it comes from an old Norse word meaning “a raging warrior of superhuman strength”. And that’s because ber meant “bear” and serk meant “shirt”: soldiers of the bear cult would don the skin of a bear to, in their minds, transform into one — howling, foaming at the mouth, and gnawing the rims of their shields. (Most adults walk through life with little understanding that the words falling out of their mouths are entities, with their own back-stories. Communication is, at the very least, more interesting when we become aware of this.) The second is to add on another language to learn — not, this time, to become fluent in it, but just to become aware of how very different human languages can be. (For native English speakers, Sanskrit might work well, or Cantonese, or perhaps even ancient Egyptian. Again, the point isn’t for this language to be useful — it’s to explore diversity.) The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations). Pretty heady stuff, for a conversation about a dead parrot. Part 4: A new kind of high school I’ll confess — I loved parts of high school… and among nerdy folks, I suspect I’m not alone. For some of us, this was a golden time. Even at my local public high school, I had access to academically thrilling classes — especially, in my last two years, advanced literature and history. I felt like I was finally understanding the ideas that mattered. In any case, Egan is quick to acknowledge that, at this level, the sort of education he advocates really is being practiced in some places. What he can add is an understanding of what makes it wonderful, how to make it even more wonderful, and how to make it wonderful for many, many more people. What’s the matter with high school? Far too often, even when high school classes are intellectual, they’re dry. For the majority of students, all this academic stuff is experienced as utterly lifeless, a mass of dead information to be squeezed inside one’s head for a test and then left to evaporate. Egan mocks the curriculum wars that seem to be a permanent feature of the teaching life; quoting the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he says “while the academic left and right bicker over whether the curriculum is too traditional or too radical, they fail to recognize that most students absorb so little of academic culture that the bickering is largely irrelevant”. Why so dry? Egan suggests three reasons to explain this. First, because high school academic classes are too often masses of small details with no sign of the big picture. Second, because they’re typically slavishly disciplinary, and aren’t able to address the questions that span the disciplines. Third, because they’re often designed to bring students through what everyone is sure of, and hide away any controversies. In all of these, Egan suggests that what’s called “academics” in high school is too often a dim imitation of what real academics are actually practicing. There’s a fourth reason, though, and it’s probably the biggest of all — by the time they get to high school, most students haven’t actually learned that much! An academic approach is designed to connect small details into the big picture; for people who arrive in high school (and college) classes without having already collected much in their heads, academics are going to taste dry. (An implication of this for anyone trying to improve schools is that we might not want to start with high schools. If your goal is to create a new kind of academic learning, first start at elementary school — or barring that, middle school.) What motivates mad scientists? When we wanted to re-conceive the elementary and middle school curriculums, we looked at what students were already good at — kids’ cognitive strengths and adolescents’ obsessions. For this level it might be easier to look — for reasons that will become clear when we finally unveil Egan’s crazy-sounding definition of education — at the sorts of things that bring intellectuals joy. Q: Which intellectuals? Take your pick. Galileo, Einstein, Smith, Marx, Goodall, Chomsky, Curie… all the people who took to the life of the mind like fish to water. But that’s a lot to hold in my mind at once, so I’m just going to think about Doc Brown from Back to the Future: He was high on intellectualism I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice Let’s call these people “mad scientists”. And let’s pretend we once again took up our job of being primatologists, and snooped on these folks “in the wild” (“in the lab”? this is beginning to get recursive…)… what would we find motivating them? Asking simple questions, for one. (What is space? What is society? What is a human? What is language?) Building general schemes (big theories) that hold lots of evidence together. Finding their place in the cosmos. And (perhaps above all) seeking certainty. Once again, Egan suggests we use these as tools to remake the curriculum. From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics
Inline links: In a biting essay, In my favorite of his books, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ywm7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9c9b1ed-a260-4117-8679-0b5a32339748_1600x574.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WPeH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62ea55f8-0458-484f-be45-7a011d050756_1600x625.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPXt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb017fc37-3151-4556-87f1-31a097cf7594_1600x574.png
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
“Residential real estate has historically returned significantly below equity markets over long time horizons” But I’m not so sure that these lessons are directly applicable to other areas of life. Some of the best things in life come from lashing yourself to the mast, burning the boats behind you, willingly giving up liquidity. The deepest monogamous relationships are built from an irrational investment in one other person, saying “In sickness and in health, until death do us part.” How many scientific problems were solved because one person had an irrational willingness to: Just. Keep. Going. Sometimes it’s powerful to use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage. Investing in relationships, subject matter expertise, even putting down roots via *gulp* homeownership reduces your liquidity, but also leads to some of the best (if intangible) things in life. 5: Edge If you can’t explain your edge in five minutes, you don’t have a very good one. OR The long-term profitability of an edge is inversely proportional to how long it takes to explain it. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is one of the core concepts taught in Finance 101. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is a lie. The person that better understands the nature of a small sliver of the world (e.g. Apple’s share price) will make more money than others. Modern financial markets are exceedingly competitive. This means that the bigger you think your edge is, the more likely it is that you’re wrong. “Evolutionary thinking applies quite directly when thinking about the evolution of markets. Having an edge in a mature market means understanding the world better than other traders, even ones who are already highly skilled. In fact, the marginal trader in modern financial markets is quite sophisticated and skilled indeed.” Lebron here warns us of getting too cute with data, of changing variables. Enough randomness will produce an “edge” that is likely to break down the second a trading strategy hits the real world. You can always find a statistical correlation if you change enough variables. But this is fundamentally the same problem facing the replication crisis in social sciences. Lebron argues that we need stories here. Edge is expressed in stories: an edge does not exist without a clear mental representation of that edge. Pure linear algebra does not suffice. I’m not so sure. It seems like AI companies are pushing forward technology in a way that suggests that mental representations are not the only path to intelligence. Lebron discounts “black box” trading strategies without much discussion of their potential merits. Are all of RenTech’s models explainable by a story? The firm is notoriously secretive, so I don’t know, but I’d guess not. “Frequently a good trade appears, has a seemingly insurmountable difficulty, and it is mere persistence that knocks down the final barrier. There may have been many others who looked at the idea, wanted to do it, but couldn’t get past that last hurdle.” Before Sam Bankman-Fried was the face of Why Effective Altruism is Bad, before he even founded FTX, he made money arbitraging the difference between Bitcoin prices on Japanese and American exchanges. I’m reminded of that trade here. It isn’t a particularly elegant trade, it doesn’t require deep technical knowledge or any models. It was a schlep. It was all operational work: figuring out how to open a Japanese bank account, transferring money between the US and Japan, standing in line for hours every day at both US and Japanese banks (presumably this wasn’t the same person). In as technical a field as trading, sheer willpower is often what gets things done in the end. 6: Models The model expresses the edge. Lebron drills into us that a model is the tool for expressing an edge. The model is not the edge. The model does not give us unique knowledge about the world. The map is not the territory. He dives into the difference between generative (G) and phenomenological (P) models. G models express a worldview and fit data into that way of thinking, whereas P models solely look at the empirical data to build a worldview. Models of the world differ from models of markets, though. Markets have quick feedback loops, are explicit in terms of what they measure, and are easy to quantify at a specific point in time. Most of our models for the world, though, are ill-defined and explicit. Models are only as good as our assumptions. As an aside, this is a common criticism of rationality or Effective Altruism – you can justify any worldview if you assign your model input weights in just the right way5. I also tend to think that “traditional” EA is overly dependent on P models, and doesn’t embrace the G models that led to economic reforms in India in the 1990s or the economic policies that led to rapid economic development in Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th Century. Interestingly, I think a lot of longtermist EA, specifically AI alignment, leans the other way, relying on G models which explicitly assume a certain P(doom) and work backwards from there. (Though I won’t pretend to be an expert here or to understand everything, so take this with a grain of salt.) Overall, startups and tech seem to take heed to Lebron’s lesson much better than the folks hanging out on this part of the internet: “Even if a model makes good predictions about some future value or event, that knowledge is useless without also knowing how to take advantage of that prediction.” Now we get a bit philosophical. By acting, you change the nature of the market. Your model predicts things that might not be true as soon as you start trading (and changing the environment) based on it. When you’re right, everyone else sees the same trades that your model does and will beat you to them. When your model is wrong, others don’t act, meaning adverse selection rears its ugly head once again. So your model shows you with an edge, but in practice you only make the trades where you don’t have an edge. Lebron closes by arguing that G models are best for understanding other people, and are good in and of themselves: “You can also see connections to traditional moral philosophy in thinking about modeling the behavior of others. To have a good G model about someone else is to have some measure of empathy and compassion for that person: what they’re like, what they think and feel, putting yourself in their shoes. Pragmatically, developing the skill of empathy and compassion for others is, aside from a moral good in itself, an excellent way to understand better the people who surround you. More people working to develop good G models of others is surely a small step to a better world.” 7: Costs and Capacity If you think your costs are negligible relative to your edge, you’re wrong about at least one of them. This section of the book displayed a good amount of epistemic humility, words that I didn’t expect to be typing in the context of a book about trading. Lebron tells us that trades don’t exist independently in the universe — in the n-dimensional space of all possible trades seeking to optimize profitability, if you have a gigantic mountain of profitability, someone else has probably at least discovered the base. So you probably don’t have a profitable trade; rather, you are misunderstanding something about your trade. You’ve either overestimated profitability or underestimated cost. Lebron highlights four types of trading costs: [graph that didn’t show up correctly here: two axes and four quadrants, with the axes being visible ←→ invisible costs and linear ←→ nonlinear costs] Here, we’ll focus on Quadrant 4, where he highlights a few interesting phenomena. Herding. It’s likely that if you have a profitable trading strategy, either: Other firms discovered a similar strategy independently and/or
Inline links: replication crisis, RenTech’s, arbitraging the difference between Bitcoin prices on Japanese and American exchanges, 5
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
8: Zach Stein-Perlman’s favorite AI governance research this year. 9: The Chichijima incident was notable as a time when George H. W. Bush almost got eaten by cannibals. During WWII, nine American pilots were shot down over an island commanded by a crazy Japanese officer who ate his enemies' livers. Eight were captured and killed (and four of those were eaten), and Bush alone fled and survived. 10: El Salvador’s murder crackdown claims results of 90% decrease in homicides, 44% decrease in emigration to US, and 90% approval rating for president Nayyib Bukele (h/t Richard Hanania). 11: In an earlier set of comments, I ignorantly repeated a claim that Mother Teresa denied her patients painkillers because she thought suffering brought people closer to God. A commenter corrected me: painkillers were just generally in short supply in India during her era (more discussion here). 12: The record for longest time a plane has spent in the air without landing is 64 days, achieved by a Cessna in 1959. You can read the full story here, but the basic setup looked like this: 13: Fact check: was Elvis Jewish? Snopes says yes, but I’m more convinced by this argument for no. [update: commenter TheGenealogian agrees no] 14: Is GPT-4 getting worse? This isn’t absurd; some people claim OpenAI has simplified the model to cut costs (though OpenAI denies this). Matei Zaharia argues yes, but I’m more convinced by the AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no (h/t Stuart Ritchie). 15: Vox has a good piece about AI company Anthropic. I would quibble that they’re not the only safety-focused or EA-affiliated org, and we have yet to see how truly safety-focused or altruistic any AI company can be while continuing to be an AI company. But granting that it’s all a matter of degree, I agree the degree seems pretty high for them. And NYT also has an Anthropic article. 16: Eliezer bets $150,000 to $1,000 against UFOs being aliens, and gives the same argument I would - it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough to travel through space would still be primitive enough to use macroscopic, biologically-piloted craft that sometimes crash. 17: More nails in the coffin of growth mindset. “When examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant: d = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.06, 0.10]. We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” I think the older, very-high-effect-size studies were clearly terrible, but I’d still like to look further into the newer, small-but-significant-effect-size-that-makes-a-difference-across-large-groups studies and how they went wrong. 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work. One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: favorite AI governance research this year, Chichijima incident, claims results, painkillers were just generally in short supply in India during her era, here, record, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6brT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F172f7be6-1e03-4919-9cc9-b04335223f35_1280x1030.jpeg, yes, this argument for no, agrees no, argues yes, argument for no, Stuart Ritchie, Anthropic, an Anthropic article, the same argument I would, More nails in the coffin of growth mindset, Previous work, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VcFl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f08bfe5-ab31-453a-896a-54ef385da7d2_706x900.jpeg, Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences
August 24, 2023 · Original source
You should see the matrimonial section of Indian newspapers. However, I hope you won't mock them.
I live in America and every time I visit India I browse a few ads in the papers because they tell me so much about things that have changed (or not) - since I grew up there.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
CENTRAL, HONG KONG Contact: Max Bolingbroke Contact Info: acx[at]alpha[dot]engineering Time: Saturday, October 7th, 3:00 PM Location: 3rd Wave Art Studio, Room B, 2/F, Hollywood Building, 186 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+38 Notes: We had to change to the alternative location, 3rd Wave Art Studio, Room B, 2/F, Hollywood Building, 186 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan. I’ve left a comment on the LessWrong event if we change, and you can also email me to confirm. India BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+38, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB Contact Info: e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Versova Social, Mumbai. We have arranged to use the co-working space at Versova Social and will be on the 2nd floor. Link: goo.gl/maps/1RLjZwTB2bfaQVmN6 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+J5 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email, so we can arrange for enough food and space. LW Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Yj9MHguuKHaznp4bo/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-1.
Inline links: goo.gl/maps/1RLjZwTB2bfaQVmN6, https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+J5, https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Yj9MHguuKHaznp4bo/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-1
Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
Alexander In India
Perhaps you have heard that Alexander tried to conquer India, but his troops mutinied, and he had to turn back. This is an absurd lie. His troops tried to mutiny, but Alexander talked them down with a brilliant speech. Then he challenged Porus, King of India, to single combat, and won.
India was the easternmost part of the known world, so Alexander got curious what was east of India and decided to march there and find out.
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
23: India is discussing changing its name to “Bharat” (the Hindi word for India) on some level. Unconfirmed rumors about Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself. No word yet on who would take “Pakistan”, but I hear Macedonia is looking for a new name.
Inline links: changing its name to “Bharat”, Pakistan being interested in claiming the name “India” for itself
9: Related: AI can now translate videos, audio-to-audio, into other languages, but the results may lack nuance.
Inline links: may lack nuance
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
Devansh Mehta has some kind of cool idea. I cannot say with confidence exactly what the cool idea is. It seems to be using blockchain-based hypercertificates to create an impact market in investigative journalism in India - based in Auroville, a New Age holy city which has transcended money in favor of giant gold golf balls.
Still, four of the five judges, including me, recommended relatively low amounts of retroactive funding. Partly this is because the project isn’t finished. But partly it’s because we’re confused and dubious. We had a hard enough time starting this tiny unambitious impact market in the ACX/rat/EA community, where everyone is rich, plugged-in, and loves weird institutional design. Devansh wants to build a much more ambitious impact market, in India, for investigative journalism in particular. And he’s trying to run it on arcane blockchain technology which must take special programmer expertise and whose justification I find a little flimsy. I acknowledge the vast ambition of this project, its impressive backers, and the large amount of work that’s already been done. I just don’t feel like funding a bet at these odds, and three of the remaining four judges agreed with me.
This is extremely impressive! I think it is <10% of what it could eventually be, but I think this has the potential to be worth millions of dollars if well executed - and thus far, it has been. Devansh has essentially created the first impact market where people can create impact certificates, provably have only one impact certificate per project (not totally sure about this) and have people/funders can come in and fund the resultant impact. Right now, this is just for small projects in India and the impact certs are often written in Indian dialects that are hard to translate and it doesn’t have a lot of funders coming in, but this is a fully fleshed out impact market ecosystem that seems to be working and could be grown out.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.6
Inline links: 6
Ethiopia source here and here, India source here, Rwanda source here.
Inline links: here, here, here, here
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
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 07, 2024 · Original source
Distribute Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality copies to students in Bangalore, India. A surprising number of people get into the rationality/effective altruism ecosystem through this particular fan-fiction, and someone calculated that distributing copies of it was a super-cost-effective way to grow the movement. I didn’t fund this because the last time someone tried this, lots of people got angry at them for spending charity money on printing a fanfiction, and I hate when people get angry at me. Maybe if one of you funded it through an impact cert, and then someone provided evidence that this was good, I could buy back the impact cert without looking like a crazy person. Alternately, we could funnel this one through the EA Infrastructure Fund, which is supposed to do this kind of field-building.
Inline links: Distribute
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB Contact Info: e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14th, 10:15 AM Location: Versova Social, Juhu Versova Link Rd, Gharkul Society, Bharat Nagar, Versova, Andheri West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400061, India Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+H5 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4aAkHFJikMrtyhHZn/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024 Group Link: LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4 Email List:https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong and join our google group: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+H5, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4aAkHFJikMrtyhHZn/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4, https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about
HONG KONG Contact: Max Bolingbroke Contact Info: acx[at]alpha[dot]engineering Time: Saturday, April 13th, 3:00 PM Location: Private flat in The Oakhill, 28 Wood Road, Wan Chai Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP75GG+HP Notes: Email me to RSVP and I will let you know which flat number to come to & give you an invite link to the ACX Hong Kong WhatsApp group. For those who couldn't RSVP in time I will also put an "ACX Meetup" sign outside the entrance of the building with the number of my flat on it. India BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 26th, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea - inside. This is where we have our regular meetups Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong for the event of May
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP75GG+HP, https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 26th, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea - inside. This is where we have our regular meetups Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong for the event of May
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
April 24, 2024 · Original source
The study had too low power to figure out if hypertension meds worked, and basically could not rule out any level of effectiveness, even effectiveness so high that the meds would instantly kill you by lowering your blood pressure to 0. I don’t think we can summarize this study as “we’ve proven medication doesn’t work”. V. Karnataka Health Insurance Experiment Same story, different scenery. This one happened in India. 10,000 families. End result is: Having measured (a) 3 parameters (direct/indirect/total) for (b) 3 ITT and one TOT effect for (c) 82 specified outcomes over 2 surveys, only 3 (0.46% of all estimated coefficients concerning health outcomes) were significant after multiple-testing adjustments. (As Table A8 shows, 55 parameters (8.38%) are significant if we do not adjust for multiple-testing.) We cannot reject the hypothesis that the distribution of p-values from these estimates is consistent with no differences (P=0.31). We also find no effect of access on our summary index of health outcomes (Table A6 and Table A7). In other words: They tested a lot of stuff
Inline links: This one
Told that they have cancer …and these were among the majority of their outcomes where the study found no effect. These don’t cast doubt on the effectiveness of medical treatment. They just look like a study where the intervention didn’t affect the amount of medical care people got very much. This was the authors’ conclusion too. In fact, they were unable to find a direct effect of giving people free insurance on those people using insurance, at all, in the 3.5 year study period! They had to rescue this with “spillover effects”, ie the effect of one person getting insurance in a village on other people, in order to even claim that the insurance increased healthcare utilization. Why couldn’t they find an effect of giving people insurance on those people using insurance? Insurance is very new in India. These people weren’t really familiar with it, and in many cases their doctors and hospitals weren’t very familiar with it. In a few cases it didn’t even seem like the insurance companies fully understood their product: Many households had difficulty using insurance to pay for healthcare. On average across treatment arms, access to insurance increased by 3.34 pp annually the number of households who tried to use their insurance card by 18 months but were unable to do so (from a base of 2.68% in the control group12). (Our TOT estimates suggest that insurance enrollment increased failed use by 4.02 pp off a base of 3% annually.) This excess failure rate is 50.50% of the successful utilization ITT effect. Lack of knowledge about the purpose of insurance and how to use insurance seem likely explanations for the failure rate. Because insurance is a relatively new product, hospitals and beneficiaries may not know how to use it (Rajasekhar, Berg et al. 2011, Nandi, Dasgupta et al. 2016). In our midline and endline surveys, we asked why households did not try to use their insurance card to pay for care and why they were unable to use the card even when they tried (Table A5). Frequent reasons given for not using the card were not knowing that the card could be used for insurance (15% at 18 months, 20% at 3.5 years), forgetting the card at home (13% at 18 months), not knowing how or where to use the card (29% and 30% at 3.5 years). Besides these beneficiary-side problems, there were also supply-side problems. Of people that tried to use the card, 55% and 69% said that the doctor did not accept the card at 18 months and 3.5 years, and 12% said that the insurance company did not accept the card (i.e., did not approve use) at 3.5 years. (These should be interpreted with caution because we do not know if doctors correctly did not approve the card because a service was truly not covered, or incorrectly did so.) This finding suggests that demand-side education and supply-side logistics may be important for raising utilization of (and thus demand for) insurance in India and similarly situated countries. I don’t want to over-update on this. They did eventually manage to find a medium effect of free insurance on insurance use when counting the spillover effects. I think the main problem with this study is the same as all the other studies - its confidence intervals are wide enough to include medicine working amazingly well, better than anyone claims it works in real life. This is what the authors think too: Care should be taken in interpreting the insignificant health effects observed. Perhaps the effect of hospital care on measured outcomes is too small to translate into health improvements that we have power to detect despite our substantial sample size (Das, Hammer et al. 2008). Moreover, confidence intervals reported in Table A6 and Table A7 suggest that medically significant effects for many outcomes cannot be ruled out. VI. Summary Of Robin’s Three Insurance Studies If it helps, think of these insurance studies as a sort of funnel: In order for more insurance to result in better health on some measurable parameter (eg lower blood pressure), you need a chain of four things. First, you need the better insurance to result in more doctors visits.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sRFi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8025e794-879e-4a35-aaeb-a4e2e6471666_252x530.png
Karnataka was poor Indians who didn’t know how to use insurance, and they only got hospital care (whereas the other two studies included primary care)
Fake Tradition Is Traditional
June 20, 2024 · Original source
A: I like Indian food.
B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?
But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!
Links for July 2024
July 24, 2024 · Original source
21: Followup to discussion on how dictatorial Modi is vs. isn’t: famous Indian author and Modi critic Arundhati Roy is now being prosecuted under anti-terror laws for a fourteen-year-old remark that Kashmir wasn’t really part of India.
Inline links: now being prosecuted under anti-terror laws
22: Slightly related: history of Danish India.
Inline links: Danish India
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Max Bolingbroke Contact Info: acx[at]alpha[d ot]engineering Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: Private flat in The Oakhill, 28 Wood Road, Wan Chai Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP75GG+HP Notes: Email me to RSVP and I will let you know which flat number to come to & give you an invite link to the ACX Hong Kong WhatsApp group. For those who couldn't RSVP in time I will also put an "ACX Meetup" sign outside the entrance of the building with the number of my flat on it. India BENGALURU, INDIA Contact: Nihal M Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 27th, 04:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea, church street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: RSVP on the event for october
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP75GG+HP, https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
Contact: Nihal M Contact Info: propwash[at]duck[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 27th, 04:00 PM Location: Matteo coffea, church street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: RSVP on the event for october CHENNAI, INDIA Contact: Sathish Contact Info: sathish9289[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 05th, 07:00 PM Location: Besant Nagar Beach Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7M42X7XC+GP Additional Notes: RSVP at sathish's email to confirm attendance
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ, https://plus.codes/7M42X7XC+GP
Contact: Sathish Contact Info: sathish9289[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 05th, 07:00 PM Location: Besant Nagar Beach Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7M42X7XC+GP Additional Notes: RSVP at sathish's email to confirm attendance HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal Contact Info: vmehra[at]pm[do t]me Time: Saturday, October 12th, 03:00 PM Location: Yellolife Cafe, 1335h, Road No. 45, Nandagiri Hills, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, Telangana 500033, India Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J9WCCF5+RH Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7M42X7XC+GP, https://plus.codes/7J9WCCF5+RH
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
India was the only non-western country where I got a good sample; it had modestly less Roman interest, at 24% of 38 responses.
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.
25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
So how are they going to do this? Bhutan’s usual strategy is to play off neighbors India and China against each other, seeing which of them will give it more money in exchange for its friendship. Some American investors also seem interested. But it’s not even clear what industries would be involved - proposals include agribusiness, hydroelectric power, and - the last refuge of every desperate poor country - cryptocurrency (you can see some extremely meaningless PR statements about industry involvement here)
Inline links: here
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Jan Contact Info: hongkong.acx.meetup.spring.2025[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 3:00 PM Location: The Catalyst art gallery, G/F, 2 Po Yan Street, Shueng Wan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PW+7X India AHMEDABAD Contact: Kabir Contact Info: rudrakabir[at]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12, 07:00 PM Location: Ares Cafe, SBR, I’ll be the dude with long hair Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H2P [remove this bit] 2bPoqUvb24ZFjr8hFrJ
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PW+7X, https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48
Contact: Vishal Contact Info: DM "koreindian" on the LAR discord Time: Wednesday, April 30th, 7:00 PM Location: 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP Group Link: https://discord.gg/TaY [remove this bit] jsvN Notes: Don't need to RSVP. Just join the discord for more details on the topic of the meeting.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP
Contact: Noah Birnbaum Contact Info: dnbirnbaum[a t]uchicago[period]edu Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM Location: On the UChicago campus - usually in the Bartlett Dining Commons lounge but this could be subject to change. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ Group Link: Uchicago: https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA General Chicago: https://chicagorationality.com Notes: If you are on the mailing list, please fill out RSVP form that will be sent out so that I know how much food to get. Indiana INDIANAPOLIS Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ, https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA, https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Since 2022, Alice has undertaken qualitative research in nine world regions: Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Britain, US, Poland, Turkey, India, Uzbekistan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Through this globally comparative analysis, she analyses the drivers and obstacles to gender equality. Gender interventions will be more impactful if they target locally binding constraints - in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this is "the honour-income trade-off" (whereby male honour depends on female seclusion, and women tend to remain at home. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean face a different obstacle: pervasive violence elevates femicides. Over the past few years, she's held visiting appointments at Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, while providing policy advice to the World Bank, and sharing insights with a public audience via Substack (www.ggd.world). In April 2025, she gave a TedTalk on romantic love as an under-rated driver of gender equality.
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
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
Arjun Academic: First generation immigrant family from India. Likely also works in tech, or maybe healthcare, or runs a small business. They want their kids to excel academically and they are fine doing it differently than the people around them
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
39: Between 1993 and 2021, female labor force participation in India stayed constant, but TFR fell from 3.8 to 2.0, posing a challenge to theories that women’s employment is a primary driver of fertility decline (h/t Scholars_Stage, mxtaverse).
Inline links: stayed constant, Scholars_Stage, mxtaverse
Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
August 12, 2025 · Original source
I've visited an Indian friend in rural Pennsylvania. Their housing community is 98% Indian. There's only 1 non-Indian family out of the 50 houses.
Close to where I live there's an apartment block which is 80% Indian, especially students.
Great point! And I agree Indians are the best example - too new to piggyback off older communities like Chinatowns, and usually rich enough that their proximity can’t be dismissed as ghettoization. I don’t really have a great explanation for this; maybe it just proves that if you’re committed enough you can still make it work.
Your Review: Ollantay
August 22, 2025 · Original source
Peru was divided into around fifty provinces called corregimientos, each of which was run by a single corregidor. The corregidor held a monopoly on trade with all the Indians in his province, and he was also in charge of collecting taxes. If that sounds like a position which lends itself pretty easily to corruption and abuse, that’s because it was; the corregidores were uniformly fabulously wealthy and fabulously hated. And in addition to having to pay taxes, all the Indians were obligated to provide free labor to factories and public works projects - public works projects which were used not to improve living conditions of the Indians or provide them with roads between their villages, but to enable moving silver from the mines in the mountains down to the coast for shipping abroad. The Spanish crown expected that around 15% of the population of a district should be providing free labor at any given time. The actual number was usually much higher.
The sole representative from the Indian villages to the viceroyalty was the curaca, the highest office that an Indian could reach. Like the corregidores, there was one curaca for each province. This guy was responsible for ensuring that the Indians paid their taxes and delivered their free labor, and he was the only one authorized to lodge complaints to the corregidor on behalf of the villages. This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.
Don Antonio Valdez was not killed in the purges. He was well-connected enough, and he was Spanish enough, to avoid the fate of all his Indian friends. Ollantay, though, was to be destroyed.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: David Contact Info: dj[a t]theory-a[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 10:00 AM Location: Zhongshan Park 中山公园 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29 Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/C [remove this bit] meRexz7JM Notes: Park meetup so feel free to bring pets, RSVPs are appreciated India BANGALORE Contact: Nihal Contact Info: propwash[a t]duck[period]com Time: Sunday, October 5th, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ Notes: Check the lesswrong group page for the announcement, and RSVP there.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29, https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
Contact: Vishal Contact Info: DM koreindian in the LAR discord Time: Wednesday, October 1st, 7:00 PM Location: 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP Group Link: losangelesrationality.com. Links to the discord in there, please join the discord. Notes: There will be a reading. Please check the discord close to the event.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP
Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 27, 2:00 PM Location: Grant Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com/ Indiana BLOOMINGTON Contact: John Contact Info: himalayansp[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 5:00 PM Location: 310 S. Eastside Drive Bloomington, IN 47401. It’s the house surrounded by the tall bushes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ Notes: just show up
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99, https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Excuse me,” a new person interjects. “I’m Eli - but, uh, if the redhead in the green dress carrying the notebook asks, my name is Werner von Aryan. Look, Ramchandra’s going back to India for a wedding next week and says he won’t be able to make the next house party. If we don’t have someone pretending to be Curtis, my new partner might realize I’m not really a right-wing baddie with access to dangerous techno-fascist parties, and I’m afraid she’ll leave me and I’ll lose the wedding venue deposit.”
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Chetan Kharbanda, $30K, to help build an effective altruist ecosystem in India. Although some rich people like Bill Gates start with strong opinions on what they want to fund, much of the HNWI philanthropy space depends on people who go around to wealth management firms and help the rich understand their charitable options. Chetan and his cofounder want to make sure that India’s millionaires - 33,000 of whom get minted every year - are exposed to EA principles and opportunities. Their current project is an animal welfare funding circle; if you’re in India and interested in participating, please let them know.
Inline links: an effective altruist ecosystem in India
Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about “set and setting” and “integration” - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them.
Inline links: Eli
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
50: Tomas Pueyo with a new theory for why cold/temperate countries are rich and warm countries are poor - it’s the mountains. Warm-climate agriculture and civilization cluster in highlands regions, where transportation and trade are harder. Partially paywalled comment responses 1 and 2. I find this very interesting, and far more thoughtful than most attempts at this question, but I’m pretty concerned about his answer here to the objection that India, Cambodia, etc birthed great empires while being hot and nonmountainous. He says that they may have had high GDP, but always had low GDP per capita, which he pinpoints as the real measure of wealth. My impression is that pre-Industrial Revolution, all countries had low GDP per capita, because they were in a Malthusian regime where economic improvement translated to population density rather than increasing per capita GDP. Any differences between regions reflected minor fluctuations in the exact parameters of their Malthusianism and were not of any broader significance. So I think the India etc objection still stands and is pretty strong.
Inline links: it’s the mountains, 1, 2
Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
This makes it tempting for US right-wingers to center their discussion of immigration around stories, narratives, and images from Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Felix Contact Info: felix[dot]breton8[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 19, 03:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 218 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+63 India AHMEDABAD Contact: Kabir Contact Info: rudrakabir[@]gmail[.]com Time: Thursday, April 16th, 7:00 PM Location: Ares Cafe, SBR Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H2P [remove this bit] 2bPoqUvb24ZFjr8hFrJ?mode=gi_t Notes: Please RSVP to me via email so I know that you are coming, but if you see this late and don’t get a reply, come anyway! Join the whatsapp group in case there are any changes.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+63, https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48
Contact: Mayank Contact Info: mayankaggarwal2004[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: Krannert Center for Performing Arts, next to Intermezzo Cafe inside Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q5G+9R Group Link: https://discord.gg/wa5 [remove this bit] 3n3cQs Indiana BLOOMINGTON Contact: John Linnemeier Contact Info: Himalayansp[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 3rd, 2:00 PM Location: 310 S Eastside Dr Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GH Notes: Kids and/or dogs are just fine. No need to RSVP, just show up. If it’s a nice day, I’ll be by the pond in the backyard so just come down the driveway. If it’s rainy or cold, knock on the front door and my dog will announce your arrival.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q5G+9R, https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GH
Israel65 mentions across 65 issues

Israel is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 65 times across 65 issues between February 16, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Another team under Eugene Merzon in Israel looked through their databases"; "Israel is quite racially diverse"; "Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations". It most often appears alongside Germany, Trump, US.

Article page
Israel
Mention count
65
Issue count
65
First seen
February 16, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Vitamin D: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 16, 2021 · Original source
So lots of people did studies, and some of them were pretty suggestive. For example, a couple of papers like Radujkovic et al found that coronavirus patients with low Vitamin D levels had worse outcomes (eg were more likely to need ICU care or to die) than patients with higher levels. A couple more papers like Annweiler et al found that patients who regularly took Vitamin D supplements for the year before they got coronavirus did better. A team from Quest Diagnostics, led by Harvey Kaufman, looked through 190,000 patients who they had tested for both coronavirus and vitamin D levels, and found that the coronavirus patients had notably lower Vitamin D levels than controls. Another team under Eugene Merzon in Israel looked through their databases and found the same in a 7807 patient sample.
Inline links: Radujkovic et al, Annweiler et al, found the same in a 7807 patient sample
If blacks get coronavirus more often because of socioeconomic reasons, and also have lower Vitamin D, anybody looking at coronavirus infection rate without adjusting for race is suspect. Merzon and the Israelis didn't control for race (and Israel is quite racially diverse). Kaufman and the Quest team say they adjusted for race, but if you look at their paper, they didn't have access to race data for any participants, so instead they looked at what zip code they were in, coded it as majority-black or majority-white or whatever, and adjusted for that. I live in a majority black zip code, so apparently I'm black now. And my lived experience as a person of color, which I hear is more trustworthy than any scientific study, tells me this is a big enough loophole to invalidate the entire paper. When white people in majority black zip codes have enough money/education to avoid the coronavirus more effectively than real black people, and also have higher Vitamin D because of their lighter skin color, the paper’s metholodogy is going to mistake this for Vitamin D preventing coronavirus.
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%]
Yglesias and Metaculus agree on most things (not Israel/Saudi Arabia, though!). Some of the disagreements might come from Yglesias making his predictions in late December and Metaculus opening theirs in February, which is kind of unfair to Matt.
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Likewise, Próspera has 100% drug approval reciprocity. If a drug has been approved in an OECD country (eg by the FDA), it’s approved in Próspera. Again, close to my heart. Amisulpride is a great antipsychotic, probably better then most of the ones we use here. It’s approved in Europe, the UK, Australia, Israel, etc, where many studies have shown it’s safe and effective. Because none of those studies were done in the US, the FDA refuses to approve it here, and has demanded several hundred million dollars worth of more studies, which the company involved has chosen not to do (an injectable version was recently approved for nausea, but can’t be easily used for psychosis). Meanwhile, bupropion (“Wellbutrin”), the fourth-most prescribed antidepressant in the US, isn’t approved for depression in Britain; the subset of patients who respond to this medication and nothing else are out of luck. Próspera will be one of the only places in the world where patients will have access to amisulpride, bupropion, and all the other medications that one country or another is restricting because “it wasn’t invented here”.
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
Never underestimate embarrassment as a driver of progress. When the US was dragging its feet on COVID vaccines, Israel vaccinated its population quickly and safely, and that embarrassed us enough to get the ball rolling. Or: the US is terrible at building infrastructure. We’re starting to discuss ways to fix this, but we wouldn’t have realized anything was wrong without stories about China constructing high-speed rail at lightning speed, or memories of our grandparents building Hoover Dam and the interstate highways.
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
Along with these good bets, I lost a bit of money on some other bets, including Warren winning the nomination, a lot of speculating on Trump's exact number of tweets and various candidates' exact polling averages, and a disastrous assumption that surely they couldn't elect Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel yet another time, could they?
No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
The best information I can find comes from this article, which tells the story of a group of Colombian converts in more depth. A megachurch pastor visited Israel, met some Jews for Jesus, liked it, and incorporated Jews for Jesus ideas into his megachurch. But the more he learned about it, the more he realized Jews for Jesus was incoherent, and wanted the real thing. So after a while, he asked his church to convert to Judaism en masse; most of them said no, but a few hundred stuck around and became Orthodox Jews. You should really read the article, but here’s my favorite part:
Inline links: this article
His experience in Israel was all he could think about. What he had seen there felt closer to the truth. He slowly steered the Iglesia Cristiana para la Familia toward Messianism, changing the title of pastor to rabbi, persuading men to wear kippot and tzitzit, emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus, the idea that Jesus had been a rabbi himself. The more he did this, though, the more he questioned the dogma of Jesus as the Messiah. If Jesus had been just a rabbi, then how could he be the son of God?
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
Popular as this theory is, there are some things it struggles to explain. Humans often do hard things without anyone paying them, like climbing mountains, volunteering, having babies and writing seven thousand word book reviews. Even worse, in some cases incentives cause performance to drop. When Edward Deci paid student volunteers to solve puzzles they became less motivated. When a day care centre in Haifa, Israel, introduced charges for late pick ups to try to get parents to arrive on time more and more started arriving late - now they could effectively pay extra for more child care the moral burden of picking up on time was gone. Bonuses can reduce creativity, and distort output. Pay for hours and you get more wasted hours, pay by publication and you get more useless papers (at one time we were looking into the literature on forecast accuracy measures. We found one using arctan. The only explanation I could find was that someone had a target number of papers to hit, and hey, it was original - in the sense that no one had ever proposed something so completely boneheaded before). At one point British dentists were paid by the procedure. They had to stop that after dentists kept filling healthy teeth. Communism is often mocked for the stupid targets which had factories churning out as many wellington boots as possible, none of them waterproof, or making chairs heavy enough to collapse a house to maximise furniture output in kilograms. Obviously, capitalism would never fall into that trap. Oh no, wait.
Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
June 14, 2021 · Original source
This is possible. I confess to doing this when listing the Solvang Conference attendees above. But this is why we have objective data. The income, net worth, and education numbers all come from self-report, which shouldn't be vulnerable to this problem. Or you can look at Nobel prizes won by Israel vs. other countries, using Israeli residence as a non-one-drop-rule-biased proxy for Judaism. Or at the Russian numbers, which were presumably based on the Russian census. Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
Inline links: Nobel prizes won by Israel vs. other countries
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
26
July 27, 2021 · Original source
Also, the Israel question. Haredi are ultra-Orthodox Jews known for having traditional (ie very large) families. Right now they are 9-12% of the Israeli population. If they keep having 5-10 kid families, and everyone else in Israel just has normal-modern-sized families, what will happen? According to Metaculus, they’ll double to 24% of the population in 2050. Makes sense, though weird to think about.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
BE'ER SHEVA, ISRAEL (RSVP) Contact: Oren, oren-acxmeetup[at]opayq[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 9 Location: רגע, מקום בפארק פארק הסופרים שכונה ב' Coordinates: https://w3w.co/couple.answers.herb
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/couple.answers.herb
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (RSVP) Contact: Inbar, inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 23 Location: Sarona market park, between the Magnum bar and Sarona beer garden. I'll have an ACX sign and some red balloons. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/market.coherent.muddle
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/market.coherent.muddle
Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
September 17, 2021 · Original source
At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of people were marching through the streets of Israel. The apparent trigger was a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef who couldn't afford an apartment near her job. She started a Facebook page saying people should protest the cost of living, one thing led to another, and soon 300,000 people were marching through the streets of Israel and Leef was a national hero.
The Israeli protesters attracted contradictory political fantasies because of the fuzziness of their definition. This repeated a pattern established in Egypt and Spain. The lack of leaders, programs, and organizational structure was if anything more pronounced. Those who spoke to the media on a regular basis, like Leef, were attractive and clever, but they lacked the power to command or decide, and they quarreled constantly among themselves. The question of whether to negotiate with the government divided the protesters. The goal of social justice - supposedly the North Star of the uprising - appeared to be as foggy a notion to them as to their media admirers.
Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.
Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
It’s always a bad sign when your study features in an image with “NUMEROUS IMPOSSIBLE NUMBERS” in red at the top. I think his point is that if you have 21 people, it’s impossible to have 50% of them have headache, because that would be 10.5. If 10 people have a headache, it would be 47.6%; if 11, 52%. So something is clearly wrong here. Seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look. I’m going to be slightly uncomfortable with this study without rejecting it entirely, and move on. Ravakirti et al: Here we’re in Eastern India - not exactly Bangladesh again, but a stone’s throw away from it. In this RCT patients were randomized into an ivermectin group (57) and a placebo group (58). Primary outcome was negative PCR on day 6, because doing it on day 7 like everyone else would be too easy. As with several other groups, this was a bad move; too few people had it to make a good comparison; it was 13% of intervention vs. 18% of placebo, p = 0.3. Secondary outcomes were also pretty boring, except for the most important: 4 people in the placebo group died, compared to 0 in ivermectin (p = 0.045). On the one hand, this is one outcome of many, reaching the barest significance threshold. Another fluke? Still, there are no real problems with this study, and nobody has anything to say against it. Let’s add this one to the scale as another very small and noisy piece of real evidence in ivermectin’s favor. Bukhari et al: Now we’re in Pakistan. 50 patients were randomized to low-dose ivermectin, another 50 got standard of care including vitamin D. There was no placebo, but primary outcome was number of days to reach negative PCR, which it seems hard for placebo to affect much, so I don’t care. 5 controls and 9 ivermectin patients left the hospital against medical advice and could not be followed up, which is bad but not necessarily study-ruining. They never measured their supposed primary outcome of “days to reach negative PCR” directly, but they did measure how many people had negative PCR on various days, and ivermectin had a clear advantage - for example, on day 7, it was 37/50 for IVR and only 20/50 for control. Even if we assume all the lost-to-followup patients had maximally bad-for-the-hypothesis results, that’s still a positive finding. Nobody else has much to say about this one, certainly no accusations that they’ve found anything suspicious. Keep. Mohan et al: India. RCT. 40 patients got low-dose ivermectin, 40 high-dose ivermectin, and 45 placebo. Primary outcomes were time to negative PCR, and viral load on day 5. In the results, they seem to have reinterpreted “time to negative PCR” as the subtly different “percent with negative PCR on some specific day”. High-dose ivermectin did best (47.5% negative on day 5) and placebo worst (31% negative), but it was insignificant (p = 0.3). There was no difference in viral load. All groups took about the same amount of time for symptoms to resolve. More placebo patients had failed to recover by the end of the study (6) than ivermectin patients (2), but this didn’t reach statistical significance (p = 0.4). Overall a well-done, boring, negative study, although ivermectin proponents will correctly point out that, like basically every other study we have looked at, the trend was in favor of ivermectin and this could potentially end up looking impressive in a meta-analysis. Biber et al: This is an RCT from Israel. 47 patients got ivermectin and 42 placebo. Primary endpoint was viral load on day 6. I am having trouble finding out what happened with this; as far as I can tell it was a negative result and they buried it in favor of more interesting things. In a "multivariable logistic regression model, the adjusted odds ratio of negative SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR negative test" favored ivermectin over placebo (p = 0.03 for day 6, p = 0.01 for day 8), but this seems like the kind of thing you do when your primary outcome is boring and you’re angry. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is not a fan: He notes that the study excluded people with high viral load, but the preregistration didn’t say they would do that. Looking more closely, he finds they did that because, if you included these people, the study got no positive results. So probably they did the study, found no positive results, re-ran it with various subsets of patients until they did get a positive result, and then claimed to have “excluded” patients who weren’t in the subset that worked. I’m going to toss this one. Elalfy et al: What even is this? Where am I? As best I can tell, this is some kind of Egyptian trial. It might or might not be an RCT; it says stuff like “Patients were self-allocated to the treatment groups; the first 3 days of the week for the intervention arm while the other 3 days for symptomatic treatment”. Were they self-allocated in the sense that they got to choose? Doesn’t that mean it’s not random? Aren’t there seven days in a week? These are among the many questions that Elalfy et al do not answer for us. The control group (which they seem to think can also be called “the white group”) took zinc, paracetamol, and maybe azithromycin. The intervention group took zinc, nitazoxanide, ribavirin, and ivermectin. There were very large demographic differences between the groups of the sort which make the study unusable, which they mention and then ignore. From there, they follow this normal and totally comprehensible flowchart: There is no primary outcome assigned, but viral clearance rates on day seven were 58% in the yellow group compared to 0% in the white group, which I guess is a strong positive result. This table… …looks very impressive, in terms of the experimental group doing better than the control, except that they don’t specify whether it was before the trial or after it, and at least one online commentator thinks it might have been before, in which case it’s only impressive how thoroughly they failed to randomize their groups. Overall I don’t feel bad throwing this study out. I hope it one day succeeds in returning to its home planet. Lopez-Medina et al: Colombian RCT. 200 patients took ivermectin, another 200 took placebo. They originally worried the placebo might taste different than real ivermectin, then solved this by replacing it with a different placebo, which is a pretty high level of conscientiousness. Primary outcome was originally percent of patients whose symptoms worsened by two points, as rated on a complicated symptom scale when a researcher asked them over the phone. Halfway through the study, they realized nobody was worsening that much, so they changed the primary outcome to time until symptoms got better, as measured by the scale. In the ivermectin group, symptoms improved that much after 10 days; in the placebo group, after 12, p = 0.53. By the end of the study, symptoms had improved in 82% of ivermectin users and 79% of controls, also insignificant. 4 patients in the ivermectin group needed to be hospitalized compared to 6 in the placebo group, again insignificant. This study is bigger than most of the other RCTs, and more polished in terms of how many spelling errors, photographs of computer screens, etc, it contains. It was published in JAMA, one of the most prestigious US medical journals, as opposed to the crappy nth-tier journals most of the others have been in. When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. Ivermectin proponents make some good arguments against it. In order to get as big as it did, Lopez-Medina had to compromise on rigor. Its outcome is how people self-score their symptoms on a hokey scale in a phone interview, instead of viral load or PCR results or anything like that. Still, this is basically what we want, right? In the end, we want people to feel better and less sick, not to get good scores on PCR tests. Also, it changed its primary outcome halfway through; isn’t that bad? I think maybe not; the reason we want a preregistered primary outcome is so that you don’t change halfway through to whatever outcome shows the results you want. The researchers in this study did a good job explaining why they changed their outcome, the change makes sense, and their original outcome would also have shown ivermectin not working (albeit less accurately and effectively). I don’t know of any evidence that they knew (or suspected) final results when switching to this new outcome, and it seems like the most reasonable new outcome to switch to. Finally, their original placebo tasted different from ivermectin (though they switched halfway through). This is one of the few studies where I actually care about placebo, because people are self-rating their symptoms. But realistically most of these people don’t know what ivermectin is supposed to taste like. Also, they did a re-analysis and found there was no difference between the people who got the old placebo and the new one. I’m making a big deal of this because ivmmeta.com - the really impressive meta-analysis site I’ve been going off of - puts a special warning letter underneath their discussion of this study, urging us not to trust it. They don’t do this for any of the other ones we’ve addressed so far - not the one by the guy whose other studies were all frauds, not the one where 50% of 21 people had headaches, not the unrandomized one where the groups were completely different before the experiment started, not even the one by the guy accused of crimes against humanity. Only this one. This makes me a lot less charitable to ivmmeta than I would otherwise be; I think it’s hard to choose this particular warning letter strategy out of well-intentioned commitment to truth. They just really don’t like this big study that shows ivermectin doesn’t work. Also, the warning itself irritates me, and includes paragraphs like: RCTs have a fundamental bias against finding an effect for interventions that are widely available — patients that believe they need treatment are more likely to decline participation and take the intervention [Yeh], i.e., RCTs are more likely to enroll low-risk participants that do not need treatment to recover (this does not apply to the typical pharmaceutical trial of a new drug that is otherwise unavailable). This trial was run in a community where ivermectin was available OTC and very widely known and used. Nobody else worries about this, and there are a million biases that non-randomized studies have that would be super-relevant when discussing those, but somehow when they’re pro-ivermectin the site forgets to be this thorough. I think a better pro-ivermectin response to this study is to point out that all the trends support ivermectin. Symptoms took 10 days to resolve in the ivermectin group vs. 12 in placebo; 4 ivermectin patients were hospitalized vs. 6 placebo patients, etc. Just say that this was an unusually noisy trial because of the self-report methodology, and you’re confident that these small differences will add up to significance when you put them into a meta-analysis. Roy et al: We’re back in East India, and back to non-randomized trials. 56 patients were retrospectively examined; some had been given ivermectin + doxycycline, others hydroxychloroquine, other azithromycin, and others symptomatic treatment only. We don’t get any meaningful information about how this worked, but we are told that they did not differ in “clinical well-being reporting onset timing”. Whatever. Chahla et al: The first of many Argentine trials. 110 patients received medium-dose ivermectin; 144 were kept as a control (no placebo). This was “cluster randomized”, which means they randomize different health centers to either give the experimental drug or not. This is worse than regular randomization, because there could be differences between these health centers (eg one might have better doctors who otherwise give better treatment, one might be in the poor part of town and have sicker patients, etc). They checked to see if there were any differences between the groups, and it sure looks like there were (the experimental group had twice as many obese people as the controls), but as per them, these differences were not statistically significant. Note that if this did make a difference, it would presumably make ivermectin look worse, not better. The primary outcome was given as “increase discharge from outpatient care with COVID-19 mild disease”. This favored the treatment; only 2/110 patients in the ivermectin group failed to be discharged, compared to 20 patients in the control group. But, uh, these were at different medical centers. Can’t different medical centers just have different discharge policies? One discharges you as soon as you seem to be getting better, the other waits to really make sure? This is an utterly crap endpoint to do a cluster randomized controlled trial on. If you’re going to do cRCT, which is never a great idea, you should be using some extremely objective endpoint that doctors and clinic administrators can’t possibly affect, like viral load according to some third-party laboratory, using the same third-party laboratory for both clinics. This is such a bad idea that I can’t help worrying I’m missing or misunderstanding something. If not, this is dumb and bad and should be ignored. Mourya et al: We’re back in India. This is a nonrandomized study comparing 50 patients given ivermectin to 50 patients given hydroxychloroquine. No primary outcome was named, but they focus on PCR negativity. Only 6% of patients in the hydroxychloroquine group were negative, compared to 90% of patients in the ivermectin group! On what day did they do the test? Uh, kind of random, and they admit that “in [the hydroxychloroquine group], mean time difference from the date of initiation of treatment and second test was significantly longer (7.24±2.75 days) as compared to 5.22±1.21 days in [the ivermectin group] (p=0.021).” Since they assessed these groups at different times, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions from them getting different results. Except that as far as I can tell this should handicap ivermectin, making it especially impressive that it did better. But also, the ivermectin group was made mostly of people who had been asymptomatic at the beginning (70%), and the hydroxychloroquine group had almost no asymptomatic cases (8%) . They were giving the ivermectin to healthy people and the hydroxychloroquine to sick people! They admit deep in the discussion that this “may be a confounding factor”. So basically they got totally different groups of people, tested them at totally different times, and the two sets of test results differed. So what? So this is why normal people do RCTs instead of whatever the heck this is, that’s what. Loue et al: …this one isn’t going to be an RCT either. Loue tells a story about a cluster of COVID cases at the French nursing home where he works. He asked people if they wanted to try ivermectin; 10 did and 15 didn’t. 1 ivermectin patient died, compared to 5 non-ivermectin patients. The non-ivermectin group looked a bit sicker than the ivermectin group in the inevitable Table 1, though it’s hard to tell. One interesting possible confounder (not mentioned, but I’m imagining it) is that demented patients probably couldn’t consent to ivermectin and ended up in the control group. This is another case of “I’m not going to trust anything that isn’t an RCT”. Merino et al: Another (sigh) non-RCT. Mexico City tried a public health program where if you called a hotline and said you had COVID, they sent you an emergency kit with various useful supplies. One of those supplies was ivermectin tablets. 18,074 people got the kit (and presumably some appreciable fraction took the ivermectin, though there’s no way to prove that). Their control group is people from before they started giving out the kits, people from after they stopped giving out the kits, and people who didn’t want the kits. There are differences in who got COVID early in the epidemic vs. later, and in people who did opt for medical kits vs. didn’t. To correct these, the researchers tried to adjust for confounders, something which - as I keep trying to hammer home again and again - never works. They found that using the kit led to a 75% or so reduction in hospitalization, though they were unable to separate out the ivermectin from the other things in the kit (paracetamol and aspirin), or from the placebo effect of having a kit and feeling like you had already gotten some treatment (if I understand right, the decision to go to the hospital was left entirely to the patient). I think this study is a moderate point in favor of giving people kits in order to prevent hospital overcrowding, but I’m not willing to accept that it tells us much about ivermectin in particular. Faisal et al: This one was published in The Professional Medical Journal (mispelled as “Profesional Medical Journal” in its URL), so you know it’s going to be good! It describes itself as “a cross-sectional study”, but later says it “randomized patients into two groups”, which would make it an RCT - I think they might just be using the term “cross-sectional” different from the standard American usage. A hospital in Pakistan got 50 patients on ivermectin + azithromycin, and another 50 on azithromycin alone. Primary outcome was not mentioned, and the data were presented confusingly, but a typical result is that only 4% of the ivermectin group had symptoms lasting more than 10 days, whereas 16% of the control group did, p < 0.01. They do a really weird thing where they compare how long it took symptoms to resolve between IVM and control groups within each bin. That is, if I’m understanding correctly, they ask “of the people who took between 3-5 days for symptoms to resolve, did they resolve faster for IVM or control?”. This is an utterly bizarre analysis to perform, although it doesn’t affect the fact that their other results still seem to favor ivermectin. Maybe I’m confused about what’s going on here. I’ve mostly been letting people off easy on no placebo, but I as far as I can tell (not very far) this paper seems to be going off whether patients reported continuing to have symptoms to the hospital doing the study, and I think that is potentially susceptible to placebo effects. Additionally, there’s no preregistration, and even though they talk a lot about doing PCR tests they don’t present the results. This is by no means the worst study here but I still think it’s pretty low quality and I don’t trust it. Aref et al: This one is published in the International Journal Of Nanomedicine, even though I’m pretty sure that isn’t a real thing. In this case the “nanomedicine” is a new nasal spray version of ivermectin which is so confusing I cannot for the life of me figure out what dose they are giving these patients. This Egyptian study gives 57 patients intranasal ivermectin plus hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, oseltamavir, and some vitamins; another 57 patients get all that stuff except the ivermectin. Primary outcome is not stated, but they look at various symptoms, all of which look better in the ivermectin group: 95% of ivermectin patients got negative PCRs at some time point, compared to 75% of controls, p = 0.004. I am pretty suspicious of this study, not least because it comes from Egypt which has an awful reputation for fake studies, and it returns extreme results that I wouldn’t expect even if ivermectin was actually a wonder drug. But I cannot find any particular thing wrong with it, nor did anyone else I looked at, so I will grudgingly let it stand. Krolewiecki et al: Another Argentine study. This one is a real RCT. 30 patients received ivermectin, 15 were the control group (no placebo, again). Primary outcome was difference in viral load on day 5. The trend favored ivermectin but it was not statistically significant, although they were able to make it statistically significant if they looked at a subset of higher-IVM-plasma-concentration patients. They did not find any difference in clinical outcomes. A pro-ivermectin person could point out that in the subgroup with the highest ivermectin concentrations, the drug seemed to work. A skeptic could point out that this is exactly the kind of subgroup slicing that you are not supposed to do without pre-registering it, which I don’t think this team did. I agree with the skeptic. Vallejos et al: Another Argentine study. It’s big (250 people in each arm). It’s an RCT. It tries to define a primary outcome (“Primary outcome: the trial ended when the last patient who was included achieved the end of study visit”), but that’s not what “primary outcome” means, and they don’t offer an alternative. Other outcomes: no difference in PCR on days 3 or 12. Hospitalization is nonsignificantly better in the ivermectin group (14 vs. 21, p = 0.2), but death is nonsigificantly better in the placebo group (3 vs. 4, p = 0.7). This isn’t even the kind of nonsignificant that might contribute to an exciting meta-analysis later. This is just a pure null result. I cannot find any problem with this study, and neither can anyone else I checked. This is the biggest RCT we’ve seen so far, so we should take it seriously. TOGETHER Trial: Speaking of big RCTs… This one hasn’t been published yet. There’s a video of a talk about it, but I am not going to watch it, because it is a video, so I am getting information secondhand from eg here. Apparently, it compares 677 people (!) randomized to ivermectin to 678 people randomized to placebo. 86 ivermectin patients ended up in the hospital compared to 95 placebo patients, p-value not significant. This was a really big professional trial done by bigshot researchers from a major Canadian university, and the medical establishment is taking it much more seriously than any of these others. When it comes out, it will probably get published in a top journal. When discussing Lopez-Medina, I wrote: When people say things like “sure, a lot of small studies show good results for ivermectin, but the bigger and more professional trials don’t”, this is one of the two big professional trials they’re talking about. This is the other one. Not coincidentally, it’s also the other trial that ivmmeta.com has a warning letter underneath telling you to disregard. Their main concern is that instead of truly randomizing patients to ivermectin vs. placebo, they did a time-dependent randomization that meant during some weeks more patients were getting one or the other. This is a problem because the trial takes place in Brazil, where different variants were more common at different times. Here’s their image: On the one hand, I have immense contempt for ivmmeta for letting all those other awful studies pass and then pulling out all the stops to try to nitpick this one. I have no idea if their proposed randomization failure really happened. And no doubt the reason they’re even able to investigate this is that this study is really careful and transparent - most of them don’t tell you anything about their randomization method. I would be shocked if other studies don’t have all these problems and worse. On the other hand, the point isn’t to be fair, it’s to be right. And this is a potential confounder. Not a huge one. But a potential one. I guess all we can do is try to bound the damage. Even if the confounding is 100% real and bad, there’s no way to make this study consistent with the crazy super-pro-ivermectin results of studies like Espitia-Hernandez and Aref. And even if we deny any confounding, we see the same slight pro-ivermectin trend - 86 hospitalizations vs. 95 - that we’ve seen in so many other studies. Nothing is going to make me believe that this isn’t in the top 33% of studies we’ve been looking at, so let’s add it as grist for the meta-analysis (though maybe not quite as much grist as its vast size indicates) and move on, angrily. Buonfrate et al: An Italian RCT. Patients were randomized into low-dose ivermectin (32), placebo (29), or high-dose ivermectin (32). Primary outcome was viral load on day 7. There was no significant difference (average of 2 in ivermectin groups, 2.2 in placebo group). They admit that they failed to reach the planned sample size, but did a calculation to show that even if they had, the trial could not have returned a positive result. Clinically, an average of 2 patients were hospitalized in each of the ivermectin arms, compared to 0 in the placebo arm - which bucks our previously-very-constant pro-ivermectin trend. Mayer et al: Not an RCT. Patients in an Argentine province were offered the opportunity to try ivermectin; 3266 said yes and become the experimental group, 17966 said no and became the control group. There were many obvious differences between the groups, but they all seemed to handicap ivermectin. There was a nonsignificant trend toward less hospitalization and significantly less mortality (1.5% vs. 2.1%, p = 0.03). While looking into this study, I learned the term “immortal time bias”. This means a period in between selection for the study and the beginning of study recording where patient outcomes are not counted. I think the problem here is that if you signed up for the system on Day X, and if you got sick before they could give you ivermectin, you were in the control group. See this Twitter thread, I have not confirmed everything he says. This only hardens my resolve to stay away from non-RCTs. Borody et al: Our last paper! …is it a paper? I can’t find it published anywhere. It mostly seems to be on news sites. Doesn’t look peer-reviewed. And it starts with “Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views”. Whatever. 600 Australians were treated with ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc. The article compares this to an “equivalent control group” made of “contemporary infected subjects in Australia obtained from published Covid Tracking Data”; this is not how you control group, @#!% you. Then it gets excited about the fact that most patients had better symptoms at the end of the ten-day study period than the beginning (untreated COVID resolves in about ten days). Why are these people wasting my time with this? Let’s move on. The Analysis If we remove all fraudulent and methodologically unsound studies from the table above, we end up with this: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who investigated many of the studies above for fraud, tried a similar exercise. I learned about his halfway through, couldn’t help seeing it briefly, but tried to avoid remembering it or using it when generating mine (also, I did take the result of his fraud investigations into account), so they should be considered not quite independent efforts. His looks like this: He nixed Chowdhury, Babaloba, Ghauri, Faisal, and Aref, but kept Szenta Fonseca, Biber (?), and Mayer. There was correlation of 0.45, which I guess is okay. I asked him about his decision-making, and he listed a combination of serious statistical errors and small red flags adding up. I was pretty uncomfortable with most of these studies myself, so I will err on the side of severity, and remove all studies that either I or Meyerowitz-Katz disliked. We end up with the following short list: We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them. …but honestly this table still looks pretty good for ivermectin, doesn’t it? Still lots of big green boxes. Meyerowitz-Katz accuses ivmmeta of cherry-picking what statistic to use for their forest plot. That is, if a study measures ten outcomes, they sometimes take the most pro-ivermectin outcome. Ivmmeta.com counters that they used a consistent and reasonable (if complicated) process for choosing their outcome of focus, that being: If studies report multiple kinds of effects then the most serious outcome is used in calculations for that study. For example, if effects for mortality and cases are both reported, the effect for mortality is used, this may be different to the effect that a study focused on. If symptomatic results are reported at multiple times, we used the latest time, for example if mortality results are provided at 14 days and 28 days, the results at 28 days are used. Mortality alone is preferred over combined outcomes. Outcomes with zero events in both arms were not used (the next most serious outcome is used — no studies were excluded). For example, in low-risk populations with no mortality, a reduction in mortality with treatment is not possible, however a reduction in hospitalization, for example, is still valuable. Clinical outcome is considered more important than PCR testing status. When basically all patients recover in both treatment and control groups, preference for viral clearance and recovery is given to results mid-recovery where available (after most or all patients have recovered there is no room for an effective treatment to do better). If only individual symptom data is available, the most serious symptom has priority, for example difficulty breathing or low SpO2 is more important than cough. I’m having trouble judging this, partly because Meyerowitz-Katz says ivmmeta has corrected some earlier mistakes, and partly because there really is some reasonable debate over how to judge studies with lots of complicated endpoints. By this point I had completely forgotten what ivmmeta did, so I independently coded all 11 remaining studies following something in between my best understanding of their procedure and what I considered common sense. The only exception was that when the most severe outcome was measured in something other than patients (ie average number of virus copies per patient), I defaulted to one that was measured in patients instead, to keep everything with the same denominator. My results mostly matched ivmmeta’s, with one or two exceptions that I think are within the scope of argument or related to my minor deviations from their protocol. Placebo vs. ivermectin groups sometimes differed in size, which I’ve adjusted for and rounded off. Probably I’m forgetting some reason I can’t just do simple summary statistics to this, but whatever. It is p = 0.15, not significant. This is maybe unfair, because there aren’t a lot of deaths in the sample, so by focusing on death rather than more common outcomes we’re pointlessly throwing away sample size. What happens if I unprincipledly pick whatever I think the most reasonable outcome to use from each study is? I’ve chosen “most reasonable” as a balance between “is the most severe” and “has a lot of data points”: Now it’s p = 0.04, seemingly significant, but I had to make some unprincipled decisions to get there. I don’t think I specifically replaced negative findings with positive ones, but I can’t prove that even to myself, let alone to you. [UPDATE 5/31/22: A reader writes in to tell me that the t-test I used above is overly simplistic. A Dersimonian-Laird test is more appropriate for meta-analysis, and would have given 0.03 and 0.005 on the first and second analysis, where I got 0.15 and 0.04. This significantly strengthens the apparent benefit of ivermectin from ‘debatable’ to ‘clear’. I discuss some reasons below why I am not convinced by this apparent benefit.] (how come I’m finding a bunch of things on the edge of significance, but the original ivmmeta site found a lot of extremely significant things? Because they combined ratios, such that “one death in placebo, zero in ivermectin” looked like a nigh-infinite benefit for ivermectin, whereas I’m combining raw numbers. Possibly my way is statistically illegitimate for some reason, but I’m just trying to get a rough estimate of how convinced to be) So we are stuck somewhere between “nonsignificant trend in favor” and “maybe-significant trend in favor, after throwing out some best practices”. This is normally where I would compare my results to those of other meta-analyses made by real professionals. But when I look at them, they all include studies later found to be fake, like Elgazzar, and unsurprisingly come up with wildly positive conclusions. There are about six in this category. One of them later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar and still found strong efficacy for ivermectin, but they still included Niaee and some other dubious studies. The only meta-analysis that doesn’t make these mistakes is Popp (a Cochrane review), which is from before Elgazzar was found to be fraudulent, but coincidentally excludes it for other reasons. It also excludes a lot of good studies like Mahmud and Ravakirti because they give patients other things like HCQ and azithromycin - I chose to include them, because I don’t think they either work or have especially bad side effects, so they’re basically placebo - but Cochrane is always harsh like this. They end up with a point estimate where ivermectin cuts mortality by 40% - but say the confidence intervals are too wide to draw any conclusion. I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance. Except that everyone is still focusing on deaths and hospitalizations just because they’re flashy. Mahmud et al, which everyone agrees is a great study, found that ivermectin decreased days until clinical recovery, p = 0.003? So what do you do? This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters. I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up. In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading. … … … … … The Synthesis Hopefully you learned something interesting about yourself there. But my answer is: worms! As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc. Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: Ravakirti et al:, Bukhari et al:, Mohan et al:, Biber et al:, the preregistration, Elalfy et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!B_IH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d3559ee-a058-44cc-9b38-09b78a0f5035_1352x1070.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9mI_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbffceed7-c84a-45c1-abfe-1fb2706dc383_483x674.png, Lopez-Medina et al:, Roy et al:, Chahla et al:, Mourya et al:, Loue et al:, Table 1, Merino et al:, never works, Faisal et al:, Aref et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-FoK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6de79b6-091b-4c13-b7be-715c9bb194a7_986x810.jpeg, Krolewiecki et al:, Vallejos et al:, TOGETHER Trial:, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7X0m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1f65fd44-58b9-4489-a934-02a5a7330499_706x768.png, Buonfrate et al:, Mayer et al:, immortal time bias, this Twitter thread, Borody et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wpjs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d8a451b-b1fc-44e5-ae67-b1506e491762_914x657.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DOjA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F17d5827a-38da-4a99-beb3-c3018df5c633_920x604.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GX1n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc692fec8-a450-4579-b337-c72bec060970_912x298.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YcH4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff36db98e-e653-44da-906c-20312b1689a3_468x205.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jbcL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd189a844-daf2-4199-bb2e-830d4fc64415_468x206.png, later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar, Popp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2B6r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F505c5ac4-3fe8-47a4-8505-dab80601b44d_416x198.png, Avi Bitterman, David Boulware, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWWh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac9e4f34-f9cc-40f2-9d83-da4e7178fad7_772x330.png, source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
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December 06, 2021 · Original source
Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
3: In the 19th century, a group of Tibeto-Burman-speaking former headhunters along the India/Burma border declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh (one of the Ten Lost Tribes) and converted en masse to Judaism. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted their claim and expedited immigration paperwork for several thousand of them.
Inline links: declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
IMO, the most interesting model I've heard of is Israel's – consumers choose one of 4 non-profit HMO's to belong to, who are paid by the government per person who subscribes. HMO's offer much better incentive models for overall quality of care, and the competition keeps services consumer-oriented (compared to fully-socialized systems like the NHS).
Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%
YGLESIAS PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats lose both houses of Congress (90%) HOLD 2. Democrats lose at least two Senate seats (80%) HOLD 3. Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats (80%) HOLD 4. Nancy Pelosi announces retirement plans (70%) HOLD 5. Stephen Breyer does not retire (60%) N/A 6. Some version of Build Back Better passes (60%) HOLD 7. Joe Biden is still president (90%) HOLD 8. At least one Biden cabinet-rank official resigns (70%) HOLD 9. No military conflict between the PRC and Taiwan (a worryingly low 90%) HOLD 10. New U.S. sanctions on Russia (70%) HOLD 11. Saudi Arabia and Israel establish diplomatic relations (60%) SELL to 50% 12. Fewer U.S. Covid deaths in 2022 than in 2021 (80%) BUY to 90% 13. Emmanuel Macron re-elected (60%) HOLD 14. Traffic light coalition exploits loopholes to get around the constitutional debt brake (70%) HOLD 15. No recession in 2021 (90%) SELL to 80% 16. Liz Cheney loses primary (80%) HOLD 17. Some version of USICA passes Congress (70%) HOLD 18. Lula elected president of Brazil (60%) SELL to 50% 19. China officially abandons Covid Zero (70%) HOLD 20. Fewer U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2022 than in 2020 (80%) BUY to 90% 21. Additional booster shots of mRNA vaccines authorized for seniors (80%) HOLD 22. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is below 6% (70%) BUY to 80% 23. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is above 4% (70%) SELL to 50% 24. The Fed ends up doing more than its currently forecast three interest rate hikes (60%) HOLD 25. Russia does not invade Ukraine (60%) HOLD 26. Viktor Orbán loses power in Hungary (60%) HOLD 27. Sinn Fein becomes the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly (60%) HOLD 28. The U.S. and Canada reach an agreement on softwood lumber (70%) HOLD 29. Democrats go down at least one governor on net (60%) HOLD 30. The unemployment rate stays between 4 and 5% (70%) SELL to 60% if you mean 12/22, to 40% if you mean it never gets outside that range at all
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#44: Long-Termism Advocacy Org In Israel ALTER, the Associations for Long Term Existence and Resilience, is an academic research and advocacy organization being started in Israel, which hopes to investigate, demonstrate, and foster useful ways to improve the future in the short term, and to safeguard and improve the long-term trajectory of humanity. The founder, David Manheim, has a PhD in public policy and a track record of research in effective altruist priority areas and risk reduction, and in policy engagement. The key goals of the organization will be to foster academic and policy work in key areas in Israel, via organizing conferences, academic engagement, and fostering collaboration with international organizations in this space. If you have connections to interested Israeli academics, experience with making this type of academic outreach successful, or you can provide funding for this work, please contact david@alter.org.il.
Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 · Original source
Other sources have defined “a people” based on exclusion from existing political structures. So since Texans have all the normal rights in the US, they’re not a separate people. But since Palestinians don’t have all the normal rights in Israel, they are. But this suggests that if Putin invaded eg Finland, and then granted the Finns whatever the normal rights are in Russia, Finns would stop being a people.
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
Eastern European countries that joined NATO are protected by the threat of American nuclear war; Israel and Middle Eastern Gulf monarchies see an Iran impeded by American sanctions
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Flush with confidence from his Panama Canal victory (his canalchemy? his Panamachievement?), Carter decides he should continue tackling foreign policy problems other people think are impossible. And there’s one obvious candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. Every single one of his advisors tells him this is a huge mistake and he definitely shouldn’t get involved, but knowing Carter, this only makes him want to do it more. His strategy: bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to Camp David for a series of intense negotiations. As usual, Carter believes that if he can just get the relevant parties in a room with him, he can convince them to see things his way.
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.
Sike! Obviously, that doesn’t happen. The Camp David Accords are seen as a triumph at the time, but in the long run, the picture is more mixed. The first part of the deal holds up, even after Sadat—who ends up becoming quite close with Carter—is assassinated by fundamentalists just a few years later. But the Israelis immediately welch on the second part of the deal and continue building settlements. Today’s Israel has more than 20x the number of settlers as it did then, making the intensity of the Carter/Begin dispute seem depressingly quaint in retrospect.
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
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
39: Did you know: the Yom Kippur War started on October 6 (Ramadan 10 in the Arabic calendar). Egypt has commemorated it with two cities called Sixth Of October and Tenth of Ramadan, both with populations in the hundreds of thousands. This makes me wonder how Egypt thinks of the war: I had always learned it was a spectacular Israeli victory / Arab defeat, but countries don’t normally name that many cities after wars that they lost.
Inline links: Sixth Of October, Tenth of Ramadan
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
Thus, note that in Israel Hanukkah is a Big Deal holiday, while Christmas is observed mostly by tourists/pilgrims. There exist Christians in Israel, slightly more than there are Druze, but certainly not enough that Jewish kids feel they're missing out. Hanukkah has become a big holiday there on its own merits.
I am willing to accept that Hanukkah got signal-boosted for different reasons in the US vs. Israel, but I think I am right about the US. Wikipedia says:
Inline links: says
Response To Alexandros Contra Me On Ivermectin
February 01, 2023 · Original source
The study I am most embarrassed about here is Biber et al, an Israeli study which found that COVID patients who received ivermectin had lower viral load. In the original post, I wrote:
Inline links: Biber et al
This is an RCT from Israel. 47 patients got ivermectin and 42 placebo. Primary endpoint was viral load on day 6. I am having trouble finding out what happened with this; as far as I can tell it was a negative result and they buried it in favor of more interesting things. In a "multivariable logistic regression model, the adjusted odds ratio of negative SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR negative test" favored ivermectin over placebo (p = 0.03 for day 6, p = 0.01 for day 8), but this seems like the kind of thing you do when your primary outcome is boring and you’re angry.
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
Israel has a program called Hasbara where they get volunteers to support Israel in Internet comment sections. I know this because every time someone is pro-Israel in an Internet comment section, other people accuse them of being a Hasbara stooge. I don’t know if this program has given Israel enough value to be worth the backlash.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
24: Vosmyorka explains the ongoing political crisis in Israel.
Inline links: explains the ongoing political crisis in Israel
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%
Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, May 4th, 07:00 PM. Location: Sarona Market, grass next to Max Brenner Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP7 Event link: https://fb.me/e/MPhkE3n4
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP7, https://fb.me/e/MPhkE3n4
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: Mustafa Ahmed Contact Info: tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 8th, 10:00 AM Location: Grinders cafe, Zayouna Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92 Group Link: https://t.me/ACX_BGH Israel TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 21st, 7:00 PM Location: The grass area next to Max Brenner in Sarona park. I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP Group Link: https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92, https://t.me/ACX_BGH, https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP, https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 21st, 7:00 PM Location: The grass area next to Max Brenner in Sarona park. I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP Group Link: https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP, https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/
23
October 31, 2023 · Original source
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
The prediction market started too late to have much of an opinion Tuesday afternoon, but by Tuesday evening it was already down to a 10-15% chance Israel was responsible.
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
HALEY: Tha . . . uh . . . gratitude to you. I thi . . . uh, I believe . . . that rising threats to peace around the globe are the most important issue. Countries li . . . countries such as Iran and . . . and . . . such as that place with Pyongyang . . . are threatening US allies. When I was UN ambassador, I learned to stand up to dangerous tyrants such as Ayatollah . . . such as the Ayatollah . . . and Vladimir Putin. And . . . that one guy in . . . in the place with Pyongyang. We need to stand together with US allies such as Israel, South . . . that place with Seoul . . . and most recently U . . . Um, our allies such as U . . . such as that place with . . . f—k.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Chris Christie. Our next question is for Nikki Haley. Nikki, what would you do to address the Chrisis . . . sorry, the crisis . . . in Israel and Palestine? Remember, your forbidden letter is still “K”.
HALEY: Hmmmm . . . um . . . [sweating] . . . the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the Maine issues facing the world today. Errgh . . . um . . . it is a source of great suffering and Missouri for the people of the Middle East. [Long pause] Idaho-ped that there would have been peace in the region, but those hopes have been dashed. [Very long pause]. I believe we Kansas-tematically develop a long term plan to bring . . .
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
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
He contrasts this with the Bible. Lots of Bible stories also fit the pattern. As in Babylonian and Norse mythology, the world begins with a primordial murder: Cain kills Abel. But the clearest example is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers grow jealous of him, coveting his beautiful multi-colored coat. They form a mob, gang up on him, and are about to kill him, when a slave caravan comes by and they decide to sell him as a slave instead. Then Joseph becomes as close to a god as the monotheistic Israelites are willing to accept (Prime Minister of Egypt) and founds the next stage of Israelite civilization as some kind of culture-hero figure.
So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”
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.
Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
December 12, 2023 · Original source
“I don’t know if religion always leads to a flourishing society. Sometimes it can make things worse. Like, what about the Israel-Palestine conflict?”
“You don’t believe in the Israel-Palestine conflict?”
“Like I said, I’m a pragmatist now. If the Israel-Palestine conflict existed, it would be a strong argument against religion, and make lots of people become atheists. But religion is necessary to hold society together. So for the good of society, I choose not to believe in it.”
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
21: Related (source, h/t @krishnanrohit):
Inline links: source, @krishnanrohit
38: Related: Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools. Some friends recently set up a tiny home/private school in Oakland that can fit another few 5-9 year olds, tuition ~$1200/month, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you want an introduction.
Inline links: and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools
Seems Like Targeting
January 31, 2024 · Original source
But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them. Assuming that many important people have skeletons in their closets (or can be believably accused of such in ways hard for them to disprove), that creates chilling effects against letting anyone criticize Israel. If you know investigative journalism is a weapon pointed against people who do X, that scares people out of doing X.
Compare to the hypothetical situation about Israel above. Investigative journalists have credibly signaled that if you go after their allies in academia, they’ll go after you and your loved ones - elevating fifteen-year-stale peccadillos by nobodies into front page news. Business Insider did investigate itself, and found no wrongdoing. But is it really normal to mention the name of the plagiarist’s husband four times in a plagiarism article?
Inline links: and found no wrongdoing
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
Will Israel launch airstrikes on Pakistan in the next year? Answer: 1%
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
2: Italy’s Basilica of the Holy House is supposedly built atop the house where the Virgin Mary raised Jesus. Why is the Virgin Mary’s house in Italy? Supposedly angels carried it there from Israel just before the Saracens’ final victory over the Crusaders. Sounds suspicious, but the house in the Basilica appears to be a genuine 1st century Palestinian dwelling. One theory: it was shipped to Italy by the Angelos family, and the angels story was a later mistranslation.
Inline links: Basilica of the Holy House
29: Two great essays on organ donation laws recently, The Fitzwilliam’s Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Works In Progress’ Compensating Compassion. The Fitzwilliam’s focuses on an underwhelming new Irish law, and also tells the author’s story (he tried to donate a kidney, but got rejected for being too young - he was in his twenties - which is one I’ve never heard before). Works In Progress surveys laws around the world; I’m especially interested in Israel’s approach (written up by MR here), which says that people who previously agreed to donate after their death get priority for organs when alive.
Inline links: Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, Compensating Compassion, written up by MR here
Who Predicted 2023?
March 05, 2024 · Original source
Andrey S is a psychologist in Israel with a background in computer science. He started forecasting on Metaculus a few years ago, and describes himself as "always interested in learning and expanding my point of view".
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
March 07, 2024 · Original source
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-PCA-reflects-self-identified-race-ethnicity-and-language-of-ATLAS-participants-A_fig1_365445594 People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly 100% the same as socially-defined racial categories. This is unsurprising, since no two definitions of a word point to exactly 100% the same extensional cluster. All words are weird clusters of correlated traits that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets the closer you look at them, and words describing race are no exception. Consider for example the Jews. Jews do share some common genes, with interesting features like the Cohen modal haplotype and usually some similar Middle Eastern genetic background regardless of where they ended up. But they also form a legal cluster: the people who are defined as Jews by the official halakhic definition - someone whose mother was Jewish, or who converted in an official ceremony. This can get arbitrarily complicated, with halakha (Jewish law) having opinions on how to sort out each weird edge case (like IVF!) But they also form a religious cluster: people who currently practice the Jewish religion. And they form a cultural cluster, consisting of people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” and have names like Weinberg and Goldstein and maybe speak a few scraps of Yiddish, even if these people are atheists. None of these clusters are exactly the same. There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection. There are extremely observant Orthodox Jews who aren’t Jewish by the halakhic definition, because at some point in their line a Jewish father married a Gentile mother and they raised their family Jewish without her officially converting. (and each of these clusters breaks down even further! There are people who are halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis but not Orthodox rabbis. There are probably a few edge cases of people who are genetically Jewish according to 23AndMe’s definition but not Ancestry.com’s.There are people who are culturally Jewish in the sense of speaking Yiddish but not caring about Israel, and other people who care about Israel a lot but don’t speak Yiddish.) But in real life there are very high correlations between all these clusters, such that someone who’s a practicing religious Jew is overwhelmingly more likely to be genetically Jewish than someone who isn’t, and someone of Jewish descent is much more likely to be culturally Jewish, and so on. So it’s reasonable to have a word “Jew” which unprincipledly smushes together cultural, halakhic, genetic, and religious definitions, so we don’t have to write an entire PhD dissertation to describe someone’s exact level of Jewishness to a communication partner. I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is. You can be a Jew if you’re irreligious but have Jewish blood. And you can be a Jew if you have no Jewish blood but follow the Jewish religion. But if you neither have Jewish blood nor follow the Jewish religion, you’re not a Jew. Probably there’s some tradeoff here, where the less blood you have, the more you have to follow the religion before other people will consider you Jewish, and vice versa. (the Jews are lucky because they have halakha. Even though halakha is just some rules that some random Jewish person and/or God invented, they’re a strong enough Schelling point that everyone else sort of kind of agrees to respect it when deciding who’s Jewish, even though non-Jews - and non-observant Jews - are under no obligation to do this.) The category “Native American” must also work like this, right? It’s an unprincipled combination of lots of different facets - genetics, legal tribal membership, culture, lived experience, etc. Suppose a white person was adopted at birth by the Mi’kmaq Indians, grew up on their reservation, speaks their language, never even met another white person until he was an adult (let’s add that for some reason he has unusually dark skin and eyes for a white person, so he didn’t look different from the other Mi’kmaqs and experience an unusual childhood on that basis). When he grows up, he is 100% identical to the other Mi’kmaqs in every way except genetically. Does he count as Mi’kmaq? I don’t know the tribal law on this issue. But common-sensically, if for some reason I have to decide this question - like that the other Mi’kmaqs decided to expel him from the tribe and I have to either sympathize with him or tell him he deserved it - in that case I think he’s pretty Mi’kmaq. But suppose a genetically Mi’kmaq person was adopted by a white couple in Topeka and raised as a completely normal white child. Suppose she had light skin and never even knew she wasn’t white until she took a genetic test as an adult. Is she a Mi’kmaq? Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.1 I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3), that race is at least a little bit based on genetics (along with other things). If that’s true, you could imagine drawing the bounding hypersphere for the category “Native American” in such a way so that Elizabeth Hoover would just barely make it inside based on her lived experience if she had 1/8th Native blood, but is just barely outside (even given the same amount of lived experience) if she doesn’t. III. But the categories are made for man, not man for the categories. Even if the category “Native American” is a hypersphere in some conceptual space, we get to decide how much to weight each axis. (I like the phrase “Native American hypersphere”. It sounds like something from an Erich von Daniken book.) And I think, even though in theory we could use genetics, there’s a pretty strong argument for basing it on something like “lived experience”. That argument is: it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test, and “lived experience” is the only potential basis that prevents that. Suppose you believe in “cultural appropriation”. That means that it’s bad and evil for someone to do too much work within a culture they don’t belong to. On the other hand, everyone seems to think it’s really valuable to do work within a culture you do belong to. Native Americans who create great specifically-Native-American art and literature, or who open Native American restaurants, or who become leaders and activists within the Native American community, are hailed as heroes. We tell minorities that enhancing the culture and recognition of their specific minority group is one of the most valuable things they can do with their lives. Half of the art world is now minorities talking about the Their-Minority-Group experience. You see the trap. You spend your whole life building on the culture of your identity group, because that’s what you were told to do. Then you get a 23andMe result and - oops, you weren’t in that group after all. Now retroactively, instead of being a hero, you’re a colonizer and imperialist who needs to be unpersonned to protect your group purity2. So here’s another trilemma: Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.
Inline links: that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets, Cohen modal haplotype, an axis in concept space, 1, the categories are made for man, not man for the categories, 2
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org. Africa & Middle East Israel HAIFA, ISRAEL Contact: Shai Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com Time: Tuesday, April 9th, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be in the zikaron garden next to the city hall, in a picnic blanket on the grass and I will be wearing a red shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.If it rains we will meet up in a bookstore called 'goldmund' which is located at ekron street 6. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4PRX7X+CQ
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4PRX7X+CQ
HAIFA, ISRAEL Contact: Shai Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com Time: Tuesday, April 9th, 6:00 PM Location: We'll be in the zikaron garden next to the city hall, in a picnic blanket on the grass and I will be wearing a red shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.If it rains we will meet up in a bookstore called 'goldmund' which is located at ekron street 6. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4PRX7X+CQ
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4PRX7X+CQ
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL Contact: Gruns Contact Info: aviram[dot]ben[dot]eliav[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, April 17th, 5:00 PM Location: Gan Sacher near the gan sipur cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G3QQ6J5+V4 Notes: please email me so we can know how many people to expect
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G3QQ6J5+V4
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
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
38: Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense. I appreciated this post, because I also remember reading stuff c. 2010 and getting the impression that all the smart people knew missile defense couldn’t work; defense contractors bamboozled uneducated voters and cynical Congressmen to get free money for their vaporware. But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed it worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?
Inline links: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
Try spotting existential risk prevention on here. I don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument? III. Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most compelling are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly larger benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty. My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations. The IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work. But IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes. I think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?” (also, effective altruism funds IPA) I’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact. And I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy. IV. Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism. And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole pitch of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to bypass a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just give money to effective charities. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued. Suppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)? EA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers. EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”. This is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell did solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it. V. You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!! But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should. I think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So: Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? Should people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention? Should people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics? EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.) There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or a spam text message” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into. The third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it massively massively backfires. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him, then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with. One f@#king time, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were much less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of. Not to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for. EA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics. VI. Stone moves on to animal welfare: It’s important to grasp that [caring about animals] is, in evolutionary terms, an error in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals and then we made friends with dogs, not vice versa. Again, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs. People having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”. Art is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures. Anyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about intra-tribal dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error? At some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist. Stone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like Axiology, Morality, Law, the super-old Consequentialism FAQ, and The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too. Again, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into: If I wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.
Inline links: Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program, I take this one pretty seriously, a spam text message, Axiology, Morality, Law, Consequentialism FAQ, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
Your Book Review: Dominion
June 28, 2024 · Original source
Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
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
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Mustafa Contact Info: wolframsigma2[dot]7[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 05th, 06:00 PM Location: In the Grinders, Zayona. I will sit with a brown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+839 Notes: please join the group or notify me in any way, I hosted 3 meet ups so far and no attended, so I would not go if no other person at least notified me. If you can't attend, but you're still likeminded and in the area, please reach out! I'd love to meet you sometime. Israel HAIFA, ISRAEL Contact: shai zilberman Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 05:00 PM Location: The Goldmund book store located at the talpiot market on ekron 6 street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSclSIRSpdSJ [ignore this part] 6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Looking forward to seeing ya'll at our meetup! Feel free to bring along anyone/anything if you'd like—everyone is welcome. To help us plan better, please RSVP via email or whatsapp (detailed here) so we can ensure we have enough space and refreshments for everyone. See you there!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+839, https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39
Contact: shai zilberman Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 05:00 PM Location: The Goldmund book store located at the talpiot market on ekron 6 street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSclSIRSpdSJ [ignore this part] 6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Looking forward to seeing ya'll at our meetup! Feel free to bring along anyone/anything if you'd like—everyone is welcome. To help us plan better, please RSVP via email or whatsapp (detailed here) so we can ensure we have enough space and refreshments for everyone. See you there! TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 20th, 05:00 PM Location: Sarona park, grass area next to Benedict restaurant. I'll have an ACX MEETUP sign and some balloons. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MPH Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: There is a secure location (מרחב מוגן) very close to where we'll be sitting in case of a missile alert - an underground staircase.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39, https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MPH, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
5: Why is Israel one of the only developed countries with above-replacement fertility rate? It’s natural to suspect some role for its ultra-Orthodox Jewish population, who live traditional lifestyles with large (5-10 children) families. But they’re not numerous enough to shift fertility all by themselves, and even secular Israelis have anomalously high fertility. Maybe the presence of the ultra-Orthodox shifts broader cultural norms? But then why don’t isolated high-fertility groups elsewhere (eg Amish and Mormons in the US) produce the same phenomenon? The “Nonzionism” blog gives the first really satisfying explanation I’ve seen: Israel has a uniquely continuous cultural gradient between their high-fertility subpopulation and everyone else (ie from ultra-Orthodox, to moderately-religious, to slightly-religious, to secular) with most stages having positive feelings about the stage above them (eg the moderately-religious respect the ultra-Orthodox for their piety). This lets ultra-Orthodox lifestyles percolate through and influence the general population in a way that eg Amish lifestyles don’t influence the average American.
Inline links: The “Nonzionism” blog gives the first really satisfying explanation I’ve seen
24: Another day, another NYT doxxing scandal: an NYT reporter joined a group chat of Jews talking about how they dealt with anti-Semitism. Then she shared the names of everyone in the group with someone who leaked it to anti-Israel activists. The activists proceeded to harass, stalk, threaten, and vandalize group members. NYT says that unspecified “disciplinary action” has been taken against the reporter, which apparently does not include firing her, demoting her, or any other effect observable in the physical world.
Inline links: NYT doxxing scandal
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
I was thinking about how the Romans would have dealt with the Israel/Palestine situation.
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.
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
One word conspicuously missing is "Trump". Doesn't Trump support Israel even more than Harris? Doesn't he have lots of other policies that Muslims might object to - like the infamous "Muslim travel ban"? You can, if you dig hard enough, find a video in the FAQ where one of the leaders admits Trump is also bad. But, he says, if Muslim-Americans elect Trump, then it will teach the Democrats not to take them for granted, and maybe they'll get more concessions next time.
Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims
November 08, 2024 · Original source
Mentioned before: a group of Muslims in Michigan are backing Trump because they’re mad at the Biden/Harris administration for supporting Israel. They understand that Trump supports Israel even more. They just worry that if they always vote straight Democrat like every other minority group, the Democrats have no incentive to listen to them. They hope that if they elect Trump, even if he doesn’t listen to them, then the Democrats will work harder to woo them next time around.
With that said: Consider the obviously better nonstandard solution to the Ultimatum Game of "accept $5, accept $4 with probability 5/6 minus epsilon, accept $3 with probability 5/7 minus 2*epsilon", etc. Formally, this would look something like, "Calculate what you think is your fair share, here the Shapley value of $5, and then agree to trade with a probability that is a function of the offer, such that your opponent's expected gains fall off monotonically but slowly as they offer you less than a fair value." The goal here is not to punish a greedy opponent, but to minimize losses in the case that people have legit disagreements about what's fair. (If you're part of a partially exploitable population and the opponent is trying to test exploiting you, then things get more complicated so let's leave that aside for now.) The analogy here would be that Muslims think Harris is not offering them a fair share of the value of their vote in anti-Israel policies. Offering more anti-Israel policies would cost Harris with other voters, though.
Let's spitball that a fair share of anti-Israel policy is a level of anti-Israelism where Harris loses half as many other marginal voters, as she gains in Muslim voters voting for her. (Maybe more sensible is "loses half as much in victory probability, as she gains from Muslims voting for her", which for small amounts of votes and the popular vote would be the same thing, but is not at all the same thing given the Electoral College.) Then if Harris offers less than this, Muslims could collectively decide to vote with a probability where Harris gains, eg, twice as much in voting win probability from Muslims, as Harris spent by alienating other voters with more anti-Israel policies than Trump has. Voting for Trump on the surface of things makes no sense, but maybe the Muslims want to demonstrate that they are in fact willing to vote and get out the vote. In this case, they could arrange for paired Harris and Trump votes (by region) to cancel each other out while still showing their strongest voting record.
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
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.
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
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.
1DaySooner's Trump II Health Policy Proposals
February 07, 2025 · Original source
Better Post-Marketing Surveillance: Improvements in transparency for existing data could be paired with modernized surveillance of the real world effects of drugs after they’ve been offered to the public. Unlike countries like England and Israel, America’s healthcare systems are highly fragmented and make it hard to aggregate evidence. A focused attempt to modernize data collection could build on the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative and give the public real-time transparency into who’s taking what drugs and what effects are being observed.
Inline links: FDA’s Sentinel Initiative
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Mostafa Shahat Contact Info: ms[a t]mostafashahat[period]com Time: Sunday, April 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Consoleya | We'll be in the main coworking space on the ground floor. I'll be wearing a name tag with 'ACX MEETUP' on it, and there will be a small sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G2H26XR+P4 Israel HAIFA Contact: Sha Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, May 6th, 5:00 PM Location: We'll be in the goldmund bookstore , at ekron 6 in the talpiot market area, and I will be wearing a batik/Hawaiian shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSc [remove this bit] lSIRSpdSJ6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Please RSVP on whatsapp/our group email so I know how many people will participate
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G2H26XR+P4, https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
April 15, 2025 · Original source
Balanced: Systems can fail for many reasons. Sometimes it’s just a hard problem with tradeoffs. Sometimes it’s been perverted from its original goal by special interests. Sometimes it’s some third thing. Usually it’s a combination of all of these. You can’t know for sure until you look at it closely. …then I think the people who use the phrase want to imagine that they’re pushing people from Naive to Balanced. But I think the last person to hold the Naive perspective died sometime in the 1980s, and in real life POSIWID is mostly used to push people from the Balanced to the Paranoid perspective without actually looking at the system involved or arguing the case. And second, the explanation above is just the most popular of about a half-dozen different exegeses that commenters offered. So if you do want to communicate the thing I suggested above - which, reminder, is: If a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding …I think you should just say that, instead of the confusing version that half of your audience will misinterpret, and which incorrectly implies that this always happens. When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge. Hopefully this will become clearer as I answer your comments one by one, starting with: Charles Lehman writes (X): The actually useful insight from POSIWID is the negative corollary: there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." This was the original, less-catchy form, but it seems exactly the same to me, and equally wrong. For example, Iran’s intelligence agency consistently fails to prevent Israel from infiltrating and attacking their nuclear program. But it’s very useful to claim that their purpose is to prevent this! If we both try to predict the behavior of Iranian intelligence, and I’m allowed to use the hypothesis “their purpose is preventing Israeli infiltration”, and you’re not allowed to use that hypothesis, I will consistently outpredict you. For example, I’ll be expecting them to interview security staff to see which ones are Israeli spies, try to intercept Israeli communications, and do other espionage activities, and you’ll still be stuck wondering whether they might take up gardening or ballet dancing. The clear, natural language expression of this useful hypothesis is “the purpose of Iran’s intelligence forces is to prevent Israeli infiltration, but they usually fail”. This clear, natural language expression is great and tells you everything that you need to know. POSIWID (or its inverse) adds nothing except an attempt to ban this excellent and communicative expressive technology, in favor of some other vague meaning of “purpose” which can’t hang together and which nobody can really explain. Ersatz writes: “I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”. This is just diluting the word “purpose” into incoherence. I think it’s useful linguistic technology to be able to say “The New York bus system both transports people from place to place, and emits lots of carbon dioxide. Its purpose is the transportation, and the carbon dioxide is an unfortunate side effect”. If the goal of POSIWID is to insist that no, the transportation and the CO2 emissions are equally purposeful, or that we’re not allowed to talk about that question, then it sabotages our ability to communicate clearly, for no apparent gain. Consider the New York carbon dioxide system, a hypothetical government department dedicated to emitting as much carbon dioxide as possible (why? to own the libs, of course!) Sometimes people drive motorcycles along its vast network of CO2 pipes, allowing them to travel from place to place. Is this exactly the same as the New York bus system? No? Why not? A natural answer would be “Because the bus system is aimed at transportation, but emits some CO2 as a minor side effect, and the CO2 system is aimed at emission, but facilitates transport as a minor side effect.” If your objection is going to be that instead of considering purpose, you should restrict yourself to saying that one transports more people than it emits CO2, and the other emits more CO2 than it helps transport people, you’ve now legislated that we must list exactly how many people the New York bus system transports, and how much carbon dioxide it emits, and how many ants it crushes, etc, every time we talk about it. But most people who talk about the bus system don’t know these statistics, and don’t have to. It’s sufficient (and linguistically convenient) to say “Its purpose is transportation, not CO2 emission or ant-crushing. Andrew Pearson writes: The steelman of the phrase, which might be what Stafford Beer had in mind when he coined the phrase, is that in large complex organisations it's very hard for individual workers to see a link between what they do and the stated purpose of the organisation - people just get on and do what they're told, and orient themselves more towards "doing what they're already doing, just more effectively" than towards "fulfilling the stated purpose of the organisation". I don’t think this is a great steelman. True, the average employee’s actions don’t obviously connect to the organization’s stated purpose. But the average employee’s actions also don’t obviously connect to what the organization does. If the stated purpose of the US military is to protect America, and what it does is bomb Middle Eastern weddings, both of those are equally remote from the day-to-day life of some low-level employee who just counts the number of screws in a warehouse. Aashish Reddy writes: I think POSIWID is best applied to bureaucracies or large structures where the reason bad outcomes occur is not because of difficult battles with reality (like government or hospitals or the Ukrainian military), but because of the way incentives are set up in the system. If someone said, “the purpose of the Civil Service is to drive through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change!”, that would clearly be absurd. That may be their goal, or how they see themselves; but the purpose of the system is not defined by either of those things. If it was, they wouldn’t incentivise caution and slowness. Whether that’s good or not, the purpose of the Civil Service is best approximated by what it does! I want to pay more attention to the word “goal” in the second sentence of the second paragraph: “[Driving innovative change] may be their goal, or how they see themselves.” It sounds like Aashish think it’s useful to use the word “goal” to discuss what a system is trying to do, separately from what it does or doesn’t accomplish. I agree! I just think “purpose” is a synonym for goal. If you use POSIWID, you have to posit some kind of weird new ontology where “purpose” means the opposite of “goal”. If you don’t use POSIWID, you can just keep the words “purpose” and “goal” having their regular everyday meaning, and describe this state of affairs with phrases like “The goal/purpose of the Civil Service is to deliver rapid change, but due to perverse incentives, its actual effect is to prevent change.” Kay writes: For example, the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour. These systems seem not to be changed, while they ostensibly truly could be. So to me this seems that the system may be working "to purpose" for the actors who want it to work that way. This is interesting because Kay is using a left-wing example: “The criminal justice system imprisons too many people of color, so its purpose is to oppress black people”. But one of the tweets in my original post was close to its right-wing opposite: “The criminal justice system consistently lets criminals off with a slap on the wrist, so its purpose is to get people raped and murdered.” As long as people are thinking in these terms, they’re going to be prey for whichever conspiracy theory best suits their pre-existing prejudices. I think both of these are worse than the Balanced View version: Some people care a lot about keeping people safe from crime, but other people care a lot about the human rights of suspects and convicts. The incarceration rate is a balance between these two forces, with some lesser contribution from sinister forces like private prison owners who want to increase incarceration to line their pockets. This has the advantage of being obviously true (there are pro-tough-on-crime activist groups and pro-soft-on-crime activist groups, they both do effective activism for their chosen cause, and the exact incarceration rate depends on which ones are in the ascendant and have the ear of politicians), and not being a conspiracy theory that forces you to believe that the government is a monolithic entity that really wants people to be raped and murdered. NegatingSilence writes: Come on, obviously "The Purpose of a System is What it Does" is meant to draw your attention to the incentives in cases where something different is happening than is supposed to be happening. My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result. I don’t know what country this person is in. But in my country, housing prices are high because of a combination of all of the following: Citizens want to preserve “neighborhood character”: they currently live in a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, they want it to remain a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, and they worry that building new homes threatens that status.
Inline links: writes (X), writes, writes, writes, writes
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.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[ period]org. Africa & The Middle East Israel RISHON LEZION Contact: Anatoly Vorobey Contact Info: avorobey[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 6:00 PM Location: Tables just behind the playground located behind the municipal court building, Meishar street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G3PXQ9J+G9
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G3PXQ9J+G9
Open Thread 399
September 15, 2025 · Original source
Donald Trump was chosen by God. You can tell because he's invincible. He can wriggle out of scandals that would sink Tricky Dick Nixon ten times over. He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner. He can support Israel harder than anyone has ever supported it before, and Arab-Americans will break fifty years of Voting Blue No Matter Who to march behind him. He can get 100% evangelical backing while oozing contempt for Christianity, 100% libertarian support while trampling the Constitution, and 100% allegiance from Wall Street while dismantling global trade. KKK wizards and celebrity rappers compete to compliment him loudest; Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises. Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.
To posit Trump's divine election is not to imply he has any positive qualities. When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments, God punished them by raising an incompetent idolator named Jeroboam to the throne. Jeroboam started a disastrous war that killed 500,000 of his own men, after which his dynasty collapsed and his entire family was slain. Jeroboam was chosen by God to crush and humiliate Israel. But he was chosen by God. Has America been obeying the commandments lately?
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
Winged Lion = OpenAI, founded by Sam Altman (Jewish). The winged lion would have been recognizable to Daniel’s audience as a symbol of the Babylonian Empire; Daniel was writing during the Babylonian Captivity, when there was no independent Israeli state and all Jews lived in Babylon.
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
…and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): 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: breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
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: 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
Against Against Boomers
December 19, 2025 · Original source
But it gets worse. Consider the way that “capitalism” gets used in socialist spaces. Although there are still a few classical Marxists with a clear conception of what capitalism is and why they hate it, most lefties just use “capitalism” to mean *gestures around expansively at everything*, with no concern about whether it involves market processes at all. Israel bombing Palestine? That’s capitalism. Trump arresting immigrants? Somehow that’s capitalism too. It’s true that our society is very capitalist, and that capitalism touches in some way upon almost everything. But that gets laundered into an excuse to believe you’re being a good communist by hating everything about everything.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Cf. the old joke about the Soviet Jew trying to emigrate to Israel. The secret police is giving him a hard time - “What don’t you like about our communist paradise? You think the economy is too weak?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You think the politics are oppressive?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You think we prevent you from practicing your primitive religion?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “Then why do you want to leave for Israel?” “Because there, I can complain.”
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Wolfram Contact Info: telegram [@]wolfram_sigma Time: Friday, April 10th, 2:00 PM Location: Grinders -- Zayouna Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73Q Group Link: Telegram Group -> https://t[.}me/+n7U-ilkVA_dkNTUy Notes: you must contact me if you are coming, I tried to host the meet up a few times before, and no one came. so if you are coming please inform me so I would actually go. Israel HAIFA Contact: shai Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[at]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, May 18th, 5:00 PM Location: We’ll be on the second floor of the Goldmund bookstore, on ekron 6 street in the talpiot market area. I will be wearing a batik/Hawaiian shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSc [remove this bit] lSIRSpdSJ6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Please RSVP on whatsapp/our group email so I know how many people will participate
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73Q, https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C
Italy47 mentions across 47 issues

Italy is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 47 times across 47 issues between March 21, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "replicate and extend Acemoglu et al’s results to Italy"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Italy"; "Germany, Belgium, England, Netherlands and Italy all have higher population densities". It most often appears alongside Germany, France, US.

Article page
Italy
Mention count
47
Issue count
47
First seen
March 21, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 164
March 21, 2021 · Original source
2: In response to my post on the consequences of the French Revolution, several people sent me Kopsidis and Bromley, which claims to debunk the Acemoglu paper - they say that Acemoglu et al miscoded some regions, and when you correct that, it becomes apparent that the real reason some parts of Germany did better than others wasn’t because Napoleon reformed them, but because they had more coal. But see also Donges, Jean-Marie, and Silva, which concludes that the original Acemoglu coding was better. And here’s a paper which claims to replicate and extend Acemoglu et al’s results to Italy. This debate seems to have reached a level of complexity where I no longer feel comfortable having an opinion on it.
Inline links: my post on the consequences of the French Revolution, Kopsidis and Bromley, Donges, Jean-Marie, and Silva, replicate and extend Acemoglu et al’s results to Italy
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
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
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
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.
Italy also remained somewhat prosperous. Italy peacefully moved from rule by an emperor to a Gothic king without the raiding and violence of other regions. The wealthy members of the Senate in Rome maintained many of the traditions and ceremonies of the old Respublica. The annona, the food ration system, was revamped and continued. There were still splendid villas on the hills of Rome, but “they now stood in the midst of deserted gardens and the emptied, charred ruins of former, even greater palaces.” Around the Senate House, the facades of buildings were maintained even after their insides were full of rubble. The seats in the Colosseum were regularly repaired. Games were still held, though gladiators no longer fought. The lay elites attempted to maintain Rome’s historic civic life. At the same time, the bishops and clergy of Rome reached out to the population in the form of relief to the poor.
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.”
Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
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
Kelter ran a series of experiments from dorm rooms to summer camps where people meet for the first time, and establish pecking orders. What he discovered was that people who behave as The Prince recommends get run out of the camp. The people who rise to power are the friendliest and most empathetic. Now to be fair to Machiavelli, summer camps are not an exact parallel for Italian city states, and Machiavelli's main concern was advising how to maintain power after you've got it. Still, that power is obtained by being the friendliest, not the backstabbiest, is useful insight for the budding megalomaniacs amongst us.
Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
The office employees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the plongeurs of every race in Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.
'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
Still, most places that were worse than Sweden had good reasons to do worse than Sweden. Italy was hit very early and has the highest percent of elderly people in Europe. The US and Brazil were very large diverse countries with bungled federal responses and borderline-COVID-denialist leaders. Belgium counted its coronavirus deaths in an unusual way that inflated the numbers relative to other countries. In the end, Sweden still ended out with a death rate about double the European average. Seems pretty bad.
Inline links: counted its coronavirus deaths in an unusual way
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
FOLIGNO, ITALY (RSVP) Contact: Orfino Dottorsi, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com Time: 4:30 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista Notes: This is a long shot: I am not aware of such a meeting in central Italy. Foligno is the middle point of the entire area and it is very well connected, the goal is to attract ACX fans throughout the nearby regions. The park is only 800 meters from the train station so that public transport would be an excellent choice. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/nitrate.merchant.carry
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/nitrate.merchant.carry
PADOVA, ITALY (RSVP) Contact: Carlo (CM), 04doqkba[at]ciarlibraun[dot]anonaddy[dot]me Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: Obelisco in Prato della Valle. I will have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/capacity.saucepan.servers Notes: Padova can be a good meeting city for most people living in the north/north-east of Italy, but I'm more than happy to move to another (close) city if it is a better alternative for 1+ other people. I’m also co-organizing with someone from Udine.
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/capacity.saucepan.servers
ROMA, ITALY (RSVP) Contact: Christian, lambiguo[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Città Universitaria Sapienza in front of the Philosophy building. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/lizards.free.crunch
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/lizards.free.crunch
On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
Green is one of these five studies, and it does superficially find loss aversion. But Fishburn and Kochenberger have done something weird. They argue that “loss” and “gain” aren’t necessarily objective, and usually correspond to “loss relative to some reference frame” (so far, so good). In order to figure out where the reference frame is, they assume that the neutral point is wherever “something unusual happens to the individual’s utility function” (F&K’s words). So they shift the zero point separating losses and gains to wherever the utility function looks most interesting! After doing this, they find “loss aversion”, ie the utility curve changes its slope at the transition between the loss side and the gain side. But since the transition was deliberately shifted to wherever the utility curve changed slope, this is almost tautological. It isn’t quite tautological: it’s interesting that most of the utility curves had a sharp transition zone, and it’s interesting that the transition was in the direction of loss-aversion rather than gain-seeking. But it’s tautological enough to be embarrassing. Still, this is Fishburn and Kochenberger’s embarrassment, not Kahneman and Tversky’s. And Fishburn and Kochenberger included this study in their review alongside several other studies that didn’t do this to the same degree. Kahneman and Tversky just cited the review article. I don’t think citing a review article that does weird things to a study really qualifies as “systematic misrepresentation.” I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how angry to be, because everything about Fishburn and Kochenberger is terrible. The average study in F&K includes results from 5-10 executives. But the studies are pretty open about the fact that they interviewed more executives than this, threw away the ones who gave boring answers, and just published results from the interesting ones. Then they moved the axes to wherever looked most interesting. Then they used all this to draw sweeping generalizations about human behavior. Then F&K combined five studies that did this into a review article, without protesting any of it. And then K&T cited the review article, again without protesting. I have to imagine that all of this was normal by the standards of the time. I have looked up all these people and they were all esteemed scientists in their own day. And I believe the evidence shows K&T summarized F&K faithfully. Shouldn’t they have avoided citing F&K at all? Seems like the same kind of question as “Shouldn’t Pythagoras have published his theorem in a peer-reviewed journal, instead of moving to Italy, starting a cult, and exposing his thigh at the Olympic Games as part of a scheme to convince people he was the god Apollo?” Yes, but the past was a weird place. As best I can tell, K&T’s citation of G&P agrees with the authors’ own assessment of their results. Their citation of F&K agrees with the reviewers’ assessment and with a charitable reading of most of the studies involved, although those studies are terrible in many ways which are obvious to modern readers. I would urge people interested in the whodunit question to read Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper. I think it paints the picture of a team very interested in their own results and in theory, and citing other people only incidentally, and in accordance with the scientific standards of their time. I don’t feel a need to tar them as “misrepresenters”. III. Okay, But Is Loss Aversion Real? Remember, all that is about the personal deficiencies of Kahneman and Tversky. Realistically there have been hundreds of much better studies on loss aversion in the forty years since they wrote their article, so we should be looking at those. Here Hreha cites Gal & Rucker: The Loss Of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain? It’s a great 2018 paper that looks at recent evidence and concludes that loss aversion doesn’t exist. But it’s a very specific, interesting type of nonexistence, which I think the Hreha article fails to capture. G&R are happy to admit that in many, many cases, people behave in loss-averse ways, including most of the classic examples given by Kahneman and Tversky. They just think that this is because of other cognitive biases, not a specific cognitive bias called “loss aversion”. They especially emphasize Status Quo Bias and the Endowment Effect. Status Quo Bias is where you prefer inaction to action. Suppose you ask someone “Would you bet on a coin flip, where you get $60 if heads and lose $40 if tails?”. They say no. This deviates from rational expectations, and one way to think of this is loss aversion; the prospect of losing $40 feels “bigger” than the prospect of gaining $60. But another way to think of it is as a bias towards inaction - all else being equal, people prefer not to make bets, and you’d need a higher payoff to overcome their inertia. Endowment Effect is where you value something you already have more than something you don’t. Suppose someone would pay $5 to prevent their coffee mug from being taken away from them, but (in an alternative universe where they lack a coffee mug) would only pay $3 to buy one. You can think of this as loss aversion (the grief of losing a coffee mug feels “bigger” than the joy of gaining one). Or you can think of it as endowment (once you have the coffee mug, it’s yours and you feel like defending it). These are really fine distinctions; I had to read the section a few times before the difference between loss aversion and endowment effect really made sense to me. Kahneman and Tversky just sort of threw all all this stuff out and saw what stuck and didn’t necessarily try super hard to make sure none of the biases they discovered were entirely explainable as combinations of some of the others. G&R think maybe loss aversion is. They do some clever work setting up situations that test loss aversion but not status quo or endowment - for example, offering a risky bet vs. a safer bet. Here they find no evidence for loss aversion as a separate force from the other two biases. Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird. I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just didn’t happen, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental. Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it. Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (h/t Alex Imas, who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force. There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re quite as careful as G&R at ruling out every other possible bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure). The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions. And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, which says: Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (n = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds. Beyond any reasonable thresholds! IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small? Continuing through the Hreha article: For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be. In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all. This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two "nudge units" here in the United States. I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average... 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%? If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity). According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field. I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy. Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction. Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a lot of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit. Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper, The Loss Of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2VLm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c49b44a-8850-4ac8-9a88-3dd07718a648_397x305.png, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Alex Imas, Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials, others, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1gY_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b127d7c-045a-4266-b515-a0e9201ce651_571x382.png, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
The dynastic part, at least, is hard to argue against. Until 1962, it was led by Indian founding father Jawaharlal Nehru. From then until 1984 it was led by his daughter, Indira Gandhi. From then until 1989 it was led by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. From 1999 to 2014 it was led by his (ethnically Italian) wife, Sonia Gandhi. And from 2014 to present, by Rajiv and Sonia’s son, Rahul Gandhi.
This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to:
Inline links: he wanted to
"...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 Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
The analogy seems weird - I think most Americans who think they’re of English descent are, and nobody ever claimed the Italian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, etc were descended from Englishmen. Still, the point about cultural descent is well-taken.
This means that if you have a large border with a non-EU country, EU countries further inland can send refugees back to wherever they first entered. Since Hungary has a border with non-EU countries, the Hungarians risk being stuck with refugees, even if the refugees themselves would prefer to move further West or North. (The problem is even larger in countries like Italy and Spain.)
In my opinion, both system has advantages and disadvanteges, the German system is more balanced, but its result is that usually no party has parliamentary majority, which forces them to form coalitions, which can be a nightmare of instablility (eg Italy).
Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 17, 2021 · Original source
On the one hand, I have immense contempt for ivmmeta for letting all those other awful studies pass and then pulling out all the stops to try to nitpick this one. I have no idea if their proposed randomization failure really happened. And no doubt the reason they’re even able to investigate this is that this study is really careful and transparent - most of them don’t tell you anything about their randomization method. I would be shocked if other studies don’t have all these problems and worse. On the other hand, the point isn’t to be fair, it’s to be right. And this is a potential confounder. Not a huge one. But a potential one. I guess all we can do is try to bound the damage. Even if the confounding is 100% real and bad, there’s no way to make this study consistent with the crazy super-pro-ivermectin results of studies like Espitia-Hernandez and Aref. And even if we deny any confounding, we see the same slight pro-ivermectin trend - 86 hospitalizations vs. 95 - that we’ve seen in so many other studies. Nothing is going to make me believe that this isn’t in the top 33% of studies we’ve been looking at, so let’s add it as grist for the meta-analysis (though maybe not quite as much grist as its vast size indicates) and move on, angrily. Buonfrate et al: An Italian RCT. Patients were randomized into low-dose ivermectin (32), placebo (29), or high-dose ivermectin (32). Primary outcome was viral load on day 7. There was no significant difference (average of 2 in ivermectin groups, 2.2 in placebo group). They admit that they failed to reach the planned sample size, but did a calculation to show that even if they had, the trial could not have returned a positive result. Clinically, an average of 2 patients were hospitalized in each of the ivermectin arms, compared to 0 in the placebo arm - which bucks our previously-very-constant pro-ivermectin trend. Mayer et al: Not an RCT. Patients in an Argentine province were offered the opportunity to try ivermectin; 3266 said yes and become the experimental group, 17966 said no and became the control group. There were many obvious differences between the groups, but they all seemed to handicap ivermectin. There was a nonsignificant trend toward less hospitalization and significantly less mortality (1.5% vs. 2.1%, p = 0.03). While looking into this study, I learned the term “immortal time bias”. This means a period in between selection for the study and the beginning of study recording where patient outcomes are not counted. I think the problem here is that if you signed up for the system on Day X, and if you got sick before they could give you ivermectin, you were in the control group. See this Twitter thread, I have not confirmed everything he says. This only hardens my resolve to stay away from non-RCTs. Borody et al: Our last paper! …is it a paper? I can’t find it published anywhere. It mostly seems to be on news sites. Doesn’t look peer-reviewed. And it starts with “Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views”. Whatever. 600 Australians were treated with ivermectin, doxycycline, and zinc. The article compares this to an “equivalent control group” made of “contemporary infected subjects in Australia obtained from published Covid Tracking Data”; this is not how you control group, @#!% you. Then it gets excited about the fact that most patients had better symptoms at the end of the ten-day study period than the beginning (untreated COVID resolves in about ten days). Why are these people wasting my time with this? Let’s move on. The Analysis If we remove all fraudulent and methodologically unsound studies from the table above, we end up with this: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who investigated many of the studies above for fraud, tried a similar exercise. I learned about his halfway through, couldn’t help seeing it briefly, but tried to avoid remembering it or using it when generating mine (also, I did take the result of his fraud investigations into account), so they should be considered not quite independent efforts. His looks like this: He nixed Chowdhury, Babaloba, Ghauri, Faisal, and Aref, but kept Szenta Fonseca, Biber (?), and Mayer. There was correlation of 0.45, which I guess is okay. I asked him about his decision-making, and he listed a combination of serious statistical errors and small red flags adding up. I was pretty uncomfortable with most of these studies myself, so I will err on the side of severity, and remove all studies that either I or Meyerowitz-Katz disliked. We end up with the following short list: We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them. …but honestly this table still looks pretty good for ivermectin, doesn’t it? Still lots of big green boxes. Meyerowitz-Katz accuses ivmmeta of cherry-picking what statistic to use for their forest plot. That is, if a study measures ten outcomes, they sometimes take the most pro-ivermectin outcome. Ivmmeta.com counters that they used a consistent and reasonable (if complicated) process for choosing their outcome of focus, that being: If studies report multiple kinds of effects then the most serious outcome is used in calculations for that study. For example, if effects for mortality and cases are both reported, the effect for mortality is used, this may be different to the effect that a study focused on. If symptomatic results are reported at multiple times, we used the latest time, for example if mortality results are provided at 14 days and 28 days, the results at 28 days are used. Mortality alone is preferred over combined outcomes. Outcomes with zero events in both arms were not used (the next most serious outcome is used — no studies were excluded). For example, in low-risk populations with no mortality, a reduction in mortality with treatment is not possible, however a reduction in hospitalization, for example, is still valuable. Clinical outcome is considered more important than PCR testing status. When basically all patients recover in both treatment and control groups, preference for viral clearance and recovery is given to results mid-recovery where available (after most or all patients have recovered there is no room for an effective treatment to do better). If only individual symptom data is available, the most serious symptom has priority, for example difficulty breathing or low SpO2 is more important than cough. I’m having trouble judging this, partly because Meyerowitz-Katz says ivmmeta has corrected some earlier mistakes, and partly because there really is some reasonable debate over how to judge studies with lots of complicated endpoints. By this point I had completely forgotten what ivmmeta did, so I independently coded all 11 remaining studies following something in between my best understanding of their procedure and what I considered common sense. The only exception was that when the most severe outcome was measured in something other than patients (ie average number of virus copies per patient), I defaulted to one that was measured in patients instead, to keep everything with the same denominator. My results mostly matched ivmmeta’s, with one or two exceptions that I think are within the scope of argument or related to my minor deviations from their protocol. Placebo vs. ivermectin groups sometimes differed in size, which I’ve adjusted for and rounded off. Probably I’m forgetting some reason I can’t just do simple summary statistics to this, but whatever. It is p = 0.15, not significant. This is maybe unfair, because there aren’t a lot of deaths in the sample, so by focusing on death rather than more common outcomes we’re pointlessly throwing away sample size. What happens if I unprincipledly pick whatever I think the most reasonable outcome to use from each study is? I’ve chosen “most reasonable” as a balance between “is the most severe” and “has a lot of data points”: Now it’s p = 0.04, seemingly significant, but I had to make some unprincipled decisions to get there. I don’t think I specifically replaced negative findings with positive ones, but I can’t prove that even to myself, let alone to you. [UPDATE 5/31/22: A reader writes in to tell me that the t-test I used above is overly simplistic. A Dersimonian-Laird test is more appropriate for meta-analysis, and would have given 0.03 and 0.005 on the first and second analysis, where I got 0.15 and 0.04. This significantly strengthens the apparent benefit of ivermectin from ‘debatable’ to ‘clear’. I discuss some reasons below why I am not convinced by this apparent benefit.] (how come I’m finding a bunch of things on the edge of significance, but the original ivmmeta site found a lot of extremely significant things? Because they combined ratios, such that “one death in placebo, zero in ivermectin” looked like a nigh-infinite benefit for ivermectin, whereas I’m combining raw numbers. Possibly my way is statistically illegitimate for some reason, but I’m just trying to get a rough estimate of how convinced to be) So we are stuck somewhere between “nonsignificant trend in favor” and “maybe-significant trend in favor, after throwing out some best practices”. This is normally where I would compare my results to those of other meta-analyses made by real professionals. But when I look at them, they all include studies later found to be fake, like Elgazzar, and unsurprisingly come up with wildly positive conclusions. There are about six in this category. One of them later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar and still found strong efficacy for ivermectin, but they still included Niaee and some other dubious studies. The only meta-analysis that doesn’t make these mistakes is Popp (a Cochrane review), which is from before Elgazzar was found to be fraudulent, but coincidentally excludes it for other reasons. It also excludes a lot of good studies like Mahmud and Ravakirti because they give patients other things like HCQ and azithromycin - I chose to include them, because I don’t think they either work or have especially bad side effects, so they’re basically placebo - but Cochrane is always harsh like this. They end up with a point estimate where ivermectin cuts mortality by 40% - but say the confidence intervals are too wide to draw any conclusion. I think this basically agrees with my analyses above - the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance. Except that everyone is still focusing on deaths and hospitalizations just because they’re flashy. Mahmud et al, which everyone agrees is a great study, found that ivermectin decreased days until clinical recovery, p = 0.003? So what do you do? This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters. I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up. In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading. … … … … … The Synthesis Hopefully you learned something interesting about yourself there. But my answer is: worms! As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc. Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body. Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write: Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases. Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going… The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what’s called “Strongyloides hyperinfection”, and pretty often you die. According to the WHO: The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration. Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions). So you need to “address the risk” of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO? Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg. Given ivermectin’s safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered. This is serious and common enough that, if you’re not going to screen for it, it might be worth “add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs” in affected areas! Dr. Avi Bitterman carries the hypothesis to the finish line: First two images are with all relevant studies; second two are a sensitivity analysis that removes some of the most dubious. The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive. Worms can’t explain the viral positivity outcomes (ie PCR), but Dr. Bitterman suggests that once you remove low quality trials and worm-related results, the rest looks like simple publication bias: This is still just a possibility. Maybe I’m over-focusing too hard on a couple positive results and this will all turn out to be nothing. Or who knows, maybe ivermectin does work against COVID a little - although it would have to be very little, fading to not at all in temperate worm-free countries. But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong! The people who called it a miracle drug against COVID were wrong. The people who dismissed all the studies because they F@#king Love Science were wrong. Ivmmeta.com was wrong. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz was…well, he was right, actually, I got the worm-related meta-analysis graphic above from his Twitter timeline. Still, an excellent troll. Also, the best part is that I ignorantly asked, in my description of Mahmud et al above: And it was! It was a fluke! A literal, physical, fluke! For my whole life, God has been placing terrible puns in my path to irritate me, and this would be the worst one ever! So it has to be true! The Scientific Takeaway About ten years ago, when the replication crisis started, we learned a certain set of tools for examining studies. Check for selection bias. Distrust “adjusting for confounders”. Check for p-hacking and forking paths. Make teams preregister their analyses. Do forest plots to find publication bias. Stop accepting p-values of 0.049. Wait for replications. Trust reviews and meta-analyses, instead of individual small studies. These were good tools. Having them was infinitely better than not having them. But even in 2014, I was writing about how many bad studies seemed to slip through the cracks even when we pushed this toolbox to its limits. We needed new tools. I think the methods that Meyerowitz-Katz, Sheldrake, Heathers, Brown, Lawrence and others brought to the limelight this year are some of the new tools we were waiting for. Part of this new toolset is to check for fraud. About 10 - 15% of the seemingly-good studies on ivermectin ended up extremely suspicious for fraud. Elgazzar, Carvallo, Niaee, Cadegiani, Samaha. There are ways to check for this even when you don’t have the raw data. Like: The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method: Check some large group of comparisons, usually the Table 1 of an RCT where they compare the demographic characteristics of the control and experimental groups, for reasonable p-values. Real data will have p-values all over the map; one in every ten comparisons will have a p-value of 0.1 or less. Fakers seem bad at this and usually give everything a nice safe p-value like 0.8 or 0.9.
Inline links: Buonfrate et al:, Mayer et al:, immortal time bias, this Twitter thread, Borody et al:, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wpjs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d8a451b-b1fc-44e5-ae67-b1506e491762_914x657.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DOjA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F17d5827a-38da-4a99-beb3-c3018df5c633_920x604.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GX1n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc692fec8-a450-4579-b337-c72bec060970_912x298.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YcH4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff36db98e-e653-44da-906c-20312b1689a3_468x205.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jbcL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd189a844-daf2-4199-bb2e-830d4fc64415_468x206.png, later revised their results to exclude Elgazzar, Popp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2B6r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F505c5ac4-3fe8-47a4-8505-dab80601b44d_416x198.png, Avi Bitterman, David Boulware, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JWWh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac9e4f34-f9cc-40f2-9d83-da4e7178fad7_772x330.png, source, Gluchowska et al, the WHO, carries, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xExE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5da21781-249c-4e59-b616-9f23d83cc044_2048x1184.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4SMr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdcd6e4b2-37f7-4602-93d5-2581c3b27a60_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-6n2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7fd6e8f4-093e-4e02-bce7-363615146c9c_2228x1346.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CPZs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0425847-198a-4bd3-a63b-149f15d147ba_700x432.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H3rK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9972491b-25b0-4c06-8aca-86fce102ae63_666x147.png, even in 2014, The Carlisle-Stouffer-Fisher method
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
But this made it hard for me to understand this section of the book, which praised countries who managed to keep drug prices low. “Keeping drug prices low” mostly seems to involve having a process that reliably generates low numbers for the government’s offers. For example, Canada used to have high drug prices, because its process was to offer the average price paid by seven other countries: France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and US. But then the Canadians decided that was too high, and removed the US from their basket; since the US had the highest drug prices, this brought the average price down, and made Canadian drugs cheaper. Emanuel praises this as a good decision. But Norway does even better: they take the average of the cheapest three countries in their basket. Obviously this works, but then why not the cheapest two? Why not just say your drug price will be Norway’s price minus one dollar? Half Norway’s price? I didn’t get a good sense of why some countries had cheaper algorithms and baskets than others. Maybe they had tougher negotiators?
Also, Canada now pays the average price paid by France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, UK, and Switzerland. But Switzerland pays the average price of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, UK, and Netherlands. The Netherlands pays the average price of Belgium, Germany, France, and the UK. And France says they pay the average price of “neighboring countries”. I hope someone has checked over the causal graph to make sure there aren’t any contradictions or infinite loops.
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
MILAN, ITALY Contact: Raffaele Mauro (raffa.mauro@gmail.com) Date: May 13 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C Location: Primo Ventures (Viale Majno, 18 - 2nd floor)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C
PADOVA, ITALY Contact: CM (carlo.martinucci@gmail.com) Date: April 30 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQH9VXG+88 Location: Italy, Padova, Prato della Valle, West Bridge
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQH9VXG+88
PISA, ITALY Contact: Raffaele (raffaelesalvia@alice.it) Date: April 30 Time: 5:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FMGPC92+M3 Location: We will meet in Piazza dei Cavalieri. The date and time are flexible; please contact me if you wish to come but would prefer a different day.
Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
Imagine you are the patriarch of an Italian peasant family. War, plague, and natural disaster have brought your family to the brink of starvation and forced you to flee from your rural home to the nearest city. Giuseppe [1], your youngest son (age 8), begins singing in the boy’s choir at the local conservatory, which also doubles as a charitable home run by the Catholic church (you are, of course, a deeply devout Catholic). One day, the head of the conservatory (a powerful and well-respected priest) comes to you with a proposal: allow your son, sweet little Giuseppe, to become castrated in order to preserve his angelic singing voice. Following the castration, he will live full time at the conservatory and undergo years of musical training in order to hone his talents. In return, you will receive a small sum of money and the hope that your son could become one of those famed castrati who sings in royal courts and opera houses all over Europe. Though part of you is repulsed at the very thought, you try to weigh the pros and cons of the proposal as objectively as you can. In truth, Giuseppe’s prospects are incredibly poor and his likelihood of bearing a legitimate son are virtually nil—if he even survives past childhood, he will either become a soldier (not exactly conducive to staying alive and fathering children in those days) or spend his life as an anonymous clergymen in some remote chapel. In the end, your reservations are outweighed by your desperation to improve the lot of your family and you agree to send Giuseppe away for castration.
These animal-centric fabrications point to an important piece of cultural context through which the castrati were understood in their time. Italy was very rural in the 16th century when the practice originated and many Italians had firsthand or second-hand experience with the castration of bulls or chickens (the castration of chickens, known as caponization, was commonly done in order to improve the taste of their flesh). This connection between the castrati and the animal world is further illustrated in one of the most striking (and humorous) passages in the book, an anecdote from the autobiography of Filippo Balatri. First, it’s worth providing some context on Balatri himself as his life’s story is instructive of the role that many castrati came to play in royal society. Feldman writes:
Inline links: Filippo Balatri
English women seemed particularly susceptible to Italian eunuchs. Another castrato, Consolino, made clever use of his delicate, feminine features in London. He would arrive at trysts disguised in a dress then conduct a torrid affair right under the husband’s nose. ( “Why Castrati Made Better Lovers”)
Inline links: Why Castrati Made Better Lovers
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
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
Well, let me ask you a question. Why didn't the death of Princess Diana in France because of a car chase with a paparazzo cause Italy to go to war with Canada?
H&S do acknowledge that one reason the Pact appealed to the Allies was that they were on top at the time, and the Peace Pact would preserve the empires they had built in the face of upstart imperial contenders, including Germany, Italy, and Japan.
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
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10) Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd.
Inline links: at her blog here, book
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.
Inline links: Etirabys, clarifies two additional points, Garrett Jones says, Related quote:
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
Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
That being said, people are more willing to trust you if you're an ingroup member. Most of Charles Ponzi's early investors were, like Ponzi himself, members of Boston's Italian-American community. Davies notes that affinity group membership can be a way to infiltrate a web or network of trust. An offer that sounds "too good to be true" might sound more believable if it's coming from a member of your church congregation:
Ponzi even carried out a trial transaction, sending dollars to a relative in Italy to convert into lire, buy IRCs and mail them back to Boston. He then took these coupons to the post office in Milk Street, exchanging them for US stamps worth around double his initial investment. It looked like a free money machine, and all he needed was more capital.
Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
7: Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to “protect food heritage”. I already count on Italy to reflexively ban any new technology, but this particular ban entrenches the current factory farm system, making it a particularly gross and cruel example. Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
Inline links: moves to ban lab-grown meat to “protect food heritage”, all good “Italian” food was invented in America
Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline
July 20, 2023 · Original source
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: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
Hitler took full advantage of Strasser’s Italian holiday. While Strasser was gone, Hitler seized control of Strasser’s political networks, replacing the leaders most loyal to Strasser and forcing the rest to give him special oaths of loyalty. The Nazi Party held together.
He could not find him. Far from trying to take over the Party, Gregor Strasser had left for a much-needed vacation in Italy.
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.
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
2: Italy’s Basilica of the Holy House is supposedly built atop the house where the Virgin Mary raised Jesus. Why is the Virgin Mary’s house in Italy? Supposedly angels carried it there from Israel just before the Saracens’ final victory over the Crusaders. Sounds suspicious, but the house in the Basilica appears to be a genuine 1st century Palestinian dwelling. One theory: it was shipped to Italy by the Angelos family, and the angels story was a later mistranslation.
Inline links: Basilica of the Holy House
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
DUBLIN Contact: Rían O Mahoney Contact Info: romahone[at]tcd[dot]ie Time: Thursday, April 25th, 6:30 PM Location: Hotel Motel One Dublin, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220, Ireland Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o Italy MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele and Federico Contact Info: raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, April 19th, 6:30 PM Location: Primo Ventures, Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129, Milano (MI) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o, https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C
MILANO, ITALY Contact: Raffaele and Federico Contact Info: raffa[dot]mauro[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, April 19th, 6:30 PM Location: Primo Ventures, Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129, Milano (MI) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C
ROME, ITALY Contact: Giulio Contact Info: giulio[dot]starace[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 3:00 PM Location: Villa Doria Pamphili (park), just south of the "Cedro del Libano" on the grass opening. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FHJVCMX+PP Group Link: https://tinyurl.com/RomeACX
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FHJVCMX+PP, https://tinyurl.com/RomeACX
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Is this an unfair comparison, since America has 8x Iraq’s population? No more so than Welles’ is (Italy has 8x the population of Switzerland). But beyond the specifics, I think it’s useful for shocking us into Near Mode. War isn’t actually that great for science, art, or the economy. I’m not expecting Russia or Ukraine to leapfrog the rest of the world any time soon. I’m expecting them to fall further and further behind until the war ends, at which point maybe they’ll get a chance to catch up.
Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
August 23, 2024 · Original source
If this is true of the poetry itself, it is truer of the patterns in which poetry has been uttered, and especially of the fixed forms. The sonnet, an emigrant from Italy that became naturalized in English literature, still holds its own as a major method of expressing serious poetry, in the eyes of many poets and readers. Even at that, it is now regarded as puerile by the extreme advocates of free verse or polyrhythmic poetry, especially since Whitman and the Imagist movement. Numerous other alien verse forms did not fare so well, and have established themselves primarily as mediums for light and humorous verse. These include the ballade, the rondeau, the villanelle, the triolet, and so on. This may be because of their rigid rules and formal repetitions, which were not acceptable to the living poet. And yet, they started as seriously as Sapphics, heroic blank verse, or polyrhythms...
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.
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Drago et al 2009 investigated an Italian mass release of prisoners, where they were released with the caveat that if they were rearrested, they would have to serve not only the new sentence for the new crime, but the remainder of their original sentence too. This created a regime of very different punishments for the same crime; someone who was originally arrested for murder but released would have to serve a sentence for murder if (for example) they got caught shoplifting. They found that each extra month of a potential sentence decreased reoffending rates by 0.16 pp (1%) per month. This is on the high side of estimates, but in general we’ll find European studies find stronger effects from imprisonment than American studies; this is probably because Europe has lower incarceration rates in general and has yet to “pick the low hanging fruit”.
Inline links: Drago et al 2009
Buonanno and Raphael (2013) investigate the same Italian mass pardon that we discussed earlier. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 18 crimes per year. This is higher than Levitt’s estimate of 7. But Italy has a lower incarceration rate than the US, potentially meaning that the average criminal they incarcerate is worse, so they still might both be right.
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
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: David O Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[a t]icloud[period]com Time: Friday, April 11th, 7:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.) Notes: No RSVP required Italy BERGAMO Contact: Daniele Contact Info: daniele[period]denuntiis[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 4:00 PM Location: Via Martin Luther King, 100, 24127 Bergamo BG. We'll be hanging out near the Cafe, I'll bring a sign or something recognizable. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. RSVPs appreciated but not required.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X
Contact: Joel Contact Info: WhatsApp: [plus]393517734452 Time: Wednesday, April 2nd, 6:00 PM Location: 6PM at Giardino pubblico "La Montagnola" Via Salvi Cristiani, 50135 Firenze FI, Italy https://maps.app.goo.gl/eX51qGzDcwHhyXuV6 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FMHQ7GV+FG Notes: RSVP with WhatsApp to +393517734452
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FMHQ7GV+FG
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
As I read Hoel’s post, I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Since 2022, Alice has undertaken qualitative research in nine world regions: Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Britain, US, Poland, Turkey, India, Uzbekistan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Through this globally comparative analysis, she analyses the drivers and obstacles to gender equality. Gender interventions will be more impactful if they target locally binding constraints - in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this is "the honour-income trade-off" (whereby male honour depends on female seclusion, and women tend to remain at home. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean face a different obstacle: pervasive violence elevates femicides. Over the past few years, she's held visiting appointments at Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, while providing policy advice to the World Bank, and sharing insights with a public audience via Substack (www.ggd.world). In April 2025, she gave a TedTalk on romantic love as an under-rated driver of gender equality.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
To pick an element purely because I happen to know something about it: We have dance manuals in the fifteenth century from two places: Italy and Burgundy. They don't show up elsewhere in Europe until the sixteenth century, or for laggardly places like England, the seventeenth.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source
Open Thread 396
August 25, 2025 · Original source
He was the dictator of fascist Italy.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: David Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[a t]icloud[period]com Time: Friday, September 12th, 6:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.) Notes: No RSVP required. Email me if you have trouble accessing the group. Italy BOLOGNA Contact: Luca Contact Info: luc[period]petrolati[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 5th, 4:00 PM Location: Piazza Santo Stefano, in front of the Basilica Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FPHF8RX+V9
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://plus.codes/8FPHF8RX+V9
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
(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, Sun Turned Purple?, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
Someone accustomed to dealing PDFs of old scanned documents should translate the Ghiaie testimonies here and see if there’s any interesting information.
Inline links: here
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
20: Did you know: in Italy, the unlucky number is 17 instead of 13, because XVII is an anagram of vixi, Latin for “I have lived” (note past tense).
Inline links: Did you know
A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
March 27, 2026 · Original source
I did my best to research the event, and the results were The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Highlights From The Comments On Fatima. The main thing I was able to add to the Substack discussion, if not the broader worldwide one, was a survey of similar events. There were apparent sun miracles at various other Catholic sites and apparitions of the Virgin, including a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Italy, and a small town in Bosnia where they seem to happen regularly. But also, people who “sungaze” - a weird alternative medicine practice where people stare at the sun in the hopes that maybe this will help something and they won’t go blind - report sometimes seeing the sun spin and change color in similar ways. And Buddhist meditators report that concentrating very hard on any bright light will cause similar things to happen.
Inline links: The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: David O. Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[@]icloud[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ETaD [remove this bit] qjMaFFTB6gDzZwfKoI?mode=gi_t Italy BERGAMO Contact: Daniele Contact Info: daniele[.]denuntiis[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:00 PM Location: Via Martin Luther King, 100, 24127 Bergamo BG. I’ll bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X Notes: This is an interest check, if you’re interest in attending, even if it’s just a maybe, let me know by email or LessWrong DM.Venue may shift to a café or bar depending on attendance and weather.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X
Ireland28 mentions across 28 issues

Ireland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 28 times across 28 issues between February 09, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "When I lived in Ireland for a few years in the mid-to-late 2000s"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Ireland"; "colonial oppression in Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds". It most often appears alongside Israel, Scott, Europe.

Article page
Ireland
Mention count
28
Issue count
28
First seen
February 09, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
In particular, I wish there was a discussion of other countries. When I lived in Ireland for a few years in the mid-to-late 2000s, they seemed to have a system much like 1960s America, where nobody could tell you the difference between the two major parties (or, rather, they would wax rhapsodic about the parties' differing positions on a 1920s treaty, and then when you interrupted and said "no, I mean today", they would say "oh, no difference"). This was baffling to me. I would ask Irish people how they chose which party to vote for, and it would usually be something along the lines of "ah, we're a Fianna Fail family, always have been, always will be, someone from Fine Gael killed my great-grandpa during the war. Never bothered to look at either side's position on the issues, but still hope to get around to it one day." I can only aspire to this level of centrism.
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
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
By making possible the division & specialization of labor (you dig bait, I'll catch fish) Capital is a force multiplier that supercharges the productive power of labor. It doesn't supply labor with raw materials (nature does), nor does it provide for the maintenance of workers (who eat bread by the sweat of their own brow). George says this is why capital isn't a limit on industry. ...okay, George grants that capital may limit the form of industry. You can't plow without a plow or milk without a cow. George also grants that the lack of specialized tools can greatly limit productivity because you don't get the benefit of the force-multiplying effect of capital. Um... aren't you contradicting yourself here, Mr. George? You spent all this time hammering home your doctrine of wages to prove that capital doesn't limit industry, but you just said its absence can limit both the form and the productivity of labor! Time to unpack what we mean by "limit" and be super clear about it from now on: But to say that capital may limit the form of industry or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing from saying that capital limits industry. Okay, what do you mean? For the dictum of the current political economy that "capital limits industry," means not that capital limits the form of labor or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the exertion of labor. Okay, I think I see what he's saying. The existing school of thought says that because capital provides labor with both materials and maintenance, therefore if capital dries up, labor productivity must go down because workers will have nothing to work on, and nothing to eat or wear. Labor is thus "limited" by capital, for without it is literally and metaphorically starved for capital. But George says no – the only way capital actually "limits" productivity in real life is in the degrees by which it force-multiplies labor's productivity and unlocks certain forms of labor in the tech tree. The kind of "limit" George objects to is the idea that you need capital just to get any work done at all, or that without capital to sustain it, labor will shrivel up. Instead, capital is rocket fuel that labor supplies to itself by investing a portion of its wages. And yet, with all the awesome slots we've unlocked on the tech tree, and barrels and barrels of rocket fuel to fire up eager laborers, we still find our economy sinking into mysterious depressions. Something is gumming up the works, but it's not a simple scarcity of capital: the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution Or as G.K. Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This might seem like a pedantic distinction – misallocated capital could be said to be "scarce" capital – but they're not the same thing at all. As Francis Bacon said in 1625: Riches were like [Manure]: When it lay, upon an heape, it gave but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit. Because the prevailing theories of George's time are based on incorrect ideas about the relation between wages and capital, "all remedies, whether proposed by professors of political economy or workingmen, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by the increase of capital or the restriction of the number of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be condemned." In short, more investment, more protectionism, and more efficiency programs can't, won't, and haven't fixed poverty and industrial depressions because they all proceed from false premises. Having finally beaten the nexus of wages, capital, and labor into a bloody pulp, George turns his eyes towards another leading theory for why everything is terrible: the specter of overpopulation. II. Population and Subsistence The entire second book might as well be titled "Why Malthus is Dumb and Wrong and Bad." It's dedicated to dunking on Malthusianism, a philosophy that ascribes economic crises to the exponential growth of the human population, which must necessarily end in catastrophe. according to Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. George attacks Malthusian ideas not just because they're wrong, but because they make it easier to accept the prevailing theory of wages (as more capital is allocated, laborers will keep popping up like weeds to gobble it up, so wages must eternally stagnate). George draws a straight line between these faulty ideas and holocausts and genocides – specifically citing how colonial oppression in China, India, and Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds. One million people died in the English-engineered Irish potato famine alone, and when you add in those who fled the entire population declined by 25% percent. And this isn't a tenuous link either – George directly connects the completely avoidable famine to his favorite bugbear, private landownership and extortionate rent. Given that Malthusianism is now widely discredited I'm just going to skip this chapter, but if you want to hear George in all his righteous fury, check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism III. The Laws of Distribution When society produces wealth, who gets different shares of it, and why? Let's start by beating some words to death. By George, we're told that there are three factors in production: Land, Labor, and Capital. For each of these terms there must be a "law of distribution" that explains how each gets compensated for its part in production. The reward you get from production by owning Land is called Rent. The reward you get from production by supplying Labor is called Wages. The reward you get from production by supplying Capital is called ... um, what? We're looking for a term that clearly expresses the return to capital alone and nothing else. The closest thing we have is Interest, and that's probably good enough. George gives the common definition of interest as "the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, except such as may be involved in the security." This is pretty close to what we want – something that expresses the sole return to capital without mixing in anything else. But ... what about Profits? Profits is "almost synonymous" with revenue, assuming you have some left after you deduct expenses. It means a gain in money or wealth, but the trouble is this gain is a mix of rent, wages, and "compensations for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital." What we want is a term that means the return to capital alone, totally separate from the return to laborers and landowners. To talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. George spends a few pages talking about how everyone from Adam Smith on down got confused about this (spoiler: it's tied up with thinking wages are drawn from capital), before presenting his model for how it all works. If you want to see him knock that stuff down, see Appendix B (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Here's George's model for how it all works: Land is"all natural opportunities or forces" and its return is rent Labor is "all human exertion" and its return is wages Capital is"all wealth used to produce more wealth" and its return is interest George says the false assumption at the root of the old theories is in thinking of "capital as the prime factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor as its agent or tool." George makes the following assertions: "Labor can be exerted only upon land"
Inline links: Francis Bacon said in 1625, Malthusianism, English-engineered Irish potato famine, Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism, Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution
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
(Modified from source, CC BY 2.0, author: Philip Taylor) The problem with our current system is that when anyone in the community builds improvements, it makes adjoining land more valuable, and then those adjoining landlords jack up the rent. This makes things worse for everybody but the landlords. George's insight is that extra value from my improvement "spills over" from my land and is soaked up by the ground rent of your land. So under a land value tax, we can correct for the perverse economic incentives, distortions, and oppressions that come from land rent, without having to actually take your land from you. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land — only to confiscate rent. You also are 100% the owner of the improvements on your land, which won't be taxed. This is why Georgism doesn't mean people have the right to barge into your house in the middle of the night even though land is "held in common." Your house is still private property, but the value of the land it sits on is common property. What if I plant some nice trees, and invest in some landscaping to stop erosion? Where's the line between "improvements" and "ground rent?" In most cases it's pretty straightforward to separately assess the value of a plot from the value of what sits on it (modern property tax assessors do this already), but George grants that in some edge cases with the passage of time at least some improvements will be subsumed into the land value and that's okay: But it will be said: There are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title to the improvements become blended with the title to the land; the individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Okay, ground rent bad. How much should we tax it? By George, One Hundred Percent. Take the rent the tenant has to pay each month, calculate the portion attributable to the value of the unimproved land itself, and send it to the taxing agency. Effects of the Remedy Wow! 100% tax rate on ground rent! Can we really do that? In practice Georgists often talk about rates closer to 85+% given real-world limitations in assessment, but the point is to hit it as hard as you possibly can. Get close enough and you still have good effects. Won't land taxes jack up land prices? No, actually - in fact it will do the opposite, because such a tax is laser-calibrated to eliminate speculation, which makes up the bulk of inflated land values, and thus rent. Tax land for the full ground rent and you make real estate more affordable, not less. Won't it enable an all-powerful centralized nanny state? Quite the opposite – land value assessment is a fundamentally bottom-up, localized task, so it naturally empowers local municipalities at the expense of distant central authorities. Also, income taxes, wealth taxes, investment taxes, etc, require an ever-vigilant centralized bureaucracy peeking into every aspect of an individual's life to catch tax evaders, who have every incentive to hide their assets or even just flee. Perversely, the IRS currently audits the poor at the same rate as the top 1%, even though higher earners are responsible for withholding the vast majority of tax money in fraud. Land can't move or hide, and nowadays we have tools like GIS to make it even easier to assess. Under land value tax, nobody needs to pry into your personal life or impose burdensome accounting rules on your small business that actually entrench the power of giant corporations (who have entire departments devoted to serving up the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich). A Brief Interlude From the Future Today land value tax is widely considered to be the only tax that doesn't suffer from Deadweight Loss. Deadweight Loss is the lost economic activity or value caused by some policy. It's often summarized by the phrase "If you want less of something, tax it." Look at this chart, for example: (source, CC BY-SA 2.5, author: SilverStar) The place where the demand curve (red) and supply curve (blue) meet is the equilibrium point that the market naturally tends towards. But if we impose a price control lower than what the market will bear, the yellow area of the curve shows economic activity that can't happen. If you put price controls on gasoline, for instance, you'll get shortages because there's more demand than supply, and supply can't profitably rise to meet the extra bit of demand that's willing to pay a little more. But here's how things look with a land value tax, notice that the supply curve is vertical – that's weird, what does that mean? (source, CC BY-SA 3.0, author: Explodicle) A vertical supply curve means no matter what the price of land is, the same amount will always be supplied. This is because you can't make land – the supply is effectively fixed. Remember, the Netherlands doesn't count because the sea bed is land, and filling it in is just an improvement to land that already existed. And even if we granted "The Netherlands occasionally makes land" for the sake of argument, the amount of land "created" in this way is pretty darn negligible in the grand scheme of the economy, and almost exclusively the domain of governments or state-owned actors. The supply of land being fixed has some really interesting properties. By contrast, consider oil, the supply of which is not fixed. If we tax oil, some of the more marginal wells will be too expensive to operate and make a profit, so producers shut those down and the supply of oil decreases. Deadweight loss comes from a producer's ability to change the amount of product they supply in response to price signals. You'll notice the above graph of land tax has no deadweight loss at all! Since nobody produces land, it's the one thing you can tax without getting less of it. This drives out speculators entirely. Speculators can no longer distort rents by bidding up the price of land and holding it out of use, and can no longer compete with those who actually intend to use the land. This restores the proper balance of land, labor, and capital. Now if you work harder, or invest more capital, you can actually expect to see an increasing return without it all being gobbled up by ever-increasing rent. If you think about it this way, land value tax has negative deadweight loss, because it eliminates the speculative distortion that is the unearned privilege of landownership. Okay, but won't the landlords just pass the land tax on to their tenants? By George, no. Rent is a price, and price is governed by supply and demand. Supply of land is fixed, so land value tax has no effect on supply. What about demand? Except in cases where it causes the economy to boom (a good thing), land value tax won't increase land value – what it always does, however, is reduce the demand for land by speculators. If it costs nothing to hold on to land, of course I'm going to want to grab some and HODL. If the rent I could hope to gain is taxed away, I won't bother. Consider the case of oil again, where a tax reduces the supply. Reduced supply, given unchanged demand, causes a rise in price. And you'll find the increase in price tracks very closely with the amount of tax. Land value tax is just about the only kind of tax that can't be passed off to someone else. For more on deadweight loss and the land value tax, see Welfare Economics of the Land Value Tax by BlueRepublik. So does this mean there can never be profitable landlords ever again? Of course not – they just have to earn their living honestly like everyone else. Remember, we don't tax the improvements, just the "ground rent." So Ms. Nguyen still gets paid for all her honest work and judicious investments, but Mr. Slumlord doesn't make a dime until he gets off his lazy butt and does something productive. This is really important, because aside from speculation, the principal cause of land value increase is the productivity of your neighbors. An empty lot in the middle of nowhere is worthless, but an otherwise identical empty lot in the middle of New York city is priceless. As they say in real estate - "location, location, location." The reason location is valuable is because of the activity and contributions of the community, and yet the landlord claims the right to seize it all as rent. Modern economists have some interesting things to say about George's ideas, too. In 1977 Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated that land rents have a tendency to almost perfectly equal the value of investment in public goods. He called this the Henry George Theorem. Milton Friedman famously called land value tax the "Least Worst" tax. But one of my all-time favorite endorsements will always be that one time the economist Ramin Shokrizade unwittingly re-derived land value tax from first principles to (successfully!) fix recessions in EVE Online. Okay, so we tax all the ground rent. It will remove the speculative component of the rent (because there will no longer be any incentive to jack the prices up artificially), but it won't drive the price down to zero. That's because 100% LVT is only achievable on a frictionless plane populated by spherical cows; here in the real world you'll be left with a small sliver of land value. And of course regardless of the LVT rate, houses and buildings will still have a price. And that's fine. Land in Times Square will still be a lot more valuable than land in Podunk, Saskatchewan, but both will approach the same price as the LVT rate gets closer to 100%. This encourages people to actually make use of valuable land rather than holding it out of use, blighting the urban core and forcing development to sprawl out for miles in every direction, leading to worse transportation and more pollution. But... doesn't this mean that if people aren't putting land to productive use, they'll eventually be pressured to sell it off to someone who will? George sees this as a good thing. Without land value tax you get situations where somebody can anticipate that an empty lot will become valuable in the future, buy it, HODL forever, lobby against future development that would depress their property values, and now you have the Bay Area's housing crisis. Or buy an apartment block, do the absolute minimum the tenants will tolerate without killing you, constantly jack up the rent as the city grows, and you get slums. As BlueRepublik observes in No, Georgism is Still Sane: If you look at the commercial blight in New York City (http://www.vacantnewyork.com/) 90%+ is from landlords refusing to lease out to small businesses, waiting for a larger bank or big business to pay a higher rent bill. This causes property values of nearby businesses to drop, equity value to drop, and businesses to move out from the city center, increasing urban sprawl and urban blight. It’s a massive drain on personal wealth, and is very highly linked with poverty and higher crime rates. It’s also not a great model for having a stable social fabric. In a fit of performance art, a Georgist by the name of Fay Lewis once famously bought an empty lot and stuck a big sign on it to demonstrate the principle in action: Okay, but isn't building too much stuff bad for the environment? Won't this encourage over-development? By George, no. What's bad for the environment is sprawl, which the current system encourages and which the land tax would directly attack. If you want dense, walkable cities that don't depend on cars to get around, you should eliminate land speculation. A stronger objection to land value tax is when it's not some shifty speculator or a genocidal English landlord who suffers the brunt of it, but, say, this guy: The premise of Pixar's movie Up is that Carl Fredricksen, a lovably grumpy pensioner, is the last holdout standing in the way of developers bulldozing the rest of his neighborhood in the name of Progress™. He refuses to sell because he can't bear to part with the house which for him is tied up with all the cherished memories of his departed wife. This isn't just sentimental fiction, this is something that really does happen. Isn't Georgism just going to price the poor Carl Fredricksens out of their homes so that someone with a more """productive""" use can have it instead? There's several good response to this. For starters, if you're worried about kindly old people losing their homes, that's a thing that's happening already, and most of the time it's because The Rent Is Too Damn High, and our existing system is net worse on this score. We are currently facing an unprecedented crisis of evictions in tandem with the COVID pandemic, and it's not like things were peachy before. And even though homelessness seems to be declining in the US overall, it's getting worse in the most prosperous cities, exactly as George predicted. Okay, maybe it's better for renters, but what about people who own their homes, like Carl? Isn't it unfair to stick them with land taxes that might kick them out? What if they're retired? Remember, let's not confuse land tax with land confiscation, Here's George (emphases mine): I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. Okay, but you have to admit that even if the state isn't confiscating everybody's land, if you can't pay your land taxes you have no choice but to sell your land, right? Isn't this morally unjust to the Carl Fredricksens of the world? First, it's not a given that Mr. Fredricksen will be worse off on net: he already pays income and sales taxes, capital gains on any investments, as well as property tax which taxes both land value and the value of his house. As speculators leave the real estate market the land tax that replaces his property tax drop will drop, and his house is an improvement that goes entirely untaxed. Also, if the speculators holding onto all the most valuable real estate in the downtown districts are forced to give it up, there won't be as much competition for land and so there's a good chance developers won't be interested in trying to buy up land in a bedroom community in the first place. BlueRepublik further points out that LVT can be used to fund a Universal Basic Income, which should soften the blow considerably: Keep in mind also that the Georgist Land Value Tax is pair with a "Citizen's Dividend" or what we see as UBI, so that it's not the government claiming land rent, rather the land rent is taxed and split up equally for all men. But as a matter of political practicality, in the rare event that after all that Mr. Fredricksen still somehow finds himself in the hole after LVT is applied, Nate Blair suggests a deferment option to grandfather the Carls of the world through the transition: The LVT gets assessed annually for everyone, but owner occupiers (businesses and homeowners) can apply to defer the sum of those payments until they sell or transfer the land. Government can charge a nominal interest. A final point of modern application of land value taxes is to level the playing field between different areas by eliminating "cost of living" discrepancies that arise entirely from speculative rent. This is pretty relevant given the "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley right now in response to increased remote work as a direct consequence of the COVID pandemic. Back to George. Great, we've taxed ground rent at 100% and eliminated speculation and all other manner of social ills. Now what do we do with the money? Lots of things! For one, you can get rid of some other taxes. Back in George's day it was even argued that a 100% land value tax on ground rents should be the only tax – the "Single Tax," replacing all other tariffs, duties, and other taxes (keep in mind this was in the late 1800's and Federal income tax wasn't introduced until the 16th amendment in 1913). Remember, all these other taxes have deadweight loss. Income tax is a tax on labor, and so taxing it means we really do get less productive labor. The portion of property tax that targets improvements punishes you for investing in improvements, and sales tax is just straight up regressive, hitting the poor harder than the rich. There's some argument today about whether the "Single Tax" would be enough to fund the modern US budget, with some Georgists saying it would be sufficient and others saying we would still need some other taxes but could at least significantly offset what we already have. But by George, another thing we could do is just give all the money back to the people, as BlueRepublik mentioned above. This could be used as a straightforward Universal Basic Income – what George calls a Citizen's Dividend, or what Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend. It could also be used for the funding of public goods. George doesn't see this as an act of charity on the state's behalf – the value of the land has its origin in the productive labors of the entire community, so it's a simple act of justice to give the returns to those who actually produced the value, which is society at large. Another effect George asserts is that once land is no longer monopolized, labor is no longer forced into one-sided competition, so wages start to go up. Even better, laborers now have far more opportunity to go into business for themselves, which spurs innovation and investment. So to sum up, if we tax the ever loving hell out of ground rent, George says we'll see the following benefits: Make housing much more affordable
Inline links: source, Philip Taylor, property tax assessors do this already, audits the poor at the same rate as the top 1%, GIS, Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich, Deadweight Loss, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MSUe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e01d1dd-61fa-4c1b-8f90-6669f2c20d81_632x632.png, source, SilverStar, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WZ7g!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F730bd7b8-6dbf-4e23-a799-91187ec8b9ed_520x520.png, source, Welfare Economics of the Land Value Tax, Henry George Theorem, to (successfully!) fix recessions in EVE Online, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZKi0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fd890f3-35ce-415d-a461-2e507eff4ed9_680x709.png, No, Georgism is Still Sane, http://www.vacantnewyork.com/, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gVc9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0eccd663-f37b-44b6-ba75-469069befa34_1863x1268.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mVYl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80f4b70f-b472-47b0-b46d-e74b3190ddfd_536x554.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G2qa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa948c9cc-5271-4b71-8c74-de55e126f16a_640x360.png, really does happen, crisis of evictions, getting worse in the most prosperous cities, "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley, Citizen's Dividend, the Freedom Dividend
Theses On The Current Moment
May 12, 2021 · Original source
And what about the Victorians in England? What about the gradual secularization of Ireland during the end of the 20th century? There are so many interesting stories of societies going from more to less repressive without obvious outside intervention. This is yet another thing someone should work on instead of tweeting! If we had a general theory for how repressive societies transitioned into open ones, we would have a better idea which levers to push.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
1 The ellipsis is a favorite Zeihan tick. Having listened to him on more than a few podcasts since picking up the book, his voice comes through the pages. It reads like you’re old friends and he’s telling you the way it is over beers. For example, in discussing the effects of the Bretton Woods system, Zeihan notes the creation of “banking empires in… Ireland and Iceland,” with a footnote saying “Seriously. WTF?”
Inline links: 1
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
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
DUBLIN, IRELAND (RSVP) Contact: Laplace, bayesianconspirator[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 25 Location: Stephen's Green playground Coordinates: https://w3w.co/steep.beside.veal
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/steep.beside.veal
Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
14: You’ve probably heard statistics about how 50% of transgender youth attempt suicide before age 21. This paper tries to analyze the situation in more depth. The 50% number usually comes from surveys, but there’s some evidence people exaggerate on surveys, rounding up “I think about it a lot” to “I attempted”. The authors gather data on completed suicides among trans people, and find that they’re about 0.01%/year (which is about 5x the cisgender rate). If we suppose that people have about 5 years between becoming transgender and turning 21, then the 50% attempted suicide rate → 0.05% completed suicide rate implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me [but see this comment for a critique] 15: Gwern on the failures of 20th century eugenics. I’ve previously linked a piece about how, aside from the general moral failure, the 20th century eugenicists got lots of implementation details really wrong. Gwern adds to the picture: they had a purely Mendelian (as opposed to polygenic) model of intelligence, and felt that bad traits were probably caused by single recessive genes. This dichotomized the population in a way that contributed to the moral problems - if IQ is truly a continuum, then someone with 120 IQ might still wonder if they were “inferior” to someone with 130 IQ, in a way that made them feel some sympathy to someone with 80 IQ who was being pronounced “inferior” by the eugenicists of the time. But instead, they thought some people had the specific recessive “low intelligence” gene, those people could be “cleansed” from the population, and then everyone else would be fine! It also prevented them from considering improving the populace by encouraging intelligent people to breed more (as opposed to sterilizing unintelligent people) - this wouldn’t eliminate the recessive variants that were causing all the trouble! I’m confused how they could have believed this even with the limited knowledge of the time; this was long after Galton had proven that genius was genetic, and once you have genetic genius you know there’s more going on than Mendelian inheritance of subnormality. 16: Sexual selection bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes 17: NFTorah: “The Torah [is] the original blockchain”. I think it’s funny that this exists, but it’s exactly what you would expect, and you don’t have to click on the link. 18: More IRB nightmares. 19: @ethanbdm When we piloted a public lottery to evaluate cash transfers in Liberia, the potential recipients arranged beforehand to insure one another. After the randomization and grant, the winners compensated the losers and unraveled the field experiment.","username":"cblatts","name":"Chris Blattman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 18 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":77,"like_count":678,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 20: DeepMind made a programming AI that was able to participate in a human coding competition and place around the middle. Nostalgebraist gives his thoughts: “impressed with the raw performance, not massively surprised, not sold that it implies anything big in particular”. A lot of people will be watching whether it can win programming competitions outright a year or two from now, though I bet their perspectives on how relevant this is for AI takeoff speeds will be pretty mixed. 21: Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits. 22: Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. “Why should we care? Brain efficiency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” 25: The latest in the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis: Harrison, Noble, and Jennions publish a meta-analysis failing to find evidence of greater male variability in the personality of non-human animals. Del Giudice and Gangestad have a rebuttal saying that they were underpowered to detect it even if it did exist, plus noting the ways that media coverage of this study was incredibly irresponsible even by its own terms. 26: Some recent critiques of Cook (2014) on racial violence vs. black patents, including Michael Wiebe challenging the violence measures and AnechoicMedia arguing that the black patent measure declines right when switching from one (more complete) dataset to another (less complete) one. Rebuttal by Brad DeLong here, he argues that Cook uses multiple methods and some of them don’t have this problem. Relevant since Cook is now being considered for the Federal Reserve; see eg this Wall Street Journal editorial against. 27: Claim: 31% of British people say they have seen or met Queen Elizabeth (this seems plausible to me, I would answer ‘yes’ to this because she visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car). 28: This couple-of-month-period in wokeness: Scientific American attacks late biologist EO Wilson, in a screed whose highlight is calling him problematic for describing ants as having “colonies”. This is part of a more general (and surprisingly fast) pivot at Scientific American from real science to culture warring; when even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke, you’ve gotten too woke.
Inline links: This paper, this comment, the failures of 20th century eugenics, bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes, NFTorah:, IRB nightmares, DeepMind made a programming AI, Nostalgebraist, Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits, Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality, Harrison, Noble, and Jennions, Del Giudice and Gangestad, challenging the violence measures, arguing that the black patent measure declines, here, this, seen or met Queen Elizabeth, highlight, even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
When I lived in Ireland I was creeped out by things like the May Bank Holiday. It felt too much like I was living in a dystopia. “Worker #4113, you and the rest of North West City get the May Bank Holiday off from your job at Nutrient Factory 87”. If you tried to pull that in America, we would revolt.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images
Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images
33: If you’ve served any time in the trenches of the IQ nature-vs-nurture wars, you’ll be familiar with one of the nurture side’s strongest arguments: average Irish IQ appeared to rise from mid-80s to 100 as Ireland modernized in second half of the 20th century. Psychologist Russell Warne looks into the evidence and finds that no, Irish IQ has probably been pretty stable during that time, though some of this depends on the definition of “IQ” and “stability” - some early Irish failed the tests because they had never taken any similar test before and were confused, but quickly improved to near-100 after being acquainted with the process.
Inline links: looks into the evidence and finds
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: Rian O Mahoney Contact Info: maturely[dot]ravioli78[at]mailer[dot]me Time: Saturday, April 22nd, 12:00 AM Location: Clement & Pekoe, 50 William St S, Dublin 2, D02 DE93 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PRP+JV Notes: Here is a link to our WhatsApp groupchat ->https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fg9KWUEqyUU3RauvsXtMxo
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PRP+JV, https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fg9KWUEqyUU3RauvsXtMxo
Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
I won’t explain “confound” here, but I will give some examples. A few decades ago, researchers discovered that drinking coffee in America was associated with dying from lung cancer, whereas tea was the apparent culprit in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Eventually, the researchers noticed that people were likely to smoke when drinking coffee or tea. No effect of hot drinks was found for nonsmokers. Then there is the excess of Lisa Minelli vinyl in their record collections allegedly found to distinguish early victims of HIV/AIDS…Could a swift record burning have saved lives?
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Kieran Egan was born in Ireland, raised in England, and got his PhD in America (at Stanford and Cornell). He lived for the next five decades in British Columbia, where he taught at Simon Fraser University.
Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability
July 25, 2023 · Original source
Anyway. This is something I've studied a decent amount because of the impact the Social Model, Charity Model and Medical Model has had on the Australian model, and in particular studying the history of the IDF (the former ICIDH), and a few other things. But I'm not an expert. And I'm also speaking from the perspective of a disabled Australian and not Ireland (our history with the social model mostly goes back to the late 80s at best).
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
Maybe in doing so the Church was reacting to existing conditions: reading the human situation and responding “hey, what we need here is less intensive kinship”. If so, then it might put more effort into pushing the MFP in places where that was likely to have higher payoffs: in, say, the centre of the Carolingian empire – the strip running north-south roughly from Belgium to North Italy, where many trade routes meet, and which will be the richest part of Europe from at least the 12th century until the 21st. Not so much in Ireland, at the edge of the known world, long on monks but low on opportunities for trade; or in Sweden where the Church has barely a foothold. But now that threatens the randomness of your treatment, because the MFP correlates with existing economic institutions. Also, maybe when and where it did the MFP, the Church also took other actions to achieve the same goal.
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
Zone based reforms are a hack around the public choice challenges of nation-state reforms. Bob Haywood, former director of the World Economic Processing Zones Association, makes the case that zones address Doug North's "natural state" of oligarchy preventing liberalization because export zones don't immediately threaten the rent-seeking structures. In his experience, usually zones were adovcated by the peripheral elites - not the core elites, but the son-in-law, cousin, younger brothers, etc. who had access to elites but were not currently benefiting from rent-seeking themselves. Without zone solutions, however irregular their success, most nations tend to be stuck in the "natural state" of oligarchic rent-seeking. Haywood makes the case that zones led to broader economic liberalization in Mexico, China, Mauritius, Ireland, and elsewhere. If the benefits of zone-based reforms includes broader economic liberalization then the returns are much greater.
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
29: Two great essays on organ donation laws recently, The Fitzwilliam’s Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Works In Progress’ Compensating Compassion. The Fitzwilliam’s focuses on an underwhelming new Irish law, and also tells the author’s story (he tried to donate a kidney, but got rejected for being too young - he was in his twenties - which is one I’ve never heard before). Works In Progress surveys laws around the world; I’m especially interested in Israel’s approach (written up by MR here), which says that people who previously agreed to donate after their death get priority for organs when alive.
Inline links: Organ Donation Law: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, Compensating Compassion, written up by MR here
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
BUDAPEST Contact: Timothy Underwood Contact Info: timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14th, 2:00 PM Location: The North East corner of Muzeumkert is the plan. There are a bunch of benches that we can move around to sit in a circle. If the weather is raining, or otherwise bad, we'll squeeze into the California Coffee co next to the Muzeumkert, which will hopefully have enough room since it will be on a Sunday. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest Ireland DUBLIN Contact: Rían O Mahoney Contact Info: romahone[at]tcd[dot]ie Time: Thursday, April 25th, 6:30 PM Location: Hotel Motel One Dublin, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220, Ireland Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8, https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest, https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o
DUBLIN Contact: Rían O Mahoney Contact Info: romahone[at]tcd[dot]ie Time: Thursday, April 25th, 6:30 PM Location: Hotel Motel One Dublin, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220, Ireland Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qiu5TGJHxaZyb3p5o
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Tim Contact Info: timunderwood9[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, October 06th, 02:00 PM Location: Muzeumkert, with Sirius Teahaz as backup in case of bad weather Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest Notes: We'll have a sign, feel free to bring kids, and it'll be great to see you all. Ireland DUBLIN, IRELAND Contact: David O. Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[at]icloud[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 06:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.) Notes: No RSVP required
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8, https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest, https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Contact: Simon Contact Info: acxmannheim[at]mailbox[dot]org Time: Sunday, September 15th, 08:00 PM Location: Murphy's Law (Irish Pub) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+5G Group Link: https://signal.group/#CjQKIFmicB23eRhkDDjxjT94PWsbTYPdux-uoZJH2bH2M7OqEhBzfNMhsDNayw_ETHxhsGG6 Notes: Look for the table with the ACX sign on it!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+5G
Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
August 30, 2024 · Original source
Lecky was born in Ireland in 1838 to a distinguished family of scholars and government officials. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, where “in addition to the ordinary university course, he went through that appointed for divinity students…He confesses to have been perhaps culpably indifferent to college ambitions and competitions, and he threw himself with intense eagerness into a long course of private reading, chiefly relating to the formation and history of opinions.”
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.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Tim Contact Info: timunderwood9[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 1:00 PM Location: Muzeum Kert, in the North East corner, Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest Ireland DUBLIN Contact: David O Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[a t]icloud[period]com Time: Friday, April 11th, 7:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.) Notes: No RSVP required
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8, https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest, https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Contact: Chris Wintergreen Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: Parliament lawn Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+MGJ Notes: If it rains, we'll likely go into Irish Murphy's. You can contact me via email on the day.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+MGJ
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.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source
Pursuit of efficiency: As women entered the workforce en masse in the postwar era, the pool of hours available to be spent on domestic labor like cooking shrank. As much as any dishwasher or washing machine, convenience foods are labor-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies for the home. This last factor is the only one that can explain the continued development of instant mashed potato technology. There were no potato-flaking interests during the war to have inertia; the instant mashed potatoes are not superior to their fresh antecedents; there was no ingrained consumer preference for an instant mashed potato product. It is only the desire to reduce time spent on food prep that could create “better instant mashed potatoes” as a commercially viable R&D space in the 1950s. The other factors contributed to the unique awfulness of my father’s instant mashed potatoes, though. Another WWII technological innovation, the cavity magnetron used in radar installations, led directly to the invention of the home microwave oven which began to proliferate widely in the 1970s. The microwave supercharged all “convenience food” trends, shortening not just prep time but cooking time as well. Uneven heating is hardly a concern when you can speed up your meals by a factor of ten. Meanwhile, the existing postwar status of margarine and skim milk was greatly enhanced by the dietary fat scare of the 1980s and 1990s. These products displaced butter and whole milk as health-conscious consumers sought to eliminate saturated fats from their diets in a doomed effort to stave off the incipient obesity epidemic. My parents, both already primed to accept these imitative products by my grandparents’ wartime preference formation, exclusively purchased margarine and skim milk for the household once they got married. And, pressed for time with two jobs and two kids, they frequently purchased instant mashed potatoes as well. And cooked them in the microwave. What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted with desiccated flakes, real milk with a thin byproduct, real butter with refined vegetable oil, real mashing with the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame with microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained. Yet because the name was the same, my father still believed he was eating the same dish my grandma made, the same dish his ancestors ate in Ireland, the same dish Glasse wrote about a quarter millennium ago. The appeal to him was undiminished. His body ate the slurry, but his mind still ate the maſhed potatoes of his youth. My World is Built on Lies In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand happening in this Reddit post title.1 The phrasing implies that chuño resembles modern instant mashed potatoes in some way, that instant mashed potatoes are in some sense continuous with indigenous ways of potato-knowing. But there is no continuity of process, because the way chuño is created has no particular commonalities with the Philadelphia Cook beyond the removal of moisture. There is no continuity of form, for chuño actually looks like this: (source) And there is no continuity of purpose, either. To the Andean peoples, chuño was the only way of ensuring that their potato crops would be available well into the future. In America, our indigenous way of achieving this potato security is the entire miracle of modern agriculture and food distribution. I don’t need to stomp on freeze-dried potatoes in the Altiplano to make sure I’ll have access to potato nutrients next year. I just have to rely on the continued existence of Idaho and Target. No, despite what this redditor would like to believe, the instant mashed potato serves some other purpose. That purpose is illuminated by the second rhetorical sleight of hand in the Reddit post, the one occurring on the box, in the form of the offset between the yellow lower-case “Instant” and the white majuscule “MASHED POTATOES”. “These are fundamentally maſhed potatoes,” this typography lies, “that happen to have been given the quality of ‘instant’”. But they’re not. They’re a different thing entirely, a completely new evolutionary lineage of potato preparation that’s called “instant mashed potatoes” even though they’ve never been mashed. They are as distinct from Glasse’s maſhed potatoes as chuño is, but they masquerade as being the same, because that is their purpose - the fulfillment of a psychological need to consume something resembling the classic dish of “mashed potatoes” with slightly less effort than that dish requires. This is a pedantic distinction - but it’s a distinction that had a big impact on my culinary life, because I believed the lie. My mental category of “mashed potatoes” was hijacked by this impostor and it made me think, for years and years, that I hated something that I actually would have liked all along. My preference formation was distorted by this warped, hyper-optimized fulfillment of my father’s crystallized preference. The expedient way to fulfill one generation’s desire locked the next generation out of experiencing that desire at all. At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers. Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps: Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Inline links: this post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GFq8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee286622-7cfd-45fa-b18e-6fc06b9fea81_739x919.png, 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dL21!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f7f74da-27ee-4ffa-8d76-ea9fa3853394_1280x855.png, source
While formulating this review, I encountered a troubling congruence: the period during which my dad has been eating instant mashed potatoes consistently (roughly 1990-present) is about the same as the period between the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish potato famine in 1845. Why does one thirty-five-year pattern of potato consumption get to be considered authentic cultural heritage while another is self-deception? Aren’t they both equally contingent and ephemeral? Why should either be ‘real’?
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Richard Contact Info: horvirich[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 27, 1:00 PM Location: South-East corner of Muzeumkert (near the playground). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest Additional Notes: In case of rain, we will gather in California Coffee Company nearby. Ireland DUBLIN Contact: David Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[a t]icloud[period]com Time: Friday, September 12th, 6:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.) Notes: No RSVP required. Email me if you have trouble accessing the group.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7, https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest, https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Contact: Chris Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Parliament House Gardens Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ Notes: We'll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the "Spring" ACX meetup). Bad weather and we'll move into Irish Murphy's.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ
Contact: Ruben Contact Info: acxmannheim[a t]mailbox[period]org Time: Saturday, September 20th, 5:00 PM Location: Murphy's Law (Irish Pub) near the Main Station. I'll have a sign that says "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+6G
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+6G
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
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): 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: here’s the chaser, I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud, Part 2, recent paper, Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X), here (X), got accepted, started taking pre-orders, Public opinion, Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X), New revelations, claims (X), Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country, St. Carlo Acutis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkfL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcffc254-0a35-4360-baaf-2ffae8c00e64_769x931.png, St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Richard Contact Info: horvirich[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM Location: South-East corner of Muzeumkert (near the playground). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest Ireland DUBLIN Contact: David O. Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[@]icloud[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ETaD [remove this bit] qjMaFFTB6gDzZwfKoI?mode=gi_t
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7, https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest, https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Contact: Chris Contact Info: cvjones7[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 02:00 PM Location: Parliament House Gardens Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ Additional Notes: We’ll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the “Spring” ACX meetup). Bad weather and we’ll move into Irish Murphy’s.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ
Contact: Simon Contact Info: acxmannheim[@]mailbox[.]org Time: Friday, May 8th, 5:00 PM Location: Fahnenmast Rheinpromenade, in case of bad wheather: Murphy’s Law Irish Pub. There’s be a sign with ACX in both cases. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFH6+8J Group Link: https://signal.group/#CjQKIF [remove this bit ] micB23eRhkDDjxjT94PWsbTYPdux-uoZJH2bH2M7OqEhAFf8Kh5ECwoizGSv-lhADt Notes: Bring a blanket, and optionally your favourit snack/drink!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFH6+8J
Iraq25 mentions across 25 issues

Iraq is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 25 times across 25 issues between March 15, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""We'll definitely find WMDs in Iraq""; "failure of that apparatus to easily pacify Iraq on the ground"; "imperialist interventions in ... Iraq". It most often appears alongside US, Russia, China.

Article page
Iraq
Mention count
25
Issue count
25
First seen
March 15, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 · Original source
The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week.
When this really starts getting good is when there's a prediction market you can compare to. Imagine Dumb '00s Pundit #X predicted "We'll definitely find WMDs in Iraq", and the prediction markets said 50% chance. After a while, you can start noticing that the pundit underperforms the prediction markets on the specific topics they're interested in. Now you do have some evidence that maybe they're a fraud.
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
There were some other supposed examples of neoliberal practice contradicting liberal ideology - although I can’t find easily quotable bits, I think he’s thinking of the Iraq War and various bailouts (though not the 2008 bailouts, since this book was written in the early 2000s). I agree that the government has not been a perfect ideological neoliberal at all times, but this impresses me less than it seemingly impresses David Harvey. Again, I think this critique is strong enough to apply to any ideology - what government has ever perfectly followed the diktats of socialism, or conservatism, or theocracy? The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent.
Previous phases of capitalist history—one thinks of 1873 or the 1920s—when a similarly stark choice arose, do not augur well. The upper classes, insisting on the sacrosanct nature of their property rights, preferred to crash the system rather than surrender any of their privileges and power. In so doing they were not oblivious of their own interest, for if they position themselves aright they can, like good bankruptcy lawyers, profit from a collapse while the rest of us are caught most horribly in the deluge. A few of them may get caught and end up jumping out of Wall Street windows, but that is not the norm. The only fear they have is of political movements that threaten them with expropriation or revolutionary violence. While they can hope that the sophisticated military apparatus they now possess (thanks to the military industrial complex) will protect their wealth and power, the failure of that apparatus to easily pacify Iraq on the ground should give them pause. But ruling classes rarely, if ever, voluntarily surrender any of their power and I see no reason to believe they will do so this time. Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself. While this may sound a counter-revolutionary conclusion to those on the far left, it is not without a strong element of self-interest either, because it is ordinary people who suffer, starve, and even die in the course of capitalist crises (examine Indonesia or Argentina) rather than the upper classes. If the preferred policy of ruling elites is après moi le déluge, then the deluge largely engulfs the powerless and the unsuspecting while elites have well-prepared arks in which they can, at least for a time, survive quite well.
This appeal to the universalism of rights is a double-edged sword. It may and can be used with progressive aims in mind. The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and others cannot be dismissed as a mere adjunct of neoliberal thinking. The whole history of humanism (both of the Western—classically liberal—and various non-Western versions) is too complicated for that. But the limited objectives of many rights discourses (in Amnesty’s case the exclusive focus, until recently, on civil and political as opposed to economic rights) makes it all too easy to absorb them within the neoliberal frame. Universalism seems to work particularly well with global issues such as climate change, the ozone hole, loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction, and the like. But its results in the human rights field are more problematic, given the diversity of political-economic circumstances and cultural practices to be found in the world. Furthermore, it has been all too easy to co-opt human rights issues as ‘swords of empire’ (to use Bartholomew and Breakspear’s trenchant characterization). So-called ‘liberal hawks’ in the US, for example, have appealed to them to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, and, above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
I see this most clearly with recent war veterans. 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans file for disability, a large fraction psychological: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/05/27/almost-half-new-veterans-seek-disability-benefits/sYQAAY00ddXBRoqfsKMheJ/story.html
Inline links: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/05/27/almost-half-new-veterans-seek-disability-benefits/sYQAAY00ddXBRoqfsKMheJ/story.html
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
On the other hand, you get stories where police think someone might be growing marijuana or whatever, they gather a SWAT team complete with surplus tanks from Iraq, they break down the person’s door, and they shoot everyone involved because “it looked like they might be reaching for a gun”. If anyone survives, the police stick them in prison for ten years for “resisting arrest” or something. Maybe these people are left with the feeling that police could stand to be a little less strict and less proactive.
Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
September 17, 2021 · Original source
With the beginning of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century, bloggers and social media influencers short-circuited the established hierarchy. America's crimes and failures in Vietnam had percolated slowly and inconsistently through word of mouth, with most people content to believe whatever sanitized version the nightly news told them. But when America had crimes and failures in Iraq, leaked photos of torture in Abu Ghraib spread instantly across the Internet; there was no opportunity for elites in government and media to come to an agreement on how much of it they were going to share or what the narrative should be. The scientific equivalent (Gurri argues) was Climategate, where hackers leaked the emails of top climate scientists and everyone got to see exactly how the sausage got made and decide for themselves whether they trusted it or not. And then there was the 2008 market crash. For the first time, people were able to go on Facebook and the comment sections of their favorite blogs and talk about how everyone involved in finance and government was a crook who needed to be hung from a lamppost. The discussion had a momentum of its own, and people who wouldn't have dared think a heretical thought if they'd been listening to Walter Cronkite found themselves adding to the avalanche.
Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
He argues that the West is overestimating Ukraine - Russia is closer to Kyiv than America was to Baghdad at this stage of their Iraq invasion, and everyone was impressed with that stage of the American campaign. But he was intellectually honest enough to give a very specific prediction - collapse of Ukrainian resistance within a week - so he can’t really get out of admitting he miscalculated here. I definitely think both these things can be true at once: the Russians underestimated the extent of Ukrainian resistance even as the West may be overestimating it.
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
I don’t think Ukraine proves that “history has restarted” or “the Pax Americana was a paper tiger” or anything of the sort. These kinds of local conflicts were always allowed. Just ask an Iraqi. Or a Chechen, or an Afghan, or a Syrian, or a Bosnian, or a Crimean, or a Tigrayan or go back and ask the Iraqi a second time.
Sometimes its reasoning was noble: preventing genocide in Kosovo. Sometimes it was at least understandable: get vengeance for 9-11. Other times it was almost incomprehensible: we’ll debate what happened with Iraq II forever.
Part of me wants to say we’re different from the Russians - at least we haven’t launched a war of annexation in a while. Usually we have the decency to skulk around funding rebel groups and opposition parties instead of launching full scale invasions. The rare exceptions tend to be genuinely bad dudes - however unjust the Iraq War was, nobody wants to defend Saddam.
Open Thread 215
March 13, 2022 · Original source
2: Comment of the week: Steven Ehrbar gives a theory I’d never heard before for why US invaded Iraq: to unpin US garrisons in Saudi Arabia. There were also good comments on Zulresso, but I’ll probably spin them off into a separate Highlights post.
Inline links: a theory I’d never heard before for why US invaded Iraq
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 06, 2022 · Original source
ISIS (in western Iraq and parts of Syria)
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
Second, Mearsheimer, Bosen, and Waltz argued that nationalism is strong enough to make states act like unitary actors. However, nationalism only appears strong when compared to the pull of universalist ideologies like Marxism or liberalism, because soldiers can continue fighting for their fellow combatants despite widespread disillusionment with the mission itself as seen in the Iraq war. Nationalism is weaker than financial self-interest, as no viable army can exist without paying soldiers market salary, and states need laws like tariffs to protect domestic industry; nationalism is also weaker than familial interests, as states need laws against nepotism.
Second, the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence. Even politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant, for example most(!) counterterrorism officials — the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a seven-term congressman then serving as the vice chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. The same favoured interests exert influence at all levels of society, including at the top, for example intelligence agencies are discounted if they contradict what leaders think they know through personal contacts and publicly available material, as was the case in the run-up to the Iraq War.
The First Gulf War (1990-1991): UNSC authorised the US and 34 other countries to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invation out of Kuwait at the Gulf Monarchy’s request
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.
Inline links: More Dakka
The Qutbian enemy, therefore, is breathtakingly encompassing. The realm of Jahiliyyah is not merely the West, with its secularism, racism, imperialism, inequality, and sexual promiscuity. Nor is it simply Nasser and his henchmen, the brutes who ran torture chambers like Tora Prison. It encompasses all secular Arab governments—including those in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria. It also includes the ulema, the clergy who claim to speak for Islam, but support the lordship of man. It includes anyone who stands in the way of the establishment of an Islamic State. The enemy is the rest of the world.
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq.
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
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
I was expecting to find a similar explanation for a third Illuminati factoid in the article - a claim that just before his death, George Washington wrote a letter fretting about the Illuminati - but actually this one is completely true. Weird! 7: Iraqi Chemical Weapons jumpingjacksplash writes:
Inline links: this one is completely true, writes
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/world/nation-challenged-secret-sites-iraqi-tells-renovations-sites-for-chemical.html
Inline links: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/20/world/nation-challenged-secret-sites-iraqi-tells-renovations-sites-for-chemical.html
An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images
Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images
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
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org. Africa & Middle East Iraq BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: Mustafa Ahmed Contact Info: tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 8th, 10:00 AM Location: Grinders cafe, Zayouna Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92 Group Link: https://t.me/ACX_BGH
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92, https://t.me/ACX_BGH
BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: Mustafa Ahmed Contact Info: tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 8th, 10:00 AM Location: Grinders cafe, Zayouna Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92 Group Link: https://t.me/ACX_BGH
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+92, https://t.me/ACX_BGH
Dictator Book Club: Chavez
November 02, 2023 · Original source
From here on, things were comparatively smooth sailing. Partly this was because the opposition had been discredited. Partly it was because Chavez had replaced the independent economy and civil society with oil subsidies and Cuban services loyal to him personally. And partly it was because the US invaded Iraq and drove up the price of oil, and suddenly Venezuela had even more infinite money than the near-infinite amount of money it had before. The amount of money oil consumers were throwing at Venezuela made it almost impossible for a shrewd president who had put himself in position to direct oil revenues to lose. And Chavez (mostly) didn’t lose.
Against Learning From Dramatic Events
January 16, 2024 · Original source
Even if you are on a board legally charged with “safeguarding the interests of humanity”, you can’t just speak out and try to safeguard the interests of humanity. You have to play savvy corporate politics or else you’ll lose instantly and everyone will hold you in contempt. These are the opposite lessons as the FTX scandal. I’m not denying we screwed up both times. There’s some golden mean, some virtue of practical judgment around how many red flags you need before you call out a hotshot CEO, and in what cases you should do so. You get this virtue after looking at lots of different situations and how they turned out. You definitely don’t get this virtue by updating maximally hard in response to a single case of things going wrong. If you do that, you’ll just fling yourself all the way into the opposite failure mode. And then when you fail again the opposite time, you’ll fling yourself back into the original failure mode, and yo-yo back and forth forever. The problem with the US response to 9-11 wasn’t just that we didn’t predict it. It was that, after it happened, we were so surprised that we flung ourselves to the opposite extreme and saw terrorists behind every tree and around every corner. Then we made the opposite kind of failure (believing Saddam was hatching terrorist plots, and invading Iraq). The solution is not to update much on single events, even if those events are really big deals. VI. This can’t be true, right? The bread-and-butter of modern news, politics, etc, is having a dramatic event happen, getting shocked and outraged, demanding that something be done, and then devoting a news cycle or Senate hearing to it. We can’t just throw all that out, can we? Here are a few minor, contingent counterarguments: Obviously when a dramatic event happens, even if you don’t update your predictions for the future, you still need to respond to that particular event. For example, if a major hurricane strikes New Orleans tomorrow, you may not want to update your models of hurricane risk very much, but you still need to send aid to New Orleans.
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
Try spotting existential risk prevention on here. I don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument? III. Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most compelling are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly larger benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty. My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations. The IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work. But IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes. I think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?” (also, effective altruism funds IPA) I’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact. And I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy. IV. Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism. And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole pitch of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to bypass a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just give money to effective charities. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued. Suppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)? EA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers. EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”. This is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell did solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it. V. You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!! But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should. I think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So: Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? Should people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention? Should people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics? EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.) There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or a spam text message” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into. The third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it massively massively backfires. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him, then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with. One f@#king time, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were much less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of. Not to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for. EA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics. VI. Stone moves on to animal welfare: It’s important to grasp that [caring about animals] is, in evolutionary terms, an error in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals and then we made friends with dogs, not vice versa. Again, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs. People having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”. Art is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures. Anyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about intra-tribal dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error? At some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist. Stone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like Axiology, Morality, Law, the super-old Consequentialism FAQ, and The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too. Again, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into: If I wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.
Inline links: Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program, I take this one pretty seriously, a spam text message, Axiology, Morality, Law, Consequentialism FAQ, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
I’m skeptical of this argument. America’s been at peace since World War II (foreign adventures like Vietnam haven’t substantially changed our national experience) and produced the computing revolution, the Internet, AI, the moon landing, the Human Genome Project, antiretrovirals, the microwave, the laser, the smartphone, and the reusable rocket. During that time, Iraq has had approximately eight major wars and didn’t even get a cuckoo clock out of it.
Is this an unfair comparison, since America has 8x Iraq’s population? No more so than Welles’ is (Italy has 8x the population of Switzerland). But beyond the specifics, I think it’s useful for shocking us into Near Mode. War isn’t actually that great for science, art, or the economy. I’m not expecting Russia or Ukraine to leapfrog the rest of the world any time soon. I’m expecting them to fall further and further behind until the war ends, at which point maybe they’ll get a chance to catch up.
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at] rationalitymeetups[ dot]org. Africa & Middle East Iraq BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: Mustafa Contact Info: wolframsigma2[dot]7[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 05th, 06:00 PM Location: In the Grinders, Zayona. I will sit with a brown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+839 Notes: please join the group or notify me in any way, I hosted 3 meet ups so far and no attended, so I would not go if no other person at least notified me. If you can't attend, but you're still likeminded and in the area, please reach out! I'd love to meet you sometime.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+839
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
It is not possible to understand al-Qaeda's strategy without understanding its fixation on fulfilling the prophecies. Creating the preconditions for the arrival of the Mahdi also explained the group's later establishment of affiliates in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and the Maghreb, which along with Afghanistan are the lands of the Five Armies of Jihad prophesied to fight in the epic battles.
This is a good moment to note that that jihadists in the book are all obsessed with Israel, mostly not because they are angry at the oppression of Palestinians (Muslims are oppressed in many places around the world), but because Jerusalem features in a lot of prophecies, so it’s really important for it to be under Muslim rule. They also passionately hate the USA, partly because of its support of Israel, but maybe even more importantly because the US has stationed troops in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War. This was a reasonable thing to do against a potential Iraqi invasion that was a very real threat while Saddam was in power. But Infidel soldiers staying in the country of Mecca and Medina was considered a huge sacrilege by the jihadists and made them hate the US a lot.
'Our generation started the war, the next generation will fight the war, and the generation after that will win the war,' al-Masri declared. 'You know there's a group in America that wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein? But they say the American people won't support a war in Iraq unless there's an event on the scale of Pearl Harbor.' Then, with a rare flash of amusement in his eyes, he added, 'We should – with God's help and grace – give them a Pearl Harbor! Let them come into Iraq, let them come into Afghanistan, let them come into Somalia.'
The Other COVID Reckoning
May 21, 2025 · Original source
Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.
Against Against Boomers
December 19, 2025 · Original source
Zooming out, it seems sort of like Boomers have delivered the greatest period of peace and prosperity in history: global, American, take your pick. The window of Boomer dominance, c. 1980 - 2010, saw the fall of Communism, steadily rising incomes, steadily growing life expectancy, and no foreign wars bigger than Iraq (total American death toll: 4,500).
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[ period]org. Be advised that he’s going to be slower than usual about responding to things though. Africa & The Middle East Iraq BAGHDAD Contact: Wolfram Contact Info: telegram [@]wolfram_sigma Time: Friday, April 10th, 2:00 PM Location: Grinders -- Zayouna Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73Q Group Link: Telegram Group -> https://t[.}me/+n7U-ilkVA_dkNTUy Notes: you must contact me if you are coming, I tried to host the meet up a few times before, and no one came. so if you are coming please inform me so I would actually go.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73Q
Iran22 mentions across 22 issues

Iran is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 22 times across 22 issues between March 15, 2021 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance"; "Iran resumes compliance"; "In this case Iran decided it wasn't worth picking a fight". It most often appears alongside United States, China, Trump.

Article page
Iran
Mention count
22
Issue count
22
First seen
March 15, 2021
Last seen
March 18, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y
March 15, 2021 · Original source
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent 8. Lakers win the NBA championship 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US 13. Substack will still be around 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary 20. No federal tax increases are enacted 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members
1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races (60%) 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia (95%) 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%) [83%] 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%) [60%] 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%) [84%] 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent (80%) 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent (80%) 8. Lakers win the NBA championship (25%) [25%] 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president (95%) [96%] 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule (60%) 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court (70%) [50%] 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%) [80%] 13. Substack will still be around (95%) 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable (80%) 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon (90%) [84%] 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%) [53%] 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%) 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%) 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary (60%) 20. No federal tax increases are enacted (95%) 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt (80%) 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance (80%) 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%) [38%] 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs (70%) 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members (70%) [75%]
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
This hedged hard, but I think looks good in retrospect. Trump mostly doddered around without changing much. But his order to assassinate Iranian general Qasem Soleimani - which by my understanding was kind of a decoy out-of-range extreme plan his generals suggested only to make their other plans sound more reasonable - was exactly the sort of potentially-WWIII-causing blunder I worried about. In this case Iran decided it wasn't worth picking a fight, but that was their good decision, not Trump's. I realize this is sort of sketchy; I'm declaring a thing which empirically went well to unobservably be a massive blunder, then counting my prediction of massive blunders right. But based on my sincere assessment of the Soleimani situation, I feel more honest doing this than not doing it. B.
Inline links: order to assassinate Iranian general Qasem Soleimani
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Zeihan provides similar analysis regarding many other countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Angola, and Iran, before turning to Europe and China. As mentioned in the first paragraph, Zeihan sees collapse coming.
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 bombing of Librya (2011): a newly passed UNSC resolution allowed NATO to enforce a no-fly zone against al-Gadhaffi’s government “to protect civilians”, but did not sanction the no-fly zone intended for regime change, nor the subsequent airstrike that led to the capture and killling of al-Gadhaffi by rebels Indeed, the idea of some wars being “illegal” seems odd enough, but the fact that no country on earth violates the most fundamental tenets of international norms so flagrantly and often as the United States means that IR theorists cannot insist on the grand strategy of maintaining “rules based international order”. Hanania also dismisses other popular explanations of American grand strategy, in particular Chomsky’s argument that America’s interventions are a matter of great power competition and/or a struggle for resources. Somalia and Yugoslavia are some of the least strategically important states in the 1990s; the war in Iraq did not in any way increase American power but rather empowered Iran; and the removal of al-Gadhaffi made it clear to Kim Jong Un that any leader willing to dismantle their WMD program and ally themselves with the US in the war on terror were destined to be killed. As for intervention in oil-rich states, the US was not even willing or able to ensure American corporations benefited as Libya was already selling its oil on the open market (al-Gadhaffi’s removal only hurt production), and the largest Iraqi oil contracts under US occupation went to China and Russia (even if they went to the US, the costs of war ~$3 trillion was far from recoverable). It’s surprising how the longest-running meme of American invasion for oil is misplaced cynicism; US foreign policy elites aren’t even competent enough to secure oil for American exploitation. An additional evidence against American grand strategy is the pattern of troop deployments abroad: 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
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!c0Vf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F152da6ba-c572-47f8-9fb1-360b098c4117_680x707.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Pf-j!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bfb861a-939d-4397-bb35-3711da16c1e8_930x1488.png
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
Counterinsurgency (COIN) In the case of Afghanistan, the Bush administration was so eager to go to war it avoided any other options. No evidence has ever emerged that Taliban (the political faction that ruled Afghanistan at the time) itself knew about the 9/11 attacks, much less planned it; the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan condemned the attacks on 9/12. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” became the standard American line — before the war began, Taliban was willing to discuss bin Laden’s fate but the White House Chief of Staff refused; after the war began, Taliban was willing to hand over bin Laden to a third country for trial but White House refused just the same. In the case of Iraq, Bush was so eager to, in his own words, “Fuck Saddam, We’re taking him out” as early as February 2002 (and floated the idea of invading Iraq to Tony Blair), that on 9/17 Bush told his cabinet “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not gong to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” The administration couldn’t find any evidence directly tying Saddam to 9/11, so they settled on the now-discredited lies of WMDs and “ties” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. “We don’t negotiate with terrorist”’ extended to the non-terrorist Saddam — before the war, Saddam was cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency; after the war began, Saddam was willing to accede to practically all Amercan demands but White House refused communication just the same. Just like in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had no interest in exploring any other option short of war. Two feuding factions within the Bush administration had little contact with each other: the war hawks (neocons like Cheney i.e. products of Lockheed Martin), supported by the Pentagon, did not want to do nation-building; those partial to nation-building (the State Department) did not want war. Bush agreed with the former at the start of the war, but once Saddam was removed, sided with the latter. The postwar plan for Afghanistan was officially determined by the Bonn Agreement of 2001, but neither Bush nor Cheney consider it to be worthy of much thought in their memoirs despite years of hindsight; the postwar plan for Iraq lay entirely in the hands of Paul Bremer as subsequent Deputy Committee meetings on Iraq stopped being conducted — there wasn’t a single meeting to discuss disbanding the Iraqi army that left 400,000 jobless former soldiers prime for insurgency. The Iraq war dealt with no real crisis but cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, plunged Iraq into two decades of intermittent civil war — a candidate for the worst American foreign policy failure in history, but a success for the careers of Bush (who won reelection and congressional seats) and his advisors who led the US into Baghdad (who went on to work for think tanks, the World Bank, and the Trump Administration). Once again, there is no grand strategy as each party was only self-interested in short-term gains. The Earlier Obama Years As a candidate, Obama campaigned in support of the Afghanistan war, and indeed his first foreign policy decision as president was to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, largely due to overwhelming political pressure from top generals like Petraeus and McChrystal who boxed Obama into sending more troops by limiting the options presented to Obama, blatantly lobbying in press interviews, and threatening dire consequences like resigning from commanding troops in Afghanistan. We know Obama was hesitant as he announced at the same time that American troops would begin withdrawal in July 2011 (by 2015 he announced that American troop presence would stay in Afghanistan indefinitely). Obama’s second decision was to bomb al-Qadhafi in the name of Libyan regime change, due to domestic but this time also international political pressure from the heads of France and the UK who would face political embarrassment if Qadhafi’s regime, despite months of bombing and sanctions by the US-led coalition, recaptures the rebel-held Benghazi. NATO forces bombed al-Qadhafi’s convoy. Ten days after the killing of the dictator, the bombing campaign ended, and the subsequent decade of intermittent civil war faded from the American consciousnesss. Obama’s third decision was to cripple Assad’s regime in Syria with sanctions and by arming and training rebels, again due to overwhelming political pressure from hawkish ‘foreign policy community’ who still criticise Obama for having ‘done nothing’ despite spending $1 billion through the CIA and $500 million through the Pentagon, and crushing the Syrian economy. Top officials in the Obama administration admitted that assisting rebels would not change the course of war, nor was there any way to prevent arms from ending up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Syrian civil war only got bloodier with American involvement. The Later Obama Years Obama’s first major decision was the war on ISIS with the reentry into Iraq from which all American troops withdrew just a few years ago in 2011, due to overwhelming political pressure and in the face of a potentially humanitarian catastrophe (ISIS was going to massacre the Yazidi religious sectarians in Mount Sinjar). This time, the United States would roll back all territorial gains of the Islamic State by working with the Iraqi government, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Obama’s second decision was signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Acton (JCPOA) with Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for UN and EU sanctions to be lifted, $100 billion in assets seized by the US to be returned to Iran, and the US to stop implementing secondary or third-party sanctions. This time, Obama faced unusually significant pressure from Congress which passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act by overwhelming majority to be able to revoke JCPOA, but Obama signed JCPOA with Iran nonetheless as enough Democrats would be able to sustain a veto. This was the one and only decision that made sense from the perspective of classical IR theory — American leaders doing things they think are right for the country without a clear political payoff. Indeed, the Iranian nuclear agreement is the exception that proves the rule of public choice, as the deal was only possible near the end of Obama’s second term, and at the end cancelled by Trump upon entering office — a president’s foreign policy accomplishment made without the support of concentrated interests only lasted as long as his administration. 6. Learning From American Foreign Policy Failures IR theorists widely acknowledge that it was a mistake to invade Vietnam and Iraq, and even the war in Afghanistan went on for too long even if it was originally justified, but these scholars have yet to comprehend the shortcoming of the unitary actor model in accounting for the lack of rational cost-benefit analysis. Comparing the pre-invasion GDP of the countries to what the US has sacrificed (even setting aside the number of lives lost), the GDP-to-money-spent ratio has been 1:74 in South Vietnam, 1:43.3 in Iraq, and a staggering 1:396 in Afghanistan. In other words, the United States has spent in Afghanistan the equivalent of that country’s level of production for close to four centuries. Cost-benefit analysis also fails outside the major wars: NATO, despite the collapse of the USSR, is willing to absorb practically any country including states that can drag the US into war without contributing anything to American security; the military expenditure in Japan and South Korea, despite anti-China talks in Washington, are either flat or declining. While an utter failure in humanitarian and economic terms, American foreign policy has a been a resounding “success” from the public choice perspective: Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone (more than any company in history)
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
An obscure office in the U.S. Treasury Department is tasked with enforcing sanctions rules: the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. Over the course of the last two decades, OFAC has developed more targeted—and effective—sanction tools. The biggest innovation came in 2010. At the behest of OFAC, Congress passed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, which strengthened U.S. sanctions on the Iranian energy industry and financial sector. Whereas previous measures had targeted Iranian firms, Congress now authorized the imposition of “secondary sanctions” on any bank, anywhere in the world, that transacted with Iran’s central bank. By placing it on the black list, OFAC could cut off any bank from access to the U.S. financial sector. The United States offered banks a choice: You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Iran; you can’t do both. (Chapter 16)
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
The poor economy receives an additional shock with the 1979 oil crisis, when a drop in global oil production instigated by the Iranian revolution (more on that later) triggers a market reaction that more than doubles the price of oil. The result is not just skyrocketing gas prices but around-the-block lines at gas stations, with some even instituting rationing. Carter’s approval ratings, never great to begin with, drop into the low 30s.
The origins of the Iran hostage crisis go back all the way to 1951, when the CIA led a coup in Iran to prevent the democratically-elected government from nationalizing their oil industry. As is usually the case with people who seize power in coups, the new, US-backed leader, the Shah, is a bit of a despot. (He infamously has gourmet lunches flown in from France on the Concorde.) By 1979, The Iranian people have had enough, and the Shah himself is overthrown by a group of fundamentalist Islamic clerics, who still control Iran to this day. In conclusion, we totally nailed the situation and none of our decisions backfired in any way. Go America!
Shortly after his escape from Iran to exile in Egypt, the Shah is diagnosed with cancer, and since he’s been a consistent American ally, lots of influential people think we should let him come to the U.S. where he can benefit from our best-in-class treatment. Carter is against the idea at first (in fact, he directly predicts that granting the Shah entry to the U.S. could lead to Americans in Iran getting taken hostage), but eventually he’s worn down by his advisors and gives in. Less than two weeks after the Shah arrives, Carter’s prediction come true: the American embassy in Iran is overrun and 52 citizens are taken hostage. Ironically, even the Shah ends up worse off, as he ultimately dies not from his cancer but from a series of avoidable medical errors made by his American doctors.
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
July 22, 2022 · Original source
This is not a fantasy - this is your news feed. The U.S. is predicting a false-flag attack by Russia in the Ukraine. Russia accused the UK of a false-flag attack in Syria. The U.S. accuses China of genocide. China and Iran claimed COVID was a U.S. bio-attack.
Inline links: a false-flag attack, accused, accuses, claimed
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists who use financial repression as a tool of control. So they better have a plan. Crypto is the best-developed one I know. Or if you’re still not concerned about the US, at least be concerned about Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Russia or Iran, where there are already authoritarian governments and people are already using crypto to try to get around them.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images
Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
An oversized transplant force creates a transplant economy: a place that depends on industries that it did not generate itself. Getting a transplanted factory is always tempting for the governments of poor regions. But while the new jobs do alleviate poverty, transplants almost never lead to durable economic development (with rare exceptions, such as Taiwan). Jacobs has multiple examples, but the one I like most is Iran just before the revolution, when the Shah used oil money to buy a helicopter factory from the United States — thereby spurring a lot of development in the United States, where many companies got involved in building the factory, and almost none in Iran.
The third transaction of decline is heavy trade between advanced and backward cities, especially on credit. Selling a helicopter factory to the Shah of Iran is fine if the Shah pays for it with oil, but if Iran buys the factory on a loan and fails to pay it back (as poor regions often do, and as Iran did due to the revolution), then that’s also wealth that is drained away from cities. Nor does this kind of trade help backward economies develop. You can’t replace imports from an economy that’s much more advanced than you are: the gulf is too great.
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
HALEY: Tha . . . uh . . . gratitude to you. I thi . . . uh, I believe . . . that rising threats to peace around the globe are the most important issue. Countries li . . . countries such as Iran and . . . and . . . such as that place with Pyongyang . . . are threatening US allies. When I was UN ambassador, I learned to stand up to dangerous tyrants such as Ayatollah . . . such as the Ayatollah . . . and Vladimir Putin. And . . . that one guy in . . . in the place with Pyongyang. We need to stand together with US allies such as Israel, South . . . that place with Seoul . . . and most recently U . . . Um, our allies such as U . . . such as that place with . . . f—k.
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
39: Claim (h/t @NiohBerg, @eigenrobot): “Islam is dying in Iran”
Inline links: “Islam is dying in Iran”
Iranians in the comments chiming in to say this matches their experience. Also, notice the 7.7% Zoroastrian! Official Iranian numbers say there are about 25K Zoroastrians in Iran, but this suggests more like 7 million! This Wiki article suggests that the 25K are ancestral Zoroastrians, and the other 6.975 million are people who are “expressing Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith”.
Inline links: about 25K Zoroastrians in Iran, This Wiki article
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
38: Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense. I appreciated this post, because I also remember reading stuff c. 2010 and getting the impression that all the smart people knew missile defense couldn’t work; defense contractors bamboozled uneducated voters and cynical Congressmen to get free money for their vaporware. But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed it worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?
Inline links: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense
Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source. But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
Inline links: see here
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
November 05, 2024 · Original source
Iranian nukes more likely under Trump (49.5%) than Harris (45%)
Iranian nukes more likely under Trump (49.5%) than Harris (45%) All of these involve foreign policy going worse under Trump than Harris. Is this unfair? Even Trump’s supporters would agree he is less interested in funding Ukrainian resistance than Harris; Metaculus’ numbers here seem in line with this. Harris is more likely to continue deals where Iran gets sanctions relief / money in exchange for not going nuclear. Whether or not you agree with Trump that those deals are extortionary and unfair, it makes sense that Iran is more likely to go nuclear if those deals are discontinued. But this is also a small effect and could be noise. The Taiwan numbers are the least convincing, but seem to be based off of arguments like the ones here: Trump has said that Taiwan should “pay for” defense, and generally been skeptical of foreign entanglements. And here’s Manifold’s version of the same thing: Polymarket’s Wild Ride On October 14th, Polymarket gave Donald Trump 54% odds of winning, compared to Nate Silver’s 49% and Metaculus’ 45%. Whatever, everyone knows Polymarket has a small right-wing bias, and 5% isn’t too bad. Three days later, it had risen from 54% to 61%, despite no news and no change for Metaculus or Nate, bringing the Polymarket/Silver spread to an unprecedented 11%. What happened? This is the rare prediction market story where the answers are already in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: one really rich guy put $30 million on Trump (a recent followup by Jorge Velez claims it’s actually more like $75 million). Although he prefers to remain anonymous, reporters have talked to him and are able to reveal that he’s French, goes by “Theo”, is a former banker, and has no insider connections. He just a normal rich guy who really thinks Trump will win. This is exactly the sort of shock that prediction markets are supposed to be resilient against. Instead, the market stayed at 61% for days, swung even higher for a while, finally fell back down two weeks later, then went back up again. What happened? The simplest story would be insufficient liquidity: there just weren’t enough people to gather the $75 million it would take to bet against Theo. This is superficially plausible: Polymarket requires crypto and bans Americans, so the mispricing couldn’t be corrected until enough crypto-literate, American-election-following foreigners showed up to bet $75 million. That’s a tall order, and maybe it took two weeks. But the simple story seems wrong. Other real-money markets rose approximately in tandem with Polymarket. For example, Smarkets got to Trump 59% on 10/16, and peaked at 64% on 10/30. Kalshi followed a similar path. Both tracked Polymarket, not Nate Silver or Metaculus (neither of whom ever went above Trump 55% since Harris joined the race). So I think the remaining stories are: Theo made his giant bet on Polymarket. By coincidence, at the same time, bettors everywhere massively overcounted a few good polls for Trump and started a feeding frenzy on pro-Trump shares. This made all other markets gain, and Polymarket stay at its Theo-caused peak, until a few bad polls for Trump brought everyone back to reality last week.
Inline links: here, here’s, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ubU7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F709cc4a2-d203-424d-a6fb-a796d1ad2cdb_949x547.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!i5yn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc272d35b-10d7-4580-9757-05dd258e69d3_741x443.png, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, followup, Smarkets, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8twW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25ccd651-3404-446a-a7cb-5747af316038_1180x315.png
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
April 15, 2025 · Original source
Balanced: Systems can fail for many reasons. Sometimes it’s just a hard problem with tradeoffs. Sometimes it’s been perverted from its original goal by special interests. Sometimes it’s some third thing. Usually it’s a combination of all of these. You can’t know for sure until you look at it closely. …then I think the people who use the phrase want to imagine that they’re pushing people from Naive to Balanced. But I think the last person to hold the Naive perspective died sometime in the 1980s, and in real life POSIWID is mostly used to push people from the Balanced to the Paranoid perspective without actually looking at the system involved or arguing the case. And second, the explanation above is just the most popular of about a half-dozen different exegeses that commenters offered. So if you do want to communicate the thing I suggested above - which, reminder, is: If a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding …I think you should just say that, instead of the confusing version that half of your audience will misinterpret, and which incorrectly implies that this always happens. When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge. Hopefully this will become clearer as I answer your comments one by one, starting with: Charles Lehman writes (X): The actually useful insight from POSIWID is the negative corollary: there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." This was the original, less-catchy form, but it seems exactly the same to me, and equally wrong. For example, Iran’s intelligence agency consistently fails to prevent Israel from infiltrating and attacking their nuclear program. But it’s very useful to claim that their purpose is to prevent this! If we both try to predict the behavior of Iranian intelligence, and I’m allowed to use the hypothesis “their purpose is preventing Israeli infiltration”, and you’re not allowed to use that hypothesis, I will consistently outpredict you. For example, I’ll be expecting them to interview security staff to see which ones are Israeli spies, try to intercept Israeli communications, and do other espionage activities, and you’ll still be stuck wondering whether they might take up gardening or ballet dancing. The clear, natural language expression of this useful hypothesis is “the purpose of Iran’s intelligence forces is to prevent Israeli infiltration, but they usually fail”. This clear, natural language expression is great and tells you everything that you need to know. POSIWID (or its inverse) adds nothing except an attempt to ban this excellent and communicative expressive technology, in favor of some other vague meaning of “purpose” which can’t hang together and which nobody can really explain. Ersatz writes: “I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”. This is just diluting the word “purpose” into incoherence. I think it’s useful linguistic technology to be able to say “The New York bus system both transports people from place to place, and emits lots of carbon dioxide. Its purpose is the transportation, and the carbon dioxide is an unfortunate side effect”. If the goal of POSIWID is to insist that no, the transportation and the CO2 emissions are equally purposeful, or that we’re not allowed to talk about that question, then it sabotages our ability to communicate clearly, for no apparent gain. Consider the New York carbon dioxide system, a hypothetical government department dedicated to emitting as much carbon dioxide as possible (why? to own the libs, of course!) Sometimes people drive motorcycles along its vast network of CO2 pipes, allowing them to travel from place to place. Is this exactly the same as the New York bus system? No? Why not? A natural answer would be “Because the bus system is aimed at transportation, but emits some CO2 as a minor side effect, and the CO2 system is aimed at emission, but facilitates transport as a minor side effect.” If your objection is going to be that instead of considering purpose, you should restrict yourself to saying that one transports more people than it emits CO2, and the other emits more CO2 than it helps transport people, you’ve now legislated that we must list exactly how many people the New York bus system transports, and how much carbon dioxide it emits, and how many ants it crushes, etc, every time we talk about it. But most people who talk about the bus system don’t know these statistics, and don’t have to. It’s sufficient (and linguistically convenient) to say “Its purpose is transportation, not CO2 emission or ant-crushing. Andrew Pearson writes: The steelman of the phrase, which might be what Stafford Beer had in mind when he coined the phrase, is that in large complex organisations it's very hard for individual workers to see a link between what they do and the stated purpose of the organisation - people just get on and do what they're told, and orient themselves more towards "doing what they're already doing, just more effectively" than towards "fulfilling the stated purpose of the organisation". I don’t think this is a great steelman. True, the average employee’s actions don’t obviously connect to the organization’s stated purpose. But the average employee’s actions also don’t obviously connect to what the organization does. If the stated purpose of the US military is to protect America, and what it does is bomb Middle Eastern weddings, both of those are equally remote from the day-to-day life of some low-level employee who just counts the number of screws in a warehouse. Aashish Reddy writes: I think POSIWID is best applied to bureaucracies or large structures where the reason bad outcomes occur is not because of difficult battles with reality (like government or hospitals or the Ukrainian military), but because of the way incentives are set up in the system. If someone said, “the purpose of the Civil Service is to drive through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change!”, that would clearly be absurd. That may be their goal, or how they see themselves; but the purpose of the system is not defined by either of those things. If it was, they wouldn’t incentivise caution and slowness. Whether that’s good or not, the purpose of the Civil Service is best approximated by what it does! I want to pay more attention to the word “goal” in the second sentence of the second paragraph: “[Driving innovative change] may be their goal, or how they see themselves.” It sounds like Aashish think it’s useful to use the word “goal” to discuss what a system is trying to do, separately from what it does or doesn’t accomplish. I agree! I just think “purpose” is a synonym for goal. If you use POSIWID, you have to posit some kind of weird new ontology where “purpose” means the opposite of “goal”. If you don’t use POSIWID, you can just keep the words “purpose” and “goal” having their regular everyday meaning, and describe this state of affairs with phrases like “The goal/purpose of the Civil Service is to deliver rapid change, but due to perverse incentives, its actual effect is to prevent change.” Kay writes: For example, the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour. These systems seem not to be changed, while they ostensibly truly could be. So to me this seems that the system may be working "to purpose" for the actors who want it to work that way. This is interesting because Kay is using a left-wing example: “The criminal justice system imprisons too many people of color, so its purpose is to oppress black people”. But one of the tweets in my original post was close to its right-wing opposite: “The criminal justice system consistently lets criminals off with a slap on the wrist, so its purpose is to get people raped and murdered.” As long as people are thinking in these terms, they’re going to be prey for whichever conspiracy theory best suits their pre-existing prejudices. I think both of these are worse than the Balanced View version: Some people care a lot about keeping people safe from crime, but other people care a lot about the human rights of suspects and convicts. The incarceration rate is a balance between these two forces, with some lesser contribution from sinister forces like private prison owners who want to increase incarceration to line their pockets. This has the advantage of being obviously true (there are pro-tough-on-crime activist groups and pro-soft-on-crime activist groups, they both do effective activism for their chosen cause, and the exact incarceration rate depends on which ones are in the ascendant and have the ear of politicians), and not being a conspiracy theory that forces you to believe that the government is a monolithic entity that really wants people to be raped and murdered. NegatingSilence writes: Come on, obviously "The Purpose of a System is What it Does" is meant to draw your attention to the incentives in cases where something different is happening than is supposed to be happening. My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result. I don’t know what country this person is in. But in my country, housing prices are high because of a combination of all of the following: Citizens want to preserve “neighborhood character”: they currently live in a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, they want it to remain a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, and they worry that building new homes threatens that status.
Inline links: writes (X), writes, writes, writes, writes
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
September 11, 2025 · Original source
First, their bad-faith critics - of whom they have many - take great delight in over-emphasizing the “bomb rogue states” part of this plan. “Yudkowsky thinks we should start nuclear wars to destroy data centers!” I mean, that’s not exactly his plan, any more than it’s anyone’s plan to start World War III to destroy Iranian centrifuges, but the standard international arms control playbook says you have to at least credibly bluff that you’re willing to do this in a worst-case scenario. If it were me, I would defuse these attacks by summarizing this part as “yeah, we’ll follow the standard international arms control playbook, playbooks say lots of things, you can read it if you’re interested” and then moving on. But in keeping with their usual policy of brutal honesty and leaning into their own extremism, they make the strikes-against-rogue-states section unmissable.
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
A rumour was spread that an old, pious lady from the holy city of Qom found a hair of the prophet in her Koran. On the same evening she had an epiphany from which she learned that the devout believer would see the face of Ayatollah Khomeini during the next full moon. It is said that the story was spread all over Iran in less than a day. At the awaited day of 27 November [1978], millions of people received the moon with cheers, actually recognized the image of Ayatollah Khomeini and shouted “āllāhu akbar” from the rooftops of their houses – which became an established sign of political disobedience in the subsequent days and weeks. The emotional change transported through this mass phenomenon was exceptional: The people of Iran “experienced a festive moment that sharply contrasted with the rest of that bleak bitterly cold and bloody autumn. Tears of joy were shed and huge quantities of sweets and fruits were consumed as millions of people jumped for joy, shouting ‘I’ve seen the Imam in the moon.’”
Regrettably, it cannot easily be ascertained how or whether at all Khomeini responded to this episode soon after it occurred; due to the general strike in Iran, no public discourses can be found in the newspapers. However, the belief that Khomeini’s face could be seen in the moon and “that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see” it became so widely held that it demanded response at least two months later when history repeated itself. On 13 January, just when the first rumours of the Shah’s imminent abscondence and the Ayatollah’s return to Iran were being spread by the newspapers, the “people spoke of an Islamic government starting the following day, and that evening people were in the streets, ecstatic at what they saw: Khomeini’s face appearing on the moon”. Allegedly, this time some people in the province of Hamadan decided to sacrifice a sheep in order to celebrate this amazing phenomenon.
If we acknowledge Fatima as a plausible miracle, worthy of our attention, should we be equally charitable to Moon-Khomeini? I can’t actually bring myself to take it seriously - but why not? Superficially, it’s very similar: the pious humble mystic predicting a celestial phenomenon on a certain day, the hordes of ecstatic believers, the secular newspapers admitting their defeat. There’s less documentation, but that’s to be expected - many newspapers were on strike, Iran has less cultural cross-pollination with the West, and there was no Formigao / de Marchi figure to obsessively chronicle and publicize everything.
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
I don’t feel revolutionized. Why not? The problem isn’t that the prediction markets are bad. There’s been a lot of noise about insider trading and disputed resolutions. But insider trading should only increase accuracy - it’s bad for traders, but good for information-seekers - and my impression is that the disputed resolutions were handled as well as possible. When I say I don’t feel revolutionized, it’s not because I don’t believe it when it says there’s a 20% chance Khameini will be out before the end of the month. The several thousand people who have invested $6 million in that question have probably converged upon the most accurate probability possible with existing knowledge, just the way prediction markets should. I actually like this. Everyone is talking about the protests in Iran, and it’s hard to gauge their importance, and knowing that there’s a 20% chance Khameini is removed by February really does help to place them in context. The missing link seems to be between “it’s now possible to place global events in probabilistic context → society revolutionized”. Here are some possibilities: Maybe people just haven’t caught on yet? Most news sources still don’t cite prediction markets, even when many people would care about their outcome. For example, the Khameini market hasn’t gotten mentioned in articles about the Iran protests, even though “will these protests succeed in toppling the regime?” is the obvious first question any reader would ask. Maybe the problem is that probabilities don’t matter? Maybe there’s some State Department official who would change plans slightly over a 20% vs. 40% chance of Khameini departure, or an Iranian official for whom that would mean the difference between loyalty and defection, and these people are benefiting slightly, but not enough that society feels revolutionized. Maybe society has been low-key revolutionized and we haven’t noticed? Very optimistically, maybe there aren’t as many “obviously the protests will work, only a defeatist doomer traitor would say they have any chance of failing!” “no, obviously the protests will fail, you’re a neoliberal shill if you think they could work” takes as there used to be. Maybe everyone has converged to a unified assessment of probabilistic knowledge, and we’re all better off as a result. Maybe Polymarket and Kalshi don’t have the right questions. Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like: Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?
If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?
Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
A more prosaic explanation is that, according to this site, Staten Island Chuck is almost a broken clock, predicting spring on 25/31 occasions. If early springs are more common than long winters on Staten Island, that fully explains the phenomenon. It could equally well explain Mojave Max, the legendary anti-oracular tortoise of Las Vegas, who has managed a 20% success rate over decades on what ought to be a coin flip - he won’t stop predicting long winter, and is nearly always wrong. Iran Warcasting Speaking of Groundhog Day, we’re bombing the Middle East again. Here’s what the markets have to say:
Inline links: this site, Mojave Max
Speaking of Groundhog Day, we’re bombing the Middle East again. Here’s what the markets have to say: These two well-behaved markets agree on a somewhat less than 50-50 chance that the current round of airstrikes topple the Iranian regime.
Inline links: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-iranian-regime-fall-by-june-30
These two well-behaved markets agree on a somewhat less than 50-50 chance that the current round of airstrikes topple the Iranian regime.
Support Your Local Collaborator
March 18, 2026 · Original source
I worry about this less than some people, because voters are so uninformed and polarized that policy is almost irrelevant to their decisions. Two weeks in, Trump’s war on Iran has yet to affect his approval rating. If voters aren’t moved by Iran, how likely are they to be influenced by that flu vaccine that got blocked? If it had stayed blocked, would most Americans have heard about it? Would they have formed opinions (“this move was contrary to the best available science, and so must have been politically motivated”)? Would they remember it on Election Day? (there’s substantial evidence that voters don’t punish candidates even for things they care about, like gas price increases, if they happen too far from the election). The vaccine probably won’t be available until after 2028, so it’s not even like Americans will have less flu and subconsciously associate their good health with this administration. It’s just a total political non-starter - but also, getting it right could save tens of thousands of lives.
Inline links: has yet to affect his approval rating
Indonesia16 mentions across 16 issues

Indonesia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 16 times across 16 issues between May 04, 2021 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "ordinary people who suffer, starve, and even die in the course of capitalist crises (examine Indonesia or Argentina)"; "In Indonesia a fledgling labour movement of great potential importance"; "A few will join the US as “masters of the chaos,” as they have favorable geographies". It most often appears alongside Japan, India, Singapore.

Article page
Indonesia
Mention count
16
Issue count
16
First seen
May 04, 2021
Last seen
February 05, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
Previous phases of capitalist history—one thinks of 1873 or the 1920s—when a similarly stark choice arose, do not augur well. The upper classes, insisting on the sacrosanct nature of their property rights, preferred to crash the system rather than surrender any of their privileges and power. In so doing they were not oblivious of their own interest, for if they position themselves aright they can, like good bankruptcy lawyers, profit from a collapse while the rest of us are caught most horribly in the deluge. A few of them may get caught and end up jumping out of Wall Street windows, but that is not the norm. The only fear they have is of political movements that threaten them with expropriation or revolutionary violence. While they can hope that the sophisticated military apparatus they now possess (thanks to the military industrial complex) will protect their wealth and power, the failure of that apparatus to easily pacify Iraq on the ground should give them pause. But ruling classes rarely, if ever, voluntarily surrender any of their power and I see no reason to believe they will do so this time. Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself. While this may sound a counter-revolutionary conclusion to those on the far left, it is not without a strong element of self-interest either, because it is ordinary people who suffer, starve, and even die in the course of capitalist crises (examine Indonesia or Argentina) rather than the upper classes. If the preferred policy of ruling elites is après moi le déluge, then the deluge largely engulfs the powerless and the unsuspecting while elites have well-prepared arks in which they can, at least for a time, survive quite well.
Traditional worker-based movements are by no means dead even in the advanced capitalist countries where they have been much weakened by the neoliberal onslaught on their power. In South Korea and South Africa vigorous labour movements arose during the 1980s and in much of Latin America working-class parties are flourishing if not in power. In Indonesia a fledgling labour movement of great potential importance is struggling to be heard. The potential for labour unrest in China is immense though unpredictable. And it is not clear either that the mass of the working people in the US, who have over this last generation often willingly voted against their own material interests for reasons of cultural nationalism, religion, and moral values, will for ever stay locked into such a politics by the machinations of Republicans and Democrats alike. Given the volatility, there is no reason to rule out the resurgence of popular social democratic or even populist anti-neoliberal politics within the US in future years.
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
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).
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
But even though he puts it excruciatingly kindly, Studwell is kind of accusing the global economic establishment of impoverishing several dozen major countries. He goes through the recent history of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and shows how in each case, the global economic establishment (especially the IMF and World Bank) convinced them not to protect infant industries, not to institute capital controls, and not to stress manufacturing too much. Then each of those countries suffered financial crises and their development stagnated. It really is striking how the countries that did the best were the ones that gave the world establishment the middle finger (unless of course this is cherry-picking and there are lots of big countries that followed IMF advice and did great). To whatever degree this is true, it belongs on the list of science failures that should keep us up at night, alongside all those people saying not to wear masks for COVID. Except that the COVID mistake lasted a few months and killed a 5-6 digit number of people, and the IMF advice lasted decades and kept hundreds of millions in poverty.
Inline links: science failures
South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda, even if the farce that is the Philippine reform programme continues. Given this, can the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand do anything else to improve their economic performance? Most obviously they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work as a vehicle for effective industrial policy. There is no reason why the four core economies of ASEAN (and indeed Vietnam, the important economy omitted from this book) could not run an effective manufacturing infant industry policy in what is a market of 500 million people. But there is no sign of this happening. Rather than raising barriers and promoting exports to nurture local manufacturing enterprise, ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements with industrially more developed states, including China. There is very little cohesion, or substantive dialogue, between the political leaders of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. And the considerable influence of the offshore financial centre of Singapore in ASEAN is developmentally deeply unhelpful. It is as if Switzerland or Monaco had been granted a seat at the table when post-war European industrial policy was being planned in the 1950s. South-east Asia remains a beacon for what not to do if you want economic transformation. Allow landlordism and scale farming despite the presence of vast numbers of underemployed peasants capable of growing more. Do not worry too much about export-oriented manufacturing, which can happily be undertaken by multinational enterprises. Leave entrepreneurs to their own devices. And proceed quickly to deregulated banking, stock markets and international capital flows, the true symbols of a modern state. That is how its politicians constructed the south-east Asian region’s relative failure.
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
Because China, Vietnam, and Laos started so late, they don’t look great on the 1950 plot. They look a lot better on the 1990 plot, and it seems justified putting them in a separate “winner” category compared to “losers" Philippines/Indonesia/Malaysia/etc (South Korea, Taiwan, etc are already too rich to be able to grow fast by this point). If you switch the start date to 2005, then a lot of the gap closes.
I should add that including Laos and Vietnam in the same category as Studwell’s other “winners” is my own inference, and not really mentioned in the book, so Studwell would be entirely within his rights saying that China, South Korea, Taiwan, etc had already done well, and Malaysia/Indonesia etc haven’t caught up with them, and nothing that’s happened since 2005 changes that.
Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, etc. are in the 85-90 range.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
JAKARTA, INDONESIA (RSVP) Contact: Jaticarta, goomilar[dot]setya[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: Arborea Café, Senayan, DKI Jakarta Coordinates: https://w3w.co/uptake.harmony.conclude
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/uptake.harmony.conclude
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
BANDUNG, INDONESIA Contact: Fawwaz (fawwazanvi@gmail.com) Date: May 14 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P593JR6+682 Location: JCO Reserve - Merdeka, Jl. Merdeka No.54, Babakan Ciamis, Kec. Sumur Bandung, Kota Bandung, Jawa Barat 40117 Group info: We're very excited to organize a meetup for local rat-adjacent people here, there's already been a loosely affiliated student study group at Bandung Institute of Technology, and we've been in contact with organizers in Jakarta too.
CANGGU, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: Steven (steven@irurueta.net) Date: May 15 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P3Q84WP+F3 Location: Bwork Bali - Jl. Nelayan No.9C, Canggu, Kec. Kuta Utara, Kabupaten Badung, Bali 80361, Indonesia
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P3Q84WP+F3
JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Jati (indonesiarationalist@gmail.com) Date: May 8 Time: 3:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58RR8G+J4Q Location: Kawisari Cafe & Eatery in Menteng, Central Jakarta. The nearest train station is Gondangdia (15 minutes walk or just take an online moto-taxi). Feel free to bring whatever you think could be fun or exciting! The organizer will be there from 15.00 WIB. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or send an E-mail to the above address. Group info: Jakarta has a rationality-adjacent group that meets occasionally, so some members of that group will come to this ACX meetup.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58RR8G+J4Q
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)
An account by a member of the British 23rd Indian Division—known as “The Fighting Cock” for the insignia on the uniforms of the men within it—shows how the colonized turned the colonizers’ ideals against them. During the war, the Japanese had seized control of Indonesia from the Dutch. When the Japanese surrendered in early September 1945, the Fighting Cock went to Java to accept a transfer of authority to Allied forces. In Singapore, en route to Java, an advance party met a “cheerful Dutchman who assumed that he and his countrymen were coming back to the peaceful reoccupation of their Empire.” But the Indonesians had a different idea. To greet the returning imperialists, they covered carriages and vehicles with graffiti declaring: “Atlantic Charter means freedom from Dutch Imperialism.” “Indonesia for Indonesians.” And, simply, “Merdeka”—Freedom. The armed resistance did not abate until the United Nations recognized the country’s independence in 1949.
Indonesia was not alone. With the war won, it was difficult to square the ideals for which the Allies had fought with the realities of empire. (Chapter 14)
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: The Geography Of Madness
February 22, 2023 · Original source
She reminded me that yesterday she was unusually grumpy, so much so that she had apologized to me for it and tried to come up with explanations - and then later yesterday she had her period. Meanwhile, Bures’ counterargument is - what? That it sounds kind of sexist to accuse female hormones of making women overly emotional? Hasn’t he ever heard of stereotype accuracy? That people asked their doctors to be treated for it more often after they knew it was considered a medical condition, and was treatable? That seems to have a much simpler explanation! That there are no biomarkers? There are inconsistent biomarkers that work sometimes but not other times, just like for schizophrenia, epilepsy, cancer, and half the other conditions in medicine. That these conditions don’t occur in most cultures? From here: A World Health Organization (WHO) study on menstruation (1981) surveyed 5,322 women from Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. . . The majority of women in all cultures report some premenstrual physical discomfort in addition to negative mood changes, however fewer women report mood change than physical change. The main cross-cultural difference was in the prevalence of specific symptoms. Immigrants to the United States report more PMDD the longer they’re here? True (source), but it’s a matter of degree, and seems more true of the PMDD diagnosis than specific symptoms. The diagnosis requires impairment, which is subjective. I imagine an immigrant from a culture where mental disorders are unthinkable - something that only happens to a few psychos in asylums - and where you work 12-hour days in sweatshops. Someone asks her “hey, has this mental disorder ever prevented you from working?”, and she says no, because obviously you grit your teeth and work through the symptoms. And I imagine an American seeing the same question and saying “Yeah, I did decide I had to take a couple of sick days because of that.” I’m not saying this definitely happened, just that it’s a possibility. Meanwhile, this entire area of study is a mess. The “PMDD is culture-bound” hypothesis was originally invented by feminist scholars trying to argue that the diagnosis was a sexist attempt to pathologize women as overemotional and untrustworthy (this is also where Bures got his “it’s just hysteria by a different name” idea). See for example here and here, the second of which says that “the feminist argument is that if women are angry/distressed, it is for good reason, not due to pathology”. Bures somehow swallowed and repeated this, and then some feminists on Vox wrote an article attacking him as a “male writer” who was denying women’s lived experiences of PMS and stereotyping them as stupid and gullible. Neither side has an argument beyond “I can think of a reason it would be sexist for people to disagree with me” and neither side will acknowledge that the other side is also feminists basing their argument entirely on how it would be sexist to disagree with them. Everything in every area of social science has been like this for at least the past twenty years. But also, this highlights the difficulties with declaring something culture-bound. How do you know if something’s culture-bound, vs. people don’t notice it or mention it if they don’t have a name for it? How do you know if something’s culture-bound vs. some cultures consider it too embarrassing or taboo to think about? How do you know if something’s culture-bound, vs. people will go to doctors about it if they think doctors can treat it, and otherwise they won’t? I’ll discuss these questions more later, but I want to finish Bures’ argument. He gestures at a few other possible candidates for culture-bound mental disorders, including repetitive strain injury and chronic pain. But he quickly moves on to a long section that tries to establish the reality of “voodoo death”, ie the thing where if you believe you are going to die hard enough, you actually die. I think most arguments for voodoo death are pretty bad, and I didn’t find Bures’ convincing. But bonus points for referencing a study claiming that chronically stressed people only die at higher rates if they believe chronic stress is bad for them, and if not then they don’t (this is not really how I interpret the abstract, but I haven’t looked closely) Is it weird to stay on the crazy train long enough to agree that cultural effects are strong enough to make you think witches are stealing your penis, and then get off it once people start talking about voodoo death? I think no - these are very different situations. Believing in koro can make you hallucinate that your penis is shrunken or gone, but no belief, however strong, can (directly) remove your penis itself. Culture → beliefs is fine; culture → reality is a step I’m not willing to take. V. Since I rejected Bures’ PMDD example, I want to digress to what I think is a stronger argument: anorexia, which Ethan Watters discusses in his book Crazy Like Us. Anorexia was mostly unknown in the West, until becoming “trendy” in the mid-1800s. During that period, doctors reported high prevalence of anorexia among “hysterics”, but the fad ended after about ten or twenty years, and it went back to being basically unknown. In 1983, famous singer Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, thrusting it back into the national news, and suddenly lots of people (in the West) were anorexic again. Meanwhile, foreign doctors who trained in the West went back to their home countries, searched far and wide for it, and found almost nothing. The few cases they did see didn’t resemble the typical Western version at all - for example, one Hong Kong psychiatrist was able to find a woman who refused to eat out of grief when a boyfriend left her, but she didn’t think she was fat, or feel any cultural pressure to be thinner. The absence of anorexia abroad was especially surprising since anorexics tend to end up in the hospital with extremely noticeable malnutrition that doesn’t really mimic anything else. It’s not really possible to hide severe anorexia the way you can hide severe depression. In 1994, Hong Kong got its own Karen Carpenter - a young girl died of anorexia, setting off a national panic and many public awareness campaigns. Near-instantly, anorexia rates shot up to the same level as the West, with the appropriate number of people presenting to hospital ERs with severe malnutrition. This story raises a lot of questions. For example: where did the first anorexics (Karen Carpenter, the girl in Hong Kong) come from? Why anorexia and not something else? And how come knowing about anorexia makes it spread so quickly? VI. Past this point I’m using this review to discuss my own thoughts, not Bures’ or Watters’. “Culture-bound” is less all-or-nothing than you’d think. Look hard enough, and you’ll find people having “culture-bound syndromes” from cultures they’ve never heard of. Ntouros et al in Thessaloniki describe “koro-like symptoms in two Greek men”. One, a paranoid schizophrenic: . . . reported for the first time a sensation that his penis retracts into the abdomen and a fear that it will subsequently be lost. This would be accompanied by anxiety and sadness pertaining only to the loss itself. He would then proceed to search manually for his penis and masturbate. No pleasure was gained by masturbation, but the anxiety would be lifted. Romero et al describe a case of koro in "an intellectually disabled Caucasian patient" in Spain. They write that "although it is widely regarded as an epidemic in South-east Asia, there are some isolated cases in other cultures as well." Wilson and Agin describe a 29 year old white male from New York, "not exposed to the Chinese culture”, who went to the doctor with a five month history of worrying that his genitals were retracting into his body: Sometimes, he would manually reaffirm the presence of his genitals. Occasionally he would, in private, remove his garments and visually confirm the presence of his genitals. On one occasion, while taking the train home from work, he experienced an acute exacerbation of these symptoms. His pain increased from 3/10 to 10/10, and he felt as if his genitals had fully retracted within his belly. Upon reaching his hometown, he immediately went to the local hospital emergency room where examinations for inguinal hernia, urinary tract infection, proctitis, prostatitis, and testicular disorders proved negative. He improved significantly on the anti-anxiety medication desipramine. Chowdhury surveys the evidence on koro and divides the condition into two types: culture-bound and non-culture-bound. The culture-bound type usually goes in large epidemics, hundreds to thousands of people, in koro-believing parts of Africa and Asia; the victims were usually previously psychologically normal. The non-culture-bound type hits a few scattered individuals, is not contagious, and can happen anywhere - Greece, Spain, America. Some patients are psychologically normal, but there are a disproportionate number of schizophrenics, drug users, brain damage victims, and other previously-mentally-ill people. Other culture-bound illnesses seem to be like this too. Running amok has been big in Malaysia for 300 years. The Columbine shooters seem to have been autocthonous American cases, equivalent to that one New Yorker who got koro - before their fame inscribed amok onto the US collective consciousness the same way Karen Carpenter’s inscribed anorexia. Japan’s jikoshu-kyofu affects occasional victims in the US under the name olfactory reference syndrome. Watters admits there were a tiny handful of unusual anorexia cases in Hong Kong before Westernization. And even that Indian there’s-a-lizard-in-my-skin condition differs only in species from delusional parasitosis. Delusional parasitosis - the false belief that you are infested with parasites and can feel them crawling in your skin - is actually an especially interesting case. Two groups are disproportionately represented among patients: menopausal women and cocaine addicts. Relatedly, two biological conditions that can sometimes cause weird skin sensations that feel like crawling insects are . . . menopause and cocaine use. So there’s no mystery here. But, also represented among delusional parasitosis patients are the roommates and family members of these people. The index case hallucinates insects for a well-understood biological reason; their close contacts hallucinate insects through social contagion. So a unified theory of these conditions might be: Some people have the condition for a normal biological or psychiatric reason. For example, someone might believe a lizard is crawling under their skin because they use cocaine, which causes hallucinatory crawling sensations. Or someone might believe their penis is missing because they’re schizophrenic, which makes them naturally hallucination-prone.
Inline links: stereotype accuracy, inconsistent biomarkers that work sometimes but not other times, here, source, here, here, and then some feminists on Vox wrote an article, chronic pain, are pretty bad, a study, Ethan Watters discusses in his book, Ntouros et al, Romero et al, Wilson and Agin, surveys the evidence, olfactory reference syndrome, delusional parasitosis
Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
It still remains the case that if you can find a crooked geologist, and if your fake mine is remote enough to make inspections unfeasible, you can get away with a lot. As recently as 1997, a more or less valueless hole in the ground in Indonesia was valued by Canadian investors at $12 billion, on the basis of reports which seemed to suggest that it was the largest gold discovery in the history of the world.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB Contact Info: e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Versova Social, Mumbai. We have arranged to use the co-working space at Versova Social and will be on the 2nd floor. Link: goo.gl/maps/1RLjZwTB2bfaQVmN6 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+J5 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email, so we can arrange for enough food and space. LW Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Yj9MHguuKHaznp4bo/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-1. Indonesia JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Fawwaz Contact Info: fawwazanvi[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 10th, 3:00 PM Location: Workshop Space, Cecemuwe Cafe and Space - Senayan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8 Notes: Please RSVP on my twitter account -- @fawwazanvilen -- so I have an idea of how many are coming.
Inline links: goo.gl/maps/1RLjZwTB2bfaQVmN6, https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+J5, https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Yj9MHguuKHaznp4bo/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-1, https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8
JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Fawwaz Contact Info: fawwazanvi[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 10th, 3:00 PM Location: Workshop Space, Cecemuwe Cafe and Space - Senayan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8 Notes: Please RSVP on my twitter account -- @fawwazanvilen -- so I have an idea of how many are coming.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.
MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB Contact Info: e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14th, 10:15 AM Location: Versova Social, Juhu Versova Link Rd, Gharkul Society, Bharat Nagar, Versova, Andheri West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400061, India Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+H5 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4aAkHFJikMrtyhHZn/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024 Group Link: LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4 Email List:https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong and join our google group: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about Indonesia JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Jati (twitter @samsarigged) Contact Info: Martius[dot]surya[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 21, 02:00 PM Location: Crematology X Senopati (South Jakarta) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QR77+RG Group Link: There used to be one but it is now inactive. Additional Notes: Please email me at martius.surya[at]gmail[dot]com, but it is also fine if you come unannounced!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RGC+H5, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4aAkHFJikMrtyhHZn/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4, https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about, https://plus.codes/6P58QR77+RG
JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Jati (twitter @samsarigged) Contact Info: Martius[dot]surya[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 21, 02:00 PM Location: Crematology X Senopati (South Jakarta) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QR77+RG Group Link: There used to be one but it is now inactive. Additional Notes: Please email me at martius.surya[at]gmail[dot]com, but it is also fine if you come unannounced!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58QR77+RG
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Chetan Kharbanda Contact Info: chetan[dot]kharbanda2[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 11:00 AM Location: Doolally Taproom - Andheri. https://maps.app.goo.gl/gf8U9AgUtbe892678?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RPM+C6 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4 Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people to expect for the seating at the venue Indonesia JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Aud Contact Info: helloaud2000[at]gmail[do t]com Time: Sunday, September 22nd, 02:00 PM Location: First Crack Coffee Jl. Bumi https://maps.app.goo.gl/1VBV9GmM51HxLEnL7 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7R+42 Notes: Please RSVP to my email so I know how many people to expect. Thanks!
Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gf8U9AgUtbe892678?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy, https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RPM+C6, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/MsTdZ4KpJmHFmLrt4, https://maps.app.goo.gl/1VBV9GmM51HxLEnL7, https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7R+42
Contact: Aud Contact Info: helloaud2000[at]gmail[do t]com Time: Sunday, September 22nd, 02:00 PM Location: First Crack Coffee Jl. Bumi https://maps.app.goo.gl/1VBV9GmM51HxLEnL7 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7R+42 Notes: Please RSVP to my email so I know how many people to expect. Thanks! UBUD, INDONESIA Contact: River Contact Info: acx[dot]k55uc[at]passinbox[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 12th, 11:00 AM Location: Kafe Upstairs Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P3QF7P7+CM Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HydwIF [ignore this part] 3u7Ve0nfpbc9EtnS
Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1VBV9GmM51HxLEnL7, https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7R+42, https://plus.codes/6P3QF7P7+CM
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Suryansh Tyagi Contact Info: suryanshtyagiphone[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 5:00 PM Location: Spaced out Cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JWVG6X6+QP Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jph [remove this bit] 8xQOprnK1mA7DBKkWOS Notes: Please RSVP on +919997299972. Feel free to bring friends. Indonesia JAKARTA Contact: Aud Contact Info: helloaud2000[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 20th, 2:00 PM Location: JJ Royal Cafe Menteng Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58RR3G+X4 Notes: Please RSVP to my email so I know how many people to expect. Thanks!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7JWVG6X6+QP, https://plus.codes/6P58RR3G+X4
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Suryansh Tyagi Contact Info: suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 5, 4:30 PM Location: Spaced Out Cafe, Shahpur Jat Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JWVG6X6+QP Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jph8xQO [remove this bit] prnK1mA7DBKkWOS?mode=ems_copy_t Additional Notes: Please join the WhatsApp group or message me if you're not in it Indonesia JAKARTA PUSAT Contact: Fawwaz Contact Info: fawwazanvi[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 11th, 1:00 PM Location: NITRO COFFEE @ Nugra Santana Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 7-8, Karet Tengsin, Kecamatan Tanah Abang, Jakarta, Daerah Khusus Jakarta 10250Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QRRC+HF Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LsV [remove this bit] YGNILxze6nNexpSXDZC Notes: Please RSVP through email, or by joining our WhatsApp group (WhatsApp preferred)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58QRRC+HF
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
36: Indonesia has solved the conflict between density and single-family zoning by putting suburban neighborhoods on top of giant multi-story buildings (h/t @xathrya):
Inline links: @xathrya
Istanbul16 mentions across 16 issues

Istanbul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 16 times across 16 issues between March 18, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kasimpasa, an Istanbul slum"; "Erdogan for mayor of Istanbul"; "the leftist mayor of Istanbul bungled a strike by sanitation workers". It most often appears alongside Turkey, ACX, Budapest.

Article page
Istanbul
Mention count
16
Issue count
16
First seen
March 18, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The New Sultan
March 18, 2021 · Original source
Recep Tayyip Erdogan was born in 1954 in Kasimpasa, an Istanbul slum with the same kind cultural cachet in Turkey that Eight Mile Road or Compton has in the US - a place where you have to be tough to survive. His family were recent immigrants from Turkey's equivalent of the Bible Belt, and figured young Erdogan needed strong values if he was going to resist the temptations of the big city. They decided to send him to an Imam Hatip school, even though it meant throwing away his future.
Erbakan's Islamic Party rushed into a gap made by collapse and infighting among more established parties. When the generals had banned politics after the coup, brave resistance leaders in various parts of the political spectrum had started secret parties in defiance of their orders. When politics became legal again, the secret resistance parties refused to step back and let the pre-coup parties take over again, meaning that for a while there was a pre-coup center-left party vs. a secret resistance center left party, a pre-coup liberal party vs. a secret resistance liberal party, etc. The infighting weakened the traditional parties. The Islamists were almost the only ones left - and they nominated Erdogan for mayor of Istanbul.
His was a common-sense Islam, the same kind that "real" Turks cherished [...] He took photo opportunities at meyhanes - tavern-style Turkish restaurants where alcohol flows freely - and he even pulled publicity stunts by visiting Istanbul's legal brothels. Standing among the gobsmacked sex workers, he insisted that most of them would support the RP [his party] and its conservative mission, since it was the only party that would rescue them from their trade [...]
Open Thread 164
March 21, 2021 · Original source
6: Some good comments on the Erdogan post. Turkish ACXer Emrah D gives some commentary and corrections - Erdogan’s predecessor as Istanbul mayor was merely left-wing, not communist, and Imam Hatip schools seem less “stigmatized” if you just think of them as trade schools not intended to provide general education (plus 16 other excellent points). Fellow Turksih ACXer Fevzi P has some other thoughts, including that Ataturk didn’t really want democracy for Turkey (he modernized it, but it was his successors who extended this to democratization). Also:
Inline links: some commentary and corrections, some other thoughts
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#97: Start An EA Club At A Turkish University I am Berke, a philosophy major interested in Effective Altruism from Istanbul, Turkey. I am interested in EA since 2019, and currently I am a research volunteer at Kafessiz, an organization working to end the use battery cages for hens in Turkey. EA doesn’t have much presence neither in Istanbul nor the country in general. There are no EA clubs at colleges, and I intend to start the first one at my college. We plan to do seminar programmes (fellowships) similar to the ones in Oxford and increase EA outreach at both our college and in online Turkish language platforms. If we find enough people interested, we plan to start a fellowship program in one or two months and a few other things. If you’re interested you can contact me at berke.celik@boun.edu.tr . What would be achieved in the name of utility if you fund an EA Society at a college you've never heard of? For certain EA causes, there is a lot to be achieved in Turkey. For example, the number of hens in battery cages in Turkey is something around 100 million. Establishing a non-trival EA presence at my college would be good first step because it is the most selective college in the country. In Turkey you enter college via a central exam, and 70% of the 1000 people who scored highest in the exam chose to be here, and this is not a flex, I am just trying to say:If one wants Effective Altruist ideas to spread in a country of 80 million, or at least among the future Turkish elite, my college is a good place to start.
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: Berke (berkedubomont@gmail.com) Date: May 22 Time: 12:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V6+8R Location: We'll meet up at w.Bi Coffee, and go to Yıldız Parkı. Email me if you want to come, we might change the venue if it's too far away from you. Notes: Possible participants should definitely mail me, Istanbul is giant and if people say they live too far from the location I want to meet up at, we might choose a more reasonable location.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V6+8R
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
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
Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
1: New meetups have been registered in Canterbury, UK and Tallinn, Estonia. Meetups scheduled for the coming week include Los Angeles, Ottawa, Milano, Lisbon, Moscow, Edinburgh, Montreal, Waterloo, San Francisco, Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Auckland, Berlin, Denver, Istanbul, and many more! As always, check the meetups list for details.
Inline links: check the meetups list for details
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 4th, 12:00 PM Location: We meet in Kadıkoy at Kahve Dunyası at Yeni Iskele. Yeni Iskele is the seaport where we take ferry to get to Eminonu/Karakoy from Kadıkoy ( not to Besiktas). Please go upstairs, walk through the bookstore Istanbul Kitapcisi to meet me at the terrace. I will have a ACX MEETUP sign. If it rains, we meet inside the cafe, or under large cafe umbrellas. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VC+4R Notes: I hope we chat with coffee.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VC+4R
Open Thread 327
April 28, 2024 · Original source
1: More meetups this week, in Istanbul, Edinburgh, Manchester, Phoenix, Fort Meade, Brooklyn, Hanoi, and New Orleans. And Sao Paulo has been added to the list. More information, including times and dates, here.
Inline links: here
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Annalise Contact Info: annalisetarhan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 03:00 PM Location: We'll be meeting at the Shakespeare in Beach Park, on the patio. Look for a propped up notebook with ACX in big letters. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G8GVMMC+4VR ISTANBUL, TURKEY Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 02:00 PM Location: Kadikoy, Rıhtım, Yeni Iskele Upstairs, Istanbul Kitapcisi Kahve Dunyasi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F Notes: This time we organize this meeting together with AI Safety Istanbul Group. Everybody warmly welcomed.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G8GVMMC+4VR, https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 02:00 PM Location: Kadikoy, Rıhtım, Yeni Iskele Upstairs, Istanbul Kitapcisi Kahve Dunyasi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F Notes: This time we organize this meeting together with AI Safety Istanbul Group. Everybody warmly welcomed.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+4F
Open Thread 349
September 30, 2024 · Original source
2: Late addition to Meetups Everywhere: Moscow on October 6, see link for more. Other meetups coming up this week include Philadelphia, Austin, Istanbul, Canberra, Budapest, and Warsaw. 3: If you haven’t already, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest - voting closes Sunday, October 6. 4: And if you’re an ACX veteran, you might remember the winner of the very first book review contest - Lars Doucet’s review of Progress And Poverty, the book on Georgism. Since then, Lars has gone on to start a Georgism-inspired land valuation company, Valuebase, which has gotten investment from Sam Altman, Nat Friedman, and others. Now they’re recruiting paid interns, including: Technical interns: Ideal candidates have experience in programming, data science, machine learning, or AI, and are eager to work on real-world problems that scale across millions of properties.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest, Lars Doucet’s review of, Valuebase
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Annalise Contact Info: annalisetarhan[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: Beach Park, Shakespeare, on the patio - look for a propped up notebook with "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G8GVMMC+4VR ISTANBUL 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/8G8GVMMC+4VR, https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94
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
Open Thread 379
April 28, 2025 · Original source
1: ACX meetups this week in Istanbul, Belfast, Copenhagen, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Rome, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and LA. See the post for details.
Inline links: the post
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Erol Can Akbaba Contact Info: erolcan[period]akbaba[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Cafe Botanica Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GFJWV36+VW ISTANBUL (See Istanbul. It’s in Europe.)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GFJWV36+VW
(See Istanbul. It’s in Europe.)
(See Ankara. It’s in Asia & the Middle East.) ISTANBUL Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 3:00 PM Location: Kadıkoy Yeni Iskele Kahve Dunyası ( the ferry pier building that we take ferries from Kadıkoy to Eminonu or Karakoy. Second floor, upstairs bookstore and cafe) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45 Notes: ACX readers, old friends, new friends welcome for an easy afternoon coffee. Please contact me at ozgeco@yahoo.com for any help request. Looking forward to seeing you soon.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45
Open Thread 401
September 29, 2025 · Original source
1: Meetups this week include Ankara, Bangalore, Dallas, DC, Delhi, Denver, Hyderabad, Istanbul, LA, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco, Zagreb; see the meetup post for more information.. And late additions Aachen, Lviv, and Malaga have been added to the list for October.
Inline links: the meetup post
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Vitor Contact Info: acxzurich[@]proton[.]me Time: Saturday, May 9th, 3:00 PM Location: Irchelpark, next to the bridge over the pond. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9GXW+723 Group Link: https://luma.com/acx-zurich Notes: We have an email list and a signal group to announce ~monthly meetups. Write an email to be added. All events are also listed on our Luma calendar. Turkey ISTANBUL Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[@]yahoo[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Kaffe Schütz in Beşiktaş. This is a large cafe with few floors upstairs. I will be either on the entrance floor or upstairs, depending on the availability of seats. Please look for the ACX MEETUP sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F Notes: Old friends, new friends: everyone welcomed to meet likeminded people residing in and visiting Istanbul
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVC9GXW+723, https://luma.com/acx-zurich, https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F
Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[@]yahoo[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Kaffe Schütz in Beşiktaş. This is a large cafe with few floors upstairs. I will be either on the entrance floor or upstairs, depending on the availability of seats. Please look for the ACX MEETUP sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F Notes: Old friends, new friends: everyone welcomed to meet likeminded people residing in and visiting Istanbul
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F
Iceland9 mentions across 9 issues

Iceland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between January 21, 2021 and June 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "there are 366,000 people in Iceland"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Iceland"; "creation of “banking empires in… Ireland and Iceland,”". It most often appears alongside Denmark, Germany, Norway.

Article page
Iceland
Mention count
9
Issue count
9
First seen
January 21, 2021
Last seen
June 26, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.
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
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
1 The ellipsis is a favorite Zeihan tick. Having listened to him on more than a few podcasts since picking up the book, his voice comes through the pages. It reads like you’re old friends and he’s telling you the way it is over beers. For example, in discussing the effects of the Bretton Woods system, Zeihan notes the creation of “banking empires in… Ireland and Iceland,” with a footnote saying “Seriously. WTF?”
Inline links: 1
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
But it looks even worse when you compare Sweden to other Scandinavian/Nordic countries. Nobody agrees on exactly what “Scandinavian/Nordic” is, but here’s Sweden vs. Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland:
Philippe Lemoine is extremely against this conclusion. He first argues that since we don’t know why Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark did so well, we can’t assume it’s a “Scandinavia effect” and so we can’t assume Sweden would share it. Therefore, we should be judging it against the European average rather than the (better) Scandinavian average. I would counter that, although we can’t prove that just because X is true of Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark and not other European countries, that it should also be true of Sweden, but we should have a pretty high prior on it, in the same way that eg if we know that X was true in every American state except Arkansas (whose value was unknown), and not in any non-American polities, we should have a high prior that X is true in Arkansas. Anyway, even if we don’t compare Sweden the rest of Scandinavia, we would compare it to Europe, which it did twice as bad as.
Inline links: extremely against this conclusion
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries
August 04, 2022 · Original source
There is some debate in the scientific community about whether this is happening, but as far as I can tell the people who claim it isn’t have no good refutation for the common sense argument that it has to be. The people who claim that it is make more sense, and have measured the effect in Iceland, an isolated population that it’s easy to measure genetic effects in. It seems to be a decline of about 0.3 IQ points per decade. If the American rate is close to the Icelandic one, this implies that the average US IQ in 2100 will be 97.5 by current standards, unless we get more mileage out of the Flynn Effect, in which case it might be higher (although the environmental Flynn Effect and genetic dysgenic effects seem to hit slightly different skills). I think societies are probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ, so I’m not excited about this, but I don’t expect it to directly be apocalyptic.
Inline links: the people who claim it isn’t, have measured the effect in Iceland, probably hyper-sensitive to small changes in average IQ
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images
Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images
Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
I found Njal’s Saga hard to follow. Halfway through, a friend reassured me it wasn’t my fault. The medieval Icelanders had erred in releasing it as a book. It should have been the world’s wackiest Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff1.
Inline links: 1
Remember, medieval Iceland was an early attempt at anarcho-capitalist utopia. When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits.
Inline links: medieval Iceland was an early attempt at anarcho-capitalist utopia
Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past twelve months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi2). Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all.
Inline links: 2
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
The European jurisdictions that are lower than the US are: England-and-Wales, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway.
Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
June 26, 2025 · Original source
For example, educational attainment is 50% uncorrelated with direct genetic effects. You need to square this to figure out what percent is causal; when you do that, you find that the polygenic score that explained 14% of EA is only 4%pp direct genes, with the other 10%pp being nondirect5 confounders. So yes, it seems like most polygenic scores that don’t validate within families are confounded. However unhappy we previously were that we had only found 14% of genes for EA (vs. 40% expected), we should now be much more unhappy - we really only know 4% of genes that directly cause EA. On the other hand, you might say - so before we only knew 14%pp out of 40%. Now we only know 4%pp out of 40%. This is discouraging, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what we know about nature vs. nurture. Both 4%pp and 14%pp are less than 40% - with either number, we must be missing something or doing something wrong. Probably that’s insufficient sample size. We’ll keep working on sample size and other things, and eventually scrounge up the missing 26%pp or 36%pp or whatever of the variance, so this doesn’t change anything. All it means is that one predictive method that the average person never knew about in the first place doesn’t work as well as we thought. Who cares? Not doctors. So far this research has only just barely begun to reach the clinic. But also, all doctors want to do is predict things (like heart attack risk). They don’t care if they use causal vs. nondirect genes. It doesn’t matter if you’re “only” at higher risk of heart attack because you’re black, or Norman, or because your parents read books to you - you still need more heart attack medication! Polygenic embryo selection companies should care. They offer polygenic scores that can be used to select healthier or smarter embryos. If the predictors they use rely partly on variants that aren’t causal within families, their real benefits could be far lower than advertised. I talked to one of these companies, who said they’d already adjusted for these effects and expected their competitors had too - the proper antidote to this problem, sibling controls, is a natural choice when you’re literally picking between siblings. The biggest losers are the epidemiologists. They had started using polygenic predictors as a novel randomization method; suppose, for example, you wanted to study whether smoking causes Alzheimers. If you just checked how many smokers vs. nonsmokers got Alzheimers, your result would be vulnerable to bias; maybe poor people smoke more and get more Alzheimers. But (they hoped) you might be able to check whether people with the genes for smoking get more Alzheimers. Poverty can’t make you have more or fewer genes! This was a neat idea, but if the polygenic predictors are wrong about which genes cause smoking and what effect size they have, then the less careful among these results will need to be re-examined. But the reason I spent so much time on the subject here is that this has confused a lot of people into thinking heritability itself was confounded and is actually just 4%. When I read my first few blog posts on these findings, I came away thinking they were claiming to have discredited twin studies and heritability. And although I take partial ownership of my own poor reading comprehension, I maintain that the way that the new anti-hereditarians discuss this is pretty bad. For example, Turkheimer’s treatment of the Tan study above is called Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomics?, and includes passages like: The median [direct genomic effect] heritability for behavioral phenotypes is .048. Let that sink in for a second. How different would the modern history of behavior genetics be if back in the 80s one study after another had shown that the heritability of behavior was around .05? When Arthur Jensen wrote about IQ, he usually used a figure of .8 for the heritability of intelligence. I know that the relationship between twin heritabilities and SNP heritabilities is complicated, and in fact the DGE heritability of ability is one of the higher ones, at .2336. But still, it seems to me that the appropriate conclusion from these results is that among people who don’t have an identical twin, genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences. And comments included things like: I don’t know if [this study] is the end of social science genomics, but it should certainly be the end of attributing significant genetic influence to behavioral traits (despite the recent scientist-generated cartoons touting genes for “income”). And: There's no doubt that this reported findings have dealt a fatal blow to my conviction that behavioral traits are pre-eminently heritable…This is a remarkable example of an objective statistical fact mercilessly crushing the more subjective experiential sense of "A looks and acts more like B than C because A and B have the same parents." This subjective evidence is almost unshakable and universal in its application as a tried and tested psychosocial heuristic. And yet, here we are. Turkheimer is either misstating the relationship between polygenic scores and narrow-sense heritability, or at least egging on some very confused people who are doing that, and the dynamic was bad enough that I got confused myself for a while. But even more confusing, the new anti-hereditarians actually are saying that lots of behavioral traits have very low heritability! But this point requires different arguments, only tangentially related to these. So let’s move on to… Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 1: GWAS & GREML) In the mid 2010s, when genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based polygenic predictors were getting better every year, it was easy to hope they might reach 40% and close the “missing heritability”. But since then, progress has stalled. The second-to-last tripling of sample size, from 300K to 1M between 2016 - 2018, increased predictive power from 6% → 12%. The last tripling, from 1M to 3M between 2018 - 2022, only increased predictive power from 12% → 14%. If you graph sample size vs. predictive power, it looks like there's an asymptote between 15 - 20% or so. (of which - remember - only 5% is directly causal!) Worse, a mid-2010s technique called GREML allowed researchers to estimate the percent of variance in a trait that comes from the sorts of common genes studied in GWAS, without having to identify the genes involved. A 2016 GREML paper suggested that the maximum share of variance that GWASs of educational attainment could ever discover was about 21% (again, compared to 40% predicted genetic from twin studies). Since unavoidable methodological issues will prevent GWASs from reaching the literal maximum possible, this agrees with the evidence suggesting an asymptote between 15 - 20%. So either twin studies are wrong and traits are less heritable than believed, or the heritability must lie somewhere other than the common genes identifiable by GWAS. What about rare genes? GWASs focus on genetic variation common enough to be worth including in a basic genetic test. Most of this is single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNPs”). A single nucleotide is one letter of DNA - for example, a C or a G. Polymorphisms are genes that commonly vary in humans - sometimes across races (for example, some humans have a gene for light skin, and other humans have a gene for dark skin), and other times within races (for example, some white people have a gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, and others don’t). So SNPs are single-letter spots in DNA where different people often have different letters. How often? Some people say 1%, but the more practical definition is “often enough that someone has noticed and added it to the test panel”. There are three billion letters in the genome, of which only a few million are commonly-tested SNPs. But these SNP studies have limited7 ability to measure personal mutations and rare variants. Sometimes your parents’ egg and sperm cells mess up copying a nucleotide of DNA, and you get a mutation that isn’t inherited from your ethnic group or even from your subgroup/family line - it’s just some idiosyncratic DNA change that you might be the first person in history to have. Since scientists have never seen this mutation before, they don’t know about it and can’t test for it without doing something more expensive than a simple SNP screen. And SNP studies have limited ability to detect anything more complicated than a single letter changing to another single letter. But some mutations are more complicated structural variants. For example, some bits of DNA get stuck on repeat - one person might have GATGAT, another person might have GATGATGATGAT, and a third person might have fifty GATs in a row. Other bits come out backwards. Sometimes a whole chunk of DNA goes missing, or moves to the wrong place. Occasionally a gene reads The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, takes it too seriously, and evolves some ridiculous trick for spamming itself all over the genome. So if even the best molecular studies seem to be asymptoting around 15-20% of variance in educational attainment, but twin studies suggest it’s 40% genetic, might rare variants and structural variants make up the missing 20-25%pp? This remains a topic of bitter disagreement. On the one side, hereditarians bring up a Darwinian argument: imagine a genetic engineer who hopes to find the genes for educational attainment and edit them to make everyone smart and successful. She looks harder and harder, becoming more and more exasperated as they fail to materialize. Finally, she realizes she’s been scooped: evolution has been working on the same project, and has a 100,000 year head start. In the context of intense, recent selection for intelligence, we should expect evolution to have already found (and eliminated) the most straightforward, easy-to-find genes for low intelligence. Therefore, everything left should be convoluted or hidden or impossible to work with. So although this requires a sort of god-of-the-gaps argument - where we keep pushing heritability into whatever genes are too weird for existing techniques to detect - there are some reasons to think God really is in the gaps here. And a 2017 paper uses some clever techniques to estimate the share of intelligence variation lurking in hard-to-measure genes and finds it’s more than half: “By capturing these additional genetic effects, our models closely approximate the heritability estimates from twin studies for intelligence and education.” (see also Wainschtein 2022, Sidorenko 2024) The anti-hereditarians disagree. They cite papers like Zeng which measure the strength of selection on intelligence and suggest that it’s too weak to concentrate so much of the variation in rare genes8. And Sasha Gusev mentions Weiner 2023, which finds that in fact rare variants “explain 1.3% (SE = 0.03%) of phenotypic variance on average – much less than common variants” (other experts say that burden heritability only captures some rare variants and is not the right tool for this problem). But it may not even matter, because another set of findings suggests that heritability is genuinely low even when the rare variants are counted. Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 2: Sib-Regression and RDR) Two newer methods, Sib-Regression and RDR, ask: using what we know from genetic studies, how much genetic variation do we think exists, total, across both common and rare genes? On average siblings share 50% of genes. But there’s a little randomness in meiosis, so some siblings might share 40% and others might share 60%. The more genetic influence on a trait, the more similar sibling pairs who share 60% of their genes will be, compared to sibling pairs who only share 40% of their genes. Since 60%-gene siblings and 40%-gene siblings are both equally part of the same family, you can use these numbers to calculate heritability unconfounded by a range of family factors. This is Sib-Regression. If you do a more complicated statistical process to extend the same idea to relatives other than siblings, it’s relatedness disequilibrium regression or RDR. GWAS asks: Looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation in a trait have we explained right now? GREML asks: looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation could we ever explain? But sib-regression and RDR ask a question more like twin studies: considering all genes, whether common / rare / easy-to-study / hard-to-study, how much variation is there total? This could address the rare variant objection mentioned above. And in many ways, these techniques are better than twin studies - Sib-Regression eliminates many potential biases, and RDR eliminates even more (although it’s harder to pull off, requiring more genetic information and computational resources). These techniques are new and hard-to-use, and only a few published studies have applied them to the sorts of behavioral traits we’re interested in: Young et al (2018) did Sib-Regression and RDR to genetic data from Iceland. Sib-regression found educational attainment = 40% (±15%) heritable, and RDR found 17% (±9%) heritable. Kemper et al (2021) did Sib-Regression only to genetic data from Britain. It found educational attainment = 14% heritable. This number conflicts with the 40% from the Young paper. Why? Unclear, but it could be selection bias - Young’s Icelandic sample was representative of the country; Kemper’s British population were Biobank volunteers who tend tend to be healthier and higher-class than the population at large. Upper-class people may have restricted range in educational attainment, or different factors affecting their educational attainment compared to the overall population. Either way, these are closer to the low estimates from GWAS and GREML (7% direct, 20% total), than to the higher estimates from twin studies (40%, generally presumed direct). And we can no longer use contributions from rare variants to paper over the difference. So what is going on? It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities: Either something is wrong with twin studies. Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants). Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things. What’s Going On? (Part 1: Is Something Wrong With Twin Studies?) Twin studies have dominated discussion of behavioral genetics for decades, so there’s a vast literature investigating their various assumptions and whether something might be wrong with them. Here are some of the assumptions and what the research says about each. Some of these will be duplicates of the GWAS confounders above, but we’ll go through them again anyway to review how they apply to twins. 1: Parents Treat Fraternal And Identical Twins The Same: Twin studies claim that twins are a uniquely powerful genetic laboratory; both fraternal and identical twin pairs have equally concordant environments, but identical twins have more concordant genes. Therefore, the more similar identical twin pairs are relative to fraternal twin pairs, the more heritable a trait must be. But this conclusion falls apart if identical twin pairs actually have more similar environments than fraternal twin pairs do, maybe because parents (knowing their twins are identical) treat them more similarly than they would fraternal twins. Would-be twin-study-discreditors have been trying to argue that this must be true for decades, but it’s always been a kind of quixotic battle. Remember, twin studies find many behavioral traits like IQ are >60% heritable, so you would need to prove not only that parents treat identical twin pairs differently from fraternal, but that this was an overwhelming effect. Parents of identical twins would have to obsessively expose them to the exact same stimuli in the exact same order; parents of fraternal twins would have to send one to the Gifted Advanced Placement Acceleration program while locking the other in a box and force-feeding them lead pellets. Common sense tells us there are no such differences, and studies confirm this: when parents are wrong about their twins’ status (eg they have fraternal twins, but falsely think they’re identical, or vice versa) their trait similarity matches their real status, rather than the incorrect status that determined how their parents treat them; parental treatment explains less than 1% of why identical twin pairs are more concordant (2, 3, 4). See also Felson 2013, which tries to measure environmental similarity and adjust for it, with minimal effects. Are these two cuties monozygotic or dizygotic? Are you sure? (answer) 2: Fraternal And Identical Twins Have Equally Concordant Uterine Environments: Fraternal twins have different sacs in the uterus and use different placentas. Most identical twins share a placenta, and some share an amniotic sac. If trait similarity is caused by sharing a placenta or sac (maybe because the placenta is defective, the fetal brain is starved of nutrients, and so the person has a lower IQ when they grow up), twin studies would falsely read this identical-fraternal difference as genetic. Luckily this is easy to study; not all identical twins share a placenta or sac, so you can cleanly separate the effect of uterine environment from genetics. If you measure enough traits, you can find small deviations in some, but it’s not clear whether this is just multiple testing, and in any case the deviations are small. The best studies suggest this chips off somewhere between 0 - 3% from heritability estimates9. 3: There is little assortative mating: We discussed this one above in the earlier section on GWAS - smart/pretty/kind/whatever people tend to marry other smart/pretty/kind/whatever people. Why would this bias twin study results? Identical twins share 100% of their genes. Fraternal twins ought to share 50% of their genes - but they get half their genes from their mother, and half from their father. In the degenerate case where the mother and father have exactly the same genes (“would you have sex with your clone?”) even fraternal twins will be extremely similar (although not quite identical, since they’ll get different alleles from each clone). In the more plausible case where mothers and fathers are just a little more alike than chance (eg because smart people tend to marry other smart people), fraternal twins will share a genetic tendency towards a trait somewhat more than their 50% shared genes suggest. Since this makes fraternal twin pairs more (genetically) like identical twin pairs, and twin studies assess heritability as the difference in fraternal-identical-twin-pair concordance, this bias would make twin studies underestimate heritability. But this is the opposite of what you would need to “discredit” twin studies - if this bias is true, then everything is more genetic than twin studies think. And unlike the previous two biases, this one seems real and important, so much so that when you adjust for it, the heritability of educational attainment rises from ~40% to ~50%. I’m only mentioning this one here because some anti-hereditarians argue that you can’t trust twin studies because of assortative mating, without mentioning that this can only bias them down. 4: Population stratification: This is often large and worth worrying about, but it applies to identical and fraternal twin pairs equally, and doesn’t bias twin study heritability estimates much (though it might shift the balance between shared and non-shared environment). See eg the sentence around footnote 30 here. 5: Non-additive / “interaction” effects: These are theoretically interesting, but all research thus far has found they are minimal (1, 2). Some experts think this may miss rarer or harder-to-find interactions; we’ll return to this later. 6: “Genetic nurture”, parent-to-child Mentioned above: if there is a gene for reading books to kids, and reading books raises IQ, it will look like a “gene for IQ”. This isn’t as relevant to twin study estimates of heritability, since both identical twins and fraternal twins are equally related to their parents, and any trait caused by genetic nurture wouldn’t differ between them (and therefore would not falsely appear heritable in this design). Rather, they would appear as shared environment. 7: “Genetic nurture”, sibling-to-sibling That is, suppose your sibling’s traits influence your own development. For example, suppose your sibling has a gene that makes them sabotage your schoolwork, causing you to fail and drop out of school early. An identical twin would share this gene with their sibling more often than a fraternal twin, making it look like a “gene for doing badly at school” (since the people who have it do worse at school than those who don’t). Why are we even talking about this? Do we really think it’s a big part of the variance in behavioral traits? Challenging twin study heritability estimates through this route requires inhabiting a weird no-man’s-land where otherwise-invisible genetic and environmental pathways suddenly flare up when you say the magic words “it was done by a sibling”. For example, this requires a strong effect of shared environment - that is, your educational attainment has to depend on whether you’re being sabotaged or not. But in general, shared environmental effects are weak. And it requires a strong effect of genes - that is, this mechanism only works if your sibling’s tendency to sabotage you is highly genetically determined. But we’re deploying this claim to deny that traits like IQ or educational attainment are highly genetically determined. So to get much out of this, the tendency to sabotage siblings would have to be more genetic than other behavioral traits! The reason this convoluted possibility gets brought up so often is that, unlike the more plausible parent-to-child genetic nurture, twin studies can’t rule it out. So if you really want to deny twin studies, this is one of your best bets. But when investigated, this has effects indistinguishable from zero. I’ve been a bit mean in this whole section, because people really like to dismiss twin studies as “Oh, don’t you know, those depend on assumptions, I bet you never considered that assumptions might be wrong”, and then Gish Gallop you with different assumptions until you give up. But scientists have actually done a lot of really good work checking the assumptions and they mostly hold. An alternative way of validating twin studies (brought up by Noah Carl in this article) is to check them against their close cousins, adoption studies and pedigree studies. Pedigree studies investigate large family trees, and check how trait similarity decreases with genetic distance. They avoid twin specific biases (like different treatment of fraternal vs. identical twin pairs, or different prenatal environments), while adding others like assortative mating. Here are the heritabilities of IQ and EA found in pedigree studies10 (see footnote for sources and caveats, and see also here and here for somewhat similar designs): Adoption studies investigate whether adoptees’ traits are more correlated with their adoptive or biological parents. They avoid a large swathe of biases, at the risk of introducing new adoption-related biases of their own (like the possibility that agencies deliberately place adoptive children with parents who are culturally or behaviorally similar, or the possibility that adoptees were adopted late enough to still get some shared environment from their biological parents). Here are the findings of some of the largest and best11: Both straightforwardly confirmed the larger heritability numbers found in twin studies. I would add the evidence from some less formal “adoption studies”12. During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict. Ultimate source here. Although the study is confusing about this, I think it’s trying to say that almost 90% of subjects were adopted before age 2. But I don’t think studies do contradict this. Given the degree to which their assumptions have been validated, and the level of confirmation from pedigree and adoption studies, I think they have earned a presumption of accuracy. Doubting the twin studies doesn’t seem like a promising route to reconciling the twin-vs-Sib-Regression/RDR discrepancy. What’s Going On? (Part 2: Is Something Wrong With Sib-Regression And RDR?) Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off. There is one caveat: although RDR includes most of the rare and structural variants missed by GWAS, in theory it can miss certain ultra-rare variants which are so uncommon that they aren’t shared between some of the relative pairs used in RDR. De novo variants that occurred during the subject’s own conception would be in this category, if the subject didn’t have children or didn’t pass on that gene13. This seems like a pretty small subcategory of genetic variation, and I wouldn’t normally expect that much of importance to be hiding here, but maybe it’s more important than it seems. RDR also doesn’t include much variance caused by statistical interactions between genes. Although we said above that these are usually found to be insignificant, they might be more important in a trait like intelligence that has been under recent evolutionary selection that lops off easily-detectable sources of variance and leaves only the weird obscure ones behind. There’s limited ability for classical Mendelian dominance to affect common variants, but more complicated genetic interactions might still prove important. Overall these are strong methods, and their failure to converge is troubling. If forced to explain them away, we might tell a story like: So far, there is only one RDR study and a few Sib-Regression studies, so we should wait for more data before updating too hard.
Inline links: 5, Polygenic embryo selection, need, Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomics?, 6, like, And, 300K, 1M, 3M, A 2016 GREML paper, 7, evolves some ridiculous trick, a Darwinian argument, a 2017 paper, Wainschtein 2022, Sidorenko 2024, Zeng, 8, Weiner 2023, other experts say, meiosis, Young et al (2018), Kemper et al (2021), their trait similarity, matches their real status, 2, 3, 4, Felson 2013, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r3kV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd575f2d6-3619-40e6-9a5e-f9f1ec1399a5_650x422.png, answer, The best studies, 9, seems real and important, here, 1, 2, when investigated, in this article, 10, here, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b3LF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc094f9c0-4c71-48cf-89dc-615498d94812_483x51.png, 11, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XFWU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85f433e5-d141-47b7-8dc5-2271925032e9_483x102.png, 12, https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1935731422205010135, here, 13
Maybe gene x gene interactions, especially epistasis, are more important than we thought. There’s some (weak) evidence for the latter two claims: Sib-Regression, unlike RDR, includes results from certain types of ultra-rare variants and non-additive effects. In the Iceland study, Sib-Regression found EA heritability of 40% (similar to twin studies), and RDR found 17% (much less than twin studies). Maybe these make Sib-Regression better at estimating the sort of broad heritability investigated in twin studies? What’s Going On? (Part 3: Is Educational Attainment Just Weird?) Above, we said that there were only two published peer-reviewed studies using Sib-Regression and RDR to estimate heritability of behavioral traits. But Markel et al (2025), a not-yet-peer-reviewed pre-print from GMU (why is it always GMU?) complicates things further. It looks at genetic data from six different countries/studies to estimate heritability of IQ and EA. Using Sib-Regression, they find educational attainment heritability of only 8% (±9%)14, and cognitive performance (~IQ) heritability of 75% (±20%)! Markel’s 8% for EA is very different from Young’s Icelandic estimate of 40% - is this bad? Not necessarily - as with Kemper, these studies might have different levels of selection bias. Or the countries where they take place might have different levels of educational mobility. But also, this is the first Sib-Regression study to investigate IQ - all the others had only done EA. They replicate (and even go beyond) the twin studies’ high IQ number, while continuing to get low heritability for EA. This suggests our previous assumption - that EA was usually a decent proxy for IQ - might be totally off. This doesn’t directly solve any of our problems - the twin study estimates for EA and the Sib-Regression estimates are still worryingly different. But it slightly bounds the damage. It suggests that the twin study estimates for IQ are ~correct, potentially meaning that whatever’s going on is some kind of EA-specific confounder. We know that EA is a pretty unusual trait, with high assortative mating, high shared environmental component, and high potential for genetic nurture / dynastic effects. We saw above that there are theoretical reasons not to expect these to bias twin studies upward or Sib-Regression downward. But maybe it did that anyway, despite the theoretical reasons. Stepping back, maybe educational attainment is full of landmines. Plenty of political and economic factors affect the degree to which your genes vs. your culture determine how far you go in school. Suppose a country passes a feel-good policy that high schools have to try to graduate all students, even ones who fail algebra. That changes the heritability of EA! Or suppose that scholarships become easier/harder to get, making rich people less/more likely to go to college relative to poor people. That changes the heritability of EA! Or suppose that the economy changes and jobs requiring PhDs are less/more lucrative than before - now ambitious people are less/more likely to pursue PhDs relative to people doing it for the love of academia, and that changes the heritability of EA! Finally, suppose some study enrolls mostly rich/well-educated people, and some other study enrolls proportionally across the population. That artificially restricts range and . . . changes the heritability of EA! So two potential takeaways from this preprint are: EA is a weird trait with a high shared environmental component, and might not be a good flagship trait to use for discussing heritability more generally.
Inline links: Markel et al (2025),, 14
Heritability of EA might genuinely vary a lot among different countries, populations, and eras, so maybe we should be less concerned when studies give weird results. What’s Going On? (Part 4: Is Everything Weird?) On the other hand, here are some boring medical/biological traits. Graph is from here, but the ultimate data source is the same Iceland paper: Many of the boring medical traits have as much “missing heritability” as educational attainment. For example, creatinine is a measure of kidney function; although twin studies find it’s about 55% heritable, Sib-Regression and RDR find less than half that. But here there are limited opportunities for confounders. Nobody assortative-mates on kidney function. It’s hard to see how family members could push other family members to have better or worse kidney function. Identical twins don’t have more similar kidney function environments than fraternal twins. Could there be some remaining possibility for confounding? Maybe there’s a gene for teaching your kid to have a good diet, and good diet causes better kidney function? Or maybe the measurements for creatinine were really bad during the Sib-Regression study (but apparently better during the twin studies?) I don’t really know what’s going on here. What’s Going On (Part 5: No, Seriously, What’s Going On?) So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this? I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation. Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work. In this model, polygenic scores, GWAS, and GREML could straightforwardly fail to pick up rare variants and interactions. The conclusions of RDR and Sib-Regression are harder to explain, but most of these anomalies are in educational attainment in particular - which is such a cursed construct, and so variable from sample to sample, that perhaps we can put it aside and focus on more stable traits. Otherwise, we can take solace in these methods’ failure to stay consistent even among themselves, which makes their inconsistency with twin studies somewhat less jarring. What mysteries remain? The parts that still bother me are: Why did the Iceland study find significantly lower numbers for Sib-Regression/RDR than twin studies for almost every trait? (hilariously, not for educational attainment with Sib-Regression this time, although I suspect this is just the big margin of error and the real number is commensurate with the other traits studied)
Inline links: eras, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lIwR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc1f2d9a3-2fb1-4fc5-b681-f2c34b7a2075_4440x2192.png, 1, 2, 3, 15
Indiana8 mentions across 8 issues

Indiana is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between June 03, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "My housemate’s family lives in Indiana, whose state government showed COVID vaccination sites"; "Indiana SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, USA"; "Indiana". It most often appears alongside Scott, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page
Indiana
Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
June 03, 2021
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies
June 03, 2021 · Original source
I’ll note that subunits of society don’t need to be in conflict (as in regulation avoidance/enforcement spirals) for increasing complexity to bring costs up – entities that nominally want the same thing can waste resources on working around each other just fine in a sufficiently large system. This isn’t a great example, but it’s what I have on hand: My housemate’s family lives in Indiana, whose state government showed COVID vaccination sites with individual appointment availability, but not an aggregated list of sites that had slots in the near future. My housemate built a simple scraper that updates a website giving this information. The state caught on after a week and blocked the scraper, which was making a request every two seconds. The Indiana state website could much more easily build the same feature by querying their own database, but they happen to be an organization that isn’t outputting this behavior, so the only people who are doing it are outsiders who annoy them by putting load on their network resources. The coherent extrapolated state of Indiana wants vaccines to go out efficiently, but subunits are wasting time working around each other.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Ben Contact Info: cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 22nd, 3:00 PM Location: UIUC, Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 3401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F Group Link: https://discord.gg/ZM6kJzDJc Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP on LW or by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord. Indiana SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, USA Contact: Darcey Riley Contact Info: darcey[dot]riley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 2:00 PM Location: Chicory Cafe in Downtown South Bend (*not* the one in Mishawaka) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HMMPGX+3W
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F, https://discord.gg/ZM6kJzDJc, https://plus.codes/86HMMPGX+3W
SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, USA Contact: Darcey Riley Contact Info: darcey[dot]riley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 2:00 PM Location: Chicory Cafe in Downtown South Bend (*not* the one in Mishawaka) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HMMPGX+3W
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HMMPGX+3W
WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, USA Contact: NR Contact Info: mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 16th, 1:00 PM Location: We'll be in the south of the Earhart Hall lobby (not the dining court) near the piano, and I will be wearing a shirt with a lemur and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GG+728 Notes: We've had a couple meetups during previous rounds of ACX Everywhere and they were quite enjoyable!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GG+728
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Ben Contact Info: cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14, 3:00 PM Location: UIUC, Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 3401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F Group Link: https://discord.gg/8BNujpU6XD Indiana WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, USA Contact: NR Contact Info: mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Address: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room and wear a shirt with a lemur. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C Notes: We'll have a box of chips and possibly other food.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F, https://discord.gg/8BNujpU6XD, https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C
WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, USA Contact: NR Contact Info: mapreader4[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Address: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room and wear a shirt with a lemur. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C Notes: We'll have a box of chips and possibly other food.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Nmk Contact Info: nmkiahrne[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 04:00 PM Location: I will be in the south east end of the main quad at UIUC. Hopefully i will be wearing red and carrying a small sign saying ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q4F+J7 Group Link: https://discord.gg/6vYrRTmu Notes: I probably won't have any activities planned , so if you have any good ideas, feel free to bring them and the necessary materials. Indiana INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, USA Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q4F+J7, https://discord.gg/6vYrRTmu, https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5 WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, USA Contact: NR Contact Info: mapreader4[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 12:00 PM Location: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room and wear a shirt with a lemur. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C Group Link: https://discord.gg/Uc7hMMSNCF Notes: We'll have a box of chips and possibly other food.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5, https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C, https://discord.gg/Uc7hMMSNCF
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Noah Birnbaum Contact Info: dnbirnbaum[a t]uchicago[period]edu Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM Location: On the UChicago campus - usually in the Bartlett Dining Commons lounge but this could be subject to change. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ Group Link: Uchicago: https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA General Chicago: https://chicagorationality.com Notes: If you are on the mailing list, please fill out RSVP form that will be sent out so that I know how much food to get. Indiana INDIANAPOLIS Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ, https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA, https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
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
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 27, 2:00 PM Location: Grant Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com/ Indiana BLOOMINGTON Contact: John Contact Info: himalayansp[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 5:00 PM Location: 310 S. Eastside Drive Bloomington, IN 47401. It’s the house surrounded by the tall bushes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ Notes: just show up
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99, https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ
Contact: John Contact Info: himalayansp[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 5:00 PM Location: 310 S. Eastside Drive Bloomington, IN 47401. It’s the house surrounded by the tall bushes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ Notes: just show up INDIANAPOLIS Contact: Blake Riley Contact Info: blake[period]j[period]riley[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Upland FSQ Brewery 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 I'll have a sign and a copy of Unsong at the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ Notes: Might be seated indoors or outdoors depending on the weather. Brewery is all-ages and family-friendly, not 21+
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ, https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ
Contact: Blake Riley Contact Info: blake[period]j[period]riley[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Upland FSQ Brewery 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 I'll have a sign and a copy of Unsong at the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ Notes: Might be seated indoors or outdoors depending on the weather. Brewery is all-ages and family-friendly, not 21+
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Mayank Contact Info: mayankaggarwal2004[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: Krannert Center for Performing Arts, next to Intermezzo Cafe inside Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q5G+9R Group Link: https://discord.gg/wa5 [remove this bit] 3n3cQs Indiana BLOOMINGTON Contact: John Linnemeier Contact Info: Himalayansp[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 3rd, 2:00 PM Location: 310 S Eastside Dr Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GH Notes: Kids and/or dogs are just fine. No need to RSVP, just show up. If it’s a nice day, I’ll be by the pond in the backyard so just come down the driveway. If it’s rainy or cold, knock on the front door and my dog will announce your arrival.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q5G+9R, https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GH
Iowa8 mentions across 8 issues

Iowa is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between February 25, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Make your 50-year old working-class Iowa farmer constituent imagine whether he or his kids might ever invent a cool new kind of car"; "He sent young Jason to live with relatives in Iowa"; "Shea was sent off to Iowa". It most often appears alongside China, Trump, California.

Article page
Iowa
Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
February 25, 2021
Last seen
March 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 25, 2021 · Original source
It could appeal to Republicans who are in it for the capitalism (including the rich donors). You would argue that capitalism is the system that lets people succeed regardless of class; even the most uncouth and uneducated person can strike it rich if they work hard and make good deals. The Democrats hate this; they prefer a system where powerful insiders get to play favorites, where success depends on who you know and not what you know, and where good jobs are locked behind gates of correct credentials from the right colleges. Every time Democrats attack Elon Musk for being rich, you can point out that Elon Musk was an immigrant who worked hard for his money, and you're the party representing people like that - whereas the Democrats are the party of people who got hired by McKinsey straight out of college to a job that pays a higher entry-level salary than most people get in their entire lives. Make your 50-year old working-class Iowa farmer constituent imagine whether he or his kids might ever invent a cool new kind of car, vs. whether they could ever get hired as McKinsey consultants.
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
His childhood was marked by upheaval. During the Red Scare, VP Shea's enemies accused him of being a Communist. The charge was absurd - all anyone had against him was some ill-advised comments where he had praised a book about 1930s labor activism - but in the climate of the day, they threatened his political career. Angry mobs protested in front of his house; he received letters threatening his wife and children. Around this time, Jason's older sister committed suicide - we don't know the exact details - and VP Shea decided enough was enough. He sent young Jason to live with relatives in Iowa, while he continued fighting for his political life.
Shea spent his teenage years in the town of Long Grove, Iowa. He apparently hated it there - his relatives were strict disciplinarians, and he was forced to do backbreaking labor on their farm. After less than a year, he surreptitiously bought a train ticket for Washington and tried to return home, but his mother refused to let him in. He was arrested by the police as a runaway, and eventually taken back to Iowa, where he lived for seven more years.
He started with some built-in advantages. After eight years of Republican rule, the country was ready for a Democrat. The only Republican who'd had half a chance, super-popular Texas governor Bo Shelley, had been caught taking bribes from organized crime early in 2007, and was fighting to avoid prison. Shea, with his Harvard education, New York experience, Iowa roots, and story of overcoming adversity during the unfair persecution of his father, had something for everybody in the Democratic base. He got a high-profile endorsement from Bill Clinton, won the nomination, and coasted to an easy victory over Republican John McCain in 2008.
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 - these are stratospheric scores. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10% of the Harvard freshman class of 1960. Moreover, the 1960 class was drawn from a much wider socioeconomic pool. Smart kids from Queens or Iowa or California, who wouldn’t have thought of applying to Harvard a decade earlier, were applying and getting accepted . . . and this transformation was replicated in almost all elite schools. At Princeton in 1962, for example, only 10 members of the 62-man football team had attended private prep schools. Three decades earlier every member of the Princeton team was a prep school boy.
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
Enter Wang Huning, a young political scientist at Fudan University. He wanted to become an “America expert”. Toward that goal, he got a visiting scholar position in the most dynamic corner of the US - Iowa City, Iowa. His quest: to poke around Iowa until he figured out what the heck was going on with the United States, then report back. The result: America Against America, a 200 page book on US culture and institutions.
Inline links: America Against America
Another result: a career boost for Wang Huning. He got asked to head the Party’s “political research” office, then gradually rose higher and higher through the ranks. Today he’s considered the CCP’s chief intellectual, and has been called the second most powerful man in China (alternately “the most influential man in China”). He’s used his position to push China against American values and towards a sort of anti-Western cultural conservatism. Whatever he saw during those six months in Iowa must have scared him hard. I thought I would pick up America Against America to figure out what it was.
Inline links: the second most powerful man in China, the most influential man in China
It wasn’t easy. This book doesn’t read like the screed of an anti-American zealot or the manifesto of a political mastermind. It reads like a confused but slightly charming alien bumbling through the world, recording his musings on whatever he encountered1. The combination of mediocre English, plus surprise at learning facts every child knows2, makes the text sound like it was written by a precocious ten year old. He frequently uses sentences no human being would ever say, like "Let's dissect the organizational structure of Iowa".
Inline links: 1, 2
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
25: Elsewhere in bad policy: after California voted for higher standards for animal welfare in factory farms, the agricultural industry has proposed the EATS Act, banning states from setting standards for what agricultural products they will allow. This seems like a clear attack on states’ rights to me. Still, its supporters cast it as promoting states’ rights, since if eg California bans unethically-factory-farmed meat then Iowa doesn’t have the right to unethically-factory-farm its meat if it wants to sell to California. This is a stupid argument, like saying that it “promotes individual rights” to force dieters to eat high-calorie meals, because their decision not to do so impinges on the rights of chefs to make their meals high-calorie if they would like to sell to dieters. If you’re making a federal power grab, at least admit you’re making a federal power grab! I hope this will either fail or get struck down by the Supreme Court. A post on the Effective Altruist forum urges you to write your representative.
Inline links: the EATS Act, its supporters, A post on the Effective Altruist forum
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
MODERATOR: As I was about to say . . . In our next round, all candidates will still have to avoid their Forbidden Letter or Letters. But we’re introducing an additional complication! Candidates, please open the sealed envelope you’ll find at your podium. Each of you will also have to follow a Second Round Constraint which you and the audience will know, but the other candidates won’t. If you slip up, you’ll lose your time. But if any of the other candidates guess the constraint you’re trying to follow, they’ll get to steal the remainder of your time from you, plus 100 of your votes in the Iowa primary. Is everyone ready?
DESANTIS: Again, nobody told me about that rule, and I think the Iowa vote part might be un-Con . . . un- . . . could be contrary to that big piece of paper by the people in the building in Philadelphia.
MODERATOR: Sorry Ron, the constraint isn’t that he has to mispronounce vowels. We’ll be subtracting 100 votes away from your eventual total in the Iowa caucus for your incorrect guess.
Links for July 2024
July 24, 2024 · Original source
11: The founders of Iowa divided it into 100 equally-sized square-ish counties, giving it a pleasing and orderly geometry. Then Kossuth County annexed its northern neighbor, Bancroft County. Now there are 99 counties, and they look like this (Kossuth in red):
Inline links: Kossuth County
Iowans keep trying to split Kossuth County to make their state pleasing and orderly again, and the Kossuthians keep refusing.
Inline links: keep, refusing
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Grant Contact Info: grantfellows18[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 3:30 PM Location: Address: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C Group Link: https://discord.gg/WpG [remove this bit] TW4htZm Iowa AMES Contact: Sarah Contact Info: throwaway3454554[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 4:00 PM Location: Cafe Diem- 229 Main St, Ames, IA 50010. I will have a sign with ACX meet up on it. Likely sitting near the window towards the front of the store Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86J829GP+3M Notes: RVSP NOT required but useful. First time doing this.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C, https://plus.codes/86J829GP+3M
Contact: bean Contact Info: battleshipbean[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 05th, 01:00 PM Location: Pavilion by the planes at the 45th infantry division museum. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8674GG5G+8H Notes: I will be wearing a USS Iowa hat.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8674GG5G+8H
Illinois7 mentions across 7 issues

Illinois is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between August 25, 2023 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Illinois CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA"; "Illinois"; "examination center in Peoria, Illinois". It most often appears alongside California, Scott, Washington.

Article page
Illinois
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
August 25, 2023
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
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 Illinois CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 09th, 2:00 PM Location: Grant Park on the north side Balbo just east of the tracks Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+96 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V96, https://acxatlanta.com/, https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+96, https://chicagorationality.com
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 09th, 2:00 PM Location: Grant Park on the north side Balbo just east of the tracks Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+96 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+96, https://chicagorationality.com
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Ben Contact Info: cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 22nd, 3:00 PM Location: UIUC, Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 3401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F Group Link: https://discord.gg/ZM6kJzDJc Notes: RSVPs are appreciated but not at all required. You can RSVP on LW or by email or by pinging me in the Discord server. Suggested entrance is the East side of the building - we'll try to make sure at least that door is unlocked, but if it isn't then ping us on email or Discord.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F, https://discord.gg/ZM6kJzDJc
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
BOISE, IDAHO, USA Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[dot]r[dot]burr[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM Location: Ann Morrison Park. I will bring my dog and some lawn games, and set up in the grass on the northwest side. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX Notes: Feel free to bring dogs, kids, games, tasty beverages... Illinois CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM Location: We'll be in Grant Park just between the train tracks and Columbus on the north side of Balbo. There's a shaded area with some trees. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+9 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX, https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+9, https://chicagorationality.com
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 18th, 2:00 PM Location: We'll be in Grant Park just between the train tracks and Columbus on the north side of Balbo. There's a shaded area with some trees. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+9 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+9, https://chicagorationality.com
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS, USA Contact: Ben Contact Info: cu[dot]acx[dot]meetups[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14, 3:00 PM Location: UIUC, Siebel Center for Computer Science, Room 3401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F Group Link: https://discord.gg/8BNujpU6XD
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q7G+H8F, https://discord.gg/8BNujpU6XD
Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
The novel that would eventually be titled The Pale King went through many stages, starting with an early draft focused on an IRS agent so obsessed with viewing himself from a third person perspective that he stars in his own porno. This plotline receded, with the book converging on its eventual focus: a group of IRS agents travel to an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, 1985, where a battle takes place over the philosophical and technological future of the agency.
The plot: a group of IRS hires converge on an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. There’s the sense that once they’re there, things will start happening, but nothing really does. The chapters alternate between the 1985 story, character background, debate/discussion of the deeper philosophical meaning of the IRS, metanarrative written in the voice of 2005 David Foster Wallace, scraps of trivia/world building/slices-of-life.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Nancy Hua Contact Info: nancythehua[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 4:00 PM Location: Kapiolani park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/73H4758H+5Q Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. Illinois CHICAGO Contact: Noah Birnbaum Contact Info: dnbirnbaum[a t]uchicago[period]edu Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM Location: On the UChicago campus - usually in the Bartlett Dining Commons lounge but this could be subject to change. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ Group Link: Uchicago: https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA General Chicago: https://chicagorationality.com Notes: If you are on the mailing list, please fill out RSVP form that will be sent out so that I know how much food to get.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/73H4758H+5Q, RSVP on LessWrong, https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ, https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[period]r[period]burr[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 1:00 PM Location: Sunset Park, 32nd Street side Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH Illinois CHICAGO Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[at]chicagorationality[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 27, 2:00 PM Location: Grant Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99 Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com/
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH, https://plus.codes/86HJV9FH+99
Last Rights
March 11, 2026 · Original source
Democrats: You’re about to take a beating in the next census. California is moving to gerrymander its Congressional delegation, but it’s also going to lose four seats. Texas is moving to gerrymander its delegation even more aggressively, and it’s going to gain four seats. Florida is going to gain three. Illinois and New York are losing seats. Across the board it’s bad news; while you might come out on top in this year’s elections, you’re going to lose the gerrymandering battle come 2030. Ratifying the CAA will make the battle that much fairer for you.
Inline links: lose
Republicans: You’re about to take a beating in the midterms. The aggressive gerrymandering in Texas could easily backfire in a blue year, and California just passed the “I Hate Republicans” act to gerrymander that state as well. Ratifying the CAA is a way to blunt the effect, and let your colleagues in Illinois and California and New England have their voices heard. But there’s a bigger reason for you to want to support this. If you’re a Republican in 2026, you exist to serve Donald Trump and his vision for America. You want to help Donald Trump recreate America in his image. The image of America will be the image of the new Capitol Building, and Donald Trump will lead this design. You saw how excited he was about the east wing of the White House; imagine how ecstatic he would be to get to design the Donald J. Trump Capitol Building. Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.
Inline links: beating
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[.]r[.]burr[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM Location: Sunset Park, near 32nd St. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH Illinois CHICAGO Contact: Todd Contact Info: info[@]chicagorationality[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 5:30 PM Location: We will be hanging out and socializing at South Loop Strength & Conditioning (yes, a gym owned by one of our co-organizers). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9F9+CV Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH, https://plus.codes/86HJV9F9+CV
Idaho5 mentions across 5 issues

Idaho is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 07, 2023 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Idaho-ped that there would have been peace in the region"; "Idaho"; "Vivek and other anti-bureaucracy activists have pointed to a recent success story: Idaho". It most often appears alongside Georgia, Israel, Philadelphia.

Article page
Idaho
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
November 07, 2023
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
HALEY: Hmmmm . . . um . . . [sweating] . . . the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the Maine issues facing the world today. Errgh . . . um . . . it is a source of great suffering and Missouri for the people of the Middle East. [Long pause] Idaho-ped that there would have been peace in the region, but those hopes have been dashed. [Very long pause]. I believe we Kansas-tematically develop a long term plan to bring . . .
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
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 Idaho BOISE, IDAHO, USA Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[dot]r[dot]burr[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM Location: Ann Morrison Park. I will bring my dog and some lawn games, and set up in the grass on the northwest side. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX Notes: Feel free to bring dogs, kids, games, tasty beverages...
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V, https://acxatlanta.com/, https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX
BOISE, IDAHO, USA Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[dot]r[dot]burr[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 1:00 PM Location: Ann Morrison Park. I will bring my dog and some lawn games, and set up in the grass on the northwest side. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX Notes: Feel free to bring dogs, kids, games, tasty beverages...
Inline links: https://plus.codes/85M5JQ7G+QX
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
January 09, 2025 · Original source
That’s worse! A few years ago, I debated Kevin Drum about (what I considered) a particularly egregious case where the FDA dragged its feet approving a life-saving medication. Drum argued that the FDA had behaved well. In support, he found some quotes from the doctor working on the medication, who praised all the FDA bureaucrats she had interacted with, calling them extremely helpful. This bothered me for a while, until I realized that of course it was true. In the model above, each bureaucrat processes ten forms. If the bureaucrats are benevolent, this might look like talking to the doctors, walking them through the process of figuring out their ten forms, and doing the work to add their ten forms to the FDA’s growing pile of evidence supporting the application. All of this co-exists comfortably with the insight that making doctors fill out a thousand forms before they can use a medication is an impediment to medical progress. This really sunk in for me when I read an article about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state. If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.” Maybe he is working off a thesis where red tape expands to consume the resources available to it (as measured in bureaucrats). But my impression is that the amount of red tape is determined more by things like: — How likely is it that their decision will get challenged in court? And if it gets challenged in court, what amount of paperwork do they have to show the judge to prove that they made the decision on a “reasonable basis”? For example, when I type “FDA sued” into Google, the top result is a news story from a few days ago, saying that an environmental organization sued the FDA for not listening to their earlier request to ban phthalates from food. Six years ago, the environmental groups submitted a petition (the catchily-named “Food Additive Petition 6B4815”) demanding that the FDA ban 28 phthalates. Two years ago, after consulting with industry, the FDA finally banned 23 phthalates but said that the other five were okay, releasing a 58 page decision explaining its decision. Two days ago, the environmental groups sued, saying the remaining 5 phthalates are still bad. I assume the lawsuit will nitpick the details of the the 58 page decision, trying to prove that it it didn’t violate any of hundreds of federal laws saying that bureaucratic decisions must be reasonable, bureaucratic decisions must be based on science, bureaucratic decisions must respond to the petitioners’ complaints, bureaucratic decisions cannot have disparate impacts on different races, etc. I also assume that if the FDA had banned all the phthalates, they would have faced an equally serious lawsuit from Big Phthalate saying they were unfairly crippling business. Why does it take six years to respond to a petition? My guess is because they knew they would get sued and so they have some sort of million-step process that addresses every single thing you can sue over, so that they can prove to the court that their process addresses all possible complaints and they followed it to the letter. If you cut their bureaucrats in half, that doesn’t mean there will be fewer steps in the process. It means they’ll keep wanting not to get sued, the process will stay the same, and everything will take twice as long. — What has Congress mandated that they do? For example, when I Google “Congressional FDA mandate”, I get a page on HR 7248, a bill currently making its way through Congress, which says: This bill requires the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish a process that supports nonclinical testing methods for drug development that do not involve the use of animals. Specifically, the FDA must establish a pathway by which entities may apply to have nonclinical testing methods approved for use in a particular context. Qualifying methods must be intended to replace or reduce animal testing and to either improve the safety and efficacy of nonclinical testing or reduce the time to develop a drug. The FDA must issue its decision within 180 days of receiving an application. The FDA must also prioritize the review of applications for drugs that are developed using an approved nonclinical testing method. The FDA must annually post a report on its website that summarizes the results of the bill's implementation, including the number of applications received, types of methods that were approved, and the estimated number of animals saved as result of these methods. So the FDA has to establish this process and post an annual report on its website. How many bureaucrats per year does this take? Maybe five? If you halve the number of people at the FDA, you still need a constant five bureaucrats to comply with this particular law. If the bill passes, the FDA comes up with a nonclinical testing process, and someone (eg the nonclinical testing industry) doesn’t think it’s good enough, they can sue the FDA for not following the law. How good a nonclinical testing process will the FDA need in order to avoid lawsuits under this bill? I assume there is a large body of administrative law answering that question, and that it will take many bureaucrats to figure this out. Finally, I admit I’m a bit confused by this. IIRC “nonclinical testing” refers to things like testing drugs on stem cells or artificial organs instead of humans. You can obviously do this for some parts of the drug testing process, but not others; the FDA has already adjusted for this and integrated it into their guidelines to some extent. I can’t tell whether this law is a righteous attempt to correct bureaucratic foot-dragging, or a powergrab by Big Nonclinical Testing demanding that the FDA privilege their products over other forms of experiment. If the latter, the FDA may try to come up with some fake pathway that satisfies the letter of the law without really giving Big Nonclinical Testing any unfair privileges, and Big Nonclinical Testing will probably sue and say it violates this bill. How many bureaucrats do you think it will take to manage that? — How much will they get yelled at if they take too long to approve drugs, vs. if they mistakenly approve a bad drug? This is the basic determinant of all FDA drug approvals. Halving the number of FDA bureaucrats wouldn’t have literally zero effect on this balance. It would mean that approving new drugs would be delayed twice as long. This would be a little more outrageous than the current delay, and might shift an outrage-minimizing FDA director slightly in the direction of cutting rules. But solve for the equilibrium: there would still be more delay than there is now. Also, I don’t think public outrage about long drug delays is linear with regard to delay, and public outrage at bad drugs is constant and large. So I think at best, firing bureaucrats would shift this balance a small amount, and only by making everything overall worse. II. One possible objection: this assumes that the average bureaucracy is like the FDA drug approval process. But the FDA drug approval process’ job is to approve things. Maybe the average bureaucracy’s job is to ban things. Then decreasing their capacity would be good. (Vivek gets to be main example here because he tweeted, but the same considerations apply to Elon: even though the government as a whole is delaying SpaceX rocket launches, individual bureaucrats might be speeding them up through the same 1000-forms logic as in the FDA case) There’s certainly a spectrum from the most approval-focused bureaucracies to the most ban-focused bureaucracies. Thinking hard about this spectrum would be a step up from “instantly” firing 50% of all bureaucrats based on social security number. So maybe a steelman of Vivek’s point would be to fire 50% of people in the ban-focused bureaucracies (and maybe double the number of people in the approval-focused ones?) I’m still skeptical that this is how it works. The past few years have seen the cryptocurrency industry demand regulation, and the government mostly fail to step up (though crypto businesses hope the Trump administration will do better). Why do crypto businesses want to be regulated more? Because the alternative is something where it’s not clear what’s legal and anyone could be sued or shut down at any time. The chief legal officer of Coinbase, from the second link: All of us are begging for sensible standards that would allow us to get back to building great products and services and spend less time and frankly, less money, arguing over legal definitions and statutes. This isn’t because anyone specifically banned crypto. It’s because there are bans on other things (like unlicensed securities, money laundering, etc) that crypto is vaguely related to, sometimes an agency regulating these things will tell a crypto company “sorry, we think you’re illegal”, and crypto wants some specific list of things it can follow that explicitly establish it as on the right side of money-laundering and security-licensing laws. Obviously industries would prefer that these be simple and easy standards (“oh, don’t worry, you don’t have to worry about money laundering if you’re a crypto company”), but they would settle for strict regulations as long as the regulations carve out some ability for them exist at all. I’ve seen the same thing play out in another area I follow, cultured meat. There are many laws about what meat you can and cannot sell, how the animals have to be treated, what the sanitation standards are, et cetera. Some of these standards make no sense when applied to cultured meat; others, cultured meat naturally fails by default (you can’t prove you’re treating the animals in a certain way because there are no animals). Others are novel philosophical questions (can you sell cultured meat without saying it’s cultured? How big does the print need to be before it counts as saying that it’s cultured? What about on restaurant menus?) Situations like these mean that there’s no clear distinction between default-yes and default-no bureaucracies. There’s no explicit ban on crypto or cultured meat. But if you cripple bureaucracies’ ability to interact with these fields, it doesn’t mean they’re fully legal, free, and happy forever. It means they’re stuck in regulatory limbo. III. So it seems like you don’t want to fire bureaucrats, you want to cut red tape. In our toy model, you want to reduce the number of forms from 1,000 to (let’s say) 100. Then the same number of bureaucrats can get drugs approved ten times faster. In our non-toy actual model of what’s going on, this would require changing incentives. Maybe you could change judicial procedures so that fewer people sue, or the FDA needs less evidence to win any given lawsuit. This sounds hard (Vivek and Elon seem more qualified to wield chainsaws than to understand legal minutiae), possibly illegal (does the administrative branch even control how judicial procedure works?), and politically unpopular (this basically looks like telling people “f@#k you, companies can put as many phthalates as they want in food, we don’t have to prove that this decision is evidence based, and you’re not allowed to challenge us.”) Or it would require Congress to repeal legislation mandating things. These Congressional mandates are probably things that Congressmen and their constituents (either real constituents or special interests) care a lot about, so good luck getting them repealed. Also, doesn’t Congress pass like one bill per year now? This would normally make me pessimistic, but Vivek and other anti-bureaucracy activists have pointed to a recent success story: Idaho. Idaho cut their regulatory code by 38% in 2019, and since then it’s only gone down. How did they decrease red tape so fast? They did it through the power of nominative determinism. In that year, they elected a governor named Brad Little. His administration is called the Little Administration. Obviously government had to get smaller. But on a purely exoteric level, what methods did they use to pull this off? This CPAC article gives the basic story: The Little administration instituted sunset provisions that review each regulation every five years and make sure it’s justifiable.
Inline links: I debated Kevin Drum, a news story from a few days ago, a 58 page decision, have seen the cryptocurrency industry demand regulation, hope, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TTSy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb73cf3f3-e501-49b6-b2a3-b84c602d5038_481x344.webp, This CPAC article
Idaho cut their regulatory code by 38% in 2019, and since then it’s only gone down. How did they decrease red tape so fast? They did it through the power of nominative determinism. In that year, they elected a governor named Brad Little. His administration is called the Little Administration. Obviously government had to get smaller. But on a purely exoteric level, what methods did they use to pull this off? This CPAC article gives the basic story: The Little administration instituted sunset provisions that review each regulation every five years and make sure it’s justifiable.
Inline links: This CPAC article
The Idaho regulatory code is short enough that individual agencies’ portions are only a few hundred pages, and humans from those agencies can read the few hundred pages and see if they make sense.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
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 Idaho BOISE Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[period]r[period]burr[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 1:00 PM Location: Sunset Park, 32nd Street side Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8W, https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
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/ Idaho BOISE Contact: Tim Contact Info: tim[.]r[.]burr[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM Location: Sunset Park, near 32nd St. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH
Inline links: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8, https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH
Irvine5 mentions across 5 issues

Irvine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 14, 2021 and September 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The result - Irvine, California - is constantly showing up in various Best City lists"; "Próspera is a lot more ambitious than Irvine"; "I’ll be in Irvine this week visiting family". It most often appears alongside California, Colombia, Dubai.

Article page
Irvine
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
April 14, 2021
Last seen
September 04, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
It’s hard for me to get too freaked out about corporate model cities - I grew up in one. The Irvine family of California ranchers founded the Irvine Company to develop their land, and in the 1970s they partnered with the UC system and local real estate developers to build a new city. The result - Irvine, California - is constantly showing up in various Best City lists - #5 best public schools in America, #1 fiscally strongest city, #10 best place to raise a family, #8 healthiest, #3 greenest, #1 safest, etc, etc, etc. Also, Irvine Company head honcho Donald Bren made $17 billion and is now the 32nd richest man in America. I may not have extracted quite as much value from the experiment as Mr. Bren did, but I got a very good childhood out of it and I feel suitably grateful.
Inline links: various Best City lists
A typical Irvine commercial district, giving off heavy planned-city vibes. So while I understand that other people might find it shocking or crazy for a corporation to buy up some land, sketch a street plan, and try to make billions of dollars by creating as nice a city as possible, well - to me it kind of reminds me of home. I promise it’s not that weird when you’re living in it.
Próspera is a lot more ambitious than Irvine - not just planned streets and utility grids, but planned government and law code. It doesn’t just want to be the #X Nicest City, it wants to declare war on global poverty and win.
Irvine Meetup This Monday
April 16, 2022 · Original source
I’ll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don’t mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too.
Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food court in Irvine, California.
Inline links: this mysterious hexagonal sigil
Open Thread 220
April 17, 2022 · Original source
4: I’m still planning to be at an Irvine meetup on Monday, see this post for details.
Inline links: this post
Open Thread 243
September 26, 2022 · Original source
4: ACX meetups update: this week we have Tallinn on Monday, Tanzania on Thursday, Princeton + Irvine on Saturday, and Berlin + Dublin + Barcelona + Denver on Sunday - plus many more. And if you went to a meetup, Mingyuan would like to hear how it went - especially from organizers, but attendees can respond too. You can send her this form.
Inline links: many more, this form
23: California Dreamin'
September 04, 2023 · Original source
According to this article, State Senator Bill Dodd2 worries that a new city might have an “impact on agricultural production”, “harm Travis Air Force Base”, and cause “suburban sprawl”. And if they defeat all these people and win the local election, anyone who is against them can still lodge the normal CEQA and NEPA objections that have gummed up most large building projects in California over the past fifty years. And if they defeat those, they still have to build the city. Rep. Garamendi is skeptical, saying3: I think it’s pie in the sky. We know this area. I've talked to a very seasoned developer in California and asked what do you think of that? He said, keep in mind that the land is about 1/10th of the actual cost of building the city. You've got streets and roads and sewer systems and sanitation. They even want to build a concert hall. And if they manage that, what do they do about their own citizens? California allows a local government form called a “charter city”, but I don’t think you can get away with being actually undemocratic. So once 10,000 people live in their town, what’s to stop those people from becoming NIMBYs and voting against further growth? I assume there’s some answer to this question, since people have built successful company-owned planned cities in California in the past (eg Irvine). I’m just not sure what it is. Could their city charter ban zoning? Could they have some sort of super-powerful city manager paired with a very weak democratic council? Could they build everything first, and only invite people to move in after they’re done? Of course there are prediction markets: This is the only one with more than 15 traders, but go here to see the smaller ones; I’ll try to highlight them later if they get big enough to be credible. Also, some people asking the important questions: The Paradox Of Praxis You can think of new city projects as existing on a spectrum: Usually the ones on the left are more fun to talk about, but the ones on the right are more fun to invest in. The paradox of Praxis is that to all appearances, they’re several miles off the left side of this graph. No amount of reading starry-eyed overly-ambitious Silicon Valley ad copy can prepare you for how over-the-top Praxis is. Praxis has a manifesto with phrases like “glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns" and "atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed a synthetic bug paste". Praxis holds parties in classical-music-filled candlelit lofts where they ask participants about “Janusian thinking”. Praxis has a website www.terrifyingangel.com which is just a YouTube video on the idea of meaning throughout human history, plus a resignation letter you can send to your boss when you quit to join Praxis. Seen on the Praxis founder’s Twitter account. Milady is some kind of NFT thing, otherwise it makes as much sense to me as it does to you. But the other half of the paradox is the constant rumors that they’re competent and have some kind of good plan. These are spoken only in hushed whispers, I don’t know the details. But in 2021, they raised $4 million in a seed round from well-regarded venture capitalists whose investments usually make money. In 2022 they raised another $15 million in a Series A round from . . . okay, partly from Sam Bankman-Fried and Three Arrows Capital, two notorious crypto scammers. But you would think scammers would be extra careful not to invest their own money in scams! Also, they recently signed on David Weinreb, a completely normal (and well-regarded) city planner person. What’s the strategy that both involves both Milady Raves and lots of competent people agreeing you’re a good investment? One strategy is something like: buy some land somewhere. Build some houses and streets. Convince digital nomads to move there on the grounds that you are very cool and visionary. Do some cool and visionary seeming things, or at least throw some really good raves. Other digital nomads get jealous and move there too. Sell parcels of land to these people, get rich, pay back your investors. And then who knows, maybe create a new civilization that redefines what it means to be human. Consider Elon Musk. Elon Musk is good at certain business-related skills. But that’s not the essence of Elon Musk. The essence of Elon Musk is that he’s a Visionary who can bring the Glorious Future. We know this because he’s a crazy person who says stuff that doesn’t really make sense. When Elon Musk buys a company, its value goes up - maybe partly because people expect Musk to make good business decisions, but also partly because now the company is part of Musk’s Glorious Future, and therefore exciting. Employees, customers, and investors all get excited and reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. And although Musk might not always accomplish the exact Glorious Future future he promises, his companies do well and make money, because having motivated employees, star-struck customers, and willing investors is a great combination. Elon Musk has an aura of destiny because he succeeded at his first several companies. Dryden Brown of Praxis Society, lacking a Paypal Mafia to join, is trying to hack together an aura of destiny out of raves and angel-related videos. So far it seems to be going pretty okay. Prospera Sues Honduras For 2/3 Of Its National Budget To refresh: in the mid-2010s Honduras’ pro-market government created ZEDEs - businesses that bought up unoccupied land could start their own districts with their own preferred legal system in exchange for bringing in investment. The government knew businesses wouldn’t invest long-term if the next government could just cancel the agreement and seize all of their stuff, so they fortified the law with as much protection as possible. It would take a long constitutional amendment process to repeal, and ZEDE investors might be able to object to any changes under international investment treaties. Lured by these protections, three companies started ZEDEs, including a big high-profile one called Prospera. In early 2022, a socialist government took power, and started trying their best to destroy the ZEDEs. They started the constitutional amendment process (they seem to think they’ve finished it, but a Prospera rep I talked to believe they have to hold another vote by the end of this year, something I see no signs of them doing) and have been harassing and stonewalling existing ZEDEs. One ZEDE, Orquidea, shut down immediately. A second, Ciudad Morazan, seems to still be operating but I cannot figure out exactly how or why. Prospera has been most vocal in its opposition, and sued Honduras for $11 billion in the World Bank’s court of investment arbitration. (Prospera has only spent about $100 million so far, so it’s unclear why they deserve 100x that in penalties. Also $11 billion is “two-thirds of the 2022 Honduran national budget”, and forcing Honduras to pay it would cause national catastrophe. This might be more of a highball offer than a number they actually expect to get.) This article (poorly translated from Spanish, sorry) has the most information. It suggests Honduras believes they signed onto the investment treaties “with reservations”, ie conditional on being allowed to do things like shut down ZEDEs, and that therefore the suit is meaningless and they will not defend themselves. Although the magazine is on the government’s side of the overall issue, it suggests they didn’t actually sign on with reservations, that the country’s lawyers might just have no idea what they’re talking about, and that their bold strategy of refusing to defend themselves will not pay off. In contrast, Prospera has prestigious lawyers specializing in exactly this area, so things aren’t looking good for the government. Honduras seems to recognize this and is threatening to withdraw from ICSID, the international investment treaty that governs such disputes. This wouldn’t be completely unprecedented - Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have also done this. But ICSID rules say that withdrawing from ICSID, while it might help prevent future cases against you, doesn’t cancel existing cases, and wouldn’t protect Honduras against Prospera’s claim. (How would ICSID collect against Honduras if they lost? I don’t know, but I assume the global financial order has some way to make your life worse if you defy it.) I think everyone is hoping Honduras realizes that cancelling a flourishing economic zone that’s bringing lots of investment into the country at no cost to them - just isn’t worth taking an $11 billion loss, cancelling international treaties, and scaring off future investment. But who knows how these people think? In other Prospera news: Prospera announces another $36 million in recent investment, which I take as evidence that VCs with good lawyers and research departments also think its case is very strong.
Inline links: this article, 2, saying, 3, Irvine, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gDuy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99d925cd-4a30-4d27-87fd-9cf75154b881_1596x168.png, Praxis, manifesto, parties, www.terrifyingangel.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SyT0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faff4d7cb-112f-4ba7-a999-3cf6d7332077_1536x2048.jpeg, the Praxis founder’s Twitter account, raised $4 million in a seed round, raised another $15 million in a Series A round, recently signed on David Weinreb, To refresh:, harassing and stonewalling, sued Honduras for $11 billion, This article, threatening to withdraw from ICSID, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have also done this, announces another $36 million in recent investment
Indian Ocean3 mentions across 3 issues

Indian Ocean is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 15, 2021 and December 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In 2004, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the Indian Ocean"; "Maldives, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean"; "been on a tiny Indian Ocean island". It most often appears alongside China, Marginal Revolution, Substack.

Article page
Indian Ocean
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 15, 2021
Last seen
December 28, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
In 2004, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami devastated Southeast Asia. One of the worst-affected countries was Sri Lanka, where 30,000 people died and millions were left homeless.
22
August 01, 2022 · Original source
They seem to have gotten…an Indian tribe? That wasn’t on my bingo card for 2022. The Catawba Digital Economic Zone is the brainchild of Joseph McKinney (founder of the pro-charter-cities Startup Societies Foundation) and the Catawba Nation of Native Americans (a federally recognized tribe with a reservation in South Carolina). Indian tribes have regulatory independence from state governments, which some tribes have famously used to allow casinos in their territory. The Catawba are going one step further: they claim to have favorable cryptocurrency regulations which make it easier to register and operate your crypto company in Catawba territory than in the rest of the US. You can find their exact laws here, although they are long and in legalese. CoinDesk has an explainer of the crypto benefits, which seem to focus on digital asset regulations which “integrate digital assets under existing law”, including rights around disputes and loans. They also expect upcoming laws on DAOs, stablecoin, and banking. “Native American tribes” and “cryptocurrency” were not previously two concepts I associated closely with each other. But the Catawba were already a standout for their political savvy and economic ambitions, and they seem intimately involved here; the Zone is being run by “the business branch of the Catawba Indian Nation”, the commissioners are mostly Catawba citizens and tribal elders, and there are some nice touches like financial incentives for businesses that employ Catawba citizens. I like crypto as an insurance policy against oppressive governments, but I am not very bullish about it as an industry right now. Still, I am excited about the idea of Indian reservation charter cities - either in cooperation with outsiders like McKinney, or - who knows? - as grassroots designs from the tribes themselves. Reservation charter cities wouldn’t be the biggest deal. Tribes have substantial independence from state and local governments, but not much independence from the national government, and a lot of the dysfunction that needs escaping is at the federal level. Still, there are probably some niche opportunities; see eg Squamish tribe building skyscrapers on their land in Vancouver despite NIMBY opposition for one example of where this sort of idea could go. Seasteading In Paradise Malé is the capital of the Maldives, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean. It looks like this: One noticeable feature of Malé is its lack of lebensraum. Maldives is a pretty well-off country with a strong tourist industry, and lots more people would like to be nearby. What to do? You can already guess the proposed solution of Maldives Floating City. They want a 20,000 person seastead docked ten minutes away from the 130,000 person island-capital. The Floating City will serve both tourists and local Maldivians (some of whom are getting nervous about rising sea levels, and would probably appreciate a development guaranteed to stay above water). According to the organization’s press release, the Dutch corporate sponsor has obtained full permission to build the seastead, some test construction has already started, and full construction will begin in January. They hope to finish by 2027. Here are the inevitable pretty pictures: The layout is supposedly based on brain coral, but is this really the best way to lay design a seastead? Does this pattern really maximize the ease of getting from Point A to Point B? If you like tropical paradises and are incredibly optimistic, you can buy a house in the Floating City here, prices seem to be $150-250K. This is not the long-awaited dream of the libertarian seastead; the whole city will be firmly anchored in Maldives, both physically and legally. But if it works, it’s a proof of concept that libertarians may be able to build on later. Elsewhere In Model Cities 1: Prospera now hosts the drone delivery service Aerialoop, which will eventually transport cargo from their Roatan Island hub to various outposts on the mainland; you can find more information here. Their long-term plans include eventually following this up with passenger drones. And here’s some more information on the growing drone industry in Latin America. 2: Related: Prospera intern and resident George Kerpestein is writing a Substack about his experiences there. And here is the Prospera newsletter. 3: Thanks to commenters last month for pointing out that Chinese cult Falun Gong has its own compound/city in upstate New York. You can read more about it here: 4: Sealand is an independent nation (according to Sealand) based out of an old WWII sea fort in international waters. It is not for sale, but the Bull Sandfort is, for only £50,000. Alas, this one is firmly within British territorial waters. But it does look pretty defensible…anyway, see the listing here. Predictions In 2030, there are at least 50,000 people in whatever the Neom project has evolved into by then: 75%
Inline links: Startup Societies Foundation, Catawba Nation, here, CoinDesk has an explainer of the crypto benefits, already a standout, building skyscrapers on their land in Vancouver despite NIMBY opposition, Malé, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FGww!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b977d54-218e-4a02-8ffe-630a48099ec2_1386x924.jpeg, Maldives Floating City, press release, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_9hG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59b2e0ea-e379-4e67-b7a0-7ad9c4ab034a_2400x1350.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WoEb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9be04950-c68a-4869-aca0-d7134a6ccfc0_1200x918.jpeg, here, here, the growing drone industry in Latin America, writing a Substack, the Prospera newsletter, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Kdyl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd505ec-7998-4f17-b1b5-82cbaa663ea0_700x525.jpeg, Sealand, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X_kO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3fc09d9d-ac8b-4e5f-a4c0-061832919c87_753x416.png
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
43: Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse, maybe the weirdest post I’ve read this year. Julian Jaynes argued that modern theory of mind, where we know we’re individuals, understand that we have minds, and can “talk” “things” “over” “with” “ourselves” “in” “our” “heads”, is only as old as the Late Bronze Age; people before that were much weirder. I always imagined this transition as gradual and hard-to-notice. The SmoothBrains blog writes about a weird anthropologist who claimed to have been on a tiny Indian Ocean island during the exact moment of a sudden phase transition from pre-Jaynesian to post-Jaynesian mental states. I am almost sure this is false, and it goes harder on the Noble Savage trope than I have ever seen anything go before - but it was still very much worth reading.
Inline links: Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse, Julian Jaynes argued
Indianapolis3 mentions across 3 issues

Indianapolis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, USA"; "INDIANAPOLIS". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, ACX, ACX.

Article page
Indianapolis
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
August 29, 2024
Last seen
August 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Nmk Contact Info: nmkiahrne[at]outlook[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 04:00 PM Location: I will be in the south east end of the main quad at UIUC. Hopefully i will be wearing red and carrying a small sign saying ACX meetup on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q4F+J7 Group Link: https://discord.gg/6vYrRTmu Notes: I probably won't have any activities planned , so if you have any good ideas, feel free to bring them and the necessary materials. Indiana INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, USA Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q4F+J7, https://discord.gg/6vYrRTmu, https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 01:00 PM Location: Tap Indianapolis, 306 N Delaware St, Indianapolis, IN 46204, outside of the weather is nice, otherwise look for the sign saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQRCW+J5
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Noah Birnbaum Contact Info: dnbirnbaum[a t]uchicago[period]edu Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM Location: On the UChicago campus - usually in the Bartlett Dining Commons lounge but this could be subject to change. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ Group Link: Uchicago: https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA General Chicago: https://chicagorationality.com Notes: If you are on the mailing list, please fill out RSVP form that will be sent out so that I know how much food to get. Indiana INDIANAPOLIS Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ, https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA, https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Contact: Tyler Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: John Contact Info: himalayansp[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Friday, October 3rd, 5:00 PM Location: 310 S. Eastside Drive Bloomington, IN 47401. It’s the house surrounded by the tall bushes Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ Notes: just show up INDIANAPOLIS Contact: Blake Riley Contact Info: blake[period]j[period]riley[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Upland FSQ Brewery 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 I'll have a sign and a copy of Unsong at the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ Notes: Might be seated indoors or outdoors depending on the weather. Brewery is all-ages and family-friendly, not 21+
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GJ, https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ
Contact: Blake Riley Contact Info: blake[period]j[period]riley[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Upland FSQ Brewery 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203 I'll have a sign and a copy of Unsong at the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ Notes: Might be seated indoors or outdoors depending on the weather. Brewery is all-ages and family-friendly, not 21+
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ
Irvine, CA3 mentions across 3 issues

Irvine, CA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "IRVINE, CA ( RSVP )"; "IRVINE, CA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

Article page
Irvine, CA
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
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
IRVINE, CA (RSVP) Contact: Nick, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, October 2 Location: William R Mason Regional Park. Look for ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/peanut.shuts.elevate
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/peanut.shuts.elevate
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
IRVINE, CA Contact: Nick (cohenskijanuary1@mail.com) Date: May 7 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8554M526+6H Location: Irvine, University Town Center Benches
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8554M526+6H
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
I-52 mentions across 2 issues

I-5 is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 13, 2022 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "And for all those who know the Valley only from road trips along I-5"; "sixteen cars behind them on an I-5 near McKitterick CA". It most often appears alongside Mexico, #MeToo, 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Article page
I-5
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
October 13, 2022
Last seen
September 06, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 13, 2022 · Original source
The song illustrates some of the themes you discuss above, Scott, and it captures how love of the Valley is largely a matter of taste. For some, it is a version of California paradise; for others it is a long and boring stretch of empty highway miles. And for all those who know the Valley only from road trips along I-5, know that State Route 99 is significantly less empty. Even better, get off the main highways and explore the back roads. You may be surprised by the beautiful landscapes and interesting people and places you encounter.
Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
- We witness the messy mind of literature’s worst psychic, who channels random irrelevancies like “The middle name of the childhood friend of a stranger they pass in a hallway,” or “someone they sit near in a movie was once sixteen cars behind them on an I-5 near McKitterick CA on a warm, rainy October day in 1971.”
IFE2 mentions across 2 issues

IFE is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "IFE, OSUN STATE, NIGERIA ( RSVP )"; "meetups have been added in Bangalore, Tokyo, and Ife (Nigeria)". It most often appears alongside Bangalore, Berkeley, facebook.

Article page
IFE
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 23, 2021
Last seen
August 29, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
...ation: Sarona market park, between the Magnum bar and Sarona beer garden. I'll have an ACX sign and some red balloons. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/market.coherent.muddle IFE, OSUN STATE, NIGERIA ( RSVP ) Contact: Matteo Di Bernardo, md3498[at]columbia[dot]edu Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Obafemi Awolowo Campus, Main Square LAGOS, NIGERIA ( RSVP ) Contact:...
Open Thread 187
August 29, 2021 · Original source
2: Since the last post, meetups have been added in Bangalore, Tokyo, and Ife (Nigeria), and a lot of existing meetups have changed times/dates/places, so please check the spreadsheet to make sure the last thing you read about meetups is still up to date.
Inline links: check the spreadsheet
Indians2 mentions across 2 issues

Indians is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 24, 2021 and March 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans"; "almost a billion Indians". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Achilles, Afghan.

Article page
Indians
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
May 24, 2021
Last seen
March 08, 2022
Outbound links
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Related pages
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.
Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels in Heaven praising Allah, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you. So far nobody in the Idealized Middle East has come up with a good solution to this, and the FAA currently recommends avoiding demon-bird-men and sticking with mechanical flying horses instead. Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
But the vast majority of people reading this have probably never been personally affected by a war and might not even know anyone who has been. And a billion Chinese, and almost a billion Indians, and almost everyone in South America, and a lot of other people, can say the same.
International Space Station2 mentions across 2 issues

International Space Station is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 17, 2022 and December 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "similar to the International Space Station"; "We spent $100 billion building the International Space Station, which is basically just a big house in space". It most often appears alongside Russia, Ukraine, ACX.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
June 17, 2022
Last seen
December 08, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
By the 1970s, it was apparent that making fusion power work is possible, but very hard. Fusion would require Big Science with Significant Support. The total cost would be less than the Apollo Program, similar to the International Space Station, and more than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Department of Energy put together a request for funding. They proposed several different plans. Depending on how much funding was available, we could get fusion in 15-30 years.
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
The space program has existed for more than fifty years, and mostly succeeded at reinventing things we already have on Earth, only worse. Remember the story of that special astronaut pen that cost $1 million? We already have pens on earth, for like $0.10, and they work better! The lunar rover is just a car, only worse. That robocopter that flew around Mars is just a drone, only worse. We spent $100 billion building the International Space Station, which is basically just a big house in space. But we already have houses on Earth which are cheaper and more comfortable in every way!
In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. This means you can use it for all of those cool things - sending remittances, circumventing corrupt banking systems, resisting authoritarian governments - that are hard to do with regular money. Of course subjecting yourself to a difficult constraint is going to be harder than not doing that! You don’t hate the International Space Station for being worse than houses on Earth. You marvel at the fact that anyone can live in space at all!
Israel-Palestine2 mentions across 2 issues

Israel-Palestine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "National Water Carrier Project of Israel-Palestine made life in the Fertile Crescent possible"; "the National Water Carrier Project of Israel-Palestine made life in the Fertile Crescent possible"; "An attempt to put Israel-Palestine in context by mapping it onto the SF Bay Area". It most often appears alongside Arizona, California, GiveWell.

Article page
Israel-Palestine
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
April 30, 2021
Last seen
December 01, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
In "Water," again, the Wizards have a solid track record. The Wizardly California State Water Project transformed a desert into the most productive farmland and state in the nation; the National Water Carrier Project of Israel-Palestine made life in the Fertile Crescent possible for millions of Jewish refugees. Desalination projects (expensive, but with nearly bottomless potential, given how huge our oceans are) have de-escalated the fight for shrinking groundwater resources in California and the Middle East. In this arena, the Prophets have been a little more successful in offering alternative conservation-oriented solutions that have stuck: storm and wastewater reclamation, drip irrigation, and behavioral change campaigns to encourage more frugal water usage that have seeped (pun intended) so deeply into the public consciousness that running the tap while brushing your teeth feels as illicit as lighting up a cigarette. All of these measures do little, though, to solve the fundamental underlying problem of massive urban growth in water-scarce areas like the American Sunbelt; if anything, growing water efficiency among consumers exacerbates the problem by shrinking utility profits and forcing them to either cut back on much-needed infrastructure repair and service improvement or raise water costs. Conservation and reclamation can only do so much; they can’t provide water to the exploding populations of Arizona or Sub-Saharan Africa.
Inline links: California State Water Project, National Water Carrier Project, shrinking utility profits and forcing them to either cut back on much-needed infrastructure repair and service improvement or raise water costs
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
47: An attempt to put Israel-Palestine in context by mapping it onto the SF Bay Area at the same scale (source, or click to enlarge):
Inline links: source
Ibadan1 mentions across 1 issues

Ibadan 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 "IBADAN, NIGERIA". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry
Ibadan
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 10, 2022
Last seen
April 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
IBADAN, NIGERIA Contact: Mo (fromoneaddicttoanother@gmail.com) Date: May 30 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FV5CRMP+9R Location: Word of Grace Family church, Ologun-eru Ibadan
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FV5CRMP+9R
Ibiza1 mentions across 1 issues

Ibiza 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 "IBIZA". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry
Ibiza
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
April 01, 2026
Last seen
April 01, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Jose Contact Info: jsillerosalado[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:00 PM Location: Parque el Arenal Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CMV736G+6H4 Notes: Let me know via comment or email if theres a chance youll be coming! IBIZA Contact: Tristan Contact Info: (change incoming, for the moment try the whatsapp) Time: Saturday, April 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Juntos Farm Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FF32CCV+PR Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fey [remove this bit] aWJGwhVm4tHy3ZBMK4d?mode=gi_t Notes: Please RSVP via the WhatsApp group
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CMV736G+6H4, https://plus.codes/8FF32CCV+PR
Ice Age aquifer1 mentions across 1 issues

Ice Age aquifer is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 13, 2022 and October 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the huge Ice Age aquifer". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry
Ice Age aquifer
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 13, 2022
Last seen
October 13, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 13, 2022 · Original source
Likewise, in the Southern California low desert around Palm Springs, you are allowed to use whatever water you pump out of the huge Ice Age aquifer, but you aren't allowed to sell your water to Los Angeles or San Diego, so the hot Coachella Valley has a ridiculous number of golf courses that are kept green even in the 112 degree summers.
Idaho river1 mentions across 1 issues

Idaho river is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river"; "wolves understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

Reference entry
Idaho river
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 13, 2022
Last seen
August 13, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing.
Idealized Middle East1 mentions across 1 issues

Idealized Middle East 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 "Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Allah, Arabian Nights.

Reference entry
Idealized Middle East
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 24, 2021
Last seen
May 24, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: Arabian Nights
May 24, 2021 · Original source
Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil. Named characters are always so beautiful and skilled and virtuous that it sometimes gets used it as a plot device - a character is separated from his family member or lover, so he wanders into a caravanserai and asks for news of someone who is excessively beautiful and skilled and virtuous. "Oh yes," says one of the merchants, "I talked to a traveler from Cairo who said he encountered the most beautiful and skilled and virtuous person he'd ever seen in a garden there, he couldn't shut up about them for days" - and now you know your long-lost brother must be in Cairo. In one case, a woman went searching for her long-lost son, tasted some pomegranate jam in Damascus, and immediately (and correctly!) concluded that only her son could make pomegranate jam that good. She demanded to know where the merchant had gotten the jam, and the trail led to a happy reunion.
The most common jobs in Idealized Middle East are sultan, merchant, poor-but-pious tailor, fisherman, merchant, evil vizier, sorcerer, merchant, thief, person who gets hired to assist a sorcerer because they have the exact right astrological chart to perform some otherwise-impossible ritual, and merchant. Of these, merchant is number one. Whatever else you're doing - sailing, stealing, using your perfect astrological chart to enter a giant glowing door in the desert mysteriously invisible to everyone else - you're probably also dealing goods on the side. The only exceptions are Moroccans (who are all sorcerers), Zoroastrians (who are all demonic cannibals), and Jews (who are all super-double merchants scamming everyone else). Also maybe the 5 - 10% of the Middle Eastern population who witches have turned into animals at any given time.
The most common hobby in the Idealized Middle East is telling and listening to stories. Whenever something interesting happens in the city, the people involved are brought before the sultan to tell the story. If an especially beautiful and skilled and virtuous person is spotted in the city, they are recognized as a likely protagonist, and brought before the sultan to tell their story. Sometimes when criminals are brought to the sultan, the police will read off their ridiculous convoluted crimes, and the sultan will say "What a wondrous story!", and the criminals will say "O Sultan, if I can tell you a story even more wondrous than that, will you pardon me?" and the sultan always says yes. The sultan is always amazed, and pardons the criminal, and states that the story should be written in letters of liquid gold for the edification of future generations. Sultans are such suckers for stories that they basically never get a chance to rule, which I assume is why government is mostly run by evil viziers.
Ile de France1 mentions across 1 issues

Ile de France 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 "Ile de France, the region surrounding Paris". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agamemnon, Age of Empires II.

Reference entry
Ile de France
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 is a pretty good prediction. But it's not perfect. It's written down in early 1431 and presumably made in early 1431, too, by the date of the trial. The relevant dates for her prediction: May 1435, French win a small-scale victory at Gerberoy, killing a leading English general; September 1435, Bedford dies of natural causes and the Burgundians switch sides again; April 1436, French take Paris with support from inside the city; 1441, the last English stronghold within the Ile de France falls; 1453, every English stronghold in France falls except the debatably French Calais; 1558, Calais falls.
But you'll note that they don't lose all in France - even in the Ile de France - "before seven years be passed," unless Joan has a different definition of the Ile than Wikipedia does.
One of the persistent problems with the language of every figure in this period, Joan included, is that France wasn't very well defined, in rather the same way an American could say "New York" to mean New York State or New York City, except worse. So "France" could mean either all of the territory held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory rightfully held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory in the ancient Kingdom of France, which had more different borders than I could shake a stick at, or just the Ile de France, the region surrounding Paris that was the heart of the domain of the French kings. Joan talks about herself as French and also talks about going into France from Lorraine, and plenty of others from this period talk about going from Normandy into France or France into Flanders. I can't ask them to talk more precisely than I speak myself, but it's still really annoying.
imperial China1 mentions across 1 issues

imperial 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 "the government of imperial China". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.

Reference entry
imperial China
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 19, 2022
Last seen
August 19, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
To modern sensibilities, Ming dynasty China was a lurid and savage place, where the gaudy veneer of an ancient and decadent civilization lent pomp and polish to underlying currents of unreconstructed barbarism. No doubt some of Robert E. Howard's depictions of his Conan character adventuring and buccaneering and conquering in fictional exotic lands were inspired in part by his impression of the legendary dynasties of imperial China. But 1587 has no unambiguously heroic protagonist, nor any dramatic resolution: in some ways it truly was “a year of no significance.”
Inline links: Conan
Wan-li was only eight when the early death of his father (at age 35) set him upon the throne of imperial China. He grew up in the Forbidden City, which he was forbidden to leave.
The entire legitimacy and power of the bureaucracy rested on the legitimacy of Chinese tradition, and therefore its primary goal was to ensure adherence and allegiance to tradition. There was no real system of checks and balances in the government of imperial China - the Emperor could, and did, dispose of any particular official who became an irritant. But, realistically, he lacked the power to replace the entire government. If the scholar-bureaucrats were united against his opinion, he had a very limited ability to impose his will over their objections. And the writing of censorious memos regarding the inappropriate behavior of anyone and everyone, including the Emperor, was itself a longstanding tradition.
imperial Germany1 mentions across 1 issues

imperial Germany is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 13, 2022 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "still-inferior citizenship in imperial Germany". It most often appears alongside 1890s, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.

Reference entry
imperial Germany
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
July 13, 2022
Last seen
July 13, 2022
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Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
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.
Imperial Spain1 mentions across 1 issues

Imperial Spain is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "transported to cities all over Imperial Spain". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

Reference entry
Imperial Spain
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 10, 2022
Last seen
October 10, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
Spain began to trade slaves in the 15th century and this trade reached its peak in the 16th century. The history of Spanish enslavement of Africans began with Portuguese captains Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão in 1441. The first large group of African slaves, made up of 235 slaves, came with Lançarote de Freitas three years later. In 1462, Portuguese slave traders began to operate in Seville, Spain. During the 1470s, Spanish merchants began to trade large numbers of slaves. Slaves were auctioned at market at a cathedral, and subsequently were transported to cities all over Imperial Spain. This led to the spread of Moorish, African, and Christian slavery in Spain. By the 16th century, 7.4 percent of the population in Seville, Spain were slaves. Many historians have concluded that Renaissance and early-modern Spain had the highest amount of African slaves in Europe.
Inde1 mentions across 1 issues

Inde is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

Reference entry
Inde
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 23, 2024
Last seen
August 23, 2024
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Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
August 23, 2024 · Original source
My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse, By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde, Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce, Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde; Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde, And send me to greate ladyes of estate; Then Parot must have an almon or a date.
1936, however, was a bad year for poetry. Rudyard Kipling died, having at one point been the most widely-read contemporary poet in the English language. G.K. Chesterton died, still remembered today by the online limerick dictionary in limerick form:
Inline links: Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, online limerick dictionary in limerick form
The 1936 edition was made right in this transitional time between ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ poetry, and in many ways represents the best of both. Poetry, especially in academia and among the kind of people who write rhyming dictionaries, was stale in the early 20th century. Sure, Kipling and Chesterton and Graham were all writing bestsellers, but if they showed up in academia, it tended to be in student newspapers and not higher. Plus, while they could all write in any fixed form or rhyme scheme or metre, they tended to favor simpler ones, not the rondeau or the villanelle or the triolet that academics a few decades earlier might have preferred. Wood warns, both in the introduction and again and again throughout the book, about the failure modes he sees in poets too entrenched in archaic language and wording:
Indian1 mentions across 1 issues

Indian is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Indian offices had 90% of their staff cut". It most often appears alongside 787, adderallposting, ADL.

Reference entry
Indian
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
September 18, 2023
Last seen
September 18, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Beyond that it would appear that a not insignificant number of these cuts were outside the US. Indian offices had 90% of their staff cut, for example. I have no idea what the implications are for this, but many of the impacts on twitter UX might just not be happening in Scott’s region.
INDIANA, PA1 mentions across 1 issues

INDIANA, PA 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 "INDIANA, PA". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry
INDIANA, PA
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 26, 2022
Last seen
August 26, 2022
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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
Indies1 mentions across 1 issues

Indies is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "did indeed raid the native villages of the Indies, capture many of them as slaves". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

Reference entry
Indies
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 10, 2022
Last seen
October 10, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
…but Columbus seemed pretty upset not to find much gold in the West Indies and seems to have slave-raided at an unusually intense level to compensate. I can’t tell what percentile of badness for a 15th-century explorer he was, but I’m guessing it’s >50th, and reading about some of the awful things he did it’s hard to care.
> The maintenance of justice and the extension of the dominion of Her Highness has hitherto kept me down. Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the mines. A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid. I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad example for the present and for the future. I take my oath that a number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in the sight of God and of the world; and now they are returning thither, and leave is granted them.”
I cannot find anyone denying that Columbus promised the king and queen of Spain that he would provide them with lots of slaves, and did indeed raid the native villages of the Indies, capture many of them as slaves, and send 500 back to Spain (200 of whom died en route). He talks about doing this in his own letters, so I don’t think this one is a rumor spread by his enemies.
Inglewood1 mentions across 1 issues

Inglewood 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 "investment in the Black Community ... in Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood & Oakland". It most often appears alongside #Abolitionist, #AntiNazi, #antiwar.

Reference entry
Inglewood
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 24, 2022
Last seen
May 24, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
Instead of following fraudulent Black Lives Matter Organization that is Anti-American. They committed FRAUD and purchased a 6 Million Dollar Mansion with the Non-Profit Donations it received instead of supporting the Black Community. As Governor, I will make an immediate 30 Million Dollar Investment in the Black Community in Education, Small Business & Jobs in Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood & Oakland.
Inner Mongolia1 mentions across 1 issues

Inner Mongolia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2023 and May 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City". It most often appears alongside Alex Poterack, Alexander, America.

Reference entry
Inner Mongolia
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
May 10, 2023
Last seen
May 10, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices
May 10, 2023 · Original source
Kangbashi, China’s most famous ghost city. What are housing prices like in the ghost city? Again from Bloomberg: Sitting on the southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City (population 2.2 million), Kangbashi was the archetypal ghost city 10 years ago, with barren boulevards and empty buildings standing forlornly in the desert. Local officials are adamant that things have changed. They say 91% of homes in the district are occupied. In fact, after a yearslong construction freeze, the government approved six housing projects in 2020 and expects 3,000 homes to be built by the end of this year. Apartments in a new development are selling for 9,500 yuan per square meter, and downtown they go for 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, according to Liu Yueyue, 28, a salesman at a new residential development in the district’s northeast. “Would houses in a ghost town sell at such high prices?” asks Liu. Half of his customers come from outside Kangbashi, and most are parents who want to send their children to the well-regarded local schools, he says. Looking at this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Kangbashi seems squarely in the middle - for example, Wuhan and Xian are also in the 15,000 - 16,000 range. I claim this supports my argument: surely twenty years ago, houses in this particular deserted corner of Inner Mongolia would have been dirt cheap (if any even existed). But if you build a city there, it becomes just as expensive as any other city! Here it’s very obvious that the density caused the high prices instead of the other way around. Still, the Chinese housing market is weird, with significant vacancies even in expensive, well-developed cities. Paul Botts: No official vacancy rates are published in China and no specific definition of it exists there. Various think tanks and researchers both within that country and elsewhere have published estimates ranging from as low as 11 percent to as high as 24 percent. Those estimates have been for varying samples of Chinese cities, have used various definitions of housing vacancy rate, etc. The best (as in most systematic) estimate yet produced has come from researchers at a university in Liaoning. They used night-time urban lightsheds captured by a new (2018 launch) Chinese satellite having a new level of light sensing technology which allows separating out light from parks and plazas. They covered a large sample (49 cities), and made their sample representative of city type, city size, regions within China, etc. They also crossed-referenced with local housing data to ensure accurate balancing of their sample and to confirm that the satellite was successfully identifying light coming from housing blocks. They found vacancy rates of just under 20 percent in China's Tier 1 cities, and found rates above 20 percent in 40 of the 49 cities. They found the highest vacancy rates in western and northeastern cities, which are also the newest ones; that finding is consistent with the hypothesis of significant numbers of recently-built ghost cities. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data And Phil H (author of the blog Tang Poetry) writes: The price of housing in China has skyrocketed over the past few decades, as all those extra apartments have been built. I live in a pleasant but unremarkable southern city, and I paid London prices (about 4.5m yuan/$650k for a 1,300 sq ft flat). That seems to match Scott's hypothesis that high density leads to high prices. House prices here have risen much faster than incomes. They've risen in rural areas, too, but the increases in price in cities have been stratospheric. 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant I won’t name and shame people, but for example: You excluded Tokyo from your dataset. Tokyo has much higher density than SF and much lower price per sqft. Tokyo just kills this. Tokyo is bigger than New York and has significantly lower rent because they build more housing! This is in a wealthy country with even lower interest rates than the US. I don't think you have justified excluding non-US metros, like Tokyo, or Auckland. Doesn't this lead to the natural conclusion that there is a sufficient level of housing to build, and that the problem is that the USA's many metros are structured to prevent housing? It seems like you're just arguing that US metros are bad at building housing, which is also what Matt Yglesias is arguing. "Change my mind about housing, but don't mention Tokyo" is like saying "Change my mind about gun possession, but don't mention Switzerland." You can't test the effect of allowing new housing unless you're willing to look at cities that do, in fact, allow it. Tokyo and NYC both attract tons of new residents But Tokyo's housing rents have been stable, while NYC rents keep rising. Why? Tokyo has permissive housing construction laws. NYC makes building new housing almost illegal. Yes, dense cities are attractive, and that makes them get more dense over time. But it only makes them more expensive if you forbid new housing to keep up with the new residents. Tokyo! But I’m like the 10th person to bring it up… As I wrote on the original post (not even edited in! it’s been there the whole time!): I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself! That is, yes, you’re all correct that cities are only expensive in the context of more demand for city housing than the (NIMBY-constrained) city housing market can currently supply. You are all correct that if this problem were solved at the national level, then city housing would be cheap, and every additional city house would make it cheaper. My claim is that marginal changes - like Oakland building an extra 10,000 units, but everyone else staying the same - will most likely increase Oakland prices. Yes, if Oakland unilaterally built 50 million units, that would soak up the entire excess demand and probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). Yes, if the entire US switched to good housing policy at the same time, that would probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). But if we don’t do any of that stuff, and just build another 10,000 houses in Oakland, I think it would probably increase prices in Oakland. Some other people brought up that Japan has a declining population, and it’s much easier to have low house prices when your population is declining (compared to some previous time when number of houses presumably matched number of people), but ddd pointed out that people continue to migrate from the Japanese countryside to Tokyo, so its population continues to increase. Also, Mike (I’m stitching together two comments here): In a country with a declining population, you would expect that fewer homes are being built per capita because there's little to no competition for existing homes. But it's exactly the opposite! Japan builds far more homes per capita than the US does, despite their declining population […] As a result, the average Japanese home is very new and the average house is torn down and replaced after a relatively short 30 years. They're living in nice new homes for cheaper. 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I think you're making a very common mistake here of confusing supply/demand with *quantity* supplied or quantity demanded. (This is very common! we teach students about this in micro 101 because it's so easy to make!) What you're seeing is that the quantity supplied is correlated with housing prices (true!). But this is very different from establishing that the supply curve--i.e. the amount of housing that would be produced at any given price, and what moves up/down when we regulate/deregulate supply--is positively correlated with price. Figuring out what supply curves look like is a lot less intuitive and requires some high-grade econometrics, which is why economists had to set up a whole commission just to study this particular problem (the Cowles Commission). In terms of resources for understanding how these concepts are different, a micro 101 textbook will cover this distinction. For the econometrics side of this, I've heard good things about Scott Cunningham's *Causal Inference Mixtape*, although I haven't personally used it. My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability. MLE later gets more on point: The effect you're discussing here is kind of real in a sense. When the marginal utility of housing increases for *other* people, density arguably becomes more desirable for me, which is kind of like the demand curve shifting up. These are called bandwagon goods and discussed here: http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf In theory, the bandwagon effect could be so strong that parts of the demand curve are upward-sloping. Solutions like this are not, technically, prohibited by the laws of mathematics, just the laws of economics. (And arguably of physics--see paper for conditions where these kinds of bandwagon effects imply the amount of housing in the city would have to be negative). In practice, this effect exists but just can't overcome the normal, non-weird economics that says "making more of a good makes the prices fall." Again, I claim the existence of Manhattan vs. Conanicut shows that sometimes it does. I cannot find the words “housing”, “real estate”, or “land value” anywhere in that paper. Alex Poterack writes: There's two things going on here: confusing shifts in demand with movement along the demand curve, and getting causation backwards. You're assuming density causes prosperity, rather than prosperity causing density. There are ways the former can happen, but the bigger thing is that, for a wide range of historical reasons, you can make a lot of money in NYC and SF, so lots of people want to live there, so they get very dense. This is the prosperity shifting demand right, so at any given price, more people want to live there; this drives prices up, and they go higher the more fixed supply is. If you built a bunch of housing in Oakland, lots of people would move there because it's cheaper, which is movement along the demand curve; it's still the same number of people who want to live there at any price. Now, it's possible that the increased number of people living there makes the city more prosperous (this is the phenomenon of induced demand), which would shift demand right, but there are way more differences between NYC/SF and Oakland than just the density, so I don't think it would shift demand enough to offset this. In particular, if it's just a small increase in small, it's also a small increase in density, so there's almost no shift in demand (but there is movement along the curve). I still think this is missing my point, but I present it here in case anyone else is enlightened by it and wants to try further to convince me I’m making this mistake. 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions Scott Sumner is an economist and blogger; he writes: It is certainly the case that building more housing can make a city more desirable, and that this effect could be so strong that it overwhelms the price depressing impact of a greater quantity supplied. But studies suggest that this is not generally the case. Texas provides a nice case study. Among Texas’s big metro areas, Austin has the tightest restrictions on building and Houston is the most willing to allow dense infill development. Even though Houston is the larger city, house prices are far higher in Austin: Houston pretty much describes the “Oakland with more housing” outcome that Alexander views as somewhat far-fetched. Only in this case, it’s Austin with more housing. Alexander seems too quick to accept the, “If you build it they will come” idea—that you can build more housing and thereby boost demand so much that prices actually rise. I started the post with a graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. I’m having trouble seeing how Sumner’s point isn’t just “if you remove 48 of those cities and cherry-pick two, the relationship is negative”. My attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph, using Sumner’s data plus a few other things available online. Why weren’t they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities, but I’m not sure and agree this is confusing. Everyone knows Austin is more expensive than Houston because Austin is a trendy tech and culture hub and Houston isn’t (and relatedly, because Austin’s median family income is 50% higher than Houston’s). Unless someone wants to claim that its failure to build housing helped turn it into a trendy tech and culture hub, I don’t think there’s much point to this comparison. It’s true that Houston’s bigger size didn’t let it leapfrog over Austin to become a trendy tech and culture hub, which goes against some of what I claimed in the first part of this post. But I never claimed there would be a perfect 1-1 correlation between city size and trendiness, or that you could never find a pair of cities where one was bigger but the other was more trendy. Just that there would be a correlation. Moving on: Here’s the problem with this argument. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration, with population changes due to regulatory changes such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against Alexander’s argument. Over the past 50 years, increasingly strict zoning has reduced housing construction on big cities like New York and San Francisco. As a result, their populations have increased by less than in cities with less strict zoning, such as Houston. If Alexander were correct, then the price gap between the tightly controlled cities on the coast and the more laissez-faire cities of Middle America should have shrunk over time. Instead, the price gap has widened. New York and San Francisco were always more expensive than other cites, but with tighter zoning and less new construction the gap has become far wider. During the last fifty years, there was also deindustrialization and demographic sorting. This is just the Austin vs. Houston story all over again. Alexander is implicitly viewing this outcome as a “problem” for the city that builds more housing. They must sacrifice so that the rest of the country can gain. But in his scenario, Oakland is better off. Indeed if it were not better off, then why would more people choose to live in Oakland? In order for it to be true that building more housing boosts housing prices, it must also be true that the quality of existing houses (including neighborhood effects) rises by more than enough to offset the increase in supply. That means the new housing construction must make Oakland such a desirable place to live that the amenity effect overwhelms the quantity effect [...] Of course, economic change always has winners and losers. Here’s how I would describe the impact of allowing more housing construction in Oakland, in the unlikely event that this did raise housing prices: 1. America would benefit. 2. Oakland would benefit. 3. Poor people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 4. Affluent people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 5. Homeowners in Oakland would benefit. 6. Some renters in Oakland would benefit (from a more economically dynamic city.) 7. Some renters in Oakland would suffer from higher rents. In the much more likely case where new housing construction would lower prices, the impact described in #5 and #7 might reverse. Either way, there is no defensible argument for not building more housing in Oakland, regardless of the impact on price. If building more housing reduces its price, then there is a strong argument for allowing more housing construction. If building more housing raises its price, then the argument for more construction is even stronger. I agree with all this. Jeremiah Johnson is a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, host of the Neoliberal Podcast, and a YIMBY activist (not to be confused with Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, who killed 300 Native Americans and ate their livers). He writes: Here's why you're wrong in a single sentence: Demand causes high prices, not new units. Prices are high in SF and NYC because those are desirable places to live for a huge number of people. People all over the country and the world would live there if they could, and prices reflect that. The fact that the densest cities are the most expensive is true. But the high prices are not caused by density - rather, the density and the high prices are both a consequence of crushingly high demand […] There's a feedback loop, but what matters here is the elasticity, which is less than one. We can measure this empirically. New housing lowers prices via the mechanism of adding supply, which is basic economics and how we expect markets to work. New housing could raise prices if it also made the city a more desirable place to live and shifted people's preferences, such that there was more demand to live there after the new housing is built. If you think it's unclear which of these effects would dominate, luckily we have empirical data that over and over and over shows adding housing supply does indeed lower prices on a local level. This is a fairly well established result that replicates well. edit: I'm actually thinking about drawing out the weighted DAG graphs here to make the conceptual stuff easier, but it would be pretty long. I'd love to do this as a guest post. I’m skeptical of the empirical results because they don’t match the much stronger “Manhattan vs. Conanicut island” empirical results, and if I try to think about why, the best explanation I can think of is that the Manhattan experiment has been going on longer (ie long enough for Manhattan’s extra residents to found businesses and institutions that attract new people). I’ve told him he can try pitching this guest post to me; in either case, I would be interested in seeing the graphs. Several other people also posted this graph that Johnson helped make famous: Hopefully by now you can predict my objection: the places in the southeast corner are mostly unfashionable red state Sun Belt cities; the places in the northwest corner are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities. My conclusion is that trendy liberal coastal cities are both more NIMBY and more desirable, and if you use this to draw any conclusions about housing policy you’ll just end up confused. But maybe I should take this same lesson to heart myself. Dense cities are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities; uninhabited tundra in North Dakota isn’t. Maybe the demand is just for trendy liberal coastal cities, and once you attain that status, extra density doesn’t matter that much. Maybe Oakland has already maxed out its “trendy liberal coastal city” status, and even if it became Manhattan-sized, it wouldn’t get any trendier, or would get trendier only with a long time lag. There are a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch); maybe these (rather than North Dakota) are the natural control group for San Francisco. I think they are still cheaper than SF, but maybe not by very much. Cameron Murray is a housing economist whose work some other commenters recommended; he also writes the blog Fresh Economic Thinking. He very kindly showed up and wrote: I think you are in general right that agglomeration effects are real, which is why bigger cities have higher value to residents. I agree that people move locations. But I think you can go a step further. If one city is growing faster and densifying, surely those people are not demanding homes in other cities and those cities build slower. This is part of the spatial equilibrium story that further makes claims about “build density and get cheap homes” less plausible. 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll Thanks to everyone who commented on this post and helped me refine my thoughts. I’m willing to concede the following points: It might be that only attracting the sort of educated people who found companies, universities, etc will make housing prices go up. Less educated people will take more jobs than they create and not ratchet up the city’s desirability level. (I’d previously told commenters talking about “gentrification” that it was irrelevant to the mechanism I was talking about here, but maybe it isn’t - maybe “gentrifiers” are the people creating more jobs and institutions than they consume, and so homes that attract them in particular will increase demand more than they increase supply? Maybe this discussion does reduce to the gentrification discussion?)
Inline links: this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Paul Botts, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data, Tang Poetry, writes, ddd pointed out, Mike, Maximum Limelihood Estimator, gets more on point, http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf, writes, writes:, far higher in Austin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tAF8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f2b338-da84-4d85-b71c-0ce2e02e10e1_685x559.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mLwn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf942da-5716-49e8-a177-20140681e7fc_573x421.png, Center for New Liberalism, the Neoliberal Podcast, Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, Johnson helped make famous, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tg5t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc490a60a-3e97-4b73-9806-79bb967b5172_608x550.png, Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote
Interwar America1 mentions across 1 issues

Interwar America is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 04, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Just scratch out the references to "Tartarian Empire" and replace it with "Interwar America"". It most often appears alongside 19th century African art, 20th century, 9-11.

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Interwar America
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Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
So, is it just me or is the Tartaria conspiracy theory… blatantly obviously correct? Like, our modern society has all the trappings of that sort of “twilight of the gods” fiction. We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel), a culture of pessimism and trying to hold on to what we have over producing anything new, a decadent and onanistic upper class, a drugged-into-complacency lower class. Like, there’s nuttiness which I don’t accept, but this seems so abundantly obviously true-in-substance that I feel like it just barely counts as a “conspiracy theory”. Just scratch out the references to "Tartarian Empire" and replace it with "Interwar America" and it seems like a fairly accurate description of history.
Investment & Innovation Startup Zone1 mentions across 1 issues

Investment & Innovation Startup Zone 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 "his website now advertises an Investment & Innovation Startup Zone in Sri Lanka". It most often appears alongside Aiman Al-Mudaifer, Art Finch, Bhutan.

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25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
...I do not believe this project is shaping up that way for now and I pray dialog can improve this.” But he seems to have landed on his feet - his website now advertises an Investment & Innovation Startup Zone in Sri Lanka . Elsewhere In Model Cities 1: Without even a site picked out, Praxis has received another $525 million from VCs (for context, 4x more than Prospera’s lates...
...lized version of the project. I do not believe this project is shaping up that way for now and I pray dialog can improve this.” But he seems to have landed on his feet - his website now advertises an Investment & Innovation Startup Zone in Sri Lanka . Elsewhere In Model Cities 1: Without even a site picked out, Praxis has received another $525 million from VCs (for context, 4x more than Prospera’s latest raise). Dry...
Iowa City1 mentions across 1 issues

Iowa City is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 07, 2023 and June 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "visiting scholar position in the most dynamic corner of the US - Iowa City, Iowa". It most often appears alongside 747, America, America Against America.

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Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
Enter Wang Huning, a young political scientist at Fudan University. He wanted to become an “America expert”. Toward that goal, he got a visiting scholar position in the most dynamic corner of the US - Iowa City, Iowa. His quest: to poke around Iowa until he figured out what the heck was going on with the United States, then report back. The result: America Against America, a 200 page book on US culture and institutions.
Inline links: America Against America
Alcohol, there are strict regulations to control. People who are underage cannot drink alcohol, and drinking alcohol is a violation of the law. Stores must obtain a government license to sell alcohol, and no store or restaurant is allowed to sell alcohol without a license. Iowa City’s supermarkets do not sell alcohol on Sunday mornings before 12:00 p.m., on the grounds that people are expected to be at church for Mass at that time. Of course, this is not the intention of the government, but a religious influence and a tradition.
Irish1 mentions across 1 issues

Irish is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "if Irish drink more beer, then genes common in the Irish". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, AI Policy Institute, Arizona.

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Irish
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Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
10: Ancestral genetic components are consistently associated with the complex trait landscape across Europe. People of different ancestral backgrounds have different genetic predispositions to 32 out of 53 complex traits tested, including things like BMI, likelihood of smoking, and levels of various immune cells. Caveats: the paper tried hard to eliminate various confounders (like if Irish drink more beer, then genes common in the Irish will look like genes for beer-drinking) but can’t prove they got this 100%; the ancestral backgrounds studied were very high level (Ievel of Indo-European vs. pre-IE farmer ancestry) and not as fine-grained as the ethnicities normal people think about.
Inline links: Ancestral genetic components are consistently associated with the complex trait landscape across Europe
Irpin1 mentions across 1 issues

Irpin 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 visited Lviv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Irpin, Kherson". 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
This winter a friend of mine, an American living in Europe, went to Ukraine with a humanitarian mission. (Here’s a twist for you, dear reader.) He visited Lviv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Irpin, Kherson. He was shelled a few times; he now can recommend a hotel in Kyiv with “the best bomb shelter in town”. His reasons for going there in the first place were dark. The results, however, were miraculous and heart-warming, and align very well with everything said above. His story could have been a nice coda to this review. However, his story is also much bigger than this review, and it is also his, so I will not elaborate more than I already have. He will tell it in his own time and in his own way. And for now, if there are any darling buds of trust sprouting between us, dear reader, you’ll just have to trust me on this. Because for an actual coda I chose something much more grim.
IRS Center1 mentions across 1 issues

IRS Center is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 06, 2024 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The book is set at an IRS Center". It most often appears alongside #MeToo, 21st century political dogmatism, Advanced Tax.

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IRS Center
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Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.
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Irvine, California, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Irvine, California, USA 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 "IRVINE, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
IRVINE, CALIFORNIA, USA Duplicate of Newport Beach Contact: Michael Michalchik Contact Info: michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 2nd, 2:00 PM Location: We usually start in the front patio of my yard at 1970 port Laurent and weather permitting go for a walk in the park and the surround wild areas. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8 Group Link: Send requests to be included on the mailing list to michaelmichalchik[at]gmail[dot]com Notes: This meeting repeats most Saturdays year around. Email me with the subject line ACXLW to be added to the mailing list.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8
Islington1 mentions across 1 issues

Islington is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 03, 2022 and June 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "seen in the Fields of Islington or Mile-End". It most often appears alongside 18th century, A Eunuch's Dream, Alessandro Moreschi.

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Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
Farinelli drew every Body to the Haymarket. What a Pipe! What Modulation! What Extasy to the Ear! But, Heavens! What Clumsiness! What Stupidity! What Offence to the Eye! Reader, if of the City, thou mayest probably have seen in the Fields of Islington or Mile-End or, If thou art in the environs of St James', thou must have observed in the Park with what Ease and Agility a cow, heavy with calf, has rose up at the command of the Milk-woman's foot: thus from the mossy bank sprang the DIVINE FARINELLI.
Israeli1 mentions across 1 issues

Israeli is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 28, 2024 and March 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a celebrity Israeli murder case". It most often appears alongside ACX comment thread, ACX subreddit, Asia.

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Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad. This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up. One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker. So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis. Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email): It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me. I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon. If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter told blogger Philipp Markolin that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.” Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on: Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
Inline links: does Putin have cancer, celebrity Israeli murder case, argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, took him up on it, on an old ACX comment thread, told blogger Philipp Markolin, put out a call for judges
Interview with Saar about Rootclaim (not the lab leak debate) in Israeli news
Inline links: Interview with Saar about Rootclaim
Israelis1 mentions across 1 issues

Israelis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 30, 2024 and January 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’d previously seen that only 15% of Israelis wanted him to stay after the war was over". It most often appears alongside 538, Aaronson, ACX.

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Israelis
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1
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1
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January 30, 2024
Last seen
January 30, 2024
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  • 24 January 30, 2024
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24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
I was surprised to see this one; I’d previously seen that only 15% of Israelis wanted him to stay after the war was over. But he’s now up to 32%. Why? He doesn’t seem to be handling the war very well. I think the difference might just be that the first poll asked if he was good, and the second poll asked if there was anyone else better.
Inline links: only 15% of Israelis, now up to 32%, doesn’t seem
Both 15% and 32% are low numbers, but Israelis in the comments bring up that there aren’t scheduled elections in 2024. So if Bibi didn’t resign and his coalition partners didn’t desert him, he could potentially cling on. And nobody clings to power more ferociously than Benjamin Netanyahu.
Issyk-Kul1 mentions across 1 issues

Issyk-Kul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 25, 2022 and October 25, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ezekiel from Issyk-Kul". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX Grants, Andrew Ng.

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Issyk-Kul
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1
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1
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October 25, 2022
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October 25, 2022
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From The Mailbag
October 25, 2022 · Original source
DEAR SCOTT: How do I get involved in the IRL rationalist/EA community? - Ezekiel from Issyk-Kul
IT park1 mentions across 1 issues

IT park 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 "Location: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in IT park". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

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IT park
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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
CEBU CITY, PHILIPPINES (RSVP) Contact: Hampton, hampton[dot]moseley[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:30 PM, Saturday, September 25 Location: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in IT park, across the street from The Walk. I will have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/single.wisely.altitude
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/single.wisely.altitude
Italian1 mentions across 1 issues

Italian is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 24, 2024 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "As an Italian, if I don't think about the greatest empire". It most often appears alongside A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOU, ACOUP.

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Italian
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1
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1
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September 24, 2024
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September 24, 2024
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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
As an Italian, if I don't think about the greatest empire, at least once every 24 hours the ghost of Heliogabalus visits me.
Italian Alps1 mentions across 1 issues

Italian Alps is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2023 and August 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "going skydiving in the Italian Alps"; "or going skydiving in the Italian Alps". It most often appears alongside Alice, Attack On Titan, Bali.

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Italian Alps
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1
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1
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August 16, 2023
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August 16, 2023
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In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences
August 16, 2023 · Original source
Hi, I’m Larisa. You could say I’m kind of a go-getter. After graduating second in my class at Brown, I was featured in “Twenty Young People To Watch” in TALYNT Magazine. Since then, I’ve started my own eco-conscious footwear line, with branches in five states (soon to be six). I’m looking for someone who moves as fast as I do, a relationship where we motivate and complement each other. Someone who can enjoy a working vacation in Bali, or going skydiving in the Italian Alps (see attached picture). I know there are quality men out there, so book a spot on my calendar if you want to get coffee sometime.
Ithaca1 mentions across 1 issues

Ithaca 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 "ITHACA". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

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Ithaca
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1
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1
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April 01, 2026
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April 01, 2026
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Stefan Contact Info: stefanlenoach[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, April 24th, 8:00 PM Location: 81 McGuinness Blvd Apt. 6A Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8P3G2+5F Notes: Please RSVP to my email ITHACA Contact: B. S. Contact Info: bjs322[@]cornell[.]edu Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 4:00 PM Location: Ithaca Commons Entrance. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J5CGR3+47M
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G8P3G2+5F, https://plus.codes/87J5CGR3+47M
Contact: B. S. Contact Info: bjs322[@]cornell[.]edu Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 4:00 PM Location: Ithaca Commons Entrance. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J5CGR3+47M
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87J5CGR3+47M
Ivory Coast1 mentions across 1 issues

Ivory Coast 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
Ivory Coast
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1
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1
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October 28, 2025
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October 28, 2025
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  • 25 October 28, 2025
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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”)
IX1 mentions across 1 issues

IX is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 13, 2022 and August 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "She’s from IX, a planet that builds technology that can mostly block Leto’s psychic powers". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, ancient Greeks.

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IX
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1
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1
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August 13, 2022
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August 13, 2022
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Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
August 13, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.