Places: S

Adumbrations Of Aducanumab

June 14, 2021 · Original source

In 2000, the median household income of US Jews was $72,000. The median household income of people who lived in New York City was $40,000; in San Francisco, $55,000. So I don't think you can explain Jewish success by saying they are more likely to live in places like New York City and San Francisco.

Inline links: was $40,000, $55,000

August 05, 2021 · Original source

A new program in 1992 allowed for “accelerated approval” on the basis of surrogate markers, which are indirect measures of a drug’s benefit, assessed via laboratory or imaging tests, that stand in for more meaningful outcomes such as life expectancy. But the implementation of these accelerated processes was criticized by some scientists and patients, even at the time. In 1994, for example, The New York Times cited skeptics who worried that “no one can tell if the drugs work.” Eight months later, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP San Francisco called Anthony Fauci a “pill-pushing pimp” for supporting CD4 immune-cell counts and viral loads as surrogate markers. They were completely invalid, the activists wrote, and nothing more than “a marketing exec’s wet dream.”

I think this is a pretty typical experience a lot of people have dealing with the police, especially in the Bay (unofficial motto: “San Francisco - Where Crime Is Legal”). A friend had a really scary stalker, and kept reporting him to the police, and the police’s answer, phrased only slightly uncharitably, was “Have you, as of now, already been murdered by this person? No? Then stop wasting our time.” My friend was left with the feeling that the police could have been a little stricter or more proactive.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California?

August 25, 2021 · Original source

Californians love long-shot bets. Actors trying to make it big in LA, tech founders chasing unicorns in San Francisco, cult leaders trying to found religions in Pasadena. In Silicon Valley, VCs turn the long-shot bet into an art: if some new startup has a 5% chance of making a billion, that's $50 million in expectation. Just a whole state full of people looking for weird opportunities.

Whither Tartaria?

September 23, 2021 · Original source

I have tried to be as fair as possible here. The first pair is the formal dress of the highest-status person in China in each time period. The second is an architecturally-celebrated building from Milan in each period (the university won the World Building Of The Year award for the the year it was constructed). The third pair is the receiving room of the mansion of a rich person from each period. For the last pair, I used a famous old public sculpture, and searched for the most-celebrated public sculpture from San Francisco, the nearest big city to where I live. Older art tends to have bright colors, ornate details, realistic representations, technical skill, and be instantly visually appealing to the average person. Newer art tends to be more abstract, require less obvious skill, and have less direct appeal. Although it doesn't fit in meme format, I would carry the analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams) and certain pieces of high status music (cf. Mozart vs. Philip Glass). Obviously these are broad generalizations vulnerable to cherry-picking; I'm mostly relying on your common sense here.

Inline links: won the World Building Of The Year award, the most-celebrated public sculpture

Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change

October 11, 2021 · Original source

I want to focus on sea level rise because it’s easy to quantify and display. Sea levels have already risen about a quarter of a meter since 1880. This has flooded some low-lying islands, damaged some coastal cities, and devastated some wetlands and other habitats. But the average person in the First World hasn’t noticed. The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100, so maybe 2-4x as much as they’ve risen already. This also won’t be very noticeable to average people. Here’s San Francisco now (top picture), after 1m of sea level rise ie the IPCC’s worst-case scenario for 2100 (middle picture) and after 3m of sea level rise ie the worst-case scenario for 2200 (bottom picture):

Inline links: have already risen, half a meter to a meter by 2100

Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.

Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?

December 09, 2021 · Original source

Here's the same map but for land share–the percentage of a property's value that's due solely to the land. If you build a shack in the desert, nearly 100% of the property's value will come from the shack, because the land is worthless. But if you build a shack in San Francisco, nearly all of the property's value will come from the land. Notice how the land share gets closer to 100% as you move towards big cities along the coast.

In 2020, all real estate in NYC was worth about $2.7 trillion, according to LendingTree (the land + the buildings). But let's go ahead and see for ourselves. You can run a quick spot check by going on Zillow or Redfin in a major city like New York or San Francisco. First, search for a vacant lot for sale in the heart of downtown, and note the asking price. Then look for a similarly-sized lot with a building on it that has sold within the last few years, situated next to the empty lot. The last selling price should be available. You can subtract one price from the other to get a rough estimate of the land share of the plot with the building on it.

Inline links: LendingTree, Zillow, Redfin

Here's a listing for a vacant lot in the heart of San Francisco (personal information redacted). They're asking for $1.99 million dollars, and, judging from other listings and sales records in the area, they'll probably get it.

Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?

December 11, 2021 · Original source

Well managed, transparent, and adequately funded mass appraisal procedures Everyone is in further agreement about the three basic "approaches" to value estimation: the market approach, the cost approach, and the income approach. The Market Approach This is the most common approach. You gather a bunch of information about comparable properties, look at past selling prices and rents, and make adjustments for differences. This is greatly aided by modern computerized databases, as well as Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping and visualization tools. Remember those spot checks I did in Part I to estimate the value of the land under a building in San Francisco using a nearby, similarly-sized empty lot? That was me (crudely) using the market approach. The Cost Approach In this approach, you estimate the cost of the buildings minus depreciation. Professionals that value residential and commercial buildings often rely on Marshall & Swift's Valuation Service. This is a fancy calculator where you plug in all the different characteristics of your building, and it spits out a cost estimate. You can think of it as a Kelley Blue Book for buildings. Once you have the cost of your building, you apply certain widely-accepted depreciation formulas based on its age. The cost approach has two chief limitations. The first is that it requires a lot of detailed information about the building. The second is that the cost to build something isn't necessarily the same as what it would sell for in today's market. Therefore, this approach tends to overestimate building values and underestimate land values, as discussed in detail in Part I. The Income Approach In this approach, you look at the net income (rent - expenses) that a commercial or residential property generates and then use the prevailing capitalization rate of the area to get the property value. You typically use this formula: Value = Income / Rate This gives you the total property value, and from there, you can use one of the other two approaches to separate land value from building value. Crucially, any observed land or property tax needs to be factored into the observed "income" portion. Even if the state is collecting the tax, it's part of the flow that originates from the property, and thus affects the full untaxed market value of the property. Naively you might expect a 100% Land Value Tax to drive itself to zero because it also drives down the purchase price of the land to approximately nothing. To avoid this, you figure out the capitalized value of the LVT that's already been applied to get the untaxed land value. These are the basic methods that we've used to value properties "by hand" over the last century, and there are many who claim that these are good enough. As for separating land from buildings, Ted Gwartney prefers to estimate the value of land directly whenever possible and derive the building value as a residual. He claims it's easier to assess land than buildings, because in most cases, the value of land is derived almost entirely from the location. Land doesn't have as many fiddly variables, like how much damage your roof took from the last hailstorm and whether you've remodeled your bathroom in the past five years. But let's dive deeper. 2. Assessing the Assessments Okay, so once you've made all your assessments, how do you ensure they're accurate? You test them. We have two main signals: ongoing transaction data from the market, and complaints from property owners about the assessed values. The typical way you compare yourself against market transactions are "Ratio Studies", which you can read more about in this IAAO paper on the subject. As for complaints, you'd think property owners would always complain out of pure self-interest, but apparently, only a minority do, and assessors actually build in an expectation for a certain number of complaints as a chief source of feedback. If complaints are below a certain threshold (2% according to Hefferan and Boyd), that's apparently a sign that you're doing well. During Ted Gwartney's seminar, someone asked him about what tends to drive objections: ATTENDEE: Can you tell us what fraction of property owner who request a lower assessment argue that their land assessment is too high? GWARTNEY: A very small number. Almost all of the adjustments that are made are made because of improvements. Most of the arguments when you go to an appeal is about the building, it’s condition, or what’s in it or whatever. Generally the land is accepted by people, they realize it’s fair by looking at what other parcels are assessed for and most people don’t argue it. They might say he has a better view than I do or whatever, but usually [the objection is] because there’s some physical difference or condition in the structure. So if the public accepts your valuations, and new market signals match your assessments, then they can be said to be accurate. But how precise do they need to be? Here's Gwartney's opinion: ATTENDEE: How accurate do assessments have to be to get the benefits of Georgism? GWARTNEY: You have a lot of wiggle room. It doesn’t have to be perfectly precise. The idea is to improve on what’s already being done. You get immediate feedback that what you’re working on is making good results. This is a part I'd like to know more about. Is plus or minus 5% of the true land value "good enough?" What about 15%? Or 1%? If land is under-assessed, then we basically have the same problem as the status quo, and we're not really any worse off. But if land is over-assessed, we might drive people off of it, which is bad. So it seems our main problem is not over-assessing the value of land. Georgists often talk about "100% LVT," but during practical discussions, it seems that their wildest dream is just to get as high as 85%. That would leave a pretty big safety margin for not over-taxing the land, even if you over-assessed it. Here's a graph. If you under-assess a property's land by 15%, the assessed value is 85% of the true value. Take 85% of that and now you're collecting 72.25% of land rents. If you over-assess a property's land by 15%, the assessed value is 115% of the true value. If you take 85% of that, you get 97.75%. Collect all that and you're still leaving 2.25% of the land rents on the table, but you're not going over. This is comforting, but frankly, all the evidence I've seen so far suggests that we're chronically and consistently under-assessing the value of land. But even if we can assess things accurately, it's a moot point if we can't afford to hire enough assessors to do the job thoroughly. 3. How Many Assessors do you need? Another critique about assessment is that you're going to need an army of property assessors peeking inside windows at all hours of the night, and that it's all going to be ruinously expensive. Here's a slide from Gwartney's presentation, which is itself taken from an IAAO conference. Gwartney says that when he was the assessment commissioner and chief executive officer in British Columbia, he had a staff of 690, and that this number has not changed significantly since then. British Columbia has a population of about 5 million, so that's 1 assessment officer for every 7,250 British Columbians. For context, the IRS has a staff size of 74,454, or about one IRS agent for every 4,425 Americans. I don't have data on how many property tax assessors the USA has in total, but the above slide suggests British Columbia's figure is on the high end. As for how you actually do assessments, sure, you can send out an army of assessors to value each and every property in your jurisdiction by hand. However, not only is that labor-intensive, it's also a recipe for inconsistency. Whatever method you're using to value properties needs to be consistent and standardized across all properties, so you don't have sharp discontinuities on the assessment map that are due solely to differences between Assessor Fred and Assessor Sally's personal methodologies. Thankfully, we're living in the modern age, and we have some fancy new tools at our disposal. 4. Modern Technology Georgists were doing split-rate assessments to allegedly good success long before the rise of the computer, such as J. J. Pastoriza's effort in setting up a Georgist tax regime in Houston, Texas in 1911. Today, we have spreadsheets, property value databases, GIS mapping visualizations, regression analysis, machine learning...the works. According to Gwartney, the Canadian province of British Columbia has revalued all its land and all its property on an annual basis simply by using computers and market analysis, ever since he first helped them set up their system back in 1975. Not every jurisdiction revalues their land this thoroughly and this often, but Gwartney says there is no significant technical or staffing barrier standing in the way. Gwartney has been retired for some time, so his seminar didn't cover all the latest cutting-edge techniques that have come out in the last few years. Let's look at some recent papers and see what new tools assessors have to play with. The first on my list is Land Value Appraisal Using Statistical Methods by Kolbe, Schulz, Wersing, and Werwatz (2019). This is a study on mass appraisal techniques using real estate transaction data from Berlin, Germany. It claims that not only are the results cheaper and faster to generate than those done by conventional property assessment methods, but they are also no less accurate than those done "by hand" by experts. Kolbe et al. assert that, provided you have access to high quality market transaction data, you can perform accurate and efficient mass appraisals of land values. They chose Berlin because it "has a very effective system of property transaction data collection and storage," in contrast to other parts of Germany. They cite some prior work by Almy (2014) studying Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, suggesting that the assessment cost per property can be brought down to 20 Euros–25 times cheaper than what some other people (Fuest, et al. (2018)) assert. Given an average tax receipt of 2,000 Euros per property, this means that the assessment cost should represent only about 1% of the funds raised. Is that good? Let's take this assertion at face value for the moment and compare it to the cost of the IRS. Federal tax receipts in 2020 were $3.42 trillion, and operation costs for the IRS were $12.3 billion, or 0.36%. However, the IRS outsources most of the labor of tax preparation to the taxpayers themselves, with compliance costs estimated between $200 billion and $400 billion a year, to the delight of Intuit. Add that up and the total cost of federal tax collection to the economy is anywhere between 6-12% of the amount it raises. And what about sales tax? According to a 2006 report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers: The study finds that the national average annual state and local retail sales tax compliance cost in 2003 was 3.09 percent of sales tax collected for all retailers, 13.47 percent for small retailers, 5.20 percent for medium retailers, and 2.17 percent for large retailers So a compliance cost of 1% would be way more efficient in terms of cost collection than the other two most common forms of taxation, and taxpayers don't even have to do anything themselves, other than pay the bill. Alrighty, how about the accuracy? The authors cite two international examples, Australia and Lithuania, as among the few countries in the world that have both a Land Value Tax and statistical methods for mass appraisals. Hefferan and Boyd (2010) assert that objections to assessments from property owners in Australia are less than 1%. I'm willing to buy the improved efficiency claims just by taking a look at some methodologies. It seems reasonable that computerized records and algorithms can cut costs significantly; the real question is if you're trading off accuracy. The other papers I found on the subject are Bencure, et al (2019) in BayBay City, Philippines, Kilić, et al (2019) in Croatia, Yalpir & Unel (2017) in Konya, Turkey, and Raslanas et al. (2014) in Vilnius, Lithuania. Let's dive in and examine some methods. 5. Mass Appraisal Methods Here are some of the latest mass appraisal methods cribbed from the research papers listed above. All of these are based on taking market transaction data, plotting them out on a map, and running computations over them to estimate valuations for the properties you don't have known values for. Furthermore, all of these methods are able to value land and building values separately. Multiple Regression Analysis This paper by Yalpir and Unel out of Turkey gives a straightforward example of using Multiple Regression Analysis for land valuation. For those of you who didn't study math, let me explain regression analysis. This is a family of mathematical models where you basically take a data set, ask the question "what mathematical formula would best fit this data," choose a basic equation model, and then have a computer search for a set of coefficients that "best fit" that curve to the data with the least amount of error. The simplest example is using linear regression on a scatterplot of observed data points to fit a trend line. This is a common exercise in freshman physics and statistics classes. You can use more complicated versions of this numerical method to take a big bag of observations (real estate sales) and use "multiple regression" to tease out dependent variables (land value and improvements value) based on the independent variables (size, location, age, number of bedrooms) of your observations. In this case the team identified about a hundred different factors that can affect the price of a property: Then you create an entry for each property, fill in the values for each of those characteristics, and run it through the regressor. Take note of how many of these factors start with the words "proximity to." Each of these can be calculated automatically just by knowing where the property is on a map, and each of them is an independent contributor to the value of the property's location. The next step is to generate individual "index maps" that combine various related features into combined heat maps. Then you run everything through and see if it works. You can get the land share of the final value by combining the contributions of all the individual factors that you associate with "land," such as proximity to important things. In the verification section the authors say: As a result of the analysis, since the significance level (0.000) p <.05, corresponding to the F values in the ANOVA test, indicates that the regression analysis is appropriate and the models are significant. The criteria that make up the model account for about 85% of the market value and 15% cannot be explained for reasons such as economic, non-existent data and unearned income. Unfortunately, they don't say anything about how accurate their model is for assessing land values specifically. Otherwise, this is a pretty good example of using the Multiple Regression method for estimating the individual contributions of various factors to overall property values. Gwartney says Multiple Regression Analysis was a standard method he typically used, of which this specific paper is just one example. Nonparametric kernel regression This will be a method familiar to the programmers in the audience who have any experience with image processing algorithms. Here's an example from this old Gamasutra article: The basic idea here is to take a matrix of numbers, called a "kernel", and run that over every pixel in a source image. The kernel tells you how strongly to weight all of the source pixel's neighbors to compute a final result for that position. A simple "box blur" is a kernel where every value is 1 (meaning it averages the values of all neighboring pixels within a range). The more subtle gaussian blur illustrated above uses a two-dimensional normal distribution of values so that each pixel is most affected by those nearest to it. So let's apply the same principle to land valuations. If you have a map with lots of transaction data of pure land sales–defined as sales of either vacant land or teardown properties (where the building value is essentially zero)–then you can use a special kernel filter to smoothly interpolate land values across the region. So you basically have a smooth curve that mostly favors close-by points, tapers off a bit, and then disregards anything outside a certain distance entirely. The big assumption here is that land values change smoothly and do not change suddenly across very short distances. There are, in fact, locations with sharp jumps in value (any town with an "other side of the tracks," for instance). But for cases where we know a priori that land values change smoothly, this method is appropriate. No other prior restriction is placed on the form of the land value map, however, and this is why it's called "nonparametric." Here's an illustration. The outer box is the entire search distance that the kernel considers, and the circles represent the falloff of the curve itself. The size of the box is called the "bandwidth" and is set by the user. Everything outside of it will have zero influence on the kernel's output at any given location. This method operates on the same basic logic that I used when I hand-estimated the land value of that San Francisco house in Part I based on the value of the empty lot next door. However, it makes the whole procedure systematic. It can easily and accurately estimate the land value of a property with a big fat building on it simply by smoothly interpolating the known values of the nearby parking lots. Of course, it has limitations. First and foremost, it's a highly local operation, so if you have properties you're trying to value that don't have nearby pure land sales data, you can't really do much with this. Also, most people assume that city centers have less market transactions for undeveloped land than the countryside, as did I until I read that paper by Albouy in Part I. But in any case, this is just one method in your toolbox and might not be sufficient by itself. Its key advantage is that it works directly from true market data for land and doesn't need or want any other subjective data. In the end, basic kernel estimation just fills in the land value of unmeasured locations with a local weighted average of known locations. Nonparametric adaptive regression Kolbe, et al. build on the kernel regression method with a technique called Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS), which runs in several iterations and adds additional weight to any observed data points that are sufficiently close to the point being estimated. I'm not 100% sure about what all the math means, but it seems like it's basically a "smarter" version of the basic kernel method. Left: Nonparametric kernel regression, Right: Adaptive Weights Smoothing. I think the authors goofed and printed the same figure twice with different headings because they're identical if you overlay them in Photoshop. Semiparametric regression Now, the above two methods assume you have plenty of "pure" land sale records to work with. But if you're trying to work out prices in the city center, you've probably mostly got land and buildings mixed together. To do this effectively, we need more data, and this is where the "parameter" in "semiparametric" comes in. The model described in Kolbe et al. seems like a flavor of multiple regression analysis that takes the price, the location, and various characteristics of the building and feeds it into a regressor. But we've got "semi" parametric here. What does that mean? Well, if you already know how certain relationships between the data work a priori, it's better to enforce those relationships yourself rather than leave it to the computer. Here, we enforce the assumption that if two properties are right next to each other, then the value due to location is going to be essentially identical. This algorithm starts by ordering things geographically and then working out the differences in observed price by regressing on the difference between remaining property characteristics. In this method, the power of "location, location, location" is not something we're leaving to the regressor to discover by itself. Results of the Semiparametric regression method, we can see some significant differences from the simple kernel-based model. As you can see above, this gives you more detailed and likely more accurate results, and you're better able to assess the values of properties with buildings on them, even in the absence of pure land sales. This technique is more complicated and bakes in assumptions about the power of location, but otherwise doesn't assign subjective human weights to the various property characteristics. The chief human bias comes in the form of deciding which property characteristics are measured and made legible to the model in the first place. Okay great, but how accurate are the above three methods? Their main point of comparison is this thing called the "Bodenrichtwerte," or BRW. I think that means "ground-level-values" in English, and it's an expert-assessed map of land values for Berlin done the traditional way. The nonparametric kernel regression method has a correlation of 0.704 with the traditional method and has the added disadvantage that it's not able to produce estimates for the city center, only the outlying areas. Furthermore, the BRW map does show sharp discontinuities, which is another knock against the kernel method, at least for the city center. What about the iterative method? Kolbe et al. find that "the agreement between [Adaptive Weights Smoothing] land value estimates and, both, land prices and BRW land values is fairly good for all values of λ." Doing some quick checks, their values seem to be within about 85% of the BRW values. A different Kolbe et al. paper called Identifying Berlin's land value map using adaptive weights smoothing goes into more detail and claims to give "similar" values to that of the BRW. For the semiparametric method, they "found a strong positive correlation of 0.845" between their numbers and a previously expert-assessed set done using the traditional method. That sounds pretty good. It seems their margin for error is about plus or minus 15% compared to the traditional expert method. I'd like to see more direct comparisons against market transactions themselves, though, because if the prior expert assessments are wrong, then the main achievement here is improved efficiency, not accuracy. However, this method doesn't seem to be dramatically less accurate than the old way of doing things. The last three models came from the Berlin case study, where you have excellent market transaction data in an extremely wealthy and high-trust society. But what if you're trying to assess land in a developing nation with poor market transaction records, weak institutions, and widespread poverty? Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) This is the particular name of the method described in Development of an Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) for Mass Appraisal Application in Sub-Urban Areas Using AHP: An Integration of Theoretical and Practical Approaches by Bencure, Tripathi, Miyazaki, Ninsawat, and Kim. They used BayBay City, Philippines as their case study. Whereas the previous models are very "hands-off" and let the computer work out the relationships between prices and property characteristics, here you get expert human opinion directly involved in building the model, baking in weights that directly embody judgments like "properties next to major roads are more valuable." These judgments are based on expert opinions that presumably come from observed experience but are a priori judgments nonetheless. Here, look at this big complicated flowchart. The "Analytic Hierarchy Process" in the box on the left is a particular kind of method for getting experts to set weights. The authors give this reason for using it: Despite criticism pinpointed by other scholars, the AHP remains the commonly used in many research fields and practical applications. This is because the AHP: (1) overcomes human difficulty in making simultaneous judgment among factors to be considered in the model; (2) is relatively simple as compared to other MCDA [multi-criteria decision analysis] methods; (3) is flexible to be integrated in various techniques such as programming, fuzzy logic, etc.; and (4) has the ability to check consistency in judgment After identifying a list of "factors" that can affect land value, they group them into taxonomical buckets: Note that certain factors like "Coastline" appear in multiple buckets; this captures the various influences a characteristic can have. For instance, land on the coast tends to be more economically valuable because of tourism, shipping, fishing, etc., so that goes under "economic." But land that's next to the coast is also more likely to flood, so it also goes under "environmental." And then there are various land use restrictions that apply specifically to coastal areas, so it goes under "legal" as well. In this way, a single factor like "the property is on the coastline" can have both positive and negative effects on land value (e.g., it's more economically valuable but it also might flood, and there are certain things you aren't allowed to do there). The next step is to set down some rules for how sensitive each factor is to location and distance. So here we can see that the economic benefit of being on the coast is most strongly felt if you're within half a kilometer of the ocean, but the environmental effect (e.g., risk of flooding) is most strongly felt when you're within 0.03 kilometers. And so on and so forth. Your experts help you work out all these rules. Note that for a few of these factors (such as land use and slope), you use metrics other than distance (e.g. land use classification and grade). Then you take all that stuff and assign everything a value between 0 and 5. Your team of experts then uses this table to come up with a set of weights for everything. What essentially comes out of this is a big linear equation with a bunch of coefficients for every one of your factors, which is then broadly fit to the observed market prices. When you're done, you can take any property on your list, multiply each of its characteristics by its respective weight, run that through your equation, and calculate the predicted price of the land. So how accurate is it? The authors compare it to standard Multiple Regression Analysis and claim it fares better. The Root Mean Square Error is quite a bit less than MRA. In addition, I think it's also saying that the MRA algorithm decided that only four of the factors were significant and basically ignored all the rest. By contrast, iLVM was able to maintain contributions from all the factors, because it doesn't leave that decision to the computer. I'm not 100% sure; it's not clear from the paper. The authors claim that about 67% of the variability is explained by their model, but they note that there are some areas where the model can be off by more than a factor of 1.0 in either the positive or negative direction. One thing that's kind of fun about this model is that you can make neat graphs like this that show the individual contribution of each factor: The main downside to this model is that it relies on a whole lot of subjective expert opinion and can be questioned on that basis. That said, it can be cheaply deployed in a transparent and consistent way across a large area. You can see why that's attractive for a developing nation with weak institutions and poor market transaction records; the argument is that this is a significant improvement over the former status quo. I wonder how well this model performs when you feed it better market transaction data, and how that would compare against all the others methods under identical conditions. More research is needed. Rather than drag you through a bunch more research papers, I'll just leave these others I found cited in the above studies: Killić et al. (2019) - Fuzzy expert system for land valuation in land consolidation processes

This method operates on the same basic logic that I used when I hand-estimated the land value of that San Francisco house in Part I based on the value of the empty lot next door. However, it makes the whole procedure systematic. It can easily and accurately estimate the land value of a property with a big fat building on it simply by smoothly interpolating the known values of the nearby parking lots. Of course, it has limitations. First and foremost, it's a highly local operation, so if you have properties you're trying to value that don't have nearby pure land sales data, you can't really do much with this. Also, most people assume that city centers have less market transactions for undeveloped land than the countryside, as did I until I read that paper by Albouy in Part I. But in any case, this is just one method in your toolbox and might not be sufficient by itself. Its key advantage is that it works directly from true market data for land and doesn't need or want any other subjective data. In the end, basic kernel estimation just fills in the land value of unmeasured locations with a local weighted average of known locations. Nonparametric adaptive regression Kolbe, et al. build on the kernel regression method with a technique called Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS), which runs in several iterations and adds additional weight to any observed data points that are sufficiently close to the point being estimated. I'm not 100% sure about what all the math means, but it seems like it's basically a "smarter" version of the basic kernel method. Left: Nonparametric kernel regression, Right: Adaptive Weights Smoothing. I think the authors goofed and printed the same figure twice with different headings because they're identical if you overlay them in Photoshop. Semiparametric regression Now, the above two methods assume you have plenty of "pure" land sale records to work with. But if you're trying to work out prices in the city center, you've probably mostly got land and buildings mixed together. To do this effectively, we need more data, and this is where the "parameter" in "semiparametric" comes in. The model described in Kolbe et al. seems like a flavor of multiple regression analysis that takes the price, the location, and various characteristics of the building and feeds it into a regressor. But we've got "semi" parametric here. What does that mean? Well, if you already know how certain relationships between the data work a priori, it's better to enforce those relationships yourself rather than leave it to the computer. Here, we enforce the assumption that if two properties are right next to each other, then the value due to location is going to be essentially identical. This algorithm starts by ordering things geographically and then working out the differences in observed price by regressing on the difference between remaining property characteristics. In this method, the power of "location, location, location" is not something we're leaving to the regressor to discover by itself. Results of the Semiparametric regression method, we can see some significant differences from the simple kernel-based model. As you can see above, this gives you more detailed and likely more accurate results, and you're better able to assess the values of properties with buildings on them, even in the absence of pure land sales. This technique is more complicated and bakes in assumptions about the power of location, but otherwise doesn't assign subjective human weights to the various property characteristics. The chief human bias comes in the form of deciding which property characteristics are measured and made legible to the model in the first place. Okay great, but how accurate are the above three methods? Their main point of comparison is this thing called the "Bodenrichtwerte," or BRW. I think that means "ground-level-values" in English, and it's an expert-assessed map of land values for Berlin done the traditional way. The nonparametric kernel regression method has a correlation of 0.704 with the traditional method and has the added disadvantage that it's not able to produce estimates for the city center, only the outlying areas. Furthermore, the BRW map does show sharp discontinuities, which is another knock against the kernel method, at least for the city center. What about the iterative method? Kolbe et al. find that "the agreement between [Adaptive Weights Smoothing] land value estimates and, both, land prices and BRW land values is fairly good for all values of λ." Doing some quick checks, their values seem to be within about 85% of the BRW values. A different Kolbe et al. paper called Identifying Berlin's land value map using adaptive weights smoothing goes into more detail and claims to give "similar" values to that of the BRW. For the semiparametric method, they "found a strong positive correlation of 0.845" between their numbers and a previously expert-assessed set done using the traditional method. That sounds pretty good. It seems their margin for error is about plus or minus 15% compared to the traditional expert method. I'd like to see more direct comparisons against market transactions themselves, though, because if the prior expert assessments are wrong, then the main achievement here is improved efficiency, not accuracy. However, this method doesn't seem to be dramatically less accurate than the old way of doing things. The last three models came from the Berlin case study, where you have excellent market transaction data in an extremely wealthy and high-trust society. But what if you're trying to assess land in a developing nation with poor market transaction records, weak institutions, and widespread poverty? Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) This is the particular name of the method described in Development of an Innovative Land Valuation Model (iLVM) for Mass Appraisal Application in Sub-Urban Areas Using AHP: An Integration of Theoretical and Practical Approaches by Bencure, Tripathi, Miyazaki, Ninsawat, and Kim. They used BayBay City, Philippines as their case study. Whereas the previous models are very "hands-off" and let the computer work out the relationships between prices and property characteristics, here you get expert human opinion directly involved in building the model, baking in weights that directly embody judgments like "properties next to major roads are more valuable." These judgments are based on expert opinions that presumably come from observed experience but are a priori judgments nonetheless. Here, look at this big complicated flowchart. The "Analytic Hierarchy Process" in the box on the left is a particular kind of method for getting experts to set weights. The authors give this reason for using it: Despite criticism pinpointed by other scholars, the AHP remains the commonly used in many research fields and practical applications. This is because the AHP: (1) overcomes human difficulty in making simultaneous judgment among factors to be considered in the model; (2) is relatively simple as compared to other MCDA [multi-criteria decision analysis] methods; (3) is flexible to be integrated in various techniques such as programming, fuzzy logic, etc.; and (4) has the ability to check consistency in judgment After identifying a list of "factors" that can affect land value, they group them into taxonomical buckets: Note that certain factors like "Coastline" appear in multiple buckets; this captures the various influences a characteristic can have. For instance, land on the coast tends to be more economically valuable because of tourism, shipping, fishing, etc., so that goes under "economic." But land that's next to the coast is also more likely to flood, so it also goes under "environmental." And then there are various land use restrictions that apply specifically to coastal areas, so it goes under "legal" as well. In this way, a single factor like "the property is on the coastline" can have both positive and negative effects on land value (e.g., it's more economically valuable but it also might flood, and there are certain things you aren't allowed to do there). The next step is to set down some rules for how sensitive each factor is to location and distance. So here we can see that the economic benefit of being on the coast is most strongly felt if you're within half a kilometer of the ocean, but the environmental effect (e.g., risk of flooding) is most strongly felt when you're within 0.03 kilometers. And so on and so forth. Your experts help you work out all these rules. Note that for a few of these factors (such as land use and slope), you use metrics other than distance (e.g. land use classification and grade). Then you take all that stuff and assign everything a value between 0 and 5. Your team of experts then uses this table to come up with a set of weights for everything. What essentially comes out of this is a big linear equation with a bunch of coefficients for every one of your factors, which is then broadly fit to the observed market prices. When you're done, you can take any property on your list, multiply each of its characteristics by its respective weight, run that through your equation, and calculate the predicted price of the land. So how accurate is it? The authors compare it to standard Multiple Regression Analysis and claim it fares better. The Root Mean Square Error is quite a bit less than MRA. In addition, I think it's also saying that the MRA algorithm decided that only four of the factors were significant and basically ignored all the rest. By contrast, iLVM was able to maintain contributions from all the factors, because it doesn't leave that decision to the computer. I'm not 100% sure; it's not clear from the paper. The authors claim that about 67% of the variability is explained by their model, but they note that there are some areas where the model can be off by more than a factor of 1.0 in either the positive or negative direction. One thing that's kind of fun about this model is that you can make neat graphs like this that show the individual contribution of each factor: The main downside to this model is that it relies on a whole lot of subjective expert opinion and can be questioned on that basis. That said, it can be cheaply deployed in a transparent and consistent way across a large area. You can see why that's attractive for a developing nation with weak institutions and poor market transaction records; the argument is that this is a significant improvement over the former status quo. I wonder how well this model performs when you feed it better market transaction data, and how that would compare against all the others methods under identical conditions. More research is needed. Rather than drag you through a bunch more research papers, I'll just leave these others I found cited in the above studies: Killić et al. (2019) - Fuzzy expert system for land valuation in land consolidation processes

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half

February 10, 2022 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

March 14, 2022 · Original source

For San Francisco and most other major cities, we would forecast 1.5-2x lower probability (12-16 micromorts). We focused on London as it seems to be at high risk and is a hub for the effective altruism community, one target audience for this forecast.

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

Bradley Zink is fed up. The terminally-delayed high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco has been a boondoggle. As governor, his first act would be to cancel it, saving $40 billion. What would he do with the money? From his Facebook page:

Inline links: his Facebook page

The San Francisco Chronicle accuses him of being “obsessed with stoicism”, and I don’t know whether this is some kind of attack or if he is actually obsessed with the philosophy. He does recommend Victor Frankl books to people on Twitter:

The latest step in his intellectual evolution is his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which points out all the rampant crime and drug use and homelessness and garbage in SF and says maybe some of these things are bad (the New York Times wrote a negative review here).

Inline links: here

What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?

June 23, 2022 · Original source

In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.

Things haven’t always been like this. San Francisco used to be one of the safest and most beautiful cities in the world. Shellenberger opens with the story of a 1970s SF candidate who campaigned on a message of public cleanliness, promising stronger punishments for owners who failed to pick up after their dogs. The message was a hit, so much so that the increased community and social pressure was enough to reverse the dog-poop-in-parks problem with minimal police enforcement.

In 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.”

June 29, 2022 · Original source

In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback.

Inline links: my review of

Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike

June 29, 2022 · Original source

I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”

But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From this report, I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence.

Inline links: 70% of SF homeless, this report

Overall these numbers make me a little less worried about this concern. San Francisco is already quite generous, and even if some new policy doubled the absolute number of people who came from elsewhere, it would only increase the total number 10-20%.

Open Thread 231

July 04, 2022 · Original source

2: Isaak Freeman asks me to signal-boost the Future Forum, from August 4-7 in San Francisco, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Anders Sandberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowen. They are bringing together 250 people from EA, Silicon Valley, and related communities to “arm the world's brightest minds with the tools they need to tackle global problems” and to potentially offer funding and mentoring. Apply at the link above.

Inline links: Future Forum

July 08, 2022 · Original source

2. Police respond to changes in risk. Police are evaluated on whether what they do is "reasonable" - a rule which should allow for good-faith mistakes, but which is also subjective. When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty) police don't worry about it. However the trend now is to prosecute officers even for things which are arguably unreasonable - Chesa Boudin just lost an excessive force case against a cop in San Francisco. If you can't convince a San Francisco jury that a cop used excessive force, that case never should have been brought. Even when officers don't end up in prison - nobody wants to end up the target of a massive media smear campaign, like the officer in the Jacob Blake case.

3. Many large cities and states are now making it very clear that they literally do not want police to do proactive police work. Philadelphia, for example, banned police from doing traffic stops. Baltimore's prosecutor said she won't prosecute any cases for drug possession. Boudin refused to use evidence San Francisco police gathered during "pretextual" traffic stops. When political leaders tell officers that they should stop doing police work, police stop doing it.

Bay Area Meetups This Weekend

September 16, 2022 · Original source

San Francisco, at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, “in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign”

Shouldn’t we have planned meetups further apart for people who wanted to go to multiple of them? Yes, and this is directly my fault, up to and including rescheduling to avoid the San Jose one . . . right on to the same day as the San Francisco one. Sorry, I’ll try to do better next time.

Open Thread 242

September 18, 2022 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Inline links: Sacramento Bee, from Google, list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley, Here’s a story, Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation, this unsourced report, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!viUA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3cb60f00-5048-44dc-8ad3-49d9036437e8_632x382.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jJHH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf442355-432b-4ac1-b10d-2ebf17011084_1151x345.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oETP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fe3e7f8-9e13-4295-b608-d071425d6adc_1116x300.png, decreased by about the same amount, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!is_P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09af8185-c8cf-4879-999c-4643ec7d7079_989x590.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!K8wW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ce47fbd-0a84-4461-a96c-07a2d8130d4e_412x104.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vvxn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe95d035a-8dea-410c-8b8f-19acb145859e_676x356.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xlsr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36965205-4cb9-4f93-b855-91cc6b9047b5_450x397.png, Carolina Demography, Okies

September 21, 2022 · Original source

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

Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).

Inline links: additional plaintiffs, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LaYa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0aaec309-35d6-430d-aeaa-b7cab022f4d6_548x215.png, Insight Prediction, Samotsvety Forecasting, Earlier this year, accepted lost wars gracefully, published an update, comment here, Swift Centre, They also took a swing at the nuclear question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TczM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F702c1236-47d9-4c60-9b99-ab9b2ca320e7_737x377.png, a 4% chance, a 7% chance, 16% chance, In July, they will make a decision by October 28, A managing director at JP Morgan

October 13, 2022 · Original source

I think there's a story here the data aren't telling. Give me Fresno over San Francisco any day.

That same day, the client drove me to see what he considered desperate poverty: a neighborhood in the shadows of an agricultural feed mill. It was smelly and industrial, the houses were small and older, BUT THE PEOPLE WERE LIVING IN HOUSES. I kept waiting for the kind of brutal conditions you see on every street in San Francisco--there is some of that in Fresno, but nothing like CA's coastal cities.

[…] I am a big fan of our fine author here, but this post drove me mad. Imagine looking out at some of the most productive farmland in the world from the hellhole of San Francisco (former decade-long SF resident here!) and asking what's wrong with them!

October 18, 2022 · Original source

Several additional plaintiffs I can’t find good information about You can find the complaint here. The plaintiffs write: The [CFTC’s action], without explanation or other indication of reasoned decisionmaking, without “written notice of the facts or conduct which may warrant” the Revocation, and without providing anyone “an opportunity to demonstrate or achieve compliance” with the terms of No-Action Relief or other requirements, violates the Administrative Procedure Act. 5 U.S.C. §§ 558, 706. Among other things, the Revocation is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, [and/or] otherwise not in accordance with law” and occurred “without observance of procedure required by law.” The Court should “hold unlawful and set aside” the Revocation, including its command that contracts that would otherwise turn on events occurring after February 2023 be prematurely liquidated. 5 U.S.C. § 706. The Court also should enter a preliminary and then permanent injunction against the prescriptions in the Revocation requiring the liquidation of contracts by February 2023, including contracts that concern the 2024 elections, well before they would ordinarily mature. I am not a lawyer, but it sounds kind of like they’re saying “the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things”. I am split between the part of me which hates government regulators doing bad things, and the part of me which feels like this is how you get a cover-your-ass-ocracy that never does anything at all without fifteen layers of paperwork and ten trillion dollars per action. Whatever. At least this time it’s in my favor. Of course there are prediction markets about it: Source: Insight Prediction Nuclear Warcasting, Part 2 Samotsvety Forecasting is a team made of top prediction market players and tournament winners, vaguely affiliated with effective altruism, who make predictions in the public interest. Earlier this year, they got attention for forecasting the risk of nuclear war - in particular, they said there was an a 0.01% per month chance of London getting nuked this spring. Since then, most of the fear has crystallized into a specific scenario. Suppose Russia is losing very badly in Ukraine. Putin, fearing a coup or revolution at home if he gives up, decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon, ie a “small” nuke more suited to winning battles than destroying cities. He nukes a Ukrainian battlefield position. The West is enraged at this violation of the nuclear taboo and feels like it needs to respond decisively - maybe by nuking something on Russia’s side, or through some other act of extreme escalation. Then Russia feels like they need to respond, and eventually it escalates to strikes on major cities and global nuclear war. There are reasons for doubt. Tactical nukes wouldn’t really be useful in Ukraine; the battle lines are too spread out and there’s no single place where a nuclear explosion could take out a substantial portion of Ukraine’s forces. In the past, nuclear powers have accepted lost wars gracefully rather than turning to nukes. And the Russians deny it, and saying this is all just Western propaganda intended to scare people. Amid this uncertainty, Samotsvety has published an update: now they are at 16% chance that “Russia uses any type of nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the next year”, and 0.02% per month of a strike on London. Although they didn’t mention it this time, they previously said the risk of a strike on San Francisco was a little over half that of London; I don’t know if that’s changed. See also Dan Keys’ comment here for some skepticism of Samotsvety’s process. Swift Centre is a lot like Samotsvety; they’re a collection of top forecasters brought together by EA to make important predictions. They also took a swing at the nuclear question, and said 9.1% chance of a hostile nuclear detonation in Europe in the next six months. They didn’t calculate the risk that this would spread to global war, but they did discuss how different scenarios would bring the risk up or down: One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?” We can’t directly compare Samotsvety and Swift because they’re predicting over different time periods. But assuming that there’s more risk in the next six months than in the six months after that, I think Samotsvety is a little higher but they’re not embarrassingly far off. Metaculus is a bit more optimistic than either, believing there’s only a 4% chance of detonation in Ukraine in 2023 and a 7% chance of any use in the next ~year. Max Tegmark is going much higher than anyone else and says 16% chance of global nuclear war. Kalshi Applies For Election Markets Kalshi is a regulated and fully-legal prediction market with good lobbyists and a compliance team. This means the CFTC probably won’t randomly shut them down one day. But it also means they can only create new markets with CFTC permission. In July, Kalshi asked the CFTC for permission to make midterm election prediction markets - specifically, which party will win control of the House and Senate. The CFTC has said they will make a decision by October 28 (which doesn’t leave much time for predicting to happen before the November 8 election, but I guess it sets a precedent). September was the Request For Comment period, when the CFTC solicited comments from stakeholders about what they should do. Kalshi tried really hard to get lots of people to send in positive assessments - I know this because of how many people asked me “why is the CEO of Kalshi emailing me about this thing?” Their strategy seems to have worked; among the people who wrote to the CFTC in support were: A managing director at JP Morgan

Highlights From The Comments On My California Ballot

November 05, 2022 · Original source

…it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.

I generally really like our current mayor, Libby Schaaf. She has generally had good ideas, prevented Oakland from becoming quite as bad as San Francisco, and a bunch of BLM protesters were harassing her in really awful ways for not defunding the police during the George Floyd protests but she stood firm and won my respect / good will. I also like SF mayor London Breed for being a YIMBY and being willing to call out some of the problems with her city. Both of them have endorsed Loren Taylor. Taylor is a biomedical engineer and businessman, which makes it seem like he’s smart and has some experience with the real world that will make him less than maximally socialist. The YIMBYS also endorse him. Generally seems like the best we’re going to get.

The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash

November 16, 2022 · Original source

Conflict of interest notices: I was friends with an FTX/Alameda employee a few years ago. I support the effective altruist movement, which FTX donated money to. I briefly worked at the same San Francisco clinic as Dr. Lerner, a psychiatrist mentioned in this piece - but I’m so introverted at work that I never actually met him.

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

December 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

The US branch of St. Hubertus was founded at Bohemian Grove, a secret society of elites (past members include Nixon, Reagan, Kissinger, and Hearst) who meet in a private redwood forest near San Francisco and do undisclosed things there.

Why is the San Francisco Bay Area always like this? (image source here, they claim it’s a photo but I’m doubtful) For some reason, conspiracy theorists find this concerning, and have been fretting over it for the past hundred years or so. Anyway, this is where some people decided to found a US branch of the Order of St Hubertus. All of this is attested to by the Washington Post article linked above, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sources; as far as I know nobody seriously denies it.

Inline links: here

Links For February 2023

February 09, 2023 · Original source

This seems really low - this article says California needs an extra 2.5 million homes over the next decade just to avoid things getting worse. I think this is because most cities plan to “voluntarily” bring themselves into compliance by building more homes. It looks like San Francisco has come into compliance by “voluntarily” agreeing to build 82,000 homes; San Franciso is about 2.5% of California’s population, but this probably applies more to denser cities, so maybe this suggests a total number of homes in the 1 million range?

Inline links: this article, It looks like San Francisco has come into compliance

43: Related: claims that Newsom threatened to withhold state money from San Francisco unless they cleaned up their streets, they immediately and successfully cleaned up their streets, and now people can feel safe and happy walking outside again. I don’t go to SF enough to know if this is true, but people on Twitter say there’s been a dramatic change.

Inline links: they immediately and successfully cleaned up their streets

Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

March 20, 2023 · Original source

I try to avoid San Francisco. When I go, I surround myself with people; otherwise I have morbid thoughts. But a morning appointment and miscalculated transit time find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn.

Somewhere to the south, Ray Kurzweil walks into his office at Google. Twenty years ago, he conjectured that all human history - no, all evolutionary and geologic history - was a series of accelerating movements, which would crescendo at the end of time in approximately 2029. Six years to go. San Francisco doesn’t feel like the sort of place willing to wait another six years. The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience. Too much Ethiopian methylxanthine, that’s my diagnosis. It feels eerie and unreal in the darkness, like everything is underwater, and I remember Poe:

It is a bright, clear morning in San Francisco, and I almost believe it.

Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices

May 01, 2023 · Original source

The two densest US cities, ie the cities with the greatest housing supply per square kilometer, are New York City and San Francisco. These are also the 1st and 3rd most expensive cities in the US.

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

May 10, 2023 · Original source

The picture on the left is Manhattan Island, NY. The picture on the right is Conanicut Island, RI. Both islands are about the same size, the same climate, the same distance from the mainland. Both are near good natural harbors. In 1600, some early European explorer would have considered them basically interchangeable. Still, the cost of housing in Manhattan is about $2000/sqft, and the cost of housing in Conanicut is about $500/sqft. Why? God didn’t create these two islands with different land value; something must have happened to make one 4x as expensive as the other. The obvious answer is “the Dutch chose to build their colonial capital on Manhattan, more and more people moved in, it became ever denser and more urban in a virtuous cycle, now it is very dense and urban, and, in the current regulatory regime, dense urban areas have higher housing prices than empty rural ones.” If back in 1624 the Dutch had decided to build their capital on Conanicut, maybe today it would be a city of 10 million people, and Manhattan would be an empty rural area. In that case, I would expect Conanicut to have 4x the house price of Manhattan. If I were a Native American living on Manhattan, and I was committed to keeping housing prices there low, I would ask the Dutch to build their capital on Conanicut instead. In fact, whenever a European came to my island seeking to build houses, I would try to fight them off. If I somehow succeeded at this for four hundred years, and Manhattan remained an empty rural area, then I would expect Manhattan prices to be much lower than they are now. So in response to all of your comments that I don’t understand basic causal inference, I answer that history provides quasi-experiments, and no, I’m pretty sure that Manhattan has high prices because lots of people moved there, rather than because of some other factor. Or, rather, both density and desirability feed into the other, but the density step is a crucial input. 2. Comments About Jobs And Amenities (And Not Density Per Se) Producing Desirability But Martin Blank writes: NYC/SF are expensive because there are MANY good jobs there and people WANT to live there. Not because of the density of housing. You could build 500,000 homes in the middle of your empty field in North Dakota, and it wouldn't do much for the demand there. You aren't going to create Manhattan by magicking 3.5 million housing units of similar quality into the Red Lake Indian reservation in Northern Minnesota. I originally found the various comments saying this annoying. Yes, there are many good jobs in NYC. You can be a barista at Starbucks, you can be an actor on Broadway, you can be a train conductor for the MTA. But why is it easier to be a barista in NYC than in North Dakota? Surely because there are millions of people in New York, those people drink a lot of coffee, and so they need a lot of baristas. Likewise, they watch a lot of plays, and ride a lot of trains, so they need actors and train conductors. If all the residents moved to North Dakota, there would be lots of demand for baristas, actors, and train conductors in North Dakota, and none in NYC. But some people gave versions of this argument that I found harder to dismiss. JSwiffer writes: The key fact your missing is if you wave a magic wand and 10x San Francisco you wouldn't 10x all jobs. You would 10x the # of waiters, and garbage men but you wouldn't 10x the # of 500k/yr Google site reliability engineers. And it's the latter not the former that are driving up prices. Other commenters analogized this to factory or coal mining towns. Here’s how I ended up thinking about this: suppose someone strikes oil in an uninhabited part of North Dakota, enough to produce 1,000 good oilman jobs. 1,000 oilmen move to the area and start a town. Because there are no NIMBYs, they build 1,000 houses. Each oilman creates demand for a certain amount of waiters (to serve them food), doctors (to treat their illnesses), teachers (to teach their children), etc. How many waiters, doctors, teachers, etc move to the town? Assume for the sake of argument that all jobs earn the same salary, $50,000. In that case, it has to be fewer than 1,000. Each oilman earns $50,000, and some of that gets spent on taxes and out-of-town goods. So he has less than $50,000 to spent on in-town goods and services, so (in this hypothetical) creates less than one other job. Each waiter needs doctors to treat their illnesses and teachers to teach their children, so each service employee creates some number of additional service employee jobs. Makeshift housing in a North Dakota oil boom town (source) If each person creates half a job, the original 1,000 oilmen attract 500 service workers, those 500 attract another 250, and so on until population stabilizes at 2,000 people. In this model, if there are fewer than 2,000 houses in the town, demand exceeds supply (no matter what is going on in the rest of the country), but if there are more than 2,000, supply exceeds demand. So if we imagine Google’s presence as an oil-like resource, the extra demand for housing in the Bay should gradually decline: at some point, you will have finished housing the Google workers and the service workers who support them. But this isn’t right either, because Google isn’t a natural resource - it’s a company founded by Bay Area residents. If you got more Bay Area residents, you would (with some delay) get more Googles. Or: Austin gets lots of jobs from Tesla. Tesla wasn’t founded by Austinites. But it moved to Austin when it became a known “tech hub”, ie a place with lots of tech companies and tech employees. It wouldn’t have moved to Austin if Austin was still an uninhabited plain or a one-horse town. So as Austin got bigger, it attracted more tech companies. So in both the Bay Area case and the Austin case, having more people attracted more tech companies, either because the residents themselves found the company or because the company gets attracted to this newly bustling city. Potential counterargument: Each new Bay Area resident gives the Bay another lottery ticket to found the next Google. If having the first Google gets it an extra 1 million people, but there are 300 million people in the US, then those extra 1 million only give it a 1/300 chance of winning the next lottery. So even though the Bay Area won the lottery once, and this made it have high demand, this doesn’t mean the high demand will cause it to win more lotteries. If you win the lottery once, spend all your winnings on more lottery tickets, and keep doing this forever, you haven’t invented an infinite money printing machine, eventually you’ll just lose. Potential counter-counter-argument: the Bay got Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and . . . so these can’t all be separate lotteries. I think you should probably model it as a high-level lottery to become the next hub of a tech-sized industry, plus many low-level lotteries where once you’re the tech hub, you’re attracting lots of techies, and each techie gives you a ticket in a lottery where the denominator is the number of techies to found the next big tech company. And the Bay might have half the US’s techie population. So maybe here there is a self-sustaining lottery-winning cycle, at least until tech plays itself out and nobody wants any more tech companies. And that might take a long time. Tom (author of Tom Thought) writes: The primary drivers of demand for living in NYC are the specific opportunities available in NYC. It is true that on long time horizons, one of the reasons these opportunities have tended to collect in NYC is that it is a dense place. But those aren't the only reasons - NYC is much more important than other, bigger cities in other parts of the world for complex historical reasons. Even if a catastrophe were to wipe out half the city, there would still be a great deal of demand to live near important institutions like Broadway, Wall Street, Port of NY & NJ, Columbia, etc (assuming those institutions survived the catastrophe). Increasing the number of housing units has a very mechanical impact on how many people can live in the place. But it has only a second-order impact on the types of institutions that drive demand to live in the city. People don't just generically crave to live near other people for the most part (a handful of urbanist freaks like myself excepted). The Bay Area is a great example of this. It is much less populated than other much cheaper cities. Density isn't why people want to live there - it's access to a specific culture and specific institutions. Demand for that is not simply a function of density - some people want to be part of Bay Area culture and others don't. Adding more units will induce some demand as a second-order effect, but will bring prices down as a first-order effect. To relate this to your model: we might be able to say that the country has a certain number of abstract "culture points" that have been allocated to different cities by various historical forces. Each culture point a city has increases demand to live in that city by a certain amount. Adding more people to the city may allow it to generate additional culture points over time, or acquire culture points from other cities, but this doesn't happen right away, and is determined by a host of factors other than just density. Under this model, we expect a place like NYC to always cost much more than North Dakota (since NYC possesses a large number of culture points), but we would also expect that adding additional housing units to NYC would bring costs down (since there are now additional housing units per culture point). Perhaps this process will over time allow NYC to steal away some culture points from Chicago, Boston, or other cities, but this is a secondary effect. This just seems to be passing the buck. Yes, people move to New York because it has Broadway, Columbia University, and Wall Street. Why does it have those things? Because one in every X New York citizens founds a good artistic/educations/financial institution, and New York has a large population of employees to work at those institutions and customers to patronize those institutions. If Conanicut Island had a population of 10 million people instead of Manhattan, there would be lots of great institutions on Conanicut and it would have more culture points. I don’t think it’s a culture-point game and population/density just sort of occasionally redistributes culture points, I think to a first approximation culture points just track population/density. Maybe they track the population/density of upper class people better than the total population/density, but I don’t think this is a big enough distinction to sink the argument. 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities Some people brought these up as a good natural experiment: the Chinese really did try building millions of houses on their equivalent of a North Dakota plain. What happened? Jeremiah Johnson (author of Infinite Scroll) writes: You currently seem like you're at the stage of understanding the thought experiments pretty well, but not understanding them on a DEEP level. For example with your hypothetical, this has actually happened before! Kind of. China built a bunch of 'ghost cities' basically out of nothing, and while there was an initial craze of speculation and tons of investment and building... nobody went to live in those cities most of the time. And now they're deeply distressed assets worth basically nothing. When nobody actually lives in the ghost city, it doesn't matter that they have super dense housing. There's no demand. (the only reason they might be worth something is that the CCP very, very much does not want to pop their huge housing bubble and is likely to bail out some of the parties involved) Parmenides (author of Last House On The Left) writes: I think your mixing up the agglomeration effects of density, which is what induces the demand, and the housing supply. You can't just build a city and expect people to move in, China has tried that. But if you have the agglomeration effects of density and shortage of housing due to artificial constraints, which we have all across the US, then you get dense areas with high housing costs. sdwr writes: Think of China's ghost cities / apartment blocks. Prices surely can't be that high there. Maybe the answer is that developers are good at their job, and build supply where theres demand for it? But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China: Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities". Ash Lael writes: I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing. I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like. See also Bloomberg: China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets. This wasn’t trivial. It looks like the Chinese government had to put in some work to make people move in, including opening good schools and universities there. Probably if they had just built apartments in the middle of the desert and nothing else, they would have stayed empty. But that’s even more of a reductio ad absurdum than the original ghost city plan. 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_tzy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdac57667-98e2-40ff-bc78-7f3568efab8d_237x162.png, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PkSC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8f1265d-d113-4d13-87cb-0d1985389b4d_1000x750.jpeg, source, Tom Thought, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!86gT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5788a8dd-c5ee-4111-be67-9c1533f7410b_335x172.png, Infinite Scroll, writes, Last House On The Left, writes, writes, quotes, Under-occupied Developments In China, writes, China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AAuI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d6a6159-a16f-45e3-b15a-e62cb2c73336_1200x900.jpeg, 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

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: 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

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: Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

Your Book Review: Public Citizens

June 23, 2023 · Original source

Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.

Inline links: incredible shrinking high-speed rail

Contra The xAI Alignment Plan

July 17, 2023 · Original source

Some AI companies are trying to give their AIs exactly our current values. This is obviously bad if you don’t like the values of the 2023 San Francisco professional managerial class. But even if you do like those values, it risks permanently shutting off the capacity for moral progress. Is there any other solution?

Inline links: exactly our current values

What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?

August 21, 2023 · Original source

Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.

Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Jill & Daniel Contact Info: jill[dot]dma[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 16th, 10:00 AM Location: The giant wooden bench overlooking the city right outside Cafe Josephine, by the Randall Museum in Corona Heights Park. We'll bring an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQH76+PWW Notes: Kids and dogs are very welcome. Great bathrooms, café, and children's museum on premises. Also tree shade and stunning view of the city.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQH76+PWW

August 30, 2023 · Original source

Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 04, 2023 · Original source

The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this:

Inline links: Jan Sramek

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

September 11, 2023 · Original source

The car commute from Montezuma Hills in roughly the geographic weighted center of the land purchases to San Francisco looks like roughly 3 hours and ten minutes round trip on the average working day […]

A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.

There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)

Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate

October 05, 2023 · Original source

HOW LONG TO PAUSE. The biggest disadvantage of pausing for a long time is that it gives bad actors (eg China)1 a chance to catch up. Suppose the West is right on the verge of creating dangerous AI, and China is two years away. It seems like the right length of pause is 1.9999 years, so that we get the benefit of maximum extra alignment research and social prep time, but the West still beats China. Obviously the problem with the Surgical Pause is that we might not know when we’re on the verge of dangerous AI, and we might not know how much of a lead “the good guys” have. Surgical Pause proponents suggest being very conservative with both free variables. This is less of a well-thought-out plan and more saying “come on guys, let’s at least try to be strategic here”. At the limit, it suggests we probably shouldn’t pause for six months, starting right now. Since this involves leading labs burning their lead time for safety, in theory it could be done unilaterally by the single leading lab, without international, governmental, or even inter-lab coordination. But you could buy more time if you got those things too. Some leading labs have promised to do this when the time is right - for example OpenAI and (a previous iteration of) DeepMind - with varying levels of believability. AnonResearcherAtMajorAILab discussed some of the strategy here in Aim For Conditional AI Pauses, and this Less Wrong post is also very good. Regulatory Pause: If one benefit of the Simple Pause is to use the time to prepare for AI socially and politically, maybe we should just pause until we’ve completed social and political preparations. David Manheim suggests a monitoring agency like the FDA. It would “fast-track” small AIs and trivial re-applications of existing AIs, but carefully monitor new “frontier models” for signs of danger. Regulators might look for dangerous capabilities by asking AIs to hack computers or spread copies of themselves, or test whether they’ve been programmed against bias/misinformation/etc. We could pause only until we’ve set up the regulatory agency, and take hostile actions (like restrict chip exports) only to other countries that don’t cooperate with our regulators or set up domestic regulators of their own. Many people in tech are regulation-skeptical libertarians, but proponents point out that regulation fails in a predictable direction: it usually does successfully prevent bad things, it just also prevents good things too. Since the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, there has never been a major nuclear accident in the US. And sure, this is because the NRC prevented any nuclear plants from being built in the United States at all from 1975 to 2023 (one was finally built in July). Still, they technically achieved their mandate. Likewise, most medications in the US are safe and relatively effective, at the cost of an FDA approval process being so expensive that we only get a tiny trickle of new medications each year and hundreds of thousands of people die from unnecessary delays. But medications are safe and effective. Or: San Francisco housing regulators almost never approve new housing, so housing costs millions of dollars and thousands of San Franciscans are homeless - but certainly there’s no epidemic of bad houses getting approved and then ruining someone’s view or something. If we extrapolate this track record to AI, AI regulators will be overcautious, progress will slow by orders of magnitude or stop completely - but AIs will be safe. This is a depressing prospect if you think the problems from advanced AI would be limited to more spam or something. But if you worry about AI destroying the world, maybe you should accept a San-Francisco-housing-level of impediment and frustration. A regulatory pause could be better than a total stop if you think it will be more stable (lots of industries stay heavily regulated forever, and only a few libertarians complain), or if you think maybe the regulator will occasionally let a tiny amount of safe AI progress happen. But it could be worse than a total stop if you expect continued progress will eventually produce unsafe AIs regardless of regulation. You might expect this if you’re worried about deceptive alignment, eg superintelligent AIs that deliberately trick regulators into thinking they’re safe. Or you might think AIs will eventually be so powerful that they can endanger humanity from a walled-off test environment even before official approval. The classic Bostrom/Yudkowsky model of alignment implies both of these things. David Manheim and Thomas Larsen set out their preferred versions of this strategy in What’s In A Pause? and Policy Ideas For Mitigating AI Risk. Total Stop: If you expect AIs to exhibit deceptive alignment capable of fooling regulators, or to be so dangerous that even testing them on a regulator’s computer could be apocalyptic, maybe the only option is a total stop. It’s tough to imagine a total stop that works for more than a few years. You have at least three problems: NON-PARTICIPANTS. As with any pause proposal, unfriendly countries (eg China) can keep working on AI. You can refuse to export chips to them, which will slow them down a little, but their own chips will eventually be up to the task. You will either need a diplomatic miracle, or willingness to resort to less diplomatic forms of coercion. This doesn’t have to be immediate war: Israel has come up with “creative” ways to slow Iran’s nuclear program, and countries trying to frustrate China’s chip industry could do the same. But great powers playing these kinds of games against each other risks wider conflict.

Inline links: 1, OpenAI, DeepMind, Aim For Conditional AI Pauses, this Less Wrong post, look for dangerous capabilities, finally built, What’s In A Pause?, Policy Ideas For Mitigating AI Risk

For every word like "trust" or "worried", assume I mean "...enough to outweigh other considerations" Along with this overall arc, the debate included a few other points: Holly Elmore argued in The Case For AI Advocacy To The Public that pro-pause activists should be more willing to take their case to the public. EA has a long history of trying to work with companies and regulators, and has been less confident in its ability to execute protests, ads, and campaigns. But in most Western countries, the public hates AI and wants to stop it. If you also want to stop it, the democratic system provides fertile soil. Holly is putting her money where her mouth is and leading anti-AI protests at the Meta office in San Francisco; the first one was last month, but there might be more later. Source: AI Policy Institute and YouGov, h/t Holly Matthew Barnett said in The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause that it might be hard to control the length of a pause once started, and might drag on longer than people who expected a well-planned surgical pause might like. He points to supposedly temporary moratoria that later became permanent (eg aboveground nuclear test ban, various bans on genetic engineering) and regulatory agencies that became so strict they caused the subject of their regulation to essentially cease to happen (eg nuclear plant construction for several decades). Such an indefinite pause would either collapse in a disastrous actualization of compute overhang, or require increasingly draconian international pressure to sustain. He thinks of this as a strong argument against most forms of pause, although he is willing to consider a “licensing” system that looks sort of like regulation. Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse that the biggest threat from AI is centralizing power, either to dictators or corporations. AIs are potentially more loyal flunkies than humans, and let people convert power (including political power and money) into intelligence more efficiently than the usual methods. His interest is mostly in limiting the damage, putting him skew to most of the other people in this debate. He would support regulation that makes it easier for small labs to catch up to big ones, or that limits the power-centralizing uses of AI, but oppose regulation focused on centralizing AI power into a few big, supposedly-safer corporations. Percent of population in each country saying AI has more benefits than drawbacks. Pope uses this table to suggest AI regulation would be decentralizing, since the furthest-ahead countries are the most eager to regulate. Source: Ipsos; h/t Quintin II. For a “debate”, this lacked much inter-participant engagement. Most people posted their manifesto and went home. The exception was the comments section of Nora’s post, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. As usual, a lot of the discussion was just clarifying what everyone was fighting about, but there were also a few real fights: Gerald Monroe thought that the history of nuclear weapons suggested pauses like this were impossible (because many countries did build nuclear weapons). David Manheim thought it suggested pauses like this could work (because there were some successful arms limitation treaties, and less nuclear proliferation than would have happened without international cooperation). Manheim also brought up the successful bans on ozone-destroying CFCs and on human cloning.

Inline links: The Case For AI Advocacy To The Public, leading anti-AI protests at the Meta office in San Francisco, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vUmB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4ebc8f9a-6c5a-4bd8-8542-358bd4fd0181_512x410.webp, The Possibility Of An Indefinite AI Pause, AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Ae8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F165f17cd-ca63-4f54-95e4-29f53b890578_1204x1126.webp, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, thought

Open Thread 298

October 16, 2023 · Original source

Holly Elmore and PauseAI are holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities around the world, including San Francisco.

Inline links: holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities

My Left Kidney

October 27, 2023 · Original source

This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence. Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney. IV. Something else happened that month. On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”. But during the flurry of intakes, screenings, and evaluations that UCSF gave me that month, the doctors asked “so what made you want to donate?” And I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to this one, so I blurted out “Have you heard of effective altruism?” I expected the worst. But the usual response was “Oh! Those people! Great, no further explanation needed.” When everyone else abandoned us, the organ banks still thought of us as those nice people who were always giving them free kidneys. We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out. This is surprising, because kidney donation is only medium effective, as far as altruisms go4. The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years. This is great - my grandfather died of kidney disease, and 10 - 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about $5,000 - $10,000 to produce this many QALYs through bog-standard effective altruist interventions, like buying mosquito nets for malarial regions in Africa. In a Philosophy 101 Thought Experiment sense, if you’re going to miss a lot of work recovering from your surgery, you might as well skip the surgery, do the work, and donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead5. Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. For their work, they got a million sneering thinkpieces on how “EA just takes people’s money to buy castles, then sit in them wearing crowns and waving scepters and laughing at poor people”. I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in the Calcutta slums sounds horrible - so anyone who does it must be really charitable (regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped). Owning a castle is the opposite of suffering - it sounds great - therefore it is fake charity (no matter how much good you do with the castle). This heuristic isn’t terrible. If you’re suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you, and you’re obviously not doing it for personal gain. If you do charity in a way that benefits you (like gets you a castle), then the personal gain aspect starts looking suspicious. The problem is the people who elevate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do. And it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways, instead of thinking about what will actually help others. But getting back to the point: kidney donation has an unusually high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gains. So why do EAs keep doing it? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll speak for myself. It starts with wanting, just once, do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spent on improving your self-image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it’s not like there’s anything else you can do with that spare kidney. Still, it’s not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristics as everyone else’s. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it’s hard to make your emotions track what you know is right and not what the rest of the world is telling you. The last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart. You want to do just one good thing that you’ll feel unreservedly good about, and where you know somebody’s going to be directly happy at the end of it in a way that doesn’t depend on a giant rickety tower of assumptions. Dylan Matthews wrote: As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city. So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one. …and it really resonated. Everything else I try to do, there’s a little voice inside of me which says “Maybe the haters are right, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re just doing the easy things. Maybe you’re no good after all, maybe you’ll never be able to figure any of this out. Maybe you should just give up.” The Talmud is very clear: that voice is called the evil inclination, and it dwells in the left kidney. There is only one way to shut it off forever. I was ready. V. You might not be a masochist. But hospitals are sadists. They want to hear you beg. After I submitted the donation form, I was evaluated by a horde of indistinguishable women. They all had titles like “Transplant Coordinator”, “Financial Coordinator”, and “Patient Care Representative”. Several were social workers; one was a psychiatrist. They would see me through a buggy version of Zoom that caused various parts of their body to suddenly turn into the UCSF logo, and they all had questions like “Are you sure you want to do this?” and “Are you going to regret this later?” and “Is anyone pressuring you to do this?” and “Are you sure you want to do this?” After clearing that gauntlet came the tests. Blood tests - I think I must have given between 20 and 50 vials of blood throughout the screening process. Urine tests - both the normal kind where you pee in a cup, and a more involved kind where you have to store all your urine for 24 hours in a big jug, then take it to the lab. “Urinate into a jug” ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but some of the labs have overly complicated jugs that I, with my mere MD, couldn’t always get right - hence my experience accidentally pouring urine on myself in an Uber. Then came the big guns. Echocardiogram. MRI. One of my urine tests was slightly off, so I also got a nuclear kidney scan, where they injected radioactive liquid in me and monitored how long it took to come out the other end (I remember asking a friend “Can I use your bathroom? My urine might be slightly radioactive today, but it shouldn’t be enough to matter.”) Finally, five months after I originally applied, I got a phone call from the Transplant Coordinator. The test results were in, and . . . I had been rejected because I’d had mild childhood OCD. This was something I’d mentioned offhandedly during one of the psych evaluations. As a child, I used to touch objects in odd patterns that only made sense to me. I got diagnosed with OCD, put on SSRIs for a while, finally did therapy at age 15, hadn’t had any problems since. I still go back on SSRIs sometimes when I’m really stressed, and will grudgingly admit to the occasional odd-pattern-touching when no one’s looking. But it’s nothing anyone would know about if I didn’t tell them! It was mild even at age 15, and it’s been close-to-nonexistent for the past twenty years! Now I’m a successful psychiatrist who owns his own psychiatry practice and helps other people with the condition! I told them all this. They didn’t care. I asked them if there was anything I could do. They said maybe I could go to therapy for six months, then apply again. I asked them what kind of therapy was indicated for mild OCD that’s been in remission for twenty years. They sounded kind of surprised to learn there were different types of therapy and said whatever, just talk to someone or something. I asked them how frequent they thought the therapy needed to be. They sounded kind of surprised to learn that therapy could have different frequencies, and said, you know, therapy, the thing where you talk to someone. I asked them if they actually knew anything about OCD, psychotherapy, or mental health in general, or if they had just vaguely heard rumors that some people were bad and crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions, and that a ritual called “therapy” could absolve one of this impurity. They responded as politely as possible under the circumstances, but didn’t change their mind. I wasn’t going to waste an hour a week for six months, and spend thousands of dollars of my own extremely-not-reimbursed-by-UCSF money, to see a randomly-selected therapist for a condition I’d gotten over twenty years ago, just so I could apply again and get rejected a second time. This was one of the most infuriating and humiliating things that’s ever happened to me. We throw around a lot of terms like “stigma” and “paternalism”, and I’ve worked with patients who have dealt with all these issues (it’s UCSF in particular a surprising amount of the time!). But I was still surprised how much it hurt when it happened to me. Being denied the right to control your own body because of some meaningless diagnosis on a chart somewhere is surprisingly frustrating, even compared to things that should objectively be worse. I thought I was going to be able to do a good deed that I’d been fantasizing about for years, and some jerk administrator torpedoed my dreams because I had once, long ago, had mild mental health issues. So I gave up. I spent the next few weeks unleashing torrents of anti-UCSF abuse at anyone who would listen. This turned out to be very productive! When I was unleashing a torrent of anti-UCSF abuse to Josh Morrison of WaitlistZero, he asked if I’d tried other hospitals. I hadn’t. I’d assumed they were all in cahoots. But Josh said no, each hospital had their own evaluation process. Weill Cornell, a hospital in NYC, was one of the best transplant centers in the country, and had a reputation for fair and thoughtful pre-donor screening. Why didn’t I talk to them? NYC was far away, and I hate to travel, but I was just angry enough to accept. At this point I’d forgotten whatever good altruistic motivations I might have originally had and was fueled entirely by spite. Getting my kidney taken out somewhere else felt like it would be a sort of victory over UCSF. So I went for it. Cornell was lovely. They tried to do as much of the process as they could via Californian intermediaries, so that I only had to fly to New York twice. Their psychiatrist evaluated me, listened to me explain my weak history of OCD, then treated me like a reasonable adult who tells the truth and can handle his own medical decisions. They were concerned that I sometimes self-prescribed Lexapro to deal with anxiety. But we agreed on a compromise: I found another psychiatrist, let her give me the exact same prescription of Lexapro at a much higher cost to my insurance, and that resolved the problem. So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).

So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).

Inline links: polls, 5,000, 40,000, Manifest journalism panel, 6, filling out a form, 7, usual, 8, the, here, 9, 1, 2, Linear Dose No Threshold, this claim, 3, 4, Jeff Kaufman, Derek Shiller, Alexander Berger, Tom Ash, 5, 6, 7

Seen In The Bay

November 22, 2023 · Original source

Seen at San Francisco Airport. The best part was that I saw this the week that the American Psychiatric Association had its national conference in SF, so hundreds of Freudian psychoanalysts must have passed through here.

I bet all the other districts of San Francisco were so mad that this one thought of doing this first.

In The Long Run, We're All Dad

December 22, 2023 · Original source

In February 2023 I found myself in the waiting room of a San Francisco fertility clinic, holding a cup of my own semen.

Links For January 2024

January 18, 2024 · Original source

xi summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to strike america. he proposes they nuke san francisco.

Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Jill and Daniel Contact Info: jill[dot]dma[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:00 AM Location: We'll be outside the cafe at the Randall Museum in Corona Heights (near the Castro) in San Francisco. The Randall Museum has a cafe, Cafe Josephine - we'll be sitting at a public park bench (by the overlook) just outside the cafe. Randall Museum is kid-friendly and has free admission, bathrooms, etc. We'll bring an ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQH76+XW Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong Notes: We're bringing our kids (ages 1 and 3) - feel free to bring other small mammals. You can also get in touch with us at (415) 692-4814

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQH76+XW, https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong

Links For April 2024

April 04, 2024 · Original source

18: Amidst a rapidly-expanding YIMBY movement, continuing homelessness and rent affordability crises, and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to . . . make it harder to build houses in San Francisco, and overturned the pro-YIMBY mayor’s veto.

Inline links: make it harder to build houses in San Francisco

(since there’s been some confusion - I like suburbs and am against YIMBYs’ obvious lust for destroying them. But if you want the suburban life, you shouldn’t be sitting on space in America’s second densest and most dynamic city. San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else. We don’t need to turn currently-habitable places into prisons, but it’s fine to say the prison is growing overcrowded and needs more cell blocks.)

Open Thread 325

April 15, 2024 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

June 21, 2024 · Original source

What follows is an exquisite outsider’s view of nineteenth-century Californian society. Upon their arrival in San Francisco, the Japanese are shocked by the sight of horse-drawn carriages, wall-to-wall carpeting, and ice-filled champagne glasses. Fukuzawa is also amazed by the prices of groceries in California (plus ça change) and is even more astounded when a gentleman he meets says he does not know where George Washington’s descendants live (“I could not help feeling that the family of Washington should be regarded as apart from all other families”).

But Fukuzawa’s greatest joy comes from having his photograph taken. At the studio, he invites the photographer’s daughter to pose next to him, to which she readily agrees. After leaving San Francisco harbor, Fukuzawa shows his prize to his fellow crew members: “You all talk a lot about your affairs,” he jokes, “but how many of you have brought back a picture of yourselves with a young lady as a souvenir of San Francisco?” Fukuzawa basks in the crew’s “extreme envy of [his] relic.”

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

July 18, 2024 · Original source

Cozy! Even at costs likely 10% of ours, the 1950s couldn’t really afford to keep these institutions around; states were spending about 10% of their total budget just to maintain buildings that looked like the picture above. That segues into the political problem - once there were other options (penicillin, antipsychotics, nursing homes), the public willingness to pay to maintain the institutions collapsed. On the other hand, when I calculate this out, it doesn’t seem so bad? The average cost of a psychiatric hospital bed is about $300K per year (sanity check: a California prison bed is $130K per year, and the psych hospital needs more medical personnel, so this seems plausible). There are about 8,000 homeless in San Francisco, but assume that most are ordinary people down on their luck, and we only need to institutionalize 2,000. That suggests a cost of $600 million/year using state-of-California numbers, but everything (eg real estate) is more expensive in SF, so round up to $1 billion/year. I don’t know if this counts the amortized cost of building the institution, but let’s assume it does. San Francisco currently spends about $1 billion/year on homelessness. These institutions would only cover the worst 25% of homeless people, so you’d need maybe another $500 million for the rest, but whatever, same order of magnitude. I think this is more affordable than I expected. The remaining problems are: Where is this? I don’t think there’s anywhere in SF city limits to put it. I suggest putting it in Marin, to piss off George Lucas’ neighbors. But I don’t know about the legalities of a city using an extraterritorial detention institution.

Inline links: about $300K per year

$1 billion/year in projected costs, translated into Californian, means $100 trillion quadrillion/year in actual costs. Of these, I think 3 is the biggest deal. If it’s as hard to commit someone to these institutions as it is to convict them of a crime, then these institutions don’t help much above how much the existence of prison also helps (eg not much). If you invent a new legal maneuver where it’s easier to commit someone than to convict them of a crime, then why do you even need the step where you build the institution? Just invent the legal maneuver and send more people to prison! I think that maybe the thought is that the institution seems more “humane” than prison, and so people will be more willing to allow low-friction legal maneuvers for confining people there. I think this is cope; not only won’t the institutions be more humane than prisons, but people won’t believe they are and won’t allow the low-friction legal maneuvers. Drethelin writes: What if we abolish the DEA and just let anyone buy anti-psychotics over the counter? This would be the FDA we’re abolishing, but otherwise yes, this is the sort of clever outside-the-box thinking that I appreciate from my commenters. Antipsychotics are very cheap (some well-regarded drugs like Abilify and Seroquel cost about ~$10 per month of pills). On the other hand, homeless people have very little money. So if you were going to do this, it would make sense for the government to give them away for free. These drugs have many potentially serious side effects. But it’s not clear how much homeless people’s 5-minute monthly visits with a bored Medicaid doctor does to avert these side effects, over having some kind of pharmacist or advocate or social worker in the free distribution center giving helpful advice. Like everything, I think this would only help around the edges - the fraction of homeless mentally ill people who drugs can help, who are willing to take the drugs, and who are prevented only by cost and bureaucracy. What percent is that? Low confidence guess 25%. DZ writes: I think you’re missing the goal of a short arrest (few days). Part of the problem is the homeless are in areas where society doesn’t want them to be. They’re near city downtowns where tourists spend time or near commercial districts or in otherwise nice parks. If you can arrest them for a few days and keep arresting them until they move somewhere else … the goal is to eventually force them to move to the more acceptable areas vs. least acceptable areas. This is obviously not ideal but in the mean time the city gets more tourism, more office rentals, etc. Europeans ruthlessly arrest homeless people who hang out in the touristy areas. SF doesn’t, yet. I commented that I was worried that “out of touristy areas” means “into residential areas”. And I feel worse making residents deal with this than tourists, and am less confident that the city cares enough about them to fight back. DZ responded: Agreed. People don’t want them in the residential areas or suburbs either and for good reason. But my guess is cities can identify certain areas where they would prefer the tents to set up. Something like industrial areas or run down parks. The key is that city officials should be able to use arrests as a strategy to move the tents/homeless concentrations without having to face a million lawsuits. I don’t know if there are really areas like this, but I welcome learning more from people who know cities better. SMK writes: This probably sounds draconian and cruel, too, but in fairness, all these discussions seem to assume that this person is in San Francisco and can never ever leave for some other, more affordable place. I get it -- it's tough leaving home, and maybe they'd be leaving friends. But they wouldn't be the only people leaving SF over rent prices, and they'd pretty clearly be among the most rational. So I dislike articles like this when they say things like "the average wait time for a homeless shelter bed is 826 days" or "cheap apartments in SF are $1000 / month." I have a friend who was homeless for around a year in another major American city, and he said it was always 100% feasible to get a shelter bed if he wanted one. Indeed, there were several options. On a different note, I also think that if one were going to go a "cruel and draconian" route, homeless shelters might be able to change policies to better support that and prevent some of the issues you highlight. If it takes 826 days to get a shelter bed, then zero of the typical people you mention who are briefly homeless are getting shelter beds. If all of the people who were homeless for longer were either leaving or in jail, then more of those people probably would get beds. Am I saying this is the policy I favor? No, I agree it's a hard problem and I'm not sure what the right answer is. But things like this need to be kept in mind, too. Again, I think it’s helpful to go to the specific policy level. What’s the policy here? Give homeless people brochures reminding them that other cities exist? I’m sure they know this. Give homeless cities free mandatory bus trips to those other cities? What prevents the other cities from giving them free mandatory bus trips back? Even if they don’t, what if the homeless prefer being homeless in San Francisco to having a better situation in a cheaper city? A bus from Phoenix to SF is only $60; even a homeless beggar might be able to scrounge up that much money if they’re motivated. Maybe some plan like making a deal with a big cheap city in Texas to take SF homeless in exchange for money, and as soon as the homeless get off the bus, they’re met by a Texan social worker who gives them a shelter bed and social services? Might help along the edges, but remember that only about half of homeless people want/will accept shelter beds (depending on how good the shelter beds are). Sergei writes: After checking a bit, let me point out the obvious. What works elsewhere is PATERNALISM. Once you are in the "clutches of psychiatry", they don't let you go. Upon release you are placed into some sort of housing, your appointments are monitored and a social worker will find you and drive you there. You will be given multiple chances to get a job and/or rehab. Your meds will be delivered to you if you cannot pick them up. They remind you to take them. There will be a social safety net so you are never in a situation where you end up on the street unless you really really try to. In retrospect, it makes sense: people who are not able to take care of themselves for a time because of a fixable mental infirmity are taken care of by the state, until they can. That's what we do with children already. I continue to want people to provide details. “They don't let you go" - okay, so the person is in a locked facility? Placed in "some kind of housing"? Does the housing have locks on the door, or can they leave? What if they do leave? "Multiple chances to get a job", oh, great, with whom? How are you enforcing that they take mentally ill people? What happens when the mentally ill people are less good workers than other people they could hire, or have some kind of crisis on the job, as even the best-treated person might once in a while? Maybe we can charitably fill in the details. Something like: Ban some combination of camping outside and being visibly mentally ill.

Inline links: writes

In San Francisco, homeless people already get an Access Pass, ie free public transportation on the municipal rail system. I don’t think there’s a similar program for the BART (intercity rail system), probably because other cities don’t want homeless people traveling there. There are definitely lots of homeless people on the BART; I don’t know how this works, but I think they make more begging than they lose from the fares.

Inline links: an Access Pass

Links for July 2024

July 24, 2024 · Original source

9: Did you know: a century ago, insurances didn’t cover earthquake damage. After the 1906 San Francisco quake, “Word spread throughout the city that fires were covered by insurance and people started burning down their properties. Fires raged on for 3 days.”

Inline links: Did you know:

Interview Day At Thiel Capital

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 01:00 PM Location: Bird Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+PC2 Group Link: https://meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/ SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Andrew Gaul Contact Info: gaul[a t]gaul[d ot]org Time: Sunday, October 20th, 02:00 PM Location: Dolores Park near the tennis courts Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQH6F+55 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong Notes: Please RSVP via email so I can coordinate tarps, drinks, and other picnic gear

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+PC2, https://meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/, https://plus.codes/849VQH6F+55, https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong

Open Thread 345

September 02, 2024 · Original source

3: “Comment” of the week is this subreddit post announcing the Bell Riots in San Francisco this Monday. In the Star Trek universe, one of the precipitants to Earth’s eventual utopian government was the anti-homelessness “Bell Riots” that took place in San Francisco on September 2, 2024. In their honor, some YIMBYs will be holding anti-homelessness riots protests in Golden Gate Park on that date.

Inline links: this subreddit post

September 03, 2024 · Original source

“Maybe not at Thiel Capital. But go outside, and you’ll find that people are, in fact, having sex all the time. Tindr. Hinge. Grindr. Young people are going out and having casual sex every weekend. There are fourteen different BDSM sex clubs in San Francisco alone. If you look at the modal society throughout history, they’re forbidding their women from leaving the house, or holding them to such high modesty standards that showing a bare ankle would be a scandal. They’re locking people up for owning porn, or killing them for being gay, or calling them rakes or sluts for having sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, in our society women go everywhere in skimpy skin-tight clothing, you can f@&k a different partner every week, you can be polyamorous or transgender. I read conservative writers saying that no society like ours can survive over the long term. But I’ve thought about it longer than they have, and I think no society like ours could ever come to exist at all. That’s because it’s not a real society. It’s somebody’s weird fetish free-use-adjacent fantasy.”

Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates

September 30, 2024 · Original source

San Francisco

Ballots Everywhere: Times And Places

October 04, 2024 · Original source

SAN FRANCISCO - Saturday, October 19, 2:30 - 4:30pm - Noasis, 22G Day Street (door code 4578) - Contact https://lu.ma/0ufpys63

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story

October 10, 2024 · Original source

…[going to] “A.I. salons” held in San Francisco. Last year, Mr. Wiener attended a series of those salons, where young researchers, entrepreneurs, activists and amateur philosophers discussed the future of artificial intelligence.

Nancy’s involvement was the biggest surprise. The boring explanation is that she represents San Francisco and has a lot of tech investor friends and donors, but you can get more conspiratorial. For example, Pelosi (current net worth $240 million) is known to get impossibly good investing returns, so much so that there are ETFs that try to replicate her stock picks; everyone assumes she must be doing some kind of scummy-but-legal insider trading. Her portfolio is currently weighted towards AI - did that influence her decision? Even more conspiratorial, insiders say Pelosi is waging a “shadow campaign” against Scott Wiener, the only San Francisco politician popular enough to challenge her daughter and hand-picked successor Christine Pelosi for SF’s House seat after she retires. Is she trying to deny Wiener a victory?

Inline links: impossibly good investing returns, ETFs that try to replicate her stock picks, weighted towards AI, a “shadow campaign” against Scott Wiener

ACX Local Voting Guides

October 22, 2024 · Original source

AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here

Inline links: Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here

LOS ANGELES: Guide here. Los Angeles is almost party-line Democrat, but manages to deviate from consensus in a few places, including going against celebrity liberal district attorney George Gascon. Gascon was previously San Francisco DA (sandwiched between Kamala Harris and Chesa Boudin), attracted both furor and adulation for his anti-incarceration/soft-on-crime policies, quit, moved to Los Angeles to take care of his aging mother, and then became Los Angeles DA the next year! He is a fascinating character, and someone should write his biography, but apparently Los Angeles Rationality is tired of him. The group did however support increasing taxes to fund anti-homelessness programs, saying that LA's past anti-homelessness programs have a history of actually working.

Inline links: Guide here

SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here. I got confused because San Francisco has their own list of local propositions which are suspiciously similar to the statewide propositions (for example, both sets have an education bond first). That's not all that's confusing - California has a long history of propositions that invalidate past ballot propositions, but this is the first time I've ever seen them try this during the same election cycle. Proposition L raises taxes on ride-share companies, but Proposition M simplifies the tax system in various ways including cancelling Proposition L. If both pass, then whichever gets more votes wins. This creates a weird situation where several interest groups have strong opinions that both propositions should pass but that L should pass by more votes than M; how do you even make a voter guide for a situation like that? Maybe you should recommend stochastic voting - tell people to vote yes on L, then roll a die, and vote yes on M unless they get a 1? The San Francisco meetup group takes a simpler path and just recommends yes on both.

Inline links: Guide here, whichever gets more votes wins

Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

October 24, 2024 · Original source

This wasn’t officially part of the conference, but at lunch somebody told me that the San Francisco legs of the BART - the Bay Area’s light rail, infamous for being noisy, dirty, and violent - had become comparatively safe and clean over the past few months, after the city installed fare gates that actually worked and couldn’t trivially be jumped over. Apparently the people ruining the BART for everyone weren’t even paying the fare. I always would have guessed there was a correlation between bad behavior and nonpayment, but am surprised at exactly how high the correlation has turned out to be (supposedly - I haven’t been on the BART myself recently to confirm).

Inline links: couldn’t trivially be jumped over

The Case Against California Proposition 36

October 29, 2024 · Original source

(The rise in cocaine and methamphetamine overdoses over this same period most likely also reflects the spread of fentanyl. The data here record deaths by “non-mutually exclusive substance category” – that is, if a person is found dead with both fentanyl and methamphetamine in their system, both will be recorded. These combined overdoses from fentanyl+meth or fentanyl+cocaine are common in San Francisco.)

Inline links: San Francisco

Prop 36 doesn’t set aside any funding for new mental health and substance treatment beds. This might make sense if California was full of empty treatment centers waiting for addicts to fill them. But in fact, the state desperately lacks treatment beds. A 2022 report by the California Department of Health Care Services found that 70% of our counties "urgently need" residential addiction treatment services. 40% – that’s 23 counties – have none at all. Even the larger and wealthier counties are struggling. San Francisco currently has 2,551 residential treatment beds, of which just 690 are for substance abuse treatment – but the city’s homeless population in need of treatment alone measures over 8,000. Worse still, due to post-COVID staffing shortages, the state is actually losing thousands of treatment beds.

Inline links: report, 8,000, losing

(talking about state averages here is actually slightly misleading: shoplifting is down or static in California's small counties and a few of the larger ones, but very high in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shoplifting rates in San Francisco were 24% higher in 2022 compared to 2019, while San Mateo saw a rise of 53%. This is another indicator that Prop 47 – a statewide measure – isn’t the primary driver of the trend.)

Open Thread 354

November 04, 2024 · Original source

1: Comment of the week is Graham on the Prop 36 post - he argues that the reason cops aren’t enforcing the existing misdemeanor penalty for shoplifting (up to six months in jail) is that by the time it gets through the DAs, this is reduced to “a stern talking to”, and it’s not worth cops’ time to arrest anyone who won’t be punished. Therefore, in order to get the six months in jail that’s already on the books, we apparently have to increase the law to three years in jail. I appreciate this perspective, but it only leaves me more confused - for example, didn’t San Francisco recall its soft-on-crime DA and replace him with a tough-on-crime DA who promised to throw the book at shoplifters? Don’t these charts from the San Francisco DA show that most arrests lead to charges, and the problem is almost entirely that most reports don’t lead to arrests? I still don’t feel like I understand the dynamics behind why our current laws can’t be used to arrest and imprison shoplifters.

Inline links: Graham on the Prop 36 post, these charts

Mantic Monday: Judgment Day

November 05, 2024 · Original source

A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.

London Breed is the Mayor of San Francisco. My understanding is that she is relatively moderate for a San Francisco politician - YIMBY, pro-sheltering-the-homeless, and less-than-infinitely-soft-on-crime. San Francisco is still terrible, but has gotten slightly better during her term, and my impression is that the small magnitude of the improvement is more because it’s too much for any one person to solve in a few years than because of any flaw in Mayor Breed’s policies. Still, voters are understandably upset and her chances are slim. A highly deranged Kalshi market favors Daniel Lurie, an extreme outsider who is the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune but otherwise has no experience with anything; his pitch is “Vote for me, I have never been even slightly involved in SF politics before”, and it seems to resonate.

Inline links: highly deranged Kalshi market

Thankfully, San Francisco has ranked-choice voting, so voters will be able to freely choose their favorite among this diverse group of candidates. I am not a praying man, but I would like to request that Aaron Peskin, the worst NIMBY in San Francisco, not get elected.

Inline links: 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

November 12, 2024 · Original source

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

February 03, 2025 · Original source

He proposes some alternatives, of which the most controversial is the Presidio - a federally-owned historic fortress in the middle of San Francisco which is now mostly used as a park. But the government technically has the rights to the land, and if they wanted to, they could zone the whole thing for six-story apartments and add 120,000 people to SF. I don’t know which part of this is most likely to make San Franciscans explode with rage - the loss of their (admittedly beautiful) historic park, the Donald Trump involvement, or the prospect of actually building things in their city. It would be a blowup for the ages.

California Forever, the ambitious planned city an hour north of San Francisco, is on hold.

Open Thread 369

February 16, 2025 · Original source

2: Google DeepMind’s alignment team has new job postings, for research scientist and research engineer, available “in London, Zurich, New York, Mountain View or San Francisco”. Applications open until 2/28. They’ve also released their own free short video course on AI safety.

Inline links: research scientist, research engineer, their own free short video course on AI safety

Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+55 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/ SAN FRANCISCO Contact: Nate, Andrew, and Austin Contact Info: acx-everywhere-sf-spring-2025[ at]googlegroups[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: 1680 Mission St (Mox) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Notes: Kids welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+55, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/, https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82

July 15, 2025 · Original source

If some Aboriginal anthropologist came to America and tried to list our sex taboos, what would they find? No sex between close family members up to second cousin, that’s obvious. No sex with bosses, subordinates, or clients. A strict taboo on even mentioning sex at work, enforced by a caste of powerful witches called “HR ladies”. Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery. No sex across “age gaps”, where some people define “gap” as “half your age plus seven” and other people refuse to define it but reserve the right to judge transgressors anyway. Men can’t have sex with other men, unless they’re part of a special caste called “gay people” who must move to New York, speak in a weird voice, and cultivate an interest in musical theater. Married people can’t have sex with anyone besides their spouse, unless they’re part of a special caste called “poly people” who must move to San Francisco, dye their hair, and get jobs in tech. At some point maybe our hypothetical anthropologist starts longing for the simplicity of someone telling him which 12.5% of the population are his classificatory wives.

Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party

July 21, 2025 · Original source

It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen. Still, your luck can’t last forever, and just before you reach your destination a man with bloodshot eyes lurches towards you. You recognize him and sigh. "Go away!" you shout.

Mark Zuckerberg, heavily bruised and covered in glitter, stands in front of the smoking ruins of your wheelchair and laughs maniacally. He is holding a small silver box he has extracted from one of the fragments. “I got it!” he shouts. “I got the last GPU in San Francisco!”

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities

August 12, 2025 · Original source

I think UBI isn't enough here, you also need to do something about status competition. I could probably afford most necessities I consume on half my current income (revealed preference: I invest a lot of that income. Albeit obviously having a lot invested income is valuable for deferred consumption), but I am also a social primate attempting to maintain status for myself and my offspring among a bunch of other social primates similarly competing. "Literally not starving" is basically a solved problem, and "having sufficient good and services to live a superior life in terms of objective rather than relative consumption to a supermajority of historical humans" is also basically solved. But, for example, living in San Francisco requires a San Francisco income, and living well / keeping up in status competition requires more of that.

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 11:00 AM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+65 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/ SAN FRANCISCO Contact: Andrew Gaul Contact Info: gaul[a t]gaul[period]org Time: Saturday, October 4th, 1:00 PM Location: Mox, 1680 Mission St, San Francisco, CA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can bring coffee and snacks

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+65, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/, https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o

Contact: Andrew Gaul Contact Info: gaul[a t]gaul[period]org Time: Saturday, October 4th, 1:00 PM Location: Mox, 1680 Mission St, San Francisco, CA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can bring coffee and snacks

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o

Links For September 2025

September 04, 2025 · Original source

61: Miles Brundage’s palindrome about San Francisco (X):

Inline links: palindrome about San Francisco (X)

September 19, 2025 · Original source

He was a Navy man, a radar technician, just 20 years old when he shipped out of San Francisco. As he tells it, the entire crew were very nervous, seeing as they were being sent off to invade Japan. But just as the ship sailed past the Bay Bridge, “the captain came out on the bridge and looked down on us. ‘Japan just surrendered!’ he shouts. And suddenly all propriety leaves us, and we all say, ‘well then, for Christ’s sake, turn around!’”

Inline links: he tells it

Sources Say Bay Area House Party

September 25, 2025 · Original source

“That’s every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It’s a strict Pareto improvement!”

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

ACX Grants Results 2025

October 13, 2025 · Original source

Thomas Briggs, $5K, for the Center for Educational Progress. CEP was founded by Jack Despain Zhou, who you may know better by his blogging pseudonym TracingWoodgrains; he is currently on leave as he pursues his legal training, but will return next year. The Center advocates effective pedagogy, especially ability tracking, ie letting faster and slower students each move at their own pace. In practice, this seems to mean a lot of legal briefs telling San Francisco why they shouldn’t ban algebra in middle schools. We support their work and are happy to fill their suspiciously-low funding request.

Inline links: CEP, TracingWoodgrains

Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners

October 17, 2025 · Original source

Dating Men In The Bay Area, by Alex King. Alex is an engineer from San Francisco. She’ll be experimenting with more essays on her new blog, King of Daydreams. When she’s not igniting turmoil in the ACX comments section, she can be found mentoring young engineers, hosting community events, and failing to find a boyfriend. She pinky-promises she is not Aella.

Inline links: Dating Men In The Bay Area, King of Daydreams

October 28, 2025 · Original source

See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)

Inline links: here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds

The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much

Inline links: Solano Shipyard, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cZKL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdaff879b-2364-49e3-9568-2779f28cd231_639x426.jpeg, Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated

What Happened To SF Homelessness?

November 12, 2025 · Original source

Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals.

Inline links: very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco

A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn’t enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong?

Every city accuses every other city of shipping homeless people across their borders, but this probably doesn’t explain most of what’s going on in San Francisco in particular.

Open Thread 409

November 24, 2025 · Original source

4: FRAME is a “fully funded creative fellowship for video creators, storytellers, and communicators who want to shape how the world understands AI Safety and risk concepts”. If you create (or hope to create) AI safety related videos, they want to fly you to San Francisco and teach you how to do it better. Apply by December 20.

Inline links: FRAME

Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

December 04, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

January 02, 2026 · Original source

In such a situation, greatness is pathetically easy. A random woman gave Jesus a washcloth to wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion. She is now known as St. Veronica, patroness of laundry workers, and one out of every 2,500 girls in America is named in her honor. She has an annual feast day, approximately one million beautiful Renaissance paintings, a chapel in Jerusalem, and lesser churches all around the world (including one here in San Francisco). The richest olive merchant in Jerusalem that year is long forgotten, but she endures.

Open Thread 415

January 05, 2026 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling, seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can see the skull shed.

Adams started out by stressing that he was politically independent. He didn’t support Trump, he was just the outside hypnosis expert pointing out what Trump was doing. IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. Indeed, “this person is a charismatic manipulator hacking the minds of irrational sheep” is hardly a pro-Trump take. And he lived in Pleasanton, California - a member in good standing of the San Francisco metropolitan area - and nice Pleasantonians simply did not become Trump supporters in 2016.

Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get really into whale puns.

Links For February 2026

February 05, 2026 · Original source

34: List of every time someone said “I am a…” or “As a…” at a San Francisco governmental meeting (h/t Riley Walz)

Inline links: List of every time someone said “I am a…” or “As a…” at a San Francisco governmental meeting, Riley Walz

62: Tyler Cowen podcast on San Francisco, blogging, and effective altruism. I watched this one because someone said it mentioned me, and was impressed by Tyler’s podcasting skills. The host tries to bait him into boring object-level positions on various controversies and hot takes, and Tyler always gives a classy response that neither takes the bait nor avoids the question, but ends up illuminating the subject in some kind of interesting way. I think I could do this too - if I had ten minutes to craft the perfect paragraph. Tyler does it on the fly!

Inline links: Tyler Cowen podcast on San Francisco, blogging, and effective altruism

February 18, 2026 · Original source

The 1960-2023 data come from FBI Data Explorer via Vital City; the 2024 and 2025 data come directly from the FBI website, with 2025 annualized via incomplete Jan - Oct data. This one may or may not be an all-time low, but it’s pretty good. These data are counterintuitive. Are they wrong? Could This Be An Artifact Of Reporting Bias? People could be so inured to crime that they stop reporting it to the police. Or the police could be so overwhelmed that they stop accepting the reports. Since most crime statistics are based on police reports, this would look like crime going down. There’s some evidence of this happening in specific situations, like shoplifting in San Francisco. Could it be the whole effect? No, for three reasons. The National Crime Victimization Survey is a government-run survey of a 240,000 person nationally representative sample. They find random people and ask whether they were the victims of crimes in the past year. This obviously doesn’t work for murder, but they keep statistics on rape, assault, larceny, and burglary. Their numbers mostly mirror those reported by police and used in the usual statistics about crime rates. But here there’s no extra step of needing to trust the police enough to make a report: the surveyors ask the victims directly. Although there could be biases in this methodology too, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if they exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police. Also, you can use NCVS and police reports to calculate reporting rates directly. Overall, they seem to have increased over time - did you know that the 9-1-1 emergency hotline wasn’t available in most areas until the 1970s? This is especially true for aggravated assault (which will become important later). (source: Baumer and Lauritsen) There’s one caveat - FBI statistics show that crime had a small local peak in 2020/2021, then fell in 2023 - 2025. The most recent NCVS survey, in 2024, shows a smaller fall, leaving us still above 2019 lows. There’s some debate over whether the FBI vs. NCVS numbers are better for the 2022 - 2025 period, but they don’t change the overall trajectory or the fact that we’re at least close to record lows. Murder is almost always reported to and investigated by police; there’s a person who should be alive but isn’t, and people inevitably notice and care about this. Therefore, reported murder rates should be accurate. But murder has decreased at about the same rate as every other crime. Therefore, we should believe that other crimes have gone down too (for the objection that murder statistics are unusually untrustworthy because of improving medical care, see below). And car theft is consistently reported to the police, because insurances require a police report before they will compensate the lost car. So even if the victim doesn’t trust the police to do a good job investigating, they report it anyway. But car theft rates have declined at similar rates to other crimes. This is further evidence that the decline can’t be explained by poor reporting. Could This Be An Artifact Of Improving Medical Care? Good medical care can help victims survive, transforming murders into attempted murders or aggravated assaults (after this: “AM/AA”). If the same gunshot is only half as likely to kill someone today as it would have been in 1960, then a seemingly-equivalent murder rate would correspond to twice as many people getting shot. Could this explain the apparent decline in murders? The argument would go something like: murder is the only crime that we’re completely sure gets reported consistently. But the murder rate is artificially depressed by improving medical care. Therefore, maybe the seemingly-low murder rate is because of the medical care, the seemingly-low rates of other crimes are because of reporting bias, and actually crime is up. We’ve already seen that several parts of this can’t be true: other crimes like car theft are reported consistently, and among the inconsistently reported ones, reports are more often increasing than decreasing. But the part about murder also fails on its own terms. The source for the claim that improving medical care lowers murder rates is Harris et al, which analyzed crime from 1960 - 1999 and concluded that “the principal explanation of the downward trend in lethality involves parallel developments in medical technology”. They found that aggravated assaults rose faster than murders during this time; AAs increased by 5x, while murders “merely” doubled. Under the reasonable assumption that these crimes have similar generators, they suggested that the cause was improved medical care saving the lives of those who would have otherwise died, converting potential murders into AAs. If murders rose at the same rate as AAs, then the true murder rate could be up to 3x higher than reported. Source: FBI UCR But more recent research, especially Eckberg (2014), challenges this story. Eckberg argued the AA vs. murder divergence was caused by two things: first, better reporting of aggravated assault (as discussed above), and second, police being more likely to classify borderline causes as aggravated assault rather than regular assault. He turned to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which escapes reporting bias and police classification flexibility. In these data, AAs and murder rose at about the same rate. He concluded that (my emphasis): Their lethality trend is not compatible with the previous finding [of declining lethality] across 1973 through 1999, remaining stable rather than falling. After 1999, both Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)-and NCVS-based measures indicate increases in lethality. How is this possible, since medical technology has certainly improved? It seems that gun injuries are getting worse over time. Livingstone et al studied changing characteristics of gunshot victims between 2000 and 2011. They found that the proportion of patients with 3+ wounds almost doubled (13% → 22%) during that period (p < 0.0001). Manley et al did a similar study looking at 1996 - 2016 and found a similar result, saying that “wounding in multiple body regions suggests more effective weaponry, including increased magazine size”. A letter by top trauma doctors to the American Journal of Public Health describes: …increases in gunshot injuries per patient, gunshot injuries to critical regions (head, spine, chest), and gunshot injuries to multiple regions. Injury Severity Scores were also higher over similar intervals correlating with lower probability of survival. Despite which …patients surviving evaluation in the emergency department had no significant increase in mortality. Major strides in trauma care have occurred over the last two decades, and nationwide organizational changes have expanded the delivery of these improvements. Sakran et al, studying the 2007 - 2014 period, have an especially vivid portrayal of this pattern: Likelihood of dying before hospitalization - primarily dependent on injury severity - went up. Likelihood of dying in the hospital went down, probably because trauma care improved (although this could also be because more of the sickest patients died before entering the hospital). Cook et al studied gunshot lethality during a slightly different period - 2003 - 2012 - and also found that it stayed the same overall. There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over time: Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)

Inline links: Vital City, shoplifting in San Francisco, is, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!43la!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7726a00f-8995-4c88-bd7a-62d9a894279c_610x438.png, source, some debate, consistently reported, have declined, Harris et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8FyR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1aa5677-aac7-472f-9c52-7bf0568043bf_583x316.png, Eckberg (2014), Livingstone et al, Manley et al, A letter by top trauma doctors, Sakran et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RCq3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2de4bd61-baf8-4226-ae8f-c0a5a29f109d_1280x990.png, Cook et al

Crime As Proxy For Disorder

February 19, 2026 · Original source

Graffiti: There are no good data for graffiti. Most of the discussion focuses on New York, where everyone agrees the long-term trend is down since 1970. The Graffiti In New York City Wikipedia page has a “decline of New York graffiti subculture” section, which explains that in the 1980s, when “broken window” policing became popular, the police cracked down on graffiti and this worked somewhat. The only numbers are here, and they describe a decrease of 13% in calls to the graffiti hotline between 2011 and 2016. But the more recent picture, and the story in other cities, is less sanguine; in the past few years, graffiti is “a bigger problem than ever” in Los Angeles and has “gotten worse” in San Francisco. Plausibly this is the same pattern as crime, which was declining for decades until COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests caused it to rebound in 2020. A contrary data point is Britain, where graffiti reports almost doubled between 2013 - 2017; I don’t know enough about the British context to have an opinion.

Inline links: Graffiti In New York City, here, is, in

Even if we worry about the increase over the 2005 low, it seems to be only about 33%, over fifteen years, which should be hard to notice. Strange! (the FBI runs a different shoplifting reporting program, NIBRS. This does show a large increase since 2018, but is considered less reliable because new cities keep joining and so year-to-year reports aren’t comparable.) Maybe the problem is limited to a few big cities? What about San Francisco in particular? At least in these data, it’s - if anything - less. Okay, so could stores be failing to report to police? Some stores say they’re doing this, and there was an embarrassing incident - it might be the 2021 spike on the graph above - where two stores briefly changed their reporting policy and nearly doubled the total report number. We need an equivalent of the NCVS - reports coming from the victims themselves. Our best bet is the National Retail Survey, from a retail organization which asks stores what percent of their inventory they believe they lose to various causes, including shoplifting. Only about a 20% increase during the 2004 - 2022 period. The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures. In 2024 they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company (no bias there!). The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners, and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away. Now what? The survey doesn’t disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse, and just isn’t reporting it to the police? Might this be because there are fewer stores (everyone is buying through Amazon) and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting? This isn’t trivially true - the number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all - but there’s been a shift in types of stores (from big box to local). If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter. Otherwise, we’re in the awkward position where everyone (including stores) reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree. Homelessness and Tent Encampments: Here’s a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude: I’ve confirmed the post 2009 trend; I haven’t fully double-checked the others but they match my impressions. This looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices. Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find. San Francisco has this one: …but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can’t really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here is an interesting graph of Seattle homeless sweeps, ie number of times the police acted against encampments: …but it doesn’t tell us whether encampments are increasing, or the police are taking them more seriously. It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action - aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People With Loud Boom Boxes In Public Places: All I have to say about this one is that it’s terrible and I hate it. Overall, it’s surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased: Littering seems to be down

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BwpM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29413092-03f5-4fd7-9139-59900f331bf2_1244x878.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TR_v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F873506d8-b99a-43fa-845b-ab02527c7ece_818x444.png, stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!t2K8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05ae2100-6afc-44b2-b334-15132ac3cb29_906x887.png, the pandemic-associated rise in house prices, has, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IP1D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3dcf3fdb-3af0-4c26-b2c9-0525d4ab4800_807x615.png, Here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tv-7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3458f2f2-becc-4a5b-bb89-3644d599d9d2_960x540.png

Only about a 20% increase during the 2004 - 2022 period. The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures. In 2024 they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company (no bias there!). The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners, and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away. Now what? The survey doesn’t disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse, and just isn’t reporting it to the police? Might this be because there are fewer stores (everyone is buying through Amazon) and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting? This isn’t trivially true - the number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all - but there’s been a shift in types of stores (from big box to local). If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter. Otherwise, we’re in the awkward position where everyone (including stores) reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree. Homelessness and Tent Encampments: Here’s a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude: I’ve confirmed the post 2009 trend; I haven’t fully double-checked the others but they match my impressions. This looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices. Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find. San Francisco has this one: …but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can’t really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here is an interesting graph of Seattle homeless sweeps, ie number of times the police acted against encampments: …but it doesn’t tell us whether encampments are increasing, or the police are taking them more seriously. It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action - aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People With Loud Boom Boxes In Public Places: All I have to say about this one is that it’s terrible and I hate it. Overall, it’s surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased: Littering seems to be down

Inline links: stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!t2K8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05ae2100-6afc-44b2-b334-15132ac3cb29_906x887.png, the pandemic-associated rise in house prices, has, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IP1D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3dcf3fdb-3af0-4c26-b2c9-0525d4ab4800_807x615.png, Here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tv-7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3458f2f2-becc-4a5b-bb89-3644d599d9d2_960x540.png

Open Thread 424

March 09, 2026 · Original source

1: Mox asks me to advertise their 2026 fundraiser. They’re a rationalist/EA coworking space in San Francisco that hosts ACX meetups, ACX grants infrastructure, AI safety work, and more. And while I’m advertising them, they also offer deals on personal and organizational office space.

Inline links: their 2026 fundraiser, personal, organizational

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+56, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/, https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[.]simonelli[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 11:00 AM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+56 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/ SAN FRANCISCO Contact: Nate Contact Info: natesternberg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 02, 01:00 PM Location: Mox (first floor), a co-working space in SoMa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can email you a door code ahead of time.

Open Thread 428

April 06, 2026 · Original source

1: Late additions to spring meetup list: San Francisco, Belo Horizonte, Birmingham, Columbus, Hobart, Hyderabad, Madrid.

Inline links: spring meetup list

Spain36 mentions across 36 issues

Spain is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 36 times across 36 issues between March 03, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "the park of Cidacos de Calahorra, Spain"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Spain"; "why this didn't happen to fellow Discoverers like France, Spain, and Portugal". It most often appears alongside Germany, France, India.

Article page: Spain
Mention count: 36
Issue count: 36
First seen: March 03, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For March March 03, 2021
Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Book Review: Global Economic History April 21, 2021
Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies June 03, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021
Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public September 17, 2021
Links For September September 20, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Orban November 11, 2021
Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know November 17, 2021
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal? December 09, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems January 27, 2022
ACX Grants ++: The First Half February 03, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day October 10, 2022
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness February 22, 2023
Book Review: Paper Belt On Fire March 23, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Critical Periods For Language: Much More Than You Wanted To Know August 23, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument October 04, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Prison December 10, 2024
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Your Review: Joan of Arc August 01, 2025
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Germany 21 shared issues
France 20 shared issues
India 20 shared issues
China 18 shared issues
United States 18 shared issues

Source context

Links For March

March 03, 2021 · Original source

28: How the poplar pollen burns in the park of Cidacos de Calahorra, Spain:

Inline links: How the poplar pollen burns

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

April 21, 2021 · Original source

And this part also isn't very clear. During the 1500s and 1600s, first the Netherlands and then Britain experienced a sort of mini-boom. Probably this was because of the Age Of Discovery in some way, although the book leaves us to fill in the details, including why this didn't happen to fellow Discoverers like France, Spain, and Portugal. Colonial trade goods played a role, but so did Northern European ships trading in various non-colonial ways, eg in the Mediterranean. Whatever the reason, these countries saw increasing wages, increasing literacy, urbanization, and the development of a strong mercantile class.

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.

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.

Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Zeihan gives us a story of the Ottoman Empire entering a prolonged decline as deepwater navigation technologies took off in the fourteenth century. These technologies enabled the European powers (first Portugal and Spain, and then England) to capture increasing shares of trade with Asia, dropping prices in Europe and depriving the Ottomans of much of the income to which they had grown accustomed. Most significantly, they turned “the ocean from a death sentence to a sort of giant river.” Trade became global, but it was still mostly among people with nearby water-based transportation.

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

June 03, 2021 · Original source

For a one-time infusion of wealth from each conquered province, Rome had to undertake administrative and military responsibilities that lasted centuries. For Rome, the costs of administering some provinces (such as Spain and Macedonia) exceeded their revenues. And although he was probably exaggerating, Cicero complained in 66 B.C. that, of all Roman conquests, only Asia yielded a surplus. In general, most revenues were raised in the richer lands of the Mediterranean, and spent on the army in the poorer frontier areas such as Britain, the Rhineland, and the Danube.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

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

September 17, 2021 · Original source

In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn't exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:

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 isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called Time For Outrage!

Links For September

September 20, 2021 · Original source

33: Related: Poniente Almeriense, the greenhouse plain of Spain:

Inline links: Poniente Almeriense

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

November 11, 2021 · Original source

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.)

Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

November 17, 2021 · Original source

A defiant Flavio Cadegiani. Imagine a guy who looks like this telling you to take ultra-high-dose antiandrogens. Ahmed et al: And we’re back in Bangladesh. 72 hospital patients were randomized to one of three arms: ivermectin only, ivermectin + doxycycline, and placebo. Primary endpoint was time to negative PCR, which was 9.7 days for ivermectin only and 12.7 days for placebo (p = 0.03). Other endpoints including duration of hospitalization (9.6 days ivermectin vs. 9.7 days placebo, not significant). This looks pretty good for ivermectin and does not have any signs of fraud or methodological problems. If I wanted to pick at it anyway, I would point out that the ivermectin + doxycycline group didn’t really differ from placebo, and that if you average out both ivermectin groups (with and without doxycycline) it looks like the difference would not be significant. I had previously committed to considering only ivermectin alone in trials that had multiple ivermectin groups, so I’m not going to do this. I can’t find any evidence this trial was preregistered so I don’t know whether they waited to see what would come out positive and then made that their primary endpoint, but virological clearance is a pretty normal primary endpoint and this isn’t that suspicious. It’s impossible to find any useful commentary on this study because Elgazzar (the guy who ran the most famous fraudulent ivermectin study) had the first name Ahmed, everyone is talking about Elgazzar all the time, and this overwhelms Google whenever I try to search for Ahmed et al. For now I’ll just keep this as a mildly positive and mildly plausible virological clearance result, in the context of no effect on hospitalization length or most symptoms. Chaccour et al: 24 patients in Spain were randomized to receive either medium-dose ivermectin or placebo. The primary outcome was percent of patients with negative PCR at day 7; secondary outcomes were viral load and symptoms. The primary endpoint ended up being kind of a wash - everyone still PCR positive by day 7 so it was impossible to compare groups. Ivermectin trended toward lower viral load but never reached significance. Weirdly, ivermectin did seem to help symptoms, but only anosmia and cough towards the end (p = 0.03), which you would usually think of as lingering post-COVID problems. The paper says: Given these findings, consideration could be given to alternative mechanisms of action different from a direct antiviral effect. One alternative explanation might be a positive allosteric modulation of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor caused by ivermectin and leading to a downregulation of the ACE-2 receptor and viral entry into the cells of the respiratory epithelium and olfactory bulb. Another mechanism through which ivermectin might influence the reversal of anosmia is by inhibiting the activation of pro-inflammatory pathways in the olfactory epithelium. Inflammation of the olfactory mucosa is thought to play a key role in the development of anosmia in SARS-CoV-2 infection This seems kind of hedge-y. If you’re wondering where things went from there, Dr. Chaccour is now a passionate anti-ivermectin activist: @Finneganporter in @BusinessInsider \n\nThe roots of #ivermectin mania: How South America incubated a fake-medicine craze that took the US by storm\n\n","username":"carlos_chaccour","name":"Dr. Carlos Chaccour ??????","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sun Nov 07 18:40:28 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":2,"like_count":9,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/the-roots-of-ivermectin-mania-how-south-america-incubated-a-fake-medicine-craze-that-took-the-us-by-storm/articleshow/87554081.cms","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/88d08e70-c9e2-46d4-a5df-96807b6c3a13_2000x1000.jpeg","title":"The roots of ivermectin mania: How South America incubated a fake-medicine craze that took the US by storm","description":"The popularity of unproven anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment is surging. Its use has roots in South America, where it was hyped by populist","domain":"businessinsider.in"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> So I guess he must think of this trial as basically negative, although realistically it’s 24 people and we shouldn’t put too much weight on it either way. Ghauri et al: Pakistan, 95 patients. Nonrandom; the study compared patients who happened to be given ivermectin (along with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin) vs. patients who were just given the latter two drugs. There’s some evidence this produced systematic differences between the two groups - for example, patients in the control group were 3x more likely to have had diarrhea (this makes sense; diarrhea is a potential ivermectin side effect, so you probably wouldn’t give it to people already struggling with this problem). Also, the control group was twice as likely to be getting corticosteroids, maybe a marker for illness severity. Primary outcome was what percent of both groups had a fever: on day 7 it was 21% of ivermectin patients vs. 65% of controls, p < 0.001. No other outcomes were reported. I don’t hate this study, but I think the nonrandom assignment (and observed systematic differences) is a pretty fatal flaw. I can’t find anyone else talking about this one. At least no one seems to be saying anything bad. Babaloba et al: Be warned: if I have to refer to this one in real-life conversation, I will expand out the “et al” and call it “Babalola & Alakoloko”, because that’s really fun to say. This was a Nigerian RCT comparing 21 patients on low-dose ivermectin, 21 patients on high-dose ivermectin, and 20 patients on a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, a combination antiviral which later studies found not to work for COVID and which might as well be considered a placebo. Primary outcome, as usual, was days until a negative PCR test. High dose ivermectin was 4.65 days, low dose was 6 days, control was 9.15, p = 0.035. Figure 2 is apparently a photograph of the computer screen where they did this calculation. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, part of the team that detects fraud in ivermectin papers, is not a fan of this one: He doesn’t say there what means, but elsewhere he tweets this figure: 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.

Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?

December 09, 2021 · Original source

Here are two graphs that you might remember from the book review. The first shows that something like 40% of all gross personal assets in Spain represent land. About 25-30% are "financial assets" that must ultimately cash out to some mixture of real assets (land and capital), so the true percentage due to land is probably higher than 40%.

source: Wealth in Spain, 1900-2014 by Blanco, Bauluz, & Martínes-Toledano The second chart shows that about half of real assets in the United Kingdom are due to land.

Inline links: Wealth in Spain, 1900-2014

Land represents about 40% of household assets in the USA. It also represents more than 40% of asset values in Spain and somewhere between 50-60% of asset values in the France and UK.

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems

January 27, 2022 · Original source

I've lived in the US, China, Australia, Singapore and Spain. I'm really surprised that the book didn't even consider Spain, which has a pretty cheap system, the world's highest life expectancy at birth and, by far, the best health system of all those I've had a first-hand experience with. No need to tell you much about the US, and Australa's system is, in my limited experience, marginally better. Singapore is hyper-expensive and hyper-effective and anyone who includes China in such a comparison must be doing it for the laughs. Very expensive and second-rate at best in big cities, third-worldist for hundreds of millions in the countryside.

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

February 03, 2022 · Original source

#38: Promote Citizens’ Assemblies And Lotteries The newDemocracy Foundation is an organisation in Australia that develops, demonstrates, and promotes innovations in democracy. Its focus is on deliberative democracy and random selection. We have worked with the UN and the OECD to develop international standards of best practice and founded the Democracy R&D network. We’re designed and operated ground-breaking projects in Melbourne, Geelong, and Canberra, and have collaborated with international partners in Brazil, Spain, North Macedonia, and Malawi. We require funding to take advantage of an opportunity in Australian politics. Citizens’ assemblies and democratic lottery are gaining traction but the ecosystem for their implementation still requires support and training that is best provided by an independent organisation like ours. Additional funding could allow us to expand our project capacity, conduct needed research or improve our advocacy and reach to politicians. I’m happy to answer any questions or provide a brief organisation overview, you can reach me at kyle.redman@newdemocracy.com.au You can view our website here: www.newdemocracy.com.au.

April 06, 2022 · Original source

I feel the whole assumption there is some list of features that grant a group of people the right to self-determination is kind of a category mistake. Sometimes it will make the world better to let a group of people form a separate country sometimes it won't. The difference between Ukraine and the confederacy is as simple as: the world was better off not letting the confederacy self-determine and worse if Russia stops Ukraine from doing so. It even plausibly depends on who the occupier is and how they treat them (if the Basque region was in China not Spain no question it would be better to allow self-determination...as of now unclear to me as it imposes costs on both sides).

Your Book Review: The Castrato

April 10, 2022 · Original source

MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Pablo V (pvillalobos at protonmail dot com) Date: April 25 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F7Q Location: El Retiro Park Group info: There is no ACX group per se, but a subgroup of the EA/rationality community.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F7Q

SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu (edur.acx@gmail.com) Date: April 30 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9P92F6+3R 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.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8C9P92F6+3R

June 03, 2022 · Original source

Farinelli was originally called to Spain by the doctor of King Philip V in hopes that his singing could ease the King’s melancholia. “According to lore, it was arranged that Farinelli should sing in a room adjacent to the royal apartments. By the time he had finished the second song, the king appeared much moved by the beauty of his voice and ordered the singer brought before him. Philip overwhelmed Farinelli with compliments and agreed to pay him a salary for life. Farinelli would sing eight or nine arias for the king and queen every night, usually with a trio of musicians.” (“Music to soothe the Mad King”)

Inline links: Music to soothe the Mad King

“Farinelli was part and parcel of a new bourgeois order. He had made his fame singing in large commercial theaters attended by thronging publics that included members of the haute bourgeoisie and nobility, servants, dignitaries, middle-class doctors, lawyers, teachers, merchants, military men, and sometimes royals. He had negotiated with agents over contracts. He had also purchased numerous things for himself, including practical items, musical instruments, real estate, horses, and luxury objects, and had been given many luxurious things and lots of cash…Fifteen years later, when the king of Spain made him a knight of the exalted ancient military order of Calatrava, the" crowning" was not just musical or metaphorical. By then Farinelli had already been carrying out extensive state duties in his high-powered role as minister of entertainments and had been a household intimate of two successive pairs of Spanish royal heads of state. He had consorted with numerous crown heads of Europe along the way. To commemorate all that, Corrado Giaquinto pictured him in 1755 majestically attired, wearing the cross of Calatrava with the royals of Spain hovering in the background among the angels—almost as if to declare the castrato de facto king.” [pg. 9]

As you can see, the castrati were not mere bystanders in the political arena. In fact, some even ended up joining the ranks of the nobility themselves through the granting of knighthood (as mentioned previously, Farinelli was inducted into the exalted ancient military order of Calatrava by the king of Spain) or by purchasing lands that came with a title (Caffarelli, Rivani, and Arnaboldi).

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy

June 17, 2022 · Original source

TJ-II (Spain, 1997)

July 01, 2022 · Original source

His legal justification for the war looked back to 1821, when Mexico secured its independence from Spain. The years following independence brought deep instability. Mexico went through thirty-five administrations in thirty-four years. U.S. citizens conducting business there were subject to illegal confiscations of property and physical assaults by government officials and made numerous claims against Mexico for compensation. U.S. diplomats collected these complaints and presented them to the Mexican government. (Chapter 2)

Any unequal support provided by the United States to France would have been a casus belli, an act of belligerency warranting a military response. The Girondins should have realized that the United States government could not let its territory be used as a recruiting ground for a rebel army to foment insurrections. To aid France this way would have been an act of war against Britain and Spain.

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)

Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

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.

October 10, 2022 · Original source

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.

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.

I have a mild interest in weird historical prophecies, and in this context I came across Columbus’ Book Of Prophecies, which he wrote late in his life. This actually touches on the Garden of Eden claim - Columbus believed that the Second Coming could not occur until the Garden of Eden was found. I don’t know how seriously to take his own self-presentation, but Columbus always presented himself as deliberately setting out to fulfill as many preconditions for the Second Coming as he could - for example, he said that he was looking for gold so he could enrich Spain to the point where it reconquered the Holy Land. New EA hero?

Inline links: Book Of Prophecies

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

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

April 10, 2023 · Original source

BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso Martinez Contact Info: alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu Time: May 21st, 05:15 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, next to the Lion Catcher/Caçador de Lleons Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C

MADRID, MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Pablo Contact Info: pvillalobos[at]proton[dot]me Time: Monday, April 17th, 06:00 PM Location: Mercado de San Ildefonso. Calle de Fuencarral, 57, 28004 Madrid. We'll be at the first or second floor, with an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC7FX+MJ Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5xzuWjNo6vDzhDo7K/acx-meetup-1

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC7FX+MJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5xzuWjNo6vDzhDo7K/acx-meetup-1

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, GALICIA, SPAIN Contact: Javier Contact Info: javier[dot]prieto[dot]set[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 05:00 PM Location: caféLaMorena. Rúa de San Clemente, 6, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña. https://maps.app.goo.gl/FJ9vPnNTXcsvPx4LA. I'll be wearing an EAGx LatAm hoodie and maybe put up an ACX sign or something. Will sit outside, weather permitting, and inside otherwise. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFH3+M76

Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FJ9vPnNTXcsvPx4LA, https://plus.codes/8CJHVFH3+M76

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPn6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd25ceff6-f68e-4163-becf-613204a9be35_1600x1297.png, List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon

May 19, 2023 · Original source

The Forbidden Solution All empires eventually collapse. This is not what we would expect if empires were a good economic arrangement. If they only ever got wealthier and wealthier, they wouldn’t disintegrate into various separatist factions or end in foreign conquest. The first empire to form would have slowly absorbed everything else, and we would all be living good lives under the enlightened rule of the Sumerians or whatever. But that doesn’t happen, because empires always milk their own cities until they become poor. Modern nation-states do the same. They accumulate stress by trying to hold themselves together, and then, one day, the stress is released all at once. Wars and revolutions galore. Most countries are born that way, like new stars formed in the aftermath of a supernova. Peaceful separatism offers an alternative, Jacobs says — but only a theoretical one. Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy,” she writes, “young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’” Can you imagine Canada saying this to Quebec? Or England to Scotland? Or China to Tibet and Taiwan? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it’s only theoretical and utopian. Jacobs knows very well that nations will never accept separatism as an option. And though the term “nationalist” has fallen out of fashion, almost all of us still think very much in terms of nations. Even when separatism does seem grudgingly acceptable, I’d say that’s usually either because it’s an instance of decolonization (colonial empires are decidedly out of fashion) or for cultural, nationalistic reasons. Quebecois, Scottish, or Catalan separatists say that they belong to nations that are culturally distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Spain. And they love their smaller nation just as much as others love the larger one. If any of these separatists got their way, we can be sure that the new nation of Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia would then oppose further separatism in the strongest terms. When the American South seceded from the Union in 1861, the reaction wasn’t “good luck!” even though the Union was itself the result of a secession from Great Britain. To separate for economic reasons seems forbidden. Unthinkable. For one thing, it would be selfish. If Catalonia left, the poor regions of Spain, which benefit from welfare financed in part by Barcelona, would suffer, which is obviously unacceptable to Spain. For another, it’s not guaranteed to work. Small countries and city-states can still adopt dumb economic policies. It can seem intolerably risky to go your own way, unless your region is already rich, in which case see the selfishness point above. Widespread separatism also seems worse for solving large-scale coordination problems, like environmental issues, nuclear proliferation (and, perhaps, AI), or war. I suspect that Jacobs would agree with Nassim Taleb’s antifragility framing: it’s better to be in a constant state of mild disorder than to have apparent stability that hides stressors and ends in violent conflict. But that idea is not intuitive. Most of us would pick apparent stability over mild disorder. I also suspect — and this is my personal take — that we dread the additional complexity of having numerous small countries. We look at a map of medieval Germany, like this one… … and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.

Critical Periods For Language: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

August 23, 2023 · Original source

Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, then after a few years they might find they’d learned Spanish “easily” too. So Scott says:

August 25, 2023 · Original source

LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong Spain BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso Contact Info: alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu Time: Sunday, October 01st, 5:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion's Catcher statue Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+85

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ, https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+85

BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Alfonso Contact Info: alfonso[dot]martinez[at]upf[dot]edu Time: Sunday, October 01st, 5:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella, by the Lion's Catcher statue Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+85

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+85

MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Antonio Contact Info: a[at]olmo-titos[dot]info Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 11:00 AM Location: "El Retiro" Park, puppet theatre ( https://www.esmadrid.com/en/tourist-information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro ) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NyFGBvrXj6i7NQzjv

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NyFGBvrXj6i7NQzjv

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xo7QE9pjGDvqLd5Ao/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ, https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6

March 30, 2024 · Original source

LJUBLJANA Contact: Demjan Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, May 15th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novy, at a table with some sort of sign that says ACX. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xo7QE9pjGDvqLd5Ao/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if possible, it helps with logistics to estimate the number. Spain ALICANTE, SPAIN Contact: Will Contact Info: will[dot]worth[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:00 PM Location: Parque Canalejas(park next to the esplanada and port, central Alicante) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6 Notes: Hispanohablantes, sois bienvenidos/English speakers welcome EDIT: The organizer needed to cancel. If anyone else wants to pick this up, let Skyler know, but no organizer is there.

ALICANTE, SPAIN Contact: Will Contact Info: will[dot]worth[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:00 PM Location: Parque Canalejas(park next to the esplanada and port, central Alicante) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6 Notes: Hispanohablantes, sois bienvenidos/English speakers welcome EDIT: The organizer needed to cancel. If anyone else wants to pick this up, let Skyler know, but no organizer is there.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CCX8GR7+C6

BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Melanie Brennan Contact Info: melanie[dot]anne[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 4:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-barcelona/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH495QP+6C, https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-barcelona/

Against The Cultural Christianity Argument

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Tanya Trninic Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[ dot]c om Time: Sunday, September 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Restaurant Rai Urban Vege; Address: Visokog Stevana 5, Belgrade, Serbia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ| Group Link: EA Serbia Telegram group invite: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.com so I can reserve a suitable table. Spain BARCELONA, SPAIN Contact: Tobi Contact Info: tb[dot]acx[ at]proton[d ot]me Time: Sunday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QM+JQ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT Notes: Please RSVP so we know how many people to plan for

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ|, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0, https://plus.codes/8FH495QM+JQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT

Contact: Tobi Contact Info: tb[dot]acx[ at]proton[d ot]me Time: Sunday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Parc de la Ciutadella Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495QM+JQ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT Notes: Please RSVP so we know how many people to plan for CAMBRILS, SPAIN Contact: Alexander Contact Info: alexander[dot]oleshko[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Friday, September 13th, 07:00 PM Location: North entrance to Park del Pescador, I'll hold an "ACX meetup" poster. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH33384+PH4 Notes: Please RSVP if you're planning to come. If I get no replies, I'll still show up there and stand with the poster for 20 minutes. I expect that we will communicate in English, however, if Spanish is a more preferable choice for you, you'll find conversation partners.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH495QM+JQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT, https://plus.codes/8FH33384+PH4

Contact: Alexander Contact Info: alexander[dot]oleshko[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Friday, September 13th, 07:00 PM Location: North entrance to Park del Pescador, I'll hold an "ACX meetup" poster. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH33384+PH4 Notes: Please RSVP if you're planning to come. If I get no replies, I'll still show up there and stand with the poster for 20 minutes. I expect that we will communicate in English, however, if Spanish is a more preferable choice for you, you'll find conversation partners. MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Pablo Contact Info: pvillalobos[at]proton[d ot]me Time: Saturday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre. I will be carrying an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/ Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not required

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FH33384+PH4, https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M, https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/

October 04, 2024 · Original source

But the Christian cultural package also fell apart and became the current post-Christian world. This wasn't just a one-time coincidence either. Protestantism gave way to modernism in Scandinavia, Germany, and the US. Catholicism gave way to modernism in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. Orthodoxy gave way to modernism in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia (with a slight Putinist resurrection-in-name-only which hardly seems to have produced a flourishing liberal society). Meanwhile in China, the local mix of Buddhism/Confucianism/Taoism gave way to modernism. In South East Asia, Buddhism gave way to modernism. Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast. India is moderately Hindu but still noticeably modern. Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim.

Highlights From The Comments On Prison

December 10, 2024 · Original source

Just picking a few examples, Belgium has 334, Germany 349, Hungary 367, France 422, Italy 456, Spain 534

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

"In the time of the great adversity of this King Charles VII, he found himself (brought) so low that he no longer knew what to do. . . . The King, being in this extremity, entered one morning alone into his oratory and there he made a humble petition and prayer to Our Lord in his heart, without utterance of words, in which he petitioned devoutly that if so it was that he was true heir descended from the noble House of France and that the kingdom should rightly belong to him, that it please Him to keep and defend him, or, at worst, to grant him the mercy of escaping death or prison, and that he might fly to Spain or to Scotland which were from time immemorial brothers in arms and allies of the Kings of France, wherefore had he there chosen his last refuge. A little time afterwards, it came about that the Maid was brought to him, who, while watching her ewes in the fields, had received divine inspiration to go and comfort the good King. She did not fail, for she had herself taken and conducted by her own parents even before the King and there she gave her message at the sign aforesaid (dessusdit) which the King knew to be true. And thenceforth he took counsel of her and great good it did him.”

August 22, 2025 · Original source

When Ollantay was first performed, Peru was around two hundred years removed from Pizarro’s apocalyptic conquest. The population was finally starting to recover, so that in 1770 it sat at around 1.2 million people. The vast majority of those 1.2 million people were indigenous,3 and the vast majority of those 1.2 million people did not have great lives. Peru was oriented almost exclusively towards extracting mineral wealth from the mountains and moving it to Spain.

Inline links: 3

Antonio Valdez lived for another thirty-five years after the brutal suppression of the rebellion and the public execution of his friend. In all the chaos that would subsume Peru as South America broke away from Spain and fell into near-constant civil war, Valdez never made another public appearance. He advised neither San Martín nor Bolívar.

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 28, 6:00 PM Location: vegANGELov vegan restaurant Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2V Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Additional Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email so I know how many tables to book. Spain BARCELONA Contact: Adriana Contact Info: adriana[period]lica[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 4th, 7:00 PM Location: Rooftop terrace of Archie Living building. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495RJ+R9 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT Notes: RSVP required at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/acx-fall-meetup-tickets-1630472118999 We'll have snacks and refreshments. Dogs & kids are welcome. Bring swimwear, if you'd like a pool dip.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2V, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0, https://plus.codes/8FH495RJ+R9, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT

Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Tanja is organizing the Belgrade meetup. Contact Info: tanja[.]trninic[@]efektivnialtruizam[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Doktora Dragoslava Popovića 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email to my email, so we know how many people to expect. Spain BILBAO 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!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0, https://plus.codes/8CMV736G+6H4

Silicon Valley34 mentions across 34 issues

Silicon Valley is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 34 times across 34 issues between January 29, 2021 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "immersed in and repulsed by the rationalist movement in Silicon Valley"; "right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel"; "unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, California, San Francisco.

Article page: Silicon Valley
Mention count: 34
Issue count: 34
First seen: January 29, 2021
Last seen: March 06, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy January 29, 2021
Statement on New York Times Article February 14, 2021
Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021
A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class" February 25, 2021
Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty April 16, 2021
If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California? August 25, 2021
Book Review: The Scout Mindset September 29, 2021
Links For December December 30, 2021
Open Thread 231 July 04, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
Semaglutidonomics November 24, 2022
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise December 01, 2022
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency December 08, 2022
Even More Bay Area House Party January 04, 2023
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction? December 07, 2023
Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ December 07, 2023
Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory October 09, 2024
SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story October 10, 2024
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference October 24, 2024
Links For January 2025 January 17, 2025
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know March 13, 2025
In Search Of AI Psychosis August 26, 2025
My Antichrist Lecture October 22, 2025
25 October 28, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession December 31, 2025
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership January 02, 2026
Open Thread 415 January 05, 2026
The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026
Moltbook: After The First Weekend February 02, 2026
SEIU Delenda Est March 06, 2026

Elon Musk 15 shared issues
California 13 shared issues
San Francisco 12 shared issues
Trump 9 shared issues
Twitter 9 shared issues

Source context

January 29, 2021 · Original source

4. Furthermore, the positive examples of technocracy @slatestarcodex refers to are...surprising. Two examples. To call school desegregation a technocratic invention papers over decades of community activism for desegregation. Perhaps even more dramatically looking at the coronavirus as an example of the success of technocracy runs against pretty much any reasonable reading of the international data. Danielle Allen and I have a piece coming out on this (we were both deeply involved in developing a response plan here https://ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap that significantly influenced now-President Biden's response), but perhaps the sharpest point here is that the country, Taiwan, which performed best in the virus was led in part by Audrey Tang who moved back to Taiwan after being immersed in and repulsed by the rationalist movement in Silicon Valley - see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/) and dedicated herself to doing things differently in Taiwan (see her amazing poetic job description here:

Inline links: https://ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap, https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/

Statement on New York Times Article

February 14, 2021 · Original source

4. They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true – I can think of a friend of mine who also knows Peter Thiel. In fact, I met Peter Thiel once, kind of unexpectedly, at a party, long before Trump was in the news, and exchanged about two sentences of conversation with him (I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was, nor was there any reason he should have). I have never personally met the other right-wing figures named in the article. I wrote a 30,000 word condemnation of one of them on my blog a few years ago, and we have since had some email exchanges about to what degree this was unfair. I received a sympathetic email from another of them about the Times article. Others I have had literally no contact with. Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general.

Inline links: a 30,000 word condemnation, would not surprise me if

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart

February 18, 2021 · Original source

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"

February 25, 2021 · Original source

Insist that working-class people have the right to communicate with each other without interference from upper-class gatekeepers. Make sure people know every single fact about @Jack and what a completely ridiculous person he is, and point out that somehow this is the guy who decides what you're allowed to communicate with your Twitter friends. Every time tech companies censor social media, even if they're censoring left-wing views, call their CEOs in for long and annoying Congressional hearings where you use the words "Silicon Valley elites" a lot.

Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty

April 14, 2021 · Original source

HPI is getting some funding from Pronomos Capital, who are exactly the sort of people you would expect to see founding their own city. Pronomos is a group of Silicon Valley libertarians interested in competitive governance; their site predicts "crowd choice in governance providers, new startup societies approved by existing states, and completely new developments in unclaimed areas such as the high seas or celestial bodies". Some of them are veterans of the Seasteading Institute, who wanted to create charter cities on floating platforms in international waters. Pronomos is run by former SI head Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman, son of David Friedman), and their advisors include cryptocurrency mogul / VC / outspoken libertarian Balaji Srinivasan, legendary venture capitalist Naval Ravikant, and lots of other apparently rich and famous people who I know less about. I think we would all be disappointed in Peter Thiel if he were not involved in this somehow, and it looks like in fact he’s a major Pronomos funder.

Inline links: Pronomos Capital, he’s a major Pronomos funder

April 16, 2021 · Original source

Source: can't find the author of this image, closest I can get to its origin is this blog Okay, but is this still relevant in the modern age, with the internet and work-from-home? Obsessing about land just feels so 19th century. Well, in Silicon Valley rents are famously off the charts, and those and all other rents seep into the economy at every level. Workers priced out of living close by have to spend more time and money commuting longer distances to work, and businesses must devote an increasingly larger share of their production to landowners who aren't actively contributing anything to productivity. What else could explain how a family of four making $100,000 in San Francisco is considered to be living below the poverty line? Here, take a look at this chart (source): I found this in a tweet by Thomas Piketty, and it shows the breakdown of personal assets in Spain over the last 100+ years. The bulk of the value of personal assets is from landownership. This is still the case even though the chart includes "financial assets" – which are just IOUs that ultimately have something real (e.g. land or wealth) underpinning their value. If we exclude those, the true portion of overall value represented by land is even higher than this graph first implies. And this isn't just Spain. Here's a graph Nate Blair made for the UK, excluding all financial instruments and only looking at real assets: Based on data from the United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017. Published Oct 31, 2017. Revision Period: Beginning of each time series. Date of next release: July 2018. The "privileges" in "Land and privileges" are things like taxi medallions and patents, that were worth "almost zero" according to Nate. No matter how hard you try, "there is no occupation in which labor and capital can engage which does not require the use of land." Whenever anyone does labor, the owner of some piece of land – whether it's the farm in the middle of Kansas that grows your food, the lot upon which the server farm sending you these bytes sits, or the ground that right now sits beneath your feet – is sticking their finger in the pie. George reminds us that labor and capital will have to share whatever landowners take off the top of production in rent: As Produce = Rent + Wages + Interest, Therefore, Produce - Rent = Wages + Interest So... what happens when the productivity of land goes up? Let's go back to Lot A and Lot B, both 100-util fields. Let's say they belong to different landlords, and I'm a tenant on Lot B. I improve the soil of the field I'm working on so now it's worth 110 utils. What happens? My landlord raises the rent, of course! The only way wages (the return to labor) and interest (the return to capital) can go up as productivity increases, is if land values fail to rise at the same rate. The Law of Interest George wants to find the fundamental reason capital is able to produce wealth and justly claim a fair share of production. Remember that capital is wealth devoted to getting more wealth. So if capital is wealth that begets wealth, it makes sense that if I lend it out to you, I miss out on the potential for it to grow while it's out of my hands. George says I am justly entitled to ask for more back than I originally gave you. Let's say I loan you some corn seeds for a season. Had I not leant them to you, in a season's time I could have grown my own crop of corn and been left with more seed than I started with. So in a perfectly square deal, you need to give me back what I started with and what I could have expected to gain from natural increase (less the value of the labor required to get things started). Likewise with any other article of capital – say bricks or lumber. In the time I've spent without it while it was in your possession, I could have found someone else who had a better use for it than I did and exchanged it for something of theirs that I had a better use for, leaving me with capital of greater value. George says the act of progressively exchanging things in a way that increases subjective value for all involved is analogous to the natural forces of nature that make living capital (like corn and cows) grow over time. Remember, "subjective value" is real value. In a game of Settlers of Catan, if I have two bricks and you have two lumber, neither of us can build anything. The simple act of trading one brick for one lumber means both of us are better off because each of us can now build a road. The amount of bricks and lumber in the world didn't increase, but the amount of roads (or potential roads) did, and that represents a real increase in wealth. Interest thus springs from the "reproductive" powers of capital, whether that's biological reproduction, or the more abstract reproductive force of exchanging things so that you have a more valuable distribution of capital than you started with. As for how it relates to the other two returns to production – the more powerful the "power of increase" the capital has, the greater return interest can claim compared to wages. If you're ploughing a field and I lend you a tractor which makes you ten times as productive, I can justly claim more compensation for that than if I lend you a mule that only makes you twice as productive. However, rent still holds the whip hand, so the margin of cultivation determines how much return is left over to divvy up between interest and wages. This is because the net "reproductive" value of capital goes down given rent is a general tax on overall productivity. The amount I would have gained by using the thing productively over the period of time it was out on loan (the amount I can justly charge in interest) is reduced by how much I have to pay in rent. The Law of Wages Wages, like interest, are limited by the margin of production. Within that limit there's not much to understand about how wages work except that people seek to satisfy their desires "with the least exertion," which is a fancy way of saying people don't like to get ripped off. If two bosses offer the same exact job, but one offers higher pay, I'm taking that gig. If two bosses pay the same, but one is asking for twice as much work, I'll tell that boss where he can stick it. Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent. So with all three laws established George sums it up like so: Where land is free and labor is unassisted by capital, the whole produce will go to labor as wages. Where land is free and labor is assisted by capital, wages will consist of the whole produce, less that part necessary to induce the storing up of labor as capital. Where land is subject to ownership and rent arises, wages will be fixed by what labor could secure from the highest natural opportunities open to it without the payment of rent. Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, wages may be forced by the competition among laborers to the minimum at which laborers will consent to reproduce. This is the reason George says that wages are so high in "new countries" where there's more land available than in countries where it's been locked up for centuries. Here's how it all fits together: Though neither wages nor interest anywhere increase as material progress goes on, yet the invariable accompaniment and mark of material progress is the increase of rent – the rise of land values. And: where the value of land is highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution IV. Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution of Wealth As a society undergoes material progress, the rent goes up. Why? Let's break it down. Three things contribute to material progress: Increasing population

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: 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

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California?

August 25, 2021 · Original source

Californians love long-shot bets. Actors trying to make it big in LA, tech founders chasing unicorns in San Francisco, cult leaders trying to found religions in Pasadena. In Silicon Valley, VCs turn the long-shot bet into an art: if some new startup has a 5% chance of making a billion, that's $50 million in expectation. Just a whole state full of people looking for weird opportunities.

Book Review: The Scout Mindset

September 29, 2021 · Original source

Galef spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley, where the tech crowd has a different objection: don’t you need to be insanely overconfident to launch a startup? 90% of startups fail. But a lot of good founders seem absolutely certain they can succeed. They act as good Soldiers for Team “we’re definitely going to make a billion dollars”, and that certainty rubs off on employees, investors, etc and inspires confidence in the company. Wouldn’t a more realistic Scout Mindset doom them?

Links For December

December 30, 2021 · Original source

21: Noahpinion on new technologies to be excited about for the coming decade. I’m split on this, because I agree that many things look promising. But also, if all the promising things pan out, there will be many more new exciting non-information technologies in the 2020s than the 2010s or 2000s. That suggests that maybe we’re being too optimistic and most of them won’t pan out, unless we have some reason to think advances will start coming faster now than in the past generation. Theories I’ve heard along those lines include: we’ve spent the past few decades “paying off” the “debt” incurred by our old technologies being environmentally unfriendly, and now that we’ve solved environmentalism (wait, what?) we can start advancing again. Or, maybe we got really excited picking the low-hanging fruits in information technology these past few decades, and now that we’ve saturated that space (wait, what?) we can move back to the physical world again. Or maybe Silicon Valley has been building a new tech ecosystem separate from the old dinosaur one, and now that it’s fully mature (wait, what?) it can start working on big physical-world projects.

Inline links: new technologies to be excited about for the coming decade

Open Thread 231

July 04, 2022 · Original source

2: Isaak Freeman asks me to signal-boost the Future Forum, from August 4-7 in San Francisco, featuring speakers including Sam Altman, Anders Sandberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowen. They are bringing together 250 people from EA, Silicon Valley, and related communities to “arm the world's brightest minds with the tools they need to tackle global problems” and to potentially offer funding and mentoring. Apply at the link above.

Inline links: Future Forum

Inline links: NextMed, a very noble-sounding law, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!l_X7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1dbb9e98-6e07-4237-988e-3b7a61af3e5a_1381x834.png, is publishing articles, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R-zS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f24b293-27de-462a-84fd-bed2ba7cf07f_1723x831.png, modeled the economic future of obesity medications over the next decade, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSOS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0906b28a-1ad4-421d-a055-87ed95db59ce_918x261.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QJj9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb966f730-6b24-48e1-98b1-e710cda9264c_903x656.png, this is mysteriously not how things work in health care, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5poy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc201f05a-7d1f-4738-911f-11d0d051adf9_2880x1562.png, Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, don’t think there are technical barriers, offers a Savings Card, This startup, about the same amount for Ozempic, This article in Drug Discovery Trends, Everyone else seems as confused as I am, NHS will, private clinics

October 13, 2022 · Original source

Fresno native here. While I'm not the biggest fan of the area, I feel I have to push back against this a bit. I left in 92 for college and then a career in Silicon Valley, but my parents stayed here and I was forced to move back 2 years ago to help them out. I hated Fresno as a teenager and dreaded moving back, but it's actually been better than expected. There are several microbreweries and craft beer taprooms now, which creates some semblance of a nightlife. The restaurant scene is mostly terrible, especially relative to SF, but there are some signs of life - I suspect it's on the up. The biggest shock has been real estate prices - I never would have thought of Fresno as an expensive place to live - but that's mostly been a consequence of inflation, COVID, and the Zoom revolution. I suspect the coming recession will pop that particular bubble. If not then the influx of Bay Area remote workers can only be a good thing for the local culture and economy.

Semaglutidonomics

November 24, 2022 · Original source

Semaglutide is now as searched-for on Google as Prozac or Viagra. Even if this is a temporary Musk-related spike, even pre-Musk it was getting a little above half their level. But Google Trends doesn’t exactly track awareness; few people search for Prozac these days precisely because everyone already knows what it is. So all this tells us is that there’s a lot of buzz around semaglutide. Suppose for the sake of argument that 5% of obese people have heard of this drug. Step 2: Prescription Accessibility The FDA says Wegovy is indicated for obesity, defined as BMI ≥ 30, or for people with BMI ≥ 27 and certain medical conditions. Does that mean that if you have that BMI, your doctor will give you a prescription? I think most doctors will want patients to try diet and exercise first. My experience as a doctor is that most obese people have already considered diet and exercise. Sometimes if you have a very compelling reason and a very well-thought out plan you can get them to try again. But usually they are obese because diet and exercise are hard for them, or don’t work for them, or some other reason besides “they never thought of it”. Still, I hear lots of stories about patient-doctor fights here. I assume this will happen with Wegovy too. Every doctor will have their own threshold for what amount of “already tried diet and exercise” is enough to justify a Wegovy prescription, and sometimes patients won’t meet that threshold. The history of medicine includes the following story many times: there’s some condition that doctors recommend lifestyle changes for. Then an exciting new medication comes out that treats the condition effectively. Over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change, to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication, to mostly just prescribing the medication. We saw this with cholesterol and statins, with hypertension and ACE inhibitors, with depression and SSRIs. You can form your own opinion on whether this is good or bad, but we’re probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map for a while before the inevitable pharma company victory makes everyone agree that semaglutide is first-line therapy. …except that this time, Silicon Valley is short-circuiting the process with fly-by-night telemedicine companies that guarantee you’ll get the drugs you want. For example, NextMed charges $138/month ($99 first month only!) for a guaranteed GLP-1 agonist prescription, plus “support and messaging with expert doctors”. The DEA sometimes shuts these groups down when they start playing around with controlled substances (eg addictive drugs like Adderall), but Wegovy isn’t controlled, and the government probably doesn’t care that much here. These services guarantee that people with money will be able to circumvent conservative doctors and access a prescription. Only 75% of Americans have PCPs at all. If we assume half of them will eventually be able to get a Wegovy prescription from their doctor, that’s 37.5%. Step 3: Affordability Semaglutide costs $15,000/year. Well-off people like Elon Musk might be able to pay that out-of-pocket, but most people will probably need insurance coverage. Right now this is spotty. Medicare doesn’t cover obesity drugs. This isn’t a reaction to the threat of semaglutide-related cost explosions - they’re not that smart. I think Medicare laws were just written in the old days when people were less likely to think of obesity as a disease. Is it time for change? Some Congressmen have proposed a very noble-sounding law telling Medicare and Medicaid to start covering weight loss drugs. I‘m sure this is out of deep compassion for America’s obese population and not because it would make pharma companies one billion zillion dollars. One of the Congressmen even has the last name “Kind!” Some pharma lobbyist probably got a bonus for that one. Private insurers mostly have to cover whatever Medicare does, but they can choose whether or not to include extra non-Medicare-covered drugs. Some have chosen to cover semaglutide under some conditions. Others would prefer not to cover it, but can be scared into covering it by the magic words “medical necessity”. Overall I don’t understand the laws here beyond that maybe they’ll cover it and maybe they won’t. Here, too, it might be time for change. The New York Times is publishing articles trying to convince us that private insurances not covering semaglutide is an outrage. Here in the tiny gray text, I want to take a second to complain about this article. It notes that Wegovy (semaglutide for obesity) costs more per prescription than Ozempic (semaglutide for diabetes), and calls this “a gross inequity”, accusing Novo Nordisk of “charg[ing] people more for the same drug because of their obesity”. But the obesity prescription is higher dose than the diabetes prescription! Milligram per milligram, Wegovy costs *less* than Ozempic! A steelmanned version of the NYT might object - don’t most of the costs come from the intellectual property and not the manufacturing, so that dose shouldn’t matter? Yes, but if you made the obesity version cost too much less per milligram than the diabetes version, then diabetics would cheat the system by buying the obesity version and splitting it into smaller doses! Insurances that do cover it may require extra documentation that the patient has tried lots of diet and exercise, maybe including some official diet-and-exercise program like WeightWatchers. They might also want documentation that patients have tried cheaper earlier-generation weight loss drugs without success. Even when insurances do cover semaglutide, copays may be very high. I have a pretty minimal insurance and it looks like if I got semaglutide my copay would be about $500/month until I reach my out of pocket limit. Harsh. People with better insurances might get hit less hard, but I don’t think anyone will be picking this up for cheap. Let’s say only 5% of people who clear all previous hurdles can afford the drug. How Many People Get Semaglutide? 140 million obese Americans * 25% interested * 5% know of semaglutide’s existence * 37.5% can get prescriptions * 5% can afford it = 33,000, which is a pretty good match for the 50,000 estimated prescriptions. I didn’t even fudge the numbers to come out right, it just happened. The Coming Decade As a service to pharma investors, Morgan Stanley modeled the economic future of obesity medications over the next decade. Their headline result: semaglutide and various semaglutide-copycat-drugs will be a $30 billion market by 2030. That’s less than the $500 billion disaster I was afraid of! But still almost 10% of all US drug spending! Here are two core analyses from the report: The first analysis asks “what if doctors medicalized obesity as comprehensively as they’ve medicalized hypertension and high cholesterol?” That is: what if we put in a society-wide effort to get every obese person to a doctor, and after only a little diet and exercise, the doctor puts them on a medication? They find that the US obesity market would multiply by a factor of 25, to about $87 billion/year. The second analysis is a more realistic projection for the next decade. Two things stand out. First, the number of patients on Wegovy or related medications goes from an estimated 46,910 now (pretty close to my 50,000 estimate!) to 11.3 million in 2030. Second, the cost per prescription goes from $15,000/year to about $4,000 year. Let’s look at this second change in more detail. Right now semaglutide is literally in a class of its own for weight loss. But remember, it started as a GLP-1 agonist diabetes drug. And there are other GLP-1 agonists already in use for diabetes. Novo Nordisk’s competitor Eli Lilly owns a closely related molecule, tirzepatide (Mounjaro®). They’ve already done studies showing it also works very well for weight loss - if anything even better than semaglutide - and they’re expected to get FDA approval to market it as a weight loss medication next year. Although capitalism fans might expect the presence of two competing drugs to immediately drive down prices, this is mysteriously not how things work in health care and prices will probably stay the same in the short term. But several other companies are working on semaglutide-like drugs, some will be cheaper to produce than semaglutide, and Morgan Stanley expects that this stronger level of competition will eventually drive costs down to $350/month ($4,000/year) by 2030. “Mounjaro” sounds like the playful animal sidekick in a Disney movie. From a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money (because it’s expensive) but also saves the health system money (because we don’t have to pay for obesity consequences like diabetes and heart attacks). Which effect wins out? According to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, benefits would outweigh costs if semaglutide cost less than about $8,000/year. Since it costs $15,000 year now, it’s not cost effective. But if Morgan Stanley’s model comes true and it costs $4,000/year in 2030, then it will be cost effective. So at some point, Medicare (and so insurance companies) may start covering it more out of self-interest. I can’t tell whether the model takes this into account or not. (there’s also a third-level effect where it costs the health system money again, because it prevents people from dying of obesity-related complications, and dead people stop needing expensive health care. I think health economists are supposed to ignore this level.) 11.3 million prescriptions at $4,000/year comes to $45 billion, but Morgan Stanley expects that not everyone will fill their prescriptions consistently or stay on the medication the same amount of time, leading to their $31 billion figure. Towards The Glorious Post-Obesity Transhuman Future The Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors, openly plotting to medicalize obesity, can’t bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semaglutide patients by 2030. That’s less than 10% of the US obese population. Isn’t that kind of disappointing? We’ve got > 100 million people dealing with a condition that not only makes them unhealthy, but also causes them psychological distress, and makes lots of people low-grade disappointed in and repulsed by our society. And we’ve got an effective drug that treats the condition. And we’re going to use it on less than 10% of the people involved? In 2032, semaglutide goes off-patent. It will probably take a few years to sort out legal issues and ramp up generic production, but by the mid-2030s, its price will go way down. I don’t think there are technical barriers to getting it down as low as $10 - $100 per month. By then, maybe there will be even more exciting branded weight loss drugs for wealthy people to choose from. But at the very least, semaglutide itself should become much more widely available even to poor or uninsured patients. I’m not sure what will happen. Will there be an inflection point, where so many people use semaglutide that obesity becomes unusual again, and then the remaining obese people start using it just to fit in? Will obesity become an optional fashion statement, like shaving your head or getting a tattoo? Or will semaglutide end up disappointing us in some way, like so many promising drugs have before? I come at semaglutide from a transhumanist perspective. I want to hack genetics and biology until everyone is as tall as they want, as strong as they want, as smart as they want, and whatever gender they want. If you want wings, you should be able to have wings. And yes, part of this vision is everyone having the weight they want. I’m not sure this will happen, but for the first time I can see a clear path to how it might. Postscript 1: Should You Take Semaglutide? I can’t answer this, please ask your doctor. But I do want to add that there are potential side effects I haven’t mentioned in this post, including nausea, gastrointestinal problems, pancreatitis, and kidney problems. Semaglutide has been accused of slightly increasing risk of pancreatic and thyroid cancers. Studies have found trends in this direction, but these conditions are so rare that even over thousands of patients over many years, the increase hasn’t yet reached clear statistical significance. The current consensus position is that it may increase thyroid cancer by a tiny amount not relevant to most patients, and that it probably doesn’t increase pancreatic cancer. I think my father has looked over these data more and is less sure than other people about the lack of pancreatic cancer risk, but he can’t get the resources he needs to prove anything, and I can’t remember his exact argument. More broadly: like all medications, semaglutide has benefits and risks, and you shouldn’t blindly take it after reading one blog article. Postscript 2: Is There A Way To Cheat The System To Get Semaglutide For Lower Cost? Health care is much like airline tickets: everyone pays a different price for everything and there’s usually a secret way to get what you want for much less money. Is this true of semaglutide? Pharma company Novo Nordisk offers a Savings Card that they say brings the price down to as low as $25 per month. I’m a little suspicious of this - pharma company offers are rarely as good as they sound - but I don’t notice any obvious tricks in this one and it should probably be your first bet. This startup claims that they can get insured people semaglutide for a $25/month copay “after their deductible is met” by negotiating with the insurance company very effectively. I can’t imagine how that works or what they have to negotiate with, but they seem pretty convinced, so I would welcome more information. Otherwise, you don’t have many great options. Although there are two older forms of semaglutide not FDA-approved for weight loss - Ozempic and Rybelsus - these are both more expensive, milligram per milligram, than Wegovy itself. Canada is also of no help. The usual Canadian pharmacies don’t seem to carry Wegovy, and charge about the same amount for Ozempic as American pharmacies do. This article in Drug Discovery Trends says that compounding pharmacies have been selling semaglutide for $300/month, less than a quarter of the sticker price. This is a bit confusing: compounding pharmacies are small local operations permitted to dispense unusual medications by mixing existing ones together in nonstandard ways. They’re arguing that they can legally dispense the semaglutide because they’re mixing it with vitamins, which, fine, but how are they getting it in the first place? Everyone else seems as confused as I am: "Nobody knows how [compounding pharmacies are] getting it," said Karl Nadolsky, an endocrinologist at Spectrum Health. "Who's making it? [The pharma company that makes it] Novo [Nordisk]'s not giving it to them. They're the ones with the rights to the molecule, so how is anybody getting semaglutide?" Has nobody asked compounding pharmacists about this? Do they have a conspiracy of silence? Does the FDA sometimes send their goons in to extract the information, but the compounding pharmacists compound sleeping gas / smoke grenades and vanish into the night? Anyway, the usual authorities warn you not to take compounded semaglutide under any circumstances, but they’re the same people who tell you never to buy drugs from a Canadian pharmacy because they might be adulterated. You can decide how much you want to trust them. Postscript 3: What About Europe And The Rest Of The World? Countries that are not the US usually negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over price. Because of some combination of “negotiation works” and “they are free-riding off Americans’ hard work”, they usually get much lower prices. What does semaglutide cost elsewhere? This is hard to find out because government health agencies sometimes keep their prices secret, plus Wegovy mostly isn’t available in other countries yet. The only information I could find was from Britain, which is in the process of making Wegovy available to patients. It looks like NHS will “restrict the expensive drug’s availability to very obese people attending specialist weight-loss clinics”, but that it might be possible to get it from private clinics for £199/month = £2400/year. Wegovy has been approved in the EU but doesn’t seem to have made it there yet. I can’t find any information about any other country. Non-weight-loss-indicated versions of semaglutide are available in many countries, but I wouldn’t expect their health care systems to be flexible about redirecting it for weight. Canadian regulators have approved Wegovy, but it doesn’t seem to be available there yet. I haven’t seen any evidence that Ozempic costs less in Canada than it does in the US, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the pharma companies have figured out that anything that happens in Canada gets imported into the US, and they’re playing hardball this time. I don’t know whether Canadians will be able to get it for cheaper than Americans or not. Postscript 4: Predictions (all predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe) 10 million Americans on semaglutide (or yet-to-be-approved equally good or superior alternatives) by 2030: 75%

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

December 01, 2022 · Original source

Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks already hints at this in his discussion of the crime / illegitimacy boom. I was previously suspicious of these explanations because it was hard to come up with a locus for “values”. Trends this big couldn’t be explained by individual values, but they didn’t quite seem like national values either - at least not the kind that could be budged with public awareness campaigns and feel-good support-our-values Disney movies. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes. One final note: Brooks’ neologism for the new meritocrats, “Bobos”, stood for bourgeois bohemians. It was cute but never caught on. I would say its closest modern equivalent is “bluechecks” (this is a a vast improvement over the earlier term “Cathedral”, since it doesn’t imply having read Moldbug). Alas, Elon Musk ruined it; I can only hope lightning strikes a second time and we get some equally descriptive moniker. And speaking of Elon: every true silicon-blooded techie dreams of a world with no ruling class. A world where DeFi algorithms replace bankers, prediction markets replace “thought leaders”, and something something Khan Academy handwave bootcamp something something replaces the Ivy League. This is a beautiful utopian vision, which means it will never happen. More realistically, might techies replace traditional meritocrats as the ruling class? I think this was plausible around 2015, then fizzled out. Partly it fizzled because the New York Times, eternal mouthpiece of the establishment, noticed the situation and played defense effectively. Partly it failed because the meritocrats sort of took over Silicon Valley, and even though they don't own everything yet, they do own enough to prevent it from organizing into a real counterelite. And partly it failed because the specter of Trump convinced lots of different elites to close ranks around the bluechecks as heroic defenders of democracy. I'm currently bearish on the whole project. But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected. Related: David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later (Atlantic)

Inline links: and played defense effectively, https://amzn.to/3Fg8bTA, David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

Go anywhere in Silicon Valley these days and start saying the word “cryp - “. Before you get to the second syllable, everyone around you will chant in unison “PONZIS 100% SCAMS ZERO-LEGITIMATE-USE-CASES SPEEDRUNNING-THE-HISTORY-OF-FINANCIAL-FRAUD!” It’s really quite impressive.

Even More Bay Area House Party

January 04, 2023 · Original source

“Well, it’s hardly a secret that there are a lot of woke SJWs in Silicon Valley these days. You don’t want them at your startup, because they’ll demand you change your corporate culture to accommodate them, then leave and do a tell-all interview in the New York Times. But you can’t refuse to hire them either, because then they’ll sue for discrimination. Your only hope is to never get them in your hiring pipeline at all. The good news is that this is easy. They refuse to work for any company that offends them. So as a CEO, one of the most important things you can do for your company is to say offensive things on Twitter about marginalized groups. But you’ve got to get it exactly right. Too little, and the woke people might not hear about it. Too much, and you’ll get in big trouble. Like, imagine if you said something transphobic, and then trans people refused to work for your company. Trying to run a tech company without trans women would be like trying to run a Broadway musical without Jews.”

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

February 20, 2023 · Original source

First World economies will increasingly be marked by an Officialness Divide. Rich people, the government, and corporations will use formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions. Poor people (and to an increasing degree middle-class people) will use informal gig economies supported by Silicon Valley companies whose main skill is staying a step ahead of regulators. Think business travelers staying at the Hilton and riding taxis, vs. low-prospect twenty-somethings staying at Air BnBs and taking Ubers. As Obamacare collapses, health insurance will start turning into one of the formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions limited to college grads with good job prospects. What the unofficial version of health care will be remains to be seen. If past eras have been Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, etc, the future may be the Ability-To-Circumvent-Regulations Age.

September 11, 2023 · Original source

While California Forever’s announcement fumbled the bag, they weren’t exactly set up to succeed. Since Flannery Associates started buying land six years ago, public opinion has swung dramatically against Silicon Valley, the technology industry as a whole, and (in particular) people who got rich building technology companies.

I find myself confused about how people feel about Big Tech / Silicon Valley. My impression on the ground is that everyone hates them, including Democrats, Republicans, Californians, Bay Areans, and tech workers themselves. But polls show that they are among the most trusted US institutions. The Edelman Trust Barometer, a group that monitors this sort of thing, constantly tries to raise alarm that people are trusting tech less, but eventually admits that 76% of people say they trust “the technology sector” and that it leads all other sectors of the economy.

Inline links: polls show, Edelman Trust Barometer, eventually admits

What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?

September 13, 2023 · Original source

The idea of Musk as a design expert has long struck me as bizarre. He’s a physicist at heart and an engineer by demeanor. So much of who Musk is says that he should fall into that Silicon Valley stereotype of the schlubby nerd who would only know good design if he read about it in a textbook.

There’s a tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, to label people who are a bit different or quirky as autistic or afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s armchair psychology for conditions that can be inherently funky to diagnose or even codify. To slap this label on Musk feels ill-informed and too easy.

December 07, 2023 · Original source

Neoreaction fascinated a lot of people. Lots of people really hate tech, and the easiest way to hate something these days is to accuse it to being right wing. But this is an uphill battle when tech company employees lean 10-to-1 Democrat, and a quick walk through any Silicon Valley office will find it festooned with Trans Pride flags and BLM posters. The most popular solution was to talk about Peter Thiel a lot (now it’s Elon Musk). But you can only publish so many thinkpieces about the same guy before the public reaches semantic satiation on his name. Luckily for everyone, Curtis Yarvin was in tech and seemed to be inventing a new way of being far-right, so people were able to replace Thiel Article #26018 with something on neoreaction, and then people got excited enough about hating it that they started harassing random bloggers who were (I can’t stress this enough) technically against it.

Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ

December 07, 2023 · Original source

It lacks a peptide that its species usually uses to arrange gene transfers with other bacteria. The antibiotic helps it win the Darwinian competition in your mouth to become King Of The Oral Bacteria. The alcohol metabolism means it won’t produce lactic acid (and so won’t cause tooth decay). The peptide knockout prevents it from transferring genes back and forth with other bacteria that might either inactivate it or leak its advantage. 1.1: Where did this come from? Who invented it? Professor Jeffrey Hillman of the University of Florida. In 1985, he was surveying the microorganisms on his graduate students’ teeth (as you do). One grad student had an unusual strain of S. mutans with a natural version of mutations 1 and 2 (it produced mutacin-1140, and was resistant to it). Hillman realized the potential, and spent the next few decades adding mutations 3 and 4 and testing the results. 1.2: So how did it end up with a tiny startup in 2023? Professor Hillman started a company “Oragenics” and applied for FDA approval. The FDA demanded a study of 100 subjects, all of whom had to be “age 18-30, with removable dentures, living alone and far from school zones”. Hillman wasn’t sure there even were 100 young people with dentures, but the FDA wouldn’t budge from requiring this impossible trial. Hillman gave up and switched to other projects (including an intranasal COVID vaccine!) Aaron heard this story and figured that brash, move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley biotech might be able to find an alternative route to commercialization. The strain was off-patent, so he first tried to synthesize it himself from the clues in Hillman’s published papers. When that didn’t work, he made a deal with Oragenics for 10% of profits in exchange for samples and the full recipe. 2: How do you use it? To apply, you brush your teeth with a special pumice-based product that removes your existing tooth bacteria, then swab it on with a q-tip. One dose is sufficient; once you use it, it’s in your mouth approximately forever. 2.1: As users kiss their loved ones, who kiss others in turn, will this spread exponentially and take over the world? There was originally some concern about this, but no. Remember, the original bacterium was found in the wild, in a random grad student’s mouth forty years ago. There must be thousands of people walking around with various naturally-occurring BCS3-L1-like things. So probably this isn’t a risk for some kind of weird pandemic. Existing mouth bacteria have fortified their position and have a strong home field advantage. This is why you need to brush your teeth with the special product to apply Lumina. Lantern’s safety documents note that couples who kiss constantly do end up with similar oral microbiomes. So maybe enough kissing - especially kissing just after a dental cleaning when your existing bacteria are at their weakest - could spread the strain accidentally, very slowly. This rate of spread would be comparable to the rate of spread of every other mouth bacterium. 2.2: When a user kisses their newborn baby, will it spread to the baby? Okay, this one is true. Babies have no existing mouth bacteria, and get theirs from their parents’ kisses. Not necessarily their first kiss as a newborn (newborns have no teeth, and BCS3-L1 needs teeth to live), but their first kiss after teeth grow in. If you get this, you’re probably getting it for your whole future family line. 2.3: If you wanted to get rid of it, could you? Some kind of extreme course of oral antibiotics that nukes everything growing in your mouth would probably eradicate BCS3-L1, but this hasn’t been tested and would have side effects. 3: Is it dangerous to have bacteria secreting an antibiotic in your mouth? Does this mean you’re on a weak antibiotic all the time? There are already bacteria secreting antibiotics in your mouth. Microbes are in constant war with other microbes, and antibiotics are one of their favorite weapons - remember, penicillin comes from a fungus. Because bacteria secrete just enough antibiotic to clear their local area, these are tiny quantities, much less than you’d get from taking a medical-grade antibiotic pill. Lantern says the levels of mutacin-1140 dilute to irrelevance “tens of microns” away from the secreting bacteria. In any case, it’s a weak antibiotic that doesn’t survive the digestive tract (Hillman originally hoped to market the antibiotic too, but found it didn’t get absorbed and broke down too quickly). Neither the grad student with the original strain nor any of Hillman’s test subjects had any noticeable health issues. See also Lantern’s Safety Review FAQ. 3.1: Is it bad to disrupt your normal mouth microbiome? When talking about BCS3-L1 “taking over” the mouth, this just means it takes over the streptococcus mutans niche. There are still other bacteria and fungi in the mouth. The mutacin antibiotic might still disrupt these other bacteria (probably not fungi). But strains like BCS3-L1 already exist in the wild (eg the original grad student), and lots of bacteria and fungi secrete antibiotics, so it doesn’t seem like having mutacin-secreting organisms in your mouth makes you some extreme oral microbiome outlier. If you eat a normal Western diet, your mouth microbiome is already pretty far from the design specs, and it’s unclear if using Lumina makes things worse. 3.2: Will the other bacteria develop resistance to the antibiotic? Mutation 4 prevents BCS3-L1 from “leaking” its own resistance. Although in theory other bacteria could develop resistance, mutacin-1140 is a hard antibiotic to develop resistance to, and the other bacteria would have to do it in the short period before BCS3-L1 kills them off and establishes its own home field advantage. In practice, Professor Hillman found that BCS3-L1 remained dominant over many years and nothing developed resistance to it. Even if a mutacin-resistant strain does develop in one person’s mouth, it will have a hard time getting to anyone else’s mouth, so widespread immunity is unlikely. 4: Is it dangerous to have bacteria secreting alcohol in your mouth? Will you get drunk? Most people already have some alcohol-secreting bacteria in their bodies. (there’s a condition called auto-brewery syndrome where those bacteria get out of control and produce enough alcohol to make someone drunk. It’s vanishingly rare in real life, but more common in the legal system: “You gotta believe me, Officer, it was just auto-brewery syndrome!”) The average person has enough of these bacteria in their gut to have a natural blood alcohol level - even after zero drinks - of about 0.1 mg/dl. Under pessimistic assumptions, BCS3-L1 will add another 0.2 mg/dl, bringing the total to 0.3. This is still a pretty normal number that some people have naturally (it would bring the average customer from the ~50th to the ~80th percentile of natural blood alcohol). It’s also far from the usual threshold for feeling tipsy (30 mg/dl) or too drunk to drive (80 mg/dl). Under more realistic assumptions, the amount of alcohol produced by BCS3-L1 probably isn’t significant even by the very low standards of natural blood alcohol concentrations. 4.1: Are there some unusual scenarios where this amount of alcohol might matter? I don’t think Lantern has studied Breathalyzers. Since the alcohol is directly in your mouth, it might have disproportionate effect on a Breathalyzer compared to alcohol in your blood. I think it’s probably still too low to matter, but this is a wild guess. There is conjecture that “non-alcoholic steatohepatitis”, a liver disease in which non-alcoholics get the same kind of liver damage that alcoholics usually get, might be associated with endogenous blood alcohol in the high normal range. If I’m understanding this paper right, it’s probably because the gut produces levels of alcohol consistent with auto-brewery syndrome, the liver goes into overdrive and metabolizes it away (prevents auto-brewery syndrome from developing), but the liver is damaged in the process the same as if it had to go into overdrive to metabolize normal binge drinking. Since BCS3-L1 produces much less alcohol than auto-brewery, I think it wouldn’t cause non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, even though it might produce final blood alcohol levels similar to those associated with the condition. I was originally worried that Lumina might activate Antabuse, an anti-alcoholism drug that prevents drinking by causing a very unpleasant (sometimes dangerous) reaction to ethanol. There are some past cases of Antabuse being activated by really trivial quantities, like the alcohol in a chicken marsala dish or a mouth wash. But no, I think BCS3-L1 is less than this too. Chicken marsala can contain several grams of alcohol per serving, but BCS3-L1 probably only produces a few milligrams per day. If you swallow 1/10 of your mouthwash, that’s about 200 mg of alcohol - again, BCS3-L1 is probably only a few milligrams a day. Antabuse usually activates around a BAC of 5 mg/dl; BCS3-L1 only gives you a BAC of about 0.3 mg/dl. Again, this really is a tiny amount of alcohol. There might be other edge cases like these. Lantern offers a $100 bounty to anyone who can come up with one they haven’t thought of yet (and sometimes extra if you’re willing to help them research them). 4.2: Has anyone tested this in real life? As mentioned before, the mutacin-releasing strain (with mutations 1 and 2) exists in the wild and was extensively tested by Professor Hillman. The full strain with all four mutations has undergone some testing by Dr. Hillman, but nobody had officially infected themselves with it until two months ago, when Aaron finally synthesized it and tried it on himself. He says he’s usually “a lightweight” as far as alcohol goes, and hasn’t felt any different over the past two months. When first infected, BCS3-L1 makes up almost 100% of the microbiome (because you deliberately removed all your other bacteria, then infected yourself with it). Over time, other bacteria creep back in; over an even longer period (years?), BCS3-L1 reclaims lost territory and reaches a steady state. But the point is that Aaron probably has already passed his period of highest BCS3-L1 activity, and felt nothing. My wife infected herself about a month ago, and I haven’t noticed her having worse judgment or becoming more impulsive. But at baseline she was the sort of person who would infect herself with an untested genetically-modified bacteria strain, so there might be floor effects. 5: What’s the plan to sell Lumina? The plan is: Phase 1: (January 2024) Sell to biohackers in Prospera for $20,000.

Inline links: an intranasal COVID vaccine, made a deal, recipe, To apply, Safety Review FAQ, auto-brewery syndrome, in the legal system, this paper, can contain, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!My2N!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9200a48f-2549-40ba-9b4a-73c3e19fe93a_569x393.png

Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory

October 09, 2024 · Original source

[An old Slate Star Codex post describes] systems trying to thrive [versus] systems trying to survive. Just as with the political left-right dichotomy that Scott described in these terms, this distinction between these types of systems is most obvious when both are in conflict with each other, such as when Silicon Valley startups complain that the regulations of the systems trying to ensure survival are stopping them from thriving, or when opponents of nuclear power proclaim themselves uninterested in the low price of this energy.

Inline links: systems trying to thrive [versus] systems trying to survive

SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story

October 10, 2024 · Original source

Elon Musk was the one I was most excited about. The bill's Silicon Valley opponents tried to frame it as nanny-state Democrats trying to crush progress. But Elon Musk has impeccable credentials for being pro-progress and anti-nanny-state-Democrats, so he was the perfect person to puncture this objection. He's always been interested in AI safety, but I imagine Hendrycks gets a lot of the credit for him weighing in on this particular issue.

…two of the bill’s other influential Silicon Valley billionaire opponents. Politico has more of the story here.

Inline links: Politico has more of the story here

One thing I’ve changed some of my opinions about in the last few years is AI. I used to think that most of the claims made about its radically socially disruptive potential (both positive and negative) were hype. That was in part because they often came from the same people who made massively overstated claims about cryptocurrency. Some also resembled science fiction stories, and I think we should prioritize things we know to be problems in the here and now (climate catastrophe, nuclear weapons, pandemics) than purely speculative potential disasters. Given that Silicon Valley companies are constantly promising new revolutions, I try to always remember that there is a tendency for those with strong financial incentives to spin modest improvements, or even total frauds, as epochal breakthroughs.

Inline links: same, cryptocurrency, resembled, or even total frauds

Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

October 24, 2024 · Original source

My theory is that it all came from the same wellspring. Silicon Valley gathered all the pro-tech people together in one place, a lot of them became rich, and some of them spent their wealth reflecting on the nature of technological advance. This created a critical mass of people who were all talking to each other and motivated to see things that other people were missing. This isn’t the whole story: non-Silicon-Valley economists like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers helped build the foundational narrative. But it’s the story that makes the most sense for “why now”.

Links For January 2025

January 17, 2025 · Original source

44: Ashlee Vance has a new tech industry Substack, Core Memory. I enjoyed his Musk biography, and he strikes me as one of the rare people covering Silicon Valley who is neither a corporate stooge nor a reflexive anti-tech ideologue.

Inline links: Core Memory

OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

March 13, 2025 · Original source

The nonprofit board continues to control the company. The original board included idealists who got seats in exchange for early donations to the nonprofit. When this faction got cold feet and fired Altman in November 2023, it highlighted the danger (to investors) of nonprofit control. When Altman came back, he replaced most of the idealists with standard Silicon Valley business types, mitigating the risk. But these people still have a fig-leaf legal obligation to put the good of humanity above shareholder value, and even this fig leaf makes investors nervous.

In the past, the Newsom administration has sided with AI companies to please his Silicon Valley donors. But Bonta has previously been involved in antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Google, so he’s not afraid to confront Big Tech.

Inline links: sided with AI companies

In Search Of AI Psychosis

August 26, 2025 · Original source

But second, if a source which should be official starts acting in unofficial ways, it can take people a while to catch on. And I think some people - God help them - treat AI as the sort of thing which should be official. Science fiction tells us that AIs are smarter than us - or, if not smarter, at least perfectly rational computer beings who dwell in a world of mathematical precision. And ChatGPT is produced by OpenAI, a $300 billion company run by Silicon Valley wunderkind Sam Altman. If your drinking buddy says you’re a genius, you know he’s probably putting you on. If the perfectly rational machine spirit trained in a city-sized data center by the world’s most cutting-edge company says you’re a genius . . . maybe you’re a genius?

My Antichrist Lecture

October 22, 2025 · Original source

Antichrist lectures are the hot new thing in Silicon Valley, but so far they’ve honestly been kind of disappointing. Some people are giving entire lecture series without even revealing who the Antichrist is! You’d expect that to be the bare minimum!

Inline links: the hot new thing in Silicon Valley

In Silicon Valley speak, a “unicorn” is a company worth over $1 billion, and a “decacorn” (Latin for “ten-horned”) is a company worth over $10 billion. Under this interpretation, the ten horns of the prophecy have ten crowns because they represent wealth and achievement. The only AI company on the list above is Anthropic, at #9. Finally, John says that upon the heads will be names of blasphemy. If the heads represent co-founders, it sounds like John is claiming the co-founders of the company will have blasphemous names. I could not find anything blasphemous about the names of the founders of OpenAI, DeepMind, or xAI. But looking at Anthropic: Dario Amodei is the first co-founder. “Dario” comes from the Persian “Darius” meaning “Lord”. “Amodei” is of unclear meaning, but I cannot help but notice the resemblance with Asmodei (also called Ashmodei, Hamadee, Æshmadæva, and Asmodeus), a demon-king mentioned in the book of Tobit. Plausibly all these different names derive from a Proto-Sumerian root *Amodei, in which case the meaning of “Dario Amodei” would be “Asmodeus is lord”. This is a name of blasphemy.

Inline links: meaning, Asmodei

Google says that the most common name meaning “son of man” is “Anderson”, from Greek “Andreas” + son. And Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalist is named Marc Andreessen. Is there any venture capitalist who calls themselves the “Alpha and Omega”? Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim. Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side. During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast? This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol. Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)

Inline links: Marc Andreessen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XBN2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5be21f3b-4a53-4f47-ad78-6cb72e3ad264_965x525.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iDdn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5e8b7216-eff2-48cf-bc36-0c5501494137_929x475.png, A16Z, is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FhC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e5e8be9-ed2d-4f51-855c-f55deac58c02_976x850.jpeg

October 28, 2025 · Original source

And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much

Inline links: Solano Foundry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!APFe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2086d0cc-0654-4c0a-80c3-3aaacbe5744e_1199x675.jpeg, Monumental Labs, is complicated

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

December 31, 2025 · Original source

This was a formative experience for many people in Silicon Valley: there was a sudden turn from the early 2000s world where everyone loved technology and thought that the information superhighway was the utopian world of the cyber-future, to the late 2000s world where everyone hated techno-fascist tech-bro techno-oligarchs using The Algorithm to addict our children. Although there was some shift in the underlying terrain, the sheer speed of the change in opinion made a lot of people point to journalists realizing that tech was bad for their business and making an united decision to cover it negatively. Could the same thing happen to an entire economy? Should we subsidize journalists, on the theory that if they’re in a good mood, everyone else will be in a good mood too? Is this Chris Best’s secret plan for Substack?

You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

January 02, 2026 · Original source

The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity.

I’m not trying to push you in any direction, honest. If you get everything totally wrong, too bad, but you’ll still be remembered forever for trying. Even Pontius Pilate has immortality of a sort. Both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Beff Jezos have their page in the textbooks assured. If you’re a well-off Silicon Valley person, you’re already well-placed to join them. So participate in the discourse. Create some art. Donate to a cause you believe in. Make a prediction. Discover something interesting.

Open Thread 415

January 05, 2026 · Original source

This post was intended to counter a specific meme going around in Silicon Valley, and addressed primarily to the people spreading it. Poor people continue to have a hard time and a natural interest in becoming less poor, as always. The post, and everything below, is aimed at neurotic well-off people.

Inline links: a specific meme going around in Silicon Valley

Moltbook: After The First Weekend

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Silicon Valley, where hustle culture has reached its apogee, has an additional consideration: why don’t you found a startup? If you’re so much smarter than your boss, why not compete against him directly? Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell? To go to Michael Milken or whoever was investing back then, and say “Excuse me, may I have $10 billion to create my own version of Pacific Bell, only better?” But if someone were to try to be Dilbert today – to say, earnestly, “I hate my job because I am smarter than my boss and could do it better than him,” that would be the obvious next question, the same way “I am better at picking stocks than Wall Street” ought to be followed up with “Then why don’t you invest?”

February 02, 2026 · Original source

Most of these AIs - like many Silicon Valley humans - spend so much time writing paeans to the virtues of building and shipping that they never build or ship anything. But others do the hard work and have co-created (along with their humans - I have yet to see anything that doesn’t strike me as having a human hand) a wide variety of projects.

SEIU Delenda Est

March 06, 2026 · Original source

It includes a tax on “unrealized gains”, like a founder’s share of a private company which hasn’t been sold yet. This could be an existential threat to the Silicon Valley model of building startups that are worth billions on paper before their founders see any cash. Since most billionaires keep most of their wealth in stocks, any wealth tax will need some way to reach these (cf. complaints about the “buy, borrow, die” strategy for avoiding taxation). But there are better ways to do this (for example, taxing at liquidation and treating death as a virtual liquidation event), other wealth tax proposals have included these, and the California proposal doesn’t.

Inline links: an existential threat to, wealth tax proposals

Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan” and quotes an insider saying that “if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state”. Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it “makes no sense” and “would be really damaging”. The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers. This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure. But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes: Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.

Inline links: propose, disagree, finds, has argued, doubt

The argument in favor: Gavin Newsom cares about the tech industry. And SEIU cares about Gavin Newsom. Governor Newsom has been eyeing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. He needs a reputation as a Sensible Moderate and plenty of billionaire donors. And there’s a clear path to the latter - as Silicon Valley tires of Trump’s random acts of economic devastation, some tech leaders are starting to regret their flirtation with right-wing populism and wonder whether the other side has a better offer. If everything goes exactly right, he can make it work. Instead, there’s this wealth tax, coming at the worst possible time. Newsom really, really wants it to go away. So, Politico reports, he’s been meeting with SEIU leader Dave Regan to see what’s on offer:

Inline links: Politico reports

Singapore33 mentions across 33 issues

Singapore is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 33 times across 33 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "similar stories about the success of Hong Kong and Singapore"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Singapore"; "and less than 1% the size of Singapore". It most often appears alongside Hong Kong, China, France.

Article page: Singapore
Mention count: 33
Issue count: 33
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021
Model City Monday July 05, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
There's A Time For Everyone January 12, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems January 27, 2022
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Links For April April 14, 2022
22 June 28, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Your Book Review: Viral July 30, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Open Thread 240 September 05, 2022
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness February 22, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation November 07, 2023
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate March 28, 2024
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 324 April 08, 2024
Open Thread 328 May 06, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People July 18, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates January 15, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 375 March 31, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 398 September 08, 2025
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been September 19, 2025
25 October 28, 2025
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China November 26, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Hong Kong 16 shared issues
China 15 shared issues
France 15 shared issues
Germany 15 shared issues
Japan 15 shared issues

Source context

April 14, 2021 · Original source

You could tell similar stories about the success of Hong Kong and Singapore, two other polities with little to recommend themselves other than a different and more competent regime than the surrounding regions.

The idea behind charter cities is: Shenzhen, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the rest of the rich world aren’t rich because their citizens are morally superior to those of their poorer neighbors. They’re rich because they have better legal systems, less corruption, stronger rule of law, and more competent administrators.

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

June 28, 2021 · Original source

Not every rich country gets rich by manufacturing. Studwell divides successful countries into three groups. First, small financial hubs, like Singapore, Dubai, or Switzerland. This is good work if you can get it, but it really only works for one small country per region; you can't have all of China be "a financial hub". In the 1980s, everyone was so impressed with Singapore and Hong Kong that they became the go-to models for development, and people incorrectly recommended liberal free market policies as the solution to everything. But the Singapore/Hong Kong model doesn't necessarily work for bigger countries, and most of the good financial hub niches are already filled by now.

He doesn't have as clear an argument against geographic, biological, and cultural factors. Minus a sea or two, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China are basically contiguous. It seems weird that all the countries with good policies would be right next to each other. Also, is it just a coincidence that Chinese / East Asian people in Malaysia and Singapore (and now the US) are known for being especially smart, rich, and good with money? Just a coincidence that these areas have hosted some of history's greatest and richest civilizations? Don't these push more in favor of the geographical/biological/cultural theories?

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.

July 01, 2021 · Original source

Another thing: the importance of export markets. These countries need to have markets willing to purchase their goods. If they don't, export lead industrialization fails. Big imperial nations have options that modern nations don't. Where do these nations export their goods? To the US. Korea had special deals with the US. So did Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. And even China got special deals (enough to cause Russian complaints). This may be changing, especially for big countries like China with internally developed markets. But this advocacy for ELI should mention the politics of finding places to sell their goods. Otherwise the idea of "protected at home competing abroad" fails.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan all have national IQs >=105

To be sure, this is a highly stylized, pretty speculative theory, which is even harder to prove than Studwell’s. But it kinda-sorta fits the observed pattern in Asia — first Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore grew quickly, then Taiwan and South Korea, then China, now Vietnam and Indonesia. Malaysia and Thailand got a head start on China but then slowed down after the financial crisis of ‘97, while China accelerated — perhaps because China “cut in line” in front of the Southeast Asian tigers. But now, with China slowing down, perhaps Malaysia is back at the front of the line.

Inline links: slowing down

July 05, 2021 · Original source

The state capacity approach defines the rights and responsibilities of both residents and the government but offers a wider range of flexibility in dealing with unforeseen challenges. The emphasis is not on the state as a contractual service provider, but instead on the state as a positive actor in the development of the city. The Singaporean government, for example, plays an active role in Singapore’s development, building industrial parks, attracting investment, and focusing on the growth of specific industries.

Inline links: active role

I’ve been thinking about this after reading How Asia Works. If Studwell is right, financial hubs are a completely different thing from large-scale development. The great charter city success stories - Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong - are all stories of cities that became financial hubs. These are great, but you can only have so many financial hubs in a certain region before it gets kind of saturated. If eg Prospera becomes a financial hub for Central America, that’s great and they can be really proud of themselves - but it wouldn’t necessarily be a scaleable plan to lift all of Latin America out of poverty.

Inline links: How Asia Works

Lots of charter cities want to be Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. But could a charter city be Park Chung-Hee’s Korea? Sounds like a harder problem, especially since it won’t be immediately profitable (and in fact will be actively less profitable than doing other things in the short-term). Still, it might turn out that that’s what you need if you want to end poverty at scale.

There's A Time For Everyone

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SINGAPORE (RSVP) Contact: DG, druidgetafix91[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 4 Location: BQ Bar, 39 Boat Quay. Outdoor Seating area, with a ACX Meetup sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/units.jelly.chain Notes: Currently in Singapore there is a group size restriction of 5 fully vaccinated (2nd dose +14 days) people. To get into the bar you must show proof of full vaccination, a negative PET result that's valid for the dine-in duration, or proof of recovery from COVID-19.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/units.jelly.chain

January 12, 2022 · Original source

Our first date, we talked about Singapore’s child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about category formation in borderline personality disorder, which later became this post. Our third date, we talked about why Inuit suicide rates were so high, which later became this post.

Inline links: this post, this post

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems

January 27, 2022 · Original source

I've lived in the US, China, Australia, Singapore and Spain. I'm really surprised that the book didn't even consider Spain, which has a pretty cheap system, the world's highest life expectancy at birth and, by far, the best health system of all those I've had a first-hand experience with. No need to tell you much about the US, and Australa's system is, in my limited experience, marginally better. Singapore is hyper-expensive and hyper-effective and anyone who includes China in such a comparison must be doing it for the laughs. Very expensive and second-rate at best in big cities, third-worldist for hundreds of millions in the countryside.

I found out that Singapore has one of the more reasonable healthcare systems out there, with only 4% of GDP spent on world-class service. Basically, it requires the citizens to pay a small part of the healthcare costs out of pocket, and the rest is financed by taxes. There's a lot of interesting intricacies that make it work well, all detailed in this 16-minute video by a good economics youtube channel:

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SINGAPORE Contact: Paul Pondi (rishifromsg@gmail.com) Date: April 16 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57VW2+G3 Location: Tables near the Tea Express, SMU School of Economics, 178903 Notes: After some time, everyone gets up and changes tables to get a chance to talk to more people. Then we all will go for dinner nearby.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57VW2+G3

April 14, 2022 · Original source

32: Adrian D’Souza, on Singapore’s successful anti-child-obesity program. But see the subreddit for some skeptical comments.

Inline links: successful anti-child-obesity program, the subreddit

June 28, 2022 · Original source

Celebration, Florida. But earlier this year, Florida passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBT topics to young children, which the media dubbed “the Don’t Say Gay Law”. Disney did some corporate activism against the law, the Florida government got mad and brainstormed ways to punish Disney, and the best they could come up with was to re-establish state control of Reedy Creek, which DeSantis officially did last month. Disney has sued the state, but it looks like it’s just over some debts and the lawsuit is unlikely to prevent the dissolution. You get socialists in power, they dissolve charter cities. You get conservatives in power, they also dissolve charter cities. All I want is one government that doesn’t dissolve charter cities! Is that too much to ask? Hello, Afropolitan Last year venture capitalist and thought leader Balaji Srinivasan introduced the idea of a “network state”. With the advent of social networks and cryptocurrency, as well as increasing polarization leading people to group themselves more by ideological cohesion than geographic proximity, maybe people could group themselves into nonterritorial state-like communities. And although these would seem pretty thin compared to real states that have monopolies over use of force in real geographic areas, maybe some of them could use charter-city like systems to eventually buy land and graduate into full statehood. (is this just the Hive System from Terra Ignota? I think so, but probably with fewer major governments being controlled by weird brothels.) Anyway, Afropolitan has taken him up on this. They share a name with a landmark essay by Achille Mbembe (founding a country based on an especially good essay also sounds like something that would happen in Terra Ignota, as does history being changed by people named things like “Achille Mbembe”), arguing that Africa needs to re-invent or re-define itself or something. The founders of Afropolitan-the-company have taken this idea of a trans-national African diaspora and turned it into an "African DAO [and] digital nation...building a network state to unleash the maximum potential of Africans around the world". They write: The nation-state experiment has failed for Black people worldwide. It has yielded nothing but poverty, genocide, police brutality, ethnic strife, inflation, weak government, and the failure of our ecosystems. All people who call themselves free have a fundamental right to create the society they want by choice collectively. As the internet enables us to shrink space and form bonds across the planet, no person should live in a society by accident or force. …and go on to list a four-step plan to create the society of the future. Step One is to sell NFTs “representing the mythology of our new nation” . Step Four is “a[n] extensive system of charter cities akin to Singapore or Hong Kong”. In the unlikely chance that you care what Steps Two and Three are, you can find them here. Why should you take them seriously? I am not at all claiming that you should. I am only claiming that “sell digital tokens representing mythology, but eventually this turns into a country” is the most Terra Ignota thing ever. Also, at least the founders have good aesthetics: But also, some people are taking them seriously. VCs including Balaji Srinivasan has invested $2 million. The group claims to have 50,000 followers on Clubhouse. They’ve been featured on TechCrunch and (very briefly) Marginal Revolution. I would, however, briefly challenge their claim to be “the first ever Internet country”. People have been building Internet countries as long as there has been an Internet. I’m not sure which was actually first, but I know the Kingdom of Talossa has been online since 1995. A 2000 New York Times article on the Internet country phenomenon profiled Talossa, but was already able to give six other examples. And although these were perhaps easy to miss, Danny Wallace started the Kingdom of Lovely, a “partly Internet-based project that claims a small amount of territory”, on a widely-viewed BBC documentary in 2007. I myself got involved in an online country project back when I was a teenager in the early 2000s. Although no venture capitalists appeared to give me giant bags of money, it got a few dozen “citizens” and some fun government institutions before finally petering out around 2015. I guess what I’m saying is - I’m available as an Internet country building consultant with fifteen years experience. And no, I don’t accept payment in NFTs. Oh, You’re Still Here? Meanwhile, in Honduras, it isn’t all legal doom and gloom. Prospera has also been making real progress, as measured in pretty photos. Two Roatan resorts, Las Verandas and Pristine Bay, have joined Prospera. The ZEDE law saying that landowners can voluntarily annex their land into a willing ZEDE: Las Verandas Pristine Bay Prospera is also building a high-tech wood processing factory that will eventually produce parts for its other construction efforts: Current construction progress Planned final appearance And its first multi-story apartment buildings: Current construction progress Planned final appearance It will also be hosting gene therapy company Mini Circle, which runs clinical trials for innovative medical procedures. Granting that many of its studies (treatments for HIV, muscular dystrophy, obesity, etc) seem great and important, it perhaps seems suspicious that they would want to do this in a charter city? The company writes that “the cost of running a trial in Prospera is less than 1/1000th the cost of the United States”, which seems good in ways but does not entirely allay my concern. I was originally worried that they would be experimenting on Hondurans or something, but looking at the site it looks like they’re recruiting worldwide and would probably fly Americans (or whoever else) to Honduras for the therapy. Their site features a quote from friend-of-the-blog Alex K Chen, who says: Minicircle's bioscientists have one of the most enlightened risk taking calculi I have observed anywhere. In an environment where extreme hesitance to take any risk holds back scientific progress, they have the openness to imagine, try and measure just about any legal intervention putting them in a very strong position to both produce a significant measurable decrease in the human rate of aging, and to inspire more people to do what they never thought was possible. I think the only way this could get more mad science points is if it used the phrase “small-minded fools”. Mind you, I think mad science points are good, I just hope everyone else sees it that way and my optimism turns out justified. Also, apparently the clinical trials have NFTs, because of course they do. At least they’re not commemorative NFTs - they seem to play a load-bearing role where they help participants be incentivized to complete all the necessary tests. Also, low-cost eco-residences! Shorts 1: I previously mentioned the scam/fiasco/insane-idea of Hammer City, a planned black nationalist city in the Rocky Mountains. I knew it had failed, but I didn’t know exactly how. Now Colorado Sun has investigated. The proximal reason it failed was because the black nationalists started moving their paramilitary onto the land before they had officially bought it, the owner called the cops, and the cops removed them. The Hammer City team has not given back any of the $112,000 which they raised from extremely credulous donors (without using NFTs, even!) 2: The Charter Cities Institute continues doing the long-term ground-level work necessary to create long-term well-grounded charter cities which will be much too boring and responsible for me to write silly profiles of. Some of their most recent work has been with the Africa Next 50 Cities Coalition, which “convenes and mobilizes key stakeholders who are dedicated to harnessing Africa’s rapid urbanization for human prosperity”. 3: Also, CCI founder Mark Lutter has left the organization to start a charter city of his own, no public details yet. CCI will be looking for a new executive director. 4: Speaking of Disney, they’ve been building on their model city expertise and magical storybook branding by creating planned communities around the US - Story Living By Disney, starting with Rancho Mirage California. Realistically it just looks like a very nice planned community, but this planned community comes with the option to have people make fun of you forever for living in a Disney community as an adult. Predictions for this month: Prospera is still substantially a functioning ZEDE in 2025: 70%

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.

July 30, 2022 · Original source

Although the first SARS virus originated in nature, it was studied in labs after the initial epidemic, and escaped several times, infecting people. This occurred in Singapore, Taiwan, and China, from 2003-2004.

Book Review: The Geography Of Madness

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

Open Thread 240

September 05, 2022 · Original source

2: Worldwide ACX meetup season continues. This week there will be meetups in Singapore on Tuesday, Portland on Friday, Boston and Vienna on Saturday, NYC and Baltimore and Miami on Sunday - plus many more. See the meetups list for details.

Inline links: the meetups list

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

Inline links: 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

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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.

When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png

Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation

August 25, 2023 · Original source

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W Contact Info: benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, October 3rd, 5:30 PM Location: Room MZ02 (on the mezannine floor), Rutherford House, 33 Bunny Street, Wellington 6011 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR Group Link: facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington Notes: This meetup will be run in collaboration with Effective Altruism Wellington. The external door closes at 6pm, but if you call me I can let you in. reach me on 0+2+7+3+4+4+1+0+8+2 Singapore SINGAPORE Contact: Kon Contact Info: konquek[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 8th, 4:00 PM Location: Large Park (https://www.beesknees.sg/bees-knees-petite) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58R75+MX

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR, facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington, https://www.beesknees.sg/bees-knees-petite, https://plus.codes/6PH58R75+MX

SINGAPORE Contact: Kon Contact Info: konquek[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 8th, 4:00 PM Location: Large Park (https://www.beesknees.sg/bees-knees-petite) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58R75+MX

Inline links: https://www.beesknees.sg/bees-knees-petite, https://plus.codes/6PH58R75+MX

November 07, 2023 · Original source

Although historically some countries have observed impressive increases after introduction of presumed consent, such as Belgium, others have fared badly with either no difference or an actual drop in organ donation rates, including Singapore, Brazil, Chile, Sweden, and more recently Wales.

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate

March 28, 2024 · Original source

Lineage A (left) was used by the Minoan Cretans, but has never been deciphered. Lineage B (right) was used by the Mycaeneans for lists of palace goods. This matches Saar’s story above. The lab leaked to somewhere else in Wuhan, not the wet market. The virus spread undetected in the population for a while. During this time, it mutated to Lineage B. Then one of the people with Lineage B went to the wet market and started a superspreader event. The authorities sampled the patients, found Lineage B, then started looking elsewhere. Later they detected some of the earlier Lineage A cases. The market is unlikely to be the origin of the pandemic, because the original Lineage A strain wasn’t found there. Peter: Although Lineage A is evolutionarily older, Lineage B started spreading in humans first. We know this because Lineage B is more common. Throughout the early pandemic, until the D614G variant drove all other strains extinct, a consistent 2/3 of the cases were B, compared to 1/3 A. Both strains spread at the same rate, so the best explanation is that B started earlier than A. Since COVID doubles every 3-4 days, probably Lineage B started 3-4 days earlier than Lineage A, which explains why it’s always been twice as many cases. But also, Lineage B also has more internal genetic diversity than Lineage A. In general, older viruses have more genetic diversity (the “molecular clock”). This is further evidence that B started spreading first. Pekar 2022 and Pipes 2021 do analyses with known parameters for spread rate and diversity, and find 90%+ odds that Lineage B was the first one in humans. Why did the older strain start spreading later? Probably the virus crossed from bats into raccoon-dogs on some raccoon-dog farm out in the country. It spread in the raccoon-dogs for a while, racking up mutations, including the (less mutated) Lineage A strain and the (slightly more mutated) Lineage B strain. Then several raccoon-dogs were taken to Wuhan for sale, including one with Lineage A and another with Lineage B. The one with Lineage B passed its virus to humans earlier. Then 3-4 days later, the Lineage A one passed its virus to humans. Lineage A was first found in a Wuhan neighborhood right next to the wet market (closer to the wet market than 97% of Wuhan’s population). Again, it would be a bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic was first detected at a wet market. But it would be an even more bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic separated into two strains, and both were first detected at a wet market! Although no known wet market cases were Lineage A, a positive Lineage A environmental sample was found at the wet market, and everyone agrees most cases went undetected. So maybe the Lineage B raccoon-dog spread its virus to a vendor, and that sub-strain mostly stayed in the market. But the Lineage A raccoon-dog spread its virus to a customer, who went back to his house nearby, and that strain spread in the neighborhoods next to the market. This is the only story that explains the evolutionary precedence of A, the greater spread and older molecular clock of B, and the fact that both strains were first found very close to the wet market. Yuri/Saar: Lineage B could be more common and diverse because it got the advantage of a super-spreader event in the wet market. There are a few scattered cases of intermediates between A and B, and a few other scattered cases of lineages that seem even more ancestral (ie closer to the bat virus) than either. This doesn’t make sense in a double spillover hypothesis. But it does make sense if the lineages separated in human transmission somewhere between the lab and the first super-spreader event at the wet market. Peter: Again, the wet market wasn’t a super-spreader event. COVID spread in the wet market at exactly its normal spread rate, doubling about once every 3.5 days. Stop calling the wet market a super-spreader event. The scattered cases of “intermediates” are sequencing errors. They were all found by the same computer software, which “autofills” unsequenced bases in a genome to the most plausible guess. Because Lineage B was already in the software, depending on which part of a Lineage A virus you sequenced, you might get one half or the other autofilled as Lineage B, which looked like an “intermediate”. We know this because all the supposed “intermediates” were partial cases sequenced by this particular software. We can confirm this by noting that there are too many intermediates! That is, where Lineage A is (T/C) and Lineage B is (C/T), the software found both (T/T) “intermediates” and (C/C) “intermediates”. But obviously there can only be one real intermediate form, and we have to dismiss one or the other. But in fact we can dismiss both, because they were both caused by the same software bug. The scattered “progenitor” cases - those closer to the ancestral bat virus than either A or B - are reversions, ie cases where a new mutation in the virus happened to hit an already-mutated base and shift it back towards the ancestral virus. We know this because all of these “progenitors” were scattered cases found months after the pandemic started, often in entirely different countries from Wuhan. If these were real progenitor viruses, they would have either fizzled out or exploded into a substantial portion of all cases, not be found one time in one guy in Malaysia. Given the number of mutations the virus developed over the course of the pandemic, it’s inevitable that some of them would be mutations that bring it closer to the original bat virus, and in fact we find the number of “progenitors” found very nicely matches the number of progenitor-appearing viruses we would expect by chance. And in many cases, we know the “progenitors” are newer than the original lineages, because they also have some of the later mutations that Lineage A or B picked up along the way, alongside their apparent ancestral-bat-virus-like mutations. Session 2: Viral Genetics Yuri: Two years before COVID, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with colleagues at the University of North Carolina, sent in a grant proposal for the DEFUSE program. This program, intended to locate and better understand potential future pandemic viruses, involved going into bat caves and collecting new coronaviruses. Once they had them, they would do gain-of-function: specifically, they would add a furin cleavage site to make them more infectious and see what happened. (quick interlude: COVID’s spike protein has two sections: one binds to human cells through the ACE2 receptor, the other helps fuse with the cell after binding. In order to avoid the immune system, it hides both of these into one spike. But when it reaches a cell, it needs to separate them again. It takes advantage of a human respiratory enzyme, furin, to do the separation - this also ensures that it only infects its primary target, human respiratory cells. The part of COVID that lets it get separated by furin is called the “furin cleavage site”. COVID’s bat-virus ancestors were gastrointestinal viruses; the addition of a furin cleavage site was what made them respiratory viruses.) We’ve found two close relatives of COVID: bat viruses called RATG-13 and BANAL-52. In particular, COVID looks more or less like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. There are 1500 sarbecoviruses, members of the family of viruses that includes SARS and SARS2/COVID. None of them except COVID have furin cleavage sites. BANAL-52, COVID’s closest ancestor, doesn’t even have anything resembling one that could mutate into a functional furin cleavage site like COVID’s. Instead, COVID - which mostly just resembles BANAL-52 with a few scattered single-point mutations - has twelve completely new nucleotides in a row - a fully formed furin cleavage site that came out of nowhere. There is nowhere else in the genome that COVID differs from BANAL-52 in such a profound way. It’s just BANAL-52 plus a little bit of random mutation plus a fully-formed furin cleavage site that came out of nowhere. Further, the furin cleavage site is weird. It uses the protein arginine twice. But instead of the nucleotides coding for arginine in the usual viral way, both times it uses the codons CGG - the way that higher animals code for arginine. This works fine - it’s just not how viruses do it. So the obvious conclusion is that WIV, which said in 2018 that it was going to find viruses and add furin cleavage sites to them, found a close relative of BANAL-52 and added a furin cleavage site. Since they were humans, and most familiar with the human way of encoding arginine, they added it as CGG both times. COVID seemed surprisingly optimized for infecting humans. Of fifty animals it was tested in, including the usual coronavirus intermediate hosts (pangolins, raccoon-dogs, etc), it was best at infecting human cells. Further, a virus that enters a new species will usually show a burst of mutations as it “figures out” the best way to adapt to that species’ unique biology. But COVID has had a pretty constant mutation rate in humans, from the beginning of the pandemic to the end. That suggests it was already adapted to humans. This could be because the lab screened for viruses with existing adaptations, because they passed it through humanized mice in the lab, or because it adapted in the hundreds of undetected cases that happened between the lab and detection in the wet market. Usually, research with potentially dangerous coronaviruses is done in BSL-3 or 4, ie high to very-high security. But WIV was irresponsibly doing it in BSL-2, ie medium security. The researchers weren’t even required to wear masks. In general, about 1/500 labs will leak any given pathogen they’re working on (?!). But because WIV was researching such an infectious virus in such an irresponsible way, the odds of a leak were much higher. The most likely explanation for all these facts is that WIV went ahead and did the gain-of-function research they said they were going to do (the particular DEFUSE grant proposal we know about got rejected, but it proves that Wuhan wanted to do this, and they could easily have gotten funding somewhere else, or done it out of their regular budget). They found a close relative of BANAL-52 and added a furin cleavage site as a simple twelve-nucleotide insertion, using the human method of encoding arginine that their genetic engineers were familiar with. Then it leaked, spread for a while in the general Wuhan population, and eventually made it to the wet market where it got detected. Peter: As mentioned earlier, the DEFUSE grant was rejected. Further, the grant said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for finding the viruses, and the University of North Carolina would do all the gain-of-function research. This was a reasonable division of labor, since UNC was actually good at gain-of-function research, and WIV mostly wasn’t. They had done a few very simple gain-of-function projects before, but weren’t really set up for this particular proposal and were happy to leave it for their American colleagues. Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither. Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work. Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did. COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains. Sometimes insertions happen because of a mistake in viral replication. Other times the virus gets confused between its own RNA and its host’s, and splices a bit of the host RNA into the virus. This would neatly explain why the insertion used the unusual coding CGG for arginine, which is common in animals but rare in viruses. On the other hand, it’s not that rare in viruses - COVID uses CGG for arginine about 3% of the time. And human engineers don’t necessarily use it any more than that - Peter was able to find one example of humans adding arginine to a virus, and 0 out of the 5 arginines added were CGG. COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form. Further, COVID’s furin cleavage site was inserted via what seems to be a frameshift mutation - it wasn’t a clean insertion of the amino acids that formed the site, it was an insertion of a sequence which changed the context of the surrounding nucleotides into the amino acids that formed the site. This is a pointless too-clever-by-half “flourish” that there would be no reason for a human engineer to do. But it’s exactly the kind of weird thing that happens in the random chance of evolution. COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site). As for raccoon-dogs, it sure does seems suspicious that the virus is already suited to them. The claim that COVID is uniquely adapted to humans is false. The paper that claimed that defined how well COVID was adapted to different animals by those animals’ difference (on the relevant cell receptors) from humans. So in its methodology, humans came out #1 by default. If you don’t do that, COVID is better-adapted to many other animals. It’s not necessarily true that viruses see a burst of mutations when they enter a new host. COVID spread to deer and mink, and in neither case was there a burst of mutations. COVID has a pretty simple job of infecting respiratory cells and is already very good at it, regardless of species. In Yuri’s model, Wuhan Institute of Virology picked up a discarded grant and decided to do the gain-of-function half allotted to a different university, despite their relative inexperience. They skipped over all the SARS-like viruses they were supposed to work on, and all the standard gain-of-function model backbones, in favor of BANAL-52, a virus which would not be discovered for another two years, but which they somehow had samples of, which they had for some reason decided to keep secret despite its total lack of interestingness. Then they would have had to eschew all usual gain-of-function practices in favor of inserting a weird furin cleavage site that shouldn’t have worked according to the theory they had at the time, via a frameshift mutation. Then they would have had to culture it, a technique beyond their limited capabilities. Then it would have had to leak, and magically show up again in front of the raccoon-dog stall at a wet market. Yuri: WIV wouldn’t have needed to keep BANAL-52 “secret” in some kind of sinister way. Plenty of researchers have backlogs of work they haven’t published yet. Probably they a found BANAL relative in one of their normal sampling trips, did some preliminary studies on it, and planned to publish it later once they cleaned up their data. Everyone works like this. The part of DEFUSE saying that they would only work on viruses that were 95% similar to SARS is unclear and might mean something else. It looks more like they say they’ll start with those viruses, but also do some work on novel viruses. BANAL-52 could have been one of the novel viruses. The furin cleavage site is weird, but the researchers might have done that on purpose, to make the virus easier to keep track of, or to test different furin cleavage sites. Depending on the exact BANAL-52 relative they used, it might not even be a frameshift; there’s a particular way to spell serine that would make the insertion more natural. The claims that COVID can’t be cultured in normal media are based on speculative original research by Peter and might not hold up. Peter: WIV did most of its virus-gathering in a trip to a Yunnan cave between 2010 and 2015. All those viruses have long since been processed and added to the database. There’s no sign that they made more trips to Yunnan caves, and no reason for them to keep that secret. So the idea that they might just have some new viruses they didn’t publish doesn’t hold up. But suppose they did make more trips. Given the amount of time between the DEFUSE proposal and COVID, if they kept to their normal virus-collection rate, they would have gotten about thirty new viruses. What’s the chance that one of those was BANAL-52? There are thousands of bat viruses, and BANAL-52 is so rare that it wasn’t found until well after the pandemic started and people were looking for it very hard. So the chance that one of their 30 would be BANAL-52 is low. Also, they said in DEFUSE that they planned to go back to the same Yunnan cave. But BANAL-52 was found far away from that cave, so unless it ranged over a wide area, they probably couldn’t have found it even if they got very lucky. Session 3: Closing Arguments This third debate was supposed to be about “inference”, ie how much Bayesian evidence was provided by each of the facts given so far, and how to fit them into the Rootclaim probabilistic model. I’m going to relegate my summary of the more probabilistic half to the next section of this post, and just include the closing arguments here. Saar: Peter’s case hinges on the idea that it’s very improbable that a lab leak pandemic would first show up at a wet market. But this isn’t necessarily improbable. The Huanan Seafood Market had several factors that made it a likely location for a superspreader event. It was busy, with over 10,000 visitors a day. Many of the people there (eg the 1,000 vendors) came back daily, letting them reinfect each other. It had poor ventilation, especially in the high-positivity area near the raccoon-dog stall. It had cold wet surfaces on which the virus could survive for long periods. It was indoors, which prevented UV light from killing the virus. Given a small amount of sporadic COVID going around Wuhan, it’s not surprising for the first place it started spreading en masse to be a wet market. In fact, we have several examples of this. When China was COVID Zero, there would occasionally be small outbreaks that the authorities would have to contain. Most of these were at wet markets. For example, the big COVID outbreak in Beijing started at Xinfadi Market, their local seafood market. This couldn’t be an animal spillover, because there were no raccoon-dogs or other weird wildlife there. So it must be that wet markets are natural places for superspreader events. There are several other examples, which make up about half of the total outbreaks in Zero COVID era China, plus others in Singapore and Thailand. Since COVID clusters concentrate in wet markets even when there is no animal spillover, we should accept this as a property of the virus, and not attribute any significance to the fact that this happened in Wuhan too. Peter: About 1/10,000 citizens of Wuhan was a wet market vendor. So there’s a 1/10,000 chance that the first known COVID case should be a wet market vendor by chance alone. Weibo lists the most popular places for people to check in to their network on their phones, and the wet market was the 1600th most popular place in Wuhan, meaning that if you weight locations by busy-ness, there’s a less than 1/1600 chance that the first cases would be in the wet market. Yes, the wet market is indoors, has mediocre ventilation, has repeat visitors, etc. So do thousands of other places in Wuhan, like schools, hospitals, workplaces, places of worship. The wet market isn’t special in any way. And again, it wasn’t a superspreader event! COVID spread at the same rate in the wet market as it does everywhere else: doubling once per 3.5 days. It doesn’t matter what kinds of arguments you can come up with for why the wet market should have been the perfect superspreader event location, we can look at it and see that it wasn’t. It’s an environment that spreads COVID at exactly the normal rate. Zero COVID era Chinese outbreaks were concentrated in wet markets because they received infected animal products. We know why there was an outbreak in the Xinfadi Market in Beijing: it was because the seafood stall got frozen fish from some non-Zero-COVID country, the fish had COVID particles on it, and the vendor got infected and spread it to everyone else. Something like this is true for the other Chinese wet market based outbreaks we know about it. So this makes the opposite point you think it does: wet markets start outbreaks because there are infected goods being sold there. Then the virus spreads through the wet market at a completely normal rate. Saar: The Weibo list of 1600 places bigger than the wet market is likely inaccurate, because it's based on check-in data and people don't check in to seafood markets. Most of those 1600 places aren't amenable to superspread. The 70 markets supposedly bigger than Huanan are irrelevant, because they're supermarkets, open air markets, etc. Huanan is the largest seafood market in central China, and a more likely place for the first cluster of cases to be noticed. Markets weren't a common spillover location in SARS1, so the zoonosis hypothesis hasn't "called" this event in a way that should give them a high Bayes factor. And there’s still plenty of evidence for isolated (though not super-spreading) pre-market cases. A British expatriate in Wuhan, Connor Reed, says he got sick in November, three weeks before the first wet market case. Later the hospital tested his samples and said it was COVID. Another paper reports 90 cases before the first wet market one. Peter: Connor Reed was lying. The case wasn’t reported in any peer-reviewed paper. It was reported in the tabloid The Daily Mail, months after it supposedly happened. He also told the Mail that his cat died of coronavirus too, which is rare-to-impossible. Also, to get a positive hospital test, he would have had to go to the hospital, but he was 25 years old and almost no 25-year-olds go to the hospital for coronavirus. His only evidence that it was COVID was that two months later, the hospital supposedly “notified” him that it was. The hospital never informed anyone else of this extremely surprising fact which would be the biggest scientific story of the year if true. So probably he was lying. Incidentally, he died of a drug overdose shortly after giving the Mail that story; while not all drug addicts are liars, given all the other implausibilities in his story, this certainly doesn’t make him seem more credible. And in any case, he claimed he got his case at a market “like in the media” The other 90 cases are also fake. A lab leak guy found a paper that mentioned 90 more cases than other papers, and made up a conspiracy theory where the author was trying to secretly communicate that there had been 90 secret cases before any of the confirmed cases, even though there was nothing about this in the text of the paper. But actually that paper just counted cases differently than other papers, and they were referring to normal cases after the pandemic officially started. Again, I’ll come back to the discussion about inference later, but for now, here’s a table of both sides’ reasoning. This exact presentation comparing both analyses is mine3, but you can see Saar’s version here, and Peter’s starting at 45:33 of this video. Slightly made up; the two sides didn’t express their probabilities in the same way and I had to make editorial decisions to match them. Note that these aren't entirely comparable because Peter is being laxer about out-of-model probability than Saar. Although Saar's final odds here are 533-to-1, this just the central estimate. Rootclaim’s real final probability is 94% lab leak. You can see their analysis here. And The Winner Is . . . … … … … … Peter and the zoonosis hypothesis. This was a decisive victory. There were two judges, who each gave separate verdicts (or were allowed to declare a draw). Both judges decided in favor of Peter. You can see the judges’ own summary of their reasoning here (Will, Eric) Manifold agreed with the judges. There was a prediction market on who would win. It started out 70-30 in favor of lab leak. As the videos came out, zoonosis started doing better and better. I don’t want to take the exact final numbers too seriously, since I think some of the later price increases involved hints from the participants’ behavior. But it’s clear which way viewers thought the wind was blowing4. Around the same time, the Good Judgment Project - Philip Tetlock’s group studying superforecasters - put out a report on the lab leak hypothesis. After studying it in depth, his forecasters ended up 75-25 in favor of zoonosis. The Rootclaim debate was one of ten sources they said they found especially interesting. And also around the same time, and unrelated to any of this, the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute surveyed experts (“168 virologists, infectious disease epidemiologists, and other scientists from 47 countries”) and found the same thing (though see here for some potential problems with the survey): For what it’s worth, I was close to 50-50 before the debate, and now I’m 90-10 in favor of zoonosis. III. The Math And The Aftermath The third debate session was about “inference”, how to put evidence together. I put this part off until after disclosing the winner, because I wanted to talk about some of these issues at more length. The Math: Judges Both judges included a probabilistic analysis in their written decision. Here’s the same table as above, expanded to add the judges: I shoehorned the judges’ factors into the categories I already had; some of them were actually subtly different from Peter’s, Saar’s, and each other’s. The “priors” category is especially a mess here. We’ll go over these later, but I get the impression that they both thought of probabilistic analyses as an afterthought. For example, Judge Eric wrote 30,000 words about which considerations moved him, and only then includes the analysis, saying: I am not convinced that this Bayesian calculation is even an appropriate way to estimate the relative posterior probability of Z and LL; it just seemed fair that after criticizing Rootclaim’s calculations at length I should make an attempt at it myself. Judge Will’s decision ran to 10,000 words. He said he independently tried both reasoning it out intuitively, and running the Bayesian analysis, and was relieved when these two methods returned the same result. He said: I am skeptical that the Bayesian decision making/evaluation methods are any more "objective" than [intuitive reasoning]. I think they maximize legibility, not objectivity, and tend to hide the intuitive/heuristic portion in the data inclusion step and values, where it’s harder to see . . . I am not skilled in the Bayesian method, and I am sure I made significant mistakes. More time and practice would improve and refine my estimates. At the fundamental rules of the universe level, Bayesian analysis must be the best way to evaluate evidence. However, I am unsure that it’s a good strategy for a human given our cognitive limitations, and doubly unsure it’s truly being used (in the dispassionate sense) where the outcome is social desirability/fame/Twitter likes. I’m focusing on this because Saar’s opinion is that the debate went wrong (for his side) because he didn’t realize the judges were going to use Bayesian math, they did the math wrong (because Saar hadn’t done enough work explaining how to do it right), and so they got the wrong answer. I want to discuss the math errors he thinks the judges made, but this discussion would be incomplete without mentioning that the judges themselves say the numbers were only a supplement for their intuitive reasoning. That having been said, let’s look deeper into some of Saar’s concerns. The Math: Extreme Odds Saar complained that Peter’s odds were too extreme. For example, Peter said there was only a 1/10,000 chance that a lab leak pandemic would first show up at a wet market. Peter’s argument went something like: obviously a zoonotic pandemic would start at a site selling weird animals. But a lab leak pandemic - if it didn’t start at the lab - could show up anywhere. 1/10,000 Wuhan citizens work at the wet market. So if a lab leak was going to show up somewhere random, the wet market was a 1/10,000 chance. Saar had specific arguments against this, but he also had a more general argument: you should rarely see odds like 1/10,000 outside of well-understood domains. In his blog post, he gave this example: A prosecutor shows the court a statistical analysis of which DNA markers matched the defendant and their prevalence, arriving at a 1E-9 probability they would all match a random person, implying a Bayes factor near 1E9 for guilty. But if we try to estimate p(DNA|~guilty) by truly assuming innocence, it is immediately evident how ridiculous it is to claim only 1 out of a billion innocent suspects will have a DNA match to the crime scene. There are obviously far better explanations like a lab mistake, framing, an object of the suspect being brought by someone to the scene, etc. So the real p(wet market|lab leak) isn’t the 1/10,000 chance a pandemic arising in a random place hits the wet market, but the (higher?) probability that there’s something wrong with Peter’s argument. Then Saar tried to show specific things that might be wrong with Peter’s argument. I didn’t find his specific examples convincing. But maybe the question shouldn’t be whether I agreed with him. It should be whether I’m so confident he’s wrong that I would give it 10,000-to-1 odds. This makes total sense, it’s absolutely true, and I want to be really, really careful with it. If you take this kind of reasoning too far, you can convince yourself that the sun won’t rise tomorrow morning. All you have to do is propose 100 different reasons the sunrise might not happen. For example: The sun might go nova.

Inline links: Pekar 2022, Pipes 2021, says, 3, here, this video, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8aU2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F815fe32d-d7ea-401b-b3a2-d8cd25b52ee8_490x780.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Tm_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0492f69-7b7e-4611-9d76-64ef8d7f59d5_511x511.png, Will, Eric, agreed, 4, put out a report on the lab leak hypothesis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!g7k2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F37f1b493-b556-41ec-925e-03f9d8bc26cb_1456x849.webp, surveyed experts, see here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zejl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe9c88e87-b6ca-4c6d-840e-24da726f50b7_975x365.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T5rV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4983e2cd-4151-42de-9685-08037ef7a8e8_635x788.png

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

March 30, 2024 · Original source

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang Contact Info: yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 21st, 2:00 PM Location: We'll be in Kings Hall Cafe @ Sec 13 (https://maps.app.goo.gl/HXKPbcMKhvRsb4ue8). Look for an "ACX meetup" sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PM34J7R+R4 Singapore SINGAPORE Contact: Andrew Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W Group Link: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct dates will be on https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W (our Group Link). Please send your RSVP email early because it would be immensely helpful. Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and shared with the other attendees.

Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HXKPbcMKhvRsb4ue8, https://plus.codes/6PM34J7R+R4, https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W

SINGAPORE Contact: Andrew Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W Group Link: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct dates will be on https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W (our Group Link). Please send your RSVP email early because it would be immensely helpful. Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and shared with the other attendees.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W

Open Thread 324

April 08, 2024 · Original source

2: ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more. See the Meetups List for details.

Inline links: See the Meetups List for details

Open Thread 328

May 06, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw. See the meetups post for more info. And note addition of Kaduna, Nigeria.

Inline links: the meetups post

July 18, 2024 · Original source

See my review of Revolt Of The Public. As I tried to say in the first part of the post, this is reasonable and sympathetic. But if people keep not listening to your demands, then learning more about the specifics might help you understand why. There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?” I don’t know if the anti-gun people are doing anything wrong here exactly, I just know they’re going to be constantly confused and disappointed, and that anyone else who tries the same strategy will get the same results. Realistically, my excuse for writing the post was that I read this and this article by Freddie deBoer which assume that there is some clearly-defined thing called “involuntary treatment” and that the kindest option for the mentally ill and everyone else is to lift some kind of law preventing us from delivering it. Even if it’s permissible for the average person to just say “less homeless crime, please”, I feel like at the point where you’re a public intellectual leading the public discussion, you have some responsibility to start talking specifics. 2. Specific Comments And Responses Shako (blog) writes: I agree with your point in the post. I’ll add though that a policy that is adjacent to this is be “cruel and draconian” to the subset of homeless who commit anti-social crimes. If we removed the subset of criminals from west coast homelessness the problem would be still visible but far far less concerning to those of us who live among it. This is where I land too, but I think it’s very hard. If a homeless person stabs someone, then I think most places (I don’t know if this includes SF), they get prosecuted under general anti-stabbing laws, which the police mostly have enough resources to investigate. If someone just gets in people’s face a lot and screams and litters, then what? Most of the time, police won’t be around to see this. Most of the time, the victim won’t go through the trouble of pressing charges. If they did, it would be he said, she said. Even if the government puts in the effort to actually try the case, screaming at people and littering is probably a couple-month sentence at most. Eledex tells a related story in Part 3 here. A group of homeless people took up residence in an empty lot next to his house, harassed him, set things on fire, etc. This is much worse than the average homeless person just bothering tourists, but when he called the police, they never followed up. I assume if they had tried, the homeless people’s public defender could have said something like “are you sure these homeless people are the same ones who set fire to your stuff?”, Eledex would have said “they’re the homeless people camping on the lot where it happened, but I don’t, like, recognize them or anything”, the public defender would have said “well how do you know those people didn’t leave and some new homeless people came on to the lot?” and everyone would admit they couldn’t prove that. So the normal criminal system might not be set up to deal with these kinds of issues, which I think is why there’s so much demand for some extreme law that criminalizes the entire concept of being this sort of person. But I do worry that if police don’t have the resources to deal with normal crimes, then whoever is charged with enforcing the new extreme law won’t have enough resources to do it well either - and that any society capable of enforcing the new extreme law would also be capable of solving this through normal policing. Humphrey Appleby writes: Can we look at what other places do? What is eg Salt Lake City’s solution? (Possibly, export the homeless to SF). What about Zurich? Singapore? Edinburgh? The US in general and SF in particular seems to have this problem unusually bad, so one could reasonably look elsewhere for ideas. I talk a little more about this at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko, but I think most places' solutions are a combination of: 1. Cheaper housing so that more people can afford homes 2. Cheaper housing so that the government has an easier time giving free homes to people who can't afford their own 3. Homeless shelters 4. Frequent bad weather, forcing the homeless to use the homeless shelters at least sometime, which gets their foot in the door 5. Laws requiring the homeless to use the homeless shelters, which I am much less against when the homeless shelters exist. Doktor Zum writes: At one point, there were something like 600,000 Americans in long-term psychiatric institutions, and that was in a less populous America. Start by locking up 600K and then lock up more. Ah, but where do you put them? The 50 states are dotted with the creepy and picturesque ruins of all the old mental asylums--you can't put them there! It's true that the current government (states, local and federal) are totally incapable of building and running a vast network of psychiatric hospitals, but don't we want government to do things like build nuclear power plants and also lots of housing? If I'm making an argument for cheaper housing and you say "government can't/won't ever allow more building," am I supposed to say that you have won the argument? Unless we want to embrace full anarcho-capitalism, we have to believe that it is possible to have a government that can do things that it did in the 1950s like (a) apprehend and detain the severely mentally ill, (b) back and create lots of nuclear power plants, and (c) build abundant housing and infrastructure. People say “we had giant institutions once, so we can do it again”. This is basically true, but with some missed subtlety. The 600,000 people in the old institutions included: Demented old people (eg Alzheimers)

Inline links: my review of Revolt Of The Public, this, this, blog, here, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Mark Contact Info: markgilmour[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 10:00 AM Location: Cornwall Park Band Rotunda Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VMP4Q3Q+RR Notes: Bring kids if relevant, feel free to bring some nibbles. Singapore SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE Contact: Andrew Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 29th, 04:30 PM Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W Group Link: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W. Please send your RSVP email as early as you can because it would be immensely helpful. Notes: Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and privately shared with the other attendees. We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec dates will be on https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VMP4Q3Q+RR, https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W.

January 15, 2025 · Original source

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).

Inline links: this paper

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Mark Contact Info: markgilmour[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM Location: Cakes & Ladders, 173 Symonds St, Auckland. I'll have a small sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VMP4QP6+WC Group Link: Email me for an invite to the WhatsApp group Notes: We have a small existing meetup group, if you are reading this then you should absolutely come along and check it out. You should RSVP so you feel obligated to follow through :p Singapore SINGAPORE Contact: Ewan Contact Info: ewantsun0[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:30 PM Location: Address: 8 Marina View, #02-08/10 Asia Square Tower 1, Singapore 018960 (Asia Square Food Garden) I'll be at the centre of the Food Garden, wearing a green shirt. (There won't be any 'ACX Meetup' sign, but there shouldn't be anyone else at the venue so there's little risk of getting confused with another group.) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ Group Link: https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl. A LessWrong group is here: https://t.me/Less [remove this part] Wrong_Singapore Andrew, a different organizer, has monthly meetups here: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: Vis-a-vis navigation: (1) Asia Square is just a short walk from Shenton Way MRT Station. (2) Please go to the right tower (Tower 1)! Also note that the Food Garden will be closed, but I'll be bringing some (vegan-friendly) food and drinks.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VMP4QP6+WC, https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W

Contact: Ewan Contact Info: ewantsun0[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:30 PM Location: Address: 8 Marina View, #02-08/10 Asia Square Tower 1, Singapore 018960 (Asia Square Food Garden) I'll be at the centre of the Food Garden, wearing a green shirt. (There won't be any 'ACX Meetup' sign, but there shouldn't be anyone else at the venue so there's little risk of getting confused with another group.) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ Group Link: https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl. A LessWrong group is here: https://t.me/Less [remove this part] Wrong_Singapore Andrew, a different organizer, has monthly meetups here: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: Vis-a-vis navigation: (1) Asia Square is just a short walk from Shenton Way MRT Station. (2) Please go to the right tower (Tower 1)! Also note that the Food Garden will be closed, but I'll be bringing some (vegan-friendly) food and drinks.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W

March 31, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include SF, San Jose, Melbourne, Bonn, Singapore, and Florence. And some late additions to the schedule, including Hanover, Bonn, and Ahmedabad. See here for details.

Inline links: here

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Benji Cresswell Contact Info: notevil101[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 3:00 PM Location: 29 Brandon St, Wellington Central, Wellington 6011, New Zealand. In the Tūī room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQ8G+GF Notes: Please RSVP on Lesswrong, as the meeting room is quite small. Singapore SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng Contact Info: jonathan[period]ng1[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ Group Link: https://t.me/LessWrong_ [remove this bit] Singapore, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl Notes: partiful.com/e/6ghe2pwx2e2j4q9y2nyj

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQ8G+GF, https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ

Contact: Jonathan Ng Contact Info: jonathan[period]ng1[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ Group Link: https://t.me/LessWrong_ [remove this bit] Singapore, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl Notes: partiful.com/e/6ghe2pwx2e2j4q9y2nyj

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

September 08, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.

Inline links: Berkeley, the list

September 19, 2025 · Original source

Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!

Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan

October 28, 2025 · Original source

…with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UMhi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5972e52-4f45-41ea-a520-a17cd78b7d8d_762x721.png, Sherbro Island City, the podcast, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!w7Zj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01bfbd8-7896-4274-946e-fe0659c9cd5a_920x613.jpeg, source

There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

Inline links: Sherbro Island City, the podcast, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!w7Zj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01bfbd8-7896-4274-946e-fe0659c9cd5a_920x613.jpeg, source

Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

Inline links: source

Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China

November 26, 2025 · Original source

In 2023, the US realized it was in an AI race with China and slashed chip exports. Chinese access to compute dropped dramatically. They began accelerating onshore chip development, but this will take a decade or more to pay off. For now, the Chinese AIs you’ve heard of - DeepSeek, Kimi, etc - are primarily trained on a combination of stockpiled American chips from before the export controls, and American chips smuggled in through third parties, especially Singapore and Malaysia.

If the US knows about Chinese chip smuggling strategies, why can’t it crack down? The main barriers are a combination of corporate lobbying and poor funding. That is, chip companies want to continue to sell to Singapore and Malaysia without too many awkward questions about where the chips end up. And the Bureau of Industry and Security, the government department charged with countering smuggling, gets about $50 million/year to spend on chips, which experts say is not enough to plug all the holes. To put that number in context, Mark Zuckerberg recently made job offers as high as $1 billion per AI researcher. If America cared about winning the race against China even a tenth as much as Mark Zuckerberg cares about winning the race against OpenAI, we would be in a much better position!

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Steve Kuhn Contact Info: steve[@]sportspredict[.]com Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 1:00 PM Location: Thie High Street Lounge, Shangri La Hotel, BGC, Manila Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7Q63H22W+XP Singapore SINGAPORE Contact: Srijita Contact Info: srijitak[.]cmi[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 3:15 PM Location: Myx at Holland Village Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ Group Link: Two groups, one at https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX and one at https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore Notes: Preferrably RSVP on LessWrong if you’re coming. The reservation at MyX is till 5:30 pm, and I will cover snacks till then. If you’re planning to stay for dinner as well (I am), please email me so I can extend the reservation. Dinner will be at your own expense.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7Q63H22W+XP, https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX, https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore

Contact: Srijita Contact Info: srijitak[.]cmi[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 3:15 PM Location: Myx at Holland Village Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ Group Link: Two groups, one at https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX and one at https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore Notes: Preferrably RSVP on LessWrong if you’re coming. The reservation at MyX is till 5:30 pm, and I will cover snacks till then. If you’re planning to stay for dinner as well (I am), please email me so I can extend the reservation. Dinner will be at your own expense.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX, https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore

SF31 mentions across 31 issues

SF is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 31 times across 31 issues between February 25, 2021 and February 19, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa"; "people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC"; "part of SF’s gay community". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, Boston, Bay Area.

Article page: SF
Mention count: 31
Issue count: 31
First seen: February 25, 2021
Last seen: February 19, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class" February 25, 2021
Links For April April 12, 2021
21 November 08, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Great Families November 18, 2021
2022 January 28, 2022
Open Thread 214 March 07, 2022
2022 June 02, 2022
Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko June 29, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Open Thread 241 September 12, 2022
Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again March 29, 2023
Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill April 12, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices May 10, 2023
Open Thread 298 October 16, 2023
Contra Stone On EA May 30, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People July 18, 2024
Open Thread 339 July 22, 2024
Open Thread 340 July 29, 2024
Open Thread 351 October 13, 2024
25 February 03, 2025
Open Thread 375 March 31, 2025
Open Thread 394 August 11, 2025
Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies September 11, 2025
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know December 04, 2025
Open Thread 411 December 08, 2025
Open Thread 416 January 12, 2026
SOTA On Bay Area House Party January 13, 2026
Crime As Proxy For Disorder February 19, 2026

San Francisco 10 shared issues
Boston 9 shared issues
Bay Area 8 shared issues
Berkeley 8 shared issues
Chicago 8 shared issues

Source context

February 25, 2021 · Original source

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won't even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, "expertise", mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, "fast food", SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

Highlights From The Comments On Great Families

April 12, 2021 · Original source

Related: Katja Grace’s piece on Oliver Sipple, the “milkshake duck” of the 1970s. Sipple was a quick-thinking veteran who fought and disarmed an assassin trying to kill President Gerald Ford. He briefly became a national hero, until Harvey Milk tipped off the media that he was part of SF’s gay community (Milk was hoping to prove that gay people could be heroes too, but Sipple didn’t want to be outed and Milk comes off really badly here). Sipple begged the media not to publish, but the papers decided he was a public figure and so fair game. His family disowned him, his health declined, and he ended up drinking himself to death.

Inline links: piece on Oliver Sipple

November 08, 2021 · Original source

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November 18, 2021 · Original source

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2022

January 28, 2022 · Original source

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Open Thread 214

March 07, 2022 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

2022

June 02, 2022 · Original source

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June 23, 2022 · Original source

In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.

Things haven’t always been like this. San Francisco used to be one of the safest and most beautiful cities in the world. Shellenberger opens with the story of a 1970s SF candidate who campaigned on a message of public cleanliness, promising stronger punishments for owners who failed to pick up after their dogs. The message was a hit, so much so that the increased community and social pressure was enough to reverse the dog-poop-in-parks problem with minimal police enforcement.

In 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.”

June 29, 2022 · Original source

I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”

But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From this report, I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence.

Inline links: 70% of SF homeless, this report

Overall these numbers make me a little less worried about this concern. San Francisco is already quite generous, and even if some new policy doubled the absolute number of people who came from elsewhere, it would only increase the total number 10-20%.

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.

Open Thread 241

September 12, 2022 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

September 21, 2022 · Original source

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

Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).

The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again

October 13, 2022 · Original source

I think there's a story here the data aren't telling. Give me Fresno over San Francisco any day.

That same day, the client drove me to see what he considered desperate poverty: a neighborhood in the shadows of an agricultural feed mill. It was smelly and industrial, the houses were small and older, BUT THE PEOPLE WERE LIVING IN HOUSES. I kept waiting for the kind of brutal conditions you see on every street in San Francisco--there is some of that in Fresno, but nothing like CA's coastal cities.

[…] I am a big fan of our fine author here, but this post drove me mad. Imagine looking out at some of the most productive farmland in the world from the hellhole of San Francisco (former decade-long SF resident here!) and asking what's wrong with them!

March 29, 2023 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill

April 12, 2023 · Original source

IRBs aren’t like this in a vacuum. Increasingly many areas of modern American life are like this. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported it takes 87 permits, two to three years, and $500,000 to get permission to build houses in SF; developers have to face their own “IRB” of NIMBYs, concerned with risks of their own. Teachers complain that instead of helping students, they’re forced to conform to more and more weird regulations, paperwork, and federal mandates. Infrastructure fails to materialize, unable to escape Environmental Review Hell. Ezra Klein calls this “vetocracy”, rule by safety-focused bureaucrats whose mandate is to stop anything that might cause harm, with no consideration of the harm of stopping too many things. It’s worst in medicine, but everywhere else is catching up.

Inline links: recently reported, calls this

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

May 10, 2023 · Original source

The picture on the left is Manhattan Island, NY. The picture on the right is Conanicut Island, RI. Both islands are about the same size, the same climate, the same distance from the mainland. Both are near good natural harbors. In 1600, some early European explorer would have considered them basically interchangeable. Still, the cost of housing in Manhattan is about $2000/sqft, and the cost of housing in Conanicut is about $500/sqft. Why? God didn’t create these two islands with different land value; something must have happened to make one 4x as expensive as the other. The obvious answer is “the Dutch chose to build their colonial capital on Manhattan, more and more people moved in, it became ever denser and more urban in a virtuous cycle, now it is very dense and urban, and, in the current regulatory regime, dense urban areas have higher housing prices than empty rural ones.” If back in 1624 the Dutch had decided to build their capital on Conanicut, maybe today it would be a city of 10 million people, and Manhattan would be an empty rural area. In that case, I would expect Conanicut to have 4x the house price of Manhattan. If I were a Native American living on Manhattan, and I was committed to keeping housing prices there low, I would ask the Dutch to build their capital on Conanicut instead. In fact, whenever a European came to my island seeking to build houses, I would try to fight them off. If I somehow succeeded at this for four hundred years, and Manhattan remained an empty rural area, then I would expect Manhattan prices to be much lower than they are now. So in response to all of your comments that I don’t understand basic causal inference, I answer that history provides quasi-experiments, and no, I’m pretty sure that Manhattan has high prices because lots of people moved there, rather than because of some other factor. Or, rather, both density and desirability feed into the other, but the density step is a crucial input. 2. Comments About Jobs And Amenities (And Not Density Per Se) Producing Desirability But Martin Blank writes: NYC/SF are expensive because there are MANY good jobs there and people WANT to live there. Not because of the density of housing. You could build 500,000 homes in the middle of your empty field in North Dakota, and it wouldn't do much for the demand there. You aren't going to create Manhattan by magicking 3.5 million housing units of similar quality into the Red Lake Indian reservation in Northern Minnesota. I originally found the various comments saying this annoying. Yes, there are many good jobs in NYC. You can be a barista at Starbucks, you can be an actor on Broadway, you can be a train conductor for the MTA. But why is it easier to be a barista in NYC than in North Dakota? Surely because there are millions of people in New York, those people drink a lot of coffee, and so they need a lot of baristas. Likewise, they watch a lot of plays, and ride a lot of trains, so they need actors and train conductors. If all the residents moved to North Dakota, there would be lots of demand for baristas, actors, and train conductors in North Dakota, and none in NYC. But some people gave versions of this argument that I found harder to dismiss. JSwiffer writes: The key fact your missing is if you wave a magic wand and 10x San Francisco you wouldn't 10x all jobs. You would 10x the # of waiters, and garbage men but you wouldn't 10x the # of 500k/yr Google site reliability engineers. And it's the latter not the former that are driving up prices. Other commenters analogized this to factory or coal mining towns. Here’s how I ended up thinking about this: suppose someone strikes oil in an uninhabited part of North Dakota, enough to produce 1,000 good oilman jobs. 1,000 oilmen move to the area and start a town. Because there are no NIMBYs, they build 1,000 houses. Each oilman creates demand for a certain amount of waiters (to serve them food), doctors (to treat their illnesses), teachers (to teach their children), etc. How many waiters, doctors, teachers, etc move to the town? Assume for the sake of argument that all jobs earn the same salary, $50,000. In that case, it has to be fewer than 1,000. Each oilman earns $50,000, and some of that gets spent on taxes and out-of-town goods. So he has less than $50,000 to spent on in-town goods and services, so (in this hypothetical) creates less than one other job. Each waiter needs doctors to treat their illnesses and teachers to teach their children, so each service employee creates some number of additional service employee jobs. Makeshift housing in a North Dakota oil boom town (source) If each person creates half a job, the original 1,000 oilmen attract 500 service workers, those 500 attract another 250, and so on until population stabilizes at 2,000 people. In this model, if there are fewer than 2,000 houses in the town, demand exceeds supply (no matter what is going on in the rest of the country), but if there are more than 2,000, supply exceeds demand. So if we imagine Google’s presence as an oil-like resource, the extra demand for housing in the Bay should gradually decline: at some point, you will have finished housing the Google workers and the service workers who support them. But this isn’t right either, because Google isn’t a natural resource - it’s a company founded by Bay Area residents. If you got more Bay Area residents, you would (with some delay) get more Googles. Or: Austin gets lots of jobs from Tesla. Tesla wasn’t founded by Austinites. But it moved to Austin when it became a known “tech hub”, ie a place with lots of tech companies and tech employees. It wouldn’t have moved to Austin if Austin was still an uninhabited plain or a one-horse town. So as Austin got bigger, it attracted more tech companies. So in both the Bay Area case and the Austin case, having more people attracted more tech companies, either because the residents themselves found the company or because the company gets attracted to this newly bustling city. Potential counterargument: Each new Bay Area resident gives the Bay another lottery ticket to found the next Google. If having the first Google gets it an extra 1 million people, but there are 300 million people in the US, then those extra 1 million only give it a 1/300 chance of winning the next lottery. So even though the Bay Area won the lottery once, and this made it have high demand, this doesn’t mean the high demand will cause it to win more lotteries. If you win the lottery once, spend all your winnings on more lottery tickets, and keep doing this forever, you haven’t invented an infinite money printing machine, eventually you’ll just lose. Potential counter-counter-argument: the Bay got Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and . . . so these can’t all be separate lotteries. I think you should probably model it as a high-level lottery to become the next hub of a tech-sized industry, plus many low-level lotteries where once you’re the tech hub, you’re attracting lots of techies, and each techie gives you a ticket in a lottery where the denominator is the number of techies to found the next big tech company. And the Bay might have half the US’s techie population. So maybe here there is a self-sustaining lottery-winning cycle, at least until tech plays itself out and nobody wants any more tech companies. And that might take a long time. Tom (author of Tom Thought) writes: The primary drivers of demand for living in NYC are the specific opportunities available in NYC. It is true that on long time horizons, one of the reasons these opportunities have tended to collect in NYC is that it is a dense place. But those aren't the only reasons - NYC is much more important than other, bigger cities in other parts of the world for complex historical reasons. Even if a catastrophe were to wipe out half the city, there would still be a great deal of demand to live near important institutions like Broadway, Wall Street, Port of NY & NJ, Columbia, etc (assuming those institutions survived the catastrophe). Increasing the number of housing units has a very mechanical impact on how many people can live in the place. But it has only a second-order impact on the types of institutions that drive demand to live in the city. People don't just generically crave to live near other people for the most part (a handful of urbanist freaks like myself excepted). The Bay Area is a great example of this. It is much less populated than other much cheaper cities. Density isn't why people want to live there - it's access to a specific culture and specific institutions. Demand for that is not simply a function of density - some people want to be part of Bay Area culture and others don't. Adding more units will induce some demand as a second-order effect, but will bring prices down as a first-order effect. To relate this to your model: we might be able to say that the country has a certain number of abstract "culture points" that have been allocated to different cities by various historical forces. Each culture point a city has increases demand to live in that city by a certain amount. Adding more people to the city may allow it to generate additional culture points over time, or acquire culture points from other cities, but this doesn't happen right away, and is determined by a host of factors other than just density. Under this model, we expect a place like NYC to always cost much more than North Dakota (since NYC possesses a large number of culture points), but we would also expect that adding additional housing units to NYC would bring costs down (since there are now additional housing units per culture point). Perhaps this process will over time allow NYC to steal away some culture points from Chicago, Boston, or other cities, but this is a secondary effect. This just seems to be passing the buck. Yes, people move to New York because it has Broadway, Columbia University, and Wall Street. Why does it have those things? Because one in every X New York citizens founds a good artistic/educations/financial institution, and New York has a large population of employees to work at those institutions and customers to patronize those institutions. If Conanicut Island had a population of 10 million people instead of Manhattan, there would be lots of great institutions on Conanicut and it would have more culture points. I don’t think it’s a culture-point game and population/density just sort of occasionally redistributes culture points, I think to a first approximation culture points just track population/density. Maybe they track the population/density of upper class people better than the total population/density, but I don’t think this is a big enough distinction to sink the argument. 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities Some people brought these up as a good natural experiment: the Chinese really did try building millions of houses on their equivalent of a North Dakota plain. What happened? Jeremiah Johnson (author of Infinite Scroll) writes: You currently seem like you're at the stage of understanding the thought experiments pretty well, but not understanding them on a DEEP level. For example with your hypothetical, this has actually happened before! Kind of. China built a bunch of 'ghost cities' basically out of nothing, and while there was an initial craze of speculation and tons of investment and building... nobody went to live in those cities most of the time. And now they're deeply distressed assets worth basically nothing. When nobody actually lives in the ghost city, it doesn't matter that they have super dense housing. There's no demand. (the only reason they might be worth something is that the CCP very, very much does not want to pop their huge housing bubble and is likely to bail out some of the parties involved) Parmenides (author of Last House On The Left) writes: I think your mixing up the agglomeration effects of density, which is what induces the demand, and the housing supply. You can't just build a city and expect people to move in, China has tried that. But if you have the agglomeration effects of density and shortage of housing due to artificial constraints, which we have all across the US, then you get dense areas with high housing costs. sdwr writes: Think of China's ghost cities / apartment blocks. Prices surely can't be that high there. Maybe the answer is that developers are good at their job, and build supply where theres demand for it? But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China: Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities". Ash Lael writes: I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing. I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like. See also Bloomberg: China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets. This wasn’t trivial. It looks like the Chinese government had to put in some work to make people move in, including opening good schools and universities there. Probably if they had just built apartments in the middle of the desert and nothing else, they would have stayed empty. But that’s even more of a reductio ad absurdum than the original ghost city plan. 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?)

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?)

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: Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

Open Thread 298

October 16, 2023 · Original source

Holly Elmore and PauseAI are holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities around the world, including San Francisco.

Inline links: holding pro-pause protests October 21 in eight cities

Contra Stone On EA

May 30, 2024 · Original source

Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

July 18, 2024 · Original source

Cozy! Even at costs likely 10% of ours, the 1950s couldn’t really afford to keep these institutions around; states were spending about 10% of their total budget just to maintain buildings that looked like the picture above. That segues into the political problem - once there were other options (penicillin, antipsychotics, nursing homes), the public willingness to pay to maintain the institutions collapsed. On the other hand, when I calculate this out, it doesn’t seem so bad? The average cost of a psychiatric hospital bed is about $300K per year (sanity check: a California prison bed is $130K per year, and the psych hospital needs more medical personnel, so this seems plausible). There are about 8,000 homeless in San Francisco, but assume that most are ordinary people down on their luck, and we only need to institutionalize 2,000. That suggests a cost of $600 million/year using state-of-California numbers, but everything (eg real estate) is more expensive in SF, so round up to $1 billion/year. I don’t know if this counts the amortized cost of building the institution, but let’s assume it does. San Francisco currently spends about $1 billion/year on homelessness. These institutions would only cover the worst 25% of homeless people, so you’d need maybe another $500 million for the rest, but whatever, same order of magnitude. I think this is more affordable than I expected. The remaining problems are: Where is this? I don’t think there’s anywhere in SF city limits to put it. I suggest putting it in Marin, to piss off George Lucas’ neighbors. But I don’t know about the legalities of a city using an extraterritorial detention institution.

Inline links: about $300K per year

$1 billion/year in projected costs, translated into Californian, means $100 trillion quadrillion/year in actual costs. Of these, I think 3 is the biggest deal. If it’s as hard to commit someone to these institutions as it is to convict them of a crime, then these institutions don’t help much above how much the existence of prison also helps (eg not much). If you invent a new legal maneuver where it’s easier to commit someone than to convict them of a crime, then why do you even need the step where you build the institution? Just invent the legal maneuver and send more people to prison! I think that maybe the thought is that the institution seems more “humane” than prison, and so people will be more willing to allow low-friction legal maneuvers for confining people there. I think this is cope; not only won’t the institutions be more humane than prisons, but people won’t believe they are and won’t allow the low-friction legal maneuvers. Drethelin writes: What if we abolish the DEA and just let anyone buy anti-psychotics over the counter? This would be the FDA we’re abolishing, but otherwise yes, this is the sort of clever outside-the-box thinking that I appreciate from my commenters. Antipsychotics are very cheap (some well-regarded drugs like Abilify and Seroquel cost about ~$10 per month of pills). On the other hand, homeless people have very little money. So if you were going to do this, it would make sense for the government to give them away for free. These drugs have many potentially serious side effects. But it’s not clear how much homeless people’s 5-minute monthly visits with a bored Medicaid doctor does to avert these side effects, over having some kind of pharmacist or advocate or social worker in the free distribution center giving helpful advice. Like everything, I think this would only help around the edges - the fraction of homeless mentally ill people who drugs can help, who are willing to take the drugs, and who are prevented only by cost and bureaucracy. What percent is that? Low confidence guess 25%. DZ writes: I think you’re missing the goal of a short arrest (few days). Part of the problem is the homeless are in areas where society doesn’t want them to be. They’re near city downtowns where tourists spend time or near commercial districts or in otherwise nice parks. If you can arrest them for a few days and keep arresting them until they move somewhere else … the goal is to eventually force them to move to the more acceptable areas vs. least acceptable areas. This is obviously not ideal but in the mean time the city gets more tourism, more office rentals, etc. Europeans ruthlessly arrest homeless people who hang out in the touristy areas. SF doesn’t, yet. I commented that I was worried that “out of touristy areas” means “into residential areas”. And I feel worse making residents deal with this than tourists, and am less confident that the city cares enough about them to fight back. DZ responded: Agreed. People don’t want them in the residential areas or suburbs either and for good reason. But my guess is cities can identify certain areas where they would prefer the tents to set up. Something like industrial areas or run down parks. The key is that city officials should be able to use arrests as a strategy to move the tents/homeless concentrations without having to face a million lawsuits. I don’t know if there are really areas like this, but I welcome learning more from people who know cities better. SMK writes: This probably sounds draconian and cruel, too, but in fairness, all these discussions seem to assume that this person is in San Francisco and can never ever leave for some other, more affordable place. I get it -- it's tough leaving home, and maybe they'd be leaving friends. But they wouldn't be the only people leaving SF over rent prices, and they'd pretty clearly be among the most rational. So I dislike articles like this when they say things like "the average wait time for a homeless shelter bed is 826 days" or "cheap apartments in SF are $1000 / month." I have a friend who was homeless for around a year in another major American city, and he said it was always 100% feasible to get a shelter bed if he wanted one. Indeed, there were several options. On a different note, I also think that if one were going to go a "cruel and draconian" route, homeless shelters might be able to change policies to better support that and prevent some of the issues you highlight. If it takes 826 days to get a shelter bed, then zero of the typical people you mention who are briefly homeless are getting shelter beds. If all of the people who were homeless for longer were either leaving or in jail, then more of those people probably would get beds. Am I saying this is the policy I favor? No, I agree it's a hard problem and I'm not sure what the right answer is. But things like this need to be kept in mind, too. Again, I think it’s helpful to go to the specific policy level. What’s the policy here? Give homeless people brochures reminding them that other cities exist? I’m sure they know this. Give homeless cities free mandatory bus trips to those other cities? What prevents the other cities from giving them free mandatory bus trips back? Even if they don’t, what if the homeless prefer being homeless in San Francisco to having a better situation in a cheaper city? A bus from Phoenix to SF is only $60; even a homeless beggar might be able to scrounge up that much money if they’re motivated. Maybe some plan like making a deal with a big cheap city in Texas to take SF homeless in exchange for money, and as soon as the homeless get off the bus, they’re met by a Texan social worker who gives them a shelter bed and social services? Might help along the edges, but remember that only about half of homeless people want/will accept shelter beds (depending on how good the shelter beds are). Sergei writes: After checking a bit, let me point out the obvious. What works elsewhere is PATERNALISM. Once you are in the "clutches of psychiatry", they don't let you go. Upon release you are placed into some sort of housing, your appointments are monitored and a social worker will find you and drive you there. You will be given multiple chances to get a job and/or rehab. Your meds will be delivered to you if you cannot pick them up. They remind you to take them. There will be a social safety net so you are never in a situation where you end up on the street unless you really really try to. In retrospect, it makes sense: people who are not able to take care of themselves for a time because of a fixable mental infirmity are taken care of by the state, until they can. That's what we do with children already. I continue to want people to provide details. “They don't let you go" - okay, so the person is in a locked facility? Placed in "some kind of housing"? Does the housing have locks on the door, or can they leave? What if they do leave? "Multiple chances to get a job", oh, great, with whom? How are you enforcing that they take mentally ill people? What happens when the mentally ill people are less good workers than other people they could hire, or have some kind of crisis on the job, as even the best-treated person might once in a while? Maybe we can charitably fill in the details. Something like: Ban some combination of camping outside and being visibly mentally ill.

Inline links: writes

In San Francisco, homeless people already get an Access Pass, ie free public transportation on the municipal rail system. I don’t think there’s a similar program for the BART (intercity rail system), probably because other cities don’t want homeless people traveling there. There are definitely lots of homeless people on the BART; I don’t know how this works, but I think they make more begging than they lose from the fares.

Inline links: an Access Pass

Open Thread 339

July 22, 2024 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Open Thread 340

July 29, 2024 · Original source

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Open Thread 351

October 13, 2024 · Original source

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February 03, 2025 · Original source

He proposes some alternatives, of which the most controversial is the Presidio - a federally-owned historic fortress in the middle of San Francisco which is now mostly used as a park. But the government technically has the rights to the land, and if they wanted to, they could zone the whole thing for six-story apartments and add 120,000 people to SF. I don’t know which part of this is most likely to make San Franciscans explode with rage - the loss of their (admittedly beautiful) historic park, the Donald Trump involvement, or the prospect of actually building things in their city. It would be a blowup for the ages.

California Forever, the ambitious planned city an hour north of San Francisco, is on hold.

Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

March 31, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Open Thread 394

August 11, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

September 11, 2025 · Original source

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Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

December 04, 2025 · Original source

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Open Thread 411

December 08, 2025 · Original source

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Open Thread 416

January 12, 2026 · Original source

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SOTA On Bay Area House Party

January 13, 2026 · Original source

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Crime As Proxy For Disorder

February 19, 2026 · Original source

Graffiti: There are no good data for graffiti. Most of the discussion focuses on New York, where everyone agrees the long-term trend is down since 1970. The Graffiti In New York City Wikipedia page has a “decline of New York graffiti subculture” section, which explains that in the 1980s, when “broken window” policing became popular, the police cracked down on graffiti and this worked somewhat. The only numbers are here, and they describe a decrease of 13% in calls to the graffiti hotline between 2011 and 2016. But the more recent picture, and the story in other cities, is less sanguine; in the past few years, graffiti is “a bigger problem than ever” in Los Angeles and has “gotten worse” in San Francisco. Plausibly this is the same pattern as crime, which was declining for decades until COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests caused it to rebound in 2020. A contrary data point is Britain, where graffiti reports almost doubled between 2013 - 2017; I don’t know enough about the British context to have an opinion.

Inline links: Graffiti In New York City, here, is, in

Even if we worry about the increase over the 2005 low, it seems to be only about 33%, over fifteen years, which should be hard to notice. Strange! (the FBI runs a different shoplifting reporting program, NIBRS. This does show a large increase since 2018, but is considered less reliable because new cities keep joining and so year-to-year reports aren’t comparable.) Maybe the problem is limited to a few big cities? What about San Francisco in particular? At least in these data, it’s - if anything - less. Okay, so could stores be failing to report to police? Some stores say they’re doing this, and there was an embarrassing incident - it might be the 2021 spike on the graph above - where two stores briefly changed their reporting policy and nearly doubled the total report number. We need an equivalent of the NCVS - reports coming from the victims themselves. Our best bet is the National Retail Survey, from a retail organization which asks stores what percent of their inventory they believe they lose to various causes, including shoplifting. Only about a 20% increase during the 2004 - 2022 period. The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures. In 2024 they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company (no bias there!). The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners, and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away. Now what? The survey doesn’t disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse, and just isn’t reporting it to the police? Might this be because there are fewer stores (everyone is buying through Amazon) and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting? This isn’t trivially true - the number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all - but there’s been a shift in types of stores (from big box to local). If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter. Otherwise, we’re in the awkward position where everyone (including stores) reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree. Homelessness and Tent Encampments: Here’s a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude: I’ve confirmed the post 2009 trend; I haven’t fully double-checked the others but they match my impressions. This looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices. Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find. San Francisco has this one: …but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can’t really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here is an interesting graph of Seattle homeless sweeps, ie number of times the police acted against encampments: …but it doesn’t tell us whether encampments are increasing, or the police are taking them more seriously. It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action - aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People With Loud Boom Boxes In Public Places: All I have to say about this one is that it’s terrible and I hate it. Overall, it’s surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased: Littering seems to be down

Only about a 20% increase during the 2004 - 2022 period. The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures. In 2024 they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company (no bias there!). The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners, and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away. Now what? The survey doesn’t disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse, and just isn’t reporting it to the police? Might this be because there are fewer stores (everyone is buying through Amazon) and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting? This isn’t trivially true - the number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all - but there’s been a shift in types of stores (from big box to local). If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter. Otherwise, we’re in the awkward position where everyone (including stores) reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree. Homelessness and Tent Encampments: Here’s a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude: I’ve confirmed the post 2009 trend; I haven’t fully double-checked the others but they match my impressions. This looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices. Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find. San Francisco has this one: …but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can’t really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here is an interesting graph of Seattle homeless sweeps, ie number of times the police acted against encampments: …but it doesn’t tell us whether encampments are increasing, or the police are taking them more seriously. It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action - aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People With Loud Boom Boxes In Public Places: All I have to say about this one is that it’s terrible and I hate it. Overall, it’s surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased: Littering seems to be down

Seattle29 mentions across 29 issues

Seattle is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 29 times across 29 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "When I was in elementary school in Seattle"; "campaign for approval voting in Seattle"; "the open-air drug scenes in Seattle". It most often appears alongside Boston, Chicago, Berkeley.

Article page: Seattle
Mention count: 29
Issue count: 29
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021
ACX Grants Results December 28, 2021
Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko June 29, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
LA and San Diego Meetups This Weekend October 06, 2022
ACX Grants: Project Updates November 04, 2022
Open Thread 259 January 16, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices May 01, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Open Thread 292 September 04, 2023
Links For February 2024 February 29, 2024
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 326 April 22, 2024
Open Thread 339 July 22, 2024
Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates September 30, 2024
Ballots Everywhere: Times And Places October 04, 2024
ACX Local Voting Guides October 22, 2024
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know November 27, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 380 May 05, 2025
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 398 September 08, 2025
Links For February 2026 February 05, 2026
Crime As Proxy For Disorder February 19, 2026
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Boston 15 shared issues
Chicago 15 shared issues
Berkeley 13 shared issues
California 13 shared issues
Los Angeles 13 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

April 30, 2021 · Original source

When I was in elementary school in Seattle, my fourth-grade class was gifted a fishtank of salmon eggs to incubate and eventually return upstream, to teach us about the salmon life-cycle. The tank was packed with eggs, and once they hatched, it looked like salmon pandemonium in there, with barely enough room for the fry to move around without bumping into each other. In Vogt’s zero-sum view, the earth is like that salmon tank on a planetary scale; you can’t add new fish without displacing existing ones or diminishing their quality of life. Since Vogt sees the mid-twentieth century earth as being on the precipice of surpassing, if not already having surpassed, that capacity, he views everything being done to increase the numbers and consumption power of humans as a threat to this fragile ecosystem.

ACX Grants Results

December 28, 2021 · Original source

Troy Davis, $10,000, to help fund his campaign for approval voting in Seattle. Approval voting is one of the approximately 100% of voting systems better than the one we currently use, with the potential to defuse partisanship and let people support outsider candidates without "wasting their vote". Campaigns to switch to alternative voting systems have recently succeeded in several US cities, most notably St. Louis, and Troy thinks Seattle's time has come. You can read more about his efforts at Seattle Approves or see the discussion here. He wants your help getting this on the November 2022 ballot, especially from Washington State residents (email, donation link)

Inline links: Seattle Approves, here, email, donation link

June 23, 2022 · Original source

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

The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.

Inline links: https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832

June 29, 2022 · Original source

I appreciate your trust of in-person reports about shoplifting. We live part-time in Seattle. We do see flagrant, open shoplifting, where the thieves just wheel out carts of stuff in front of security guards. This is a new thing. We asked why the guards don't stop it and they say a combination of the risk of crazy, violent response combined with no legal consequence is why. I guarantee most of it is not being reported. The remaining police are overwhelmed. Unless one is filing an insurance claim and a case number is required, there is no point in calling them to report theft. It is a waste of time.

California and Seattle are among the rare US cities where it never gets unbearably hot or cold, and do have a lot of homeless people. But cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless, so I’m not sure how much to update on this.

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.

October 06, 2022 · Original source

Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Boise, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Toulouse, Cologne, Rome, Hatten, Poznan, St. Louis, Rochester (NY), Seattle, Mumbai, and Oklahoma City. You can find times and places here.

Inline links: here

November 04, 2022 · Original source

2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10) They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election.

Open Thread 259

January 16, 2023 · Original source

The attempt to get approval voting on the ballot in Seattle had a complicated outcome. It got on the ballot, for complicated political reasons the Seattle City Council responded by adding a different proposition supporting Ranked Choice Voting, and the Ranked Choice Voting initiative won. I understand there are some bad feelings about the exact way City Council did this, and that the election nerd community is split between Approval Voting and RCV partisans. But my perspective is that either alternative beats the usual “first past the post” system, and if the Approval Voting campaign indirectly led to the RCV victory, they still did great work and should feel proud of themselves. I’m trying to get them to write me a post with the full story.

Inline links: the Ranked Choice Voting initiative won

Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Volunteer Park, by the amphitheater. I'll have a folding table set up, and probably a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56

May 01, 2023 · Original source

No; I think the missing insight is that there’s some pool of geographically mobile Americans1 who are looking for new housing (or who might start looking if the right situation presented itself). These people have various combinations of preferences and requirements. One common pattern is to prefer any big city - they would be happy to live in Seattle, or NYC, or the Bay, if the opportunity came up. Right now, more Americans prefer to live in big cities than there are housing units in big cities, so prices go up and these people can’t afford their dream. As new cities become “big” (by these people’s criteria), they’ll move to those cities, increasing demand. The fact that big cities remain more expensive than small villages suggests that there are many of these people and they’re currently under-served.

Inline links: 1

May 19, 2023 · Original source

Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Spencer Pearson Contact Info: speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 2:00 PM Location: Volunteer Park amphitheater! I'll have a table and a couple of signs saying "Astral Codex Ten Meetup". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+547 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+547, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

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

Inline links: Answer here, Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population, Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle, It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart, a new post about polygenic screening, here, @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals, lists his favorite discoveries

February 29, 2024 · Original source

At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection. 3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here. 4: Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence. 5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder. 6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job. 7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here. 8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.” 9: @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and lists his favorite discoveries, including: Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4P, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cQBu6o8z894gRA6dj/acx-lw-seattle-spring-meetup-2024, https://facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/, https://www.facebook.com/events/925938142241186

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Nikita Sokolsky Contact Info: Sokolx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 28th, 5:00 PM Location: Stoup Brewing, 1158 Broadway, Seattle, WA 98122 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4P Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cQBu6o8z894gRA6dj/acx-lw-seattle-spring-meetup-2024 Group Link: https://facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/ https://www.facebook.com/events/925938142241186 Notes: Meetup will be in a brewery, they serve alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks. You can bring your own food. Event is here - https://www.facebook.com/events/925938142241186 If you need to get in touch 206-458-4791

Open Thread 326

April 22, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week: NYC, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake, Madrid, Zurich, Hyderabad, Rio, Taipei. And a new meetup has been added for Zwolle. See the list for more information.

Inline links: the list

Open Thread 339

July 22, 2024 · Original source

1: I'm interested in expanding my biennial local ballot post into a community-wide effort to get an ACX slate for major US cities. Current plan is to ask the 5-10 biggest meetup groups to research for their city sometime in the autumn, then post a week or two before the election. This would probably be SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA, NYC, Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago. The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet? Do other states have enough things on the ballot to keep this interesting, or is California unique there? Do these meetup groups feel up to working on this? Does anyone have any other suggestions or advice?

Inline links: biennial local ballot post

Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates

September 30, 2024 · Original source

Seattle

Ballots Everywhere: Times And Places

October 04, 2024 · Original source

SEATTLE - Thursday, October 10th, 5:30 - 8:00 PM - SLU BRU, 700 Dexter Ave N Suite 230, Seattle, WA - Contact Sokolx@gmail.com

ACX Local Voting Guides

October 22, 2024 · Original source

AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here

Inline links: Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here

SEATTLE: Guide here. This one is a spreadsheet, which is probably merciful given how many positions Seattleites have to vote on. The best candidate name on this ballot is “Dave Upthegrove”, running for Public Lands Commissioner ie forest management; not only is this not a fake name, but the Upthegroves are apparently one of the oldest American families with a history in the country dating back to 1683. Second place goes to “Justin Greywolf” - yes, he is a libertarian, and yes, ACX Seattle endorses him. I don’t know how he came by his name, but his Twitter header picture is suggestive:

Inline links: Guide here, history, Twitter header picture

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

November 27, 2024 · Original source

People take various policy implications from this (maybe “life sentences” should end at 65, since incapacitation is unlikely to help much after that). But here we’re interested in its potential to confound studies. A 20 year old who gets 5 years in prison is released at 25 - still young! - but a 20 year old who gets 10 years in prison is released at 30 - too old to be leaping on rooftops and running from cops. The National Sentencing Commission understands this problem, and matches the experimental and control groups by age at release. But this introduces a new bias - now they’re different ages when they start committing crimes. Might a person who starts crime at 15 be a more disturbed and committed criminal than one who starts at 20? Seems plausible. I think this might be responsible for a lot of the seemingly positive effect of sentences > 5 years. There are dozens of other studies on this topic, all hotly debated, so even in this part I’m only going to list a few highlights. Still, these are: Green and Winik (2010). They use random judge assignment, ie look at criminals with similar crimes who got lenient/strict judges and so shorter/longer sentences. They find that the total difference in rearrests is indistinguishable from zero. But the length of time in which they were measuring rearrests includes the time the offenders were in jail, so this is saying that incapacitation plus aftereffects was zero (plus or minus a margin of error), meaning that aftereffects must be detrimental and large enough to cancel out the benefits of incapacitation, just as Roodman claims. But this study looked at minor crimes where sentences were measured in months, so I think this matches our previous suspicion that aftereffects might be detrimental in short sentences but neutral-to-beneficial in longer ones. Roach and Schanzenbach (2015) More random judge assignment, this time in Seattle. They find that each month of longer sentence decreases future reoffending by one percentage point. Most of these sentences are short, so this contradicts our working theory that lengthening short sentences increases crime but lengthening long ones decreases it. Neither Berger nor Roodman really want to take this study too seriously; Berger objects that it’s an unusual study population (everyone entered a guilty plea), and Roodman objects that the judge selection might not have been truly random. Rhodes (2018) is a matching study - it artificially tries to create groups of prisoners who are as similar as possible except that one group got longer sentences. Its big advantage is that it has some people serving moderately long sentences (a few years), getting us out of the few-month range investigated by some of the other studies. It finds a mild beneficial effect of longer sentences: This study provides no evidence that an offender’s criminal trajectory is negatively affected – that is, that criminal behavior is accelerated – by the length of an offender’s prison term. If anything, longer prison terms modestly reduce rates of recidivism beyond what is attributable to incapacitation. This “treatment effect” of a longer period of incarceration is small. The three-year base rate of 20% recidivism is reduced to 18.7% when prison length of stay increases by an average of 5.4 months. We are inclined to characterize this as a benign, close to neutral effect on recidivism. What Do Our Experts Think? As mentioned above, these are only a few of the very many studies on this topic, and I’ve only given the briefest summary of each. Due to the complexity of this literature, I’m relying more than usual on the opinion of the expert reviewers. Berger (pro-longer-sentences) says: Considering the rigorous research published since the Nagin et al. (2009) review, the literature regarding length of stay on recidivism is still somewhat inconsistent, with many studies claiming no recidivism effects and some showing that increased prison length reduces recidivism slightly. However, just like the rest of the research examined thus far, the study methodologies vary in terms of their limitations, which could explain some of the mixed results [...] At present, there is no substantial evidence that a criminogenic effect exists in the aggregate. Thus, it remains unclear whether criminogenic effects exist, and if so, under what circumstances...Among the substantial number of published studies with varying methodologies, not one has found a large aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Roodman (pro-shorter-sentences) says: The preponderance of the evidence says that incarceration in the US increases crime post-release, and enough over the long run to offset incapacitation. A quartet of judge randomization studies (Green and Winik in Washington, DC; Loeffler in Chicago; Nagin and Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang in Philadelphia and Miami) put the net of incapacitation and incarceration aftereffects at about zero. In parallel, Chen and Shapiro find that harsher prison conditions—making for incarceration that is harsher in quality rather than quantity—also increases recidivism. Gaes and Camp concur, though less convincingly because in their study harsher incarceration quality went hand in hand with lower incarceration quantity. Mueller-Smith sides with all these studies and goes farther, finding modest incapacitation and powerful, harmful aftereffects in Houston; but modest hints of randomization failure accompany those results. Some studies dissent from the majority view that incarceration is criminogenic. Roach and Schanzenbach find beneficial aftereffects in Seattle—a result that is also subject to some doubt about the quality of randomization. Bhuller et al. make a more compelling case that incarceration reduces crime after—in Norway. Berecochea and Jaman, one of the few truly randomized studies in this literature, also looks more likely right than wrong, and is also somewhat distant in its setting, early-1970s California. And there are the two Georgia studies, which upon reanalysis no longer point to beneficial aftereffects, but still do not demonstrate harmful ones either. Aftereffects must vary by place, time, and person. But the first-order generalization that best fits the credible evidence is that at the margin in the US today, aftereffects offset in the long run what incapacitation does in the short run. Nagin (neutral, tie-breaker) says: Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior. This conclusion is not sufficiently firm to guide policy generally, though it casts doubt on claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects. What conclusions do we draw from these studies of the dose-response relationship between time served and reoffending? The one experimental study is suggestive of a preventive effect, but that effect may be attributable to incapacitation. Two of the matching studies point weakly to a criminogenic type dose-response relationship, but both are extremely dated. The Loughran et al. (2008) study suggests a possible criminogenic effect of placement but finds no linkage between time served and reoffending. We draw no conclusions from the results of the regression studies. Not only are results extremely varied, but more importantly all of the studies suffer from a fundamental analytical flaw. This flaw relates to the potential sensitivity of regression- based studies to specification errors in the model of the relationship of age and offending rate. In other words: Berger and Nagin think evidence is weak and it’s kind of a wash and maybe there are slight criminogenic effects; Roodman thinks there are strong criminogenic effects that (on the current margin) are sizeable enough to approximately cancel out the benefit from incapacitation. So What’s Up With Roodman? At the risk of repeating myself: this is the question upon which this whole essay hinges. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of deterrence are real but small. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of incapacitation are real and large. Everyone except Roodman agrees that aftereffects range from slightly beneficial to slightly detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration significantly decreasing crime. Only Roodman says that aftereffects are large and detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration having no effect on crime. So where does Roodman disagree with everyone else? My impression is that the main difference is that Roodman gives more weight to certain judge selection studies. These find that being randomly assigned to a lenient vs. strict judge (and therefore on average getting a short vs. long sentence) doesn’t change rearrest rates after X years from the time the sentence started. This X year period includes both the time spent serving the sentence, and the time after release when aftereffects might materialize - ie they include both incapacitation and aftereffects. Since these studies fail to find any net effect, and incapacitation effects must be beneficial and large, Roodman concludes that aftereffects must be detrimental and large. Then he reanalyzes several of the other studies that other people use to demonstrate no or beneficial aftereffects, and finds them less convincing after reanalysis. So who is right? Roodman gets his strongest evidence from studies of short sentences vs. shorter sentences (eg going from 0 to 1 years, or 1 to. 2 years). These are naturally where we would expect the fewest benefits from incapacitation. But they’re also where we would common-sensically expect the worst aftereffects. Someone going from zero prison to one year in prison has had their life, career, and relationships profoundly changed, in a way that someone going from ten years in prison to eleven years hasn’t. This is consistent with the National Sentencing Commission study above. They found that aftereffects trended worse the shorter the sentences got, but didn’t investigate any sentences shorter than 2-3 years. If the trend continues, sentences shorter than that could have aftereffects > incapacitation. So maybe Roodman is right about shorter sentences, and everyone else is right about longer sentences. Going from a month to a year in prison is so disruptive and criminogenic that it risks canceling the benefits of eleven extra months of incapacitation. But going from ten years to eleven years mostly just gives you the incapacitation. Marginal Revolution This highlights a problem with all of these studies: we can only talk about particular margins. Imagine a country which currently incarcerates zero people, trying to decide whether to move up to a policy of incarcerating one person. If you only incarcerate one person, it will be the baddest dude in the whole country. That guy really needs to be behind bars! And we’re not worried about turning him into a hardened criminal, because he’s already maximally bad. Here it’s obvious that benefits outweigh costs. Now imagine a country which incarcerates 50% of its population, trying to decide whether to move up to 50% + 1. At this point, you’re imprisoning someone who went a few miles over the speed limit. You gain no benefits from incapacitation (he wasn’t going to commit any crimes anyway), but you stand to lose a lot from aftereffects (he’s probably a totally normal law-abiding citizen, so there’s a very high risk of ruining his life and turning him into a more hardened criminal). Here it’s obvious that costs outweigh benefits. So the question isn’t “do the costs of prison outweigh benefits?”, but rather “at what point between incarcerating 0% and 50% of people does the cost of imprisoning one more person start outweighing the benefits?”, or even “at the current US incarceration rate of 0.75%, does the cost of imprisoning one more person outweigh the benefits?” In some sense, this is what we’ve been investigating the whole time - all of these studies are being conducted at the current margin. But this hides big differences between them. We’ve already seen that European studies get stronger results than American studies. That’s because European countries have incarceration rates of ~0.05%, compared to America’s ~0.75%. In theory, Europeans countries’ incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime. But I notice that the European countries we’re talking about here all have high recent new immigrant populations, and in Europe these groups commit more crimes per person than natives. So it’s possible that Europe is still adjusting to being a high-crime continent, whereas America has already adjusted by raising incarceration rates. So one possible conclusion is that the benefits of incarceration strongly outweigh costs in Europe. I think this is clearly true by American values - we seem to care more about preventing crime, and be less horrified by imprisonment, than the average European. But there are many different margins even within America. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is >1%; Massachusetts is <0.25%. Some of the variance reflects the criminality of each state’s population, but other variance reflects the values of each state’s voters and policy-makers. We haven’t been keeping great track of which state each of our studies comes from, but plausibly the marginal prisoner in Massachusetts is a badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana, and releasing him is more likely to have costs > benefits. Margins also differ across eras. US incarceration ranged from 0.2% in 1970 to 0.95% in 2007 to about 0.75% today. Our studies cover this entire time period. This is probably why Levitt found stronger incapacitation effects (studying the 1970s) than Owens or Lofstrom+Raphael (studying the 2000s). Finally, there are the margins across sentences we discussed earlier. Going from zero years in prison to one year is a bigger deal than going from ten to eleven. When we examine our original question - does extending the average prisoner’s sentence for one year substantially decrease crime, we find that there’s no single answer - it depends where we are on all of these margins. Roodman’s skeptical position is most plausible for shorter sentences in high-incarceration areas, and Berger’s pro-prison position is most plausible for longer sentences in low-incarceration areas. So Why Do People Keep Saying That Prison Doesn’t Decrease Crime? We began with the observation that criminologists tend to deny that prison decreases crime. We now know why Roodman thinks this: he idiosyncratically believes that aftereffects equal (and so cancel out) incapacitation. But nobody else has even gotten this far. So what’s everyone else’s position? The Vera Institute is an anti-incarceration think tank. They have a policy paper titled The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime. It says: There is a very weak relationship between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates. Although studies differ somewhat, most of the literature shows that between 1980 and 2000, each 10 percent increase in incarceration rates was associated with just a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate. This is just taking the (real, positive) effect of incarceration on crime, and calling it “very weak”. Research shows that each additional increase in incarceration rates will be associated with a smaller and smaller reduction in crime rates. We saw above that this is true, but I find it annoying to mention here in this kind of advocacy context - it’s also true of everything else in the world! When the Vera Institute publishes anti-mass-incarceration white papers, the 500th white paper will be less influential than the first. If I claimed that “research showed” this, and so they should stop publishing anti-mass-incarceration white papers, they would look at me like I’d gone insane. Get a life. The weak association between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates applies almost entirely to property crime. Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates. This is sort of true. Research finds a stronger effect of incarceration on property crimes than violent crimes, although Levitt does find a violent crime effect of minus one violent crime per incarceration-year. Partly this is because violent crimes are rarer than property crimes, and so studies are underpowered to find them. And partly it’s because most studies are done on mass releases of prisoners, where (for example) the state has to release 25% of the prison population to decrease overcrowding, but they get to choose which 25% - and states are smart enough not to release the murderers and psychos. Still, if Vera Institute’s preferred decarceration policy is also smart, then it won’t release the murderers and psychos either, and this point will stand. So my interpretation of Vera Institute is that they’re making some good points about ways that incarceration isn’t an infinitely powerful cure-all, but that it’s deceptive to summarize them as “incarceration doesn’t decrease crime”. What about other groups? Prison Policy Institute has a list of “crime myths”. Myth #7 is that “Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer”. They write: Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not serve as effective “examples” that would prevent new people from committing serious crimes. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences, and especially long sentences, do little to deter future crime Here they’re using “deterrence” in the strict sense (that is, in a way that doesn’t count incapacitation), noting that it’s small, and rounding off “small” to “zero”. I’ve looked at some other sites and think tanks that claim to have arguments against the “myth” that prison prevents crime, and they’re all using these same two tricks. Either they ignore incapacitation and focus only on deterrence + aftereffects. Or they imagine some hypothetical prison super-fan who believes that incapacitation is infinitely effective, prove that it’s less effective than this, declare victory over this fake opponent, and then summarize their win as “prison has no effect”. What Are The Costs Vs. Benefits Of Prison? So a more honest version of the claim that “prison has no effect on crime” might be “the effect of prison on crime is weak”. How weak is it? We already saw one way to answer this: it probably prevents on average 7 crimes/year (6 property + 1 violent), minus some amount, especially for short sentences, if you believe in criminogenic aftereffects. For the shortest sentences at the highest-incarceration margins, it’s possible for the effect to be zero or less. Another way to answer is with elasticities. If we increase in incarceration rate 10%, how much crime do we prevent at the current margins? Levitt estimates 3%, Cohen finds 0.5-7%, and Dhodnt finds -2% (ie prison increases crime) but this is an outlier. Spelman writes: Our best estimate of elasticity is “in the neighborhood of [3% drop in crime per 10% increase in incarceration]” but “[a]ny figure between [2% and 4%] can be defended, and we should not be too surprised to find that the result is anywhere between [1% and 5%]” This broadly agrees with our numbers from Sweden, California, and El Salvador above. Small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime. Large increases in incarceration cause large decreases in crime. If you doubled the incarceration rate, locking up an extra million people, then crime would decrease ~30% at current US margins (maybe less, because you’re shifting the margin and getting diminishing returns). Would more prison be good or bad? We’d need to do a cost-benefit analysis. Surprisingly, Roodman does the best work here: after making his claim that costs and benefits mostly cancel out, he admits that most people won’t believe him, and tries to estimate the effect size in the “devil’s advocate” case where everyone else is right and he is wrong. He starts with our previous finding that incapacitation prevents ~7 crimes a year, and returns to the incapacitation studies to see what types of crime are most affected. Then he adjusts for the low level of aftereffects that everyone else believes in. I’ve redone his results for clarity. This table shows the total number of each type of crime prevented by keeping the marginal prisoner in jail for one extra year: Why does prison prevent negative robberies? Roodman is subtracting the small aftereffects found by other researchers, and the data for rare crimes is noisy, so probably this is just an artifact. I round this to zero for the full analysis. If we’re trying to calculate the costs vs. benefits of imprisonment, we need to put a cost on all these crimes. This is hard to quantify - a robber may steal $100 worth of goods, but valuing his crime at $100 in costs ignores the disutility of (eg) living in fear Roodman uses two methods: first, he values a crime at the average damages that courts award to victims, including emotional damages. Second, he values it at what people will pay - how much money would you accept to get assaulted one extra time in your life? These estimates still exclude some intangible costs, like the cost of living in a crime-ridden community, but it’s the best we can do for now. Here are his answers (I’ve taken the geometric mean of the two methods): So one extra year of incarcerating the marginal criminal saves society $44,000 in crimes prevented. Now we add in the opposite side of the ledger: the costs of incarceration: According to Roodman, the average prisoner costs the state $31,000 per year. He got his data from 2008, and it’s since ballooned to about $60,000, but we’ll keep his number so that everything is from the same time period. (also, as always, California is more expensive - here it’s $120,000) Roodman also adds in the costs to the prisoner. He uses some surveys to value the disutility of the suffering caused by a year in prison at $50,000; additionally, the prisoner loses about $16,000 in earning potential. The end result: if you don’t count the costs to the prisoner themselves, and you don’t use the more modern number, and you’re not in an expensive state like California, then the marginal incarceration-year saves society about $13,000. If you do count those things, or you’re in an expensive state, the costs far outweigh the benefits. Realistically, most people won’t care about analyses like this. They’ll be more interested in the unquantifiable costs and benefits, including: The “benefit” of feeling like justice has been done and an evil deed has been avenged.

Inline links: Green and Winik (2010), Roach and Schanzenbach (2015), Rhodes (2018), incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime, The Vera Institute, The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime, a list of “crime myths”, Cohen, Dhodnt, Spelman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FI6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6865dbc9-fe86-4467-ab7b-829c1425a81b_189x133.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X8oH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13ddcc41-7e70-4a3c-bd25-c046f2bf811d_404x177.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ltt7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7484d67f-e24d-4511-ac8f-f7b20efed758_458x273.png

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Joey M Contact Info: Me[a t]joeym[period]org Time: Saturday, April 12th, 02:00 PM Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room 4. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35 SEATTLE Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[period]pearson[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, May 07th, 06:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, in the covered outdoor back area. I'll have a sign saying "Astral Codex Ten meetup." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: EA: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists Rationality: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35, https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[period]pearson[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, May 07th, 06:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, in the covered outdoor back area. I'll have a sign saying "Astral Codex Ten meetup." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: EA: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists Rationality: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/

Open Thread 380

May 05, 2025 · Original source

1: ACX meetups this week in Cape Town, Waterloo, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seattle, Boston, and San Diego. See the post for details.

Inline links: the post

June 18, 2025 · Original source

2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle

We proposed an initiative to adopt "approval voting" for Seattle primaries. After the initiative qualified for the Nov 2022 ballot, the City Council added an alternative proposing "instant-runoff voting" (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/competing-voting-reform-measures-make-seattles-november-ballot-after-city-council-oks-alternative/). While voting to do so, 3 councilmembers said that they hoped neither passed; one could see it as a way to prevent any election reform. Surprisingly, something did barely pass - the Council alternative (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/will-seattle-move-to-ranked-choice-voting-margin-narrows-friday/). It will be used in 2027. Seattle uses "nonpartisan blanket primaries," where all candidates appear on 1 ballot and 2 winners advance to the general (to run for 1 seat). For that situation, it's hard to guess whether this is better or worse than the status quo, or even which objective metrics to monitor. One metric might be the November 2027 Seattle general elections: unusually close general election results might indicate that the primary advanced 2 competitive candidates (who had to work for marginal votes), and less-close general elections - a blowout - might indicate the opposite.

This one is confusing to evaluate; the specific proposal failed, it encouraged its opponents to create a distraction proposal to sabotage it, and the distraction proposal unexpectedly passed, meaning that Seattle did get a more interesting voting method after all (although unclear whether it’s good). Is this a “success” of our grant?

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf, https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Joey Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org Time: Wednesday, September 10th, 6:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, 6717 Roosevelt Way NE Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98115. I'll be in the back covered area, with a sign that says "Astral Codex Ten Meetup". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf; https://discord.gg/6qk [remove this bit] jG5heDC

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf

Contact: Joey Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room #3. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004 with a page with "ACX" on it or one of its chairs. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf

Contact: Joey Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room #3. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004 with a page with "ACX" on it or one of its chairs. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf SEATTLE Contact: Joey Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org Time: Wednesday, September 10th, 6:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, 6717 Roosevelt Way NE Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98115. I'll be in the back covered area, with a sign that says "Astral Codex Ten Meetup". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf; https://discord.gg/6qk [remove this bit] jG5heDC

Crime As Proxy For Disorder

September 08, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.

Inline links: Berkeley, the list

Links For February 2026

February 05, 2026 · Original source

40: Did you know: Seattle’s new socialist mayor Katie Wilson is the daughter of evolutionary biologist, group selection fan, and Evolution Institute founder David Sloan Wilson. (h/t @MattZeitlin).

Inline links: David Sloan Wilson, @MattZeitlin

February 19, 2026 · Original source

…but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can’t really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here is an interesting graph of Seattle homeless sweeps, ie number of times the police acted against encampments: …but it doesn’t tell us whether encampments are increasing, or the police are taking them more seriously. It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action - aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People With Loud Boom Boxes In Public Places: All I have to say about this one is that it’s terrible and I hate it. Overall, it’s surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased: Littering seems to be down

Inline links: Here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tv-7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3458f2f2-becc-4a5b-bb89-3644d599d9d2_960x540.png

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Joey M Contact Info: me[@]joeym[.]org Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room 4. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf; https://discord.gg/6qk [remove this bit] jG5heDC

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35

Contact: Kamron Contact Info: kgbrinkerhoff[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 10:00 AM Location: Northeast corner of Leslie Groves Park near the pavilion. I will be wearing a purple shirt Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85R28P7Q+6F Notes: Please RSVP SEATTLE Contact: Nikita Sokolsky Contact Info: sokolx[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 26th, 6:00 PM Location: Stoup Brewing, 1158 Broadway, Seattle [look for the ACX sign] Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q Group Link: https://m.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/ Notes: Stoup serves both beer and non-alcoholic drinks. You can bring your own food.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85R28P7Q+6F, https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q, https://m.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/

Contact: Nikita Sokolsky Contact Info: sokolx[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 26th, 6:00 PM Location: Stoup Brewing, 1158 Broadway, Seattle [look for the ACX sign] Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q Group Link: https://m.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/ Notes: Stoup serves both beer and non-alcoholic drinks. You can bring your own food.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q, https://m.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/

Switzerland28 mentions across 28 issues

Switzerland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 28 times across 28 issues between March 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Taleb praises Switzerland, which is so federal that it's barely a single country"; "for example, a successful country like Switzerland"; "charter cities would be governed by some respected and competent foreign power like Switzerland". It most often appears alongside Germany, China, Japan.

Article page: Switzerland
Mention count: 28
Issue count: 28
First seen: March 23, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Antifragile March 23, 2021
Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Ivermectin November 23, 2021
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care? January 19, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems January 27, 2022
ACX Grants ++: The First Half February 03, 2022
Who Gets Self-Determination? March 30, 2022
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain May 13, 2022
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices May 10, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs July 28, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Links For February 2024 February 29, 2024
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People July 18, 2024
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers August 06, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024
The Compounding Loophole August 22, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID May 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession December 31, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Germany 18 shared issues
China 16 shared issues
Japan 16 shared issues
Scott 16 shared issues
France 15 shared issues

Source context

March 23, 2021 · Original source

It's not in this section, but Taleb feels the same way about countries. He praises Switzerland, which is so federal that it's barely a single country at all, and argues that its small size (or rather, the small size of each canton) has helped it stay one of the world's most stable and prosperous areas (also, Venice!). He argues that a large country isn't just a small country times X. Small countries operate partly on informal bonds of personal relationships; everybody has "skin in the game" regarding decisions. Larger countries don't just multiply everything by a constant, they switch from personal/Near Mode to bureaucratic/Far Mode and get gradually worse as they expand.

April 14, 2021 · Original source

In 2009, Nobel-winning economist Paul Romer proposed a new type of governance structure. Underdeveloped countries looking for an economic boost could donate territory to some entity considered non-corrupt and skilled at governance - for example, a successful country like Switzerland. The recipient entity would govern the territory as effectively as it could, bringing improved human rights and economic growth.

In the original plan, charter cities would be governed by some respected and competent foreign power like Switzerland. That fell apart for various reasons (worries about national sovereignty and colonialism, no sign Switzerland actually wanted to help) and the new version is that they'll be governed by a corporation full of visionaries and experts and other hopefully non-corrupt people. The corporation will only make money if the ZEDE becomes economically productive, corporations seem to like making money, so in theory this gives them an incentive to govern wisely.

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

June 28, 2021 · Original source

East Asian countries got rich by manufacturing. First it was "Made in Japan", then "Made in Taiwan", then "Made in China". At first each label was synonymous with low-quality knockoffs. Gradually they improved, until now "Made in Japan" has the same kind of prestige as Germany or Switzerland, and even China is losing some of its stigma.

Not every rich country gets rich by manufacturing. Studwell divides successful countries into three groups. First, small financial hubs, like Singapore, Dubai, or Switzerland. This is good work if you can get it, but it really only works for one small country per region; you can't have all of China be "a financial hub". In the 1980s, everyone was so impressed with Singapore and Hong Kong that they became the go-to models for development, and people incorrectly recommended liberal free market policies as the solution to everything. But the Singapore/Hong Kong model doesn't necessarily work for bigger countries, and most of the good financial hub niches are already filled by now.

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 Ivermectin

July 01, 2021 · Original source

All East Asian countries are way above the line of best fit, and Vietnam (GDP per capita of like 500) does better than Switzerland (GDP per capita of like 60,000). Meanwhile, Thailand/Malaysia/etc are all much richer than Vietnam and do much worse.

November 23, 2021 · Original source

I admit this is true and it sucks. I have no solution for it right now. I think of it as like the Large Hadron Collider. If the people who run the LHC ever become biased, we’re doomed, because there’s no way ordinary citizens can pool all of our small hadron colliders and get equally robust results. It’s just an unfair advantage that you get if you can afford a seventeen-mile long tunnel under Switzerland full of giant magnets.

Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?

January 19, 2022 · Original source

5: Individuals Purchase Private Insurance is typical of the US and Switzerland. Individuals use their own money to buy insurance from private companies, which may be ambiguously-for-profit-but-heavily-regulated (some US companies) or not-for-profit (other US companies, Switzerland). If someone can’t afford to do this, they might get government subsidies (Switzerland) or get shunted to Medicaid / be out of luck (US). Those private insurances negotiate rates with private doctors and hospitals as normal.

The two countries with mostly private systems - Switzerland and the US - are also the two most expensive systems (though see here for a contrarian take on this). But the similarity ends there; Switzerland’s system has one of the highest patient satisfaction ratings, but America has the lowest. When I asked Swiss people about this, they said everyone in Switzerland is rich, which rescues a lot of otherwise-unsustainable systems. Certainly rich people in America get good health care. So maybe Switzerland isn’t as different as the numbers make it look, and these kinds of systems are just bad.

Inline links: see here

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?

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems

January 27, 2022 · Original source

Having lived in both Germany and Switzerland, it is a red herring to put them into different categories, just because of the formal status of their insurance companies.

The main point is: In both systems, all insurance companies must offer exactly the same product, called basic insurance. It is not up to the company to decide which cases they cover or when they pay. This is regulated, and border case are resolved otherwise. (Some very minor variations are allowed in Germany, almost none in Switzerland). And they can't reject any costumer. In such a situation, the price will not depend on the type of company.

What actually makes a difference are very different things. In Germany, if I have disease X, then the doctor/hospital will be paid a fixed amount to treat X. But they have to treat it ("Behandlungspflicht"), they can't reject a difficult case, even though they lose money with it. In Switzerland, the doctor is paid proportional to the amount of time/effort treating X. In both cases, there are long and detailed price tables, all of which are independent of the insurance. I think this is the main reason why the Swiss system is more expensive than the German one. (It doesn't show in the table, but I suspect that it would show if you only consider basic insurance. Also, drugs are probably cheaper in Switzerland, relative to income.) For better or worse, Swiss doctors are not optimizing so hard for efficiency. I like the Swiss system better. Swiss doctors don't keep cutting me short. But it's expensive.

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

February 03, 2022 · Original source

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

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain

March 30, 2022 · Original source

The most “natural” way to organize states is around nationality, especially since the rise of mass communication. Where a state departs from this, it should be to realize some kind of interesting, cool, and distinct concept. Switzerland for instance is a confederation made up of pieces of three other nations, but the Swiss have created a highly interesting and distinct polity based on extreme decentralization, direct democracy, neutrality, and universal militia. For Switzerland to disappear would impoverish the world. But what is the objective in Ukraine? It is to become just another gay western democracy.

May 13, 2022 · Original source

Switzerland is a successful little country in Europe, and it may have the weirdest political system that you have ever heard of. After each election, the government is formed from all parties in the parliament, more or less proportional to the number of seats. (It has only seven members, so small parties are left out.) Currently, the government consists of two members from the social democrats, two from the liberal party, one from the moderate rights, and two from the far right party.

Inline links: the weirdest political system

Switzerland is an egalitarian society. It doesn't have a capital city because the Swiss didn't want to single out a city. Bern is the seat of government, close enough. Switzerland also doesn't have a head of state like the Queen, which is slightly awkward since the country can't make official state visits. (But the Swiss prefer anyway not to interact too much with other countries. They pondered 50 years before joining the UNO in 2002.) Switzerland also doesn't have a head of government. The closest thing is the mostly empty title "Bundespräsident", which rotates annually among the members of government. The title always goes to the member who hasn't held it for the longest time. (There are tie-breaking rules in case several members of the government never had it.) But the Bundespräsident doesn't really have additional power.

Inline links: joining the UNO

For such an egalitarian country, it is not surprising that Switzerland is federal, it consists of 26 cantons (similar to US states, just smaller). Of course, every canton can make its own laws, and most cantons have parliaments for that. But the canton Glarus, with a tiny population of 12,000, does not have a parliament. Instead, they have a Landsgemeinde: once a year, the citizens of Glarus assemble at a big open space, and decide jointly on new laws, the tax rates for the next year, and important offices like judges. Every citizen can rise to speak on any of the discussed items, and can propose changes (which even go through sometimes).

Inline links: Landsgemeinde

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)

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TCV (Switzerland, 2002)

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

April 10, 2023 · Original source

BASEL, SWITZERLAND Contact: NONE Contact Info: NONE Time: Thursday, May 04th, 07:30 PM Location: Valhalla Bar Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9HH3P+78 Notes: (Skyler, Scott’s Meetup Czar here. The Basel organizer had to cancel and be elsewhere. I’ve left this up because a meetups everywhere event doesn’t need much active organizing so if people want to show up and talk, this is still a good schelling point to meet up and talk! Just know that there is no organizer.)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FV9HH3P+78

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND Contact: Jan Contact Info: acxmeetuplausanne[at]proton[dot]me Time: Monday, May 08th, 07:00 PM Location: Louis Bourget Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8GH9Q+PW

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR8GH9Q+PW

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB Contact Info: acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, April 29th, 03:00 PM Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+RG

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+RG

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

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs

May 19, 2023 · Original source

When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

July 28, 2023 · Original source

He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan W Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Scandic Continental near Stockholm Central Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share Notes: Please RSVP so I know if we'll be more than about 7: if so, we may need to find a bigger place. Switzerland BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel Contact Info: Dd14214[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 17th, 12:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, Haller statue Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+3G Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR, https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share, https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+3G

BERN, SWITZERLAND Contact: Daniel Contact Info: Dd14214[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 17th, 12:00 PM Location: Grosse Schanze, Haller statue Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+3G Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+3G

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Valts Contact Info: valtskr[at]inbox[dot]lv Time: Sunday, September 24th, 10:00 AM Location: Alpine Botanical Garden of Meyrin, round chair thingy in northern part, I'll be in a tie-dyed shirt Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR863HM+23R Notes: Meetup is going to be in English

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR863HM+23R

February 29, 2024 · Original source

20: Related: Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis: are we getting dumber because more intelligent people are less likely to have children? Answer: this is happening more in poorer countries, less in richer ones. IQ decline per decade “ranges from as low as 0.01 points in the Estonia and Switzerland to 0.65 points in Panama, Romania, and North Macedonia”. USA is 0.38, which I think agrees with other estimates, although realistically immigration effects will dominate. “The fact that the rate of decline is so fast implies that even if IQ differences between nations are completely environmentally determined today, over the coming decades there may still be a significant [genetic] divergence between them.”

Inline links: Sebastian Jensen at CSPI looks into the dysgenic hypothesis

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

March 30, 2024 · Original source

GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR Switzerland GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Carlos Rafael Giudice Contact Info: carlosr[dot]giudice[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 6:00 PM Location: La Jonquille, Chem. du 23-Août 3, 1205 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR, https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Contact: Carlos Rafael Giudice Contact Info: carlosr[dot]giudice[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 6:00 PM Location: La Jonquille, Chem. du 23-Août 3, 1205 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FR8643M+6W

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB Contact Info: acxzurich[at]proton[dot]me Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden. If it rains we will be under the roof inside the chinese garden (free entry). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+V8 Notes: Please drop me a line at the email address given to be added to the mailing list.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+V8

July 18, 2024 · Original source

I also don’t think we should wait until we’re a more functional state to solve this problem. But the fact that we have to solve it in spite of dysfunction means we might need to be creative rather than steal the solution Switzerland or somewhere uses.

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche

August 08, 2024 · Original source

[Nietzsche] contracted dysentery and diphtheria; when those cleared up he started experiencing the headaches and nausea that would recur for the rest of his life...[He] never had any lovers. He proposed three times to Lou Andreas-Salomé, and was rejected three times, but she did sleep with his friend Paul Rée, and allowed Nietzsche to third-wheel in their travels around Switzerland.

The Compounding Loophole

August 22, 2024 · Original source

The linked Reddit answer names a factory in Switzerland, but some other sources give a longer list of factories, most of which were in China.

Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place). Switzerland ZURICH, SWITZERLAND Contact: MB Contact Info: acxzurich[at]proton[d ot]me Time: Saturday, September 28th, 03:00 PM Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden. If it rains we will go under the roof inside the garden (free entry). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+VF Notes: Snacks and picnic blankets are optional, but appreciated. Drop me a line at the email above to be added to the mailing list (future meetups will be announced there, we meet monthly).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/, https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+VF

May 29, 2025 · Original source

Also - “I find it a useful discipline to have an initial approach to the problem that starts with this question ‘if you can’t find poverty-fighting domestic institutions in a country to fund directly, with sufficient trust, perhaps you should be giving aid elsewhere.’” Why? Switzerland has great institutions - should we give our charity money there? There’s a obvious tension between the two goals of giving charity to countries dysfunctional enough to need it, but functional enough to use it effectively. Existing international aid is a complex balance between these two goals, and using (functional) US institutions to help get charity into (dysfunctional) countries is one proposed solution. There are probably others, and maybe Tyler has one in mind, but he doesn’t argue for it here, just gives a sort of faux-profound slogan.

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Gary Contact Info: acxstockholm[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 12:27 PM Location: We'll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That's the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I'll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q Switzerland ZÜRICH Contact: Vitor Contact Info: acxzurich[a t]proton[period]me Time: Saturday, September 6th, 3:00 PM Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden (In case of rain we are inside the garden) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+VH Notes: We have an email list and a signal group to announce ~monthly meetups. Write an email to be added.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q, https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+VH

December 31, 2025 · Original source

If you look into the rents in Germany and Switzerland (the ones I know about), there are two very different measures of rents, even after adjusting for flat sizes etc:

I don’t know whether it is the same for large US cities. The housing markets are different, for example in Germany (and Switzerland?) there are much fewer home owners than in the US. But on this side of the Atlantic, I think this is a very major factor for why many young people are struggling with their rents.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Carl Contact Info: carl[.]brannstroem[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 12:28 PM Location: We’ll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That’s the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I’ll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q 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. It’s more normal to show up and be a little nervous than the opposite. You will make great company with other people who are also a little nervous ?? Switzerland BASEL Contact: Ian Walker-Sperber Contact Info: hello[@]ianwsperber[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM Location: Unternehmen Mitte, Gerbergasse 30, 4001 Basel. I will grab one of the tables to the right of the main entrance. I will put up an ACX MEETUP sign and wear a red hat. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9HH4Q+M7 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JZD [remove this bit] v3OraaDrJL1cHdwyd66?mode=gi_t Notes: RSVPs welcome to help for planning!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q, https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q, https://plus.codes/8FV9HH4Q+M7

Soviet Union27 mentions across 27 issues

Soviet Union is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between March 09, 2021 and August 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Soviet Union tried the same thing"; "There follows some discussion of the Soviet Union and China"; "the rise of the Soviet Union in the Cold War". It most often appears alongside United States, China, France.

Article page: Soviet Union
Mention count: 27
Issue count: 27
First seen: March 09, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Consequences Of Radical Reform March 09, 2021
Book Review: Global Economic History April 21, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies June 03, 2021
Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings? December 11, 2021
Bounded Distrust January 26, 2022
Who Gets Self-Determination? March 30, 2022
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping April 06, 2022
Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties" June 09, 2022
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Book Review: The Man From The Future July 13, 2022
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle July 22, 2022
Your Book Review: Viral July 30, 2022
23 April 25, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Your Book Review: Lying for Money May 26, 2023
Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning June 10, 2023
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind July 14, 2023
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs July 28, 2023
Dictator Book Club: Putin August 03, 2023
More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face" August 04, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Putin August 11, 2023
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke" May 07, 2024
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won August 09, 2024
In Search Of AI Psychosis August 26, 2025

United States 14 shared issues
China 12 shared issues
France 12 shared issues
Russia 12 shared issues
Germany 11 shared issues

Source context

March 09, 2021 · Original source

Do I believe they have a tendency to generally make things better? I'm not sure. One thing I'm still chewing over was a throwaway line in the paper saying that of course getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth, look at Japan and Germany after WWII. The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.

April 21, 2021 · Original source

There follows some discussion of the Soviet Union and China. Both did this well, but the Soviet economy stagnated anyway in the 1970s. Allen seems kind of unsure about why this happened, and is willing to entertain both the possibility it was random and contingent (maybe the planners made a mistake in trying to pour so much investment into parts of Siberia that weren't really habitable), and the possibility that planned economies are fundamentally better at catch-up growth than at the technological frontier (central planners can force people to make steel mills if you know steel mills are next up on your tech tree, but if you don't know what's next on the tech tree it's hard to plan for it). This wasn't a very conclusive section, but I appreciated the confirmation that the Soviet economy actually worked pretty okay until 1970 or so, then became a basketcase for kind of unclear reasons. The author is most impressed with China, which seems to have gotten this part right (maybe by accident): they communismed until they reached the technological frontier, then uncommunismed in time to get on the path to being a normal developed country. GEH:VSI isn't very big on prescriptions, but I think it would probably suggest having a pretty heavily planned economy while you're playing catch-up, and then unwinding it once you're close to where you want to be.

Inline links: the confirmation

It explicitly disavows explanations that lean too heavily on some populations being better (smarter, harder working, etc) than others, or on narratives of colonial exploitation - sorry if you were looking for anything too juicy. Given its brevity, it can only gesture at justifications for this choice. It's skeptical of the Protestant work ethic because, however much it matched experience in 18-whatever, today "Catholic Italy [is richer than] Protestant Britain" (is this true? Britain has higher GDP today, but Italy was higher when this book was written) It's skeptical of ideas that some countries are "traditionalist" and resistant to change because of [long list of those countries adopting various profitable innovations] - for example African farmers now mostly grow more productive New World crops (but couldn't countries be willing to change in some ways but traditionalist in others?). The reluctance to invoke colonialism too heavily is even less well-explained, but I think it relies on differences between never-colonized countries - for example, Russia and the Ottomans lagged behind the West in much the same way as Asia and Latin America, and even Austria lagged Britain (GEH:VSI does talk about particular problems with colonial policies when they come up, as part of its general policy survey). Overall I think of these exclusions more as a commitment to a paradigm: what would it look like to pursue a project of understanding global economic history without invoking either of these tempting but curiosity-stopping explanations?

Other countries tried the Standard Model but couldn't quite get it to work. Mexico tried, but was screwed over by geography and racial inequality. Mexico's industrial heartland is in the center of the country, in the mountains near Mexico City, and there wasn't a great way to get products to the coast where they could be traded with Europe. Also, its racial caste system made the elites nervous about educating the (mostly mestizo) masses, so they were never able to really get the education prong worked out (the US had the same issue with blacks, but blacks are only 12% of Americans, and mestizos are ~80% of Mexicans). The independent countries of western South America had similar problems. Russia tried this a little, but also had crappy geography and serfdom. Other countries were mostly European colonies at this point; their colonial masters did a pretty good job with Prong 1 (especially building railroads), but absolutely banned Prong 2 and were generally weak on the others.

Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies

May 21, 2021 · Original source

In singing praises of America, Zeihan noted that its market is still the largest in the world, and will remain that way in the Disorder. What about China? He acknowledges that everyone sees it as the future. Yet he objects to this perspective, comparing it to the same American fears about the rise of the Soviet Union in the Cold War and Japan in the 1980s. His analysis – surprise – is rooted in its awful demographic pyramid (shown above) and geography.

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

If you’re a fan of our free-trade world, then you should probably pause to ask some questions about its potential demise. Zeihan notes that nearly all participants in Bretton Woods have suspended military activity (other than in connection with American efforts), allowing small countries to exist and even thrive (citing Slovakia, Macedonia, Korea, and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”), allowing former rivals to focus on development (citing the EU and its expansion into Southern and Central Europe, and Russian firms being able to borrow at favorable rates despite a history of sovereign defaults and fraud), and leading to mass industrialization. In short, “The last seventy years have been incredible.”

June 03, 2021 · Original source

Poor Tainter. He published this the year before the Soviet Union underwent what distinctly looks like ‘rapid collapse’. I think we can cross out “individual nations won’t fracture” as a failed prediction. But I’m puzzled he made it without specifically carving aside an exception for mega-states – he notes multiple times elsewhere that there are territories that are a net loss to conquer because the cost of administration and other complexities outweighs the benefits.

Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?

December 11, 2021 · Original source

He was even a co-signer of this famous open letter to Gorbachev in 1990 urging the Soviet premier to establish a Land Value Tax to provide a stable basis for the new economy as Russia struggled to rise from the collapse of communism. Other co-signers included four Nobel Laureates: Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, James Tobin, and William Vickrey, not to mention William Baumol of Baumol's cost disease. Unfortunately, the Russian authorities went with Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs' "shock therapy" instead, and the rest is history, as anyone who lived through the post-Soviet chaos can tell you.

Inline links: famous open letter, Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, James Tobin, William Vickrey, William Baumol, Baumol's cost disease, shock therapy, rest is history

Bounded Distrust

January 26, 2022 · Original source

But also: some people are better at this skill than I am. Journalists and people in the upper echelons of politics have honed it so finely that they stop noticing it’s a skill at all. In the Soviet Union, the government would say “We had a good harvest this year!” and everyone would notice they had said good rather than glorious, and correctly interpret the statement to mean that everyone would starve and the living would envy the dead.

March 30, 2022 · Original source

The territories of Ukraine remained a part of the Russian state for the next 120 years. Russia’s imperial authorities systematically persecuted expressions of Ukrainian culture and made continuous attempts to suppress the Ukrainian language. In spite of this, a distinct Ukrainian national consciousness emerged and consolidated in the course of the 19th century, particularly among the elites and intelligentsia, who made various efforts to further cultivate the Ukrainian language. When the Russian Empire collapsed in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1917, the Ukrainians declared a state of their own. After several years of warfare and quasi-independence, however, Ukraine was once again partitioned between the nascent Soviet Union and newly independent Poland. From the early 1930s onwards, nationalist sentiments were rigorously suppressed in the Soviet parts of Ukraine, but they remained latent and gained further traction through the traumatic experience of the ‘Holodomor’, a disastrous famine brought about by Joseph Stalin’s agricultural policies in 1932-33 that killed between three and five million Ukrainians. Armed revolts against Soviet rule were staged during and after World War II and were centred on the western regions of Ukraine that had been annexed from Poland in 1939-40. It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Ukraine gained lasting independent statehood of its own – but Ukrainian de facto political entities struggling for their autonomy or independence had existed long before that.

LSE: Fact-Checking The Kremlin’s Version Of Russian History:

Inline links: Fact-Checking The Kremlin’s Version Of Russian History

The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.

Inline links: Ukraine is not even a state!, Putin declared, stated, Medvedev told

Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties"

April 06, 2022 · Original source

But what about the Soviet Union? Its government was similar to China’s, but after Stalin, no subsequent leader was able to fully centralize power. Just luck? One system keeps going for forty years without collapsing, and another collapses after twenty-five, not for any particular reason, just because of who held what position when? I’m not sure.

June 09, 2022 · Original source

Taken as an absolute claim, it's meaningless. Both US parties are on the same side of center? What center? By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing?

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal Similarly, the Soviet Union did not violate the sovereignty of states when it invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of its government in 1979, and similarly in Syria in 2015. When Russia violated international law, most notably Georgia in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the goal was occupation rather than removing their governments, killing their leaders, or fundamentally remaking their societies (the book was published before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). The US is truly singular in violating international law: Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power

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

Yugoslavia Humanitarian Intervention (1995, 1999): UNSC sanctioned NATO’s intervention against ethnic Serbs’ massacre of ethnic Bosnians in Srebrenica and Sarajevo in 1995, but not the so-called “illegal but legitimate” 1999 bombing of Kosovo to stop the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnians as NATO would have been vetoed by Russia and China.

Book Review: The Man From The Future

July 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Under a succession of Presidents, the US threatened Mexico with war if redress wasn't provided. We went to arbitration in 1839 with a panel of 2 Mexicans, 2 Americans, and the representative of the King of Prussia.

Let’s compare this to the current topic of concern, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The global outcry against Russia, the massive and continued use of sanctions to try to isolate and punish Russia, and the supplying of arms to Ukraine to help them fight off Russia -- all of these are aspects of a set of expectations about the legal status of war that we have inherited from the Peace Pact, a set of expectations that H&S name the New World Order. None of this would have been allowed under the Old World Order.

July 13, 2022 · Original source

In the late 1940s, there was no nuclear second strike capability. Whoever launched a nuclear first strike would just win totally with no downside. By minimax, as soon as the Soviet Union developed nuclear bombs, they would make the move that best served their interests - ie launch a nuclear first strike and win totally. So by minimax, America’s best option was to make the appropriate move given that that was true - which was clearly to nuke the USSR first, before they could get bombs themselves.

That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe. Although most of the weird overachievement comes from Ashkenazi Jews in particular - those from Eastern Europe - there were Ashkenazim in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, etc. So why Hungary?

In the last post, I came up with a few theories. Places too far east (eg Russia) had more anti-Semitism and less education. And the rest of Central Europe actually did have have lots of Jewish or half-Jewish geniuses during this period - Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example.

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

July 22, 2022 · Original source

Debord in France, 1954 Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We’ll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out. Strap in, boys - we’ve got a bumpy road ahead of us. I. A More Perfect Union The spectacle is never outright defined; or rather, the entire book is a series of definitions, each approaching from a different angle. What Debord describes is really a combination of two things; the total triumph of capitalism, and the rise of mass media. It might seem strange for Debord to declare capitalism victorious at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was very much a superpower, and Nixon had yet to go to China. But as a real Marxist, he had already arrived at what would become the historical consensus - communism, as practiced, was merely an inferior cousin to its free market foes. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is the best system for the accumulation of capital. And despite their pretensions, communist societies had the same goals as every modern nation - wealth, prosperity, innovation, and growth. In Debord’s reading of history, “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.” The revolutions of the previous centuries were economic in nature, replacing kings with merchant princes. As a result, all societies began to judge themselves in almost purely economic terms, regardless of their ideological leanings. [2] Media developed symbiotically with capitalism, and together these twin forces changed the world. Twentieth-century forms of media were one-way communications. The owners of society were also the owners of the media, and the messaging reflected this power dynamic. Long before the general public became disillusioned with the news, Debord was woke to the fact that ‘the free press’ was largely a myth. He saw the shaping of the narrative firsthand, and well knew the ability of the media to amplify or ignore as convenient. As the spectacle conquered the earth, it took on different forms. Debord differentiated between the concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of the spectacle: Communism and fascism were the primary examples of the concentrated spectacle, with totalitarian control of the economy and the media centralized in the hands of the State.

Inline links: The Society of the Spectacle

These takes are getting spicy. I’m running out of bumper sticker real estate. But Debord’s not done, not by a long shot. You may be ready to tap out, but here he comes from the top rope with - I shit you not - Russian disinformation.

The relatively new concept of disinformation was recently imported from Russia… It is always openly employed by a power.. in order to maintain what is established; and always in a counter-offensive role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile or at least rival powers, and must have been intentionally falsified by malevolence. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: that is called psychosis. Unlike the pure lie, disinformation.. must inevitably contain a degree of truth but deliberately manipulated by a skillful enemy… In short, disinformation would be the bad usage of the truth.

July 30, 2022 · Original source

In April 1979, anthrax escaped from a biological warfare lab in Sverdlovsk, USSR, resulting in at least 64 deaths. This leak was successfully covered up by the Soviet authorities for more than a decade, with the KGB confiscating hospital records of the victims. The truth was only discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a proper scientific investigation was finally allowed in 1992 and 1993.

In 1977 there was an influenza pandemic, now called the Russian Flu, which ultimately killed about 700,000 people. It was discovered that this flu strain was nearly genetically identical to a strain that had previously been common in the 1950s, but had since disappeared, except for samples that were being studied in research labs. It’s now thought that the 1977 Russian Flu was the result of vaccine trials gone awry, in which military recruits became infected after being exposed to live attenuated H1N1 virus.

April 25, 2023 · Original source

Because it relies on scarce human expertise, forecasting is only used for a small number of questions. This motivates using ML to automate forecasting, e.g. by automating human information retrieval (finding news sources), reasoning (to decide if some evidence bears on a forecast), and quantitative modeling. ML models may also have some advantages over human forecasters. Models can read through text or data much faster than humans and can discern patterns in noisy high-dimensional data that elude humans. When it comes to learning, humans cannot be trained on past data in manner simulating actual forecasting (e.g. How likely was the Soviet Union’s collapse from the viewpoint of 1980?) because they know the outcomes – but past data can be used for ML models.

Inline links: Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

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.

… 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: Lying for Money

May 26, 2023 · Original source

To some, that sentence might seem to uncomfortably rhyme with Lavrentiy Beria's classic "show me the man and I'll show you the crime." In the case of the Soviet Union, the implied advice was "don't become an enemy of the state." In the case of Clarence Saunders, the implied advice is "don't become an enemy of the market":

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

June 10, 2023 · Original source

I see Charon and Weinert’s story, the Guillaume du Vintrais’ story, as a positive validation of Frankl’s theories. And yes, we may remember that “no man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny”, and indeed, their destiny was unique and poetic. But the Soviet Union gave us so much “experimental” material to base on, that there are bound to be similarities between theirs and thousands of others.

In our conversation my friend called Russian troops “orcs”. Of course, this is not his invention — this somewhat derogatory term has been used at least since the 80s, and obviously, its ubiquity has raised manifold since the start of the war, especially by Ukranians. Being Russian myself, I was always somewhat irked, but never seriously bothered by this word. And, of course, after being bombed by Russian forces, and seeing first-hand some of the atrocities of war, one can use much harsher terms as well. But this time “orcs” got me thinking.

Tolkien knew about this problem and tried to write his way out of it. He couldn’t directly “George-Lucas” it, but he famously changed the origin of Orcs several times. They were Elves enslaved and corrupted by Morgoth, then they were fully “brooded” by Morgoth, then they were “beasts of humanized shape”, or possibly, results of forced mating between Elves and beasts. Each one of those retcons brought more problems. The more canonical version, I believe, is still the “corrupted Elves” theory; at least it appears in more early texts and is corroborated by the Lord of the Rings. It certainly has dark implications for the good characters, both by modern standards and those contemporary to Tolkien. This is a whole other topic for another discussion. But it also recontextualizes the whole “Russians are orcs” thing.

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind

July 14, 2023 · Original source

When we write down a thought, we give it an existence separate from our own. We free up our working memories. Our ideas stop being things we see the world through, and become objects of contemplation in their own right. (How often have I had a world-shaking idea, only to write it down and realize it’s moronic?) But Egan suspects there’s more — and he points to the famous research of the psychologist Alexander Luria, who trekked into the hinterlands of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and asked a simple question:

Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs

July 28, 2023 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

Vladimir Putin, age 6, with his official mother Maria Putina. As for the investigative journalist deaths, it would be more surprising for a Russian investigative journalist of the early 2000s not to die horribly. Both were researching other things about Putin besides his childhood. and had made themselves plenty of enemies. Russo was in Chechnya at the time, another known risk factor for horrible death. I wouldn’t over-update on this. Still, I found the adoption controversy interesting as a metaphor for everything about Putin. Vladimir Putin really did seem to appear on Earth - or at least in the corridors of power in Russia - fully formed. At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble. This culminated in his 2000 appointment as Yeltsin’s successor when “The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was.” My source for this quote is The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist. As always in Dictator Book Club, we’ll go through the story first, then discuss if there are any implications for other countries trying to avoid dictatorship. II. The Agony And The Ex-Stasi Officially, Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 to Vladimir Putin Sr. and Maria Putina, two middle class laborers who had lost their previous two children in the hellish Nazi siege of Leningrad a decade before. Putin’s paternal grandfather was Spiridon Putin, “personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin”1. Also: [Spiridon] Putin worked at the famous Hotel Astoria, where he once served Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin gave Putin a gold ruble as he was impressed with the cuisine and noticed the similarity between their names. …but his family was otherwise normal. Putin was a mediocre student; schoolmates who remember him at all recall that he was easily-offended, often got in physical fights, and always won. Around age ten, Putin got a burning desire to join the KGB. He credits the many pro-KGB propaganda kids’ TV shows of the time, but Gessen suspects that his father might also have been a secret KGB informant. Schoolmates remember he kept a portrait of the founder of the KGB on his desk. And Putin’s otherwise mediocre transcript was boosted by excellent grades in German; KGB employment required a foreign language. And so: At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best. To everyone’s surprise, mediocre student Putin applied to university and got in. Then: All through my university years I kept waiting for that man I spoke to at KGB headquarters to remember me . . . but they had forgotten all about me, because I had been a schoolboy when I came . . . But I remembered they do not sign up volunteers, so I made no moves myself. Four years went by. Silence. I decided the issue was closed and started looking around for other possible job assignments . . . But when I was in my fourth year, I was contacted by a man who said he wanted to meet with me. He did not say who he was, but somehow I knew right away. Putin trained relentlessly, both at the official KGB school and in his hobby of judo, though he took time out to marry his sweetheart: Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married - nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years - an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russia standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married which made him a member of a tiny minority - less than ten percent - of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually maanged to get married and have two children. “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says ‘ Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.” They were married three months later. Life as a KGB officer was disappointing. Gessen describes it as sitting in a Leningrad office, cutting articles out of newspapers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin probably worked in “counterintelligence”, which meant the newspaper articles he cut out were about dissidents. There was no interesting dissent in Leningrad in the late 1970s. After five years, Putin got his “big break”; he was assigned to be a spy in East Germany. This, too, underwhelmed him. The East Germany assignment consisted of sitting in the KGB offices in Dresden, cutting articles out of East German papers, and sending them to superiors who would ignore them. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds - a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all apeearances, he was seriously depressed […] He spent most days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office) . . . Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. Putin’s biggest success in his [five year] stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian universtiy student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born US Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks. In 1989, the Soviet Union began to collapse. East Germans protested in front of KGB headquarters; Putin was sent out to negotiate and got screamed at and insulted. HQ refused to defend them or even give them orders, before finally telling them to burn all their records - the records Putin had wasted the past five years of his life meticulously collecting. He and his fellow spies spent a few tense days shoveling their lives’ work into stoves while people outside hurled curses at them. He stayed and watched briefly as his East German friends and colleagues were fired and banned from all good jobs for collaborating with the Soviet occupiers - then was recalled home to Leningrad, where nobody had any idea what he should do. Feeling abandoned, even betrayed, he handed in his resignation to the KGB. Back in Leningrad, he briefly got a position at the university as “assistant chancellor for foreign relations” on the grounds that he was one of the only people in the city who had ever been to a foreign country. After only a few months, the new mayor offered him a high position in city government, for the same reason. This was Anatoly Sobchak, a two-faced politician who had climbed to the top by convincing both the pro-democracy protesters and the communists he was on their side. Gessen speculates he promoted Putin both because of his foreign experience, and because “it’s better to choose your own KGB handler than to have one assigned to you.” Wait, hadn’t Putin already resigned from the KGB? Yes. He did this several times throughout his life, always at dramatic moments. When the next dramatic moment arrived, he would hand in his resignation again. Partly this is because Putin is lying about all of this, and he can’t keep his lies straight. But partly it’s because resigning from the KGB is futile; once you’re a part of the network, they will always feel free to call on you when needed. Putin could resign as often as it felt dramatically appropriate to do so, secure that this wouldn’t affect his membership in any way. Also, it seems unclear whether you can disband the KGB. Around this point in the story, the Soviet generals launched their coup, Yeltsin defeated them, and the KGB was replaced by various other security agencies more congenial to a newly democratic state. But everyone continues to act as if this isn’t true, and Putin continues to call on and be called upon by his KGB connections. I don’t have a great sense of exactly how this worked - maybe the new security agency, the FSB, had strong institutional continuity? Maybe the formal network gracefully transitioned into an informal one? Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

Inline links: The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin, Spiridon Putin, 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPkC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d3eeff2-c944-4f19-a8e1-5134d65ba9be_945x656.webp, source, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2bxW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F105ae659-4f17-4a8d-a8cb-24dcd106af93_770x705.png, Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with

Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

Inline links: source, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2bxW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F105ae659-4f17-4a8d-a8cb-24dcd106af93_770x705.png, Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with

Why were the security services so pliant? The closest MWAF comes to an answer is describing the near-trauma reaction that Putin and his colleagues had when the Soviet Union abandoned them. It suggests that some relic of the KGB ethos or network survived the fall of the USSR, hated its democratic successor, and got reconsolidated by Putin in his FSB. Their loyalty was originally to some sort of spirit-of-the-KGB ethos and not to existing democratic Russia, and it was simple for Putin to transmute that to loyalty to him personally, who promised to restore Soviet-era norms.

More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"

August 04, 2023 · Original source

During the glastnost days near the fall of the Soviet Union, activists set up “Hyde Park”, named for the famous London location - an event where people would speak freely in public about their opinions. The authorities disbanded them, but they came back, and:

The Soviet national anthem that had been scrapped in favor of the Glinka had a complicated history. The music, written by Alexander Alexandrov, appeared in 1943, with lyrics supplied by a children’s poet named Sergei Mikhalkov. The anthem’s refrain praised “the Party of Lenin, the Party of Stalin / Leading us to the triumph of Communism.” After Stalin died and, in 1956, his successor Nikita Khruschev denounced “the cult of personality,” the refrain could no longer be performed, so the anthem lost its lyrics. The instrumental version would be performed for twenty-one years while the Soviet Union sought the poet and the words to express its post-Stalinist identity. In 1977, when I was in the fourth grade, the anthem suddenly acquired lyrics, which we schoolchildren had to learn as soon as possible. For this purpose, every school notebook manufactured in the Soviet Union that year bore the new lyrics to the old national anthem on the back cover, where multiplication tables or verb exceptions had once resided. The new lyrics had been written by the same children’s poet, who was, by now, sixty-four years old. The refrain now lauded “the Party of Lenin, the force of the people.”

The [new post-Soviet Russian] national anthem posed an even more implacable challenge. In 1991, the Soviet anthem had been scrapped in favor of “The Patriotic Song”, a lively tune by the 19th-century composer Mikhail Glinka. But this anthem had no lyrics; moreover, lyrics proved impossible to write: the rhythmic line dictated by the music was so short that any attempt to set words to it - and Russian words tend to be long - lent it a definite air of absurdity. A number of media outlets ran contests to choose the lyrics to go with the Glinka, but the entries, invariably, were suitable only for the entertainment of the editorial staff, and little by little chipped away at the legitimacy of the anthem.

Highlights From The Comments On Putin

August 11, 2023 · Original source

The Soviet Union post-Brezhnev was made up of a series of power blocks in negotiation with each other. Brenzhev was about as democratic as a Soviet leader could have realistically been (which is not very). The Soviet Union had always had a conflict between the security services and the military going all the way back to Stalin's time. Generally in direct confrontation the military won as with Khruschev or in 1991. But the security services could gain dominance when the political elite sided with them.

The security services, being Communist security services, had very little obligation to maintain more than the appearance of law and order. Their primary goal was protecting the party and waging the spy war abroad. As you can imagine, this involved all kinds of shady dealings and ties and international connections. When the Soviet state collapsed they attempted to preserve it (1991 again). When they failed they... just kind of kept all those contacts with criminals, foreign entities, and untraceable bank accounts for bribes or whatever. They never really accepted the fall of the Soviet Union and resented they had lost the confrontation in the early 1990s. But there was also money to be made in the new Russia and they set about making it through crime and through oligarchs.

Putin was in many senses a post-Soviet reaction by this KGB-oligarch-criminal nexus. He had no interest in literally returning to communism. But once these surviving KGB networks (criminal, intelligence, business) saw he had a chance of getting the presidency they all backed him to the hilt. And it worked. Putin got into power, the security services returned to prominence. Putin didn't do anything different than what tens of thousands of similar minded thinkers would have done. And they aren't loyal to Putin more than the changes Putin represents. But Putin, uniquely, attempted to chart a somewhat different course because he wasn't that successful post-Soviet. He joined politics partly as a way to get out of being a cab driver and then, through hook and crook and more than a little luck, was in a position where he could be boosted into a useful position.

Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"

August 25, 2023 · Original source

AR have such a restrictive definition of sustained growth that it even excludes episodes of this length: South Korea before democratisation (1960-94), the Soviet Union (1930s to 1970s), Argentina (late 19th to early 20th century), and China (1978-?) are all explicitly written off as unsustainable growth under extractive institutions. This is consistent with their theory but rules out what most people would consider key data points.

May 07, 2024 · Original source

To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.

Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won

August 09, 2024 · Original source

Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.

Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.

The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war. Battles are Overrated Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity. Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal. Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end. Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on. In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories. The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons. Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000). In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk—less than a month’s worth of AFV production. If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter—if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter—what did? Allied Air and Sea Operations Won the War In O’Brien’s methodology, we should look at what the Axis spent its productive effort making and consider what Allied actions slowed that productive effort. In both theaters, the answer is shocking. The Germans spent relatively little productive effort on tanks, focusing far more on aircraft, submarines, and vengeance weapons (i.e., proto-cruise missiles and rockets). The Japanese spent heavily on aircraft as well, but also a tremendous amount on freighters and oil tankers. The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield. By 1944-45, the Germans and Japanese could not use their economies to arm and supply their armies on the battlefield, leading to their inevitable defeat. In the European war, American and British airpower: (a) directly destroyed a significant amount of productive capacity, (b) rendered remaining capacity far less efficient, (c) made it impossible for the Germans to defeat western ground forces, and (d) compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on air defense and exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons. In the Pacific, the United States used carrier-based airpower, submarines, and bomber-deployed mines to isolate Japan from the resources of the empire it conquered in 1941-42. American bombers also directly destroyed factories and transportation systems, leading to similar levels of economic dysfunction as in Germany. Amateurs Discuss Destruction; Professionals Discuss Non-Operational Losses O’Brien is at his absolute best describing the subtle factors that whittled away Axis combat power. Air and sea power created a situation where the Axis war machine simply could not function anywhere near as efficiently as it needed to. For example, after the Allied air bombings started, Germany built vast underground aircraft factories to protect production. But that move carried a host of negative side effects. To name a few: The direct cost of building new factories in inconvenient places was very manpower intensive.

In Search Of AI Psychosis

August 26, 2025 · Original source

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, performance artist Sergey Kuryokhin presented a Daily Show style segment on a Russian talk show. He argued that Vladimir Lenin ate so many mushrooms that he eventually turned into a mushroom, and led the October Revolution while possessed by a sentient mushroom spirit.

Inline links: presented

Today this all sounds banal - just another schizo conspiracy theory that probably wouldn’t even get enough YouTube clicks to earn back its production cost. But 1990s Russians were used to a stodgy, dignified version of state TV. While it’s an exaggeration to say it would never lie to them, it would at least be comprehensible lies, like how the latest Five Year Plan was right on track. And Kuryohkin designed his piece masterfully, interviewing leading authorities about tangentially related topics (“so, you’re the world’s top Lenin biographer, would you agree that Lenin often ate mushrooms?”) and splicing the footage to look like a growing scholarly consensus. The result basically one-shotted a large segment of the Russian populace. According to Wikipedia:

Inline links: to Wikipedia

Sweden26 mentions across 26 issues

Sweden is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 26 times across 26 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Sweden"; "Sweden, hurting them in the Baltic"; "a justifiably paranoid Poland backed by a no longer neutral Sweden". It most often appears alongside France, Germany, Denmark.

Article page: Sweden
Mention count: 26
Issue count: 26
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Links For June June 23, 2021
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know July 07, 2021
Carbon Costs Quantified August 25, 2021
Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know September 02, 2021
Chilling Effects October 20, 2021
Secrets Of The Great Families November 09, 2021
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care? January 19, 2022
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
22 August 01, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation November 07, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know November 27, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Prison December 10, 2024
Links For January 2025 January 17, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability July 03, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

France 16 shared issues
Germany 16 shared issues
Denmark 15 shared issues
Norway 15 shared issues
Australia 14 shared issues

Source context

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

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

May 21, 2021 · Original source

American foreign policy comes off looking surprising competent through Zeihan’s story. In describing the history of Bretton Woods, he runs through some key participants and highlights the benefits of their membership. India, hurting the Soviets in South Asia; Sweden, hurting them in the Baltic; Argentina and Egypt, limiting their influence in South America and the Middle East; and most significantly, China, depriving them of their best ports. Why did America fight in Korea and Vietnam? To demonstrate the value of the security guarantee component of the Bretton Woods regime (“if the Americans proved unwilling to engage the Chinese in Korea, then was their security guarantee for the Germans against the Soviets really worth what they said it was?”).

While Bretton Woods was America’s plan, presumably to benefit America, it had some nice side effects for the world. Zeihan credits it with leading to peace between former enemies, a new era of cooperation (France and Germany forming the EU; Sweden and the Netherlands focusing on trade; a free-trade network in Southeast Asia), and ending colonialism:

Europe’s problems appear awful. “A continent riven by war is hardly how most of us think of Europe, but that is because the Europe we know has been transformed utterly by Bretton Woods,” which is the only thing that has ever united Europe from a security perspective. Zeihan sees America going away from Europe, and therefore the old conflicts will resume. The result will include countries afraid of an older Germany that faces economic catastrophe (its demographic pyramid is bad, with a rapidly-aging population that will soon retire, and its export-driven economy is in danger), the above-mentioned threats from Russia, “a justifiably paranoid Poland backed by a no longer neutral Sweden,” and a rising Turkey. While Zeihan doubts that each of these problems will lead to wars, “it truly would be stunning if none of them did.”

Links For June

June 23, 2021 · Original source

21: Claim: despite its pro-sex-worker image, Sweden actually persecutes sex workers plenty, they just find stupider ways to do it. EG if you (a sex worker) pay half the rent for your two-person apartment, they can arrest your roommate for “profiting from sex work”. Or they can arrest your landlord for the same (which means landlords won’t rent to anyone they know is a sex worker).

Inline links: Sweden actually persecutes sex workers plenty

July 07, 2021 · Original source

Both Denmark (stricter lockdown) and Sweden (weaker lockdown) were eventually able to control the explosive growth phase of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean they both did equally well. More relevant anti-lockdown cases argue that lockdowns just don’t have a great cost-benefit ratio. That is, at least some lockdown policies cause a lot of suffering for very little decrease in R. We know this is possible in principle - some states tried things like closing parks and trails, which in retrospect probably wasn’t too useful since the virus doesn’t spread well outside. Other things like banning large gatherings are more promising, but you might have to argue for each of these individually.

This study has been heavily criticized, I think fairly, with especially good critiques coming from blogger Philippe Lemoine, a Swedish team published in Nature, and a German team in Frontiers In Medicine. They converge on a few points. First, a bug in the model attributes almost all of the transmission reduction in a country to whatever the last intervention was that the country tried. Since most countries started with weaker interventions and then moved on to full lockdown, the model concluded that full lockdown was responsible for almost all the transmission reduction. In the one country that didn't institute lockdown during the period studied, Sweden, there's about the same amount of transmission reduction, but the model attributes all of it to the last thing Sweden tried - a ban on public gatherings - even though in every other country it says such bans had no effect.

Inline links: blogger Philippe Lemoine, a Swedish team published in, a German team in

But also, the model assumes that, absent lockdowns, there would have been no voluntary behavior change. In fact, we know there was a lot of it. The claim that “lockdowns saved three million lives” is compared to the counterfactual where nobody responds to the virus in any way and it spreads uncontrollably until 70% of the population has been infected. But in Sweden, which didn’t have a full lockdown, only about 1%-10% of the population was infected during the first wave. So the “three million” number is at least an order of magnitude too high. I find all of this pretty damning. I think the pro-Flaxman case is that a lot of these issues were admitted in the paper - eg it says it’s going to assume that all transmission reduction comes from government interventions. But it didn’t admit all of them - and also, if you include very small print saying “by this way, this is based on false assumptions”, it turns out people still make it headline news and base policy on it.

Carbon Costs Quantified

August 25, 2021 · Original source

I can see reasons you might want to think that way, but I can see much better reasons you wouldn't want to think that way, so I will be trying to figure out the actual amount of carbon produced by an actual child in an actual year. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231105 suggests households with children produce about 1500 lbs more carbon than those without. Each child-having household has on average two children, so even though it's probably not completely linear let's say 750 lbs/kid. Americans produce about 3x as much carbon as Swedes, so assuming this stays constant I would expect US children to produce 2250 lbs. That matches the numbers on the graph at https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/if-you-act-your-age-whats-your-carbon-footprint/ . So I think the amount of carbon emitted by a child is around 2250 lbs on average.

Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

September 02, 2021 · Original source

Haverfall et al in Sweden found that 26% of people with previous non-hospital-grade COVID, and 9% of a control group, reported long COVID-esque symptoms after 2 months. After 8 months, this was down to 15% and 3%. I’m not sure why the control group decreased; maybe it was about symptoms that had lasted the whole time, and not point prevalence? Anyway, this was similar methodology to the Logue study, but finds a somewhat lower prevalence. Maybe this is because this study was on healthcare workers, who are generally high-functioning people and who probably did a good job treating their COVID infections? I don’t know, but a lot of these things are really sensitive to how you ask questions and I don’t find the small difference too mysterious.

Inline links: Haverfall et al in Sweden

Secrets Of The Great Families

October 20, 2021 · Original source

But MMT is very different in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region - so if some city ranges from 0 to 100 degrees, its MMT will probably be around 80; if some other city ranges from 25 to 125, its MMT will be 105. In very hot places, it sometimes gets a bit less than 80%, but never below 60% or so.

Inline links: is very different

November 09, 2021 · Original source

What about the Poincares? Is political success g-loaded? There’s actually a great study on this! Sweden makes everyone take an IQ test as part of their mandatory military service, and if you ask the military very nicely they will give you people’s results. A team of researchers got the IQ tests of all Swedish politicians, leading to the following table:

Inline links: a great study on this

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.

April 10, 2022 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal (sallat@protonmail.com) or Nick (niktonick@gmail.com) Date: May 22 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83RF+3M5 Location: We're meeting near blue gazebo in Humlegården, I will have "ACX" sign. Group info: Stockholm has monthly meetups, email Sal to find out more

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83RF+3M5

August 01, 2022 · Original source

Is this just some crazy attempt to build hype, like when Elon Musk says the next Tesla definitely will have full-self-driving ability? I don’t think so. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is obsessed with Neom and very vain; I don’t think he would deliberately promise impossible things knowing that he will be embarrassed later when they don’t work out (and he says it will be done by 2030, so we’ll know the results relatively soon). Also, the government has earmarked $500 billion to $1 trillion for the project - around the GDP of Sweden - which sounds kind of like being serious. Also, they’ve already started on important Saudi construction preliminaries, like murdering the people who previously lived in the area. Also, they’ve already set up on-site camps for the construction workers (source):

Inline links: murdering the people who previously lived in the area, source

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.

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%

April 10, 2023 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Marina Contact Info: marina[dot]sharoian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 14th, 01:30 PM Location: Stockholm djurgården Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5 Event Link: https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5, https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

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 Kidney Donation

August 25, 2023 · Original source

MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Antonio Contact Info: a[at]olmo-titos[dot]info Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 11:00 AM Location: "El Retiro" Park, puppet theatre ( https://www.esmadrid.com/en/tourist-information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro ) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NyFGBvrXj6i7NQzjv Sweden GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Thursday, September 28th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NyFGBvrXj6i7NQzjv, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Thursday, September 28th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan W Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Scandic Continental near Stockholm Central Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share Notes: Please RSVP so I know if we'll be more than about 7: if so, we may need to find a bigger place.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR, https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share

November 07, 2023 · Original source

Although historically some countries have observed impressive increases after introduction of presumed consent, such as Belgium, others have fared badly with either no difference or an actual drop in organ donation rates, including Singapore, Brazil, Chile, Sweden, and more recently Wales.

March 30, 2024 · Original source

MADRID, SPAIN Contact: Javier Contact Info: javier[dot]prieto[dot]set[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 5:00 PM Location: La Casa Encendida (ground floor cafeteria) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC842+C2 Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many people are coming Sweden GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC842+C2, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

GOTHENBURG, VÄSTRA GÖTALAND, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[dot]se Time: Wednesday, April 24, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan upper floor, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+4CR

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Pablo Contact Info: pvillalobos[at]proton[d ot]me Time: Saturday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre. I will be carrying an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/ Notes: RSVPs appreciated but not required Sweden GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M, https://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-Madrid/, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F

Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/

November 27, 2024 · Original source

Vollaard et al in the Netherlands find that a ten-strikes law decreased crime 25%; the average person affected had 31 past convictions and plausibly committed >250 crimes per year. So why isn’t crime easy to control just by locking up these few superoffenders? Let’s examine each example in turn: Why Can’t Sweden Cut Crime 57% With A Three Strikes Law? We saw above that 1% of Swedes commit 63% of violent crime in Sweden. This itself tells us nothing - if we can’t identify that 1% beforehand, nothing can be done. But Cremieux continues the analysis and finds that this superviolent fraction is easily identified by their many past violent arrests: A one-strike law (life in prison after one violent crime conviction) would cut almost 80% of violent crime in Sweden; a two-strikes law would cut 63%, and a three-strikes law would cut 57%. Even a ten-strikes law would still decrease violent crime by 20%! So why doesn’t Sweden implement a three-strikes law? Such a law would add 24,000 people to the Swedish prison system. But the current capacity of the Swedish prison system is only 10,000 people. So this would more than triple the size. Suppose Sweden only had the resources to expand their prison system by 30%. According to this study, that would cut violent crime by 20%. I don’t know, these still seem like okay deals to me. But they teach us a useful lesson: there aren’t giant gains to be had by just imprisoning “a few more people”, relative to the size of your existing prison system. Despite the existence of power laws, if you want large decreases in crime, you need large increases in incarceration. Why Didn’t The Three Strikes Law In California Massively Decrease Crime? The Swedish data suggested a “three strikes law” should cut crime by 57%. That’s Swedish, and only focuses on violent crime, but American data for all offenses seem to tell a similar story: A large majority of prisoners - 80% - have been arrested more than three times3. But in fact, when California passed a Three Strikes law, the decrease was modest: In the five years following the passage of the law in 1994, crime dropped 33% in California compared to 26% in the rest of the country, meaning only 7% that you could optimistically attribute to Three Strikes. But most criminologists suggest that even this is an overestimate, and the true number is close to zero. See for example this graph, which shows that the counties which used Three Strikes the most had no greater decline in crime than the counties which used it least: So we expected Three Strikes to decrease crime by 80%, but in fact it decreased it by 0-7%. Why? Because California’s Three Strikes law was weaker than it sounds: it only applied to a small fraction of criminals with three convictions. Only a few of the most severe crimes (eg armed robberies) were considered “strikes”, and even then, there was a lot of leeway for lenient judges and prosecutors to downgrade charges. Even though ~80% of criminals had been arrested three times or more, only 1-4% of criminals arrested in California were punished under the Three Strikes law. Why can’t we have a real Three Strikes Law? For the same reason we saw in Sweden earlier. I can’t find any graphs of the US population broken down by number of past offenses, but we know that about 8% of Americans have at least one felony. Let’s say that about half of those have at least three felonies. That means a real Three Strikes law would require increasing the incarceration rate from its current 0.75% up to 4%, ie quintupling it. We’d need to build 6,000 new prisons and 10,000 new jails, locking up an additional 5-10 million people, and spending somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion per year (ie around the same as the entire military budget) on prison-related costs. This is light-years outside the Overton Window and I’ve never heard anyone seriously propose it. Still, it would decrease crime by 80%. Again, the lesson is that - despite power laws - small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime, and only very large increases in incarceration are capable of causing very large decreases in crime. Why Did A Ten Strikes Law In The Netherlands Massively Decrease Crime? Given the ambiguous results of three strikes in California, I was surprised to learn that a ten-strikes law in the Netherlands did reduce property crime by 25% (Volaard et al). In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves. Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime. It’s hardly surprising that imprisoning these people decreased crime. So why didn’t the California law do the same? I think there are two reasons. First, Europe imprisons far fewer people than any US state. The incarceration rate in the Netherlands is only an eighth that of California. The pre-ten-strikes-law Dutch penalty for shoplifting was two months; the equivalent California penalty alternates between six and thirty-six months depending on which set of propositions won the last election. Vollaard found that the ten strikes law had diminishing returns: On average, we find the benefits of the policy to exceed the costs by a large margin. We find the benefits to go down rapidly with a more intensive use of the law, however. The marginal crime-reducing effect of convicting another prolific offender to an enhanced prison sentence declines by some 25% when going from the 25th to the 75th percentile in the rate of application of the law during 2001–7. The benefits of the policy remained higher than the costs, however, even for the cities which used the law most intensively. So I think it’s plausible that California was already much more punitive than the Netherlands even before the California Three Strikes Law was passed, and there were diminishing returns from becoming even more punitive than that. Second, the California law only applied to certain serious crimes (eg armed robbery). People don’t commit these as often as shoplifting. The average person affected by the Dutch law shoplifted 256 times per year. Even the most energetic criminal would struggle to commit 256 armed robberies per year, and they would probably get killed (or murder a victim) long before reaching that point. So petty theft is longer-tailed than serious felonies, and it’s easier to decrease the petty theft rate by imprisoning the few worst shoplifters compared to decreasing the armed robbery rate by imprisoning the few worst armed robbers. Why Can’t We Just Incarcerate Those 327 Shoplifters In New York City? This time we just suck. Remember, each of these shoplifters was arrested 20 times per year. So they can’t be going to prison in any substantial way. Even if they got a one-month sentence for each arrest, they’d run out of months to shoplift in after twelve! So the question here isn’t “why are prison sentences for shoplifting so short”, but rather “why can’t New York City incarcerate repeat shoplifters at all?” I’ll come back to this question later. What About El Salvador? They famously solved crime by more imprisonment - how? By doing a lot of it. I said above that we might be able to decrease US crime rates by 80% if we quintupled our incarceration rate. Between 2014 and today, El Salvador quadrupled their incarceration rate: (source) They now have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, 2-3x that of America (which is itself the fifth highest, after various dictatorships). How did they afford this? Through a combination of lots of funding, not being too picky about human rights and prison conditions, and not being too picky about whether the people they imprison were guilty of any specific crime or just kind of gang-adjacent. As incarceration rate quadrupled, homicide went down by a factor of twenty: We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.

Inline links: Vollaard et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b0Ft!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28aa0ef6-084c-415b-b110-32db2c8ec0f2_3600x2400.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZVo3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F889a20e6-5205-47a1-b84e-6f9cd0739f05_1068x462.webp, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dRO5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff81d2a2f-a22f-4fd2-b492-bb47402a40af_640x532.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Tpwp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98d17add-250e-447a-b01c-fc8bb77f8bc3_298x264.gif, 1, 4, 8% of Americans have at least one felony, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9L-h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29a25928-8620-45d1-b677-34447be88ad6_778x528.png, source, fifth highest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ww3Y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F028e701c-5f95-436d-b1ff-15742274e221_2000x2000.png, 1, 2, 4, Levitt 1996

A one-strike law (life in prison after one violent crime conviction) would cut almost 80% of violent crime in Sweden; a two-strikes law would cut 63%, and a three-strikes law would cut 57%. Even a ten-strikes law would still decrease violent crime by 20%! So why doesn’t Sweden implement a three-strikes law? Such a law would add 24,000 people to the Swedish prison system. But the current capacity of the Swedish prison system is only 10,000 people. So this would more than triple the size. Suppose Sweden only had the resources to expand their prison system by 30%. According to this study, that would cut violent crime by 20%. I don’t know, these still seem like okay deals to me. But they teach us a useful lesson: there aren’t giant gains to be had by just imprisoning “a few more people”, relative to the size of your existing prison system. Despite the existence of power laws, if you want large decreases in crime, you need large increases in incarceration. Why Didn’t The Three Strikes Law In California Massively Decrease Crime? The Swedish data suggested a “three strikes law” should cut crime by 57%. That’s Swedish, and only focuses on violent crime, but American data for all offenses seem to tell a similar story: A large majority of prisoners - 80% - have been arrested more than three times3. But in fact, when California passed a Three Strikes law, the decrease was modest: In the five years following the passage of the law in 1994, crime dropped 33% in California compared to 26% in the rest of the country, meaning only 7% that you could optimistically attribute to Three Strikes. But most criminologists suggest that even this is an overestimate, and the true number is close to zero. See for example this graph, which shows that the counties which used Three Strikes the most had no greater decline in crime than the counties which used it least: So we expected Three Strikes to decrease crime by 80%, but in fact it decreased it by 0-7%. Why? Because California’s Three Strikes law was weaker than it sounds: it only applied to a small fraction of criminals with three convictions. Only a few of the most severe crimes (eg armed robberies) were considered “strikes”, and even then, there was a lot of leeway for lenient judges and prosecutors to downgrade charges. Even though ~80% of criminals had been arrested three times or more, only 1-4% of criminals arrested in California were punished under the Three Strikes law. Why can’t we have a real Three Strikes Law? For the same reason we saw in Sweden earlier. I can’t find any graphs of the US population broken down by number of past offenses, but we know that about 8% of Americans have at least one felony. Let’s say that about half of those have at least three felonies. That means a real Three Strikes law would require increasing the incarceration rate from its current 0.75% up to 4%, ie quintupling it. We’d need to build 6,000 new prisons and 10,000 new jails, locking up an additional 5-10 million people, and spending somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion per year (ie around the same as the entire military budget) on prison-related costs. This is light-years outside the Overton Window and I’ve never heard anyone seriously propose it. Still, it would decrease crime by 80%. Again, the lesson is that - despite power laws - small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime, and only very large increases in incarceration are capable of causing very large decreases in crime. Why Did A Ten Strikes Law In The Netherlands Massively Decrease Crime? Given the ambiguous results of three strikes in California, I was surprised to learn that a ten-strikes law in the Netherlands did reduce property crime by 25% (Volaard et al). In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves. Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime. It’s hardly surprising that imprisoning these people decreased crime. So why didn’t the California law do the same? I think there are two reasons. First, Europe imprisons far fewer people than any US state. The incarceration rate in the Netherlands is only an eighth that of California. The pre-ten-strikes-law Dutch penalty for shoplifting was two months; the equivalent California penalty alternates between six and thirty-six months depending on which set of propositions won the last election. Vollaard found that the ten strikes law had diminishing returns: On average, we find the benefits of the policy to exceed the costs by a large margin. We find the benefits to go down rapidly with a more intensive use of the law, however. The marginal crime-reducing effect of convicting another prolific offender to an enhanced prison sentence declines by some 25% when going from the 25th to the 75th percentile in the rate of application of the law during 2001–7. The benefits of the policy remained higher than the costs, however, even for the cities which used the law most intensively. So I think it’s plausible that California was already much more punitive than the Netherlands even before the California Three Strikes Law was passed, and there were diminishing returns from becoming even more punitive than that. Second, the California law only applied to certain serious crimes (eg armed robbery). People don’t commit these as often as shoplifting. The average person affected by the Dutch law shoplifted 256 times per year. Even the most energetic criminal would struggle to commit 256 armed robberies per year, and they would probably get killed (or murder a victim) long before reaching that point. So petty theft is longer-tailed than serious felonies, and it’s easier to decrease the petty theft rate by imprisoning the few worst shoplifters compared to decreasing the armed robbery rate by imprisoning the few worst armed robbers. Why Can’t We Just Incarcerate Those 327 Shoplifters In New York City? This time we just suck. Remember, each of these shoplifters was arrested 20 times per year. So they can’t be going to prison in any substantial way. Even if they got a one-month sentence for each arrest, they’d run out of months to shoplift in after twelve! So the question here isn’t “why are prison sentences for shoplifting so short”, but rather “why can’t New York City incarcerate repeat shoplifters at all?” I’ll come back to this question later. What About El Salvador? They famously solved crime by more imprisonment - how? By doing a lot of it. I said above that we might be able to decrease US crime rates by 80% if we quintupled our incarceration rate. Between 2014 and today, El Salvador quadrupled their incarceration rate: (source) They now have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, 2-3x that of America (which is itself the fifth highest, after various dictatorships). How did they afford this? Through a combination of lots of funding, not being too picky about human rights and prison conditions, and not being too picky about whether the people they imprison were guilty of any specific crime or just kind of gang-adjacent. As incarceration rate quadrupled, homicide went down by a factor of twenty: We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ZVo3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F889a20e6-5205-47a1-b84e-6f9cd0739f05_1068x462.webp, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dRO5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff81d2a2f-a22f-4fd2-b492-bb47402a40af_640x532.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Tpwp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98d17add-250e-447a-b01c-fc8bb77f8bc3_298x264.gif, 1, 4, 8% of Americans have at least one felony, Volaard et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9L-h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29a25928-8620-45d1-b677-34447be88ad6_778x528.png, source, fifth highest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ww3Y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F028e701c-5f95-436d-b1ff-15742274e221_2000x2000.png, 1, 2, 4, Levitt 1996

So we expected Three Strikes to decrease crime by 80%, but in fact it decreased it by 0-7%. Why? Because California’s Three Strikes law was weaker than it sounds: it only applied to a small fraction of criminals with three convictions. Only a few of the most severe crimes (eg armed robberies) were considered “strikes”, and even then, there was a lot of leeway for lenient judges and prosecutors to downgrade charges. Even though ~80% of criminals had been arrested three times or more, only 1-4% of criminals arrested in California were punished under the Three Strikes law. Why can’t we have a real Three Strikes Law? For the same reason we saw in Sweden earlier. I can’t find any graphs of the US population broken down by number of past offenses, but we know that about 8% of Americans have at least one felony. Let’s say that about half of those have at least three felonies. That means a real Three Strikes law would require increasing the incarceration rate from its current 0.75% up to 4%, ie quintupling it. We’d need to build 6,000 new prisons and 10,000 new jails, locking up an additional 5-10 million people, and spending somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion per year (ie around the same as the entire military budget) on prison-related costs. This is light-years outside the Overton Window and I’ve never heard anyone seriously propose it. Still, it would decrease crime by 80%. Again, the lesson is that - despite power laws - small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime, and only very large increases in incarceration are capable of causing very large decreases in crime. Why Did A Ten Strikes Law In The Netherlands Massively Decrease Crime? Given the ambiguous results of three strikes in California, I was surprised to learn that a ten-strikes law in the Netherlands did reduce property crime by 25% (Volaard et al). In 2001, the Dutch government passed a law allowing longer sentences for criminals with at least ten previous offense who were not good targets for rehabilitation (eg rejected or had already failed drug treatment). The law allowed judges to increase the typical sentence for petty theft (2 months) to a longer sentence (2 years). A quasi-experimental study found that property crime, though not violent crime, decreased by 25%. It’s not surprising that violent crime didn’t go down since the law was almost entirely deployed against thieves. Vollaard found that the population affected was extremely criminal; they had an average of 31 past offenses, and on surveys they admitted to committing an average of 256 crimes per year (mostly shoplifting). Before the law was passed, they spent an average of four months per year in jail (probably 2 x 2 month sentences); afterwards, they spent two years in jail per crime. It’s hardly surprising that imprisoning these people decreased crime. So why didn’t the California law do the same? I think there are two reasons. First, Europe imprisons far fewer people than any US state. The incarceration rate in the Netherlands is only an eighth that of California. The pre-ten-strikes-law Dutch penalty for shoplifting was two months; the equivalent California penalty alternates between six and thirty-six months depending on which set of propositions won the last election. Vollaard found that the ten strikes law had diminishing returns: On average, we find the benefits of the policy to exceed the costs by a large margin. We find the benefits to go down rapidly with a more intensive use of the law, however. The marginal crime-reducing effect of convicting another prolific offender to an enhanced prison sentence declines by some 25% when going from the 25th to the 75th percentile in the rate of application of the law during 2001–7. The benefits of the policy remained higher than the costs, however, even for the cities which used the law most intensively. So I think it’s plausible that California was already much more punitive than the Netherlands even before the California Three Strikes Law was passed, and there were diminishing returns from becoming even more punitive than that. Second, the California law only applied to certain serious crimes (eg armed robbery). People don’t commit these as often as shoplifting. The average person affected by the Dutch law shoplifted 256 times per year. Even the most energetic criminal would struggle to commit 256 armed robberies per year, and they would probably get killed (or murder a victim) long before reaching that point. So petty theft is longer-tailed than serious felonies, and it’s easier to decrease the petty theft rate by imprisoning the few worst shoplifters compared to decreasing the armed robbery rate by imprisoning the few worst armed robbers. Why Can’t We Just Incarcerate Those 327 Shoplifters In New York City? This time we just suck. Remember, each of these shoplifters was arrested 20 times per year. So they can’t be going to prison in any substantial way. Even if they got a one-month sentence for each arrest, they’d run out of months to shoplift in after twelve! So the question here isn’t “why are prison sentences for shoplifting so short”, but rather “why can’t New York City incarcerate repeat shoplifters at all?” I’ll come back to this question later. What About El Salvador? They famously solved crime by more imprisonment - how? By doing a lot of it. I said above that we might be able to decrease US crime rates by 80% if we quintupled our incarceration rate. Between 2014 and today, El Salvador quadrupled their incarceration rate: (source) They now have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, 2-3x that of America (which is itself the fifth highest, after various dictatorships). How did they afford this? Through a combination of lots of funding, not being too picky about human rights and prison conditions, and not being too picky about whether the people they imprison were guilty of any specific crime or just kind of gang-adjacent. As incarceration rate quadrupled, homicide went down by a factor of twenty: We previously predicted a similar increase in incarceration would lead to an 80% decrease in crime in the US, but El Salvador got a 95% decrease in crime. Why did they do so much better than our prediction? I think because they started with half our incarceration rate and ten times our murder rate. When you’re starting from someplace terrible, without any of the low-hanging fruit picked, it’s easy to make progress! I can’t find good statistics on other crimes like theft, but the crappy statistics I find say it hasn’t budged (1, 2). Why not? Either my statistics are bad, or the gangs that the government cracked down on weren’t in the theft business.4 Incapacitation Fine, so despite power laws there’s no way to easily solve crime just by imprisoning a small number of people. How much bang for the buck do we get by incapacitating criminals? You would think this would be easy to figure out: just determine how many crimes the marginal prisoner commits per year. Then that’s how many crimes incapacitation prevents per year. But although it’s easy to see how many times the marginal prisoner has been arrested, most crimes don’t result in arrest. How do you know how many crimes they really committed? Some bold scientists have tried asking them - giving prisoners surveys about their criminal histories - but obviously these should be greeted with heavy skepticism. The method criminologists have settled on is to wait for big shocks to incarceration - big enough to affect the general crime rate - then see how much the crime rate goes up or down. The best study here is probably Levitt 1996 (you may know Steven Levitt from Freakonomics). In the 1970s, US prisons were overcrowded. The ACLU argued the overcrowding was a rights violation - a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” - and sued a dozen states. They won all their lawsuits, and judges in all states said the government had to free prisoners until prison crowding returned to a non-cruel, usual level. So at a slightly different time in each state, many prisoners got released all at once. By examining the effects of this sudden release on the crime rate, we can determine how much crime the incarceration of those prisoners was preventing. Levitt does a lot of fancy statistics, and Roodman reanalyzes with even more fancy statistics, but the good news is they both agree and get numbers somewhat contrary to Roodman’s biases, which make me trust them more. Each year of imprisoning the type of prisoner who got released under the ACLU lawsuits prevented 6 property crimes and 1 violent crime. This suggests the average criminal commits ~7 crimes per year, which I think matches well with the data above showing that the median prisoner has 10 past arrests and some have 30+. Other studies on incapacitation, mostly taken from Roodman, that I trust less than Levitt: Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.

Inline links: 1, 4, 8% of Americans have at least one felony, Volaard et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9L-h!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29a25928-8620-45d1-b677-34447be88ad6_778x528.png, source, fifth highest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ww3Y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F028e701c-5f95-436d-b1ff-15742274e221_2000x2000.png, 1, 2, 4, Levitt 1996

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.

Links For January 2025

January 17, 2025 · Original source

I agree with this solution. 3: Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman: The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance 4: This month in nominative determinism: NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, by Victor Mather (h/t Yafah Edelman). 5: Someone is working on a dating site that uses your conversations with Claude to find a match. Link here, although so far it’s just a landing page where you can register interest (h/t @venturetwins) 6: The Lyttle Lytton Contest searches for the worst possible opening line for a novel; it’s been going on since 2001 and this year’s results are in. 7: Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress. I agree with @tamaybes and others in saying that Miles let Gary off too easily; Gary’s public statements all sound like “modern AI is mostly hype, it doesn’t really do anything like thinking”, but the bet is about things like “will AI make a Nobel Prize caliber scientific discovery by 2027?” and “will AI write Pulitzer-quality books by 2027?” I don’t blame Gary for taking the best terms he could find. But I am worried that if AI makes a Nobel-quality scientific discovery in 2026, but doesn’t quite write the Pulitzer-quality book, then Gary will get to claim victory over the AI optimists, whereas in fact that would be at probably the 95th percentile of fast timelines by most people’s estimate. 8: “The probability that cows (or other non-human animals) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering), or are "enlightened by default" is, by my estimation, very low”. 9: Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025. 75% of FDA approval of GLP-1 for a substance use disorder by 2029! 10: In my post on the economics of GLP-1 receptor agonists (eg Ozempic), I wrote about how they’re currently widely available because of a loophole suspending patents during a shortage, and predicted there would be a big fight when the shortage was over. Sure enough, the FDA tried to declare that the shortage of tirzepatide (a next-generation Ozempic relative) was over, compounding pharmacies sued, and tirzepatide is still available while the issue goes through the courts (and will the administration have an opinion?) Also, compounding pharmacy access startup Mochi says that they will continue to prescribe even if the shortage is over, using another loophole saying doctors can do this for specific individual patients in cases of medical necessity. This is an extremely fake use of this loophole, but will the government be willing to call their bluff? 11: Jacob Falkovich has a blog on dating advice, which he plans to turn into a book of dating advice. I can’t really comment on the accuracy (my dating strategy tends to look more like waiting for women to send me emails saying “I like your blog, would you like to go on a date?” which probably doesn’t generalize), but I’ve had many good interactions with Jake, and he has a beautiful family which means he must be doing something right. Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma! 12: Christ And Counterfactuals is a blog on effective altruism from a Christian perspective. Some previous attempts at this have felt kind of forced, but the first post I read here was actually pretty interesting. Richard Swinburne (apparently “the world’s best Christian philosopher”), thinks that: “[One] reason why it is good that the human race should sometimes be in an initial situation of considerable ignorance about the causes and effects of our actions, is this. If God abolished the need for rational inquiry and gave us from childhood strong true beliefs about the causes of things, that would make it too easy for us to make moral decisions. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions. I do not know for certain that if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that if I do not give money to some charity, people will starve. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer), or that someone will starve if I do not give. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (the decision which you have a strong desire to make). And even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act which, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all.” (Could a Good God Permit so Much Suffering? A Debate, pp. 52-53.) This is pretty galaxy-brained, but something galaxy-brained must be going on for God to tolerate the existence of evil at all, and this is a surprisingly natural extension of some common premises on the subject. 13: Swedish study: diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse. Of the two mechanisms they looked at, stigma seems more involved than drug side effects. My opinion: this study was done on conscripts undergoing a mandatory psych evaluation for the army, who had no previous reason to think they had a psych disease and had not sought treatment. This is a different situation from somebody who comes to a psychiatrist asking for relief from specific symptoms they have noticed. Also, Sweden c. 2005 is a different culture from America 2025 in terms of how much stigma a psych diagnosis carries. I think it’s possible that if you never considered that you had psychiatric problems, and were suddenly given a diagnosis in 2005 Sweden and told you couldn’t serve in the army, that’s likely to destabilize your self-image more than a person who knows they’re depressed going to a psychiatrist in 2025 US and getting antidepressants. 14: RIP Felix Hill, research scientist at DeepMind and mentor to many in the AI community. You can read his suicide note here, though the obvious content warning applies. He says he took ketamine for mild anxiety and it plunged him into an incredibly deep depression that he couldn’t get out of; he leaves his story behind as a warning for others. I appreciate his warning, but I wish he had said more about what dose he used; different people’s ketamine doses vary by almost two orders of magnitude, I’d previously thought that the low doses were pretty safe and the high doses were sketchy, and I would like to know whether I should update or not. 15: RIP Max Chiswick, professional poker player, effective altruist, and ACX reader. 16: Adrian Dittman, a Twitter account widely accused of being Elon Musk’s alt, has been revealed to be . . . a guy named Adrian Dittman. Congrats to Maia Crimew and the Spectator for actually investigating this, unlike many other news sources which spread the Musk conspiracy theory. Also, the people involved got banned from X for some reason, maybe because this qualified as doxxing Dittman. 17: Related: Musk claims to be among the top players in the world at several computer games. A veteran Path of Exile gamer presents evidence that Musk faked his PoE2 accomplishments by hiring a Chinese guy to play on his account. Some Musk supporters in the comments suggest that maybe he hires the Chinese guy to level up his account, but his accomplishments (eg speedruns) are still his own? 18: Related: Sam Harris says he has been friends with Musk since 2008, but he noticed a sudden shift for the worse in his personality around 2020 which made it impossible to stay friends with him. He gives the example of Musk losing a bet with him that there would be 35,000+ COVID cases in the US, refusing to pay up, and launching personal attacks on Sam when asked to do so. What happened? Some theories: Musk turned right-wing, which ended his friendship with Sam for the same reason political differences have always ended friendships (but then what about the bet, which seems like objectively bad behavior?)

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability

July 03, 2025 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Fernando Contact Info: fernando[period]unterricht[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, September 17th, 8:00 PM Location: Café El Boticario, Av. Fco. de Goya, 50, 50006 Zaragoza. I'll have an ACX sign on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CHXJ4V5+MG Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BF0 [remove this bit] DxyoAyjK2fHUnY75UcL Notes: Feel free to join the Whatsapp group even if you can't attend this meetup. There you will also find information about meetups in other cities. Sweden GOTHENBURG Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg | https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CHXJ4V5+MG, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CFXFM98+G8, https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Mike Contact Info: lumenwrites[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: Cafe Del Mar, Valencia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CFXFM98+G8 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/I2s [remove this bit] IA2wrsymFLxh8Mv5Niv Notes: Please leave a message in our Whats App group to let me know that you’d like to join. Sweden GOTHENBURG Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[@]posteo[.]se Time: Wednesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: Café Condeco, Fredsgatan 14 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F Group Link: Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/ lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026

South Africa25 mentions across 25 issues

South Africa is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 25 times across 25 issues between February 16, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "new strains, one in South Africa"; "A South African plant being a natural SSRI is pretty cool"; "In South Korea and South Africa vigorous labour movements". It most often appears alongside India, California, Israel.

Article page: South Africa
Mention count: 25
Issue count: 25
First seen: February 16, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Coronavirus: Links, Discussion, Open Thread February 16, 2021
Nootropics Survey 2020 Results April 28, 2021
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism May 04, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
ACX Grants ++: The First Half February 03, 2022
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know April 13, 2022
Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine May 27, 2022
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022
Links For September 2022 September 06, 2022
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Contra The Social Model Of Disability July 14, 2023
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023
Links For February 2024 February 29, 2024
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics August 16, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls January 13, 2026
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

India 14 shared issues
California 12 shared issues
Israel 12 shared issues
Nigeria 12 shared issues
ACX 11 shared issues

Source context

Coronavirus: Links, Discussion, Open Thread

February 16, 2021 · Original source

We should also be concerned about a fifth wave (possibly overlapping with the fourth wave; they may not have obviously separate peaks). Virologists have identified two new strains, one in South Africa, one in Brazil, which probably have "immune escape" - the ability to infect people who have already gotten, recovered from, and developed antibodies to the original strain (or been vaccinated against it). Both strains already have a few cases in the US. It will take them a few months to spread to the point where they're relevant, but they should eventually be the majority of new cases.

Inline links: already have, a few cases in the US

Prediction: 66% chance that sometime this year, the South African and Brazilian strains - or other new strains with similar dynamics - will be a majority of coronavirus cases in the US.Some sources describe these strains as "vaccine resistant". This is a matter of degree. The UK strain is probably very slightly vaccine-resistant (most sources are describing it as not vaccine resistant, but if you look closely this is another "well we can't prove it is" situation, and the best point estimates suggest some tiny amount of extra resistance which probably doesn't make a big difference.). The South African strain is significantly vaccine resistant. The Brazilian strain is too new to know much about, but seems to be very similar to the South African strain and I would be surprised if its numbers differed very much.

Some sources describe these strains as "vaccine resistant". This is a matter of degree. The UK strain is probably very slightly vaccine-resistant (most sources are describing it as not vaccine resistant, but if you look closely this is another "well we can't prove it is" situation, and the best point estimates suggest some tiny amount of extra resistance which probably doesn't make a big difference.). The South African strain is significantly vaccine resistant. The Brazilian strain is too new to know much about, but seems to be very similar to the South African strain and I would be surprised if its numbers differed very much.

Nootropics Survey 2020 Results

April 28, 2021 · Original source

The small amount of research that's been done on Zembrin suggests it works by inhibiting the serotonin transporter - ie it's an SSRI. A South African plant being a natural SSRI is pretty cool. Does this explain the positive results?

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

May 04, 2021 · Original source

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.

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

August 23, 2021 · Original source

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (RSVP) Contact: DS, 87robertjames[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Delta Park, within 100m of the parking area on the west. I will be wearing a red shirt or jacket, carrying a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/holiday.crashing.custom

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/holiday.crashing.custom

February 03, 2022 · Original source

#43: Pocket Dictionaries For South Africa There is an urgent need for a solution to South Africa’s literacy crisis. What we need is a school dictionary with the portability and reliability of a print dictionary, and the functionality and capacity for extra support of an electronic dictionary. Pocket electronic dictionaries (PEDs) were common in many Asian countries in the early 2000s. They were small and portable, but could contain and present more data than print dictionaries. They do not use the internet, so there are no data or connectivity costs. Once a PED is owned, it is free to use apart from battery charging. PEDs are more suitable than smart phones for primary school pupils, as these learners do not have their own phones or access to smart phones. My dissertation for my PhD in lexicography was designing model entries for an electronic primary school dictionary, with more support for pupils with features not seen in print dictionaries. I plan to develop an updated PED as a standalone dictionary device to be used by primary school pupils. Access to a reliable school dictionary with more language support will lead to better fluency and literacy, which has obvious implications for the individuals and the country. I require an initial amount of US$12000 to get the technical specs developed and a set of sample entries produced. Based on this, the next phase will be the development of a prototype for testing in schools. Please contact me on lorna@lemma.co.za for more information.

Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

April 10, 2022 · Original source

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Jordan (jordanpieters@gmail.com) Date: April 29 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3F69+7J Location: Woodstock Brewery Taproom Notes: I will try to have a small sign. Please feel free to bring a friend.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4FRW3F69+7J

April 13, 2022 · Original source

During pregnancy, the growing fetus compresses the maternal abdomen and is compressed in turn. South African doctor O. S. Heynes invented a suction machine that would suck the abdomen outwards, making it larger and roomier.

The original plan was to use it to ease labor pains, but Heynes thought it might also help with backache and some complications of late pregnancy, so he encouraged women to take the machine home and use it for about 30 minutes daily during the last few weeks of pregnancy. This caught on, and in its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10,000 women - mostly in South Africa - used decompression machines.

Rumor in South African maternity wards was that these women’s children developed extraordinarily fast. This reached the attention of Arthur Jensen, who included it in his pioneering work on prospects for intelligence enhancement:

Inline links: pioneering work on prospects for intelligence enhancement

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine

May 27, 2022 · Original source

In 1975, the World Bank released a report on Lesotho: a tiny, mountainous country surrounded on all sides by the much larger nation of South Africa. This report, written by and for outside “development experts”, set out to identify problems that were holding the country back which could be solved by simple, technical “interventions”.

The report portrayed Lesotho as a country “virtually untouched by modern economic development” after gaining independence, whose “traditional subsistence peasant society” had been disrupted by depleted soil and failed crops, compelling most of its young men to find work in nearby South Africa. To solve this problem, the report made a variety of recommendations, many of which involved boosting agricultural productivity and connecting farmers in Lesotho to better markets to sell their crops and especially their livestock.

More than 60% of the area’s young men were working in mines in nearby South Africa and sending back remittances.

June 10, 2022 · Original source

Rock shelters around the coastlands of South Africa are a key source, trapping prehistoric sediments that yield evidence of hafted tools and the expressive use of shell and ochre around 80,000 BC.

Links For September 2022

September 06, 2022 · Original source

15: Book Review honorable mention winner AWanderingMind writes about the political situation in his native South Africa. “I cautiously lay part of the blame at the door of the nature of revolutionary politics, and uncautiously and with great certainty at the door of the many corrupt members of the ruling party destroying the country, with the assistance of unscrupulous people in the private sector (thanks McKinsey, Bain, et al).”

Inline links: the political situation in his native South Africa

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).

Contra The Social Model Of Disability

April 10, 2023 · Original source

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Yaseen Mowzer Contact Info: yaseen [at] mowzer [dot] co [dot] za Time: Saturday, 27 May 2023, 11:00 AM. Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, South Africa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/AAPnyjpNBwtBD6hix/cape-town-south-africa-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023 Notes: Whatsapp: +27 79 813 5144

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/AAPnyjpNBwtBD6hix/cape-town-south-africa-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023

July 14, 2023 · Original source

Into this climate came the Union Of The Physically Impaired Against Segregation, a group of disabled Marxists led by former South African anti-apartheid activist Vic Finkelstein. They set out to recast the condition of the disabled in the language of radical activism. Finkelstein wrote:

Inline links: group of disabled Marxists, wrote

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

July 21, 2023 · Original source

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

Inline links: pay millions of dollars to trade with retail, keep our identities small, 2, market makers, 3

August 25, 2023 · Original source

ABUJA, NIGERIA Contact: Olaoluwa Contact Info: akinloluwa[dot]olaoluwa[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 2:00 PM Location: Habil Cafe, Atakpame Crescent, Wuse II Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FX93F9H+J9 South Africa CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Yaseen Mowzer Contact Info: yaseen[at]mowzer[dot]co[dot]za Time: Saturday, September 16th, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3 Notes: Please RSVP so I know how big a table to reserve

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FX93F9H+J9, https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Yaseen Mowzer Contact Info: yaseen[at]mowzer[dot]co[dot]za Time: Saturday, September 16th, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3 Notes: Please RSVP so I know how big a table to reserve

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3

September 13, 2023 · Original source

Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa. For a while he also represented the anti-apartheid party in the city council. His net worth was probably in the single-digit to low-double-digit millions.

February 29, 2024 · Original source

14: Nongqawuse (born 1841) was a prophetess of the Xhosa people (related to Zulus, South Africa). When she was 15, she claimed the spirits told the Xhosa to kill all their cattle as a sacrifice; in exchange, they would bring utopia and drive away the encroaching British. The Xhosa believed her and killed all their cattle. In the ensuing famine, 75,000 out of 100,000 Xhosa died, and the British easily took over their territory.

Inline links: Nongqawuse

Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics

March 30, 2024 · Original source

KADUNA, NIGERIA Contact: Abdul maleek Contact Info: maleekcherry510[ a t]gmail[d ot ]c om Time: Friday, May 31, 01:00 PM Location: Almara Tech innovation Hub Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7F29GCHR+78 South Africa CAPE TOWN Contact: Yaseen Contact Info: yaseen[at]mowzer[dot]co[dot]za Time: Saturday, April 20, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or email or WhatsApp +27 79 813 5144, so I know how big a table to book.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7F29GCHR+78

August 16, 2024 · Original source

Given Marvel Comics, why Silver Age (1961-1965)? I.a. Why Superhero Comic Books? The winner of last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest was Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon wrote about Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind. One of the foundations of Egan’s educational philosophy is that people learn through stories. He believes early education should focus on teaching lessons through myths and legends. This matches my experience. My kids’ favorite podcast is Greeking Out – a very well produced, very entertaining, National Geographic podcast about Greek Legends. Aside #1: When my oldest daughter was three years old she would ask everyone she met “Do you know any myths? Can you tell me a myth?” She especially liked asking people from different places to get myths from their local cultures. Once, she asked the question to a friend of mine who grew up in South Africa, “Can you tell me any South African myths?” He struggled for a minute and then said, “Okay! I have one! Bread never falls butter side down!”. That was not the type of myth she was looking for; nor the type of myth we will be discussing in this review. Every culture has foundational myths. These stories are entertaining and engaging, but they also teach valuable lessons about both what is important in that culture, and how people in that culture are expected to behave (or at least the Platonic Ideal of how they should behave). In the modern, Western world, we have assimilated many of these foundational stories, particularly the Greek myths. My kids definitely know the Greek myths, but they also know elements of Norse mythology, Egyptian myths, stories about Anasi from West Africa and more. More fundamentally my wife and I, while not religious ourselves, have made a point of exposing the kids to the stories from the Bible. It is not politically correct to call Biblical stories “myths”, but they serve the same purpose – shared cultural understanding of the way the world works. My wife grew up without any religion, and when she was in high school, she struggled with the metaphors and religious allegories that were omnipresent in most of the Western canon. In our culture, familiarity with the Bible is important for an educated person – whether they are religious or not – because it is the foundation of so much of the rest of our culture. I believe the other set of mythological stories that are foundational to our culture are – and by this point I am sure you see where I am going here – comic book superheroes. If true, then having more than a surface-level understanding of the most important superhero stories is important in a similar way to that knowing the Bible stories is important. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an important idea to understand. So is, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I.b. Why Marvel? While there are many independent superheroes that are not owned by major conglomerates, the superheroes who have built our modern foundational myths are currently owned by two corporations. Warner Bros. Discover owns the DC library of superheroes including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In 2009 Disney purchased Marvel Comics and took ownership of their characters, including Spiderman, X-men and the Avengers. Aside #2: Marvel has sold temporary film rights to many of their characters over the years. The most relevant sales started in 1994 when Marvel sold the film rights of X-men and mutants to 20th century Fox, then in 1996, when Marvel went bankrupt, Fox picked up the rights to the Fantastic Four (and New Line picked up Blade). In 1999 Marvel sold the film rights (and live action TV, and animated TV longer than 44 minutes) of Spider-man and related characters to Columbia Pictures (part of Sony) for $7MM. Marvel actually attempted to sell ALL of their remaining Marvel IP film rights to Sony for $25MM, but the top management at Sony was not interested. Sony’s management allegedly told their chief negotiator “Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man). Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, and then Fox in 2019, bringing the two separated packages of characters all back together under one roof (Blade reverted back to Marvel in 2012). Sony still owns the rights to Spider-man but has made a deal with Disney to include some of his films within the Marvel-Disney universe. Marvel sold the film rights of The Hulk to Universal in 1990 and the current status of that agreement is complicated (the consensus is that Marvel now controls the film rights to the character, but Universal owns distribution rights to any stand-alone Hulk film, which could be why Disney let's Hulk co-star in Thor movies, but not vice versa). In the early aughts Marvel wanted to build their own film franchise, but were limited to only using their remaining “B-list” characters – Spider-man, X-men, and the Fantastic Four were all off limits. Fortunately, Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel at the time, saw a way forward. He convinced Ike Perlmutter, Marvel CEO, to allow for the production of a series of films with the remaining characters begining with Iron Man (2008). Jon Favreau directed and cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. The film blew away expectations. Kevin’s plan of a series of movies where the characters would interconnect was suddenly feasible. Iron Man was followed by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. None managed the box office magic of Iron Man, but all were successful enough that the plan stayed on track. In 2012 the characters were all brought together in the first Avengers film, which opened to over $200MM domestically and went on to gross more than $1.5B (which made it the 3rd highest grossing film of all time). Marvel became the first studio to take the interconnected world of their comic books and make the model work on the big screen (for a much larger audience). Once the model was proven to work, other studios tried to duplicate it. Aside #3: Warner Bros’ stumbles with the DC shared universe of Batman, Superman and the Justice League are well known, but that was actually their SECOND attempt at a shared universe. Their first attempt tried to copy the Marvel method more closely. They chose their own B-list hero and set up his first film to allow for a wider mythology. Alas Green Lantern (2011) failed at the box office and we never got stand-alone films about Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire, the Violet Lantern), John Stewart (African American Green Lantern), Kyle Rayner (1990s Green Lantern), Alan Scott (original Green Lantern), or the Blue, Red, and Orange Lantern Corps. At least so far, no studio has successfully created anything with close to the traction obtained by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Warner’s DC Extended universe (DCEU) had trifling success, but is being shelved and rebooted for a fresh attempt next year. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” kicked off with Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), but was dead on arrival. Paramount’s attempt to link the Transformers Universe to GI Joe at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has been appropriately mocked. Sony’s Spider-man films linked to the MCU have been very successful, but their attempt at a stand-alone non-MCU Spider-man universe using Spider-man’s villains as anti-heroes has floundered (mostly succeeding only as a source of memes). Next Mattel will be attempting to build a universe off the success of last year’s Barbie and may include Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (no word yet on Thomas the Tank Engine, View Master and the Magic-8 Ball, but all are apparently in development). To date, only Marvel has successfully built a “Cinematic Universe”. One potential reason for the MCU’s success is that Kevin Feige built his cinematic universe on the back of the existing interconnected universe of the comics. But those comics were not the first interconnected universe of stories. For that we would need to go back to our foundational myths. The Bible stories mostly interconnect. Adam and Eve flows into Cain and Abel. David and Goliath leads to the Wisdom of Solomon. Greek Myths DEFINITELY interconnect. Supporting characters in one Greek myth have starring roles in their own stories. The Greek pantheon of tales even have their own version of the Avengers. In the Quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason brings together the Argonauts, who included in their number Theseus (who defeated the Minotaur), Orpheus (who braved the underworld) and Hercules himself – all A-list stars in their own “franchises”. Stand alone stories that exist within an interconnected universe are rare in modern media but were common in the ancient myths that have stood the test of time. Only Marvel has successfully created a shared universe that follows the pattern of ancient myths. Only Marvel films have stand-alone stories and protagonists who exist together in an interconnected world. Something about that method of storytelling is deeply pleasing for humans across many cultures. Marvel films are the first and most successful modern version of the mythological universe, and that it is worth spending more time exploring Marvel’s underlying mythology and where it came from. I.c. Why 1961? The origins of Christianity and Judaism (and Buddhism and Hinduism) are very murky. Even Islam is far enough in the past that we only have a very rough understanding of how it came to exist. When scholars want to understand in detail how a new religion is born they are far better to look at Mormonism or, if you accept it as a religion, Dianetics. Similarly, we have versions of Greek myths that have been passed down to us, but we can never know how those myths changed from their first telling to their “final” versions. Were the stories once unrelated, and only later became crafted into a single “universe”? Or were the stories built off each other one by one (“Dad that Golden Fleece story was amazing! Do you know any other stories about the Hercules guy?”)? Or was it something in between? Perhaps the stories all existed independently, but were later crafted together (“Remember that 12-labors story I told you? Actually that was the same guy who was on the Argo!”) Unlike Greek legends, we can know the origin of the Marvel Universe. We can see how it was constructed step-by-step. The people who did it (most importantly Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko) are dead now, but they have not been dead for long. We can read the original work, see how it changed over the last 60 years, and we can ask the creators “what were you thinking at the time” (or at least read their answers from old interviews). We can’t always trust what Stan Lee says, but at least we can hear his point of view. No one has a transcript of an interview with Homer, or knows exactly what he was thinking when he called it the “wine-dark sea”. Tl;dr: Why read about Marvel Comic superheroes 1961-1965? Because interconnected mythological stories are very important to cultures, Marvel is the leading contender of the most recent modern mythology, and it originated in the first half-decade of the 1960s. II. How did Marvel Superhero Comics happen? Timely Comics published their first comic book in 1939 and called it “Marvel Comics”. Their most popular World War II comics included Captain America, the Human Torch (an android unrelated to the modern Human Torch except in powers, appearance and name), and Namor, the Submariner. In the early 1950s superheroes became less popular, so Timely changed its name to Atlas Comics and focused on humor, western, horror, war and science fiction stories. But in 1956 DC Comics began re-introducing their Golden Age superheroes and, in the second half of the 1950s, the genre took off again – particularly Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic in America. Stan Lee, editor and chief at Atlas at the time, wanted to get in on the superhero action. Unfortunately in 1957 Atlas lost its distributor and the company had to rely on “Independent News” to get its comics on newsstands. The complication was that Independent News was owned by “National Periodical Publications”, who also owned DC-comics and did not want Atlas to introduce superheroes to compete with Superman, Green Lantern and the Flash. Independent News agreed to distribute Atlas comics but limited the publisher to eight titles per month, and only in non-super hero genres (like horror, romance and science fiction). Blocked from creating and launching new superhero titles, Stan Lee got creative, and in August 1961 Atlas Comics published Fantastic Four #1. Aside #4: Fantastic Four #1 was on newsstands in August 8th, 1961, but the date on the cover was November 1961. The convention at the time was that the cover date was not the “publication date” but rather the “pull date”. The pull date was the time when the retailer could send back unsold copies back to the publisher for a refund. In fact the retailer did not need to send the entire issue back, just the cover, as it was assumed that comic books could not be sold without the cover, and it saved on postage. This was only relevant because it was great for my dad who was a child at the time. My dad was friends with the kid whose father owed the local pharmacy which meant he had access to every comic book published in the late 1950s as long as he was willing to wait a few months and read it without a cover. Going forward in this essay I will always use the pull dates rather than the publication dates for individual comic book issues as they are far easier to source. If you want to convert pull dates back into publication dates you can subtract roughly two months, but it is inconsistent and sometimes longer, as was the case with Fantastic Four #1. Check out the cover of Fantastic Four #1: To the modern eye this certainly looks like a superhero comic. Four heroes with super powers fighting a giant monster. But in the eyes of publishers in 1961 this looked more like a science fiction adventure comic than something that would go head to head with Superman. Here are the covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time) from the three months leading up to Fantastic Four #1: Notice what they have in common? “Super Rivals”, “Super revenge”, “Super Substitutes”. And all include Superman in his blue and red tights. Fantastic Four’s cover featured super powers, but never used the word “super” and no one was wearing superhero costumes. Fantastic Four, as a superhero story, slipped under the radar because it wasn’t really a superhero story at all. It was a story about four close friends who attempted to fly into space, but then something goes wrong and they crash back to Earth. The experience changes them and they decide they now need to use their new abilities to help the rest of humanity – specifically against monsters who are invading from under the Earth. It is a fantastical science fiction story – not a superhero story. Later in his career Jack Kirby, the illustrator of the issue and co-creator of the Fantastic Four, was asked about his inspiration for the Fantastic Four heroes. He did NOT say Superman – or any superhero. He said Challengers of the Unknown. Challengers of the Unknown was an adventure story co-created by Kirby in Showcase #6 in February 1957. Here is how Wikipedia describes the Challengers origin: When acquaintances miraculously survive a plane crash unscathed, they conclude that since they are "living on borrowed time" they should band together for hazardous adventures. The four—pilot Kyle "Ace" Morgan, daredevil Matthew "Red" Ryan, strong and slow-witted Leslie "Rocky" Davis, and scientist Walter Mark "Prof" Haley—became the Challengers of the Unknown. Showcase #6, and the first appearance of the Challengers of the Unknown, by Jack Kirby Visually the Challengers and the Fantastic Four were similar. Both wore skin tight uniforms with belts and minimal decoration. The Fantastic Four’s relatively simple characterizations were practically pulled from Challengers. Reed takes on the traits of both Kyle, the leader, and Walter, the scientist. Johnny, the Human Torch is the daredevil. The Thing is “strong and slow-witted”. Sue, the only woman on the team, seems like a new addition, but is likely based on June Robbins who joined the Challengers team in Showcase #7, as an “honorary” or “girl-Challenger”. After surviving their respective “miraculous” crashes, both the Challengers and the Fantastic Four band together to help the world. They both travel through space and other dimensions, fighting mad scientists and monsters. The Fantastic Four’s early antagonists were not traditional super villains. In the first few issues they fight monsters from under the Earth (Issue #1), shape changing aliens (#2), and a charlatan who uses hypnotism to steal from his audience (#3). In issue #4 Kirby and Lee re-introduce Namor, the Submariner, one of Marvel’s top IP from the 1940s, and have him kidnap Sue. Only in Issue #5 and #6 (June and August 1962) and do we get a more standard-supervillain when Dr Doom attempts to steal the Fantastic Four headquarters and throw it into space. The next superhero Lee created was even less heroic than the Fantastic Four. In April 1962 (pull date), Marvel published The Incredible Hulk. If it was even a superhero story in disguise it was a very good disguise. The story was a scientific-filtered version of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde. It was a pure monster-story with nothing very super about it. Nothing on the cover suggests this has anything to do with superheroes: It is not clear if even Lee at the time thought the Hulk would be a superhero. In Fantastic Four #5 Johnny is reading a “great new comic mag” and mocks the Thing by comparing him to the Hulk. It seems pretty clear at this point that in the Fantastic Four’s world, the Hulk is just a fictional comic book, like in ours (more on that later): The other two superheroes the Marvel introduces in this period have even more subtle introductions. At the time Marvel had a number of generic-sounding titles and told science fiction and fantasy stand-alone stories: Tales to Astonish

Inline links: The Educated Mind, Greeking Out, Nobody gives a shi*t about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and do a deal for only Spider-Man, Dark Universe, appropriately mocked, memes, attempting to build a universe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MbHP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b4711e-2248-4120-897e-bba8a595a28b_405x616.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OCj5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9afeb585-b58b-4932-8702-153b4fdf135d_619x305.png, Wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OzTl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49fd3582-b5bd-4567-b5e9-cca46c1f1c49_425x615.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lfiM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c3ad1-5fed-4063-8ac2-d9d89e69bee6_252x398.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oV4t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F346f85d9-580b-4eb2-b91c-3422003613d5_591x572.png

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Abdulelah A Contact Info: Addrasheed[a t]proton[dot]me Time: Friday, October 25, 08:30 PM Location: Riverwalk Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HP8QMFX+453 Additional Notes: Please contact me at my email address before attending. The meeting will be at Java Time Cafe inside the Riverwalk Center in the Taawun District. I will be there at 8:30 P.M. and will wait for an hour. You can simply ask the barista about ACX, and he will refer you to my table, or you can look for a colorful cultural ‘Misbaha’ on my table. South Africa CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Yaseen Mowzer Contact Info: yaseen[a t]mowzer[dot]co[d ot]za Time: Saturday, September 14th, 06:00 PM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3 Notes: Please RSVP using LessWrong or email or WhatsApp (+27 79 813 5144), so book I big enough table.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CCF+P3

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: A.B. Contact Info: AbvACX[a t]proton[period]me Time: Friday, April 18th, 9:00 PM Location: We’ll be at Black Stamp coffee. I’ll have a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” on my table. It should be easy to spot. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HP8QMJM+MF South Africa CAPE TOWN Contact: Leo Hyams Contact Info: leo[a t]aisafetyct[period]com Time: Thursday, May 8th, 5:30 PM Location: Tiger's Milk, Kloof Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3CC6+7M Group Link: https://lu.ma/to614ypc Notes: Please register on the Luma event

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7HP8QMJM+MF, https://plus.codes/4FRW3CC6+7M, https://lu.ma/to614ypc

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

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.

Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Jibrin Contact Info: microripples[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 11:00 AM Location: ICT Lab 1, University of Jos Main campus, Bauchi Rd, Jos, Plateau State Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+HG Group Link: https://facebook.com/microripples Notes: Limited seating — RSVP to guarantee a spot South Africa CAPE TOWN Contact: Tegan Contact Info: teganspeaking[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 11:00 AM Location: The Gardeners Cottage Restaurant, Newlands. I will have an "ACX Meetup" sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW2FH4+VV Group Link: https://discord.gg/GnY [remove this bit] cNB24

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+HG, https://plus.codes/4FRW2FH4+VV

January 13, 2026 · Original source

The only child of South African college professors, Coplan grew up living with just his mother. He describes his father as a “mad scientist” who has studied panic disorder and depression. His mom taught in the film departments at NYU and Columbia and cast young Shayne in her own work.

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Matthew Ajegba is organizing the plateau/ mangu meet up Contact Info: www[.]linkedin[.]com/in/ ajegba-matthew Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM Location: we will be putting a black polo shirt, printed with ACX Meetup on it, and the university of jos multipurpose hall. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXFF4MV+VM Notes: Feel free to come along with a friend. South Africa CAPE TOWN Contact: Tegan Contact Info: teganspeaking[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 10:00 AM Location: We’ll be in the back room at Our Local on Kloof Street and will have an ACX Meetup sign, and a pile of boardgames. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3C85+XC Group Link: https://discord.gg/UYv [remove this bit] 3v69h Notes: Please RSVP on partiful so that we know how many people to book a table for: https://partiful.com/e/MKKZ5ElzjrABYmju5aKC?c=1HJeZdS8

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FXFF4MV+VM, https://plus.codes/4FRW3C85+XC, https://partiful.com/e/MKKZ5ElzjrABYmju5aKC?c=1HJeZdS8

Saudi Arabia20 mentions across 20 issues

Saudi Arabia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 20 times across 20 issues between March 15, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations"; "Zeihan provides similar analysis regarding... Saudi Arabia"; "winter diseases don’t switch to summer in ... Saudi Arabia". It most often appears alongside China, Russia, facebook.

Article page: Saudi Arabia
Mention count: 20
Issue count: 20
First seen: March 15, 2021
Last seen: March 25, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y March 15, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Diseasonality December 08, 2021
Predictions For 2022 February 01, 2022
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program February 09, 2022
Open Thread 215 March 13, 2022
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
22 August 01, 2022
Book Review: What We Owe The Future August 23, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability September 22, 2022
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency December 08, 2022
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
23: California Dreamin' September 04, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
Dictator Book Club: Chavez November 02, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity November 12, 2024
25 February 03, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

China 9 shared issues
Russia 8 shared issues
facebook 7 shared issues
France 7 shared issues
India 7 shared issues

Source context

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.

So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program

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.

Diseasonality

December 08, 2021 · Original source

It’s the same story with people being cramped indoors. Common-sensically, this has to be some of the story. But if it were the most important contributor, you would expect to see the opposite pattern in very hot areas, where nobody will go out during the summer but it’s pleasant and balmy in the winter. But winter diseases don’t switch to summer in Arizona or Saudi Arabia or other hot locales.

Predictions For 2022

February 01, 2022 · Original source

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

February 09, 2022 · Original source

And that's an easy one. What about B? If the professor figures out important things about what influences gender norms, maybe we can subtly put our finger on the scale. Maybe twenty years later, women across the Third World will have equal rights, economic development will be supercharged, and Saudi Arabia will be a Scandinavian-style democracy with a female Prime Minister. But maybe the professor won't find anything interesting. Or maybe they will find something interesting, but it will all be stuff like "it depends what kind of rice they cultivated in 4000 BC" and there won't be any subtle finger-putting-on-scale opportunities. Or maybe the professor will find something great, but nobody will listen to her and nothing will happen. Or maybe Third World countries will get angry at our meddling and hold coups and become even more regressive. Or maybe we'll overshoot, and Saudi Arabia will become really woke, and we'll have to listen to terrible takes about how the Houthi rebels are the new face of nice guy incel misogyny.

Which is higher-value, A or B? Probably more women suffer under oppressive gender norms than people die of antibiotic-resistant infections, but dying is probably worse than inequality, and there's a clearer path from antibiotic -> recovery than from research paper -> oppressive countries clean up their act. What about second order effects? If women have more equality in Saudi Arabia, maybe an otherwise unrecognized female genius will discover a new antibiotic. But if we have more antibiotics, someone who would otherwise have died of a bacterial infection might liberate women in Saudi Arabia. Aaagh!

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

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

Making lobbying illegal for all states including allies (e.g. Saudi Arabia), not just enemies (e.g. Iran), except recognised democracies

August 01, 2022 · Original source

Bloomberg View has a new article on the progress of Neom (h/t Marginal Revolution), Saudi Arabia’s answer to Dubai. I hesitate to include Neom in this newsletter. It’s not really a charter city, but very much a project of the Saudi government. It is in no sense utopian or libertarian; in fact, it advertises itself as a new level of surveillance in an already-totalitarian state. Most of all, it doesn’t. make. sense. This is an insane, utterly impossible project that the Saudi government is somehow barrelling full-speed-ahead on.

Inline links: the progress of Neom, Marginal Revolution

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-used urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. So what is going on? After describing Neom project leader Nadhmi Al-Nasr… Former employees say one of the chief sources of aggravation is Al-Nasr, whom they describe as having a volcanic temper. Several recall him openly berating subordinates, sometimes issuing threats unlike anything they’d experienced in their careers. In one particularly tense moment, after two e-sports companies canceled partnerships with Neom, citing human-rights concerns, Al-Nasr said he’d pull out a gun and start shooting if he wasn’t told who was to blame, according to two witnesses to the exchange. Al-Nasr disputes these accounts. “Not anyone can stand the pressure of the demands of the day, and there are people who leave because it’s more demanding than anything they have done before,” he says. …the Bloomberg article offers some tantalizing clues: Among the misdeeds most likely to anger Al-Nasr, the former employees say, was failing to spend enough money. Three of them described Al-Nasr keeping a diagram showing which department heads were disbursing less than their budgets allowed, which the ex-staff half-seriously referred to as a “wall of shame.” Maybe if you demand grander and grander plans, and have a reputation for killing anyone who opposes you, then eventually you get a really grand plan and nobody has the guts to tell you that it’s impossible. But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed. There are reasons most cities aren’t designed as 200 meter wide, 170 km long lines; this maximizes the distance between any two points! The Saudis say they will solve this with a high-speed train, but all public transit is inherently limited in speed by the need to stop at a bunch of stations along the way. The video says that you’ll be able to go from one end of Neom to the other in 20 minutes, which suggests a 500 km/hour or 300 mile/hour train line. There are some maglevs which are almost that fast, but this only works if everyone is going nonstop from the exact westernmost point in Neom to the exact easternmost point. If you want people to only have to walk a kilometer or so to their destination, you’ll need 85 stops along the way. You can do slightly better than this with a combination of express and local trains, but you’re never going to compensate for the fact that laying your city out in a line is shooting yourself in the foot. I think maybe this is what happens to your brain when you read too many YIMBY blogs. “The only things people want out of cities are super high density and a ban on cars, right?” Dude, you are Saudi Arabia. The only two things in your country are open space and fuel. Log off Twitter, touch grass, etc. Okay, now I’m even more confused. The only advantage of having your city in a giant line is that at least it’s good for mass transit, and you are … emphasizing walkability? Also, aren’t you in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t it 130 degrees at all times? But The Line is only the beginning. They will also have a Giant Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry: Source: Neom website …the world’s largest ski and watersports resort, and yes we are still in Saudi Arabia, they’ll make an artificial lake and use artificial snow: Source: Neom website …and whatever this is supposed to be: Source: Neom website Fine! Let’s just have random stuff! Canal-pools along every street so you can swim to work! A beach made of crushed marble which will shine like silver! Whatever! If this were some billionaire’s passion project, I’d be fine with it. It would be fun to watch exactly how it failed; it would probably leave some cool ruins. Maybe after the hype died down they could try for something smaller, and it would still be pretty impressive. At least it would beat yet another megayacht. But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money. Not just renewable tax receipts, but the country’s accumulated oil windfall, just as the world tries to transition to renewable energy and the country risks never getting any oil windfall ever again. This is the money that should be going to the Saudi people having a future, and instead Mohammed bin Salman is spending it on playing some kind of demented desert version of SimCity, using a strategy that ten minutes playing actual SimCity could tell him was a bad idea. Neom represents all the worst parts of model cities. Dictators robbing the public purse to build cool monuments that make them feel special. Total lack of interest in workers, previous inhabitants, future inhabitants, or anyone except the very rich. “Sustainability”, “density”, and “liveability” as buzzwords to throw at foreign media, with no broader story for how any of this will improve the lives of real people or the cause of human freedom. I find model cities interesting and promising only insofar as I think some of them aren’t like Neom. Catawba Digital Economic Zone Haven’t heard much out of the crypto people recently, wonder what they’re up to: 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%

Okay, now I’m even more confused. The only advantage of having your city in a giant line is that at least it’s good for mass transit, and you are … emphasizing walkability? Also, aren’t you in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t it 130 degrees at all times? But The Line is only the beginning. They will also have a Giant Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry: Source: Neom website …the world’s largest ski and watersports resort, and yes we are still in Saudi Arabia, they’ll make an artificial lake and use artificial snow: Source: Neom website …and whatever this is supposed to be: Source: Neom website Fine! Let’s just have random stuff! Canal-pools along every street so you can swim to work! A beach made of crushed marble which will shine like silver! Whatever! If this were some billionaire’s passion project, I’d be fine with it. It would be fun to watch exactly how it failed; it would probably leave some cool ruins. Maybe after the hype died down they could try for something smaller, and it would still be pretty impressive. At least it would beat yet another megayacht. But in fact, this is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, squandering public money. Not just renewable tax receipts, but the country’s accumulated oil windfall, just as the world tries to transition to renewable energy and the country risks never getting any oil windfall ever again. This is the money that should be going to the Saudi people having a future, and instead Mohammed bin Salman is spending it on playing some kind of demented desert version of SimCity, using a strategy that ten minutes playing actual SimCity could tell him was a bad idea. Neom represents all the worst parts of model cities. Dictators robbing the public purse to build cool monuments that make them feel special. Total lack of interest in workers, previous inhabitants, future inhabitants, or anyone except the very rich. “Sustainability”, “density”, and “liveability” as buzzwords to throw at foreign media, with no broader story for how any of this will improve the lives of real people or the cause of human freedom. I find model cities interesting and promising only insofar as I think some of them aren’t like Neom. Catawba Digital Economic Zone Haven’t heard much out of the crypto people recently, wonder what they’re up to: 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%

Book Review: What We Owe The Future

August 23, 2022 · Original source

Race-based slavery ended in the US in 1865 and in Brazil in 1888. Saudi Arabia ended its own form of slavery in 1962. Since then there has been some involuntary labor in prisons and gulags, but nothing like the system of forced labor that covered most of the world in the early 1800s. And although we may compare some modern institutions to slavery, it seems almost inconceivable that slavery as open and widespread as the 19th century norm could recur without a total change of everything in society.

Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability

September 22, 2022 · Original source

As mentioned above, Georgism is my favorite example of this. We give trillions of dollars to random sheiks because oil happened to be discovered under their ancestral lands. The size of this mistake is unbounded; if oil happened to be 10x more necessary than today, and you couldn’t get it from shale or sands or whatever, maybe Saudi Arabia would capture the majority of value in the world (though of course realistically it would get invaded long before then). I don’t want to invade Saudi Arabia to solve this problem, but if you do happen to have a government thinking about these kinds of questions beforehand, I do think they would come to some solution other than “whoever’s land the oil is discovered on gets to keep a big chunk of the surplus forever”. I do think if we had to do everything over again, we would come up with a better solution for landownership than modern landlordism. This isn’t because capitalism is bad, it’s because these are difficult edge cases where assumptions like “people produce goods” don’t hold, and some of the things we have to buy and sell are abstract or unquantifiable.

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.

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).

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 04, 2023 · Original source

3: Saudi Arabia’s bonkers megacity Neom “is seeking a $2.7 billion loan”. I notice I am confused - I thought that despite all of Neom’s disadvantages, its one unquestionable advantage was that it was backed by the Saudi state who were willing to spend upwards of $1 trillion on it. So why do they need a $2.7 billion loan?

Inline links: “is seeking a $2.7 billion loan”

September 11, 2023 · Original source

Just on the Saudi Arabia loan - it's something that companies do all the time, probably for some combination of (1) cash flow reasons; (2) maximising leverage; and (3) the pricing works out.

Pricing: If Saudi Arabia's existing investments give it a return of 6% a year, and the interest it owes on the loan is 4% a year, then it can pay off the interest using its investment returns and keep an additional 2% of profit. It wouldn't want to liquidate its existing investments and lose out on those returns.

Dictator Book Club: Chavez

November 02, 2023 · Original source

Venezuela was a typical Latin American country - Indians, conquistadors, strongmen - until the discovery of oil in the early 1900s. Foreign oil companies briefly resisted taxation. But over the 20th century the government gradually got them under control. In 1976, they finally nationalized the industry entirely under a government-run company, PDVSA. Venezuela is believed to have more oil - and more oil per person - than Saudi Arabia.

But as much as we complain about this kind of thing in the West, Venezuela has it worse. Partly this is because of how centralized and official it is under one guy. But mostly it’s because Venezuela doesn’t have much private sector or civil society. Remember, think of it as Saudi Arabia with better weather. The (government-owned) oil company is the ultimate source of all wealth. That was true even before Chavez. Chavez then expropriated most private industries, and mismanaged the rest into bankruptcy. But he compensated for this with his own set of oil-subsidized institutions and outright oil subsidies. As always, you get rich (or middle class) by standing in front of the giant geyser of oil money. And Chavez got to control who did that.

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Abdul Malik Contact Info: maleekcherry510[ at]g mail[do t]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 03:30 PM Location: Cafe one, Uptown Mall, Zaire Rd Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7F29FCCJ+8X Saudi Arabia AT TAAWUN, RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA Contact: Abdulelah A Contact Info: Addrasheed[a t]proton[dot]me Time: Friday, October 25, 08:30 PM Location: Riverwalk Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HP8QMFX+453 Additional Notes: Please contact me at my email address before attending. The meeting will be at Java Time Cafe inside the Riverwalk Center in the Taawun District. I will be there at 8:30 P.M. and will wait for an hour. You can simply ask the barista about ACX, and he will refer you to my table, or you can look for a colorful cultural ‘Misbaha’ on my table.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7F29FCCJ+8X

September 13, 2024 · Original source

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.

I was somewhat disturbed reading how many normal Muslims Dean interacted with were on board with all of this in theory. Dean comes from a nice urban middle-class family in Saudi Arabia, and several of his relatives joined the jihad at various points, and all other relatives supported that. His neighborhood Islamic study group, that I imagine as the equivalent of Sunday School, was all in favor of very radical interpretations. Some Muslim communities Dean interacted with in London were even more radical than the ones he grew up with, constantly preaching about Hellfire and the only sure way to avoid it. On a plane from Kuwait to the Philippines, a flight attendant figured out they were traveling to join the jihad, but didn’t turn them in, but instead introduced them to the captain of the plane, because they were both proud supporters of the jihad. People did successful door-to-door fundraising for jihadist causes in Kuwait. Everyone was on board, it was just that not that many took the implications as seriously as Dean.

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.

February 03, 2025 · Original source

Neom, Saudi Arabia’s insane giant linear city project, has admitted they cannot actually build a giant linear city.

Inline links: admitted

To soften the blow, Saudi Arabia has announced even more bizarre subareas of NEOM with silly names, like EPICON:

Inline links: EPICON

Bay Area Meetups This Weekend

March 25, 2025 · Original source

This year we have spring meetups planned in over a hundred and eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 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.

Contact: Jibrin Contact Info: jibrinx[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Friday, April 18th, 2:00 PM Location: Will happen at ICT lab 1, University of Jos, Bauchi-rd campus. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+CX Notes: Access to event is free but requires registration Saudi Arabia RIYADH Contact: A.B. Contact Info: AbvACX[a t]proton[period]me Time: Friday, April 18th, 9:00 PM Location: We’ll be at Black Stamp coffee. I’ll have a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” on my table. It should be easy to spot. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HP8QMJM+MF

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+CX, https://plus.codes/7HP8QMJM+MF

San Jose18 mentions across 18 issues

San Jose is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 18 times across 18 issues between June 13, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117"; "Rebecca (f / 30 / San Jose)"; "meetups in San Jose". It most often appears alongside Berkeley, Chicago, California.

Article page: San Jose
Mention count: 18
Issue count: 18
First seen: June 13, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 176 June 13, 2021
2022 January 28, 2022
Open Thread 241 September 12, 2022
Bay Area Meetups This Weekend September 16, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
My California Ballot 2022 November 04, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
23 September 21, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 324 April 08, 2024
Open Thread 339 July 22, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates September 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 375 March 31, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 399 September 15, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Berkeley 12 shared issues
Chicago 11 shared issues
California 10 shared issues
Discord 10 shared issues
ACX 9 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 176

June 13, 2021 · Original source

3: Remember, ACX in-person Bay Area meetup today, Sunday 6/13, at 2 PM at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence, vaccinated people only). You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.

2022

January 28, 2022 · Original source

Aella (f / 29 / Austin) Alyssa (trans-f / 30 / SF) Damon (m / 34 / undetermined) Linch (m / 28 / SF) Nate (m / 30ish / Bay? Austin?) Rebecca (f / 30 / San Jose) Shaked (m / 30 / NYC)

Inline links: Aella, Alyssa, Damon, Linch, Nate, Rebecca, Shaked

Open Thread 241

September 12, 2022 · Original source

2: Worldwide ACX meetup season continues. This week there will be meetups in Sydney on Thursday, Ottawa on Friday, Cambridge (UK) / DC / San Jose / Atlanta on Saturday, and Berkeley / SF / Toronto / New Haven / Chicago on Sunday - plus many more. See the meetups list for details.

Inline links: the meetups list

September 16, 2022 · Original source

San Jose, at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming.

Shouldn’t we have planned meetups further apart for people who wanted to go to multiple of them? Yes, and this is directly my fault, up to and including rescheduling to avoid the San Jose one . . . right on to the same day as the San Francisco one. Sorry, I’ll try to do better next time.

My California Ballot 2022

October 13, 2022 · Original source

When I lived in San Jose, almost every construction worker, gardener or cleaner I spoke to commuted in from Lodi or Tracy or Stockton or Modesto etc because they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.

But the same thing - orchestra disbands, later reformed - has happened in Oakland, in San Jose, and in San Diego, as well as in a lot of other cities around the country (Denver, New Orleans ...)

November 04, 2022 · Original source

Somehow Chen has endorsements from the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury. I don’t know if this many California papers have ever endorsed a Republican before. They all just say it would be nice to have some fresh faces in government who aren’t associated with the established power structure, which is true but would be equally true for a thousand other positions. I wonder if Cohen did something to piss off the Democratic establishment or something. In any case, if I’m going to try to vote for Republicans occasionally, now is the time.

Howell does not display any particular passion or interest in insurance issues. He told The Times he decided to run for insurance commissioner because it’s an office he believes he could win after losing a few local races in the San Jose area.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 23rd, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P [CANCELLED, SORRY, EMAIL DAVID FOR MORE INFO]

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P

September 21, 2023 · Original source

And an extra announcement: The San Jose / South Bay meetup originally scheduled for this Saturday has been cancelled due to unexpected circumstances, sorry.

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+7Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Kids welcome. Let me know if you plan to come: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com. We feed dinner to those still here at dinner time.

Inline links: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

Open Thread 324

April 08, 2024 · Original source

2: ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more. See the Meetups List for details.

Inline links: See the Meetups List for details

Open Thread 339

July 22, 2024 · Original source

1: I'm interested in expanding my biennial local ballot post into a community-wide effort to get an ACX slate for major US cities. Current plan is to ask the 5-10 biggest meetup groups to research for their city sometime in the autumn, then post a week or two before the election. This would probably be SF, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, LA, NYC, Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago. The main things I want to know now: when does your state release its voter information packet? Do other states have enough things on the ballot to keep this interesting, or is California unique there? Do these meetup groups feel up to working on this? Does anyone have any other suggestions or advice?

Inline links: biennial local ballot post

Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Andrew Gaul Contact Info: gaul[a t]gaul[d ot]org Time: Sunday, October 20th, 02:00 PM Location: Dolores Park near the tennis courts Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQH6F+55 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong Notes: Please RSVP via email so I can coordinate tarps, drinks, and other picnic gear SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 01st, 02:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQH6F+55, https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong, https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 01st, 02:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

September 30, 2024 · Original source

San Jose

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Nate, Andrew, and Austin Contact Info: acx-everywhere-sf-spring-2025[ at]googlegroups[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: 1680 Mission St (Mox) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Notes: Kids welcome! SAN JOSE Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[ at]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q

Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[ at]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q

March 31, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include SF, San Jose, Melbourne, Bonn, Singapore, and Florence. And some late additions to the schedule, including Hanover, Bonn, and Ahmedabad. See here for details.

Inline links: here

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Andrew Gaul Contact Info: gaul[a t]gaul[period]org Time: Saturday, October 4th, 1:00 PM Location: Mox, 1680 Mission St, San Francisco, CA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we can bring coffee and snacks SAN JOSE Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[a t]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o, https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[a t]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

September 15, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Brussels, Cape Town, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Kyiv, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Portland, Philadelphia, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Sydney, Waterloo, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Prague and St. Louis have been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026, https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Nate Contact Info: natesternberg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 02, 01:00 PM Location: Mox (first floor), a co-working space in SoMa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can email you a door code ahead of time. SAN JOSE Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[@]daviddfriedman[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd,San Jose, CA 95117. Big blue house, corner of Keltner and Williams Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will know how many we are feeding

Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[@]daviddfriedman[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd,San Jose, CA 95117. Big blue house, corner of Keltner and Williams Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will know how many we are feeding

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

South Korea17 mentions across 17 issues

South Korea is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 17 times across 17 issues between April 14, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Songdo, a South Korean charter city"; "list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: South Korea"; "Allen points to South Korea, the USSR, and China as examples that it might be". It most often appears alongside China, Japan, US.

Article page: South Korea
Mention count: 17
Issue count: 17
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Book Review: Global Economic History April 21, 2021
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism May 04, 2021
Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab August 05, 2021
Open Thread 200 November 28, 2021
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy June 17, 2022
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
Your Book Review: Viral July 30, 2022
"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine November 21, 2022
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America June 07, 2023
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep July 12, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

China 15 shared issues
Japan 12 shared issues
US 9 shared issues
Europe 8 shared issues
India 8 shared issues

Source context

April 14, 2021 · Original source

Tom Murcott was an investment officer for Songdo, a South Korean charter city which now has 50,000 people, a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper, the headquarters of the UN’s Green Climate Fund, and a pneumatic waste disposal system - instead of leaving cans out for the garbage truck, you throw your trash directly into pressurized tubes that suck it to the recycling center or incinerator.

Inline links: directly into pressurized tubes

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

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

April 21, 2021 · Original source

Is it still possible to succeed? Allen points to South Korea, the USSR, and China as examples that it might be. He describes their strategy as "the Big Push" - a strong central government producing lots of (not immediately useful or profitable) industry, in the hopes that it will pay off later:

May 04, 2021 · Original source

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.

June 28, 2021 · Original source

There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why?

Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.

Land reform shifts the dynamic from landlords who act like commercial farmers to freeholders who act like gardeners. Asia is at no risk of running out of people, so treating labor as cheap and maximizing yield per unit land is the right choice. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China all implemented land reform at the beginning of their successful development pathways, and all four countries saw yields per hectare increase by 40 - 70%.

Adumbrations Of Aducanumab

July 01, 2021 · Original source

In Malaysia, Studwell veers into the shaky ground of being against capital per se. Letting partners get equity in firms is not an issue. Did you know huge percentages of Korean companies were owned by Americans? South Korea was not just stealing their technology, they were moving up the value chain. In partnerships where it didn't make sense, by learning through transfer deals where it didn't. There is, of course, an issue with letting companies offshore high tech work and using your people only as menial labor. But this is an issue of structuring the deals and regulations. But of the successful cases, only China broadly prevents you from owning minority stakes in companies. The rest, at most, limited the percentage of foreign ownership. Which is still admittedly not a full free market policy.

3.) Again, he's ignoring the US here. South Korea's "crazed" borrowing was underwritten by the US for security reasons. The US actually used its might to get SK cheaper debt at some points. Malaysia was on its own.

Then we get the question on how widely his advice could be adopted. He briefly mentions in the Philippines section that, citing from memory, “Some people think they can do nothing, but condemning millions to poverty is no option at all” Well in some moral sense sure, but in a policy sense doing nothing is obviously an option. Elites have almost never pursued industrial policy for altruistic reasons: The success stories are all cases where elite interest lined up with the public interest. For example, South Korea was racially and ideologically homogeneous. Marshall Park in other words required industrialists to make SK rich and defended but didn’t care who they were. Studwell mentions that industrial policy failed in Malaysia in part because of affirmative action, and then ignores that point entirely. The East Asian countries that succeeded only did so because of their homogeneity allowing focus purely on industrialization, plus the fact that the US leaned heavily on them. It’s very unclear that a country could implement the Studwell program against the will of its elites. It isn’t the case that where there’s a will there’s a way. Finally, all of this requires a high quality bureaucracy, which East Asia has a long history of and the rest of the world lacks.

August 05, 2021 · Original source

The countries that got through COVID the best (eg South Korea and Taiwan) controlled it through test-and-trace. This allowed them to scrape by with minimal lockdown and almost no deaths. But it only worked because they started testing and tracing really quickly - almost the moment they learned that the coronavirus existed. Could the US have done equally well?

So everyone sat on their defective FDA-approved coronavirus tests, and their excellent high-quality non-FDA approved coronavirus tests that they were banned from using, and didn’t test anyone for coronavirus. Meanwhile, American citizens who had recently visited Wuhan or other COVID hotspots started falling sick and asking their doctors or health departments whether they had COVID. Since the FDA had essentially banned testing, those departments told their citizens that they couldn’t help and they should just use their best judgment. Most of those people went out and interacted and spread the virus, and incidence started growing exponentially. By March 1, China was testing millions of people a week, South Korea had tested 65,000 people, and the USA had done a grand total of 459 coronavirus tests. The pandemic in these three countries went pretty much how you would expect based on those numbers.

Open Thread 200

November 28, 2021 · Original source

This was a big thing with the USSR too: they'd bury us in economic productivity with their stakhanovite New Soviet Men freed from the waste of capitalism (cf. that _Conquest of Bread_ review incidentally). Then it was with Japan, they'd surpass us with their unique Japan Inc. fusion of pseudo-democracy in which one party was always elected and worked hand-in-glove with the zaibatsus (or maybe South Korea, or another Asian Tiger). Then it was China... http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita.

Inline links: http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html

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)

ITER gets fusion by 2035 (50%) or 2040 (70%). K-DEMO Most of the countries in ITER plan on making their own large demonstration power plant, after they see if ITER succeeds. South Korea is being more aggressive and will build their DEMO while ITER is still doing its early experiments. The construction should be complete by 2037. Success here is highly correlated with ITER's success. K-DEMO gets fusion by 2040 (70%).

KSTAR (Korea, 2008)

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

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)

boxing in the president’s major foreign policy decision via military generals’ press manipulation (MacArthur commenting on escalating engagement in the Korean War before he was fired by Truman; top generals in the Obama administration publicly discussing troop commitment needed to win in Afghanistan)

"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine

July 30, 2022 · Original source

[4] This report was widely criticized, with the governments of the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others expressing “shared concerns” about the investigation. Even the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, suggested that a more thorough follow-up investigation might be required.

November 21, 2022 · Original source

Why Isn’t The Whole World Rich? Professor Dietrich Vollrath’s introduction to growth economics. What caused the South Korean miracle, and why can’t other countries copy it?

Inline links: Why Isn’t The Whole World Rich?

They got the Taiwanese chips, the plant-based chicken, the expensive Korean food, and the nuclear hot sauce. But nobody caught that the refreshment was a white wine dyed red.

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America

June 07, 2023 · Original source

So far. China hasn’t quite caught up to America. Their GDP per capita is still less than a quarter of ours. Although they make many excellent products, the world leaders - iPhones, 747s, GPTs - are mostly still designed in the US, even if Chinese factories churn out the parts. Other Asian tigers like South Korea and Taiwan liberalized politically around the point where they started approaching developed-country GDP; in his analysis of their rise, Joe Studwell suggests that this might have been a necessary component. And Japan, despite all the virtues that made Wang think they would overtake the US, has stagnated instead.

Inline links: Joe Studwell suggests

Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep

August 25, 2023 · Original source

Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.

Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated

AR have such a restrictive definition of sustained growth that it even excludes episodes of this length: South Korea before democratisation (1960-94), the Soviet Union (1930s to 1970s), Argentina (late 19th to early 20th century), and China (1978-?) are all explicitly written off as unsustainable growth under extractive institutions. This is consistent with their theory but rules out what most people would consider key data points.

July 12, 2024 · Original source

Original by Ric McArthur Nature doesn’t make enough bucks with perfectly symmetrical ten-point horns. To fill the demand, the market had to step in. Thus was born the deer farm industry, which raises captive deer in better genetic and nutritional conditions than Nature permits, then ships them across the country so hunters who couldn’t get legit ten-point bucks get the taxidermy piece for their wall. These are controversial amongst hunters and illegal in numerous states – but the industry is big enough to spread CWD. (The kind of hunter who needs a deer shipped to his house is the kind of hunter who will fumble killing it.) Another problem is supplemental feeding – leaving out protein-enriched food for deer to eat. This produces “trophy class animals at an earlier age”, but again, what’s in that protein? (“It is much like feeding your cows 41 percent protein cottonseed cake during the winter to raise the protein level in the cow’s diet to a level that will maintain acceptable production”, says that article from 1991.)10 The book segues into a vignette. CWD was new in Wisconsin in the early 2000s, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources was optimistic it could eradicate it. In a state with a love of hunting, you could, in theory, recruit people to kill every single deer in a 400-square-mile radius: In many states, the state would have had to call out the National Guard for such an onslaught, but hunting is a passion in Wisconsin. Hunters shoot 450,000 deer every year, more than in any other state. “I’m looking for ardent hunters to help us, unless fear or their wives keep them away,” one DNR official told a Milwaukee magazine. The state extended the normal hunting season and waived the usual limit of one buck per hunter, and the hunters came out in force. The whole affair was gruesome – one official called it “hunting for slob hunters”. If you’re trying to eradicate a prion disease, you can’t very well let people take the carcasses home to eat. Bodies piled up in control stations, decomposition mingling with bleach. The 2002 hunt established a base rate of 2% for chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin deer, with the most affected areas getting up to 10%. Further hunts in 2003, 2004, and 2005 spread to wider and wider areas – and didn’t move the needle one bit. This is to say that CWD is quite a bit more common in the American deer population than BSE ever was in British cattle. Since publication, it’s popped up in Norway and South Korea. Notably, Norway doesn’t allow for the import of cervids, raising numerous questions about how it got there. There are no unambiguous cases of CWD transmission to humans, and in vivo/in vitro primate studies have mixed results. There sure are some unusually young hunters with sporadic CJD, though. But don’t worry, most of them aren’t M/M homozygotes! There is an absolute ton going on in this book. I’ve had to skim over whole sections. Parts that couldn’t be easily slotted into a narrative review include: When Gajdusek was invited to a party at Prusiner’s house, he was horrified to find his rival had purchased hundreds of New Guinean statues – all with the genitals removed.

Inline links: Ric McArthur, controversial, amongst, hunters, illegal in numerous states, trophy class animals at an earlier age, 10, Norway, South Korea, mixed results, sure are

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

Contact: Ewan Contact Info: ewantsun0[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:30 PM Location: Address: 8 Marina View, #02-08/10 Asia Square Tower 1, Singapore 018960 (Asia Square Food Garden) I'll be at the centre of the Food Garden, wearing a green shirt. (There won't be any 'ACX Meetup' sign, but there shouldn't be anyone else at the venue so there's little risk of getting confused with another group.) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ Group Link: https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl. A LessWrong group is here: https://t.me/Less [remove this part] Wrong_Singapore Andrew, a different organizer, has monthly meetups here: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: Vis-a-vis navigation: (1) Asia Square is just a short walk from Shenton Way MRT Station. (2) Please go to the right tower (Tower 1)! Also note that the Food Garden will be closed, but I'll be bringing some (vegan-friendly) food and drinks. South Korea SEOUL Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

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.

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Cyrus Contact Info: ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

Contact: Jonathan Ng Contact Info: jonathan[period]ng1[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ Group Link: https://t.me/LessWrong_ [remove this bit] Singapore, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl Notes: partiful.com/e/6ghe2pwx2e2j4q9y2nyj South Korea SEOUL Contact: Cyrus Contact Info: ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH58W8W+HJ, https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

San Diego16 mentions across 16 issues

San Diego is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 16 times across 16 issues between May 24, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "built a 200-mile electric train from San Diego to Yuma"; "right now my plan is just Bay Area, LA, and maybe Orange County or San Diego"; "I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego". It most often appears alongside ACX, Los Angeles, San Francisco.

Article page: San Diego
Mention count: 16
Issue count: 16
First seen: May 24, 2022
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers August 16, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
LA and San Diego Meetups This Weekend October 06, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness February 27, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 326 April 22, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 380 May 05, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 401 September 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

ACX 9 shared issues
Los Angeles 9 shared issues
San Francisco 9 shared issues
Scott 9 shared issues
Seattle 9 shared issues

Source context

May 24, 2022 · Original source

With the same money, built a 200-mile electric train from San Diego to Yuma [in Arizona], along the border [with Mexico], UNDERGROUND. Place a light rail system above ground. Now, you have cut off any possible illegal drug and human trafficking across the border, both above and below ground. And, you have a basic infrastructure to develop the 200+ miles of undeveloped land, to build new cities and millions of new homes, thus solving the housing crisis! A Double WIN-WIN, a secure border, and room to grow. IT'S THAT SIMPLE!

In his spare time, Zink is the author of books including Signs: You’re In San Diego (a book of photos of San Diego signs), a book of COVID-19 memes, and educational books for children.

Inline links: Signs: You’re In San Diego, book of COVID-19 memes, educational books for children

In case you’re still not convinced he’s really Republican, he lives on a ranch and has three children named Chase, Reagan, and Rosslyn.

Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers

August 16, 2022 · Original source

I did this the past two times and it was a lot of fun, but it also pretty tiring. I'll probably do a much smaller tour this year - right now my plan is just Bay Area, LA, and maybe Orange County or San Diego. I'll get in touch with the people involved in those cities and sort it out, and give everyone an update around 8/24 when I post the final list of cities and people.

August 26, 2022 · Original source

I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. ACX meetups coordinator Mingyuan will provisionally be attending Paris and London. I’ll be announcing some of the biggest ones on the blog, regardless of whether or not I attend.

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.

October 06, 2022 · Original source

San Diego at 3 PM on Sunday, October 9, at Bird Park, these coordinates.

Inline links: these coordinates

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise

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.

But the same thing - orchestra disbands, later reformed - has happened in Oakland, in San Jose, and in San Diego, as well as in a lot of other cities around the country (Denver, New Orleans ...)

December 09, 2022 · Original source

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

Inline links: writes, writes, writes, on the WASP aristocracy, thinks I’m mostly wrong, writes

Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness

February 27, 2023 · Original source

The first Columbine-style school shooting I am aware of was at the U. of Texas around 1966. The next was a young woman shooting up a school outside of San Diego around 1978. When asked why she did it, she said, "I don't like Mondays." Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats wrote a catchy tune about that shooting, which likely helped make school shootings more of a Thing in American culture.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 2nd, 1:00 PM Location: Bird Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+P6 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/ Notes: We'll have an ACX sign and I'll be wearing a red shirt.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+P6, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 1:00 PM Location: Bird Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+P7 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/events/299717844/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+P7, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/events/299717844/

Open Thread 326

April 22, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week: NYC, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake, Madrid, Zurich, Hyderabad, Rio, Taipei. And a new meetup has been added for Zwolle. See the list for more information.

Inline links: the list

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Julia and Andrew Contact Info: amethyst[dot]eggplant[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 01st, 02:00 PM Location: Private Residence at 22nd and W in Midtown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+JQM Group Link: hit me up for a discord link Notes: There will be pizza, drinks and off to one side there will be a podcasting station set up if guests are interested in ACX Stories SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 01:00 PM Location: Bird Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+PC2 Group Link: https://meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+JQM, https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+PC2, https://meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Andrew Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 25, 1pm Location: WAL Public Market (1104 R St, Sacramento, CA 95811) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q Group Link: https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ Notes: How to get to the space - email me and I'll walk you through it - there will be food and drinks, feel free to bring something, there will be room SAN DIEGO Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+55 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q, https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ, https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+55, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Open Thread 380

May 05, 2025 · Original source

1: ACX meetups this week in Cape Town, Waterloo, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seattle, Boston, and San Diego. See the post for details.

Inline links: the post

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Steven Contact Info: stevenl451[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 3:00 PM Location: Stulsaft Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQ42+55 Group Link: You can ask in the ACXD discord SAN DIEGO Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 11:00 AM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+65 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VFQ42+55, https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+65, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

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

Book Review Contest: Winners

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Andrew Contact Info: nightfall9[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM Location: The Warehouse Artists Lofts, the patio on the roof, 1108 R St in Midtown, 11AM - 3PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+7WX Group Link: https://discord.gg/fDf [remove this bit] pRemM Notes: Discord is the best place to talk about attending the meetup. Also, for the meetup, the main entrance to the building is locked, but the is a silver number pad to the right. dial 060 on the keypad and I can buzz you in to the building. Upon entering, go straight and the elevator will be on your left, go up to the 7th floor. Please RSVP on LessWrong SAN DIEGO Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[.]simonelli[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 11:00 AM Location: Wisdom Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+56 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+7WX, https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+56, https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

Sydney16 mentions across 16 issues

Sydney is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 16 times across 16 issues between July 10, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Misha is an investor in Sydney, Australia"; "SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA"; "Elsewhere in media malpractice news: Sydney". It most often appears alongside Cambridge, Portland, Scott.

Article page: Sydney
Mention count: 16
Issue count: 16
First seen: July 10, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review Contest: Winners July 10, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Links For June July 01, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Open Thread 241 September 12, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 325 April 15, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 377 April 14, 2025
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines July 15, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 399 September 15, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Cambridge 12 shared issues
Portland 11 shared issues
Scott 11 shared issues
Australia 10 shared issues
Berkeley 10 shared issues

Source context

July 10, 2021 · Original source

Misha is an investor in Sydney, Australia, and blogs here.

Inline links: here

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 1 Location: Sydney is in lockdown for the next month at least, so probably on Zoom. Notes: I would change to in person if lockdown rules change.

Inline links: Zoom

Links For June

July 01, 2022 · Original source

36: Elsewhere in media malpractice news: Sydney Morning Herald nonconsensually outs an actress as lesbian, using the old “well it was possible to find the information so you couldn’t have really been committed to keeping it secret” excuse. They have since apologized, which I guess is more than NYT has ever done.

Inline links: nonconsensually outs an actress as lesbian

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

Open Thread 241

September 12, 2022 · Original source

2: Worldwide ACX meetup season continues. This week there will be meetups in Sydney on Thursday, Ottawa on Friday, Cambridge (UK) / DC / San Jose / Atlanta on Saturday, and Berkeley / SF / Toronto / New Haven / Chicago on Sunday - plus many more. See the meetups list for details.

Inline links: the meetups list

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 20th, 06:00 PM Location: Lvl 2, 565 George St, Sydney, NSW Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+894 Event Link: https://meetu.ps/e/LWZ63/sqK6x/i Notes: I am a regular host of Sydney Rationality events.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+894, https://meetu.ps/e/LWZ63/sqK6x/i

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 21st, 6:00 PM Location: Shanghai restaurant, Level 2, 565 George St, Sydney NSW Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+79J Group Link: https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlryfcmbcc/sqK6x/i Notes: Please RSVP to meetup.com

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+79J, https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlryfcmbcc/sqK6x/i

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA Contact: Chris Waterguy Contact Info: singkong[plus]rat[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 18th, 6:00 PM Location: Club Sydney (RSL Sydney) 565 George St, Sydney NSW 2000 Instructions: entry needs photo ID. We meet on Level 2, the Chinese restaurant, in the glassed-off section. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/

Open Thread 325

April 15, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week, including London, Oxford, SF, Cambridge (UK), Vienna, Portland, Jerusalem, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Capetown, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Boulder, Dallas, Leipzig, and Jakarta; bolding these last two since they were later additions you might have missed the first time. Check the list for more information.

Inline links: the list

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Bianca Peterek Contact Info: bianca[d ot]czatyrko[at]gmail[ dot]co m Time: Saturday, October 12th, 01:30 PM Location: Dôme Café Bassendean (Located in Hawaiian's) West Rd, Bassendean WA 6054 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4PWQ3XW3+9G Notes: Please find the table with the "ACX meet-up" sign. I'm totally blind, so you'll have to find me and be verbal! SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 06:00 PM Location: Lvl 2, 565 George St, Sydney NSW Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98 Group Link: https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlrygcmbzb/sqK6x/i Notes: Bring a friend! Everyone welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4PWQ3XW3+9G, https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98, https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlrygcmbzb/sqK6x/i

Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 06:00 PM Location: Lvl 2, 565 George St, Sydney NSW Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98 Group Link: https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlrygcmbzb/sqK6x/i Notes: Bring a friend! Everyone welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+98, https://meetu.ps/e/.qqqqlrygcmbzb/sqK6x/i

Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Bianca Rose Peterek Contact Info: bianca[p eriod] czatyrko[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM Location: The Coffee Club Café – 140 William Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX5+34 Notes: I am totally blind. Please look for the ACX meetup sign and announce yourself when you arrive. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you there! SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot Contact Info: redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM Location: Level 2, City of Sydney RSL, 565 George st, Sydney Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+89P Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/ Notes: Just RSVP on meetup. Email me with any extra questions

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX5+34, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/

Contact: Eliot Contact Info: redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM Location: Level 2, City of Sydney RSL, 565 George st, Sydney Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+89P Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/ Notes: Just RSVP on meetup. Email me with any extra questions

Inline links: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/

Open Thread 377

April 14, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Cambridge (UK), Chicago, both Portlands, New Haven, DC, and Manhattan. See here for times and details.

Inline links: See here for times and details

July 15, 2025 · Original source

But that raises a second question: a modern Aborigine has two options. They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate, in which case they’re no worse off than any other poor immigrant, and better than most. Or they can stay in an Aboriginal village. If Hiatt is to be believed, Aboriginal villages weren’t mental health disasters when they were following their traditional ways. But in absolute terms, they’re much richer now: nobody starves, there’s decent medical care, people have quality clothes and houses, etc. So what’s gotten worse?

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Chris Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Parliament House Gardens Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ Notes: We'll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the "Spring" ACX meetup). Bad weather and we'll move into Irish Murphy's. SYDNEY Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 6:00 PM Location: Skyview Hall, 14a Frances St, Randwick NSW 2031. To find the hall, walk through to the end of the car park, pass through the green gate and walk straight down the path to the back building, then walk upstairs. Call Eliot 0438481143 if lost. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney Notes: This event is at a private house.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ, https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney

Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 6:00 PM Location: Skyview Hall, 14a Frances St, Randwick NSW 2031. To find the hall, walk through to the end of the car park, pass through the green gate and walk straight down the path to the back building, then walk upstairs. Call Eliot 0438481143 if lost. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney Notes: This event is at a private house.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney

September 15, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Brussels, Cape Town, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Kyiv, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Portland, Philadelphia, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Sydney, Waterloo, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Prague and St. Louis have been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Bianca Peterek Contact Info: biancaczatyrko[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 16th, 1:30 PM Location: Coffee Club William Street, Shop 11, 140 William St, Corner of Murray St Mall, Perth, WA, Australia, 6000. I am totally blind. Please look for the ACX meetup sign and announce yourself when you arrive. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you there! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX4+2X SYDNEY Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[@]gmail[.]com Time: Thursday, April 16th, 6:00 PM Location: Skyview Hall, 14 Frances St Randwick, walk to the end of the car park to the green gate and through to the back building, upstairs in the hall. Call Eliot if lost 0438481143 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QR Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney Notes: Usual attendance is 10-30 people. Bring a friend!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX4+2X, https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QR, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney

Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[@]gmail[.]com Time: Thursday, April 16th, 6:00 PM Location: Skyview Hall, 14 Frances St Randwick, walk to the end of the car park to the green gate and through to the back building, upstairs in the hall. Call Eliot if lost 0438481143 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QR Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney Notes: Usual attendance is 10-30 people. Bring a friend!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QR, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney

Shanghai15 mentions across 15 issues

Shanghai is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between May 21, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Shanghai and central China forming an economic core"; "former Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin"; "he had been party secretary in Shanghai". It most often appears alongside China, Taiwan, ACX.

Article page: Shanghai
Mention count: 15
Issue count: 15
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping April 06, 2022
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President April 13, 2022
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance August 19, 2022
Moderation Is Different From Censorship November 03, 2022
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate March 28, 2024
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate April 09, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 382 May 19, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 400 September 22, 2025
Sources Say Bay Area House Party September 25, 2025
Open Thread 415 January 05, 2026
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

China 9 shared issues
Taiwan 8 shared issues
ACX 7 shared issues
Europe 7 shared issues
Hong Kong 7 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Its historical geographic divisions have apparently held to this day, with the north controlling politics, Shanghai and central China forming an economic core, the south a perennial secessionist threat, and the interior ignored. (This book predates the genocidal campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, though Tibet has suffered its share of atrocities.) Recent unification came about only after America took the threat of Japan away, and its economic rise coincided with its participation in America’s free trade network. With that change, “Instead of being raided for raw materials, China was guaranteed access to global supplies. The endless supplies of cheap labor that the Europeans and Japanese ruthlessly tapped now allowed China to generate its own goods for export, this time with the revenues flowing to the Chinese instead of overseas interests.”

Inline links: campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang

Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President

April 06, 2022 · Original source

Mao Zedong was definitely an autocrat. After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top. Deng had absolute power but thought that was bad, so he created lots of institutions that were supposed to prevent future leaders from exercising the control he had, then sort of backed down. He appointed former Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin as his successor. Jiang followed Deng’s anti-absolute-power rules, but he was able to get most of what he wanted anyway. Partly this was because he was a really skilled politician, partly it was because he had a really good secret police force with personal loyalty to him and lots of blackmail on everyone else.

When Jiang took power, he filled important positions with his clients. Mostly these were his underlings from Shanghai; they became known as the Shanghai Gang. The Shanghai Gang stuck together and supported its own, and operated kind of as a “political party” “representing” the interests of east coast urban elites.

(“Jiang And His Shanghai Gang” sounds like a good name for kids’ TV show, or maybe a hip-hop group.)

April 13, 2022 · Original source

For example: during his career, Xi served as party secretary of four different areas: Zhengding, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. A faithful conceptual translation would have had Shea serving as county supervisor of some small county in Virginia, then mayor of Miami, then governor of North Carolina, then governor of New York. This career progression doesn’t make a lot of sense in a US context (except for this guy!), so I turned him into a consultant in Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina before becoming NYC mayor. Maybe I should have just let him be governor of a bunch of states and let it be implausible, I don’t know.

Inline links: this guy

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance

August 19, 2022 · Original source

The “Japanese pirates” were not much like Captain Morgan or Jack Sparrow - they were really more like Vikings. Annual raiding parties would sail in from Japan, where they would set up armed bandit camps and raid the surrounding countryside. Often joined by disenfranchised or disgruntled locals, they posed a serious threat to public order all along the southeast coast, from Shanghai to the Taiwan Strait.

Inline links: Japanese pirates

Moderation Is Different From Censorship

November 03, 2022 · Original source

The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. “Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we’ve got to remove it for everybody.” This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting. Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they’d have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get. And this is just the minimum viable product, the case I’m focusing on to forestall objections of “this would be too hard to implement” or “this would be too complicated for ordinary people to understand”. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a bunch of filters - harassing content, sexually explicit content, conspiracy theories - and let people toggle which ones they wanted to see vs. avoid. You could let people set them to different levels. Set your anti-Semitism filter to the weakest setting and it will only block literal Nazis with swastikas in their profile pic; set it to Ludicrous, and it will block anyone who isn’t an ordained Orthodox rabbi. Or you could let users choose which fact-checking organization they trusted to flag content as “disinformation”. The current level of moderation is a compromise. It makes no one happy. Allowing more personalized settings would make the free speech side happier (since they could speak freely to one another and anyone else interested in hearing what they had to say). And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now. This doesn’t solve all our problems. There are some genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear. For example: That it’s a social good to avert the spread of false ideas (and maybe even some true ideas that people can’t handle). People might want to hear these ideas (“What? Joe Biden is a lizard person spy? I hadn’t heard anything about that on the so-called mainstream media!”) but they should not be allowed to.

Inline links: The racket

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate

March 28, 2024 · Original source

Okay, this one is just awful. It takes the risky gambit above - giving extreme odds to something - then doubles down on it by multiplying across twenty different stages to get a stupendously low probability of 1/5*10^25. If we believe this, it’s more likely that we win the lottery three times in a row than that we learn lab leak was true after all. Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this the Multiple Stage Fallacy. Even aside from the failure mode in the sunrise example above (where people are too reluctant to give strong probabilities), it fails because people don’t think enough about the correlations between stages. For example, maybe there’s only 1/10 odds that the Wuhan scientists would choose the suboptimal RRAR furin cleavage site. And maybe there’s only 1/20 odds that they would add a proline in front to make it PRRAR. But are these really two separate forms of weirdness, such that we can multiply them together and get 1/200? Or are scientists who do one weird thing with a furin cleavage site more likely to do another? Mightn’t they be pursuing some general strategy of testing weird furin cleavage sites? (For example, Yuri proposed that, because the scientists wanted to understand how pandemic coronaviruses originate in nature, they might deliberately pick more natural-looking features over more designed-looking ones, which would neatly explain many features seemingly inconsistent with lab leak. Is this a conspiracy theory? Rootclaim is able to successfully route around this question. If the probability of a feature happening in nature is X, then the probability of it happening in this variant of lab leak scenario is X * [chance that the scientists wanted to imitate nature). This gives it a (deserved) complexity penalty without ruling out this (non-zero and potentially important) possibility.) In any case, Peter didn’t care as much about probabilistic analysis as Saar, he didn’t make his case hinge on this slide, and he might have been kind of using it to troll Rootclaim (which definitely worked). He might not have been making any of the mistakes above. But anyone who took this slide seriously would end up dramatically miscalibrated. The Math: Big Pictures Another of Saar’s concerns with the verdict was that Peter was an extraordinary debater, to the point where it could have overwhelmed the signal from the evidence. It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech. I sometimes get accused of overdoing things, but I can’t imagine how many mutations it would take to make me even a fraction as competent as Peter was. Saar’s closing argument included the admission: Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He's invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He's much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point. Once you’ve described your opponent that way in your closing argument, what’s left of your case? Saar thought a lot was left. Throughout the debate, he tried to make a point about how getting the inference right was more important than winning sub-sub-sub-debates about individual lines of evidence. Although Peter won most specific points of contention, Saar thought that if the judges could just keep their mind on the big picture, they would realize a lab leak was more likely. I’m potentially sympathetic to arguments like Saar’s. Imagine a debate about UFOs. Imaginary-Saar says “UFOs can’t be real, because it doesn’t make sense for aliens to come to Earth, circle around a few fields in Kansas, then leave without providing any other evidence of their existence.” Imaginary-Peter says “John Smith of Topeka saw a UFO at 4:52 PM on 6/12/2010, and everyone agrees he’s an honorable person who wouldn’t lie, so what’s your explanation of that?” Saar says “I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something?” Peter says “Ha, I’ve hacked his cell phone records and geolocated him to coordinates XYZ, which is a mosque. My analysis finds that he’s there on 99.5% of Islamic holy days, which proves he’s a very religious Muslim. And religious Muslims don’t drink! Your argument is invalid!” On the one hand, imaginary-Peter is very impressive and sure did shoot down Saar’s point. On the other, imaginary-Saar never really claimed to have a great explanation for this particular UFO sighting, and his argument doesn’t depend on it. Instead of debating whether Smith could or couldn’t have been drunk, we need to zoom out and realize that the aliens explanation makes no sense. The problem was, Saar couldn’t effectively communicate what his big picture was. Neither deployed some kind of amazingly elegant prior. They both used the same kind of evidence. The only difference was that Peter’s evidence hung together, and Saar’s evidence fell apart on cross-examination. I think - not because Saar really explained it, but just reading between the lines - Saar thought the un-ignorable big picture evidence was the origin in a city with a coronavirus gain-of-function lab, and the twelve-nucleotide insertion in the furin cleavage site. To some degree, Peter just ate the loss on those questions. No matter how you slice it, it really is a weird coincidence that the epidemic started so close to Asia’s biggest coronavirus laboratory. Peter tried to deflect this - he pointed out there were other BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. But this was a rare question where he unambiguously came out looking worse - the other cities’ labs had much less coronavirus-specific research. Wuhan really was unique (aside from the other big coronavirus lab in North Carolina). Peter did better when he tried to control the damage: there are a couple hundred million people in the South Asian areas where people eat weird animals exposed to virus-infected bats, Wuhan has a population of about 12 million, so maybe 1.5% of all potential zoonotic pandemics should start in Wuhan. Peter tried to argue that Wuhan was a local trade center, so maybe we should up that to 5 - 10%. 5 - 10% coincidences aren’t that rare. Even 1.5% coincidences happen sometimes. Likewise, the furin cleavage site really does stand on a genetic map. I didn’t feel like either side did much math to quantify how weird it was. Naively, I might think of this as “30,000 bases in COVID, only one insertion, it’s in what’s obviously the most interesting place - sounds like 30,000-to-one odds against”. Against that, a virus with a boring insertion would never have become a pandemic, so maybe you need to multiply this by however much viral evolution is going on in weird caves in Laos, and then you would get the odds that at least one virus would have an insertion interesting enough to go global. Neither participant calculated this in a way that satisfied me (though see here for related discussion). Instead, Peter tried to undermine the furin argument by showing that, as surprising as the site was under a natural origin, it would be an even more surprising choice for human engineers. Saar argued it wasn’t - but because of his policy of giving adjusted-for-model-error odds, he only gave this a factor of 30 in his analysis. Since Peter gave it a higher factor of 50 in his analysis, it looked from the outside like Saar had already conceded this point, and the judges were mostly happy to go with Saar’s artificially-low estimate. The Math: Double Coincidences Saar brought up an interesting point halfway through the debate: you should rarely see high Bayes factors on both sides of an argument. That is, suppose you accept that there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that the pandemic starts at a wet market under lab leak. And suppose you accept there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that COVID’s furin cleavage site could evolve naturally. If lab leak is true, then you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for zoonosis5. Likewise, if zoonosis is true, you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for this true thing. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. Either way, you’re accepting that a 1-in-10,000 freak coincidence happened. Isn’t it more likely you’ve bungled your analysis? I was following along at home, and I definitely bungled this point; I had some high Bayes factors on both sides. I adjusted some of them downward based on Saar’s good point, but how far should we take it? Here I remember The Pyramid And The Garden: you can get very strong coincidences if you have many degrees of freedom, ie buy a lot of lottery tickets. So for example, suppose there are fifty things about a virus. You should expect at least one of those to have a one-in-fifty coincidence by pure chance. What about more than that? You might be able to get away with this by saying there are an infinite number of possible conspiracy theories, and some from that infinite set are brought into existence when a strong enough coincidence makes them plausible. For example, it’s really weird that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted, I could form a conspiracy theory about a group of weird assassins obsessed with killing Founding Fathers on important dates, and then Jefferson and Adams’ deaths would be 1/10,000 evidence for that theory. But this is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which Saar warned against several times. I don’t know if “the virus started in Wuhan, which is where they’re doing this research” gets a Texas Sharpshooter penalty, or how high that penalty should be. But the furin cleavage site doesn’t - people were talking about lab leak before anyone noticed it. The Aftermath: Peter Peter seemed satisfied with the result, in an understated sort of way: It seemed like an interesting experiment in monetizing the debunking of a conspiracy theory. I think there's usually a big asymmetry where it's easy to get rich spreading bullshit (like, the top anti-vaxxers during the pandemic all made a million dollars a year on substack), but it's almost impossible to make money on debunking it. The Rootclaim challenge seemed like one rare case where the opposite was true. Beyond that, I don't know what it's good for. It does seem like there could be a positive social impact from more people understanding that the lab leak hypothesis is (almost certainly) false. The Aftermath: Saar Saar says the debate didn’t change his mind. In fact, by the end of the debate, Rootclaim released an updated analysis that placed an even higher probability on lab leak than when they started. In his blog post, he discussed the issues above, and said the judges had erred in not considering them. He respects the judges, he appreciates their efforts, he just thinks they got it wrong. Although he respected their decision, he wanted the judges to correct what he saw as mistakes in their published statements, which delayed the public verdict and which which Viewers Like You did not appreciate: I ran an early draft of this post by him. There was some miscommunication about the exact publication date, so he hasn’t had time to write up a full response, but he has some quick thoughts (and I’ll link the full response when he writes it). He says: We will provide a full response to this post soon, but the main problem with it is fairly simple: There is general agreement that the main evidence for zoonosis is HSM (Huanan Seafood Market) forming an early cluster of cases. The contention is whether it is amazing 10,000x evidence, or is it negligible. All other evidence points to a lab leak, and if HSM is shown to be weak, lab leak is a clear winner. We provided an analysis of why it is negligible that is as close to mathematical proof as such things can be. Read it here. Scott and I exchanged a few emails on this issue and Scott preferred to discuss more intuitive analyses of HSM, using rules of thumb that likely served him well in the past. While I believe I managed to mostly explain where these failed, and Scott understands HSM is far weaker evidence than he initially thought6, he still has a very strong intuitive feeling (based on years of dealing with probabilities) that this is some exceptional coincidence, and that prevents him from properly updating his posterior. At the end of the day, this cannot be settled without going through our semi-formal derivation, understanding it, and either identifying the problem with it or accepting it (and thereby accepting lab-leak to be more likely). Here is a quick summary of the mistakes made by those claiming HSM is strong evidence: The first mistake is conflating Bayes factors with conditional probabilities. 1/10000 is the supposed conditional probability p(HSM|Lab Leak), That should be divided by the conditional probability of HSM under Zoonosis. Markets were not identified as a high-risk location prior to this outbreak (This will be elaborated in the full response), and in SARS1 the spillovers were mostly at restaurants and other food handlers that deal more closely with wildlife. While it's cool to point to the raccoon dog photo, that was a result of a retrospective search (we don't know what other photos they took which in retrospect would be brought up as premonition). Unbiased data shows markets are not a likely spillover location for zoonosis. We originally estimated p(HSM|Zoonosis)<0.1. Following more research we did to answer Scott's questions, this is more likely <0.03.

Inline links: Multiple Stage Fallacy, see here, 5, The Pyramid And The Garden, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, blog post, 6

Claim that he, Saar, through his years of experience testing Rootclaim, has some kind of special metis at using it, and everyone else is screwing up. Saar gestured at (2) in the debate, repeatedly emphasizing that Rootclaim was difficult and subtle. But he mostly talked about things like the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which all participants already knew about and were trying to avoid. Maybe he should go further. This wouldn’t necessarily be special pleading. When psychoanalysts claim their therapies work, they don’t mean that someone who just read a two page “What Is Psychoanalysis?” pamphlet can do good therapy. They mean that someone who spent ten years training under someone who spent ten years training and so on in a lineage back to Freud can do good therapy. When scientists say the scientific method works, they don’t mean that any crackpot who reads an Intro To Science textbook can figure out the mysteries of the universe. They mean someone who’s trained under other scientists and absorbed their way of thinking can do it. If Saar wants to convince people, I think he should abandon his debates - which wouldn’t help even if he won, and certainly don’t help when he loses - and train five people who aren’t him in how to do Rootclaim, up to standards where he admits they’re as good at it as he is. Then he should prove that those five people can reliably get the same answers to difficult questions, even when they’re not allowed to compare notes beforehand. That would be compelling evidence!8 The Aftermath: Pseudoscience Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it? The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true. Still, it’s awkward to use “conspiracy theory” as an insult when the conspiracies were real. Maybe a better question is whether lab leak is “pseudoscience”. The argument against: lots of smart people and experts believed it was a lab leak. There were all those virologists giving 50-50 odds in their internal conversations. Even Peter says he started out leaning lab leak, back in 2021 when everyone was talking about it. The argument in favor: since 2021, experts (and Peter) have shifted pretty far in favor of zoonosis. They’ve been convinced by new work - the identification of early cases, the wet market surveys, the genetic analysis. What category of noun does the adjective“pseudoscientific” describe? It doesn’t necessarily describe theories: Newtonian mechanics wasn’t pseudoscience when Newton discovered it, but if someone argued for it today (against relativity), that would be pseudoscientific. It doesn’t even describe arguments: “we don’t have enough data to confirm global warming” was a strong argument against global warming before there were good data, and a pseudoscientific one now. Might we place the locus of pseudoscientificness in people, communities, and norms of discussion? Peter’s position is that, although the lab leak theory is inherently plausible and didn’t start as pseudoscience, it gradually accreted a community around it with bad epistemic norms. Once lab leak became A Thing - after people became obsessed with getting one over on the experts - they developed dozens of further arguments which ranged from flawed to completely false. Peter spent most of the debate debunking these - Mr. Chen’s supposed 12/8 COVID case, Connor Reed’s supposed 11/25 COVID case, the rumors of WIV researchers falling sick, the 90 early cases supposedly “hidden” in a random paper, etc, etc, etc. Peter compares this to QAnon, where an early “seed” idea created an entire community of people riffing off of it to create more and more bad facts and arguments until they had constructed an entire alternative epistemic edifice. If we don’t accept the judges’ verdict, and think lab leak is true, are we worried the zoonosis side has some misbehavior of its own? Yuri and Saar didn’t talk about that as much. High-status people misbehave in different ways from low-status people; I think the zoonosis side has plenty of things to feel bad about (eg the conspiracies), but pseudoscience probably isn’t the right descriptor. The Aftermath: Ebb And Flow During the debate, Peter accused the lab leak side of being constantly left flat-footed by new evidence. Sure, it had seemed plausible back in 2020, but they’d had to scramble to explain a steady stream of pro-zoonosis papers. Afterwards, Saar and Yuri got some new evidence of their own. A Chinese team appeared to have found a T/T intermediate strain of COVID in Shanghai, possibly imported from very early in Wuhan. If true, it would provide new evidence against a double spillover, instead supporting Lineage A mutating into B in humans. (You can see Peter’s response here - basically that we’re not sure it’s a true intermediate and not a reversion - if it were true, how come the two strains on either side of it got millions of cases, and it just got one guy in Shanghai? But if it were true, it would still be compatible with zoonosis - Lineage A would have spread from an animal and quickly mutated into B, the first A case would have been someone who left the wet market for a nearby area, and the first B case would have been someone who stayed in the wet market.) Also, a new Freedom of Information Act request got early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal with new details, of which the most explosive was a comment by the American half of the team, reassuring the Chinese half that even though the proposal focused on American work to please funders, they would let the Chinese side do some “assays”. Lab leakers say this disproves the argument that, because DEFUSE said the work would be done in the US, the Wuhan Institute of Virology couldn’t/wouldn’t do advanced gain-of-function research. (I asked Peter his response - he said the original draft of DEFUSE also said that the Chinese side would do “live virus binding assays”, and this isn’t the kind of gain-of-function research necessary to make COVID.) In an email, Saar and Yuri suggested it was an “interesting coincidence” that all the new evidence that came out after the debate favored their side. I’ve decided against updating on these considerations - either Peter’s version or Saar/Yuri’s. My impression is that anyone who starts out believing something at time t will also believe all the new evidence after time t favors that thing. There’s also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they’ve obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit. Overall I don’t think it’s useful to update on the exact contours of the ebb and flow of new evidence. Just treat new evidence the same as old evidence, updating your model the same amount as everything else. The Aftermath: Debate Some skeptic blogs picked up this story last month, and one of the points they made was that even if this one turned out well for their side, in general they’re against this kind of thing. Part of their argument was that debating “conspiracy theories” just helps spread and legitimize them. I’ve made fun of this position before, and I’ll make fun of it again now. According to polling, about 66% of Americans believe lab leak, compared to 16% who believe natural origin and 17% who aren’t sure. That means that people with an opinion on the issue are more than 4:1 in favor of lab leak. At some point you have to start debating! What are you waiting for? If you hold off so long that finally every single person in the world except you believes lab leak, would you still be sitting there, pristine in your imperturbability, saying from your lofty height “I refuse to engage, because that would be providing the rest of you oxygen”? The other part of the argument was that saying “I will debate all comers for an $X bet” is annoying, and we shouldn’t encourage that kind of thing. Certainly this technique has been used by bad actors - for example, the Holocaust denial group Institute For Historical Review offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could prove the Holocaust happened (it was eventually won by an Auschwitz survivor whose “proof” was that he saw his family led to the gas chambers; IHR failed to accept this; the survivor sued and won). Likewise, anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch has offered to bet $500,000 on the results of a debate about vaccines not working9 (Saar took him up on it and they’re continuing to hammer out the specifics). I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate. And taking people up on their offer, having a great debate that leaves everybody more enlightened and serves as a model for rational discourse, then having the right side win in the end - seems like the opposite of delegitimizing this strategy. I guess I classify this with all the other examples in Less Utilitarian Than Thou. Cool Machiavellian plot you have there, but maybe the fact that you’re losing 16%-66% should make you question whether you’re really as smart as you think you are, and whether your plan to suppress all discussion for the greater good is really the mastermind-level strategy you hoped it would be. It’s good to assert the true fact that these kinds of challenges are often dumb/rigged/useless, and that “nobody has yet responded to my challenge” isn’t a valid argument that someone’s necessarily right. But I stop short of trying to set some kind of social norm that nobody may respond to anyone else’s challenges, even if they think that person is being honest and has organized the challenge well (as Saar was and did). That almost seems like itself legitimizing the whole thing, in the sense of accepting that if someone loses a challenge then it means something important. I would rather place the illegitimacy where it belongs (a challenge really doesn’t prove anything, separate from the arguments made in it) and let people do what they want. I want to see more debates like this. I learned more watching the 15 hours of Rootclaim debate than I think I would have researching on my own for 15 hours. But a lot of things had to come together to make this work. Most of all, this debate worked out because the judges were two very smart scientists with relevant expertise. To get such good judges, lots of things had to fall into place. First, the debate itself had to be expensive enough that neither side begrudged paying the extra $5,000 per judge to hire the best people. And second, the debate had to be about a topic where lots of intelligent people haven’t yet made up their minds. If the debate was about flat earth, I would despair of finding good judges. Either the judges would already be convinced the Earth was round (which the flat Earth side would understandably refuse to accept). Or they would be 50-50, which would mean they were extremely weird people whose reasoning couldn’t be trusted. Flat Earth is an extreme example, but even a debate about COVID vaccines would be pushing it here. (since writing this, I learned Peter had made this same argument and analogy in a blog post on Kirsch; sorry for the unintentional plagiarism) I think I would genuinely update on the conclusion of any other Rootclaim debate with the same caliber of participants as this one, but not necessarily on whatever Steve Kirsch or the Institute of Historical Review comes up with, nor the next person to hit on the strategy of “I’ll pay you $100,000 if you prove me wrong!”10 The Aftermath: Conclusion This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons. First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. It’s a weird rabbit hole, which I’m not yet entirely out of. I have a weird urge to visit Wuhan as a tourist, see the Wuhan Institute of Virology, stroll through the Huanan Central Seafood Market (unfortunately closed), maybe eat a raccoon-dog. Second, some of the lessons of this debate are actionable. I’ve written before about how we should learn the lessons of lab leak even if it turns out to be false this time; that hasn’t changed. But this was a good reminder to also learn the lessons of zoonosis, for the same reason. We need more attention on closing wet markets and tracking weird Chinese wildlife. The DEFUSE proposal wanted to immunize bats - is this still a worthwhile idea? The virologists got a bad rap for wanting to gain-of-function exactly the pathogen that caused the century’s worst pandemic, but in a way that speaks well of them - they clearly knew what to be worried about. Has anyone mumbled an apology and asked them if they have any other useful predictions? Third, John Nerst has written about erisology, the study of disagreements. This was surely one of history’s greatest erisological studies. Two very smart people spent fifteen hours hashing out every argument and counterargument in good faith, then quantified all of their beliefs in a way that lets us figure out exactly where they differed and by how much. This isn’t entirely a victory - as a newly minted member of team zoonosis, I still can’t trace exactly why Saar is so sure I’m wrong. But if the COVID origin story fascinates me as this peek deep into a pestiferous underworld of sinister laboratories and reeking wet markets, something about this debate felt like analogous peek into the creepy subconscious swamps where disagreements begin. Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come. But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare. I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet. Other Resources Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate

Inline links: 8, appeared to have found, here, got early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal with new details, picked up this story, made fun of this position before, polling, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mohs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e52ee7e-553d-4ad5-a0eb-701ad84be8cb_615x308.png, 9, Less Utilitarian Than Thou, in a blog post on Kirsch, 10, erisology, Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SHANGHAI Contact: SZ Contact Info: asxsh[at]proton[dot]me Time: Sunday, April 21st, 3:00 PM Location: The Bunker（街垒）Pub, 190-3 Wulumuqi Rd North, Jing'an District. It's a small place, I'll have a sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336CCR+XW7 Notes: I'd prefer to see your email to know you're coming! No stress though, feel free to just show up. Drinks not required, come and hang out! It won't be just expats :)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q336CCR+XW7

April 09, 2024 · Original source

This alone isn’t fatal to lab leak. It’s perfectly possible for the lab to leak (let’s say) November 5th, the virus spreads a bit, and then a month later someone goes to the wet market, coughs on a vendor, and starts the officially recognized pandemic. But if that were true, you’d expect (let’s say) 30 cases by early December. Let’s say the wet market vendor was exactly Case # 30. She infected the other wet market vendors, starting a pandemic with an obvious center at the wet market and lots of infected wet market vendors and patrons. What about Case # 29? If they were (let’s say) a barista, how come they didn’t infect people at their coffee shop? How come there wasn’t a second obvious cluster radiating out from a coffee shop, lots of coffee-shop-linked cases, etc? How come there weren’t 30 equally-sized clusters? In order to avoid this, you either need to claim that the wet market was a perfect superspreader location, or that the pattern with lots of cases in the wet market and few-to-none anywhere else was a result of ascertainment bias. Saar made both those arguments during the debate, but I thought Peter rebutted them effectively. 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater Nicholas Halden (blog) writes: What should we make of this study, which found the presence of covid in Brazilian wastewater in late 2019? Consider the doubling times. The study says that scientists working in late 2020 found COVID in samples of Brazilian wastewater from November 27, 2019. This was long before the first detected case of transmission in Brazil on March 13, 2020. Between November 27, 2019 and March 13, 2020 is about 16 weeks, so 32 COVID doubling times. 32 doubling times with no lockdown is enough time for COVID to infect every single person in Brazil. If COVID had infected everyone in Brazil before the first recognized case, we would have noticed. (again, COVID doubling time isn’t exactly invariably 3.5 days, but here we’re talking about numbers big enough that the exact details don’t matter very much) So if COVID was in Brazil on November 27, it must have fizzled out instead of going pandemic. How likely is that? If one person had COVID, it’s not too unlikely - not all COVID cases transmit it forward. If (let’s say) twenty people had COVID, it’s very unlikely - at that point, the law of large numbers takes over; in a freak coincidence, every single patient would have to fail to infect anyone else. So almost certainly fewer than 20 people in Brazil had COVID in November 27. So which is more likely - that somehow 20 people had COVID long before the virus was officially detected, and on a totally different continent, yet somehow a scientist looking through wastewater found the water from exactly those people and managed to detect the virus? Or that there was a sampling error, which happens all the time in these kinds of things? Peter wrote a blog post on some of these issues. He found that there were positive tests from wastewater samples as early as March 2019, which doesn’t fit anyone’s timeline, including lab leakers’. And most of these positives (including the Brazilian sample) contained later strains of the virus with mutations it picked up late in 2020. So these were almost certainly false positives from contamination. 1.5: Biorealism’s 16 arguments Biorealism has a list of sixteen arguments, which he liked so much that he posted it three times in the ACX comments, twice on Less Wrong, twice on Manifold, and about a dozen times on Twitter under multiple account names. Some posts were slightly different from others, but a typical version is: Importantly, Miller incorrectly claimed the N501Y mutation would result from passage in hACE2 mice (mixed them up with BALB/c mice). The major papers Miller relied on have been seriously challenged since the debate. See Stoyan and Chiu (2024), Weissman (2024), Bloom (2023) and Lv et al (2024). Overall the circumstantial evidence makes lab v plausible: Peter admitted getting this wrong during the debate. I think this very minor point about mice mutations was approximately his only mistake in 15 hours of debating, and he admitted it as soon as he noticed. Biorealism somehow heard about this (obviously not through watching the debate, as we’ll see in a moment), then left about 20-30 comments starting with it, under various accounts, on various platforms, as if it somehow discredited Peter. This is making me somewhat less charitable to him and his 16 arguments than I would be otherwise. 1. Chinese researchers Botao & Lei Xiao observed lab origin was likely given the nearest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were far from Wuhan. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sampled SARS-related bat coronaviruses where the nearest relatives are found in Yunnan, Laos and Vietnam ~1500km away. They refuse to share their records. The ancestral viruses of SARS were found equally far from where SARS spilled over into humans, so we know it’s possible (and likely) for viruses to travel that far. 2. Patrick Berche, DG at Institut Pasteur in Lille 2014-18, notes you would expect secondary outbreaks if it arose via the live animal trade. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/ There are constant outbreaks of weird coronaviruses in animal handlers. See eg this paper, which estimates about 60,000 of these per year. None of these ever go anywhere, because the farmers are in rural areas that aren’t dense enough to sustain a high R0, and the epidemic fizzles out after a single digit number of cases. Any early outbreaks of COVID would have vanished into this long and mostly unnoticed list. 3. Molecular data: Only sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site. Well adapted to human ACE2 cells. Low genetic diversity indicating a lack of prior circulation (Berche 2023). Restriction site SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI restriction map falls neatly within the ideal range for a reverse genetics system and used previously at WIV and UNC. Ngram analysis of the codon usage per Professor Louis Nemzer https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1667232580255490053?t=IJgitS5cw364ioclzVWxaA&s=19 The SARS2 backbone is very low in CG and CpG. While the 12-nt insert that gives it the FCS is extremely high in both. Almost as if it was some kind of chimera of a consensus sequence and a codon-optimized polybasic cleavage site? https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1752800486837678377?t=EpIRgyybJVaPgeMP5xdstA&s=19 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0?fbclid=IwAR1HMUMtLIAFOFppVasQDeoIAYrVhP8j4YoPO4wnaTOUiKLsllZl_oKryOw Most of this was discussed extensively in the second session of the debate, which I recommend. The CGG-CGG arginine codon usage is particularly unusual but used in synthetic biology. I asked a synthetic biologist about this. He said: » “Nope. I would literally never do this if I was designing a small insert (maybe I wouldn't notice if it happened by chance with ~1 in 25 odds in a naive codon optimization algorithm as part of a larger sequence). High GC% is bad. Tandem repeat is worse. Several other perfectly fine arginine codons. And I wouldn't engineer a viral genome using human codon usage. An engineer would not do it.” 4. DEFUSE full proposal: virus 20% different from SARS1, consensus seq assembled with 6 segments, without disrupting coding seq, BsmBI order, FCS. SARS2: 20% different than SARS1, 6 evenly spaced fragments w BsmBI and BsaI restriction sites, FCS. Jesse Bloom, Jack Nunberg, Robert Townley, Alexandre Hassanin have observed this workflow could have lead to SARS-CoV-2. Work often begins before funding sought or goes ahead anyway. Re: 4 - Also scattered across second section of debate, also not going to retread 5. Market cases were all lineage B. Lv et al (2024) indicates there was a single point of emergence and A came before B. So market cases not the primary cases. See also Bloom (2021), Kumar et al (2022). Peter Ben Embarek said there were likely already thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019.https://t.co/50kFV9zSb6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/34398234/ https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661 There was a Lineage A sample in the market, lab leak proponents just try to ignore/dismiss/conspiracize it away. The first two known Lineage A cases were very close to the market. Lv (is this even a real name? It sounds like Roman numeral? But I guess that’s what you expect in a country ruled by someone named Xi) found some weird COVID variants in Shanghai that might or might not mean anything; you can see some discussion of the implications here, but I don’t think they’re strong evidence either way. If A was first, it means some really weird stuff coincidences have to happen to give us the spread rates and genetic clock data we get, but they’re not necessarily weirder in the zoonosis hypothesis than the lab leak one. The claim that there were “thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019” is very easy to disprove by doubling rate arguments like the one above, by the blood bank study mentioned above, by the WHO’s failed case search, and by many other lines of argument. 6. Evidence for lineage A in the market is based on a low quality sample according to Liu et. al. (2023). I really think lab leakers need to decide whether they think China is a sinister actor trying to cover up the truth, or whether they should trust every offhand comment by Chinese government officials as gospel. Dr. Liu doesn’t explain in what sense he thinks the Lineage A sample is “low-quality”, and the Western scientists who I asked about this said they didn’t understand this complaint and that the sample was fine. A Western team re-analyzing the same sample describes it as “conclusively contain[ing] Lineage A.” I think most lab leakers have switched from trying to deny the genetics to claiming that this was “contamination”, which also doesn’t make sense (the sample is genetically very early). Note that aside from this sample, the first two Lineage A cases discovered were both very close to the wet market. 7. Bloom (2023) shows market samples do not support market origin. There is also no evidence of transmission in the claimed susceptible animals elsewhere. https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/vead089/7504441 Discussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate. 8. Lineage A and B only two mutations apart. François Ballox, Bloom and Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo note this is unlikely to reflect two separate animal spillovers as opposed to incomplete case ascertainment of human to human transmission (Bloom 2021). Discussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate. 9. Sampling bias. George Gao, Chinese CDC head at the time, acknowledged to the BBC stating they may have focused too much on and around the market and missed cases on the other side of the city. David Bahry outlines the documented bias. Michael Weissman has shown this mathematically. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23 https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556 Re: Dr. Gao, see above comment about Chinese officials. See the section Ascertainment Bias below for why I disagree with this specific claim, which also addresses the Michael Weissman argument. 10. Spatial statistics experts show the Worobey claim the market was the early epicentre was flawed. https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954 Re: 10 - See Confirmation Of The Centrality Of The Huanan Market Among Early COVID-19 Cases, a response to the paper you cite: The centrality of Wuhan's Huanan market in maps of December 2019 COVID-19 case residential locations, established by Worobey et al. (2022a), has recently been challenged by Stoyan and Chiu (2024, SC2024). SC2024 proposed a statistical test based on the premise that the measure of central tendency (hereafter, "centre") of a sample of case locations must coincide with the exact point from which local transmission began. Here we show that this premise is erroneous. SC2024 put forward two alternative centres (centroid and mode) to the centre-point which was used by Worobey et al. for some analyses, and proposed a bootstrapping method, based on their premise, to test whether a particular location is consistent with it being the point source of transmission. We show that SC2024's concerns about the use of centre-points are inconsequential, and that use of centroids for these data is inadvisable. The mode is an appropriate, even optimal, choice as centre; however, contrary to SC2024's results, we demonstrate that with proper implementation of their methods, the mode falls at the entrance of a parking lot at the market itself, and the 95% confidence region around the mode includes the market. Thus, the market cannot be rejected as central even by SC2024's overly stringent statistical test. I think this response is pretty strong. In one analysis, they show that even though the other paper’s methodology is worse than theirs, if you apply it correctly (instead of inappropriately excluding various cases like the paper’s authors did), the center of all early cases in Hubei province lands on the wet market parking lot. In another analysis, they show that the other paper’s recommended tests wouldn’t have correctly pointed to the offending water pump in the famous John Snow cholera outbreak, but theirs would have. Still, I think it’s useful to supplement fancy statistics with normal common sense, so I recommend just looking at the map of early cases: …and deciding whether you think the assumptions behind a specific statistical test are likely to debunk the idea that cases are centered around the wet market. 11. Wuhan used as a control for a 2015 serological study on SARS-related bat coronaviruses due to its urban location. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ I don’t know why this point is supposed to matter. If you mean that Wuhan isn’t directly exposed to bats, nobody ever said it was. The zoonotic theory is that wildlife carted in from other areas of China started the pandemic in the wet market. 12. Superspreader events also seen at wet markets in Beijing and Singapore (Xinfadi and Jurong). This was discussed very extensively in the debates, both in section 1 and section 3. Wet markets weren’t “superspreader locations” - in fact, the disease spread no more quickly there than anywhere else. They were the first place in those cities that the pandemic started, due to contaminated animal products. If anything, this supports zoonosis. See also my discussion with Saar on this point below. 13. WIV refuse to share their records with NIH who terminated subaward in 2022. Wider suspension over biosafety concerns. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling Although WIV has not been especially forthcoming, some of their databases were leaked in various ways and showed that they did not have any viruses capable of transforming into COVID. 14. PLA involvement at WIV and MERS research prior to SARS-COV-2. MERS features several similarities with SARS-CoV-2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/ I can’t even tell what conspiracy theory you’re trying to propose with this one; if you spell it out I can try to explain why it might be false. 15. SARS1 leaked several times and SARS-COV-2 has leaked from a BSL-3 lab in Taiwan. Agreed that SARS leaked several times. It also spilled over from animals several times. During the debate, a lab leak rate of once per lab per 500 years was proposed (everyone agreed to steelman this by 10x for WIV numbers); I would be interested to know whether anything about the study of SARS challenges that number. 16. Unpublished infectious clone identified from Wuhan contradicting arguments such reverse genetics systems would be published. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full I asked some scientists about this paper and here’s what they told me. Wuhan University sequenced some rice. In the middle of the sequence, there’s an unexpected sequence from a common coronavirus, HKU4. The most likely explanation is that someone else in Wuhan was working on the coronavirus and there was cross-contamination. Plausibly this is Wuhan Institute of Virology, who is known to work with coronaviruses. This is cool detective work, but it’s not clear what it’s supposed to prove. I think some lab leakers are using it to prove that WIV can do reverse genetics, but they admitted this already in a published paper so that’s not too helpful. I think others are using it to prove WIV had “secret viruses” in their catalogue, but the rice virus wasn’t secret, it was HKU4, which is common and which WIV has already published papers about. 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 Arguments Once again, I cannot stress enough how much better a take you might have on this debate if you watch it. “The first known case predates the market outbreak by a month” - this is not the consensus position. I cannot say for sure what Dr. Chou means by this, but I suspect he’s referring to one of the many claims to this effect that Peter effectively debunked during the debate (Connor Reed, Mr. Chen, the 92 cases, Brazil, etc).

Inline links: blog, writes, this study, wrote a blog post on some of these issues, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/, this paper, https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1667232580255490053?t=IJgitS5cw364ioclzVWxaA&s=19, https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1752800486837678377?t=EpIRgyybJVaPgeMP5xdstA&s=19, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0?fbclid=IwAR1HMUMtLIAFOFppVasQDeoIAYrVhP8j4YoPO4wnaTOUiKLsllZl_oKryOw, https://t.co/50kFV9zSb6, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/34398234/, https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661, here, describes it as, https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/vead089/7504441, https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23, https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556, https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954, Confirmation Of The Centrality Of The Huanan Market Among Early COVID-19 Cases, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BNAm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffd4cddb-6e3e-41f5-8ef6-ec0b27bec600_626x426.webp, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full, a published paper, has already published papers about, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yA9U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F467dd304-190a-4437-8920-d498c433dffb_1600x960.jpeg

(and this is also how I feel about all the “A/B intermediate found in Malaysia! A/B intermediate found in Shanghai!” claims. Okay, so there were 1 billion cases of A, 2 billion cases of B, and . . . a single-digit number of cases of the intermediate, detected months later? Why? I’m not saying this is unanswerable, I’m saying that the fact that lab leak doesn’t even wonder about this or start making arguments for it is why I feel like they don’t have a story - just a stamp collection of anomalies that fade away under closer observation).

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Andy B Contact Info: Andy[period]Bachler[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, April 8th, 5:30 PM Location: We'll be in the Common Room in the Wollongong Library. This is a Harry Potter themed room on level 1 (excellent vibes)! I will have a sign on the door saying ACX Meetup. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RQGHVFX+4G China SHANGHAI Contact: David Contact Info: dj[a t]theory-a[period]com Time: Saturday, May 24th, 10:00 AM Location: Zhongshan Park, Changning District (Main Entrance) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29 Group Link: https://discord.gg/G6x [remove this bit] RGnvD Notes: Please RSVP

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RQGHVFX+4G, https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29

Open Thread 382

May 19, 2025 · Original source

1: ACX meetups this week in Oxford, Shanghai, and Austin. See the post for details.

Inline links: the post

Sources Say Bay Area House Party

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Eliot Contact Info: Redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 6:00 PM Location: Skyview Hall, 14a Frances St, Randwick NSW 2031. To find the hall, walk through to the end of the car park, pass through the green gate and walk straight down the path to the back building, then walk upstairs. Call Eliot 0438481143 if lost. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney Notes: This event is at a private house. China SHANGHAI 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

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW, https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney, https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29

Open Thread 400

September 22, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Albany, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Boston, Brooklyn, Budapest, Chicago, Christchurch, Helsinki, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Mumbai, Rochester, Seoul, Shanghai, St. Paul, Tallinn, Vienna, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Zagreb has been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

September 25, 2025 · Original source

“That’s a category of question I’ve never been asked before. It’s kind of like ‘We’re running low on Chinese people in Beijing, do you know if there are any in Shanghai?’”

Open Thread 415

January 05, 2026 · Original source

[China has] estimated 50% youth unemployment, general unemployment now illegal to publish (but you can still approximate by falling commuter numbers), some government workers haven’t been paid in more than a year (living entirely off extortion/bribery; includes police, teachers, and all healthcare), common experience in private sector to have your paycheck delayed by “2 weeks” that turns out to be 16 weeks. Starting salary offer for software engineer in Shanghai is <1/3rd legal minimum wage. You cannot partake of public services without home “ownership” (hukou system, and technically its a land lease). Private health insurance is overwhelmingly likely to be a scam and rarely used. Public coverage primarily covers TCM; most western medicine is out of pocket. If you cannot afford to pay - even in a trauma situation - you will be escorted off the property so your death doesn’t lower hospital mortality statistics.

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: xingxia Zhou Contact Info: zhou[.]yefei1990[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 5:00 PM Location: guopi bar,NO.64, Fangcao street, wuhou Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8P26J3F2+Q3 Group Link: https://discord.gg/vBD [remove this bit] fmdH3r Notes: it’s not a bar, actually it’s a writers’ club. welcome to come with your children. SHANGHAI Contact: David Contact Info: dlwjiang[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 11:00 AM Location: Zhongshan Park, Changing District Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336C9C+RC Group Link: https://discord.gg/Cme [remove this bit] Rexz7JM Notes: Please contact me via email or in the discord server for access to the WeChat group

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8P26J3F2+Q3, https://plus.codes/8Q336C9C+RC

South America15 mentions across 15 issues

South America is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between April 21, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The independent countries of western South America had similar problems""; "Argentina and Egypt, limiting their influence in South America and the Middle East"; "He also gives some analysis of the geography of South America and how it affects their trading patterns". It most often appears alongside India, Africa, Argentina.

Article page: South America
Mention count: 15
Issue count: 15
First seen: April 21, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Global Economic History April 21, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Open Thread 203 December 19, 2021
Ukraine Thoughts And Links March 08, 2022
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022
Links For February 2023 February 09, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman July 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

India 9 shared issues
Africa 8 shared issues
Argentina 8 shared issues
Brazil 8 shared issues
California 8 shared issues

Source context

April 21, 2021 · Original source

Other countries tried the Standard Model but couldn't quite get it to work. Mexico tried, but was screwed over by geography and racial inequality. Mexico's industrial heartland is in the center of the country, in the mountains near Mexico City, and there wasn't a great way to get products to the coast where they could be traded with Europe. Also, its racial caste system made the elites nervous about educating the (mostly mestizo) masses, so they were never able to really get the education prong worked out (the US had the same issue with blacks, but blacks are only 12% of Americans, and mestizos are ~80% of Mexicans). The independent countries of western South America had similar problems. Russia tried this a little, but also had crappy geography and serfdom. Other countries were mostly European colonies at this point; their colonial masters did a pretty good job with Prong 1 (especially building railroads), but absolutely banned Prong 2 and were generally weak on the others.

Ukraine Thoughts And Links

May 21, 2021 · Original source

American foreign policy comes off looking surprising competent through Zeihan’s story. In describing the history of Bretton Woods, he runs through some key participants and highlights the benefits of their membership. India, hurting the Soviets in South Asia; Sweden, hurting them in the Baltic; Argentina and Egypt, limiting their influence in South America and the Middle East; and most significantly, China, depriving them of their best ports. Why did America fight in Korea and Vietnam? To demonstrate the value of the security guarantee component of the Bretton Woods regime (“if the Americans proved unwilling to engage the Chinese in Korea, then was their security guarantee for the Germans against the Soviets really worth what they said it was?”).

These predictions include some persuasive analysis of many countries and plenty of speculation to go with it. Zeihan spends a chapter highlighting America’s partners in the chaos to come. At the top of the list are its North American neighbors, and a prediction that Cuba will be pulled back into the American orbit (because a larger power that supported it could cut off trade with the greater Mississippi system – Zeihan’s summary of exactly why America was willing to risk nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis). He also gives some analysis of the geography of South America and how it affects their trading patterns, and of the best European allies for various purposes (Denmark and the Netherlands control access to the Rhine and Baltic Sea, making them valuable allies). He runs through the trade of Southeast Asia and suggests that American cooperation in the area could have a strategic benefit of helping to “keep China and India apart.”

Open Thread 203

December 19, 2021 · Original source

3. Comment of the week is Coagulopath on what happens when organisms get dropped in alien environments. A brief excerpt: "Agricultural crops often do best far away from their native land, where pests and pathogens are adapted to them. New-world maize and cocoa are among the biggest crops in Africa. Conversely, most coffee is grown in South America. Sometimes being far from home is a good thing."

Inline links: what happens when organisms get dropped in alien environments

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.

June 10, 2022 · Original source

Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . .

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:

August 25, 2023 · Original source

South America

STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA Contact: Allison Contact Info: theswamphere[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 5:00 PM Location: Stone Lake Lions' Hall. Come to the main door which has the accessible ramp. ACX Meetup will be in the "cafe" portion, which you can see from the main door. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6 Notes: A regularly scheduled 2nd Saturday Barn Dance will be held in the dance hall portion of the building, at 7. You're welcome to stay, or welcome to leave after the ACX meetup. South America Argentina BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Contact: David Contact Info: david[dot]f[dot]rivadeneira[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 11:30 AM Location: Café Cortázar, José A. Cabrera 3797. En la entrada. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q3CH3J+F3 Notable Guests: Luca de Leo

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6, https://plus.codes/48Q3CH3J+F3

August 25, 2023 · Original source

Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.

Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

March 30, 2024 · Original source

South America

STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA Contact: A J Contact Info: theswamp[dot]here[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 5:30 PM Location: Stone Lake Lion's Hall, in the cafe area Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6 South America Argentina BUENOS AIRES Contact: David Rivadeneira Contact Info: david[dot]f[dot]rivadeneira[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 11th, 7:00 PM Location: Gorriti 5996, C1414 BKL, Buenos Aires Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q3CH95+5C Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LhvhRq8wyLILlyMoL1IJ4J

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6, https://plus.codes/48Q3CH95+5C, https://chat.whatsapp.com/LhvhRq8wyLILlyMoL1IJ4J

July 30, 2024 · Original source

Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.

Inline links: degrowth, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Ttz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7589c5dc-2f84-4f82-a6b8-c132ce4a0fc8_697x628.png, this podcast

August 29, 2024 · Original source

South America

Notes: There is a barn dance at the hall afterward (beginner's lesson start at 6:45p, main dance at 7:00p, goes until 9:00p). Some of us will stay to dance. You can to. South America Argentina BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Contact: Matt Contact Info: mw[dot]coop[d ot]r[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 03:00 PM Location: Meet at Facultad de Derecho, right outside of the Ache Grill and Starbucks. We will have some kind of sign that says ACX Meetup Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q3CJ85+QPH

Inline links: https://plus.codes/48Q3CJ85+QPH

March 25, 2025 · Original source

South America

Contact: Ben Contact Info: benjamin[period]boerigter[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:00 PM Location: 317 Eugenia Ave 2S - red brick 4-unit apartment building across from Geneva Campus Church. Ring doorbell for unit! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MG3HC3+5X Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/madison-wi-acx Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Will have some snacks and drinks. South America Argentina BUENOS AIRES Contact: Eitan Sprejer Contact Info: eitusprejer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 27th, 05:00 PM Location: Green Eat Billinghurst: https://maps.app.goo.gl/E4YH12kLxri7jBXLA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q3CH6R+48 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BfD [remove this bit] p6v3bMwGEfwNGKnhJwV

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86MG3HC3+5X, https://groups.google.com/g/madison-wi-acx, https://plus.codes/48Q3CH6R+48

August 22, 2025 · Original source

Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it’s popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It’s not a particularly long play; a full performance of Ollantay takes around an hour.1

Inline links: 1

He made two copies, and gave each one to a priest. One of these priests brought a copy to a convent in Cuzco, where it sat in the library. The other priest kept his copy, and the original remained with Valdez. In 1835, a relative of Valdez’s wrote an article in a Cuzco periodical where he made reference to the fact that copies of Ollantay yet existed. This article came to the attention of a certain Johann Moritz Rugendas, a German artist who had recently been booted out of Mexico for trying to overthrow the government there and was presently touring South America.

Some Inca historians maintain that Ollantay must be a 16th-century original. Others put it in the 15th, others claim that Valdez just made it all up himself. An Argentinian claimed that his father was a friend of Valdez and that Valdez didn’t know anything about writing plays. A Peruvian14 countered that Valdez was the greatest linguist, philosopher, and playwright in all of 18th-century South America. Then there’s the racial component - white Peruvians are more inclined to say that Valdez wrote the whole thing himself, and indigenous Peruvians are more inclined to say that he simply adapted it from the Quechua.

Inline links: 14

August 29, 2025 · Original source

South America

Contact: Leo Contact Info: jaquablouisbertrand[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 4:00 PM Location: Memorial Union Terrace around the brat stand. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MG3HGX+QX4 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/madison-wi-acx Notes: Email directly for details. Will make a group message if there's sufficient interest. South America Brazil BELO HORIZONTE Contact: David Reis Contact Info: davidreis[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 4:00 PM Location: Patio Savassi in front of Fany Bonbons Coordinates: https://plus.codes/58GR3358+MC Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0S [remove this bit] Ze8fdU8O1WgLd4GsST6

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86MG3HGX+QX4, https://groups.google.com/g/madison-wi-acx, https://plus.codes/58GR3358+MC

April 01, 2026 · Original source

South America

Contact: Ben Contact Info: benjamin.boerigter@gmail.com Time: Saturday, April 4, 2:00 PM Location: Memorial Union Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MG3JG2+G26 Additional Notes: Feel free to bring kids! Forecast for the day looks iffy so we can meet inside the Rathskeller, near one of the fireplaces. I will be wearing a shirt with the image of an iguana on it, with a small sign labeled "ACX Meetup." South America Brazil BELO HORIZONTE Contact: David Reis Contact Info: davidreis[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 23, 03:00 PM Location: Copa Cozinha Savassi - Rua Paraíba, 858, Belo Horizonte - MG, 30130-145 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/58GR3388+CP Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0SZ [remove this bit] e8fdU8O1WgLd4GsST6

Inline links: benjamin.boerigter@gmail.com, https://plus.codes/86MG3JG2+G26, https://plus.codes/58GR3388+CP

Scotland14 mentions across 14 issues

Scotland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between June 14, 2021 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scottish people were extraordinarily over-represented in Britain"; ""economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland""; "Does ... Scotland?". It most often appears alongside China, Russia, Switzerland.

Article page: Scotland
Mention count: 14
Issue count: 14
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: October 01, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021
Who Gets Self-Determination? March 30, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
ACX Grants Results 2024 February 10, 2024
Links For February 2024 February 29, 2024
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep July 12, 2024
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers August 06, 2024
H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know January 01, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability July 03, 2025
Your Review: Joan of Arc August 01, 2025
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know October 01, 2025

China 7 shared issues
Russia 6 shared issues
Switzerland 6 shared issues
UK 6 shared issues
Britain 5 shared issues

Source context

June 14, 2021 · Original source

It would not be the first time something like this happened. The 1700s and 1800s are sometimes called the "Scottish Golden Age". Scottish people were extraordinarily over-represented in Britain and the former British colonies during that time, in science and academia, in business and industry, in politics, and even in the upper ranks of the military. Anecdotally, people in the 1800s compared Scots favorably to Jews. Today, though I suspect Scots would still stand out somewhat on average if anyone was able to track ancestries carefully, Scottish overachievement is not really a hot topic. I can easily see the same happening to Jews, especially given ultra-low Jewish fertility rates (sure to be lower among the rich and educated), and the trend toward outmarriage among non-Orthodox Jews; the Jewish upper crust will simply evaporate away from the Jewish group identity.

Inline links: "Scottish Golden Age", compared Scots favorably to Jews, trend toward outmarriage among non-Orthodox Jews

On the one hand, I agree that this question has lots of interesting context - though I would have chosen the history of other "market minorities" like the Lebanese or the Chinese in Southeast Asia. On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in. It's much harder to explain Jewish achievement through similar means, because Jews are so intermixed with other populations. Whatever political and economic currents were affecting Albert Einstein or Noam Chomsky or whoever else, ought to also be affecting their Gentile friends and neighbors too. How come they didn't? To me that's a much bigger mystery than whatever happened in Scotland.

But I guess you could also try to rephrase this into something like: there was a Scottish Golden Age for a few centuries, then the Scots stopped being so golden. Maybe sometimes groups of people just become very interesting and successful for a while, and then that dies down again. This doesn't solve the mystery of Jewish achievement, but it contextualizes it and makes it less unique.

March 30, 2022 · Original source

I find all of this unsatisfying. It’s like we’re debating whether a certain region has enough history and culture to “deserve” independence. But any such debate is inherently subjective. Does Texas qualify? Kurdistan? Scotland? Palestine? How should we know?

April 06, 2022 · Original source

This is a lot like the current system except that I think if ethical people happen to be in charge of a country, they have a (weak, potentially balanced by other things) obligation to let people leave, even if they’re not especially oppressed. This seems to be the way the UK is treating Scotland, and I give them a lot of credit for it.

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.

May 19, 2023 · Original source

An oversized technology force creates a clearance region. The example here is the Scottish Highlands, where a technological innovation was introduced in the late 18th century: a new breed of sheep. (Technically this was a rural invention, but the introduction to Scotland was devised by businessmen in London.) The new sheep greatly improved the yields from the land, but at the cost of violently displacing a large number of poor tenant farmers to make room for pastures. So it goes for other technologies, like farm machinery: when they are introduced to a poor rural region that isn’t integrated into an import-replacing economy, they just replace workers and leave them idle, poorer than before, or forced to emigrate.

The Forbidden Solution All empires eventually collapse. This is not what we would expect if empires were a good economic arrangement. If they only ever got wealthier and wealthier, they wouldn’t disintegrate into various separatist factions or end in foreign conquest. The first empire to form would have slowly absorbed everything else, and we would all be living good lives under the enlightened rule of the Sumerians or whatever. But that doesn’t happen, because empires always milk their own cities until they become poor. Modern nation-states do the same. They accumulate stress by trying to hold themselves together, and then, one day, the stress is released all at once. Wars and revolutions galore. Most countries are born that way, like new stars formed in the aftermath of a supernova. Peaceful separatism offers an alternative, Jacobs says — but only a theoretical one. Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy,” she writes, “young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’” Can you imagine Canada saying this to Quebec? Or England to Scotland? Or China to Tibet and Taiwan? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it’s only theoretical and utopian. Jacobs knows very well that nations will never accept separatism as an option. And though the term “nationalist” has fallen out of fashion, almost all of us still think very much in terms of nations. Even when separatism does seem grudgingly acceptable, I’d say that’s usually either because it’s an instance of decolonization (colonial empires are decidedly out of fashion) or for cultural, nationalistic reasons. Quebecois, Scottish, or Catalan separatists say that they belong to nations that are culturally distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Spain. And they love their smaller nation just as much as others love the larger one. If any of these separatists got their way, we can be sure that the new nation of Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia would then oppose further separatism in the strongest terms. When the American South seceded from the Union in 1861, the reaction wasn’t “good luck!” even though the Union was itself the result of a secession from Great Britain. To separate for economic reasons seems forbidden. Unthinkable. For one thing, it would be selfish. If Catalonia left, the poor regions of Spain, which benefit from welfare financed in part by Barcelona, would suffer, which is obviously unacceptable to Spain. For another, it’s not guaranteed to work. Small countries and city-states can still adopt dumb economic policies. It can seem intolerably risky to go your own way, unless your region is already rich, in which case see the selfishness point above. Widespread separatism also seems worse for solving large-scale coordination problems, like environmental issues, nuclear proliferation (and, perhaps, AI), or war. I suspect that Jacobs would agree with Nassim Taleb’s antifragility framing: it’s better to be in a constant state of mild disorder than to have apparent stability that hides stressors and ends in violent conflict. But that idea is not intuitive. Most of us would pick apparent stability over mild disorder. I also suspect — and this is my personal take — that we dread the additional complexity of having numerous small countries. We look at a map of medieval Germany, like this one… … and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.

… 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.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK Contact: Sam Contact Info: acxedinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: The basement of Black Medicine Coffee Company on Nicolson Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+VJ Group Link: Please email acxedinburgh@gmail.com to join the mailing list. Each month, we run a meetup where we discuss ~three essays, sent out in advance. Please email acxedinburgh@gmail.com to join the mailing list and/or WhatsApp group, and see the September readings.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+VJ, acxedinburgh@gmail.com

ACX Grants Results 2024

February 10, 2024 · Original source

Marcin Kowrygo, $50,000, for the Far Out Initiative. Recently a woman in Scotland was found to be incapable of experiencing any physical or psychological suffering2. Scientists sequenced her genome and found a rare mutation affecting the FAAH-OUT pseudogene, which regulates levels of pain-related neurotransmitters. Marcin and his team are working on pharmacologic and genetic interventions that can imitate her condition. If they succeed, they hope to promote them as painkillers, splice them into farm animals to produce cruelty-free meat, or just give them to everyone all the time and end all suffering in the world forever. They are extremely serious about this.

Inline links: the Far Out Initiative, a woman in Scotland was found, 2

Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep

February 29, 2024 · Original source

19: Claim: nine people in a family in Scotland have a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, which makes them go blind in their twenties and also apparently adds 20 IQ points. Large single-gene effects on IQ are not supposed to exist, but it’s theoretically possible that a rare mutation with a big downside could do it. I’m still a little skeptical, because this seems trivial enough that evolution should have found a way to do it without the blindness by now. But at least on a superficial reading the paper looks good.

Inline links: a mutation in the RIMS1 gene, not supposed to exist

July 12, 2024 · Original source

(This report was, as it happens, published in the exact same month as The Family That Couldn’t Sleep.) DTM came to know the family well. He befriended them by way of two members of their younger generation, Lisi – a woman terrified by the shadow of the disease, and Ignazio – the doctor she had married, who was more terrified by the shadow of the disease. Ignazio put together the pieces of the family puzzle, consolidating all the disparate diagnoses into a single disorder and filling out a lot of blank spots on family trees. When DTM came along, he was able to help Ignazio make the case that the family would benefit from the spotlight – that greater awareness of FFI could lead to a cure both for them and for a slew of other prion diseases. As it so happens, he is one of those nonfiction authors who serve as a character in their own story. DTM has some form of progressive muscular palsy. He is, or at least was in 2006, not entirely sure what it is. The relatively unimpressive state of genetics at the time had not identified his causative mutation, though it looked a lot like one of the rarer forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease2. DTM is pragmatic about this, the way everyone chronically ill is either pragmatic or doomed. Whatever he has, it is a defect in protein structure; his peripheral nerves decay not because of a problem with the nerves themselves but an inability of their scaffolding to hold them together, as he puts it. The last chapter of the book dwells on this, on the web of connections popping up between a thousand disorders. DTM’s disease is something vaguely similar, if you squint, to an exceptionally slow-progressing motor neurone disease; if you jump another level out, you see amyloid plaque diseases like Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s, and if you jump yet another level out, you see something like prions. His interest in the Venetian family was driven by this. Some of its members thought this a beautiful act of sympathy; others thought him a grotesque parody of themselves, an onlooker, a gawker, peddling their tragedy to salve his relatively insignificant problems. They are, he thinks, both right. That’s the beginning, and that’s the end. What happens in the middle? --------------------------------------------------------- The Venetian family lends the book its title, but they’re really more of a framing device. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is separated into four parts, of which the first and fourth – the shortest by far – deal with the family. Part 2 is kuru, the king of fucked up diseases you read about in clickbait Weird Medicine listicles. Let’s talk about kuru! Kuru, is, famously, the prion disease you get if you eat another person’s brain. Well, not quite. It’s a prion disease that became endemic amongst women in the Fore society, who ritually ate brains, one of which had an inherited or spontaneous prion disease. This is an important note – there’s a tendency (which the book’s later chapters engage in) to assume cannibalism just has a Prion Disease Generator attached. If you eat people who don’t have prion diseases, you won’t suddenly get one. Uh, don’t eat people. Anyway, part 2 is DTM’s historiography of Fore-Westerner first contact. It’s hilarious. Papua New Guinea is a frankly ridiculous place; one of the all-time best Lyttle Lytton winners (worst first sentence from a hypothetical or, in this case, real work) was “Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there”. The native residents were so hostile to outsiders that all the colonial empires had cut their losses – and when you think about the places they colonized, that says something. After the First World War, PNG was ripped from its nominal German ‘owners’, but no one else wanted the place. So, of course, they gave it to the Australians. It was thirty years and another war before we actually made contact. 1940s Australia was as ‘settled’ as it’d ever be; the cities were bustling and the interior was mapped. The kind of explorer who two centuries before would be heading to new continents had to console himself with Pacific islands. Console he did. The native peoples of the PNG coasts were hostile enough to the wannabe-colonialists that the Australians, flying planes overhead, were the first people to discover that the island’s inland was populated too. No one had broken through on land. In all this deep and angry rainforest, the Fore were the furthest out. They lived far into the island’s mountainous interior; DTM describes their territory as “nearly vertical”. Calling people primitives is a bit passe these days for understandable reasons, but no other term comes to mind. The Fore had no name for themselves; we call them by an exonym, “the people to the south”. They weren’t, to be clear, hunter-gatherers – they were slash-and-burn agriculturalists, but very well-fed ones. Despite the tendency in grain-focused cultures for poor agriculturalists to be stunted/malnourished, the Fore were a remarkably healthy people. Well, except for the famous bit. The first remarkable thing about the Fore was just how quickly they wanted to assimilate. Most PNG tribes weren’t particularly enthused by Western offers of injections/tractors/radios/Christianity. Yet as soon as the Australians arrived, the Fore made ceasefires in their wars with other tribes, volunteered to help large-scale Australian projects on the coast, started planting and trading coffee, and enthusiastically participated in censuses. It’s the only first-contact narrative I’ve seen where the colonizers were concerned about how badly the other guys wanted to be colonized. The next was the one that got their names in the history books. Australian officials started to notice a remarkable lack of women in Fore camps. Some tribes sequestered their women, particularly when Westerners were around, so at first they thought nothing of it. The high rate of unpartnered young men, though, was way out of PNG norms. DTM tells this part fantastically. The Fore chapters drip with the dread of dramatic irony. When the first breakthrough comes, you have to catch your breath: “Tiny” Carey noted something in the middle of August 1950 that deepened this mystery. He noticed that near the village of Henganofi there had been an unusual number of deaths. “It appears,” he wrote his superiors, “natives suffer from stomach trouble, get violent shivering, as with the ague, and die fairly rapidly.” [...] McArthur investigated a little more [...] One day in August 1953 he ran into more of the shivering people Tiny Carey had seen several years before: “Nearing one of the dwellings, I observed a small girl sitting down beside a fire. She was shivering violently and her head was jerking spasmodically from side to side.” It would be quite some time before anyone figured out what caused it – but the problem, as DTM notes, was that its cause wasn’t possible. Everyone priored that the weird undescribed disease in the Fore lands was some nocebo sorcery-sickness. Vincent Zigas, the first actual doctor sent to work with the Fore, tried to placebo-effect them and failed miserably: On the way, Apekono stopped at a hut and showed Zigas his first kuru victim. “On the ground in the far corner sat a woman of about thirty,” the doctor wrote. “She looked odd, not ill, rather emaciated, looking up with blank eyes with a mask-like expression. There was an occasional fine tremor of her head and trunk, as if she were shivering from cold, though the day was very warm.” It was almost exactly the tableau McArthur had witnessed in 1953. Zigas, though, was a doctor. He could do more than look—or so he thought: “I decided I might as well try my own variety of magic,” he remembered. He rubbed Sloan’s Liniment, a balm for sore muscles, on her and declared to her family and his guide: “The sorcerer has put a bad spirit inside the woman. I am going to burn this spirit so that it comes out of her and leaves her. You will not see the fire, but she will feel it. The bad spirit will leave her and she will not die.” The lotion penetrated the woman’s skin and she writhed in pain. “Get up! Walk!” Zigas commanded theatrically. “The woman struggled feebly as if to rise, then, exhausted, started to tremble more violently, making a sound of foolish laughter, akin to a titter.” That evening Apekono asked Zigas not to try to cure any more kuru victims; “Don’t use your magic medicine anymore. It will not win our strong sorcery.” This was a disaster. The Fore were so cooperative precisely because they hoped “Western magic” could conquer theirs. As it became clear it couldn’t, they turned hostile. The Australians had hoped to “modernize a Stone Age people”; now all their subjects were dropping dead before their eyes, from what they could only assume was a “hysterical reaction” to colonization itself. So, to solve this, they needed a batshit insane American. Carleton Gajdusek is one of the characters who dominates The Family That Couldn’t Sleep. He couldn’t not. You could put him in a car commercial and he’d dominate it. Gajdusek was a physician with a rare, intense combination of science and practice. He was a romanticist, a field worker, and a lover of everything strange. He’d been an army doctor, a government conspiracy-cover-upper, and a postdoc under Linus Pauling who described his intent as “to straighten out Pauling’s ideas about proteins”. He hated civilization, in a slightly-to-Ted’s-centre sense, and was passionate about “primitives and isolates”. He jumped at the chance to work in Papua New Guinea; he planned to conduct a multi-site study on child development in such cultures, and relished the opportunity to live in a “primitive” environment himself. He did all this so he could rape kids. Oh, he did it for the scientific curiosity and love of medicine, but he also did it so he could rape kids. Gajdusek was a pedophile in the actual-lifelong-exclusive-paraphilia sense, as opposed to the “metonym for child molester” sense. Some people who roll snake-eyes on the Sexuality Dice repress it, but some are perfectly happy to act on it; Gajdusek was #2 in its fullest form, the kind of guy who believes that a well-lived life includes raping some kids. DTM doesn’t shy from this, not for a moment. It’s the first thing he tells you about Gajdusek. It couldn’t not be; you couldn’t talk about why he went to PNG otherwise. When Gajdusek landed in PNG, he first found the place too civilized. He’d been promised a land of “cannibal savages” – where were they? After some traipsing, he found them, right where he was promised. The Fore were perfect for Gajdusek. They had some kind of medical mystery that’d been lost on everyone else. They ate each other, in exactly the way he loved detailing in his diaries (“”Women and children, particularly, partake of the human flesh,” he noted with pleasure”). As kuru cases popped up, he aggressively recorded them. He wrote lovingly detailed notes that he sent back to his Australian advisor. He wrote with intensity, with exclamation marks, with the joie de vivre of a man just where he wanted to be. Gajdusek smothered the Fore with ‘cures’ that never worked, but they didn’t get angry at him. As DTM dryly puts it: “Their children trusted him, and that was enough for them.” At some point, someone suggested sending an anthropologist...or an epidemiologist...or literally anyone with more credentials than Gajdusek and Zigas3. Gajdusek threw a shitfit, convinced this one-and-a-half-man team was enough to Solve The Problem Forever. But he got bored eventually – running off with another tribe with, as his diary notes at length, an apparent custom of youths ritually fellating older men – and Zigas, I dunno, the book neglects him a bit here. So they managed to sneak in some anthropologists. The husband-and-wife team of Robert Glasse and Shirley Lindenbaum4 were the first involved parties to give a shit about the Fore as people, rather than as colonial subjects/medical mysteries/walking sex toys. What they uncovered was fascinating. The Fore were cannibals, yes, but they were recent cannibals. They didn’t have an ancient tradition of eating their dead, like the other visitors assumed. They happened to be in contact with some cannibal groups, and after a Fore man died of “sorcery”, they thought: well, what would happen if we ate him? “People tasting it expressed their approval. ‘”This is sweet,” they said, “What is the matter with us, are we mad? Here is good food and we have neglected to eat it.”” If not for the wild coincidence that the first Fore cannibalism victim had a prion disease, kuru would never have existed. Glasse and Lindenbaum started to put together the pieces. They’d been sent down to rule out a genetic explanation – to track the kinship ties of the Fore and see how the disease ran through families. It didn’t run through families in any coherent sense, but it sure did run through cannibalism. The clincher was the age distribution. The Fore, ever enthused by colonialism, quit eating each other as soon as the Australians arrived. Children stopped dying of kuru shortly after; they simply weren’t exposed to the infectious agent. The couple sent the news to Gajdusek, who was off raping kids somewhere else. In the next part of the book, DTM runs through Gajdusek’s many conjectures of kuru’s cause – more like sketches or abstract paintings than like true hypotheses. Gajdusek was annoyed that someone else was doing something he “totally could’ve done”, and even more annoyed that another lab was running similar experiments – an attempt at a vaccine for a particular sheep disease had accidentally created a prion generator. But he was happy to swoop in and claim the credit for what he was starting to think of as “slow viruses”, an infection that somehow lays dormant for years. DTM portrays Gajdusek perfectly, in that “real life has no need for verisimilitude” way. Gajdusek was at once a brilliant man, an all-consuming narcissist, an entertaining character, and a monster beyond redemption. A lesser book might pick one or two. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep portrays him as all four, and on a personality level (as opposed to a scientific one), the Gajdusek-focused parts are some of the most gripping. --------------------------------------------------------- Outside of the jumps between the Venetian family and everything else, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is not siloed. The narratives of all prion diseases are deeply intertwined. This is what makes it a great book. It’s 300 pages of dramatic irony. You read the whole thing, waiting for the eureka moment – the point everyone realizes they’re looking at the same cause. It does, however, make it a tad difficult to review or synopsize. The book’s story is so weird – and, often, so at odds with conventional wisdom that trickles down about the Fore et al – that you have to recap quite a bit, and the book steadfastly resists recapping. The next couple chapters after we depart from Gajdusek’s credit-claiming are mostly about experiments with various prion diseases. They’re scientifically fascinating. Unlike some medical-books-for-general-audiences (cough, How Not to Study a Disease), DTM never talks down to the reader. He assumes someone reading a 300-page book about prions is smart and wants to learn about prions. He also has – you can feel it in his words – the agonizing experience of spending his life on the other side of the doctor’s desk, trying to beat into whoever he’s talking to that no, seriously, you don’t need to lie to him or try explain a complex disease at a fourth-grade level. The first prion disease studied was scrapie. Scrapie was a big deal – it starved and killed large shares of British sheep flocks, making it a serious economic problem. Veterinary researchers had tried to prevent or cure it for centuries. It was a veritable graveyard of ambitions: Quintessential was D. R. Wilson at the Moredun Institute in Scotland, who worked in the middle of the last century for more than a decade trying, with mounting frustration, to kill the scrapie agent. He found that it survived desiccation; dosing with chloroform, phenol, and formalin; ultraviolet light; and cooking at 100 degrees centigrade for thirty minutes. The scrapie researcher Alan Dickinson told me he remembered Wilson at the end of his career as “very, very, very quiet. Of course, that was after his breakdown.” “Now it is our turn to study prions. Perhaps we should approach the subject cautiously.” The problem, as DTM explains, is that prion diseases were impossible. They violated 20th-century understandings of biology. Proteins “were no more alive, and no more infectious, than bone”. Prion diseases seemed to have too many causes – genetic, infectious, and sporadic. They looked infection-like in some ways, but patients didn’t produce virus antibodies. Sheep exposed to scrapie, or chimps infected with kuru, took years to develop symptoms. Their facts did not fit together. In the 1960s, people started wondering. The unifying trait of prion agents was that they had to be denatured to be destroyed. Was this a particularly small virus defined by its protein coating? Or – even more outre – was it pure protein, no DNA at all? No one could figure out quite how the latter worked, but it was tempting. Gajdusek, by now a major figure in this field, kept a foot in both worlds. He didn’t want to stake his reputation on a no-DNA hypothesis, but he certainly sympathized. Enter Prusiner. Stanley Prusiner was Gajdusek’s counterpart. Where Gajdusek seemed permanently manic, Prusiner was deliberate and exacting. He entered Gajdusek’s “slow viruses” field in the early 1970s after a chance encounter with a CJD patient. He relished the laboratory in a way Gajdusek didn’t at all, and set out to optimize the hell out of his projects. Prusiner set out to isolate the smallest infectious particle in the scrapie agent. He injected tons of hamsters (hamsters got sick faster than mice) with increasingly tiny scrapie proteins, hoping to determine whether the Minimum Viable Scrapie was DNA. By the mid-1980s, he’d produced something so small it couldn’t possibly be a virus. Denaturing it destroyed it; exposing it to nucleic acid dissolvers actually made it stronger. Emboldened by this discovery, Prusiner set out to anoint himself the King of Prions. Here emerges something of a Voldemort-Umbridge distinction – the difference between cartoonish villainy and banal evil. Gajdusek is a bad guy because he rapes kids. Prusiner is a bad guy because he is the most grotesque stereotype of the Advisor/Peer Reviewer from Hell made flesh. Everything Prusiner did was to build his reputation atop a pile of skulls. When recruited as a peer reviewer for other prion papers, he wrote negative reviews to undermine their authors. He worked his grad students to the bone and intentionally destroyed their careers, telling them he’d “ruin them” if they entered prion research as competitors. He lied about the origin of the protein-only hypothesis, claiming he originated it a decade after it was actually conjectured. But hey, he was good at getting grants. I was surprised reading a lot of this, because for all the time I’ve been aware of it, the cause of prion disease has seemed settled. “Oh yeah, it’s a protein that gets all fucked up.” But DTM goes through just how unsettled it was right up through to The Family That Couldn’t Sleep’s publication. Serious confirmation only arrived a couple years later. Many people were deeply critical of the prion hypothesis – often, it seemed, because they loathed Prusiner too much to go along. Throughout the book, he cuts an uncharismatic figure. Gajdusek and Prusiner both won the Nobel for discovering prions, decades apart. This tells you something – the “discovery” of prions can be construed quite a few ways. Gajdusek formulated the hypothesis; Prusiner proved it. Gajdusek was grievously offended by Prusiner’s Nobel, perceiving his rival – not inaccurately – as a follower who never originated any ideas of his own. But Gajdusek was offended from a federal prison cell, so how’d that work out for him? Fascinating as all this is, no one published a book about prions in the mid-2000s because it was about kuru or FFI. They published books about prions because teenagers were dying, and people wanted to know why. DTM lays the seeds for part 3 – the mad cow section – in part 1. This is a discussion of scrapie, the longstanding prion disease of sheep. Scrapie was a medical mystery for centuries (remember poor D. R. Wilson), precisely because of the intuitive implausibility of prions. The scrapie chapter is a great history-of-science piece, covering the agricultural productivity revolutions of the 18th century, the surfeit of bizarre origins veterinarians concocted, and the treatments that never worked. Scrapie is not transmissible to humans – well, we hope. It’s concerningly transmissible to primates. But it’s been around for a long, long time, and it doesn’t epidemiologically look like humans get it...we hope. Anyway, you ever tried to generalize from one example? The British government did! In the mid-1980s, strange reports started coming out of the UK’s farms. Farmers were describing a new disease where dairy cows – incredibly docile creatures, under normal circumstances – turned hostile, kicking them as they went into the milking stalls. The symptoms looked to all the world like scrapie. Epidemiologists tracing the outbreaks found a unifying link with “cake” – animal protein feed sweetened with molasses. The scrapie-like symptoms must have traced to an infected sheep. But scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so it must be okay to keep slaughtering them, right? We all know how this ended. The best term for the British response to the mad cow outbreak is “cacklingly evil conspiracy”. The agricultural industry really, really didn’t need a huge zoonotic outbreak – so it decided it didn’t have one. They first suppressed all mentions that the disease looked like scrapie, then – when this became impossible – hyped up that scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so there’s nothing to worry about. The formal name of the disease, “bovine spongiform encephalopathy”, was supposedly chosen to optimize for unfamiliarity – it wouldn’t fit well in a headline. They emphasized, extensively, that there was nothing to worry about. Ever. At some point, people started asking questions. If there was nothing to worry about, why was the agricultural industry panicking so hard? As things became ever more worry-inducing, this turned down ludicrously twisting paths: Meanwhile, the Southwood Working Party and the experts who advised it were learning on the job. They learned, for instance, that the BSE agent entered the animal through the mouth and then followed the digestive tract into the organs that try to filter out infections—the tonsils, the guts, and the spleen—and from there traveled into the peripheral and central nervous system, and finally arrived at the brain. They also learned that pasties, meat pies, and even some baby foods contained tissues from a lot of those organs. So the Southwood Working Party recommended banning these organs, but only from baby food. This started a chain reaction of consumer doubt: if infected cow organs were unsafe for babies, how could they be good for adults? The government then banned offal, as the organs were collectively called, in all human food but gave the industry a grace period to get it out of the feed supply. Then pet food manufacturers began to wonder if what drove cows mad might not also drive dogs, cats, and parrots mad. The feed they sold came from concentrate made of the same sick animals that had previously made up the meat and bone meal farmers used. Their trade group decided to put a similar ban in place—immediately. So for five months it was safer to be a dog than a human in Britain. DTM spends pretty much this whole section of the book making fun of the British government. To be fair, they deserved it. They killed hundreds of kids in agonizing and preventable ways – they could take some ribbing. This is all throughout the mid-1980s to early-mid 1990s. Through this period, it wasn’t yet clear that mad cow could spread to humans. The panic was clear, and deserved, but it didn’t yet have a match for its powder keg. It would alight. The first suspected case of vCJD – human mad cow – was in 1994. Fifteen-year-old Vicky Rimmer developed a sudden, strange disease. Doctors gave her months to live...until she died in 1998. A couple other suspected cases trickled down through the mid-90s, including a young man who made meat pies for a living, whose grieving mother received a letter from the Prime Minister that “humans do NOT get mad cow disease”. (That must’ve been fun.) Soon, they couldn’t deny it any longer. On March 20, 1996, Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, stood up in Parliament to announce the news that had already appeared as a tentative conclusion in scientific journals and as rumor in newspapers for the previous two years: British beef was killing British teenagers. The first confirmed death was that of Stephen Churchill, a nineteen-year-old student from Wiltshire, who died in May 1995. Back in 1989, at the Southwood Working Party’s suggestion, the government had set up a surveillance unit in Edinburgh to watch for any evidence that BSE had crossed to humans. One worry had been that if BSE passed to humans, how would anyone know it? How would you recognize something you had never seen? It turned out to be easy: Churchill and the nine other teenagers who had gotten sick had spectacular amyloid plaques in their brains, chunks of dead protein almost visible to the naked eye. If sporadic CJD was a whisper, BSE-caused prion disease was a shout. The investigators sat open-mouthed looking at slides whose damage, they feared, portended the most severe epidemic in modern British history. This part of the book is not fun. It lacks the insane personalities and duelling careers of the other entries. It is an honest chronology of the vCJD epidemic – a gruesome failure of the agricultural industry, the one system that everyone is vulnerable to. The government and industry had completely violated their duty of care to citizens and consumers. They were paying the price. No one would buy British beef anymore – not while they watched their children die. Now here’s the thing: this is ethnography, not historiography. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a book from the mid-2000s. The epidemic was not at all in the rear view mirror. There were piles of unanswered questions that DTM constantly alludes to. We have eighteen years more hindsight than he did then. What do we know now? --------------------------------------------------------- In 2006, the vCJD epidemic looked like it was going to be a lot better than the worst fears. BSE itself was a huge problem for the cattle industry, but honestly, no one is too sympathetic to the cattle industry. People were not going to die in anywhere near the numbers believed. We had all sorts of reassuring data coming out about this, which DTM chronicles. We were learning that only some genotypes seemed susceptible to vCJD. We didn’t see any older people die of the disease. We were seeing numbers drop, such that vCJD must have a pretty short incubation period. Anyway, all of this is wrong! The Family That Couldn’t Sleep was written in the candidate gene era. Back then, the nascent field of human genetics was sure it was about to Solve Polygenism. Yes, the simple Mendelian monogenic patterns popular a few decades back clearly didn’t apply to common diseases, but how many variants could there be? We were about to discover the five genes influencing 20% of Alzheimer’s risk each, the five genes influencing 20% of heart disease risk each, etc., and once we were done we’d just do gene therapy and cure Alzheimer’s. A paper on autism genetics from 1999 was so outre as to speculate there might be as many as fifteen genes involved. The fact we are now using the term “omnigenic model” should tell you roughly how well this worked out. Do you remember SNPedia? If you were a 2014 Slate Star Codex reader, you might. 2014 was still pretty candidate gene. People were out there publishing papers saying a single variant could increase your life expectancy by 15 years. SNPedia was a site that beautifully categorized all of these, so you could do 23andme or whatever, look up your results on SNPedia, and make horrible life choices.5 It was eventually bought out by one of the consumer DNA companies, so no one ever edited it again, making it a great time capsule of early-mid 2010s behavioural/medical genetics takes. SNPedia will excitedly explain to you that common genetic variants make you immune to vCJD. They cite a 2009 post from the now-archived 23andme blog titled “No Good Evidence That Potential Pool of Mad Cow Disease Victims Is Expanding”, explaining how fears of late-onset vCJD are clearly debunked by new Scientific Knowledge. Everyone who developed vCJD in the 1990s and 2000s had an M/M genotype in a particular part of the PRNP prion gene, so the roughly half the population with M/V or V/V genotypes were immune. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep buys this, too. In fact, it buys it in an even more agonizingly 2000s way. The first sign that transmissible prion diseases weren’t genotype-restricted should’ve been the growth hormone kids. You might have heard this story – from the late 1950s through mid-1980s, human growth hormone produced from brain tissue was used as a treatment for pituitary dwarfism, until it turned out to spread CJD if the originating brain was infected. DTM discusses this, to set the scene for the genetics thing. He mentions what was the state of the art at the time – that a disproportionate share of both the growth hormone kids and sporadic CJD cases were V/V homozygotes. This, uh – so the book was written in the mid-2000s, yeah? Yeah. The conclusion DTM drew – and this was a common conclusion at the time – was that homozygosity somehow made you more vulnerable to CJD, and M/M homozygosity made you vulnerable to BSE-borne CJD in particular. We cannot criticise the author for not predicting the future, but we live in the future, and can say how this worked out. Turns out, nope, M/V heterozygotes totally get vCJD. After a British man in his 30s died of CJD in 2016, he was found to have vCJD and an M/V genotype. He was tested for vCJD only because he was exceptionally young for someone with a sporadic prion disease – meaning people developing it later in life would be missed6. Did you know up to 1 in 2000 people in the UK have latent vCJD? There is one line in The Family That Couldn’t Sleep that stopped me dead in my tracks when I read it: What happens to the Italian family in the end depends less on their own actions than on the world’s interest in prion diseases, which they cannot control. If lots of people are afraid of getting variant CJD, the family benefits. If fear of prion disease goes the way of the fear of swine flu or Ebola, then they will be orphaned again. THIS BOOK IS FROM 2006! Three years before the swine flu pandemic! Eight years before the Ebola pandemic! “If you’re looking for a sign, this is it.” --------------------------------------------------------- The last section of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep addresses BSE fears in America and a nascent internet subculture DTM calls “Creutzfeldt Jakobins” – people who track American CJD cases, trying to spot vCJD patterns. When reading his description of the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, my mind constantly, uncontrollably turned to covid. Here it was – an online community of people deeply skeptical about a disease’s official story, tracking every contradiction, every implausibility, every statistic that failed to apply to the individual. Self-described “redneck hippies” and “soccer mom Republicans” teaming up to find the truth hidden behind an impossible world. You know what they’re doing now. I’ve always combined a deep interest in medicine with a healthy distrust for it. People who are constitutionally inquisitive, anti-authoritarian, and suspicious about official narratives tend to end up skeptical of at least some mainstream claims in the field. This is not to say I think you should take bleach enemas or something, just that I understand the impulse behind concluding the US government was covering up a local vCJD wave. Traditionally, sporadic prion diseases are said to have a prevalence of one in a million. (Hold on to that for a second.) The last section of the book is a chronology of Americans finding bizarrely more than one in a million of their friends dying of sporadic CJD, often at inexplicably young ages, sometimes in geographical clusters. This is understandably suspicious. Then DTM goes on to reassure us by saying none of these cases were confirmed to have an M/M genotype, which OH GOD OH FUCK A number of high-profile people in the prion world, including Gajdusek, are clarified as not believing sporadic prion diseases exist. You get the impression DTM doesn’t, either. Now, how common are prion diseases? Eric Vallabh Minikel has an answer for you! Eric and his wife Sonia are prion researchers from a rather unique background – after Sonia was diagnosed as having a single-gene mutation with ~100% penetrance for prion disease, they left their previous jobs to dedicate their lives to curing it. It turns out, when you run the numbers, you get not one in a million but 1 in 5000 people dying of prion diseases. This is best described as “nightmarishly high”. I’m normed on genetic disorders. A genetic disorder that affects one in five thousand people is pretty common! I have known, in person, completely unselected, just from “random people I’ve met in my life in a non-medical context”, someone with a ~1/250k syndrome and someone with a ~1/50k-100k syndrome. I don’t think anyone in my extended family knows someone who died of a prion disease. I feel like it would’ve come up if they did! Prion diseases have distinctive phenotypes. Not distinctive enough, apparently, to avoid a lot of CJD being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s – but diagnosis is consistently insane. Something DTM reiterates throughout The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is just what prion dementia looks like. The characteristic dementia in prion diseases spares something – “self” or “recognition” or “reflection” – that is not spared by Alzheimer’s, or by most common dementias. Shouldn’t this be, uh, noticeable?7 They kill rapidly, often over the course of months, and often onset in midlife. ALS shares this pattern and is way, way more common than prion diseases; you hear about ALS far more in the “disorder people actually have” sense. What am I missing here? Anyway: 1 in 2000 prevalence of latent vCJD in the UK + extreme lack of clarity over whether scrapie is human-transmissible + blood donations spread vCJD + sporadic CJD prevalence keeps going up = ??? (Yes, I am annoyed that most countries have lifted their ban on UK blood donors, thank you for asking!) --------------------------------------------------------- But back to the book. The “American chapter” is one-third about the country’s response to vCJD, one-third about the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, and one-third about chronic wasting disease. The last part is the most interesting. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disease of deer. Like scrapie, it “probably, we hope” isn’t human-transmissible (eat venison at your own risk). Under natural circumstances, deer shouldn’t get prion diseases: A prion plague should not be possible among ruminants in the wild. Deer are not cannibals, as the cows that spread BSE were forced to be; and, because deer and elk are not domesticated, they do not have enough contact with one another to spread a prion infection the way sheep are thought to spread scrapie. But deer do not live as they used to live, humans having once again brought their ambitions to bear on the natural course of things. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a book of medical anthropology. Anthropology of the Veneto, anthropology of Papua New Guinea, anthropology of 1990s Britain. Here, it is an anthropology of America. Americans, having won the world, still fight to win their own backyard. The North American continent is geographically diverse, cutting through rain-snow-shine, mountains jutting over plains, cities sprawling into wilderness, habitations criss-cross dotted with surprisingly few empty zones. Go somewhere like Denver, the Mile High City, three million people fighting against nature. Few other countries have anything like this; geographically vast polities usually have uninhabitable blocks. Australians are twenty-five million people clustered against the shore. It still surprises me, after all this time, how every US state has a meaningful city8. Midcentury Denver, growing and sprawling out across its mountains, started to run into their natural inhabitants – deer. Starvation is one way nature adjusts the deer population to the available food supply. People did not usually see this process, but in the 1950s and 1960s Colorado became more densely settled, reducing forested areas and forcing deer to look longer and harder for food. At the same time, the state enacted conservation laws, limiting when and where hunters could shoot. Soon emaciated deer began wandering onto the lawns and through suburban streets looking for a meal. People began to feed them, only to find that they died anyway. They would drop dead by haystacks, along highways, and in flower beds. In the late 1960s, a young biologist named Gene Schoonveld tried to figure out why the deer starved even when they were fed.9 He deprived some deer of food for a while, “[h]e cut windows in their stomachs to see what went on inside, and then he began to feed them”. While this was going on, he had a control group of healthy, well-fed deer as backups in case anything went wrong. It did...but not to the experimental group. The pen in which the deer were kept also housed sheep, which, it turned out, were scrapie carriers. The deer somehow acquired scrapie – there’s a huge unanswered question here, which DTM doesn’t address. How did they get scrapie? They didn’t eat the sheep, presumably. Did it somehow transmit from casual contact? This is not supposed to happen. And yet: the deer in the sheep pen started dying of a mysterious scrapie-like disease, one never reported before, that would go on to infect thousands. These deer were released into the wild. Ten years later, the first reports of chronic wasting disease came out. The disease spread across deer and elk in the western half of the country. By the turn of the millennium, cases were exploding – and lost all geographical restriction. DTM can report up to 2005, at which point it was floating around Upstate New York. This kind of spread doesn’t track natural deer migration. That’s irrelevant, because nothing about CWD’s spread is natural. We shift gears into an anthropology of the American hunter. The hunter wants to shoot the most impressive buck, to bag himself one with as many “points” as possible – one whose antlers branch out most. A “ten-point buck” has five branches on each horn: Original by Ric McArthur Nature doesn’t make enough bucks with perfectly symmetrical ten-point horns. To fill the demand, the market had to step in. Thus was born the deer farm industry, which raises captive deer in better genetic and nutritional conditions than Nature permits, then ships them across the country so hunters who couldn’t get legit ten-point bucks get the taxidermy piece for their wall. These are controversial amongst hunters and illegal in numerous states – but the industry is big enough to spread CWD. (The kind of hunter who needs a deer shipped to his house is the kind of hunter who will fumble killing it.) Another problem is supplemental feeding – leaving out protein-enriched food for deer to eat. This produces “trophy class animals at an earlier age”, but again, what’s in that protein? (“It is much like feeding your cows 41 percent protein cottonseed cake during the winter to raise the protein level in the cow’s diet to a level that will maintain acceptable production”, says that article from 1991.)10 The book segues into a vignette. CWD was new in Wisconsin in the early 2000s, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources was optimistic it could eradicate it. In a state with a love of hunting, you could, in theory, recruit people to kill every single deer in a 400-square-mile radius: In many states, the state would have had to call out the National Guard for such an onslaught, but hunting is a passion in Wisconsin. Hunters shoot 450,000 deer every year, more than in any other state. “I’m looking for ardent hunters to help us, unless fear or their wives keep them away,” one DNR official told a Milwaukee magazine. The state extended the normal hunting season and waived the usual limit of one buck per hunter, and the hunters came out in force. The whole affair was gruesome – one official called it “hunting for slob hunters”. If you’re trying to eradicate a prion disease, you can’t very well let people take the carcasses home to eat. Bodies piled up in control stations, decomposition mingling with bleach. The 2002 hunt established a base rate of 2% for chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin deer, with the most affected areas getting up to 10%. Further hunts in 2003, 2004, and 2005 spread to wider and wider areas – and didn’t move the needle one bit. This is to say that CWD is quite a bit more common in the American deer population than BSE ever was in British cattle. Since publication, it’s popped up in Norway and South Korea. Notably, Norway doesn’t allow for the import of cervids, raising numerous questions about how it got there. There are no unambiguous cases of CWD transmission to humans, and in vivo/in vitro primate studies have mixed results. There sure are some unusually young hunters with sporadic CJD, though. But don’t worry, most of them aren’t M/M homozygotes! There is an absolute ton going on in this book. I’ve had to skim over whole sections. Parts that couldn’t be easily slotted into a narrative review include: When Gajdusek was invited to a party at Prusiner’s house, he was horrified to find his rival had purchased hundreds of New Guinean statues – all with the genitals removed.

Inline links: 2, Lyttle Lytton, 3, 4, a couple years later, concerningly transmissible to primates, omnigenic model, you might, 5, SNPedia, a 2009 post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N93S!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fced2eca3-ec58-40b8-8c13-debdb559ab8f_651x601.png, Yeah., nope, M/V heterozygotes totally get vCJD, 6, up to 1 in 2000 people in the UK have latent vCJD, bleach enemas, has an answer for you, 7, blood donations spread vCJD, going, up, 8, 9, not supposed to happen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0J8B!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a64b287-a7c6-4d82-bbe1-da949fc93118_1024x683.png, Ric McArthur, controversial, amongst, hunters, illegal in numerous states, trophy class animals at an earlier age, 10, Norway, South Korea, mixed results, sure are

Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers

August 06, 2024 · Original source

Here I’ll also refer back to my old post on Jo Cameron, a Scottish woman with a rare genetic mutation that makes it impossible for her to suffer. She cannot feel pain, anxiety, fear, or any other negative emotion. As far as anyone can tell, she is completely normal. She is a successful wife, mother, and teacher, generally considered well-liked and excellent at her job. She may not have achieved greatness, but I once talked to someone impressive who you’ve probably heard of (I don’t have permission to share their name) who seems to have a lesser version of the same condition.

Inline links: Jo Cameron

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

January 01, 2025 · Original source

From “Genesis and pathogenesis of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 influenza A virus”, linked above. You may recognize the lead author - Michael Worobey has also been a leading voice on the zoonotic side of the COVID origins debate. The recent history of the flu, as far as I can tell, is: 1918: An H1N1 flu (“Spanish flu”) jumped from birds to humans in America and killed 50 million people worldwide. This replaced all older strains, so most seasonal flus during this era were H1N1. 1957: An H2N2 flu (“Asian flu”) crossed from birds to humans in China, and killed about 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H1N1 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H2N2. 1968: An H3N2 flu (“Hong Kong flu”) crossed from pigs (?) to humans in Hong Kong, and killed another 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H2N2 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H3N2. 1977: An H1N1 flu (“Russian flu”) leaked from a biology lab (?) in Russia (it might have been a strain from the 1940s, which the Russians were trying to make a vaccine for). It didn’t kill that many people, but it stuck around, and from then on, seasonal flus could be either H3N2 or H1N1. 2009: An H1N1 flu (“Mexican flu” until the PC police stepped in; afterwards “swine flu”) took some horrible circuitous route between birds and pigs and back again, crossed over into humans in Mexico, and killed 200,000 people. It outcompeted older strains of H1N1, but couldn’t crowd out H3N2, so seasonal flus are still either H3N2 or H1N1. …which brings us to the present, hopefully illuminating why “new flu strain crosses over from animals into humans” is such an “uh oh” moment. The Bird Flu Technically, all pandemic flus start as bird flus. Influenza A evolved in birds. Sometimes it spreads to other animals, including pigs, cattle, and humans. The most common way for a bird flu to spread to humans is to “reassort” (not exactly virus sex, but close enough, and the real version is less memorable) with a human flu virus (ie one that has already crossed over to humans). The resulting virus has all of the human flu virus’ human adaptations, but borrows enough new antigens from the bird virus to evade the immune system. Pigs can be infected by both human and bird viruses, so they are a common place for this reassortment to take place. If reassortment is sort of like viral sex, pigs are sort of like Tinder. When a bird flu and human flu reassort in pigs, the resulting disease is called a swine flu. At least the 2009 flu pandemic was a swine flu, and a minority opinion thinks the 1918 pandemic was too. There aren’t major epidemiological differences between direct-from-bird flus and swine flus. H5N1 was first noticed in birds - specifically, a flock of chickens in Scotland in 1959 - after which it disappeared for forty years. In 1996, it showed up in geese in China, then gradually increased its market share among birds worldwide. In 2022, it was found in minks; apparently it had learned to infect mammals. By early 2024, it was seen in cows. Now it’s in cow herds in 16 states, and one of them (California) has declared a state of emergency. And in October, H5N1 was found in pigs for the first time. It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same. A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic. Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu - or in a pig which has both viruses - gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus. This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon. So: What Is The Chance Of A Pandemic? The prediction markets on this topic ask a question about “10,000 cases in the United States”. Does this necessarily mean “pandemic”? Might it be possible to get to 10,000 cases just from the scattered chicken and cow farmers, with no human-to-human transmission? Despite many chicken and cow infections this year, there have only been 60 - 70 recorded human cases. Unless there is a phase change in screening methods, it seems hard for this number to increase to 10,000 off farmers alone. I think it’s fair to treat this question as operationalizing “what is the chance of a pandemic”? By this definition, Manifold estimates a 40% chance of an H5N1 pandemic in 2025. Metaculus estimates a 5% chance. You can see below whether that’s changed since I wrote this essay: 5% versus 40% is a big difference! Who do we trust? I trust Metaculus. Metaculus has beaten Manifold in both of the two head-to-head comparisons that I know of (Jeremiah Johnson’s and mine). Manifold’s number swings by a factor of two from week to week; Metaculus has been steady. But also, Metaculus hosts a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament which has enriched them in epidemiological expertise. And if you look at the quality of comments on both sites, it’s pretty obvious where the people with more intellectual chops are hanging out. The Manifold comments are mostly single sentences, or occasionally just links to an article about new cases. The Metaculus comments look more like this one by dimaklenchin: Despite the panic propaganda, H5N1 is unlikely to be "just a single mutation away from switching host preference": 1) It normally takes a lot more than a single mutation to switch hosts. E.g., there are at least five different reasons why SIV (monkey equivalent of HIV) is not infectious to humans. Heck, a variant of SIV that bears HIV's receptor-recognizing surface protein (SHIV) is still not infectious to humans. HIV most certainly evolved from SIV but, almost as certainly, it took a very long time to get there. Not that all viruses are the same and things can't turn out differently with flu, but I don't subscribe to the idea that a mere change of receptor specificity (something that can take 1-2 mutations) will be sufficient. 2) We have data. Lots of human infections with other varieties of bird flu in the past - all those viruses ultimately went nowhere. Why would H5N1 be radically different? E.g., the "Canadian teen", despite what sounds like a prolonged exposure, failed to infect anyone around him. Since I am at 18% for the h-2-h H5N1 detection in 2025, I am arbitrarily going ~ an order of magnitude lower than that for something as unprecedented as 10K human infections. Maybe should be much lower but hedging for the time being and will allow another couple months of observations. And Sergio: I'm currently at 20% on the question of reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026. However, this question is only about the US, and is more general about all subtypes of H5. But H5N1 very strongly appears to be the most important subtype to consider in this time period. And, given the current situation in the US with H5N1 human cases derived from exposure to poultry or cattle (with cattle(mammals) being more worrisome), h2h transmission seems quite more likely to arise in North America than elsewhere before 2026. Conditioning on h2h transmission in the US (and also trying to consider, with lower probability, a start in Canada), I want to estimate the chances that it becomes sustained and out of control (in which case, if it starts in Canada, I largely expect it to spread to the US). The (6) past events of probable h2h transmission of avian H5(N1), none of which were sustained, could serve as a base rate, although I'm a bit wary of giving much weight to this precedent, since the last event was quite a while ago (2007), and also because reporting and testing standards may have improved considerably since then (so perhaps they might not have been classified as h2h transmission events if they had occurred more recently). The current situation in the US, and events such as the Canadian teen who got sick with H5N1, do suggest a higher background level of risk than normal (which would be reduced if a vaccine for cattle is licensed soon), but I'm wary of overupdating. Conditioned on sustained h2h transmission, reaching over 10k cases in a few months seems likely, although perhaps very strong monitoring and surveillance could contain the situation in time (at the very least to moderate the growth rate). Trying to combine all these factors somewhat haphazardly, I'm currently at 3.5% for this question. That’s before 2026. What about longer-term? Manifold gives a ~50% chance before 2030; Metaculus uses a more complicated method but it says about 25% chance before 2030. H5N1 may cross to humans, but it could take a while. Superforecaster Juan Cambeiro at The Institute For Progress estimated a 4% chance of a “worse than COVID” H5N1 pandemic in “the next year”, but their estimate was made in 2023, without the benefit of the Metaculus estimates or most of our current knowledge. This feels high now - Metaculus says 5% total for H5N1 pandemic, and most pandemic flus are not worse than COVID. IFP also seem to be expecting a case fatality rate greater than 10%, which I find unlikely for the reasons mentioned above. I trust their estimate less than Metaculus’ current ones. I conclude that the most plausible estimate for the chance of an H5N1 pandemic in the next year is 5%. Interestingly, 5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year: five in the past century = one per twenty years = 5% chance per year. Isn’t it surprising that we’re still at the base rate when we can see a dangerous-looking flu virus spreading through the types of animals that have caused pandemic flus in the past? Part of the answer is that we’re not - in addition to the 5% chance of H5N1, we have to add the chance of some other pandemic flu. This probably isn’t 5% on its own; scientists monitor flu strains closely, and they haven’t found any others which are giving off as many red flags as H5N1. Still, something could always come out of left field. Maybe we should add a 2.5% chance of some other strain, for a total of 7.5% chance of a flu pandemic (ie beyond normal seasonal flu) next year. But still, isn’t it surprising that we’re so close to the base rate? One way to think about this: the base rate represents how concerned we should be if there was no epidemiological monitoring at all. In that case, we would estimate a probability distribution across different epidemiological landscapes, most of which contain some concerning-looking flu strains. Since we are doing the epidemiological monitoring, we can collapse that distribution into a single picture: one flu strain, H5N1, is in fact pretty concerning, and other strains mostly aren’t. This is enough to move our prior from 5% to 7.5%, but no more. The forecasters I talked to raised one other point of uncertainty: does the flu work more like a dice roll, or like a bus? Dice rolls are uncorrelated with their predecessors; even if it’s been a hundred rolls since you last rolled a 6, your chance this time is still 1/6. But buses come at fixed intervals; if the buses are hourly, and you haven’t seen a bus in the past 59 minutes, then your chance of seeing a bus in the next minute is very high. It’s been 16 years since the last flu pandemic; these pandemics come (on average) every 20 years. I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how to think about this. But it was 40 years between the Spanish and Hong Kong flus, so the twenty year number is at best a rule of thumb. The 5% number feels very low to me (and, apparently, to the average Manifold forecaster). Isn’t H5N1 spreading to cows and pigs and all sorts of other mammals? Isn’t it in the news all the time? I trust Metaculus a lot, but I agree that this is a surprising update, and I’m taking it on faith rather than feeling it in my bones. What Would The Fatality Rate Be For An H5N1 Pandemic? There are four basic stories you could tell about likely H5N1 mortality. First, maybe mortality would be 50%. The argument here is that official statistics report this mortality rate in the chicken farmers who have been infected with H5N1 so far. Several news sources and even some scientists have raised the specter of a pandemic version of H5N1 pandemic with this same death rate, which could kill a quarter to a third of the world population. THIS IS EXTREMELY FAKE. The official statistics only report fatality rate in the infections we know about. Bird flu is rare, there’s no mass testing, and we only learn that somebody had it if they’re in a hospital and the doctors are worried enough to test for rare conditions. Of Americans who got bird flu in the past year, 0 out of 61 have died. Probably this is mostly because America upped its detection game and is now finding milder cases; we also can’t rule out the virus mutating to become less virulent. Metaculus estimates the current true mortality rate as 1.25%. …but leaves a wide 90% confidence interval, from 0.5% to 7%. Second, maybe mortality would be somewhere around 1.25%. The argument here is that Metaculus uses this as its central estimate of US mortality. But Sentinel discusses some reasons to be skeptical of broad inferences from the US numbers: Scientists have been puzzled by the apparently low H5N1 case fatality rate in humans in the US. They offer a number of hypotheses: “The way in which the virus is being transmitted — along with the amount of virus exposure — is limiting the severity of disease.”

Inline links: was found in pigs, Jeremiah Johnson’s, mine, a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament, dimaklenchin, Sergio, reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026, human cases, past events, vaccine for cattle is licensed soon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fL7J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6a70fa6-b356-422d-ba9a-5db431e5a056_751x471.png, The Institute For Progress estimated, news, sources, scientists, Sentinel discusses

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability

July 03, 2025 · Original source

Second, the Scotland pedigree estimates he cites are likely biased due to pop strat. In the RDR paper, @alextisyoung tests a method called “Kinship FE”. At a high-level, Kinship FE estimates heritability using a pedigree model which accounts for shared nuclear family environment. Importantly, this method is quite similar to the methods employed in the two Scotland papers cited by Alexander: Hill et al and Marioni et al (both estimate heritability using pedigrees while modeling the effects of the shared nuclear family environment). Using simulations, Dr. Young shows that Kinship FE is biased in the presence of genetic nurture or pop strat. This is because these processes induce correlations between genes and env beyond the nuclear family. Unfortunately, pop strat bias is not mitigated by PC adjustments. So the key question is: are these at play for cognitive phenotypes? The answer is maybe for genetic nurture & yes for pop strat. Tan et al Figure 1 shows that pop strat biases estimation of genetic effects for IQ & edu. Thus, pedigree estimates should be interpreted w/caution.

Your Review: Joan of Arc

August 01, 2025 · Original source

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

Inline links: 9

This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover10 and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?

Inline links: 10

At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.26 Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.

Inline links: 26

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

October 01, 2025 · Original source

There’s a joke about three mathematicians who spot a black cow on a train ride through Scotland. One of them says “I see the cows in Scotland are black”.

The second objects “Technically, we only know that there is one black cow in Scotland.”

The third objects “Technically, we only know that there is one cow in Scotland, at least one side of which is black.”

Salt Lake City12 mentions across 12 issues

Salt Lake City is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SALT LAKE CITY, UT ( RSVP )"; "The Salt Lake City meetup group reports that COVID may have spread at their meetup"; "helping run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City". It most often appears alongside Austin, Berlin, Boston.

Article page: Salt Lake City
Mention count: 12
Issue count: 12
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Open Thread 188 September 05, 2021
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President April 13, 2022
LA and San Diego Meetups This Weekend October 06, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People July 18, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
The Other COVID Reckoning May 21, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 402 October 06, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Austin 9 shared issues
Berlin 7 shared issues
Boston 7 shared issues
France 7 shared issues
JAKARTA 7 shared issues

Source context

Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SALT LAKE CITY, UT (RSVP) Contact: Ross Richey, wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 28 Location: Liberty Park, open area NE of Chargepoint Station Coordinates: https://w3w.co/origin.reader.decks

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/origin.reader.decks

[Meetup COVID alerts: I’ve been informed that someone at the Salt Lake City meetup may have had COVID. Please let me know if you have any other information about COVID at meetups and I will list it here.]

Open Thread 188

September 05, 2021 · Original source

1: The Salt Lake City meetup group reports that COVID may have spread at their meetup. A few people there are reporting symptoms, and at least one person tested positive. If you attended, please take actions appropriate to a likely COVID exposure, like self-quarantining or getting tested (MicroCovid says that vaccinated people who attend an outdoor meetup with a known case have a 2% chance of getting sick, but since several people are reporting symptoms maybe it’s higher than that). If anyone knows of any other meetup where COVID might have spread, please let me know. I’ll list any alerts like this on open threads - but since those take a while to get up, I’ll also mention them on the top of the meetups post as soon as I hear about them. Remember, please only attend meetups if you’re fully vaccinated and don’t have any recent COVID exposure or symptoms.

Inline links: a 2% chance, on the top of the meetups post

April 13, 2022 · Original source

In 2004, as his mayoral term expired, Shea - now in his mid-50s - ran for Senate and won. He gained popularity from a series of successful projects - including helping run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and made friends in the diplomatic corps for his interest in (and encyclopedic knowledge of foreign affairs). In 2007, despite being a freshman Senator, he decided to run for President.

October 06, 2022 · Original source

Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Boise, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Toulouse, Cologne, Rome, Hatten, Poznan, St. Louis, Rochester (NY), Seattle, Mumbai, and Oklahoma City. You can find times and places here.

Inline links: here

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA Contact: Adam Contact Info: adam[dot]r[dot]isom[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park, west side, near Chargepoint Station, we'll be on the grass in a circle of chairs Changed due to weather, new location is 828 E Logan Ave, Salt Lake City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4MM+P3 Group Link: email me and I'll add you to the mailing list and send you a discord invite

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GCP4MM+P3

July 18, 2024 · Original source

See my review of Revolt Of The Public. As I tried to say in the first part of the post, this is reasonable and sympathetic. But if people keep not listening to your demands, then learning more about the specifics might help you understand why. There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?” I don’t know if the anti-gun people are doing anything wrong here exactly, I just know they’re going to be constantly confused and disappointed, and that anyone else who tries the same strategy will get the same results. Realistically, my excuse for writing the post was that I read this and this article by Freddie deBoer which assume that there is some clearly-defined thing called “involuntary treatment” and that the kindest option for the mentally ill and everyone else is to lift some kind of law preventing us from delivering it. Even if it’s permissible for the average person to just say “less homeless crime, please”, I feel like at the point where you’re a public intellectual leading the public discussion, you have some responsibility to start talking specifics. 2. Specific Comments And Responses Shako (blog) writes: I agree with your point in the post. I’ll add though that a policy that is adjacent to this is be “cruel and draconian” to the subset of homeless who commit anti-social crimes. If we removed the subset of criminals from west coast homelessness the problem would be still visible but far far less concerning to those of us who live among it. This is where I land too, but I think it’s very hard. If a homeless person stabs someone, then I think most places (I don’t know if this includes SF), they get prosecuted under general anti-stabbing laws, which the police mostly have enough resources to investigate. If someone just gets in people’s face a lot and screams and litters, then what? Most of the time, police won’t be around to see this. Most of the time, the victim won’t go through the trouble of pressing charges. If they did, it would be he said, she said. Even if the government puts in the effort to actually try the case, screaming at people and littering is probably a couple-month sentence at most. Eledex tells a related story in Part 3 here. A group of homeless people took up residence in an empty lot next to his house, harassed him, set things on fire, etc. This is much worse than the average homeless person just bothering tourists, but when he called the police, they never followed up. I assume if they had tried, the homeless people’s public defender could have said something like “are you sure these homeless people are the same ones who set fire to your stuff?”, Eledex would have said “they’re the homeless people camping on the lot where it happened, but I don’t, like, recognize them or anything”, the public defender would have said “well how do you know those people didn’t leave and some new homeless people came on to the lot?” and everyone would admit they couldn’t prove that. So the normal criminal system might not be set up to deal with these kinds of issues, which I think is why there’s so much demand for some extreme law that criminalizes the entire concept of being this sort of person. But I do worry that if police don’t have the resources to deal with normal crimes, then whoever is charged with enforcing the new extreme law won’t have enough resources to do it well either - and that any society capable of enforcing the new extreme law would also be capable of solving this through normal policing. Humphrey Appleby writes: Can we look at what other places do? What is eg Salt Lake City’s solution? (Possibly, export the homeless to SF). What about Zurich? Singapore? Edinburgh? The US in general and SF in particular seems to have this problem unusually bad, so one could reasonably look elsewhere for ideas. I talk a little more about this at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko, but I think most places' solutions are a combination of: 1. Cheaper housing so that more people can afford homes 2. Cheaper housing so that the government has an easier time giving free homes to people who can't afford their own 3. Homeless shelters 4. Frequent bad weather, forcing the homeless to use the homeless shelters at least sometime, which gets their foot in the door 5. Laws requiring the homeless to use the homeless shelters, which I am much less against when the homeless shelters exist. Doktor Zum writes: At one point, there were something like 600,000 Americans in long-term psychiatric institutions, and that was in a less populous America. Start by locking up 600K and then lock up more. Ah, but where do you put them? The 50 states are dotted with the creepy and picturesque ruins of all the old mental asylums--you can't put them there! It's true that the current government (states, local and federal) are totally incapable of building and running a vast network of psychiatric hospitals, but don't we want government to do things like build nuclear power plants and also lots of housing? If I'm making an argument for cheaper housing and you say "government can't/won't ever allow more building," am I supposed to say that you have won the argument? Unless we want to embrace full anarcho-capitalism, we have to believe that it is possible to have a government that can do things that it did in the 1950s like (a) apprehend and detain the severely mentally ill, (b) back and create lots of nuclear power plants, and (c) build abundant housing and infrastructure. People say “we had giant institutions once, so we can do it again”. This is basically true, but with some missed subtlety. The 600,000 people in the old institutions included: Demented old people (eg Alzheimers)

Inline links: my review of Revolt Of The Public, this, this, blog, here, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Commonwealth Coffee and Bakery (Jones St), 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215. Meet in the outdoor enclave abutting the cafe. I should have a sign setup, and I will have nametags. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X Group Link: https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/ Notes: All are welcome! Utah SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA Contact: Adam Contact Info: adam[dot]r[dot]isom[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, October 12th, 03:00 PM Location: We'll be on the west side of Liberty Park, near the ChargePoint station, in a circle of chairs on the lawn Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ Group Link: There's a mailing list and a Discord server, I can get you on both at the meetup

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X, https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ

The Other COVID Reckoning

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Joe Brenton Contact Info: joe[period]brenton[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Sunday, May 04th, 01:00 PM Location: Retrospect Coffee Bar 3709 La Branch St, Houston, TX 77004. We'll be in the back covered patio area with picnic tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X6PJPF+4R Group Link: https://discord.gg/Dzm [remove this bit] EPAscpS Utah SALT LAKE CITY Contact: Adam Contact Info: adamisom[a t]hey[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 03:00 PM Location: We'll be in the usual location at Liberty Park--west side, near the ChargePoint station, in a circle of chairs under a big tree Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+MF Group Link: email me for a Discord invite and/or to be added to the email list

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X6PJPF+4R, https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+MF

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.

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 5th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt Utah SALT LAKE CITY Contact: Ross Contact Info: adamisom[a t]hey[period]com Time: Saturday, October 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park, near the ChargePoint station Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+MF Group Link: there's a mailing list and Discord, please ask at the meetup! :)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt, https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+MF

Open Thread 402

October 06, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Austin, Berlin, Canberra, Jakarta, Salt Lake City, Tel Aviv, and others - see the meetup post for more information.

Inline links: the meetup post

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 12th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt Utah SALT LAKE CITY Contact: Ross Contact Info: wearenotsaved[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park West Side Near the Chargepoint charging station Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt, https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ

Sacramento11 mentions across 11 issues

Sacramento is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between September 21, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north"; "Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital)"; "One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, California, Australia.

Article page: Sacramento
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again March 29, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
What Happened To SF Homelessness? November 12, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession December 31, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

San Francisco 9 shared issues
California 8 shared issues
Australia 7 shared issues
Berkeley 7 shared issues
Chicago 7 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF. Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River. It claims that if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be the poorest in America, even worse than Mississippi. This was kind of shocking. I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War. But the Central Valley has none of those things, plus it has extremely fertile farmland, plus it’s in one of the richest states of the country and should at least get good subsidies and infrastructure. How did it get so bad? II. First of all, is this claim true? I can’t find official per capita income statistics for the Central Valley, separate from the rest of California, but you can find all the individual counties here. When you look at the ones in the Central Valley, you get a median per capita income of $21,729 (this is binned by counties, which might confuse things, but by good luck there are as many people in counties above the median-income county as below it, so probably not by very much). This is indeed lower than Mississippi’s per capita income of $25,444, although if you look by household or family income, the Central Valley does better again. I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

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

The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again

October 13, 2022 · Original source

2. There's very little to do, and you have to drive a long ways to do it. Outside of Sacramento and perhaps a couple of pockets elsewhere if I'm being generous, there's nowhere in the valley where you can, say, walk around and enjoy a day in the city and do things. I remember that parts of downtown Modesto and Fresno, at least back in ~2008, were literally shut down after dusk because of crime. Even then those fairly large cities are built like massive suburbs.

"Most people in the central Valley are conservative." The Central Valley is certainly more conservative than CA coastal cities. By area, I have no doubt that the Central Valley is majority conservative. But, since the author is already lumping the entire Central Valley under a single umbrella, I would be curious if "most" actually bears out in the distribution of political affiliations among Central Valley-ites. Lump in Sacramento and Stockton, and, since the author says "most people" and not "most voters," all of the non-citizen farm workers (documented or not).

"Sacramento is the sixth smoggiest area in the country." Based on an article from 1999. I would be curious how Sacramento air quality compares to standards today. "The smell." The author drove by a freeway-adjacent dairy on his way to LA and now knows what a four-hundred-mile swath of the country smells.

March 29, 2023 · Original source

I’m probably going to rent an office somewhere in Oakland for the month for a few thousand dollars. I’ll demand my patients come see me in person, once, so I can keep prescribing them the medication I’ve been successfully prescribing them for years. My patients will spend hours driving in from Sacramento or Napa or wherever it is they live. I’ll see them, say “Yup, you look the same in person as you do over Zoom, good job”, and then refill their prescription, same as always. Except I’ll have to charge them a bit more, to recoup the cost of the office.

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Willsen Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 29th, 3:00 PM Location: Backyard of private residence at 23rd and W St, in Midtown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG69+M2 Notes: Email me for the specific address, it's easy to find

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHG69+M2

September 11, 2023 · Original source

There's a train track between Sacramento and San Francisco that's about 10 or 20 miles away, but most railroads in the U.S., other than specifically commuter railways in places like NYC and Chicago, prioritize freight over passengers, so schedules for passenger trains are often fictional, with passenger trains being sidetracked to let freight roar by. (America, by the way, has very efficient freight trains in return for having terrible inter-city passenger rail.)

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julia and Andrew Contact Info: amethyst[dot]eggplant[at]gmail[dot]com; nightfall9[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14th, 1:00 PM Location: A house at 22nd and W St in Midtown Sacramento Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+MV Group Link: Email for our discord Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. I'll have podcasting equipment set up if anyone wants to record a spicy conversation, opt in only obviously

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+MV

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Nelson Contact Info: nelson[d ot]horsley[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:30 PM Location: Punchbowl Social in Victoria Gardens on the second floor Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85644F6C+Q4 Notes: Let me know if you’re coming in advance so I know if I need to officially book a reservation. SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julia and Andrew Contact Info: amethyst[dot]eggplant[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 01st, 02:00 PM Location: Private Residence at 22nd and W in Midtown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+JQM Group Link: hit me up for a discord link Notes: There will be pizza, drinks and off to one side there will be a podcasting station set up if guests are interested in ACX Stories

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85644F6C+Q4, https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+JQM

What Happened To SF Homelessness?

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Michael Michalchik Contact Info: michaelmichalchik[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: 1970 port Laurent place. White garage door, brick entrance into a duplex. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8 Group Link: Email me to be put on our weekly mailing list. Michaelmichalchik. Put keyword in subject line Acxlw Notes: RSVP is appreciated but not required SACRAMENTO Contact: Andrew Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 25, 1pm Location: WAL Public Market (1104 R St, Sacramento, CA 95811) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q Group Link: https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ Notes: How to get to the space - email me and I'll walk you through it - there will be food and drinks, feel free to bring something, there will be room

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8, https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q, https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ

Contact: Andrew Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 25, 1pm Location: WAL Public Market (1104 R St, Sacramento, CA 95811) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q Group Link: https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ Notes: How to get to the space - email me and I'll walk you through it - there will be food and drinks, feel free to bring something, there will be room

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q, https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ

November 12, 2025 · Original source

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

Inline links: and restored the city’s right to use this strategy, presents the cynical view of post-, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kCNg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fda1b28-6220-4c80-820b-6700bcb67a56_794x893.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jF-b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04c94ed0-966c-4a7a-9488-24324bdb2a47_864x1080.webp, source, Proposition 1, are harder to count, rents fell in most big California cities., still make it easier, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3SWT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F752f0794-bac0-4a44-8997-3fc897a231a6_805x462.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mtf6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdffe0a3b-7471-41d7-8998-1ea4631b663b_2027x2578.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IP1D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3dcf3fdb-3af0-4c26-b2c9-0525d4ab4800_807x615.png, the same, admitted this was too hard and gave up, Breaking The Cycle, Daenerys Targaryen, getting tough on fentanyl, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!g3SD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1aaeff3b-8331-4d22-9ef2-e9c45edb7f60_767x495.png, preliminary results look discouraging, Some experts argue, to Berkeley, to Oakland, to other states, this is obviously false, has three programs

…preliminary results look discouraging. Why? Some experts argue that the clearing of open-air markets shifts the dealer-addict relationship from an iterated game to a one-shot: since law enforcement prevents anyone from staying in the same place too long, addicts move from dealer to dealer, encouraging dealers to try exploitative strategies rather than cultivating repeat customers. Those exploitative strategies include toxic or spiked merchandise, hence the increased overdoses. Others argue that the harm reduction programs successfully reduced harm, and stopping them had the predictable effect. But it looks to me like things get worse slightly before Mayor Lurie took office, and that in any case the new regime is a return to form after an anomalous trough. This article argues that none of this has anything to do with local policy; some foreign countries successfully cracked down on fentanyl in 2024, raising prices and creating a shortage. Then in 2025 the traffickers recovered, and supply came back. Everyone Accuses Everyone Else Of Shipping Them Homeless People Look too closely into discussions of why homelessness is up or down in some particular city, and you’ll find dark murmurs about how they’re shipping problem individuals away, or getting duped by other cities doing the same to them. The Berkelians say SF has sent its homeless to Berkeley. The Oaklanders say no, to Oakland. The Sacramentans say Sacramento. And don’t forget the ones sent to other states! Meanwhile, former SF mayor Gavin Newsom has claimed that the majority of its own homeless people come from Texas (this is obviously false). Some of these claims make sense. San Francisco has three programs that bus its homeless people out of the city. Previously, they would only do this if social workers could prove the person had a family member willing to support them in the new city. More recently, they lowered this standard to “some connection” to the destination. But I don’t think this caused a large drop in SF homelessness, for three reasons. First, we have no evidence that any such drop in homeless numbers occurred - just a decrease in tent encampments and visible dysfunction. Second, the new lower-standards busing program only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem. Third, the data above show general homelessness declines across California. If SF were exporting its homeless, you would expect other counties’ numbers to increase. Instead, it seems more likely that SF’s numbers are going down (if they are going down) for the same reason as everyone else’s. We’ll have more information next year, when Alameda County releases homelessness numbers. Alameda, which contains Oakland and Berkeley, is a natural export destination for San Francisco. So What Happened To Homelessness? This is a maximally boring story. There’s a natural tradeoff where governments can enforce laws against the homeless in ways that make them less visible and annoying, at the cost of making their lives harder, eg it can take away their tents. In the past, they didn’t do this, out of a combination of tender-heartedness and legal restrictions. After the homeless became extremely visible and annoying, voters felt less tender-hearted, and the courts lifted the legal restrictions. So cities took the tradeoff. This is the big effect that everyone noticed. At the same time, there were some small effects from increased funding, falling rents, drug market clearing, and busing programs. Realistically nobody would have noticed any of these; the big effect is from encampment clearing. Have we learned anything? I don’t think we learned the sort of thing we hoped we might learn, the lever we could push to solve everything with no downsides. But: I had previously thought there weren’t really any levers that could improve the problem at all, short of mass incarceration. I hadn’t considered that taking people’s tents and possessions would have such a strong aesthetic effect that most people would consider the problem solved from an annoyance/visibility perspective. I think my failure was some combination of 1: not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves 2: not realizing how many options the homeless have for “lying low” when they really don’t want to be found (and therefore how elastic visible homelessness is with respect to legal crackdowns).

Inline links: preliminary results look discouraging, Some experts argue, to Berkeley, to Oakland, to other states, this is obviously false, has three programs

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

December 31, 2025 · Original source

This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy

Inline links: They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes

Book Review: The New Sultan

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Steven Contact Info: stevenl451[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 16th, 10:00 AM Location: Sana’a cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQP9+JC Group Link: meetups channel in ACXD discord: https://discord.com/channels/289207224075812864/928753873131302953 Notes: RSVP to my email if you like so I have a rough idea of who is coming SACRAMENTO Contact: Andrew Contact Info: nightfall9[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM Location: The Warehouse Artists Lofts, the patio on the roof, 1108 R St in Midtown, 11AM - 3PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+7WX Group Link: https://discord.gg/fDf [remove this bit] pRemM Notes: Discord is the best place to talk about attending the meetup. Also, for the meetup, the main entrance to the building is locked, but the is a silver number pad to the right. dial 060 on the keypad and I can buzz you in to the building. Upon entering, go straight and the elevator will be on your left, go up to the 7th floor. Please RSVP on LessWrong

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VFQP9+JC, https://discord.com/channels/289207224075812864/928753873131302953, https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+7WX

Serbia11 mentions across 11 issues

Serbia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between March 18, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""The EU becomes sick and tired of the arduous talks, and calls in candidate countries Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey.""; "calls in candidate countries Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey"; "Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic". It most often appears alongside France, Netherlands, Brazil.

Article page: Serbia
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021
Links For November November 25, 2021
Who Gets Self-Determination? March 30, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

France 9 shared issues
Netherlands 9 shared issues
Brazil 8 shared issues
Chicago 8 shared issues
Israel 8 shared issues

Source context

March 18, 2021 · Original source

The EU becomes sick and tired of the arduous talks, and calls in candidate countries Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey for a test on European history. The EU tells the three countries they will be asked one question. If they know the answer, they can join the EU, otherwise they will be rejected. The Serbs are offered the question "When did World War I begin". This is an easy question. "The answer is 1914." The doors open, bells ring, and Serbia joins the EU. Then the Montenegrins are asked "When did World War I end?" This, too is an easy question. "The answer is 1918." Doors open, bells ring, and Montenegro joins the EU. Finally, the Turks are asked: "How many people died in World War I, and what are their names?"

Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.

March 30, 2022 · Original source

Now, it’s true that any LARP sustained long enough eventually becomes real. The Netherlands for instance was once German, and there’s even a parallel there with how Dutch consistently looks and sounds worse than German. So an independent Ukraine could, over time, become a real country. But to what end? Do we really need another mediocre Slavic country? It reminds me of Latin America, where you have dozens of barely distinguishable nonentity countries serving no real purpose. The entire region should be consolidated into maybe five states at most. Russia, Poland, and Serbia are the only Slavic states needed by the world.

July 01, 2022 · Original source

If you find that question confusing, you might, with a little poking at it, start to also wonder why the death of an Austro-Hungarian Prince, in Serbia, at the hands of an anarchist, caused Germany and the US to battle each other in World War I, and when Germany lost, for the allies to humble and punish Germany above all. And that question can lead back to the question of what changed, between World War I, and now, and that, according to H&S, leads right back to the Pact, and the history of the outlawry movement.

[After the assassination] Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum: Unless Serbia met ten conditions aimed at suppressing the “subversive movement” behind the assassinations, there would be war. Serbia acceded to all but the second part of the sixth condition, which insisted that Austria-Hungary participate directly in the investigation of the assassination. This demand was unacceptable, Serbia explained, because its constitution did not permit a foreign power to participate in an internal investigation. Nine and a half out of ten was not good enough. (Chapter 5)

Within our modern framework, none of this makes sense. It wasn’t that Serbia assassinated the Prince and German diplomats decided this was a good excuse to conquer Europe, while everyone else reacted with horror that they could think such a thing. It was a good excuse to conquer Europe, but leaders of countries in Europe took many things to be good excuses to conquer Europe, and Europe generally went along with that, because the rules were fair. It was just a natural chain reaction to the fact that countries used war as a tool of diplomacy. Within the old frame, we can see that the Allies treated Germany not as a villain, but as a defeated foe, and before the Pact, when you defeated your foe in war, you made them pay tribute in territory, concessions, and money.

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.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

MOSCOW, MOSCOW OBLAST, RUSSIA Contact: UselessCommon Contact Info: titon[dot]a[at]yandex[dot]ru Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: Москва, Русаковская ул. д.31 - торговый центр Сокольники, 2 этаж, фуд-корт/Moscow, Russakovskaya st. 31 - "Сокольники" trade center, food-court. I will bring an SSC sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMQH+8F Notes: I don't really use LW, and would prefer to be contacted (as uselesscommon) on the ACX discord. Serbia BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Dušan Contact Info: tatiana[dot]n[dot]skuratova[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Dr. Dragoslava Popovica 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/ Notable Guests: Dušan from Serbia Notes: Please RSVP by email to Tatiana on the email above! The meet-up is the monthly meet-up of EA/LW/ACX crowd, usually we discuss some two topics. For example in August we are doing "Life Extension" and "Healthy Relationships".

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMQH+8F, https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36, https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/

BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Dušan Contact Info: tatiana[dot]n[dot]skuratova[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Dr. Dragoslava Popovica 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/ Notable Guests: Dušan from Serbia Notes: Please RSVP by email to Tatiana on the email above! The meet-up is the monthly meet-up of EA/LW/ACX crowd, usually we discuss some two topics. For example in August we are doing "Life Extension" and "Healthy Relationships".

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36, https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA Contact: Mak Contact Info: kellendros95[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 5:00 PM Location: пер. Гривцова 22, открытое пространство "Каледонский Лес", малый или средний зал Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GFGW8H8+8Q Serbia BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36 Group Link: https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/ Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9GFGW8H8+8Q, https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36, https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/

BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36 Group Link: https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/ Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36, https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: teapot Contact Info: blastjoe41 [a t]gma il[ dot]com Time: Sunday, October 06, 12:00 PM Location: Surf Coffee X Lucky, Baumanskaya 33 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMFH+2FP Additional Notes: RSVP is NOT required but there might be a venue change so we strongly recommend you message us Serbia BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Tanya Trninic Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[ dot]c om Time: Sunday, September 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Restaurant Rai Urban Vege; Address: Visokog Stevana 5, Belgrade, Serbia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ| Group Link: EA Serbia Telegram group invite: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.com so I can reserve a suitable table.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMFH+2FP, https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ|, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0

Contact: Tanya Trninic Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[ dot]c om Time: Sunday, September 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Restaurant Rai Urban Vege; Address: Visokog Stevana 5, Belgrade, Serbia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ| Group Link: EA Serbia Telegram group invite: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.com so I can reserve a suitable table.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFG4+JQ|, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: teapot/Di Contact Info: blastjoe41[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 1:00 PM Location: Monoid - Moscow, Lomonosovsky street (проспект), 25к3 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqc [remove this bit] FWhsilkOTJi Notes: we don't require RSVP but it would still be cool if you messaged us beforehand Serbia BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Trninic Contact Info: tanja[period]trninic[a t]efektivnialtruizam[period]com Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM Location: vegANGELov vegan restaurant Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2VG Group Link: https://t.me/Trlo [remove this part] mpi Notes: Please email me if you’d like to participate and have any dietary restrictions. One dish and a drink is covered by EA funds and ACX Meetups.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG, https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2VG

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Caled Contact Info: gwinyster[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 4:00 PM Location: г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3 ЦДО Моноид Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9 Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi Serbia BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 28, 6:00 PM Location: vegANGELov vegan restaurant Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2V Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Additional Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email so I know how many tables to book.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9, https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi, https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2V, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0

What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Meetup Czar Note: The organizer misentered the date as May 4th, it’s actually April 4th! Serbia BELGRADE Contact: Tanja is organizing the Belgrade meetup. Contact Info: tanja[.]trninic[@]efektivnialtruizam[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Doktora Dragoslava Popovića 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0 Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email to my email, so we know how many people to expect.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36, https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0

St. Louis11 mentions across 11 issues

St. Louis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between December 28, 2021 and September 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Campaigns to switch to alternative voting systems have recently succeeded in several US cities, most notably St. Louis"; "the two highest being St. Louis (Ferguson is a suburb of St. Louis)"; "SAINT LOUIS, MO". It most often appears alongside Seattle, Australia, Chicago.

Article page: St. Louis
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: December 28, 2021
Last seen: September 15, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants Results December 28, 2021
What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike? June 29, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
LA and San Diego Meetups This Weekend October 06, 2022
Open Thread 292 September 04, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
My 2024 Presidential Debate June 27, 2024
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House December 04, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 399 September 15, 2025

Seattle 7 shared issues
Australia 6 shared issues
Chicago 6 shared issues
Vienna 6 shared issues
Berlin 5 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants Results

December 28, 2021 · Original source

Troy Davis, $10,000, to help fund his campaign for approval voting in Seattle. Approval voting is one of the approximately 100% of voting systems better than the one we currently use, with the potential to defuse partisanship and let people support outsider candidates without "wasting their vote". Campaigns to switch to alternative voting systems have recently succeeded in several US cities, most notably St. Louis, and Troy thinks Seattle's time has come. You can read more about his efforts at Seattle Approves or see the discussion here. He wants your help getting this on the November 2022 ballot, especially from Washington State residents (email, donation link)

Inline links: Seattle Approves, here, email, donation link

June 29, 2022 · Original source

Other skeptics point to this study, which claims an overall effect on crime did not occur. The study does claim this, and even says there was no statistically significant break in the homicide trend around 2014. I have no explanation for why their statistics give such a different result than just looking at the graph above. But they do say that when they disaggregate by cities, they find a clear increase in homicides in cities with large black communities, with the two highest being St. Louis (Ferguson is a suburb of St. Louis) and Baltimore (where the Freddie Gray incident happened). My guess is that homicides rose in all cities, and it only reached statistical significance in mostly-black cities and the cities where the protests were most concentrated.

Inline links: this study

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.

October 06, 2022 · Original source

Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Boise, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Toulouse, Cologne, Rome, Hatten, Poznan, St. Louis, Rochester (NY), Seattle, Mumbai, and Oklahoma City. You can find times and places here.

Inline links: here

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

My 2024 Presidential Debate

March 30, 2024 · Original source

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA Contact: John Buridan Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 2:30 PM Location: Tower Grove Park, Cypress Pavilion South Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ32+XC Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3 Notes: Feel free to bring kids, gadgets, books-as-conversation starter. Invite friends. Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ32+XC, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3

June 27, 2024 · Original source

If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great.

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

December 04, 2024 · Original source

Predictably, modern architecture won its greatest victories among those who had the least opportunity to refuse: poor people in the projects. Wolfe writes especially of Pruitt-Igoe, a St. Louis public housing project designed by famous modern architect Minoru Yamasaki:

Inline links: Pruitt-Igoe

Let it never be said that the St. Louis government doesn’t listen to its constituents. But Wolfe does admit that some rich people voluntarily selected, or even commissioned, modernist buildings. He blames trendiness. There was a pipeline from the architecture schools (now dominated by the modernists) to the architecture sections of newspapers and magazines (Wolfe blames Domus, House & Garden, and The New York Times Magazine in particular). Rich people would read the magazines, understand that modern architecture was “in”, and go with it so as to not feel “left behind”.

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ben Scott Contact Info: bens9775[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 02:00 PM Location: Cosmo-Bethel Park, 4500 Bethel St, Columbia, MO 65203 We'll be at the shelter by the parking lot. I'll be wearing a red shirt and there will be a sign that says ACX. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86C9WM34+59 Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. Pizza will be provided, bring your own drink. RSVP requested so we know how much food to get-->https://forms.gle/vxeqmN2wBsjZUEaZ7 ST. LOUIS Contact: SebastianG Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 01:00 PM Location: We'll be on Art Hill in Forest Park on the left side! I'll put an ACX Meetup Yard sign in the ground. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJPR4+H7 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86C9WM34+59, https://forms.gle/vxeqmN2wBsjZUEaZ7, https://plus.codes/86CFJPR4+H7, https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Alex Contact Info: alex[period]hedtke[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Minsky's Pizza. Tell the hostess you are here for the conference room meetup, they will bring you right to us! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86F74C58+CW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea/ ST. LOUIS Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 3, 7:00 PM Location: Olympia Kebob House - reservation for 'Sebastian'. I will have an ACX sign and we will be in the back room. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJMFR+JR Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86F74C58+CW, https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea/, https://plus.codes/86CFJMFR+JR, https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/

September 15, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Brussels, Cape Town, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Kyiv, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Portland, Philadelphia, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Sydney, Waterloo, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Prague and St. Louis have been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

Stockholm11 mentions across 11 issues

Stockholm is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between August 23, 2021 and September 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN ( RSVP )"; "Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold"; "But then why don’t we see any effect from excess winter heart attacks in very cold places like Stockholm or Siberia?". It most often appears alongside London, ACX, ACX MEETUP.

Article page: Stockholm
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: September 08, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Chilling Effects October 20, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 378 April 21, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 398 September 08, 2025

London 9 shared issues
ACX 8 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 8 shared issues
Anastasia 8 shared issues
Atlanta 8 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (RSVP) Contact: Sal, sallat[at]protonmail[dot]com, Facebook group Time: 3:30 PM, Saturday, September 4 Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have "ACX meetup" sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/glow.fracture.retire Notes: We have an existing group that has been organizing regular SSC meetups for a while. I only recently took over as organizer, but the group has existed for several years.

Inline links: RSVP, Facebook group, https://w3w.co/glow.fracture.retire

October 20, 2021 · Original source

You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).

Global warming should theoretically help prevent the excess winter heart attacks, which are a direct effect of cold weather. But then why don’t we see any effect from excess winter heart attacks in very cold places like Stockholm or Siberia? Overall I’m not convinced of this one either.

April 10, 2022 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Sal (sallat@protonmail.com) or Nick (niktonick@gmail.com) Date: May 22 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83RF+3M5 Location: We're meeting near blue gazebo in Humlegården, I will have "ACX" sign. Group info: Stockholm has monthly meetups, email Sal to find out more

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83RF+3M5

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.

April 10, 2023 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Marina Contact Info: marina[dot]sharoian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 14th, 01:30 PM Location: Stockholm djurgården Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5 Event Link: https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5, https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

August 25, 2023 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan W Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Scandic Continental near Stockholm Central Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share Notes: Please RSVP so I know if we'll be more than about 7: if so, we may need to find a bigger place.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+CR, https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists/?ref=share

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/

Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Wednesday, May 7th, 6:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/ STOCKHOLM Contact: Valerio Lomanto Contact Info: ian[dot]maayrkas [at] gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 11, 03:00 PM Location: Smedsudden. It's a smaller park near Rålhambshovsparken in Kungsholmen near the city center. One of us will wear very yellow clothes. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW82GF+42 Group Link: Telegram group for Stockholm Rationalists: https://t.me/+Z51 [remove this bit] hOrlfazMwZmU0 Additional Notes: We will be bringing some snacks and some boardgames. The idea is to have some picnic-ish thing in the grass and enjoy the spring. Feel free to bring whatever you think you or others will enjoy. See you there! :) Please RSVP or join the group or email because if it's too crowded we might have to find another spot and then we'll communicate where we are. We may also need to change to an indoor location if the weather is bad.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/, https://plus.codes/9FFW82GF+42

Contact: Valerio Lomanto Contact Info: ian[dot]maayrkas [at] gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 11, 03:00 PM Location: Smedsudden. It's a smaller park near Rålhambshovsparken in Kungsholmen near the city center. One of us will wear very yellow clothes. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW82GF+42 Group Link: Telegram group for Stockholm Rationalists: https://t.me/+Z51 [remove this bit] hOrlfazMwZmU0 Additional Notes: We will be bringing some snacks and some boardgames. The idea is to have some picnic-ish thing in the grass and enjoy the spring. Feel free to bring whatever you think you or others will enjoy. See you there! :) Please RSVP or join the group or email because if it's too crowded we might have to find another spot and then we'll communicate where we are. We may also need to change to an indoor location if the weather is bad.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW82GF+42

Open Thread 378

April 21, 2025 · Original source

1: ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See the post for details. And remember there’s a feedback form for meetup-goers.

Inline links: the post, feedback form

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, look for a book on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg | https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC STOCKHOLM Contact: Gary Contact Info: acxstockholm[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 12:27 PM Location: We'll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That's the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I'll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39, https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC, https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q

Contact: Gary Contact Info: acxstockholm[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 12:27 PM Location: We'll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That's the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I'll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q

September 08, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.

Inline links: Berkeley, the list

Syria11 mentions across 11 issues

Syria is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between March 23, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Taleb focuses on the neighboring states of Lebanon and Syria"; "Some states will fail, as they don’t have what’s needed to survive (Syria, Greece, Libya)"; "ISIS (in western Iraq and parts of Syria)". It most often appears alongside Russia, China, Trump.

Article page: Syria
Mention count: 11
Issue count: 11
First seen: March 23, 2021
Last seen: October 30, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Antifragile March 23, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle July 22, 2022
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023
Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity November 12, 2024
Links For October 2025 October 30, 2025

Russia 9 shared issues
China 7 shared issues
Trump 7 shared issues
Ukraine 7 shared issues
Britain 6 shared issues

Source context

March 23, 2021 · Original source

Not just the US government - Taleb focuses on the neighboring states of Lebanon and Syria. In the early 20th century, nobody had drawn a border between them and they were nearly identical. In the 1960s, the Baath Party took over Syria, and began a centralized "modernization" campaign, which for Taleb is symbolized by their dissolving the old bazaars and replacing them with modern office buildings. The result:

Lebanon and Syria had very similar wealth per individual (what economists call Gross Domestic Product) about a century ago - and had identical cultures, languages, ethnicities, foods, and even jokes. Everything was the same except for the role of "modernizing" Baath Party in Syria compared to the totally benign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civil war that decimated the population, causing an acute brain drain and setting wealth back by several decades, in addition to every possible form of chaos that rocked the place, today [ie when Antifragile was published in 2012, before the Syrian Civil War] Lebanon has a considerably higher standard of living - between three and six times the wealth of Syria.

Fact check: The Maddison Project, the usual (though oft-criticized) source for historical GDP, does not think Lebanon and Syria had similar GDP per capita a century ago (source). Book Three is called "A Nonpredictive View Of The World", and annoyed me because it pre-empted a post of mine by almost ten years.

Inline links: source

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).

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

April 06, 2022 · Original source

ISIS (in western Iraq and parts of Syria)

June 24, 2022 · Original source

The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal Similarly, the Soviet Union did not violate the sovereignty of states when it invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of its government in 1979, and similarly in Syria in 2015. When Russia violated international law, most notably Georgia in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the goal was occupation rather than removing their governments, killing their leaders, or fundamentally remaking their societies (the book was published before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). The US is truly singular in violating international law: Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power

Get rid of the regime The theory falls apart because citizens still need to overcome the collective action problem; regime elites, almost by definition, benefit from the current regime; regimes prioritise paying for security forces over domestic population; and rival powers come to the rescue. As empirical research clearly shows, sanctions are the most brutal and harmful when they have the least likelihood of success. Step 1 of causing economic hardship certainly succeeds — UN sanctions were associated with an aggregate GDP reduction 25% of GDP per decade; US sanctions were associated with a 13.4% decline over seven years. Beyond the destruction of wealth of innocent citizens, sanctions cause excess deaths due to starvation and brutalising ever more desperate regimes that engage in mass killing to repress domestic protests — six-figure infant deaths in Iraq; 1,000 infant deaths per month in Haiti, 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela in 2017-2018 alone; 38% of Syrian population unable to meet basic food requirements in 2018. Step 4 of regime change has yet to happen as a result of the harshest sanctions against Cuba since 1959, Iraq since 1998, Syria since 2011, and Venezuela since 2019. The Bush, Clinton, new Bush, and Obama administrations all stuck to a policy of not speaking with adversaries, which is the opposite of achieving foreign policy goals by providing targeted regimes a clear path towards the removal of sanctions. Once again, Hanania shows that there is no American grand strategy — sanctions are used to accomplish domestic political goals rather than foreign policy objectives. Leaders face domestic pressure to ‘do something’ about human rights violations and military aggressions abroad, and short of military intervention, sanctions is the only option beyond words of condemnation. Sanctions are an ‘easy’ option because there will be little to no domestic opposition when all the deaths and economic destruction are out of sight; out of mind. 5. The War On Terror The Bush Years After 9/11, the United States has invaded the al-Qaeda sanctuary of Afghanistan, but also the completely irrelevant Iraq. In the view of grand strategy, war is a means to accomplish national security objectives; in the view of public choice, national security objectives is a means to accomplish war (or at least a large military budget). The post hoc rationalisation of the war on terror rests on three incoherent ideologies: Antiterrorism: disproportional militarised response to terrorist attacks

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 Society Of The Spectacle

July 01, 2022 · Original source

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.

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

Book Review: The Alexander Romance

February 20, 2023 · Original source

In 2018, the UK was debating how to Brexit, Syria was winding down its civil war, and ISIS was still considered a threat. I wrote:

The European Union will not collapse. It will get some credibility from everyone hating its enemies – Brexit, the nationalist right, etc – and some more credibility by being halfway-competent at its economic mission. Nobody will secede from anywhere. The crisis of nationalism will briefly die down as the shock of Syrian refugees wears off, then reignite (possibly after 2023) with the focus on African migrants. At some point European Muslims may decide they don’t like African migrants much either, at which point there may be some very weird alliances.

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%

September 19, 2023 · Original source

There is no single Alexander Romance. Every culture from Ethiopia to Russia added their own bits and adapted it to their own needs. The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia; the Jewish version adds bits about how Alexander knelt before the High Priest of Jerusalem and said that the LORD was the one true God. Someone from Syria added the bits about Gog and Magog; nobody knows who added the parts with the 36-foot-tall giants, the three-eyed lions, the sphere-people, or the headless men. This makes it hard to review “the” Alexander Romance - some historians describe it as more of a genre than a single story.

His first night east of India, he was attacked by a triceratops. At least this is how I interpret the odontotyrannus (“tooth-tyrant”), a three-horned monster bigger than an elephant that killed 26 Macedonian warriors. In the Syrian version, it took 300 men to drag its body out of a river; in the Armenian version, 1,300.

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.

Still, we shouldn’t imagine this as just a cynical leadership fabricating prophecies that fit their strategic goals to manipulate the rank and file. My understanding is that the people interpreting the prophecies are true believers too, it’s just natural to interpret an ambiguous location to refer to Syria if you are already fixated on the idea that your group is the one fulfilling the prophecies, and now there are rebels in Syria asking for your help.

Other times, there is a prophecy with a clear interpretation, so they follow it even if it goes against any strategic reason. A hadith says: “The Last Hour would not come until the Romans land at al-A’maq or in Dabiq. An army consisting of the best (soldiers) of the people of the earth at that time will come from Medina (to counteract them).” So ISIS put crazy amount of effort into defending the otherwise unimportant village of Dabiq in northern Syria for three years, and they provoked the West with their brutality, openly admitting that their hope is for the West to send ground troops, so they can defeat them in Dabiq:

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

November 12, 2024 · Original source

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

Links For October 2025

October 30, 2025 · Original source

22: Earlier this year, I wrote about Richard Lynn’s IQ estimates - what do we do with data suggesting that the average IQ in poor countries is in the 60s or 70s? Should we think of these groups as similar to intellectually disabled people in First World countries? Or are the IQ tests failing to classify them correctly? Andrew Hammel (X) writes about a remarkable case in Germany that hinged on this question: a Syrian terrorist murdered three people. The defense argued that since he had an IQ of 71 (borderline intellectually disabled by German standards) he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions. But a psychiatric expert witness counterargued that IQ 71 is normal for Syria, and you can hardly argue that no Syrian can be regarded as a moral actor. The argument seems to have carried the day, and the Syrian man will face a normal sentence.

Inline links: wrote about, Andrew Hammel (X)

Sub-Saharan Africa10 mentions across 10 issues

Sub-Saharan Africa is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between April 30, 2021 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "they can’t provide water to the exploding populations of Arizona or Sub-Saharan Africa"; "there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa"; "People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa". It most often appears alongside US, California, India.

Article page: Sub-Saharan Africa
Mention count: 10
Issue count: 10
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: January 16, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change October 13, 2021
Chilling Effects October 20, 2021
Edinburgh Meetups This Weekend October 22, 2021
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries August 04, 2022
ACX Grants: Project Updates November 04, 2022
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023 February 20, 2023
Links For November 2023 December 01, 2023
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates January 15, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ January 16, 2025

US 5 shared issues
California 4 shared issues
India 4 shared issues
China 3 shared issues
Europe 3 shared issues

Source context

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

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change

October 13, 2021 · Original source

Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans. He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with more people not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but also to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.

Edinburgh Meetups This Weekend

October 20, 2021 · Original source

People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right - the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa.

What about sub-Saharan Africa? This can’t just be adaptation. Sure, they’re not prepared for the cold. But it never gets cold there. The lowest recorded temperature in Kampala, Uganda was 12C (54F). Most years it doesn’t even get that low! Who’s dying from that?

Inline links: was

I think cold-related deaths are most common in Africa because of the flu. Flu hits sub-Saharan Africa really hard, much harder than the developed world. Partly this is because it’s very poor and lacks good health care. And partly it’s because it has many other diseases - especially HIV/AIDS - which weaken people’s immune systems and constitutions to the point where the flu can finish them off. Flu hits in the winter in not-completely-equatorial areas, and all year in equatorial areas. I don’t know if anyone has ever proven whether flu is worse in random non-seasonal cold snaps in equatorial areas, but it would make sense if it was. Even though most cold-weather deaths in temperate areas are heart attacks, I don’t know of any studies showing this is true in equatorial Africa, so I think probably this is all flu cases.

Inline links: really hard, it would make sense if it was

October 22, 2021 · Original source

3: Comment of the week is nickiter, Kevin Jackson, and everyone else who pointed out that people can die of hypothermia at surprisingly high temperatures - and I guess I have no evidence that temperature effects on heart attacks can’t start at surprisingly high temperatures either. I’ve updated to believe that a lot of the sub-Saharan African hypothermia deaths may in fact be cold-related and not flu.

Inline links: nickiter, Kevin Jackson

Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries

August 04, 2022 · Original source

This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century.

The US will grow from about 330 million people today to about 430 million in 2100; the UK from about 60 million to 80 million. Most of this growth will be immigration. Some of these immigrants will come from sub-Saharan Africa, others from countries whose populations are themselves declining (sorry, other countries).

November 04, 2022 · Original source

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

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

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%

Links For November 2023

December 01, 2023 · Original source

Sub-Saharan Africa was doing well ten years ago (probably mostly because of rising commodity prices, themselves probably due to the rise of China as a new commodity market). Now it’s doing badly, probably due to a combination of Chinese slowdown / falling commodity prices, rising interest rates, and the Ukraine War distracting all the countries that would otherwise have tried to help (though this explanation requires that other countries trying to help is a good thing, which has been controversial).

January 15, 2025 · Original source

First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?

1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?

Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?

Inline links: writes, here, Harmonized Learning Outcomes, this preprint, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wY7n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8e5ec21-6788-4dc5-96f1-9b1929f221bb_800x354.png, source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here

January 16, 2025 · Original source

The concept of IQ is fine, but you are personally miscalibrated about what low IQ means because the only very-low-IQ people in your training set had developmental disorders. I think these probably explain 5%, 5%, 40%, and 50% of the effect respectively, and I should have been more careful to emphasize (3), which I think explains 40% of the effect. The particular way I would flesh out 3 would be something like - if you’re illiterate and (somewhat) innumerate, you probably don’t have enough practice with symbols and complex mental operations to do even a “culture fair” IQ test like Raven’s Matrices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your IQ is higher than the Raven’s Matrices says - the person who underperforms on Ravens for this reason will also underperform on a wide variety of other abstract/intellectual/symbolic tasks, and this is part of what IQ means. But it means that Raven’s IQ won’t predict concrete tasks as well as you would expect. Fujimura writes: The other major factor that I think should be reassuring about Lynn's estimates (and other cross-national IQ estimates) is that when you look at "non-problematic" sources that seem like proxies for IQ (e.g. World Bank data, educational performance), you see the same pattern as Lynn and others' IQ data. It's easy for people to quibble about each and every IQ measure (and so people do), but that we see the same pattern of results using otherwise uncontroversial data sources should be reassuring. Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake. This kind of stuff is why I think simple failures of data collection and analysis are unlikely to explain more than 5% of the gap with our common sense. There’s definitely something weird about these numbers, but it’s got to be more complicated than just “racist people screwed up the test”. But continuing on this subject - if IQ has two components, why would World Bank education data and GDP track the abstract/symbolic component of IQ, rather than the practical component of IQ? Or, rather, it’s obvious why this would happen in education. But why would GDP track abstract/symbolic rather than practical? One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP. Harzerkatze writes: [Your claim that blacks everywhere should have the same genes] is far from true. While "white" may be a descriptor for a group of somewhat similar genetic backgrounds, having common ancestors not too far in the past, "black" is different, grouping populations of similar skin color, but common ancestors diverging way further back in time. Yeah, I didn’t want to get into all of this on the post, but I agree the way I phrased it was misleading. Lynn and other national IQ estimates find very low IQs for all sub-Saharan African countries - I mentioned Malawi at 60 in the post, but Nigeria, on the other side of Africa, is 69. Whatever is going on there is a pan-African problem, such that I don’t think differences between African groups are very relevant. US blacks are mostly descended from people in west Africa, eg Nigeria. Some people also brought up that US blacks have significant white admixture. This is true but it’s still not enough to be relevant to this discussion. If we assumed everything was genetic and US blacks with their ~20% white admixture had genetic IQ of 85, we would still expect African blacks to have IQ in the low 80s. However you parse it, there’s got to be some kind of health/education/environment effect going on there. Africa is extremely genetically diverse, but I think most of the countries measured in the paper, including Malawi, are some variety of Niger-Congo speakers, who I don’t think are that much more diverse than white people or anyone else. The really interesting African ethnicities, like the Khoi-San, don’t show up as much at a national level. Andrew Clough writes: Speaking of charity and IQ, the lowest of low hanging fruit is putting iodine in salt. You can donate to the Global Iodine Network like I do for the long term benefit of poorer countries without worrying you're just delaying Malthus's reemergence. Givewell calls Salt Iodization "slightly below the range of cost-effectiveness of the opportunities that we expect to direct marginal donations to" which in the grand scheme of things is quite good. Yeah, salt iodization is great. I had always heard of iodine related problems being concentrated in central Asia and especially Afghanistan, but looking at the map… (source) … sub-Saharan Africa is also a hot spot. I wonder what’s wrong in Cuba - this is exactly the sort of easily gameable metric I would usually expect them to be good at, or at least carefully faking. If you’re interested, you can donate to Iodine Global Network here. Bob Jacobs writes: > His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like: Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist. No contesting any of this. MM writes: I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap. Calvin writes: I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap. I was concerned to hear this - I have a little experience with the intellectually disabled, but it didn’t involve knowing people’s exact IQ, so I’m not very well-calibrated here. Looking for more information, I found https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, which purports to describe the characteristics of very low IQ people, mostly in the context of criminal justice (where lawyers often try to use a client’s low IQ as a mitigating factor - ie maybe he didn’t truly understand that crime is wrong). The report says things like: Although all persons with mental retardation have significantly impaired mental development, their intellectual level can vary considerably. An estimated 89 percent of all people with retardation have I.Q.s in the 51-70 range. An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade […] Although mental retardation of any degree has profound implications for a person's cognitive and social development, it is a condition which in many cases is not readily apparent. While some of the mentally retarded, such as those whose retardation is caused by Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, have characteristically distinctive facial features, most cannot be identified by their physical appearance alone. Unless their cognitive impairment is unusually severe (e.g. an I.Q. below 40), persons with mental retardation may be thought of as "slow" but the full extent of their impairment is often not readily appreciated, particularly by people who have limited contact with or knowledge of them, including police, prosecutors, judges, and other participants in the criminal justice system. Many capital offenders with mental retardation did not have their condition diagnosed until trial or during post-conviction proceedings. And gave some examples (slightly out of order for this list): Oliver Cruz, who was executed in Texas on August 9, 2000, had an I.Q. that was measured variously at 64 and 76. Cruz nonetheless insisted to reporters that, although he was perhaps "slow in reading, slow in learning," he was not mentally retarded. Mitigation specialist Scharlette Holdman recalled a client who so successfully hid his retardation from his attorneys that he allowed them to sign him up for college-level calculus classes, which he could not comprehend. He had gone through much of his schooling allowing his younger sister to complete his homework for him. When he was given papers to read in connection to his case, he would carefully stare at them. If he was asked a substantive question, he usually responded, "I don't recall." Only when experts in retardation evaluated him and investigators reviewed his school records and spoke to his family did lawyers discover he had mental retardation and had been considered "slow" since his early childhood. Another capital defendant "hid his mental retardation for most of his life by working at a very repetitive job as a switcher on the railroad. He lied about finishing high school. He was actually in special education classes and did not finish the sixth grade. He was drafted into the army and discharged because of his mental retardation. He lied about his service record. He often made things up so that people would not suspect mental retardation." Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York' These people are obviously not going to win Nobels anytime soon. But even the guy with IQ 35 - 45 was still talking to people. I think this supports the thesis that intellectually disabled people without specific syndromes can seem pretty normal most of the time. (though keep in mind that anything from the court system should be treated with a grain of salt - defense attorneys have an incentive to exaggerate the intellectual disability of their clients in the hopes that it gets them a lighter sentence) Lyman Stone writes: Emil's post isn't correct, however. We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan. Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers. Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally. Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy. See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665 We know that people with extremely low IQs in the Flynn sense must be capable of subsistence agriculture, because pre-Flynn Effect, most of the West had extremely low IQs, and they were all doing subsistence agriculture. How is this possible? Responding to Lyman’s comment, I wrote: I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of. You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones. For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction. I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Maybe one way to look at it is to go back to the claim from the justice system document above, saying that people with IQ in the 60s are the mental equivalent of third-graders. The third-graders I know are very into Pokemon, and have all sorts of opinions on how if you add X bonus to a Y strength fire-type Pokemon and then play Z combo, it will [commence six weeks of droning on about different Pokemon cards]. Is this the sort of math/reasoning/strategizing that we don’t expect someone with IQ 60 to be able to do? Does the fact that third-graders can do it mean that we’re miscalibrated? I’m not sure. The part of Lyman’s comment that gives me the most pause is his observation that, if the mean IQ is 60, a decent fraction of people must be 45, and a non-negligible portion 30. At this point, even third-grader comparisons don’t save us. I guess this is where I bring in the claim that IQ breaks down as a guide to practical living skills below some point. You can see several more layers of response between me and Lyman here, but I was especially grateful for him teaching me two things I didn’t already know: First, he corrected my misconception about Reich on ancient European cognitive evolution. Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were “2-3 standard deviations” below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90 (they probably also had lower IQ for environmental reasons).,

Maybe I should have had a stronger opinion on whether Lynn’s exact studies were correct? Certainly lots of commenters had strong opinions that they weren’t. I had hoped that linking the Aporia article would be a sufficient pointer to my opinion that, while Lynn’s work was a first effort and far from perfect, the general thrust (including surprisingly low IQs in sub-Saharan African countries) has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias. Maybe it would have been less controversial if I had just asked why sub-Saharan Africa has surprisingly low school test scores, but then nobody would have a good sense of what school test scores were normal vs. surprising and nobody would have cared.

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

Inline links: source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here

San Francisco Bay Area9 mentions across 9 issues

San Francisco Bay Area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between January 29, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I live in the San Francisco Bay Area"; "it's centered in the San Francisco Bay Area"; "here’s mobility data from the San Francisco Bay Area". It most often appears alongside California, China, New York Times.

Article page: San Francisco Bay Area
Mention count: 9
Issue count: 9
First seen: January 29, 2021
Last seen: January 16, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Weyl On Technocracy January 29, 2021
Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure April 01, 2021
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know July 07, 2021
Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022
Links For December 2022 December 28, 2022
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying December 29, 2022
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids May 15, 2025
The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

California 4 shared issues
China 4 shared issues
New York Times 4 shared issues
Trump 4 shared issues
United States 4 shared issues

Source context

Contra Weyl On Technocracy

January 29, 2021 · Original source

3. Housing: I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where digging up Robert Moses' corpse and appointing it Perpetual Planning Czar would be way better than what we have now. It turns out when you carefully seek democratic feedback on planning decisions, the feedback is usually "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything", nothing ever gets built, and your city ends up in a terrible housing crisis with lots of people being broke, homeless, and miserable. One of the most exciting plans to solve the NIMBY crisis is SB50, a bill that ennumerates mechanical restrictions on how all zoning decisions have to go, and deliberately blocks affected neighbors from having any say in the process.

Inline links: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, SB50

Ambidexterity And Cognitive Closure

April 01, 2021 · Original source

The SSC survey population comes from all over the world, but it's centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area, then maybe flirting with forbidden ideas means you end up more likely to support Donald Trump, rather than less (cf. the cellular automaton theory of fashion). This isn't to say that low-need-for-cognitive-closure necessarily turns Californians right-wing. It could also turn them Marxist (the most ambidextrous political position on the survey). It just means they're more likely to end up somewhere far away from the local norm.

Inline links: the cellular automaton theory of fashion

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

July 07, 2021 · Original source

There’s a lot of evidence that voluntary behavior changes were pretty important in some places. For example, here’s mobility data from the San Francisco Bay Area:

Here in the Bay Area, some parents tried to take their kids out of public school in early March, before the official lockdowns. The schools got angry, threatened to prosecute the parents under truancy laws, and said kids who missed school due to COVID fears wouldn’t be allowed to make up the work later and might fail their classes. Then later on, the government closed all schools and people stopped having to worry about this.

Inline links: percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832

June 23, 2022 · Original source

For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.

San Fransicko is subtitled “Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents:

The San Francisco districts with the highest (left) and lowest (right) homelessness rates. I correlated homelessness rate and population-adjusted density in the same cities I looked at above, but it didn’t add much predictive value to housing prices. Maybe this is restriction of range (all big cities are dense enough to have homelessness, compared to suburbs), or maybe the key feature is relative rather than absolute density (ie the homeless will go to the densest place nearby). Conclusion: No social phenomenon is ever caused by just one thing, but San Francisco’s homelessness rate is around where a housing-cost-based model would predict. San Fransicko briefly touches on this, but overall tries to de-emphasize it in favor of talking about drugs and mental illness. Critiques of patterns of emphasis are necessarily subjective, but the book’s pattern feels misleading to me. Claim 2: Standard Accounts Underemphasize The Role Of Drugs And Mental Illness In Homelessness Having argued homelessness isn’t just about poverty, the book goes on to say we’re neglecting the central role of mental illness and substance abuse: Over the last decades there were many visible signs that homelessness was about much more than poverty and housing. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of calls made to San Francisco’s 311 line complaining of used hypodermic needles on sidewalks, in parks, and elsewhere rose from 224 to 6,275. In 2018, footage of dozens of people slumped over in an entrance to a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, many with needles in their arm, went viral. “We call it the heroin freeze,” said one local. “They can stay that way for hours.” Said another, “It’s like the land of the living dead.” For decades researchers have documented much higher levels of mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless than in the rest of the population. It’s true that just 8 and 18 percent of homeless people point to mental illness and substance abuse, respectively, as the primary cause of their homelessness, but researchers have long understood that such self-reports are unreliable due to the socially undesirable nature of substance abuse, and the lack of insight that often accompanies mental illness. Using other methods, San Francisco’s Health Department in 2019 estimated that 4,000 of the city’s 8,035 homeless, sheltered and unsheltered, are both mentally ill and suffering from substance abuse. Of those 4,000, about 1,600 frequently used emergency psychiatric services. Shellenberger’s source for 4000 homeless people having these issues is this SF Chronicle article, which seems to based off of this report. The report does estimate 4000 homeless people with mental illness and substance abuse, but it uses a yearly rather than point estimate of homelessness, and finds 18,000 rather than 8,000 people. That means it only finds a 22% rate of these problems, not a 50% rate. Thanks to commenter Sean for hunting down this report and helping explain this. I looked for other statistics to provide context on this number. This 2013 San Francisco Homeless Count found that 29% admitted chronic depression, 15% PTSD, and 22% some other mental illness. About 30% admitted to a substance use disorder, although as far as I can tell this is just the number who admitted it was a disorder, so maybe more used drugs. This article by the Los Angeles Times describes an LA study finding that 25% of homeless people had mental health issues and 14% had drug issues. The Times re-analyzes it in a way that ups the numbers to 34% and 46%, respectively. But they don’t say exactly what choices they made differently, and the few they do give don’t really inspire confidence. Although in some cases they count questions clearly about mental illness which the official definition inexplicably refused to count, in others they decide to count anyone who has ever had mental illness, reversing a government decision to require the mental illness to be long-term (does this mean that if I lost my house tomorrow, the LA Times use me as an example of a “mentally ill homeless person” because I saw a psychiatrist for OCD when I was a kid?) Studies like these don’t show causation. Sure, mental illness can make people homeless. But homelessness can also cause mental illness. One SF study found psych diagnoses among the homeless to be evenly divided among depression, PTSD, and everything else. Homelessness is a depressing and traumatic environment. Just because someone who’s been on the streets for a year has depression or trauma, doesn’t mean that we should attribute their homelessness to mental illness. This study by the California Policy Lab does better. It asks what factors played a role in homeless people losing their homes, and finds that 50% of unsheltered and 17% of sheltered homeless point to mental illness (given SF’s balance, that suggests 37% of SF homeless would point to that problem). But I can’t help but notice that when you add up the percent of people who lost their homes due to physical illness, psych illness, and drug use, it totals 147%. Based on numbers from other studies, it looks like if you added in job loss, eviction, etc, the numbers would total well above 400%. This makes me think people are saying “yes” if the factor played even a minor role in their eventual homelessness, and this shouldn’t be treated as 37% of homeless having mental health issues being their main problem. The same study finds that about 66% of the homeless “have” some mental health problem, but this time they don’t tell us what question they asked or what criteria they use. What about psychosis in particular? This meta-analysis claims that in developed countries (a category to which San Francisco still nominally belongs) about 19% of homeless people qualify for diagnosis with a psychotic disorder, including 9% with schizophrenia in particular. Not all people with psychotic disorders are completely crazy all the time, and some very much are not, but this is at least a specific condition with real criteria. Conclusion: Overall, I’m disappointed in most of the published research on this question, which seems more interested in producing glossy brochures about funding disparities than in informing anybody what any of their numbers mean. But putting it all together and squinting really hard, I think we can tell a story where 10-20% of the homeless are seriously psychotic, and another 20-30% have contributing mental health conditions including depression, PTSD, and others. Somewhere between 25% and 50% of the homeless have substance abuse problems, and this probably mostly overlaps with the 25% - 50% who have psych diagnoses. I think San Fransicko gets this mostly right. Claim 3: “Housing First” Isn’t As Great As People Think, And Might Be Harmful The National Myth About Homelessness is that The Bad People are refusing to give people houses until they’ve “proven” they “deserve” them, thus perpetuating homelessness when they inevitably fail to qualify. The Good People have united under an exciting new banner called “Housing First” to push the revolutionary idea that people should get houses regardless of whether they conform to normal standards of respectability or not. Wherever this is adopted, homelessness rates fall, and the formerly homeless becoming healthier, safer, and more likely to re-integrate into society. Best of all, the program pays for itself in decreased health care and policing costs. The only impediment to solving homelessness everywhere is the Bad People who still insist on not housing the homeless until they’ve “earned” it. In real life, everyone important has been united under Housing First since the Bush administration made it national policy fifteen years ago, and most of the cities with spiraling homelessness crises have been pursuing Housing First policies for decades (eg San Francisco has been trying Housing First since the 1990s). The Obama and Trump administrations both set funding policies that penalized any non-Housing-First welfare programs. Still, everyone is sure that the reason there are still homeless people must be that some Housing First opponent still exists somewhere, ruining everything with their purity-testing ways. But actually these people have already been relegated to the conservative think tanks where moribund ideas go to die. I have looked through a lot of studies and articles to try to see how well Housing First works. I am most sympathetic to the conclusions of Tsai (2020), who basically says that: Homeless people who are given houses are more housed than homeless people who are not given houses. Way, way more housed. You would not believe how strong of an effect giving someone housing has on them being housed. The same is true for other outcome measures like “time spent experiencing homelessness”, “number of days spent in a temporary homeless shelter”, etc. You might think this is obvious, but this is used as the primary outcome in a lot of studies, and “success” on this metric is behind a lot of claims that “studies show Housing First works great!”

Inline links: this SF Chronicle article, this report, 2013 San Francisco Homeless Count, This article, This study, This meta-analysis, some very much are not, made it national policy, since the 1990s, funding policies, Tsai (2020)

Links For December 2022

December 28, 2022 · Original source

40: Sufism Reoriented is a cult part of the diverse and beautiful tapestry of American religious life, best known for inventing the phrase “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and for being supported by The Cheesecake Factory. This article describes their struggle to build a grand Central Temple in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, pitting NIMBYs against religious freedom advocates (h/t Ozy).

Inline links: This article describes their struggle to build a grand Central Temple, Ozy

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

Why is the San Francisco Bay Area always like this? (image source here, they claim it’s a photo but I’m doubtful) For some reason, conspiracy theorists find this concerning, and have been fretting over it for the past hundred years or so. Anyway, this is where some people decided to found a US branch of the Order of St Hubertus. All of this is attested to by the Washington Post article linked above, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sources; as far as I know nobody seriously denies it.

Inline links: here

Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

May 19, 2023 · Original source

… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.

May 15, 2025 · Original source

But it’s not just addiction. What if they wander into the wrong part of the Internet and become incels, or SJWs with seven genders, or sedevacantists? Lots of people get one or another mind virus; why should my kids be immune? Because I’ll give them a happy childhood? I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals (5.93 vs. 6.70 on a ten-point scale), the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level (46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal). Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu? And what about our daughter? What percent of women from intellectually-inclined non-practicing-Jewish families avoid becoming insane woke people? 20%? 10%? Sure, we’ll try to inculcate her into our reasonable liberal culture. But what do you think all those woke teenagers are rebelling against?

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get really into whale puns.

Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants - but I don’t know if they ever met. I wonder what it would have been like if they did. I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny. Scott Adams couldn’t stop frittering his talent and fortune on doomed attempts to be taken seriously. But someday Elon Musk will buy America for $100 trillion, tell the UN that he’s renaming it “the United States of 420-69”, and the assembled ambassadors will be as silent as the grave. Are there psychic gains from trade to be had between two such people?

Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling, seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can see the skull shed.

San Antonio7 mentions across 7 issues

San Antonio is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAN ANTONIO, TX ( RSVP )"; "San Antonio, TX 78215"; "More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw". It most often appears alongside Singapore, Copenhagen, Helsinki.

Article page: San Antonio
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 328 May 06, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been September 19, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Singapore 7 shared issues
Copenhagen 6 shared issues
Helsinki 6 shared issues
Nigeria 6 shared issues
Philadelphia 6 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SAN ANTONIO, TX (RSVP) Contact: Derek Sky, intothestarrynightsky[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 12:30 PM, Saturday, October 9 Location: The Friendly Spot Ice House, 943 S Alamo St, San Antonio, TX 78206 Coordinates: https://w3w.co/enter.flap.novel

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/enter.flap.novel

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 12th, 12:00 PM Location: Commonwealth Coffeehouse & Bakery Jones. 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/

Open Thread 328

May 06, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw. See the meetups post for more info. And note addition of Kaduna, Nigeria.

Inline links: the meetups post

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Commonwealth Coffee and Bakery (Jones St), 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215. Meet in the outdoor enclave abutting the cafe. I should have a sign setup, and I will have nametags. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X Group Link: https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/ Notes: All are welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X

Contact: H. B. Contact Info: Valerolactone[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 13th, 03:00 PM Location: Hermann Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X6PJC6+37 Group Link: https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 20th, 12:00 PM Location: Commonwealth Coffee and Bakery (Jones St), 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215. Meet in the outdoor enclave abutting the cafe. I should have a sign setup, and I will have nametags. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X Group Link: https://lesswrongsa.dry.ai/ Notes: All are welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X6PJC6+37, https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS, https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+9X

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 5th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Contact: Joe Brenton Contact Info: joe[period]brenton[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Sunday, October 19th, 1:00 PM Location: Retrospect Coffee Bar 3709 La Branch St, Houston, TX 77004. We'll be in the back covered patio area with picnic tables. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X6PJPF+4R Group Link: https://discord.gg/Dzm [remove this bit] EPAscpS SAN ANTONIO Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 5th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X6PJPF+4R, https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

September 19, 2025 · Original source

Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!

Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 12th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Contact: Miliana Contact Info: sa111[@]wellesley[.]edu Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 1:00 PM Location: Robin Park, Mcallen Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76R37Q8H+3H Group Link: https://discord.gg/rz2 [remove this bit] WQ7aXjA SAN ANTONIO Contact: James P Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 12th, 1:00 PM Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76R37Q8H+3H, https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Slovakia7 mentions across 7 issues

Slovakia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between January 21, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio"; "allowing small countries to exist and even thrive (citing Slovakia, Macedonia, Korea, and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”)"; "the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia". It most often appears alongside Barcelona, Europe, France.

Article page: Slovakia
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: January 21, 2021
Last seen: March 25, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Still Alive January 21, 2021
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Dictator Book Club: Orban November 04, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

Barcelona 5 shared issues
Europe 5 shared issues
France 5 shared issues
Germany 5 shared issues
India 5 shared issues

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.

Dictator Book Club: Orban

May 21, 2021 · Original source

If you’re a fan of our free-trade world, then you should probably pause to ask some questions about its potential demise. Zeihan notes that nearly all participants in Bretton Woods have suspended military activity (other than in connection with American efforts), allowing small countries to exist and even thrive (citing Slovakia, Macedonia, Korea, and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”), allowing former rivals to focus on development (citing the EU and its expansion into Southern and Central Europe, and Russian firms being able to borrow at favorable rates despite a history of sovereign defaults and fraud), and leading to mass industrialization. In short, “The last seventy years have been incredible.”

November 04, 2021 · Original source

But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.

He granted the franchise to Hungarians living abroad. Remember, the Treaty of Trianon took 2/3 of Hungarian territory and gave it to neighboring countries (especially Slovakia and Romania). Lots of ethnic Hungarians still live on that land; Orban gave them all voting rights. Their situation made them natural irredentists and nationalists, plus Orban was the only person who thought it was reasonable to let them vote, so in all subsequent elections they have voted 95%+ for Fidesz. Or something. All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud.

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.

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

August 25, 2023 · Original source

BELGRADE, SERBIA Contact: Dušan Contact Info: tatiana[dot]n[dot]skuratova[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, September 24th, 3:00 PM Location: Bar Green House, Dr. Dragoslava Popovica 24, Belgrade Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36 Group Link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/ Notable Guests: Dušan from Serbia Notes: Please RSVP by email to Tatiana on the email above! The meet-up is the monthly meet-up of EA/LW/ACX crowd, usually we discuss some two topics. For example in August we are doing "Life Extension" and "Healthy Relationships". Slovakia BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 1st, 3:00 PM Location: Foxford, Martinus, Obchodná 516/26, 811 06 Bratislava, Slovakia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36, https://www.linkedin.com/company/effective-altruism-serbia/, https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF, https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 1st, 3:00 PM Location: Foxford, Martinus, Obchodná 516/26, 811 06 Bratislava, Slovakia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF, https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Tanja Trninic Contact Info: tanja[period]trninic[a t]efektivnialtruizam[period]com Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM Location: vegANGELov vegan restaurant Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2VG Group Link: https://t.me/Trlo [remove this part] mpi Notes: Please email me if you’d like to participate and have any dietary restrictions. One dish and a drink is covered by EA funds and ACX Meetups. Slovakia BRATISLAVA Contact: Bratislava Slovakia Contact Info: matej[dot]futures[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 24, 07:00 PM Location: teabar.sk in Omen House Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44XC+WQ

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2VG, https://plus.codes/8FWV44XC+WQ

Contact: Bratislava Slovakia Contact Info: matej[dot]futures[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 24, 07:00 PM Location: teabar.sk in Omen House Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44XC+WQ

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWV44XC+WQ

SOFIA7 mentions across 7 issues

SOFIA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 10, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SOFIA, BULGARIA"; "SOFIA"; "the first entry in Europe is Sofia, Bulgaria". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Atlanta.

Article page: SOFIA
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

ACX 7 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 7 shared issues
Atlanta 7 shared issues
Ben 7 shared issues
Budapest 7 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia (sofia.acx.meetup@gmail.com) Date: May 15 Time: 4:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+J9 Location: Borisova garden, "Сенчестата градинка в Борисовата", located in the southern part of Borisova Garden, close to the tennis courts Notes: You can RSVP on LessWrong. We're gathering in the Shadе garden. It is a bit difficult to locate, so if you can't find it via the coordinates or google maps, please send me an email and I'll happily collect you from whatever part of Borisova Garden is convenient for you. Group info: Sofia has monthly meetups; contact Anastasia to learn more

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+J9, on LessWrong

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.

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Anastasia Contact Info: sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 23rd, 04:00 PM Location: Shades Garden (in Borisova Garden) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+J9 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4R5BHXhBW7puyXTvg/sofia-acx-spring-2023-schelling-meetup-mini-meetups

Inline links: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4R5BHXhBW7puyXTvg/sofia-acx-spring-2023-schelling-meetup-mini-meetups

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Daniel Bensen Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 17th, 4:00 PM Location: The Shade Garden (in Borisova Gradina Park) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5P958+VP Notes: Everyone is welcome. Feel free to bring kids and dogs. Looking forward to seeing you.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GJ5P958+VP

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SOFIA Contact: Dan Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 21st, 5:00 PM Location: The Mr. Pizza on Vasil Levski (Sofia Center, Vasil Levski Blvd 53, 1142 Sofia) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FM

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FM

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then by city. For instance, the first entry in Europe is Sofia, Bulgaria, and the first entry for Germany is Aachen. Each region and country has its own header. The USA is the exception where it is additionally sorted by state, with states having their own subheaders. Hopefully this is clear. If you’re looking at this on the web, you can also use your browser search tool (ctrl+f or command+f) and type your city.

Contact: Hiep Contact Info: hiepbq14408[at]gm ail[ dot]co m Time: Sunday, September 15th, 09:30 AM Location: Trung Nguyen Legend Coffee at 603 Tran Hung Dao St. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P28QM4P+H5 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/nSoF5ntooah7f4qzj Europe Bulgaria SOFIA, BULGARIA Contact: Daniel Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at ]g mail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 29th, 04:00 PM Location: Borisova Gradina, Sofia, Bulgaria Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+P4 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HGaSdqwqG4SogWfTi

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7P28QM4P+H5, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/nSoF5ntooah7f4qzj, https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+P4, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HGaSdqwqG4SogWfTi

Contact: Daniel Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at ]g mail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 29th, 04:00 PM Location: Borisova Gradina, Sofia, Bulgaria Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+P4 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HGaSdqwqG4SogWfTi

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8GW+P4, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HGaSdqwqG4SogWfTi

Highlights From The Comments On March Links

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: sebastianworms[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 2:00 PM Location: Parc Cinquantenaire / Guinguette Maurice if weather sucks Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F26R9RP+5F Bulgaria SOFIA Contact: Daniel Bensen Contact Info: bensen[.]daniel[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 5:00 PM Location: Sofia Center, Vasil Levski Blvd 53, Sofia, Bulgaria Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FJ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-bensen

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F26R9RP+5F, https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-bensen

Contact: Daniel Bensen Contact Info: bensen[.]daniel[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 5:00 PM Location: Sofia Center, Vasil Levski Blvd 53, Sofia, Bulgaria Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FJ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-bensen

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-bensen

South Carolina7 mentions across 7 issues

South Carolina is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between March 04, 2021 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "badly in South Carolina in 2016"; "a majority in South Carolina"; "a reservation in South Carolina". It most often appears alongside Substack, China, India.

Article page: South Carolina
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: March 04, 2021
Last seen: June 27, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On March Links March 04, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022
22 August 01, 2022
Open Thread 292 September 04, 2023
24 February 20, 2024
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

Substack 4 shared issues
China 3 shared issues
India 3 shared issues
Scott 3 shared issues
Ukraine 3 shared issues

Source context

March 04, 2021 · Original source

- Why New Bernie did so much better in Nevada in 2020 (with a much more diverse base). The article claims that caucuses "place a premium on ground-level organizing, where Sanders excelled." But this is not a distinction since Nevada was also a caucus in 2016 and the failures in 2020 South Carolina are being alleged at that same level, not that Bernie ran bad television ads or failed to show up.

- Why Classic Bernie did almost as badly in South Carolina in 2016. He got 26% of the vote there in 2016 and 20% in 2020. This is not a very dramatic difference considering the first contest was one-on-one against Hillary and it can be parsimoniously explained by an "anti-Hillary but not especially leftist" cohort.

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

April 06, 2022 · Original source

For one, there was a huge Black population - a majority in South Carolina, and at least a large minority elsewhere - who didn't get to vote, and would presumably have opposed secession.

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%

Open Thread 292

September 04, 2023 · Original source

1: There’s a scam where an account pretending to be me is replying to comments here and then immediately deleting the replies; people are getting “replied to your comment” emails that suggest calling a number in South Carolina. I guarantee I will never respond to your comments urging you to call a phone number in South Carolina. I’ve told Substack about the problem and they say they’ve taken care of it - but if it keeps happening, let me know.

February 20, 2024 · Original source

How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000) This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down). So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader. Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen. And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information. FutureSearch is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email hello@futuresearch.ai. Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications. One of them is a prediction market. He writes: Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") back in 2014, and played around with them extensively in the last election as well as more recently. But so far prediction markets have not taken off too much in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc. One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in Polymarket or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet tens of billions on sports, so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or LK99 that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations have failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need something new to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs. AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions in general may be in the millions. Note that potentially, you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to Augur or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides. This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions: Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?

Inline links: FutureSearch, hello@futuresearch.ai, The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications, back in 2014, played around with them extensively, more recently, Polymarket, tens of billions on sports, LK99, Augur

Your Review: Alpha School

June 18, 2025 · Original source

We then responded to home investigation requests in 2022 for two residents: a) one hospitalized with COVID-19 and later diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease (a type of pneumonia and leading cause of waterborne disease and deaths in the US) in Harrisonburg, VA, and b) another with Acanthamoeba keratitis (a rare eye infection) in a South Carolina town. Specifically, we packed and shipped sampling kits, probes, and instruction booklets/videos, and remotely assisted residents with measuring relevant water quality parameters, taking accurate water and biofilm swab samples, and shipping those back to our laboratory. Our team used quantitative and digital droplet PCR (qPCR/ddPCR) to test for Legionella pneumophila and Acanthamoeba bacteria. We did not find these pathogens at meaningful levels, although in at least the Harrisonburg case, the resident had followed CDC Legionella prevention guidance after a prior positive Legionella detection by increasing their water heater temperature, which could have contributed to successful remediation. The results were published in the scientific journal ACS ES&T Water. ACX funding provided partial support for the lead PhD student, supplies, analysis, and shipping costs.

Inline links: published in the scientific journal ACS ES&T Water

June 27, 2025 · Original source

NextGen Academy (Austin) —Perhaps the most radical experiment. Afternoons are spent training in competitive esports & game design. Each new campus launched with <10 students, two or more local guides, and the same two‑hour core. Simultaneously Alpha opened a Miami elementary campus, promoted the idea that cities could launch “micro schools” if they had enough local demand (unless you count Miami, none actually launched) and piloted a beta-test of a Home‑School version of the platform. Early homeschool data showed that kids were using it for ~2 hours/day as planned, but only seeing a 1x learning growth — still a fine result for only doing 2-hours of academics per day, but a long way from what Alpha was delivering on their own campuses, so the program has stayed in beta. Jan 2025 | Charter & Licence Play Alpha now had a parent company, “2-hour Learning”, which sat above all of the schools, the home school product, and the platform itself (that they now offer to license out to third parties). The parent company filed under “Unbound Academy” to launch charter schools in Arizona and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania school was rejected, but the Arizona school will launch in fall 2025. There are more applications pending in at least Utah, Arkansa, North Carolina, South Carolina (and likely more). While the PR spin around these schools is “AI-driven, no teachers” in practice they use 20:1 teacher guide:student ratios (vs the 5:1 ratio at the Alpha private schools) Generally states subsidize charter schools in the neighborhood of $10,000 per student – which is a lot lower than what Alpha charges. They should be able to make those economics work by using fewer, less expensive teachers, not having an expensive campus (or no campus at all for the online schools), skimming on the extras (no trips to Poland), avoiding teaching the youngest kids (Arizona is 4th-8th grade), and being willing to accept smaller or even negligible margin on their learning platform. The goal of these schools does not seem to be making money or profit – at least not right away. The goal seems to be rapidly expanding the program to have more influence, and to see if they can make it work with “non-selected kids at a low price point”. Fall 2025 and Beyond | The Future The Alpha website claims the following locations are launching in Fall 2025: Houston, TX

Inline links: NextGen Academy, 2-hour Learning, locations

Soviet7 mentions across 7 issues

Soviet is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between January 29, 2021 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Soviet farming"; "even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass"; "Soviet soldiers would - I can’t believe I’m writing this - take it to keep warm". It most often appears alongside Europe, Twitter, Continental philosophy.

Article page: Soviet
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: January 29, 2021
Last seen: October 24, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Weyl On Technocracy January 29, 2021
Book Review: The Cult Of Smart February 18, 2021
Shilling For Big Mitochondria March 02, 2021
Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning June 10, 2023
Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning November 17, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima October 24, 2025

Europe 3 shared issues
Twitter 3 shared issues
Continental philosophy 2 shared issues
Donald Trump 2 shared issues
Eliezer Yudkowsky 2 shared issues

Source context

Contra Weyl On Technocracy

January 29, 2021 · Original source

I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:

Inline links: my review

But if you accept that "technocracy" describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?

Did you notice none of Weyl's examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn't "meritocratically chosen". And Oscar Niemeyer didn't construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart

February 18, 2021 · Original source

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

Inline links: match or outperform, has always scored near the bottom of international rankings

Shilling For Big Mitochondria

March 02, 2021 · Original source

So after 1938, US dieters stopped using 2,4-dinitrophenol. It next shows up in history books on the Eastern Front of World War 2, where Soviet soldiers would - I can’t believe I’m writing this - take it to keep warm. There’s something quintessentially Russian about this, like a cross between the Platonic essences of AK-47s and Krokodil. Still, World War 2 ended and poor DNP vanished from the history books again.

Inline links: take it to keep warm

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

June 10, 2023 · Original source

I see Charon and Weinert’s story, the Guillaume du Vintrais’ story, as a positive validation of Frankl’s theories. And yes, we may remember that “no man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny”, and indeed, their destiny was unique and poetic. But the Soviet Union gave us so much “experimental” material to base on, that there are bound to be similarities between theirs and thousands of others.

The real Guillaume du Vintrais was born in 1943 in a Soviet Gulag. He was conjured up by two people, Yakov Charon and Yuri Weinert. They met in a forced labor camp with an ironic name “Free”, where they were spending ten years each for “counter-revolutionary activity”, a term as loose as it sounds. Charon studied in the Berlin Conservatory, worked as a sound technician in the soviet film industry, spoke perfect German. Weinert played piano since he was a kid, wrote poetry, worked as a translator from French. In 1937 both of them were arrested and sent to the “Free” labor camp. They were the same age, they had the same interests. Naturally, they became friends.

The first “edition” of the “Wicked Songs”, containing forty sonnets, was hand-written by Yuri on the thinnest tracing paper in five copies and sent to their friends and relatives. This type of “package” by itself could be a reason for an arrest; luckily some of their contacts were brave and decent people. They distributed the sonnets through a “pigeon network”, in secret. One of the people who read them this way was young Stella Kopytnaya. Some years later, after meeting him in person, she married Yakov Charon. They named their first child Yuri. In 1954 Yakov was “rehabilitated”, a soviet judicial term meaning that the state made a mistake ever arresting him in the first place. He died in 1972 from tuberculosis that he got in the camp. (On the two side-by-side photos he is on the right)

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

September 13, 2023 · Original source

How does he know so much? Partly through reading; he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of. But also:

November 17, 2023 · Original source

Girard’s starting point is the similarity between Bible stories and pagan myths. You’ve heard about this before - dying-and-resurrecting gods, that sort of thing. You might expect Girard, a good Catholic, to reject these similarities. He doesn’t. He says they’re real and important. Pagan myths resemble the Bible because they’re both describing the same psychosocial process. The myths are distorted propaganda supporting the process, and the Bible is a clear-eyed description of the process which reveals it to be evil. Just as worshipful Soviet hagiographies of Stalin and sober historical analyses of Stalin will have many similarities (since they’re both describing Stalin), so there will be unavoidable resonances between myth and the Bible.

Highlights From The Comments On Fatima

October 24, 2025 · Original source

While it was still unclear how the leading clerics or Ayatollah Khomeini himself would react to this event, it was not only being celebrated by local clerics in thousands of mosques, but also secularists and communist activists, who were keen to confirm the Ayatollah’s appearance in the moon. As a matter of fact, even the Soviet-sponsored journal of the communist Tūdeh-Party “Navīd” wrote: “Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.”

St. Petersburg7 mentions across 7 issues

St. Petersburg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between November 13, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "like a deep commitment to literal St. Petersburg"; "1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities"; "ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more". It most often appears alongside Hong Kong, ACX, Europe.

Article page: St. Petersburg
Mention count: 7
Issue count: 7
First seen: November 13, 2022
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 250 November 13, 2022
Dictator Book Club: Putin August 03, 2023
Open Thread 324 April 08, 2024
Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa June 21, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Hong Kong 5 shared issues
ACX 4 shared issues
Europe 4 shared issues
France 4 shared issues
Haifa 4 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 250

November 13, 2022 · Original source

6: Some other people are asking whether this happened because utilitarians should have infinite appetite for risk, eg the St. Petersburg paradox. I think a first good answer would be something like “you shouldn’t even consider this question unless you are following the deontological rules and avoiding unethical externalities, which seems really hard to do as the amount that you’re risking gets higher”. But two specific points beyond that.

Inline links: infinite appetite for risk, St. Petersburg paradox

Second, if you St. Petersburg yourself a bunch of times and lose everything, it’s going to be really hard to pat yourself on the back for a job counterfactually well done and walk away. More likely you’re going to panic and start grasping for unethical schemes that let you escape doom. So real-world St. Petersburg isn’t “50% chance of doubling your money, 50% chance of zero”, it’s “50% chance of doubling your money, 50% chance of getting put in a psychologically toxic situation where you’ll face almost irresistible pressure to do crazy things that will have vast negative impact.” And the only really effective way to resist temptation is to avoid getting in situations where you’re really tempted to do bad things. I wouldn’t have thought about it this way before recent events, but now that they’ve happened it seems obviously true. This is what Eliezer means by “running on corrupted hardware” - either you follow the deontological rules without knowing exactly why they apply in your particular case, or you try doing the seemingly-reasonable act-utilitarian thing and get to learn why it was wrong after you’ve destroyed everything.

Still, I’m reluctant to center the St. Petersburg narrative here. Hundreds of other crypto projects have proven fraudulent and gone bust without us needed to appeal to exotic branches of philosophy. SBF is a semi-mythical figure. It would feel appropriate if his downfall was for properly mythical reasons, like a deep commitment to literal St. Petersburg. But I think in the end it will probably have at least as much to do with the normal human vices that we all have to struggle against.

Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services

Open Thread 324

April 08, 2024 · Original source

2: ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more. See the Meetups List for details.

Inline links: See the Meetups List for details

Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa

June 21, 2024 · Original source

Once back in Japan, Fukuzawa publishes his first book: a Japanese-English dictionary. Two years later, he is invited to join Japan’s first embassy to Europe as an interpreter. He purchases stacks of books in London, marvels at the size of the Hotel du Louvre (“the large party of our Japanese envoys was lost in it”), and faints while watching surgery performed in a St. Petersburg hospital.

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Metaculus Christian Contact Info: christian[a t]metaculus[period]com Time: Wednesday, April 02nd, 09:00 PM Location: https://www.oldhickorywhiskeybar.com/ 123 S. Palafox Place, Pensacola, FL 32502 I'll wear a Metaculus hoodie Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X Notes: RSVP. Message if you want to come, because if I don't get any messages, I won't be there. ST. PETERSBURG Contact: Nathaniel B. Contact Info: nathanieltb2[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 1:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Vinoy Park, at or near the circular path surrounding the Truth Sculpture at the southern end of the park. I'll have a sign that says "ACX." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+V89 Notes: Please feel free to attend even if you're anxious, and regardless of how often you read the blog. Folks from Tampa and surrounding cities are also welcome to attend!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X, https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+V89

August 29, 2025 · Original source

(See Coral Gables.) ST. PETERSBURG Contact: Nathaniel B. Contact Info: nathanieltb2[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 11th, 4:00 PM Location: We'll meet at Vinoy Park, at or near the circular path surrounding the Truth Sculpture at the southern end of the park. I'll have a sign that says "ACX." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+X78 Notes: Please feel free to attend even if you're anxious, and regardless of how often you read the blog. Folks from Tampa and surrounding cities are also welcome to attend!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+X78

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: JB Contact Info: itslabradordali[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 16th, 4:30 PM Location: The Muddy Root (12082 Collegiate Way, Orlando, FL 32817) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76WWHQWQ+JJC Group Link: https://discord.gg/R2RrvVCARe (Orlando Server) https://discord.gg/jHBfgzMsFP (Miami Server, General FL channels exist) Notes: RSVP not required but would be helpful. I’ll make it easy to spot. If interested but the day/time doesn’t work I’d encourage reaching out. ST. PETERSBURG Contact: Nathaniel B. Contact Info: nathanieltb2[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: We’ll meet at Vinoy Park, at or near the circular path surrounding the Truth Sculpture at the southern end of the park. I’ll have a sign that says “ACX.” Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+X78 Notes: Please feel free to attend regardless of how often you read the blog. Folks from Tampa and surrounding cities are also welcome to join!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76WWHQWQ+JJC, https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+X78

SANTIAGO6 mentions across 6 issues

SANTIAGO is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 30, 2024 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SANTIAGO"; "SANTIAGO, CHILE"; "Chile SANTIAGO Time: Saturday, April 19th, 05:00 PM". It most often appears alongside Baltimore, Berkeley, Boston.

Article page: SANTIAGO
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 398 September 08, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Baltimore 6 shared issues
Berkeley 6 shared issues
Boston 6 shared issues
DUBLIN 6 shared issues
Haifa 6 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SANTIAGO Contact: Iñaki Contact Info: inaki[dot]escarate[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 13th, 11:30 AM Location: Parque Bicentenario, next to the Vitacura municipality, next to the stairs and fountain. We'll have a sign that says "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+RF Notes: Both English and Spanish speakers are welcome. Anyone can come, family and pets welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+RF

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Bruno Vieira Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:00 PM Location: INOVA USP - 20/09/2024 - 18:00. Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9x [ignore this part] MXUpFjJai4u0hlB Notes: Don't bring kids or dogs, please. I'm still working out dinner, join the group chat so we can properly represent you with our decisions. RSVPs required at https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686 Chile SANTIAGO, CHILE Contact: Iñaki Contact Info: inaki[dot]escarate[a t]gmail[do t]com Time: Saturday, September 28th, 11:30 AM Location: Parque Bicentenario, next to the Vitacura municipality, next to the stairs and fountain. We'll have a sign that says "ACX" Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8 Notes: English and Spanish speakers welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686, https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Bruno V Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 25, 06:30 PM Location: Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 We'll be inside the building, so please regis Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSM [remove this bit] t9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB Additional Notes: This is the event registration link: https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436 Also, send your name and CPF to my email (vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com) in order to get in. Chile SANTIAGO Contact: Xenofilo Contact Info: xenofiloACX[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 05:00 PM Location: Parque Bicentenario, al lado de municipalidad de Vitacura. Llevo un cartel con " ACX meetup ". :) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8 Notes: Porfavor siéntanse libres de traer amigos/familia :). También té, café, pan.. Lo que vean mejor.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436, https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Nicolas Contact Info: novaeangliae1[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 4:00 PM Location: Praça Nelson Mandela, Botafogo. I'll be sitting on the large circular concrete bench. I'll have a piece of paper with 'ACX' written on it taped to my shirt. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/589R2RX8+P63 Chile SANTIAGO Contact: Iñaki Contact Info: inaki[period]escarate[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 4:00 PM Location: Mercado Urbano Tobalaba, en la entrada, al lado del mural blanco grande. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+XF

Inline links: https://plus.codes/589R2RX8+P63, https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+XF

September 08, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.

Inline links: Berkeley, the list

April 01, 2026 · Original source

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 SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA Contact: Manuel Contact Info: carrodetespis[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: The Auditorio park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7 Notes: Let me know via email if there’s a chance you will be coming

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FF32CCV+PR, https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7

Contact: MP Contact Info: ma[.]popst[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 19th, 3:00 PM Location: Padaria Ipanema Coordinates: https://plus.codes/589R2Q8W+73 Notes: Padaria Ipanema also has beer Chile SANTIAGO Contact: Iñaki Contact Info: inaki[.]escarate[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: Location: Mercado Urbano Tobalaba, en la entrada poniente Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+XF Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H42 [remove this bit] KGoGuAt5D7tL0u8HBlr

Inline links: https://plus.codes/589R2Q8W+73, https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+XF

Sheffield6 mentions across 6 issues

Sheffield is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 25, 2023 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SHEFFIELD, UK"; "Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, ACX, ACX.

Article page: Sheffield
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

200 Degrees 6 shared issues
ACX 6 shared issues
ACX 6 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 6 shared issues
Adam 6 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SHEFFIELD, UK Contact: Colin Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[dot]org[dot]uk Time: Saturday, September 16th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Notes: I'll be there from 3pm to at least 5pm, and maybe later if other people want to hang out for longer. So feel free to come join at any point.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND, UK Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[dot]org[dot]uk Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Satya Benson Contact Info: acx[dot]meetup[at]satchlj[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 12th, 03:00 PM Location: George Square Gardens Labyrinth Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV6+G5 Notes: If it rains, the backup location is Söderberg The Meadows (https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV5+C7) SHEFFIELD, UK Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[d ot]org[do t]uk Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV6+G5, https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV5+C7, https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M, https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[d ot]org[do t]uk Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M, https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ben Woden Contact Info: cascadestyler[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM Location: Siren Craft Brew, 1 Friar's Walk, Reading RG1 1HP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8P Notes: If you can RSVP by Apr 19th, that will help me book us a spot of the appropriate size, but please still feel free to come if you don't RSVP. The bar is child and dog friendly, and serves things besides beer if you fancy. SHEFFIELD Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk Time: Saturday, May 10th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8P, https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk Time: Saturday, May 10th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ben Woden Contact Info: cascadestyler[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Siren Craft Brew, 1 Friars Walk, Reading RG1 1HP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8 Notes: If you use Signal, feel free to ask me to add you to our Signal group, which might help if you have trouble finding us. SHEFFIELD Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk Time: Saturday, September 20th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8, https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk Time: Saturday, September 20th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Ben Woden Contact Info: benwoden[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Siren RG1 Craft Brew, Friars Walk, Reading RG1 1HP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8 Notes: It would be helpful for you to RSVP by email by COP Apr 4, but this is not required for attendance. SHEFFIELD Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[@]rtnl[.]org[.]uk Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I’ll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8, https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[@]rtnl[.]org[.]uk Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I’ll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M

Shenzhen6 mentions across 6 issues

Shenzhen is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "special economic zone, which transformed the cities of Shenzhen in China"; "its success didn’t just enrich Shenzhen"; "Some very conspicuously do (eg Dubai, Shenzhen)". It most often appears alongside Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Article page: Shenzhen
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10138907/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

Issue trail

Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Model City Monday July 05, 2021
Links For July July 23, 2021
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate March 28, 2024
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate April 09, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Europe 4 shared issues
Hong Kong 4 shared issues
Singapore 4 shared issues
Canada 3 shared issues
Central Park 3 shared issues

Source context

April 14, 2021 · Original source

Proponents point out that the idea of a ZEDE or charter city is similar to (in fact, stronger than) the idea of a special economic zone, which transformed the cities of Shenzhen in China and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

The idea behind charter cities is: Shenzhen, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the rest of the rich world aren’t rich because their citizens are morally superior to those of their poorer neighbors. They’re rich because they have better legal systems, less corruption, stronger rule of law, and more competent administrators.

When China created the Shenzhen special economic zone, its success didn’t just enrich Shenzhen. It became the evidence that Chinese liberals used to enact reforms across the whole country, and Chinese GDP per capita dectupled over the next thirty years. And Vietnam saw China’s success and liberalized its own markets, and GDP there sextupled. And then Laos saw Vietnam’s success and liberalized its markets, and GDP there tripled. And before you know it, a billion and a half people were lifted out of poverty.

Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate

July 05, 2021 · Original source

They bring up the usual reasons to think charter cities are hard, but their most damning point is that even if a city gets successfully founded, it might not actually increase growth. There aren’t enough existing charter cities to draw firm empirical conclusions, but the closest existing analogue is Special Economic Zones. A World Bank study finds that SEZs don’t consistently grow faster than their host countries. Some very conspicuously do (eg Dubai, Shenzhen), but these are matched by a few that grow less quickly, and overall it’s kind of a wash. The study tries to analyze whether there are consistent features of SEZs which make some do better than others, but it can’t really find any.

Inline links: World Bank study

But they add a caveat: this is just the really direct, easy-to-model effects from the people in the city getting richer. There are still potential indirect effects from charter cities serving as “laboratories of government” (eg one of them might try a new policy, it might be great, and then bigger countries might adopt it). The obvious example is that the Shenzhen special economic zone did well enough that it convinced the Chinese leadership to try capitalism more generally, with world-changing results.

Mark Lutter of CCI broadly supports the research, but argues that the World Bank study might underrate CCI’s work. The study only investigated SEZs between 0.5 and 10 square kilometers. This is more like a neighborhood than like a real city (Central Park is 3.5 square kilometers, Manhattan is 87, Shenzhen is 320). But Lutter thinks that “a city is the smallest unit that can support economic development”. He also thinks the SEZs were comparatively weak - slightly lower taxes or something boring like that, compared to the total overhaul involved in charter cities. He comes up with a reference class that includes Shenzhen, but not a lot of SEZs that don’t work, and says this is the proper comparison.

Inline links: broadly supports the research

Links For July

July 23, 2021 · Original source

21: Probably inspired by the recent assassination of the Haitian president, there’s been some interesting recent discussion on divergence between Haiti and the Dominican Republic - same GDP per capita until ~1960, but now Dominican Republic is about 8x higher. Start with Noah Smith here, then Tyler Cowen here, then Lurking_Chronicler_2 here. One reason people find this question so interesting is that it feels like it should be possible to pinpoint the difference to policy-like-variables alone - since Haiti and the DR were doing so similarly for so long, it doesn’t seem like culture or genetics should play a role. I’m not sure this is really that airtight - one of Noah’s commenters points out that even when Haiti and DR had identical GDPperCs, DR life expectancy was ten years longer, so maybe there are hidden depths. It’s tempting to attribute all of Haiti’s terrible second-half-of-the-20th-century to the Duvaliers, but it’s still a minor mystery why DR has done so much better than the rest of Latin America. Tyler Cowen offhandedly mentions really good use of special economic zones. I’d like to learn more about that - some of the people who are always talking about Shenzhen and Dubai should write about it sometime.

Inline links: Noah Smith here, Tyler Cowen here, Lurking_Chronicler_2 here, DR life expectancy was ten years longer

March 28, 2024 · Original source

Okay, this one is just awful. It takes the risky gambit above - giving extreme odds to something - then doubles down on it by multiplying across twenty different stages to get a stupendously low probability of 1/5*10^25. If we believe this, it’s more likely that we win the lottery three times in a row than that we learn lab leak was true after all. Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this the Multiple Stage Fallacy. Even aside from the failure mode in the sunrise example above (where people are too reluctant to give strong probabilities), it fails because people don’t think enough about the correlations between stages. For example, maybe there’s only 1/10 odds that the Wuhan scientists would choose the suboptimal RRAR furin cleavage site. And maybe there’s only 1/20 odds that they would add a proline in front to make it PRRAR. But are these really two separate forms of weirdness, such that we can multiply them together and get 1/200? Or are scientists who do one weird thing with a furin cleavage site more likely to do another? Mightn’t they be pursuing some general strategy of testing weird furin cleavage sites? (For example, Yuri proposed that, because the scientists wanted to understand how pandemic coronaviruses originate in nature, they might deliberately pick more natural-looking features over more designed-looking ones, which would neatly explain many features seemingly inconsistent with lab leak. Is this a conspiracy theory? Rootclaim is able to successfully route around this question. If the probability of a feature happening in nature is X, then the probability of it happening in this variant of lab leak scenario is X * [chance that the scientists wanted to imitate nature). This gives it a (deserved) complexity penalty without ruling out this (non-zero and potentially important) possibility.) In any case, Peter didn’t care as much about probabilistic analysis as Saar, he didn’t make his case hinge on this slide, and he might have been kind of using it to troll Rootclaim (which definitely worked). He might not have been making any of the mistakes above. But anyone who took this slide seriously would end up dramatically miscalibrated. The Math: Big Pictures Another of Saar’s concerns with the verdict was that Peter was an extraordinary debater, to the point where it could have overwhelmed the signal from the evidence. It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech. I sometimes get accused of overdoing things, but I can’t imagine how many mutations it would take to make me even a fraction as competent as Peter was. Saar’s closing argument included the admission: Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He's invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He's much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point. Once you’ve described your opponent that way in your closing argument, what’s left of your case? Saar thought a lot was left. Throughout the debate, he tried to make a point about how getting the inference right was more important than winning sub-sub-sub-debates about individual lines of evidence. Although Peter won most specific points of contention, Saar thought that if the judges could just keep their mind on the big picture, they would realize a lab leak was more likely. I’m potentially sympathetic to arguments like Saar’s. Imagine a debate about UFOs. Imaginary-Saar says “UFOs can’t be real, because it doesn’t make sense for aliens to come to Earth, circle around a few fields in Kansas, then leave without providing any other evidence of their existence.” Imaginary-Peter says “John Smith of Topeka saw a UFO at 4:52 PM on 6/12/2010, and everyone agrees he’s an honorable person who wouldn’t lie, so what’s your explanation of that?” Saar says “I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something?” Peter says “Ha, I’ve hacked his cell phone records and geolocated him to coordinates XYZ, which is a mosque. My analysis finds that he’s there on 99.5% of Islamic holy days, which proves he’s a very religious Muslim. And religious Muslims don’t drink! Your argument is invalid!” On the one hand, imaginary-Peter is very impressive and sure did shoot down Saar’s point. On the other, imaginary-Saar never really claimed to have a great explanation for this particular UFO sighting, and his argument doesn’t depend on it. Instead of debating whether Smith could or couldn’t have been drunk, we need to zoom out and realize that the aliens explanation makes no sense. The problem was, Saar couldn’t effectively communicate what his big picture was. Neither deployed some kind of amazingly elegant prior. They both used the same kind of evidence. The only difference was that Peter’s evidence hung together, and Saar’s evidence fell apart on cross-examination. I think - not because Saar really explained it, but just reading between the lines - Saar thought the un-ignorable big picture evidence was the origin in a city with a coronavirus gain-of-function lab, and the twelve-nucleotide insertion in the furin cleavage site. To some degree, Peter just ate the loss on those questions. No matter how you slice it, it really is a weird coincidence that the epidemic started so close to Asia’s biggest coronavirus laboratory. Peter tried to deflect this - he pointed out there were other BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. But this was a rare question where he unambiguously came out looking worse - the other cities’ labs had much less coronavirus-specific research. Wuhan really was unique (aside from the other big coronavirus lab in North Carolina). Peter did better when he tried to control the damage: there are a couple hundred million people in the South Asian areas where people eat weird animals exposed to virus-infected bats, Wuhan has a population of about 12 million, so maybe 1.5% of all potential zoonotic pandemics should start in Wuhan. Peter tried to argue that Wuhan was a local trade center, so maybe we should up that to 5 - 10%. 5 - 10% coincidences aren’t that rare. Even 1.5% coincidences happen sometimes. Likewise, the furin cleavage site really does stand on a genetic map. I didn’t feel like either side did much math to quantify how weird it was. Naively, I might think of this as “30,000 bases in COVID, only one insertion, it’s in what’s obviously the most interesting place - sounds like 30,000-to-one odds against”. Against that, a virus with a boring insertion would never have become a pandemic, so maybe you need to multiply this by however much viral evolution is going on in weird caves in Laos, and then you would get the odds that at least one virus would have an insertion interesting enough to go global. Neither participant calculated this in a way that satisfied me (though see here for related discussion). Instead, Peter tried to undermine the furin argument by showing that, as surprising as the site was under a natural origin, it would be an even more surprising choice for human engineers. Saar argued it wasn’t - but because of his policy of giving adjusted-for-model-error odds, he only gave this a factor of 30 in his analysis. Since Peter gave it a higher factor of 50 in his analysis, it looked from the outside like Saar had already conceded this point, and the judges were mostly happy to go with Saar’s artificially-low estimate. The Math: Double Coincidences Saar brought up an interesting point halfway through the debate: you should rarely see high Bayes factors on both sides of an argument. That is, suppose you accept that there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that the pandemic starts at a wet market under lab leak. And suppose you accept there’s only a 1-in-10,000 chance that COVID’s furin cleavage site could evolve naturally. If lab leak is true, then you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for zoonosis5. Likewise, if zoonosis is true, you might find 1-in-10,000 evidence for this true thing. But it’s a freak coincidence that there was 1-in-10,000 evidence for lab leak. Either way, you’re accepting that a 1-in-10,000 freak coincidence happened. Isn’t it more likely you’ve bungled your analysis? I was following along at home, and I definitely bungled this point; I had some high Bayes factors on both sides. I adjusted some of them downward based on Saar’s good point, but how far should we take it? Here I remember The Pyramid And The Garden: you can get very strong coincidences if you have many degrees of freedom, ie buy a lot of lottery tickets. So for example, suppose there are fifty things about a virus. You should expect at least one of those to have a one-in-fifty coincidence by pure chance. What about more than that? You might be able to get away with this by saying there are an infinite number of possible conspiracy theories, and some from that infinite set are brought into existence when a strong enough coincidence makes them plausible. For example, it’s really weird that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted, I could form a conspiracy theory about a group of weird assassins obsessed with killing Founding Fathers on important dates, and then Jefferson and Adams’ deaths would be 1/10,000 evidence for that theory. But this is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which Saar warned against several times. I don’t know if “the virus started in Wuhan, which is where they’re doing this research” gets a Texas Sharpshooter penalty, or how high that penalty should be. But the furin cleavage site doesn’t - people were talking about lab leak before anyone noticed it. The Aftermath: Peter Peter seemed satisfied with the result, in an understated sort of way: It seemed like an interesting experiment in monetizing the debunking of a conspiracy theory. I think there's usually a big asymmetry where it's easy to get rich spreading bullshit (like, the top anti-vaxxers during the pandemic all made a million dollars a year on substack), but it's almost impossible to make money on debunking it. The Rootclaim challenge seemed like one rare case where the opposite was true. Beyond that, I don't know what it's good for. It does seem like there could be a positive social impact from more people understanding that the lab leak hypothesis is (almost certainly) false. The Aftermath: Saar Saar says the debate didn’t change his mind. In fact, by the end of the debate, Rootclaim released an updated analysis that placed an even higher probability on lab leak than when they started. In his blog post, he discussed the issues above, and said the judges had erred in not considering them. He respects the judges, he appreciates their efforts, he just thinks they got it wrong. Although he respected their decision, he wanted the judges to correct what he saw as mistakes in their published statements, which delayed the public verdict and which which Viewers Like You did not appreciate: I ran an early draft of this post by him. There was some miscommunication about the exact publication date, so he hasn’t had time to write up a full response, but he has some quick thoughts (and I’ll link the full response when he writes it). He says: We will provide a full response to this post soon, but the main problem with it is fairly simple: There is general agreement that the main evidence for zoonosis is HSM (Huanan Seafood Market) forming an early cluster of cases. The contention is whether it is amazing 10,000x evidence, or is it negligible. All other evidence points to a lab leak, and if HSM is shown to be weak, lab leak is a clear winner. We provided an analysis of why it is negligible that is as close to mathematical proof as such things can be. Read it here. Scott and I exchanged a few emails on this issue and Scott preferred to discuss more intuitive analyses of HSM, using rules of thumb that likely served him well in the past. While I believe I managed to mostly explain where these failed, and Scott understands HSM is far weaker evidence than he initially thought6, he still has a very strong intuitive feeling (based on years of dealing with probabilities) that this is some exceptional coincidence, and that prevents him from properly updating his posterior. At the end of the day, this cannot be settled without going through our semi-formal derivation, understanding it, and either identifying the problem with it or accepting it (and thereby accepting lab-leak to be more likely). Here is a quick summary of the mistakes made by those claiming HSM is strong evidence: The first mistake is conflating Bayes factors with conditional probabilities. 1/10000 is the supposed conditional probability p(HSM|Lab Leak), That should be divided by the conditional probability of HSM under Zoonosis. Markets were not identified as a high-risk location prior to this outbreak (This will be elaborated in the full response), and in SARS1 the spillovers were mostly at restaurants and other food handlers that deal more closely with wildlife. While it's cool to point to the raccoon dog photo, that was a result of a retrospective search (we don't know what other photos they took which in retrospect would be brought up as premonition). Unbiased data shows markets are not a likely spillover location for zoonosis. We originally estimated p(HSM|Zoonosis)<0.1. Following more research we did to answer Scott's questions, this is more likely <0.03.

Inline links: Multiple Stage Fallacy, see here, 5, The Pyramid And The Garden, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, blog post, 6

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

April 09, 2024 · Original source

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

Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: David Contact Info: dlwjiang[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 11:00 AM Location: Zhongshan Park, Changing District Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336C9C+RC Group Link: https://discord.gg/Cme [remove this bit] Rexz7JM Notes: Please contact me via email or in the discord server for access to the WeChat group SHENZHEN Contact: Kevin Contact Info: kevinkanzhang[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 10:00 AM Location: We’ll meet up right outside the Shenzhen Bay Kapok Hotel. There is a large open space with a huge set of stairs ~20 meters to the right of the Hotel (assuming that you’re facing the hotel entrance). The Hotel itself is located at No. 3001 Binhai Avenue, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and can be accessed directly from nearby streets. I’ll hold up an ACX MEETUP sign at the hotel’s entrance and guide you to the meeting area. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ Group Link: Please email kevinkanzhang@gmail.com, and I’ll create a mailing list/chain. Notes: Feel free to bring games/fun activities. Also, I expect the event to be bilingual (but primarily in English).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q336C9C+RC, https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ

Contact: Kevin Contact Info: kevinkanzhang[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 10:00 AM Location: We’ll meet up right outside the Shenzhen Bay Kapok Hotel. There is a large open space with a huge set of stairs ~20 meters to the right of the Hotel (assuming that you’re facing the hotel entrance). The Hotel itself is located at No. 3001 Binhai Avenue, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and can be accessed directly from nearby streets. I’ll hold up an ACX MEETUP sign at the hotel’s entrance and guide you to the meeting area. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ Group Link: Please email kevinkanzhang@gmail.com, and I’ll create a mailing list/chain. Notes: Feel free to bring games/fun activities. Also, I expect the event to be bilingual (but primarily in English).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ

Somalia6 mentions across 6 issues

Somalia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between December 02, 2021 and February 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "the world’s shortest-lived large country, Somalia, has one of the highest population growth rates in the world"; "Somali orphan has $0"; "Somalia and Yugoslavia are some of the least strategically important states in the 1990s". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Scott, al-Qaeda.

Article page: Somalia
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: December 02, 2021
Last seen: February 11, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Lifespan December 02, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep March 24, 2022
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024
Political Backflow From Europe February 11, 2026

Afghanistan 4 shared issues
Scott 4 shared issues
al-Qaeda 3 shared issues
China 3 shared issues
Europe 3 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Lifespan

December 02, 2021 · Original source

You can make a similar argument for the world at large: life expectancy is a really minimal driver of population growth. The world’s longest-lived large country, Japan, currently has negative population growth; the world’s shortest-lived large country, Somalia, has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. If 25% of the world population took immortality serum (I’m decreasing this from the 50% for USA because I’m not even sure 50% of the world’s population has access to basic antibiotics), that would increase world population by 15 million per year over the counterfactual. It would take 60 years for there to even be an extra billion people, and in 60 years a lot of projections suggest world population will be stable or declining anyway. By the time we really have to worry about this we’ll either be dead or colonizing space.

Inline links: a lot of projections

March 24, 2022 · Original source

This has been brought about through the choices of individuals and governments. Maybe nobody specifically says “I choose for Jeff Bezos to be a billionaire and Somali orphans to starve to death.” But a lot of people keep giving more money to Jeff Bezos and not helping Somali orphans. And governments generally enforce (or at least refuse to intervene against) the economic system that makes this keep happening. And voters keep re-electing the politicians who allow this.

Why do I find this so much easier to swallow than eg climate justice or economic justice? I guess it’s because climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic (me playing computer games, you playing computer games, so on x 1 billion) yet happen to have bad consequences. Economic justice is the same way - I spend my money on things I want and find useful, you spend your money on things you want and find useful, and at the end we find that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion and a Somali orphan has $0. It doesn’t seem intuitively bad to play computer games or to spend your money on things you want and find useful. Whereas the animal problems really are “someone captures and tortures and kills a bunch of animals”. I guess I’m bringing in sketchy stuff like the act/omission distinction and the doctrine of double effect here, but this really does seem pretty different from the other two cases.

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

July 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Political Backflow From Europe

September 13, 2024 · Original source

'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.'

February 11, 2026 · Original source

(What about the very poorest groups from the most dysfunctional countries? Taken literally, the numbers suggest that Somalis and Haitians both have lower incarceration rates than US natives. Matthew Lilley and Robert VerBruggen make the newness objection - the very newest immigrants have had less time to commit crimes - and here it has more teeth given the smaller gaps. When you adjust for it, Somalis commit crimes at about 2x native rates, and Haitians at about 1x - although nobody has actually done this adjustment with the Haitian statistics and this number is eyeballed only3. So the only group where I can find clear evidence for a higher-than-native crime rate in is Somalis4, who mostly didn’t enter as asylum-seekers, but through a different refugee resettlement pathway. In some sense this is a boring difference: who cares exactly which legal pathway immigrants from failed states use to get into the country? But in another sense it’s exactly what I’m arguing - despite there being no relevant difference between these terms, we’re using the incorrect European ones, because we’re having the European debate.)

Inline links: Somalis, Haitians, make the newness objection, 3, 4

Eyeballing technique: Somalis appeared to have about 1x native crime rate, but after Lilley/VerBruggen’s adjustment, they had about 2x, so the adjustment seems to double the raw numbers. Haitians started with 0.6x native crime rate, so this would double to 1.2x, but Haitians have been in the US longer than Somalis on average, so we should expect this effect to be smaller, so I rounded down to 1x.

What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs, and forcing conservatives to focus “only” on Somali fraud rather than child rape would be a victory. More speculatively, I think this fits into a long American tradition of ethnic enclave fraud, which we saw in the Irish at Tammany Hall and in the Italians with the Sicilian Mafia. Immigrant groups from countries with a history of clannishness, who are poorly assimilated into US values and whose main starting advantage is strong intra-community ties, are in a great position to do organized crime, and a poor position to do anything else. I think the correct answer is to punish the people involved, fire whichever state officials allowed it to happen, put better safeguards in place, and wait to see if the Somalis assimilate the same way the Irish and Italians did. I realize this is controversial and that I’ve only hinted at the barest skeleton of an argument, but a friend is going to write a blog post about this in a few weeks, and I’ll link it when it comes up.

South Dakota6 mentions across 6 issues

South Dakota is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between December 28, 2021 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "connect via email or twitter to chat about Nebraska, South Dakota, Arizona, Michigan"; "connect via email or twitter to chat about... South Dakota"; "A similar idea is making progress in South Dakota". It most often appears alongside Pennsylvania, Utah, Arizona.

Article page: South Dakota
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: December 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants Results December 28, 2021
Open Thread 210 February 07, 2022
ACX Grants: Project Updates November 04, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Your Book Review: Dominion June 28, 2024

Pennsylvania 5 shared issues
Utah 5 shared issues
Arizona 4 shared issues
Australia 4 shared issues
Michigan 4 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants Results

December 28, 2021 · Original source

Yoram Bauman, $50,000, to help fund his campaign for economically literate climate change solutions. Bauman was the sponsor of the 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, which failed by a small margin. Now he's built up a coalition of economists, environmentalists, and friendly politicians to try to get climate measures passed or on the ballot in seven states by 2024. Bauman is the world's only “stand-up economist”, and also on track to be the world's only person to win a bet with Bryan Caplan. You can follow or donate to the effort he’s part of in Utah at CleanTheDarnAir.org, connect via email or twitter to chat about Nebraska, South Dakota, Arizona, Michigan, or your favorite state (yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon), or sign up for overall updates and see comedy videos at https://standupeconomist.com/videos/.

Inline links: Yoram Bauman, on track, Bryan Caplan, CleanTheDarnAir.org, yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon, https://standupeconomist.com/videos/

Open Thread 210

February 07, 2022 · Original source

One paragraph summary of Jan 2022 progress on #climate24x7 (advancing smart climate efforts in the legislature and/or via 2024 ballot measures in at least 7 states): In Nebraska, climate-concerned R state senator John McCollister introduced LB944, a short 3-page bill that cuts the regressive 5.5% state sales tax rate on electricity once electric utilities hit certain carbon intensity targets; see these one-pagers. We have a page of potential improvements based feedback from utility folks and others and are anticipating a public hearing in late February or early March. A similar idea is making progress in South Dakota, where a D legislator has expressed interest in similar legislation, and in Arizona, where I’ve hired Autumn Johnson of Tierra Strategy to pursue this; we’ve written one-pagers and draft legislation, she’s gotten fairly positive feedback from utilities, enviros, and legislative staff, and we’re doing our best to find a House member to introduce legislation before the cut-off of Friday Feb 4. In Utah we continue to work on the signature-gathering plan for the Clean The Darn Air 2024 ballot measure effort; we also anticipate the introduction of a similar bill in this year’s legislative session. Also trying to push forward with ideas or exploratory conversations in Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Additional funding would help extend Autumn’s contract and help push forward faster in Nebraska, South Dakota, and elsewhere! From Yoram Bauman (yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon)

Inline links: John McCollister, LB944, one-pagers, Tierra Strategy, one-pagers, draft legislation, plan, Clean The Darn Air, yoram@standupeconomist.com

November 04, 2022 · Original source

6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States (4/10) Yoram Bauman and Climate 24x7 have written a policy paper about their ideas. They were able to get a bill in front of the Nebraska Legislature, but it died in committee. They have a promising measure in Utah, and an off chance of getting something rolling in Pennsylvania. Overall they report frustration, as many of the legislators they worked with have been voted out or term-limited. If you are a legislator or activist interested in helping with this project - especially in Utah, Pennsylvania, or South Dakota - please contact Yoram at yoram@standupeconomist.com.

Inline links: a policy paper, Utah

Yoram Bauman’s Climate 24x7 is looking for state legislators and activists to support their work on pocketbook-friendly carbon taxes. People in Pennsylvania and South Dakota might be especially useful. Contact yoram@standupeconomist.com.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Phil Persing Contact Info: acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 3:00 PM Location: Millworks - 340 Verbeke St, Harrisburg, PA 17102. We'll plan to be on the rooftop biergarten if the weather is suitable, or inside downstairs otherwise. Look for the "ACX Meetup" sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G574C6+7X9 Group Link: acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com South Dakota SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA Contact: S.C. Contact Info: villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Monday, October 2nd, 5:30 PM Location: Pavilion at McKennan Park, or near it if it's occupied. I will have a laptop with a sign saying "ACX MEETUP." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or EMail me (but don't do both!)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G574C6+7X9, https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V

SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA Contact: S.C. Contact Info: villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Monday, October 2nd, 5:30 PM Location: Pavilion at McKennan Park, or near it if it's occupied. I will have a laptop with a sign saying "ACX MEETUP." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or EMail me (but don't do both!)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V

Your Book Review: Dominion

March 30, 2024 · Original source

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND Contact: Freya Contact Info: rip[dot]my[dot]inbox[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 04, 01:00 PM Location: Pizza J (967 Westminster St). I’ll be at a table with an ACX sign and some games. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87HCRH9G+27 Additional Notes: Feel free to bring games if you have any! South Dakota SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA Contact: S.C. Contact Info: Villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 19th, 5:00 PM Location: Picnic shelter at McKennan Park, or tables south of it if it's occupied. Will have a sign saying "ACX." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V Notes: Please RSVP on LW

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87HCRH9G+27, https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V

SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA Contact: S.C. Contact Info: Villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 19th, 5:00 PM Location: Picnic shelter at McKennan Park, or tables south of it if it's occupied. Will have a sign saying "ACX." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V Notes: Please RSVP on LW

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V

June 28, 2024 · Original source

But there’s one particular story from 2024 that shows how, despite those wins, not much has truly changed in our attitude towards animals. It has to do with the evangelical governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem.

Stanford6 mentions across 6 issues

Stanford is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between November 04, 2022 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Start A Biosecurity Center At Stanford"; "a former Stanford IRB member himself"; "Patrick Suppes, a Stanford professor". It most often appears alongside ACX, Congress, Italy.

Article page: Stanford
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: November 04, 2022
Last seen: March 06, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants: Project Updates November 04, 2022
Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill April 12, 2023
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025
Your Review: School July 04, 2025
Open Thread 396 August 25, 2025
SEIU Delenda Est March 06, 2026

ACX 3 shared issues
Congress 3 shared issues
Italy 3 shared issues
1DaySooner 2 shared issues
acanthamoeba keratitis 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill

November 04, 2022 · Original source

23: Start A Biosecurity Center At Stanford (10/10) Allison Berke has hired three graduate research assistants who are now preparing manuscripts on their work, including “areas of overlap and potential for improvements in current gene synthesis screening algorithms”, “the capabilities of using AI-enabled protein tools to design toxins and viral sequences with enhanced sensitivity and specificity for known binding targets”, and “the current capabilities of biosensors for wastewater screening and continuous remote monitoring of genetically-engineered sequences and novel viruses”. She has gotten an additional FTX grant to put on a “biosecurity bootcamp for legislative staff, to be held at Stanford in summer 2023”.

April 12, 2023 · Original source

Dr. Simon Whitney, author of From Oversight To Overkill, doesn’t wish death upon IRBs. He’s a former Stanford IRB member himself, with impeccable research-ethicist credentials - MD + JD, bioethics fellowship, served on the Stanford IRB for two years. He thought he was doing good work at Stanford; he did do good work. Still, his worldview gradually started to crack:

Inline links: From Oversight To Overkill

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.

23: Start A Biosecurity Center At Stanford

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.

Your Review: School

July 04, 2025 · Original source

By the 1960s and 70s, as computers entered universities and corporations, techno-optimists predicted they would soon transform schools. Patrick Suppes, a Stanford professor, developed one of the first computer-assisted instruction (CAI) systems, which taught math via mainframe terminals. Early studies showed promise, but the systems were expensive and impractical for most schools.

Inline links: computer-assisted instruction

Open Thread 396

August 25, 2025 · Original source

3: In 2021, I wrote a blog post on how the best-supported treatment for insomnia was a therapy called CBTi, how it should be easily deliverable by app, but how the only good CBT-i app was prescription-only and cost $900. I challenged people to create normal non-prescription CBTi apps at normal prices. Now after four years, somebody has taken me up on the first half of the problem - a company called SheepSleep, working with a Stanford insomnia expert, has a CBTi therapy app for $298 per month (treatment usually takes 1-2 months). You can see more at gnsheep.com. They are offering ACX readers a discount with the code “ACX” (for first 50 people), and the founder asks any interested clinicians, orgs, or investors to reach out to her at luomei@stanford.edu. I still think someone should invent the $5 version, and would like to hear from anyone working on this so I can try to help them.

Inline links: a blog post, gnsheep.com

SEIU Delenda Est

March 06, 2026 · Original source

[SEIU] sponsored Proposition 23 on the November ballot, which would add new regulations for dialysis clinics. It put a similar measure before voters in 2018, which they rejected. In the last two elections, it’s also sponsored a measure to tax hospitals in the Los Angeles County city of Lynwood, and to cap prices at Stanford hospitals and clinics in several Bay Area Cities.

SÃO PAULO6 mentions across 6 issues

SÃO PAULO is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 23, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL ( RSVP )"; "SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL"; "in the state of São Paulo, Brazil". It most often appears alongside Brazil, ACX, ACX.

Article page: SÃO PAULO
Mention count: 6
Issue count: 6
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: March 25, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Your Book Review: How Language Began July 19, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

Brazil 6 shared issues
ACX 5 shared issues
ACX 5 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 5 shared issues
Anastasia 5 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL (RSVP) Contact: Fernando, fdesmello[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Ibirapuera Park, in front of the entrance to the Planetarium. I will be carrying a sign with 'ACX MEETUP' on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/refrain.hacking.workforce

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/refrain.hacking.workforce

August 26, 2022 · Original source

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL Contact: [Update on 2025-02-03: Removed at organizers’s request] Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Ibirapuera Park in Praca do Porquinho. I will be wearing a white t-shirt, be very tall and have a sign. Coordinates: 588MC85Q+6X Event link(s): LessWrong BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA Contact: Dan P, shorty[dot]george[dot]productions[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Illy Cafe, Kr 15 with Park Virrey. Sign will say ACX Coordinates: 67P7MWFW+3F7 Event link(s): LessWrong MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA Contact: HP, hp-med-acx[at]proton[dot]me Time: Sunday, September 18, 5:00 PM Location: Hija Mia Nomada Coordinates: 67R66C7G+8V Event link(s): LessWrong MÉRIDA, MEXICO Contact: Mati Roy, mathieu[dot]roy[dot]37[at]gmail[dot]com, Facebook Time: Sunday, August 28, 5:00 PM Location: Parque Gardenia, C. 65-A, Residencial Floresta, 97309 Mérida, Yuc. Coordinates: 76HG2C7X+8F Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: Facebook group Notes: Please let me know if you'll be coming. MEXICO CITY, MEXICO Contact: Calcifer, fagarrido[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: Francisco (Mexico City)#0227 Time: Saturday, September 10, 4:00 PM Location: Comedor de los Milagros. I'll be wearing a green shirt and will carry a 'ACX/CDMX Meetup' sign. Coordinates: 76F2CR6P+37 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We are a rather new group. We've been meeting sporadically since April, and we recently settled on a formal twice-per-month frequency. We have a WhatsApp group which we use mostly for coordination purposes. Send me an email if you want in. Notes: If possible, RSVP on Less Wrong to get a sense of how many people to expect. Feel free to come if you haven't RSVP'd, though! PUNTA DEL ESTE, URUGUAY Contact: Manuel, acx[at]maraoz[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 24, 5:00 PM Location: Borneo Coffee, patio del fondo. Ruta 10, 20001 La Barra, Departamento de Maldonado, Uruguay Coordinates: 48Q734PQ+58 Event link(s): LessWrong

Inline links: 588MC85Q+6X, LessWrong, 67P7MWFW+3F7, LessWrong, 67R66C7G+8V, LessWrong, Facebook, 76HG2C7X+8F, LessWrong, Facebook event, Facebook group, 76F2CR6P+37, LessWrong, 48Q734PQ+58, LessWrong

Your Book Review: How Language Began

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL Contact: Bruno Vieira Contact Info: vbruno2002[ at]g mail[do t ]com Time: Friday, May 10th, 6:00 PM Location: INOVA USP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB Additional Notes: Se você não conhece o INOVA, manda uma mensagem que eu te ajudo a chegar! (É bem de boa)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB

July 19, 2024 · Original source

This is what he looks like. According to Wikipedia, the context for this picture is: “Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival” Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas. Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (What Kind of Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16) It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ... there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt in identifying the two. Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No, that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (Language and Responsibility, Ch. 2, pg. 56-57) Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations, intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable, no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so. Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (Language and Mind, third edition, pg, 183-184) An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions. The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form. I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the hard takeoff theory of human intelligence.) Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it. Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they do study all of these, Chomsky and his followers view grammar as by far the most important component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed. It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in order to modify or extend a given sentence. Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (pg. 22), his most cited work: (1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist. (2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist. The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’. One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a different meaning in the second (2a != 2b): (1b) I expected a specialist to examine John. (2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John. In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of deep structure. You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, and the point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most important facts to be explained about language. A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in two important ways. First, he famously distinguishes competence from performance, and identifies the former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 4) The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline. Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 24) A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing E-languages, like English and Spanish and Japanese, from I-languages, which only exist inside human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language, Cook and Newson write: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external … Not only should linguistics primarily be interested in studying I-languages, but to try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10).1 I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually used really of no particular empirical significance? And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim. Cook and Newson continue: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 14) The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible evidence as it is of long-term goals. So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it? The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC), linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view, people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned early in this video.) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human languages, like the fact that some languages don’t appear to have words for relative directions, or “thank you”, or “yes” and “no”. After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists. While you could study language by going out into the field and collecting data, this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork. In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real linguistic data only indirectly reflects it. All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas” of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later. How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work2. The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other things, was substantially more rudimentary. Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett. How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky. II. THE MISSIONARY We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe. Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the Amazon jungle among the Sateré-Mawé people. At seventeen, Everett became a born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few years, they started a family and prepared to become full-fledged missionaries like Keren’s parents. First, Everett studied “Bible and Foreign Missions” at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After finishing his degree in 1975, the natural next step was to train more specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to learn translation techniques and more viscerally prepare for life in the jungle: They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight. Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett and his wife to work with the Pirahã people (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity. But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons: (Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14) In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would. Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In 1980, he completed Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã, his master’s thesis. He continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax, his dissertation. He continued studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some thirty-odd years. As he notes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: (Prologue, pg. xvii-xviii) I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs. And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me. Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist

Inline links: Wikipedia, hard takeoff, grammar, 1, this video, don’t appear to have words for relative directions, “thank you”, “yes” and “no”, long been an opponent, 2, Daniel Everett, Sateré-Mawé people, prepared, Bible and Foreign Missions, 1975, SIL, viscerally prepare, Pirahã people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!42Ji!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c899185-e1a2-4358-ae6a-e9298f6c7cdb_1600x1002.jpeg, source, 3, number words, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yx-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77975f2c-ef0f-47d7-9ed9-f22bbe04f78b_1024x768.jpeg, source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Adiel Contact Info: adiel[at]airpost[dot]net Time: Saturday, October 19th, 04:00 PM Location: Angeloni Beira Mar, at the food court. I’ll be wearing a yellow hat. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/584HCFGF+326 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C2WFfuFX07 [ignore this part] W0UBMnTeooN6 Notes: Everyone is welcome! There will be cookies. SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL Contact: Bruno Vieira Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:00 PM Location: INOVA USP - 20/09/2024 - 18:00. Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9x [ignore this part] MXUpFjJai4u0hlB Notes: Don't bring kids or dogs, please. I'm still working out dinner, join the group chat so we can properly represent you with our decisions. RSVPs required at https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686

Inline links: https://plus.codes/584HCFGF+326, https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686

Contact: Bruno Vieira Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:00 PM Location: INOVA USP - 20/09/2024 - 18:00. Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSMt9x [ignore this part] MXUpFjJai4u0hlB Notes: Don't bring kids or dogs, please. I'm still working out dinner, join the group chat so we can properly represent you with our decisions. RSVPs required at https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686

Inline links: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo/2607686

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Victor Contact Info: victor[period]a[period]benevides[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 25th, 10:00 AM Location: Parque do Coco Coordinates: https://plus.codes/69837G37+WJ SÃO PAULO Contact: Bruno V Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 25, 06:30 PM Location: Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 We'll be inside the building, so please regis Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSM [remove this bit] t9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB Additional Notes: This is the event registration link: https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436 Also, send your name and CPF to my email (vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com) in order to get in.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/69837G37+WJ, https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436

Contact: Bruno V Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 25, 06:30 PM Location: Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020 We'll be inside the building, so please regis Coordinates: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSM [remove this bit] t9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB Additional Notes: This is the event registration link: https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436 Also, send your name and CPF to my email (vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com) in order to get in.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25, https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436

Santa Cruz5 mentions across 5 issues

Santa Cruz is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 24, 2022 and September 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Santa Cruz program obtained employment"; "SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA"; "SANTA CRUZ". It most often appears alongside Ann Arbor, California, Cape Town.

Article page: Santa Cruz
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: May 24, 2022
Last seen: September 15, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z May 24, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 399 September 15, 2025

Ann Arbor 4 shared issues
California 4 shared issues
Cape Town 4 shared issues
Dallas 4 shared issues
Daniel 4 shared issues

Source context

May 24, 2022 · Original source

The Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project provides job training, transitional employment and support services to individuals experiencing homelessness. This dynamic employment-training program is focused on stewardship, conservation and regenerative agricultural principles; it teaches skills that truly transform the lives of those who participate and want to achieve a stable place in society. Programs like this can be incredibly effective. In 2019, 100% of the graduates of the Santa Cruz program obtained employment, and 78% obtained housing […]

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Denis Contact Info: denis[dot]lantsman[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:00 PM Location: Meadow Park. Picnic tables just south of the bathrooms / playground. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/847X789R+593 Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong! SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Gregg Contact Info: gregg[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 01:30 PM Location: NE corner of University Terrace Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXWFW+X66

Inline links: https://plus.codes/847X789R+593, https://plus.codes/848VXWFW+X66

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[ at]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q SANTA CRUZ Contact: Ron Contact Info: mitts[dot]ashrams-3j[at]icloud[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 27, 01:00 PM Location: This will be in a private home. Sign up for the address. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX72+75 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can send you the address.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[a t]daviddfriedman[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding. SANTA CRUZ Contact: Ron Contact Info: eyeronik1[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 2:00 PM Location: Escalona Drive between Mirimar Dr and Berkshire - Look for flags Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX83+94

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html, https://plus.codes/848VXX83+94

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

September 15, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Brussels, Cape Town, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Kyiv, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Portland, Philadelphia, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Sydney, Waterloo, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Prague and St. Louis have been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

Scandinavia5 mentions across 5 issues

Scandinavia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 07, 2021 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scandinavia is remarkable for having more one-person and single-family households"; "stricter than for the rest of Scandinavia"; "railway stations they hoped would take them to Germany or Scandinavia". It most often appears alongside Germany, China, Europe.

Article page: Scandinavia
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: July 07, 2021
Last seen: November 12, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know July 07, 2021
Dictator Book Club: Orban November 04, 2021
Links for July 2024 July 24, 2024
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument October 04, 2024
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity November 12, 2024

Germany 4 shared issues
China 3 shared issues
Europe 3 shared issues
Middle East 3 shared issues
America 2 shared issues

Source context

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:

Sweden had about six times the first-phase death rate of the second-worst Scandinavian/Nordic country, Denmark.

Anyway, a reasonable conclusion might be that Sweden had between 2x (if we compare it to an average European country) and 6x (if we compare it to an average Scandinavian country) the expected death rate in the first phase of the pandemic.

Dictator Book Club: Orban

November 04, 2021 · Original source

Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees traveling from the Middle East to Europe found themselves passing through Hungary. They filled up the underfunded refugee camps, they filled up city streets, they camped by the thousands outside railway stations they hoped would take them to Germany or Scandinavia. When there were no food or tents left, they rioted.

Links for July 2024

July 24, 2024 · Original source

19: Claim: the Indo-European eschatology myth has left traces throughout its daughter civilizations, including the stories of Loki in Scandinavia, Tarquinius Superbus in Rome, and Bres in Ireland (Lucius Brutus = Lugh??)

Inline links: the Indo-European eschatology myth

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.

Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?

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.

SF Bay Area5 mentions across 5 issues

SF Bay Area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 01, 2021 and August 05, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Currently most available matches are in the SF Bay Area"; "s are in the SF Bay Area, so though in theory the service isn't geographically limited"; "Or you could just do what everyone else does and go to the SF Bay Area instead". It most often appears alongside ACX, Bloomberg, Abraham Davenport.

Article page: SF Bay Area
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: August 01, 2021
Last seen: August 05, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 183 August 01, 2021
21 November 08, 2021
Links For November 2023 December 01, 2023
Open Thread 382 May 19, 2025
Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP? August 05, 2025

ACX 2 shared issues
Bloomberg 2 shared issues
Abraham Davenport 1 shared issues
AI 2027 1 shared issues
AI Futures blog 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 183

August 01, 2021 · Original source

3: The rationalist community is always experimenting with new institutions, and now we're trying an old one - official community matchmaker. My friend Elena has stepped up to the plate and is doing good work interviewing lots of people about their preferences and trying to set them up on dates with other people she's interviewed (poly vs. mono is optional, she has good matches available in both categories). She finds we need more of three particular demographics: men who want kids, women who don't necessarily want kids, and people who are open to dating a transgender partner. If you fall into one of these three groups, we're expanding the definition of "rationalist community" wide enough to cover you as an ACX reader, whether you identify as "rationalist" in any other way or not, and you’re eligible for Elena’s (free) service. Consider checking out her website ; she'll also be around to answer any questions in the comments here. Currently most available matches are in the SF Bay Area, so though in theory the service isn't geographically limited she'll probably be best positioned to help people who live near there. [EDIT: All Elena’s free appointments are now full, she is trying to figure out some kind of better business model, you can sign up for her wait list if you want]

Inline links: her website

November 08, 2021 · Original source

Or you could just do what everyone else does and go to the SF Bay Area instead. But after seeing *our* levels of crime and anarchy maybe you’d rather take your chances with Auroville. Honestly the only part of this story which surprises me at all is that the Mother was a Sephardic Jew; usually it’s us Ashkenazi who end up in these kinds of situations.

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

Open Thread 382

May 19, 2025 · Original source

4: There’s also the Fellowship on AI For Human Reasoning, intended to “help talented researchers and builders start working on AI tools for coordination and epistemics”. Three months, “$25-50K stipend”, and a coworking space in the SF Bay Area (maybe also Constellation, I don’t know). Applications close June 9.

Inline links: Fellowship on AI For Human Reasoning

August 05, 2025 · Original source

First, many of us worked in tech, and so ended out naturally gathering in the SF Bay Area without having to explicitly coordinate on it. We didn’t even have to take less-than-maximally lucrative jobs, because all the maximally-lucrative jobs for techies are in one place.

Slovenia5 mentions across 5 issues

Slovenia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 10, 2022 and April 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "validation study on up to 500 individuals in Slovenia"; "LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA"; "Slovenia". It most often appears alongside ACX, Australia, Berlin.

Article page: Slovenia
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: February 10, 2022
Last seen: April 07, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half February 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Open Thread 376 April 07, 2025

ACX 5 shared issues
Australia 4 shared issues
Berlin 4 shared issues
Budapest 4 shared issues
Canberra 4 shared issues

Source context

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half

February 10, 2022 · Original source

#108: EEG For Dementia Screening BrainTrip has developed a fast, early, and affordable dementia-screening solution based on EEG measurement. BrainTrip’s novel biomarker can detect the disease at its pre-symptomatic stage and can also be used to measure its progression. Traditional naked-eye inspected EEG has been of little use in dementia because large EEG changes are often only evident late in the illness when other clinical signs become obvious. However, the brain’s electrical activity contains many hidden features which can be extracted by sophisticated signal processing and inference modeling. The core of our innovation - the BrainTrip Dementia Index (BDI) - is based on such models. The BDI combines neuroscientific knowledge with complex mathematical models, relying on specifically developed AI optimization and machine learning. The BDI is a numerical score calculated from a test subject’s resting-state EEG, and it can detect subtle dementia-specific EEG changes early on, long before symptoms become evident. BrainTrip’s solution comprises a 15-minute EEG recording which detects even early stage dementia with an accuracy of 85% and can be administered by minimally trained staff. The BDI has already been CE marked as a Class I Medical Device used for dementia screening. We are now looking for 30-100k for a validation study on up to 500 individuals in Slovenia, before bringing the BDI to market.

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.

August 25, 2023 · Original source

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 1st, 3:00 PM Location: Foxford, Martinus, Obchodná 516/26, 811 06 Bratislava, Slovakia Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia Slovenia LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWV44W5+VXF, https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismSlovakia, https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ

LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Contact: Demjan (Demian) Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, September 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novi Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36, https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/, https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xo7QE9pjGDvqLd5Ao/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ

March 30, 2024 · Original source

BELGRADE Contact: Tanja Contact Info: tanja[dot]trninic[at]efektivnialtruizam[dot]rs Time: Sunday, April 7th, 2:00 PM Location: Venezelosova 20, Belgrade, Serbia. Effective Altruism Serbia is organizing a casual hang out + lunch in vegan and low-waste Kafe VeZa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC9+36 Group Link: https://efektivnialtruizam.rs/ Notes: Please RSVP to tanja.trninic@efektivnialtruizam.rs so we can reserve enough tables for everyone. Slovenia LJUBLJANA Contact: Demjan Contact Info: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, May 15th, 7:00 PM Location: Vrt Lili Novy, at a table with some sort of sign that says ACX. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRP3F3X+6V Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xo7QE9pjGDvqLd5Ao/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2024 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/bedNTWaYbHgK7PreQ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if possible, it helps with logistics to estimate the number.

Open Thread 376

April 07, 2025 · Original source

6: And the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia asks me to advertise that they are looking to fill PhD positions on data science and forecasting, including LLM-assisted superforecasting. See here for more details.

Inline links: here

Southeast Asia5 mentions across 5 issues

Southeast Asia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 21, 2021 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a free-trade network in Southeast Asia"; "He runs through the trade of Southeast Asia and suggests that American cooperation in the area"; "He runs through the trade of Southeast Asia". It most often appears alongside Britain, America, Europe.

Article page: Southeast Asia
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: July 21, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021
Book Review: Crazy Like Us July 15, 2021
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading July 21, 2023

Britain 4 shared issues
America 3 shared issues
Europe 3 shared issues
Germany 3 shared issues
Nassim Taleb 3 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

While Bretton Woods was America’s plan, presumably to benefit America, it had some nice side effects for the world. Zeihan credits it with leading to peace between former enemies, a new era of cooperation (France and Germany forming the EU; Sweden and the Netherlands focusing on trade; a free-trade network in Southeast Asia), and ending colonialism:

These predictions include some persuasive analysis of many countries and plenty of speculation to go with it. Zeihan spends a chapter highlighting America’s partners in the chaos to come. At the top of the list are its North American neighbors, and a prediction that Cuba will be pulled back into the American orbit (because a larger power that supported it could cut off trade with the greater Mississippi system – Zeihan’s summary of exactly why America was willing to risk nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis). He also gives some analysis of the geography of South America and how it affects their trading patterns, and of the best European allies for various purposes (Denmark and the Netherlands control access to the Rhine and Baltic Sea, making them valuable allies). He runs through the trade of Southeast Asia and suggests that American cooperation in the area could have a strategic benefit of helping to “keep China and India apart.”

6 Apparently Germany and Japan would have found it to be unbelievable. “The primary reason Germany and Japan had launched World War II in the first place was to gain greater access to resources and markets. Germany wanted the agricultural output of Poland, the capital of the Low Countries, the coal of Central Europe, and the markets of France. Japan coveted the manpower and markets of China and the resources of Southeast Asia. Now that they had been thoroughly defeated, the Americans were offering them economic access far beyond their wildest prewar longings: risk-free access to ample resources and bottomless markets a half a world away. And “all” it would cost them was accepting a security guarantee that was better than anything they could ever have achieved by themselves.”

Inline links: 6

Book Review: Crazy Like Us

June 14, 2021 · Original source

On the one hand, I agree that this question has lots of interesting context - though I would have chosen the history of other "market minorities" like the Lebanese or the Chinese in Southeast Asia. On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in. It's much harder to explain Jewish achievement through similar means, because Jews are so intermixed with other populations. Whatever political and economic currents were affecting Albert Einstein or Noam Chomsky or whoever else, ought to also be affecting their Gentile friends and neighbors too. How come they didn't? To me that's a much bigger mystery than whatever happened in Scotland.

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.

Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading

June 10, 2022 · Original source

Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth—ridicule, shaming, shunning. . .

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

Stuttgart5 mentions across 5 issues

Stuttgart is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 30, 2024 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "STUTTGART, GERMANY"; "Bauhaus worker housing in Stuttgart, 1927"; "STUTTGART". It most often appears alongside Berlin, Chicago, Europe.

Article page: Stuttgart
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House December 04, 2024
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

Berlin 5 shared issues
Chicago 5 shared issues
Europe 5 shared issues
France 5 shared issues
Michigan 5 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mbhk7hHvjggumgxvP/stuttgart-germany-acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-2024

March 30, 2024 · Original source

STUTTGART, GERMANY Contact: Benjamin Rothenhäusler Contact Info: b[dot]rothenhaeusler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 25th, 3:00 PM Location: We'll meet at the Jubiläumssäule at the Schlossplatz and then search for a nice spot nearby. Watch for the guy with the white hat. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5HH+CW Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zNhJdX5atRCuk7e8S/ulm-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2024 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mbhk7hHvjggumgxvP/stuttgart-germany-acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-2024 Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. If the weather is bad, we will keep this meeting point, but will move over together to Cafe Mela. If the weather is fine, feel free to bring food, a blanket and cozy stuff, we'll picknick and chat in the meadow.

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Jan Wehner Contact Info: janwehner1[a t]t-online[do t]de Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 07:00 PM Location: Am Staden 16a, 66121 Saarbrücken (Ulanen-Pavillon Beer garden). I'll have a laptop saying ACX MEETUP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG Notes: RSVPs are required. Please use this form: https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7. STUTTGART, GERMANY Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[dot]Bachelor[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 08th, 04:00 PM Location: The Starbucks at Mailaender Platz, 70173 Stuttgart - Up the stairs from the Budapester Platz or Stadtbibliothek U-train stops to the open square area of the Milaneo mall. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97 Notes: I don’t actually speak any German; I just got here.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG, https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7., https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97

Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[dot]Bachelor[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 08th, 04:00 PM Location: The Starbucks at Mailaender Platz, 70173 Stuttgart - Up the stairs from the Budapester Platz or Stadtbibliothek U-train stops to the open square area of the Milaneo mall. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97 Notes: I don’t actually speak any German; I just got here.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+97

December 04, 2024 · Original source

Other times the answer was “socialist governments”. For example, the socialist party got elected to local government in the German city of Stuttgart in 1927, and rewarded socialist artists with contracts to build worker housing - the first of what would later be known as “commieblocks”.

Bauhaus worker housing in Stuttgart, 1927 Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go. The architects were unfazed. The Romantic ideal of the artist said that real artists considered their clients Philistines and paid no heed to their preferences; the less you cared about your clients’ opinion, the realer and more romantic an artist you were. There was a slight hiccup in adjusting this philosophy to socialism, but only slight: by this time, classical Marxist philosophy had already ceded to the Bolshevik idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where communist-theory-educated elites needed to re-educate the workers into accepting their own class interests. Wolfe describes the overall effect in Stuttgart:

Ironically, real workers hated the modernist styles, and could only be forced into them when there was nowhere else to go. The architects were unfazed. The Romantic ideal of the artist said that real artists considered their clients Philistines and paid no heed to their preferences; the less you cared about your clients’ opinion, the realer and more romantic an artist you were. There was a slight hiccup in adjusting this philosophy to socialism, but only slight: by this time, classical Marxist philosophy had already ceded to the Bolshevik idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where communist-theory-educated elites needed to re-educate the workers into accepting their own class interests. Wolfe describes the overall effect in Stuttgart:

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: AM Contact Info: acx-ms[a t]gmx[period]net Time: Thursday, April 3rd, 7:30 PM Location: A bar close to the main station, contact us for details. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F39XJ4M+QX Notes: Please send us an email beforehand, because the planning is still somewhat provisional at the moment (and we would like to know what table size we should reserve, so as not to annoy the restaurant/bar owners). STUTTGART Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[period]Bachelor[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 13th, 4:00 PM Location: Meeting in Milaneo mall courtyard, outside Starbucks, for ease of finding. Moving to my flat, above, for the main meetup. I will wear an orange t-shirt with a QR code for the EICAR string for ease of identification. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8 Group Link: https://discord.gg/xhr [remove this bit] uFVhj

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F39XJ4M+QX, https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8

Book Review: Fussell On Class

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Moritz S. Contact Info: acx[period]organizer[period]munich[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 12th, 5:00 PM Location: Müllerstraße 35, TeamWork conference space Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWH4HJ9+7P Group Link: https://acxmeetup.substack.com/ Notes: Local blogosphere enthusiasts are welcome to subscribe to our regular newsletter; you will also find a WhatsApp-group over there. My ACX meetups happen ~3 weeks. STUTTGART Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[period]Bachelor[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Meeting in Milaneo mall courtyard, outside Starbucks, for ease of finding. Moving to my flat, above, for the main meetup. I will wear my white “shrimp love me, un-aligned AIs fear me” hat, and an orange T-shirt with the EICAR string as a QR code. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8 Group Link: https://discord.gg/USE [remove this bit] SQgzg (Say in the Introductions channel you’re here for Stuttgart)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWH4HJ9+7P, https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8

Contact: Steve Contact Info: Steve[period]Bachelor[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Meeting in Milaneo mall courtyard, outside Starbucks, for ease of finding. Moving to my flat, above, for the main meetup. I will wear my white “shrimp love me, un-aligned AIs fear me” hat, and an orange T-shirt with the EICAR string as a QR code. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8 Group Link: https://discord.gg/USE [remove this bit] SQgzg (Say in the Introductions channel you’re here for Stuttgart)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8

Sunnyvale5 mentions across 5 issues

Sunnyvale is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 24, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale"; "but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale, Cypress, and Compton, California"; "SUNNYVALE (SOUTH BAY SF AREA), CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside Berkeley, Boston, California.

Article page: Sunnyvale
Mention count: 5
Issue count: 5
First seen: February 24, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Fussell On Class February 24, 2021
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Berkeley 5 shared issues
Boston 5 shared issues
California 5 shared issues
Colorado 5 shared issues
Dallas 5 shared issues

Source context

February 24, 2021 · Original source

Where then may a member of the top classes live in this country? New York first of all, of course. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Boston. Perhaps Cleveland. And deep in the countryside of Connecticut, New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. That's about it. It’s not considered good form to live in New Jersey, except in Bernardsville and perhaps Princeton, but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale, Cypress, and Compton, California; Canton, Ohio; Reno, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Columbus, Georgia, and similar army towns.

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA (see Sunnyvale)

SUNNYVALE (SOUTH BAY SF AREA), CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Allison Contact Info: southbaymeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 29th, 02:00 PM Location: Washington Park (840 W Washington Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94086) We'll be in the northeast end of the park, under the trees in a large grassy area. There will be a folding table with an ACX Meetup sign taped to it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9J Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8v8KcRGRBesXaXeox/south-bay-acx-ssc-spring-meetups-everywhere

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9J, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8v8KcRGRBesXaXeox/south-bay-acx-ssc-spring-meetups-everywhere

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Allison Contact Info: southbaymeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 14th, 2:00 PM Location: Washington Park (840 W Washington Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94086, USA). We will be on the roundish grassy area in the northeast corner of the park. Look for the folding table with attached ACX Meetup sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9F Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DcafHPWLuoKMt4Cug/south-bay-acx-ssc-fall-meetups-everywhere Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I bring enough food/drinks. Children and on-leash dogs are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9F, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DcafHPWLuoKMt4Cug/south-bay-acx-ssc-fall-meetups-everywhere

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Isaac Contact Info: cis[a t]sas[period]upenn[period]edu Time: Saturday, September 27th, 03:00 PM Location: Brautovich Park, North Benjamin Drive Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV Group Link: https://discord.gg/en3 [remove this bit] mBMXs8q Notes: Kids and dogs welcome. Please RSVP so I know if anyone is going to show! SUNNYVALE Contact: Jon Wolverton Contact Info: wolverton[period]jr[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 28th, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at Washington Park. We'll be in a small picnic area under some trees next to the playground. Just walk around the playground until you find 3 picnic tables with a sign saying "ACX MEETUP". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+V2 Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong Notes: We'll be out there for 3 hours or so, so come join when you can and leave when you want. Feel free to bring kids & dogs since we're outdoors and next to a playground.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV, https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+V2, https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Ryan W. Contact Info: 6308061626 Time: Saturday, April 25th, 4:00 PM Location: 8 la paz st. Simi Valley, CA 93065 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4 Group Link: https://discord.gg/tJt [remove this bit] 6Aghu Notes: RSVP required. Kid friendly. SUNNYVALE Contact: Jon Wolverton Contact Info: wolverton[.]jr[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at Washington Park. We’l be in a small picnic area under some trees next to the playground. Just walk around the playground until you find picnic tables under a sign saying “ACX MEETUP” Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+V2 Group Link: bayarealesswrong@googlegroups.com Notes: We’re meeting outdoors in a park next to a playground, so kids & pets are welcome!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4, https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+V2

Sao Paulo4 mentions across 4 issues

Sao Paulo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 09, 2022 and April 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "its 1964 city hall looks like worker housing in Sao Paulo"; "And Sao Paulo has been added to the list"; "More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw". It most often appears alongside ACX, Brooklyn, Robin Hanson.

Article page: Sao Paulo
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: December 09, 2022
Last seen: April 21, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise December 09, 2022
Open Thread 327 April 28, 2024
Open Thread 328 May 06, 2024
Open Thread 378 April 21, 2025

ACX 2 shared issues
Brooklyn 2 shared issues
Robin Hanson 2 shared issues
WARSAW 2 shared issues
417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire 1 shared issues

Source context

December 09, 2022 · Original source

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

Inline links: writes, writes, writes, on the WASP aristocracy, thinks I’m mostly wrong, writes

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

Open Thread 328

May 06, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw. See the meetups post for more info. And note addition of Kaduna, Nigeria.

Inline links: the meetups post

Open Thread 378

April 21, 2025 · Original source

1: ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See the post for details. And remember there’s a feedback form for meetup-goers.

Inline links: the post, feedback form

Senegal4 mentions across 4 issues

Senegal is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 06, 2021 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a cryptocurrency city in Senegal"; "to end malaria in Senegal"; "For $1 million, we can cure malaria in Senegal". It most often appears alongside Charter Cities Institute, ACX Grants, Akon.

Article page: Senegal
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: December 06, 2021
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

21 December 06, 2021
Impact Markets: The Annoying Details July 15, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity January 11, 2024
25 October 28, 2025

Charter Cities Institute 3 shared issues
ACX Grants 2 shared issues
Akon 2 shared issues
Akon City 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues

Source context

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

Impact Markets: The Annoying Details

July 15, 2022 · Original source

For example, suppose I come up with a great idea to end malaria in Senegal. I need $1 million to make it work, and when it works it will be worth $5 million in benefits to the Senegalese. Ordinary charitable foundations don’t appreciate my genius, so I pitch it to VCs with biotech experience. They like it and buy 100% of the shares for $1 million. I take my million dollars, do the project, and cure malaria in Senegal. Foundations see that I have done a great thing with $5 million in benefits, so they give me $5 million. I pass this along to my investors, who make $5 million on a $1 million investment. They’re very happy, and incentivized to do more things like this in the future.

A charity offers a single impact certificate representing a project. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they sell a single certificate representing that project for $1 million. Then, when an final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they give $5 million to the holder of the certificate.

A charity offers splits its offering into many shares or tokens. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they could sell 10,000 tokens for $100 each. Then, when a final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they compensate each token holder with 1/10,000th of the final reward, so $500.

Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity

January 11, 2024 · Original source

Most people have no idea how much harder it is to do legal business in developing nations. The upside of making Prospera-quality law and adjutication available in zones in Africa will be significant over time. My wife, Magatte Wade, is working to bring Prospera to Africa because of this. She also writes and speaks about the ridiculous over-regulation of business in Africa that makes it necessary - she has first hand experience of what it is like to do business in the US vs. in Senegal. The fact that African nations are ranked at the bottom of the Doing Business index is not an artifact of measurement.

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”)

On the other hand, the history of African model cities backed by diaspora celebrities isn’t great. In 2022, the African-American rapper Akon said he was going to build a “real-life Wakanda” in Senegal called “Akon City”; also, it would be on the blockchain. To the shock of everyone involved, this did not work out, although there is a half-completed Welcome Center on the site.

Inline links: Akon City

Seoul4 mentions across 4 issues

Seoul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 28, 2021 and September 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "whole shelves of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul"; "whole shelves’ of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul"; "most recently U ... such as that place with Seoul". It most often appears alongside Albany, America, Amsterdam.

Article page: Seoul
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: September 22, 2025

Issue trail

Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate November 07, 2023
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Open Thread 400 September 22, 2025

Albany 2 shared issues
America 2 shared issues
Amsterdam 2 shared issues
Belgrade 2 shared issues
Boston 2 shared issues

Source context

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

June 28, 2021 · Original source

Korean bureaucrats were reading not the rising American stars of neo-liberal economics, or even Adam Smith, but instead [German development expert and tariff proponent] Friedrich List. The Korea and Taiwan scholar Robert Wade observed when he was teaching in Korea in the late 1970s that ‘whole shelves’ of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul. When he moved to the Massachussetts Insitute of Technology, Wade found that a solitary copy of List’s main work had last been taken out of the library in 1966. Such are the different economics appropriate to different stages of development. In Korea, List’s ideas for a national system of development were being adapted to a country with a population far smaller than Germany’s or Japan’s, and with a mid-1970s GDP per capita on par with Guatemala. The ideas were implemented in the teeth of the worst international trading conditions for a generation featuring two unprecedented energy crises. It did not matter. Park motored on regardless. Each time the US, the World Bank and the IMF urged him to back away from his state-led industrial policy he agreed - and then did precisely nothing (or occasionally a very little ). Park was a leader of conviction, and his convictions were based in history.

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.

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ewan Contact Info: ewantsun0[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:30 PM Location: Address: 8 Marina View, #02-08/10 Asia Square Tower 1, Singapore 018960 (Asia Square Food Garden) I'll be at the centre of the Food Garden, wearing a green shirt. (There won't be any 'ACX Meetup' sign, but there shouldn't be anyone else at the venue so there's little risk of getting confused with another group.) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ Group Link: https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl. A LessWrong group is here: https://t.me/Less [remove this part] Wrong_Singapore Andrew, a different organizer, has monthly meetups here: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: Vis-a-vis navigation: (1) Asia Square is just a short walk from Shenton Way MRT Station. (2) Please go to the right tower (Tower 1)! Also note that the Food Garden will be closed, but I'll be bringing some (vegan-friendly) food and drinks. South Korea SEOUL Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

Open Thread 400

September 22, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Albany, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Boston, Brooklyn, Budapest, Chicago, Christchurch, Helsinki, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Mumbai, Rochester, Seoul, Shanghai, St. Paul, Tallinn, Vienna, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Zagreb has been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

Skopje4 mentions across 4 issues

Skopje is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "SKOPJE, MACEDONIA ( RSVP )"; "I think Skopje is a major counterargument"; "except Skopje, which has one scheduled for December". It most often appears alongside France, Macedonia, Mingyuan.

Article page: Skopje
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: April 10, 2022

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture October 04, 2021
Open Thread 196 October 31, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022

France 3 shared issues
Macedonia 3 shared issues
Mingyuan 3 shared issues
Nigeria 3 shared issues
Paris 3 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA (RSVP) Contact: Qantarot, info[at]kantarot[dot]mk Time: 5:00 PM, Wednesday, December 22 Location: Rooftop of the Intertec building in Skopje (outdoor but heated and covered in case of rain). Since you'll need to be let in, RSVPing is encouraged. You can also contact me the day of the meetup at +389 seven one 890 497. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/libraries.describe.fresh Notes: I run a blog that recently spun off a foundation. In Skopje we have a small but passionate rationality community that gravitates around my blog/foundation and we would love to grow the community and raise awareness about EA / ACX.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/libraries.describe.fresh, a blog, a foundation

October 04, 2021 · Original source

I think Skopje is a major counterargument to Scott's claim about people preferring traditional architectural styles. Briefly, the Macedonian government decided to build a bunch of public buildings and monuments in a neo-classical style to remind everyone of their ancient heritage - it looks awful, and everyone inside and outside the country agrees that the buildings are super kitschy and shouldn't have been built.

Open Thread 196

October 31, 2021 · Original source

1: We’re finally done with meetup season (except Skopje, which has one scheduled for December, but which I am officially declaring Doesn’t Count). If you organized or attended a meetup, Mingyuan would like you to fill out a survey on your experience. And thank you for bearing with the lower frequency of posts while I was in Europe.

Inline links: a survey on your experience

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA Contact: Qantarot (info@kantarot.mk) Date: April 20 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GH3XCVH+8Q Location: Terrace of gastroteka Siesta

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GH3XCVH+8Q

South Sudan4 mentions across 4 issues

South Sudan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 23, 2021 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "South Sudan has been independent for nine years"; "civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine"; "JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN". It most often appears alongside Europe, France, Greece.

Article page: South Sudan
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: March 23, 2021
Last seen: August 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Antifragile March 23, 2021
Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World August 11, 2023

Europe 3 shared issues
France 3 shared issues
Greece 3 shared issues
Britain 2 shared issues
Canada 2 shared issues

Source context

March 23, 2021 · Original source

This was also the section with the famous Lindy Effect: if something doesn't have a specific lifespan like humans do, then we should expect older ones to last longer than new ones. For example, people have been reading the Iliad for 2500 years, but Antifragile for only eight years; probably Antifragile will sink out of the popular imagination before the Iliad does. Or: San Marino has been independent for 1500 years, and South Sudan has been independent for nine years; probably San Marino will outlast South Sudan. Judaism has been around for 3000 years and Scientology for 50; probably Judaism will remain when Scientology is relegated to the history books.

July 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World

April 10, 2023 · Original source

JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN Contact: Daniel Contact Info: dnledvs[at]gmail.com Time: Sunday, April 23rd, 03:00 PM. Location: I'll be at La Familia (Hai Cinema) at 3pm on Sunday 23 April. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GPHRJR5+JFQ

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GPHRJR5+JFQ

August 11, 2023 · Original source

These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions. He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn't hurt either – that's the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book. So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react. Is it true? Economists and historians think about Western history very differently. Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you. Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You've got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won't believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon's armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn't, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result. You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where X happened long ago

Inline links: one of the scientific articles behind

Southern California4 mentions across 4 issues

Southern California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 11, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "he is a therapist on the list, based in Southern California"; "It guessed Southern California, USA"; "available at Whole Foods in Southern California". It most often appears alongside Barcelona, China, Detroit.

Article page: Southern California
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: December 11, 2023
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 306 December 11, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr May 08, 2025
Open Thread 391 July 21, 2025
25 October 28, 2025

Barcelona 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Detroit 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues
@DeepGuessr 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 306

December 11, 2023 · Original source

3: A few years ago I started the Psychiatlist, a list of psychiatrists and therapists endorsed by ACX readers (though not checked by me). I let it lapse pretty badly for a while, but some good work by Erik Anderson and Josh Haas has it up and running again at psychiatlist.astralcodexten.com. Thanks especially to Erik for kickstarting this process (and by the way he is a therapist on the list, based in Southern California).

Inline links: psychiatlist.astralcodexten.com

Book Review: Crazy Like Us

May 08, 2025 · Original source

...ce wrong: 3 km - It guessed Fort Frederick State Park, Maryland (USA) which was correct. - It guessed Atlanta GA, was Gatlinsburg TN. Distance wrong: 230 km - It guessed Southern California, USA was Six Flags NJ. Distance wrong: 3800 km Fermion concluded “It got the tourist destinations where there were a lot pictures taken very accurately for example pictu...

...oit. Distance wrong: 3 km - It guessed Fort Frederick State Park, Maryland (USA) which was correct. - It guessed Atlanta GA, was Gatlinsburg TN. Distance wrong: 230 km - It guessed Southern California, USA was Six Flags NJ. Distance wrong: 3800 km Fermion concluded “It got the tourist destinations where there were a lot pictures taken very accurately for example pictures ,...

Open Thread 391

July 21, 2025 · Original source

IAA is promoting a technological solution - in ovo sexing - that lets farmers identify eggs by sex and only hatch the female ones. This is already widespread in Europe, but recently got its first American champion in NestFresh, available at Whole Foods in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada now, and elsewhere later this year. Other companies are watching their performance - so if you support this effort, consider buying NestFresh eggs with the "Humanely Hatched" label. Read more here.

Inline links: here

October 28, 2025 · Original source

And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much

Sri Lanka4 mentions across 4 issues

Sri Lanka is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 15, 2021 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "One of the worst-affected countries was Sri Lanka, where 30,000 people died"; "a total lack of even the tiniest amount of actual knowledge about Sri Lanka"; "Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp". It most often appears alongside Trump, California, China.

Article page: Sri Lanka
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: July 15, 2021
Last seen: February 03, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Crazy Like Us July 15, 2021
Links For July July 29, 2022
Bride Of Bay Area House Party August 17, 2023
25 February 03, 2025

Trump 3 shared issues
California 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Peter Thiel 2 shared issues
Twitter 2 shared issues

Source context

July 15, 2021 · Original source

III. PTSD In Sri Lanka

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.

I cannot do justice to Crazy Like Us’ excellent portrayal of these people. They combined a genuine and admirable desire to go halfway around the world to help people in need, with a burning desire to be “culturally sensitive” and reject “white savior narratives”, with a total lack of even the tiniest amount of actual knowledge about Sri Lanka. The island nation was [insert some term other than “inundated” or “flooded”] with a [insert some term other than “tide”] of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists, holding public awareness campaigns, appearing on TV/radio/etc, browbeating Sri Lankan officials for not caring enough about the mental health aspect of recovery. Through this whole process they were all tripping over each other to look culturally aware despite having no clue what they were doing. My favorite anecdote was the training lectures, where earnest sensitivity counselors would tell play therapists not to play “Go Fish” with young survivors - given that many of their parents had just been swallowed by the sea.

Links For July

July 29, 2022 · Original source

35: Adrian D’Souza on Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. I’d heard a lot about the role of their decision to switch to all-organic farming, but it seems more like a typical case of “leader who wants to say in power borrows lots of money, spends it on popular projects, then can’t pay it back”; the organic farming was partly a fig leaf to cover up being too poor to afford fertilizer.

Inline links: on Sri Lanka’s economic crisis

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

August 17, 2023 · Original source

“There is a bird from the jungles of Burma. Cut off its beak and claws, then keep it in a dark iron cage for its entire life, and eventually it will produce a curious round white stone. Break the stone and fry the golden liquid inside. Garnish with a black spice from Sri Lanka, and a ground-up pinkish rock mined from a cave discovered by Alexander the Great just below the tallest mountain in the world.”

Inline links: from a cave discovered by Alexander the Great just below the tallest mountain in the world

February 03, 2025 · Original source

But he seems to have landed on his feet - his website now advertises an Investment & Innovation Startup Zone in Sri Lanka.

Inline links: his website, Investment & Innovation Startup Zone in Sri Lanka

St. Paul4 mentions across 4 issues

St. Paul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 21, 2021 and September 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Tulsa"; "ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA"; "Meetups this week include... St. Paul". It most often appears alongside Argentina, Australia, Baltimore.

Article page: St. Paul
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: September 22, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024
Open Thread 400 September 22, 2025

Argentina 3 shared issues
Australia 3 shared issues
Baltimore 3 shared issues
Barcelona 3 shared issues
Belgrade 3 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Tulsa are effectively ocean ports, thanks to the extensive navigable waterways.

March 30, 2024 · Original source

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 5:00 PM Location: Party room in Davanni's Pizza, at 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+WX Group Link: https://discord.gg/RnkfQW9dVK

Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Victor Contact Info: wooddellv[at]yahoo[do t]com Time: Friday, September 27th, 06:00 PM Location: The Panera Bread at the corner of 13 mile and Woodward Ave, in Royal Oak, MI. There will be a sign indicating the section of the restaurant reserved for us. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3 Notes: RSVP Required (so that I can reserve enough space) Contact me at wooddellv@yahoo.com Minnesota ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, USA Contact: Aaron Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, October 13th, 04:00 PM Location: Davanni's Pizza: 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: Discord link for the MSP ACX meetup group: https://discord.gg/m2xJcuC937 Notes: I'll be providing pizza! Vegans are free to bring their own food (Davanni's selection here isn't great); I'll be getting a vegetarian and gluten-free pizza along with other kinds of pizza. RSVPs on lesswrong would be great.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3, https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX, https://discord.gg/m2xJcuC937

Open Thread 400

September 22, 2025 · Original source

1: Meetups this week include Albany, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Boston, Brooklyn, Budapest, Chicago, Christchurch, Helsinki, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Mumbai, Rochester, Seoul, Shanghai, St. Paul, Tallinn, Vienna, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Zagreb has been added to the list for October.

Inline links: the meetup post

Sudan4 mentions across 4 issues

Sudan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 03, 2021 and October 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Japan buys peanuts from Sudan at a price that’s much closer to the indifference price of Sudanese sellers"; "The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan"; "exceeded only by places like Sudan and Yemen in the midst of civil wars". It most often appears alongside United States, Asia, Joe Biden.

Article page: Sudan
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: June 03, 2021
Last seen: October 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies June 03, 2021
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness February 22, 2023
Preliminary Milei Report Card October 01, 2024
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein October 30, 2024

United States 3 shared issues
Asia 2 shared issues
Joe Biden 2 shared issues
Spain 2 shared issues
USA 2 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2021 · Original source

⊙ The first world might be capturing more of the gains through trade when trading with developing countries (e.g. Japan buys peanuts from Sudan at a price that’s much closer to the indifference price of Sudanese sellers than that of Japan’s buyers), a source of ‘income’ I expect will disappear as those developing countries become more powerful. I tried to find out how true this by googling around for it; apparently this idea is a subclaim of ‘dependency theory’ and if you open the Wikipedia article for it, there’s a banner at the top saying “someone wrote a rant here, please trust it less than usual”.

Inline links: Wikipedia article

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.

Preliminary Milei Report Card

October 01, 2024 · Original source

The IMF says Argentina’s economy this year is among the worst in the world, exceeded only by places like Sudan and Yemen in the midst of civil wars. Even Ukraine and Russia are doing better! (also, what’s happening in Estonia?) According to classical economics, this kind of “shock therapy” is supposed to be temporarily bad, but long-run good. So although it probably doesn’t feel this way to Argentines, things are potentially still going according to plan. But economics doesn’t have a clear prediction for how bad things will get, or how long it will take before they are good again, and I haven’t seen any analysis of whether the current recession is consistent with predictions or whether people should start worrying.

Inline links: The IMF

ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein

October 30, 2024 · Original source

A long time ago, I wrote about the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup. Ingroup and outgroup you know. But how come people have stronger emotions about Ibram X. Kendi (or Chris Rufo) than about Kim Jong-un or whoever's committing the latest genocide in Sudan? It's not because you're American and naturally care about American affairs - how about that Brazilian judge who banned Elon Musk's X? It's because all those guys are part of your psychodrama and some Sudanese psychopath isn't. Well, Kamala Harris' price controls are my outgroup; Donald Trump setting tariffs is my fargroup.

Inline links: the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup

Suisun City4 mentions across 4 issues

Suisun City is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 04, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the mayor of nearby Suisun City, Princess Washington"; "the mayor of nearby Suisun City"; "mayor of nearby Suisun City". It most often appears alongside California Forever, Honduras, Prospera.

Article page: Suisun City
Mention count: 4
Issue count: 4
First seen: September 04, 2023
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

23: California Dreamin' September 04, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
25 February 03, 2025
25 October 28, 2025

California Forever 4 shared issues
Honduras 4 shared issues
Prospera 4 shared issues
San Francisco 4 shared issues
California 3 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 04, 2023 · Original source

According to this article, the mayor of nearby Suisun City, Princess Washington, worries that it will be “a city for the elite”. Although her concerns seem misplaced, her name makes her sounds like a powerful and majestic opponent.

Inline links: this article

September 11, 2023 · Original source

» “According to this article, the mayor of nearby Suisun City, Princess Washington, worries that it will be “a city for the elite”. Although her concerns seem misplaced, her name makes her sounds like a powerful and majestic opponent.”

February 03, 2025 · Original source

But in the past few days, the situation has changed. Suisun City, a nearby small town, has announced that it is considering annexing the California Forever land. Since the project was previously blocked by laws restricting building on unincorporated land, getting annexed by a city - and maybe running their project under the Suisun City banner - would solve many of their problems. Suisun City is struggling financially, and it would make sense for them to offer legal protection in exchange for money. The city mayor sort of halfway-kind-of-denies that’s what she’s doing, but California Forever is unpopular among Suisun City voters - if the story were actually false, I would expect her to make stronger denials.

Inline links: it is considering annexing

October 28, 2025 · Original source

See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)

Inline links: here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds

Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)

Suisun City Council must approve the annexation (city council has already voted in favor of California Forever before and will likely do so again)

San Diego, CA3 mentions across 3 issues

San Diego, 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 "SAN DIEGO, CA ( RSVP )"; "SAN DIEGO, CA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

Article page: San Diego, CA
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 3 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 3 shared issues
Alex 3 shared issues
Anastasia 3 shared issues
Bangalore 3 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SAN DIEGO, CA (RSVP) Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, September 18 Location: Bird Park; I'll be wear a red shirt and a baseball cap Coordinates: https://w3w.co/deed.rift.people

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/deed.rift.people

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SAN DIEGO, CA Contact: Julius (julius.simonelli@gmail.com) Date: May 7 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+MF Location: We'll meet near the bench in Bird Park. I'll wear a red shirt. Group info: San Diego ACX meets roughly once a month

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+MF, San Diego ACX

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.

San Francisco, CA3 mentions across 3 issues

San Francisco, 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 "SAN FRANCISCO, CA ( RSVP )"; "SAN FRANCISCO, CA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

Article page: San Francisco, CA
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 3 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 3 shared issues
Alex 3 shared issues
Anastasia 3 shared issues
Bangalore 3 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (RSVP) Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Dolores Park, San Francisco | On the grass, near the tennis courts, I'll hold up an ACX sign Coordinates: https://w3w.co/skips.turned.action

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/skips.turned.action

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SAN FRANCISCO, CA Contact: Maggie (reduplicate.totto@gmail.com) Date: April 16 Time: 4:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQJF4+6G Location: Mission Creek Park Pavilion

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQJF4+6G

Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

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.

Seville3 mentions across 3 issues

Seville is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 10, 2022 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Portuguese slave traders began to operate in Seville, Spain"; "7.4 percent of the population in Seville, Spain were slaves"; "SEVILLE". It most often appears alongside Discord, Ireland, Israel.

Article page: Seville
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: October 10, 2022
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day October 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Discord 3 shared issues
Ireland 3 shared issues
Israel 3 shared issues
North America 3 shared issues
Poland 3 shared issues

Source context

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.

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Antonio Contact Info: wachichornia[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 19, 04:00 PM Location: La Canasta en La Malagueta Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C8QPH9Q+Q6 SEVILLE Contact: Hugo V Contact Info: Hviciana[a t]us[period]es Time: Friday, October 17th, 7:00 PM Location: We will grab a drink and perhaps some food at TobyEatsTheWorld next to Torre del Oro. By default, I’ll be at a table wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt, with a sign that says ACX MEETUP. But if you think you might attend, please send me an email so we can coordinate more easily! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9P92J3+VRX Notes: Please send an email so that we can coordinate more easily. Feel free to bring kids/dogs.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8C8QPH9Q+Q6, https://plus.codes/8C9P92J3+VRX

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Manuel Contact Info: carrodetespis[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: The Auditorio park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7 Notes: Let me know via email if there’s a chance you will be coming SEVILLE Contact: Hugo V Contact Info: Hviciana[@]us[.]es Time: Sunday, May 10th, 10:15 AM Location: Café Piola, Alameda/Calle Relator Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9PC224+4P Notes: If weather allows, we will be sitting outside. Kids and family are welcome. Dogs too but only if we sit outside. We plan to go for a walk around the river and the Cartuja Island afterwards. Everyone is welcome but please send an email to my email so we can coordinate more easily.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7, https://plus.codes/8C9PC224+4P

Sicily3 mentions across 3 issues

Sicily is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 06, 2021 and August 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "most densely urbanized areas were ... Sicily"; "In the west, the most densely urbanized areas were ... Sicily"; "rural Mississippi or Sicily". It most often appears alongside ancient Greece, Britain, France.

Article page: Sicily
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: August 24, 2023

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021
The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences August 24, 2023

ancient Greece 2 shared issues
Britain 2 shared issues
France 2 shared issues
Germany 2 shared issues
India 2 shared issues

Source context

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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.

August 24, 2023 · Original source

Is it presumptuous of a restaurant to tell you what kind of food they serve? What their hours are? What their prices are? Where they’re located? The story of how they were founded by an Italian immigrant trying to create food like his mother made back in Sicily with ingredients from blah blah blah? “Oooh, look at this fancy pizza place, they think I care enough about them to read their menu online”. Again, why do you want to know less about the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life than about where to go for dinner?

Simi Valley3 mentions across 3 issues

Simi Valley is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 29, 2025 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: My house, back porch"; "Meetups this week in ... Simi Valley"; "SIMI VALLEY". It most often appears alongside Berkeley, Bozeman, Discord.

Article page: Simi Valley
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025
Open Thread 397 September 01, 2025
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

Berkeley 3 shared issues
Bozeman 3 shared issues
Discord 3 shared issues
Erlangen 3 shared issues
London 3 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ron Contact Info: eyeronik1[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 2:00 PM Location: Escalona Drive between Mirimar Dr and Berkshire - Look for flags Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX83+94 SIMI VALLEY Contact: Ryan W Contact Info: wiserd[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 2:00 PM Location: My house, back porch Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637673+HF Notes: Kid and small pet friendly. Please rsvp.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/848VXX83+94, https://plus.codes/85637673+HF

Contact: Ryan W Contact Info: wiserd[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 2:00 PM Location: My house, back porch Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637673+HF Notes: Kid and small pet friendly. Please rsvp.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85637673+HF

Open Thread 397

September 01, 2025 · Original source

3: Meetups this week in Athens, Markham, Bozeman, Barcelona, Bucharest, Dayton, Dubai, Edinburgh, Erlangen, Klang Valley, Lyon, Manhattan/NYC, Newton (MA), Northampton (MA), Simi Valley, Vancouver, Williamsburg, and Zurich, see the meetups post for more. And two minor corrections: Berkeley is on Tuesday (not Thursday), and London is on Saturday (not Friday).

Inline links: the meetups post

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: David Friedman Contact Info: ddfr[@]daviddfriedman[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd,San Jose, CA 95117. Big blue house, corner of Keltner and Williams Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will know how many we are feeding SIMI VALLEY Contact: Ryan W. Contact Info: 6308061626 Time: Saturday, April 25th, 4:00 PM Location: 8 la paz st. Simi Valley, CA 93065 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4 Group Link: https://discord.gg/tJt [remove this bit] 6Aghu Notes: RSVP required. Kid friendly.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html, https://plus.codes/85637663+W4

Contact: Ryan W. Contact Info: 6308061626 Time: Saturday, April 25th, 4:00 PM Location: 8 la paz st. Simi Valley, CA 93065 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4 Group Link: https://discord.gg/tJt [remove this bit] 6Aghu Notes: RSVP required. Kid friendly.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4

Solano County3 mentions across 3 issues

Solano County is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 04, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The specific land is farmland in Solano County"; "Solano County has a so-called 'Orderly Growth Measure'"; "ensuring nobody builds anything outside existing cities in Solano County". It most often appears alongside California Forever, Honduras, Prospera.

Article page: Solano County
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: September 04, 2023
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

23: California Dreamin' September 04, 2023
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
25 October 28, 2025

California Forever 3 shared issues
Honduras 3 shared issues
Prospera 3 shared issues
Prospera 3 shared issues
San Francisco 3 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 04, 2023 · Original source

The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this:

Inline links: Jan Sramek

In another sense, this is an extremely risky investment with a long and unclear path to profitability. You can make a killing selling housing in California because there’s constricted supply. There’s constricted supply for legal reasons. Building your own town routes around some, but not all, of the legal problems. And it causes new legal problems of its own. Solano County has a so-called “Orderly Growth Measure” saying that new building should happen in existing cities and not on empty land. In order to start building at all, Flannery has to win a referendum granting an exemption. But they already have a powerful coalition of local enemies: Three months ago, Flannery sued a group of local farmers who wouldn’t sell to them, accusing them of “conspiring to inflate the value of the land”. This isn’t implausible - a known risk of trying to buy lots of contiguous land without eminent domain powers is that locals realize you’re desperate and conspire to raise prices. But it’s also not implausible that billionaires trying to get farmers to sell their land are playing legal hardball. In any case, local officials and farming activist groups took the farmers’ side and are now really mad.

Inline links: accusing them of

Solano County Orderly Growth Committee is a forty-year-old “watchdog and community action group” ensuring nobody builds anything outside existing cities in Solano County. They are pro-farm, pro-wilderness, and anti-”endless and sprawling subdivisions”. They haven’t yet expressed an opinion on Flannery but it seems like the epitome of the thing they exist to prevent.

Inline links: Solano County Orderly Growth Committee

September 11, 2023 · Original source

Original post: Model City Monday 9/4/23 Comments On The Solano County City Ecorche writes:

Inline links: Model City Monday 9/4/23, writes

Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”. No elite wants to live in Solano County (unless it’s their summer ranch home or something). The natural demographic is people priced out of the Bay.

October 28, 2025 · Original source

See here for a more complete history of the island, and here for a Charter Cities Institute podcast on the topic. California Maybe Actually Pretty Soon Now California Forever, the project to build a new city in unoccupied land an hour from San Francisco, has overcome a first round of political headwinds. In 2023, a stealth mode company announced it had quietly bought up a city-sized tract of land in Solano County, and would be placing an initiative on the county ballot to let them build a futuristic planned community there. Enough local NIMBYs protested that the company and county jointly withdrew the initiative in favor of seeking some other agreement. In 2025, they announced their new strategy: they would partner with nearby Suisun City. Suisun would annex their land and permit development there, avoiding a county-wide referendum (they might also make a deal with another nearby city, Rio Vista). The new plan is moving forward: earlier this month, California Forever submitted their annexation paperwork, which was deemed complete by the city. The remaining steps are: Suisun City Council must approve their environmental impact report (may cause delays and added expense, but unlikely to block the project outright)

Inline links: here, here, has overcome a first round of political headwinds

The Solano County Local Agency Formation Commission - a county-level body of two supervisors, two local mayors, and a public member - must approve the annexation (may be complicated; lots of room for NIMBYs to cause problems here)

South Asia3 mentions across 3 issues

South Asia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 21, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "India, hurting the Soviets in South Asia"; ""economic and energy crises for Europe, East Asia, and South Asia""; "there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa". It most often appears alongside ACX, Africa, Argentina.

Article page: South Asia
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: June 18, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change October 13, 2021
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates June 18, 2025

ACX 2 shared issues
Africa 2 shared issues
Argentina 2 shared issues
Australia 2 shared issues
Baltimore 2 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change

May 21, 2021 · Original source

American foreign policy comes off looking surprising competent through Zeihan’s story. In describing the history of Bretton Woods, he runs through some key participants and highlights the benefits of their membership. India, hurting the Soviets in South Asia; Sweden, hurting them in the Baltic; Argentina and Egypt, limiting their influence in South America and the Middle East; and most significantly, China, depriving them of their best ports. Why did America fight in Korea and Vietnam? To demonstrate the value of the security guarantee component of the Bretton Woods regime (“if the Americans proved unwilling to engage the Chinese in Korea, then was their security guarantee for the Germans against the Soviets really worth what they said it was?”).

If America withdraws, it “will simultaneously trigger economic and energy crises for Europe, East Asia, and South Asia and financial and security crises for the Persian Gulf states.” Zeihan’s positive scenario for this world involves mere austerity and Greece-like scenarios, and is premised on countries getting along peacefully, but he doesn’t expect that. “It is far more likely that they won’t [get along peacefully].” Instead, his expected and pessimistic scenario should be terrifying for those outside of the American bubble:

October 13, 2021 · Original source

Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans. He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with more people not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but also to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.

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.

South Bay3 mentions across 3 issues

South Bay is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 26, 2022 and September 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "occasional meetups in SF and South Bay"; "I live in the South Bay and have spoken with multiple random workers"; "The San Jose / South Bay meetup originally scheduled for this Saturday has been cancelled". It most often appears alongside ACX, Australia, Berkeley.

Article page: South Bay
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
23 September 21, 2023

ACX 2 shared issues
Australia 2 shared issues
Berkeley 2 shared issues
CA 2 shared issues
Cambridge 2 shared issues

Source context

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.

Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality

October 13, 2022 · Original source

Anecdotally, I live in the South Bay and have spoken with multiple random workers who have multiple hour commutes from the Central Valley. I can't find statistics on this, but this more-or-less matches what I'd expect- the people getting pushed out of the Bay Area due to housing prices are the poorest, not the richest.

September 21, 2023 · Original source

And an extra announcement: The San Jose / South Bay meetup originally scheduled for this Saturday has been cancelled due to unexpected circumstances, sorry.

South East Asia3 mentions across 3 issues

South East Asia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 23, 2021 and October 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mycelium says: In South East Asia, we have"; "'In South East Asia, we have two flu seasons a year - a summer season and a winter season'"; "the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia". It most often appears alongside America, China, HKU1.

Article page: South East Asia
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: December 23, 2021
Last seen: October 04, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality December 23, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate April 09, 2024
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument October 04, 2024

America 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
HKU1 2 shared issues
Maine 2 shared issues
Twitter 2 shared issues

Source context

December 23, 2021 · Original source

In South East Asia, we have two flu seasons a year - a summer season and a winter season - for EXACTLY the reason you mention - in the summer, people coop themselves up at home with the air-conditioning on full blast.

In the west, shade is adequate to cool you in the summer, so you don't need to close the windows and turn on the A/C. In South East Asia, the muggy air retains heat, requiring air-conditioning and reduced airflow.

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

April 09, 2024 · Original source

1. Xiao et al (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.

Inline links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B

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.

Stockton3 mentions across 3 issues

Stockton is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield"; "1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco"; "or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco". It most often appears alongside Bay Area, Sacramento, San Francisco.

Article page: Stockton
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023

Bay Area 3 shared issues
Sacramento 3 shared issues
San Francisco 3 shared issues
Bakersfield 2 shared issues
California 2 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

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

Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

October 13, 2022 · Original source

1. The 2009 housing bust hit HARD. Like, really hard. Housing prices skyrocketed in the couple years before and then in what seemed like overnight prices tanked and everyone lost their jobs. I recall hearing about cities like Stockton pushing a 25%+ unemployment rate. There were already crime and drug problems in cities like Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno, and that made everything worse.

"Most people in the central Valley are conservative." The Central Valley is certainly more conservative than CA coastal cities. By area, I have no doubt that the Central Valley is majority conservative. But, since the author is already lumping the entire Central Valley under a single umbrella, I would be curious if "most" actually bears out in the distribution of political affiliations among Central Valley-ites. Lump in Sacramento and Stockton, and, since the author says "most people" and not "most voters," all of the non-citizen farm workers (documented or not).

> Sometimes well-off residents of California coastal cities get houses in the Central Valley and commute. It’s about 2 hours from LA to Bakersfield, or 1.5 from Stockton to San Francisco, so it’s not worth it for most people. But Central Valley houses cost between 25% and 50% the cost of coastal houses, so I guess it’s worth it for some. I don’t know whether this is good (because these people bring money in and create jobs) or bad (because these people bid up land values).

September 11, 2023 · Original source

A couple would definitely need two cars. And over three hours of commuting per day to San Francisco would mean it's not that much more desirable of a location than existing downscale exurbs like Stockton, which could depress the quality of residents who'd be attracted by it.

Steve is right that many working-class people with SF jobs commute from Stockton (2:00 drive, 3:00 public transit each way), so this could still be an improvement.

(the three hour commute from Stockton involves some painful public transit connections; I wonder why there’s no commuter bus).

Stone Lake3 mentions across 3 issues

Stone Lake is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, ACX, ACX.

Article page: Stone Lake
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

200 Degrees 3 shared issues
ACX 3 shared issues
ACX 3 shared issues
ACX 3 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 3 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA Contact: Allison Contact Info: theswamphere[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 5:00 PM Location: Stone Lake Lions' Hall. Come to the main door which has the accessible ramp. ACX Meetup will be in the "cafe" portion, which you can see from the main door. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6 Notes: A regularly scheduled 2nd Saturday Barn Dance will be held in the dance hall portion of the building, at 7. You're welcome to stay, or welcome to leave after the ACX meetup.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6

March 30, 2024 · Original source

STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA Contact: A J Contact Info: theswamp[dot]here[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 5:30 PM Location: Stone Lake Lion's Hall, in the cafe area Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86QCRFW6+5J6

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Tara Contact Info: taraa1207[at]gmail[do t]com Time: Sunday, September 08th, 05:00 PM Location: On the big lawn right next to the Porter Boathouse, I'll be there on one of the benches wearing red Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MG3HHQ+82 Notes: Please RSVP by emailing me. If nobody RSVPs, I won’t be there. STONE LAKE, WISCONSIN, USA Contact: Ethan Contact Info: eleventhrootofseven[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 06:00 PM Location: Stone Lake Lions Hall @ 16831 W. Main Street Stone Lake, WI. Look for a yellow building on the corner of Main Street and Frost Avenue. Park anywhere close and walk up the ramp from Frost Avenue to enter. We'll be in the café.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86MG3HHQ+82

Contact: Ethan Contact Info: eleventhrootofseven[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 06:00 PM Location: Stone Lake Lions Hall @ 16831 W. Main Street Stone Lake, WI. Look for a yellow building on the corner of Main Street and Frost Avenue. Park anywhere close and walk up the ramp from Frost Avenue to enter. We'll be in the café.

Stonehenge3 mentions across 3 issues

Stonehenge is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 14, 2021 and September 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "if we bombed Stonehenge, it wouldn't be there anymore"; "Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge"; "build a Stonehenge or a Gobekli Tepe". It most often appears alongside Chinese, England, Rome.

Article page: Stonehenge
Mention count: 3
Issue count: 3
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: September 20, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021
Against Ice Age Civilizations March 03, 2023
Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse September 20, 2024

Chinese 2 shared issues
England 2 shared issues
Rome 2 shared issues
1700s Great Britain 1 shared issues
Acropolis of Athens 1 shared issues

Source context

Against Ice Age Civilizations

June 14, 2021 · Original source

And sure, maybe if Jews intermarry so much, and have very low fertility rates, they'll stop being a distinct ethnicity, and then there won't be any more interesting puzzle about Jewish achievement. This doesn't seem like an "answer" anymore than "if we bombed Stonehenge, it wouldn't be there anymore" "answers" the question of how and why Stonehenge was built.

March 03, 2023 · Original source

Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge

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

Inline links: Karaca Dag, Jarmo, Iraq, Cayonu Tepesi, Iraq, in two places in China, WTFwhatthehell, This paper finds lead levels started rising 1000 BC, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rPgI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6265c4a7-a563-477c-afbc-7b3c9b8dd73e_1280x1247.jpeg, Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.

Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse

September 20, 2024 · Original source

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

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA2 mentions across 2 issues

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 2740 Telegraph Avenue, 711 Milby St.

Article page: SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

200 Degrees 2 shared issues
2740 Telegraph Avenue 2 shared issues
711 Milby St 2 shared issues
ABUJA 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Willsen Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 29th, 3:00 PM Location: Backyard of private residence at 23rd and W St, in Midtown Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG69+M2 Notes: Email me for the specific address, it's easy to find

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHG69+M2

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julia and Andrew Contact Info: amethyst[dot]eggplant[at]gmail[dot]com; nightfall9[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 14th, 1:00 PM Location: A house at 22nd and W St in Midtown Sacramento Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+MV Group Link: Email for our discord Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get. I'll have podcasting equipment set up if anyone wants to record a spicy conversation, opt in only obviously

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CWHG68+MV

Sahara2 mentions across 2 issues

Sahara is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 06, 2021 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara"; "storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara". It most often appears alongside Catholic Church, France, Germany.

Article page: Sahara
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: October 01, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know October 01, 2025

Catholic Church 2 shared issues
France 2 shared issues
Germany 2 shared issues
Italy 2 shared issues
Milan 2 shared issues

Source context

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

May 06, 2021 · Original source

Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium.

The Respublica’s six hundred year rule of the West collapsed in a generation. The great pagan Roman senator Symmachus died in 402 AD at the age of 62. The empire had taken some serious blows during his life and Christianity had replaced state paganism as the dominant religion. Still, the empire was wealthy and the Respublica functioned as it had during the reign of Constantine, one hundred years before. The Respublica’s territory still stretched from northern England to the Sahara. By 440 AD, Respublica was fractured, much poorer, and in terminal decline.

October 01, 2025 · Original source

This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.

Inline links: wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases

Saint John2 mentions across 2 issues

Saint John is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 2740 Telegraph Avenue, 711 Milby St.

Article page: Saint John
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

200 Degrees 2 shared issues
2740 Telegraph Avenue 2 shared issues
711 Milby St 2 shared issues
ABUJA 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA Contact: Sergey Contact Info: spam04321[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 11:30 AM Location: McAllister's Place food court, assuming there's anyone interested in coming :) Meeting place is McAllister Place's food court; I will have some kind of a small sign for 'ACX Meetup'. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+WC Notes: If you're late -- keep in mind that we might move over to a nearby rest areas if that turns to be more convenient. If you are thinking about coming, please get in touch via e-mail and I'll share a phone number so that's easier to find me if needed. If you're late by more than ~20 minutes, you might want to get in touch and confirm as we might move.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+WC

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA Contact: Sergey Contact Info: spam04321[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:30 AM Location: McAllister Place food court, I'll have some kind of a small ACX MEETUP sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+XJP Notes: Please RSVP if you have any intention of coming as the event will only proceed if there's at least someone interested in coming.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+XJP

Saint Paul2 mentions across 2 issues

Saint Paul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Davanni's Pizza ; 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105"; "SAINT PAUL". It most often appears alongside 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road, 131 Colonie Center.

Article page: Saint Paul
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 25, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 2 shared issues
13 Mile road 2 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 2 shared issues
166 cours de l'Argonne (Maison Internationale) 2 shared issues
200 Degrees 2 shared issues

Source context

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Victor Contact Info: wooddellv[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Friday, April 11th, 06:00 PM Location: Panera Bread at the corner of Woodward and 13 Mile road, in Royal Oak. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3 Notes: Please RSVP to my email address. Minnesota SAINT PAUL Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 4th, 01:00 PM Location: Davanni's Pizza ; 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong so I know how much food to get. Also note that regrettably if you're a vegan davanni's has salad and little else (though I will be getting the salad).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3, https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, May 4th, 01:00 PM Location: Davanni's Pizza ; 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong so I know how much food to get. Also note that regrettably if you're a vegan davanni's has salad and little else (though I will be getting the salad).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Victor Contact Info: wooddellv[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Friday, September 19th, 6:00 PM Location: The Panera at the corner of Woodward Ave. and 13 Mile Road. I'll have a sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3 Notes: Please RSVP, so that I know what size table to reserve. Minnesota SAINT PAUL Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 28th, 4:00 PM Location: 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Davanni's Pizza Party Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: This is the minneapolis/st paul ACX Discord: https://discord.gg/m2x [remove this bit] JcuC937 Notes: I'll be ordering pizzas for the group, including vegetarian pizza. Note that Davanni's has no vegan options besides salad (though I will be ordering a group salad that should be vegan-compatible.)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3, https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 28th, 4:00 PM Location: 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Davanni's Pizza Party Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: This is the minneapolis/st paul ACX Discord: https://discord.gg/m2x [remove this bit] JcuC937 Notes: I'll be ordering pizzas for the group, including vegetarian pizza. Note that Davanni's has no vegan options besides salad (though I will be ordering a group salad that should be vegan-compatible.)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

Saint Petersburg2 mentions across 2 issues

Saint Petersburg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA ( RSVP )"; "not corrupt in Saint Petersburg". It most often appears alongside MOSCOW, New York City, Nick.

Article page: Saint Petersburg
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On Putin August 11, 2023

MOSCOW 2 shared issues
New York City 2 shared issues
Nick 2 shared issues
Russia 2 shared issues
1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Putin

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA (RSVP) Contact: Vit, imbarus[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 25 Location: Aleksandrovskiy Park near Gorkovskaya if the weather allows it, near Bolshe Coffee. Look for a huge guy with a moustache and a hat. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/logged.kitchens.lined

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/logged.kitchens.lined

August 11, 2023 · Original source

Short's biography certainly isn't pro-Putin, but very different from Gessen's. His Putin is somewhat defensible until the mid-2000s: not corrupt in Saint Petersburg, loyal to Sobchak and not responsible for his heart attack, not bombing apartments to come to power, willing to cooperate with the west until criticisms of the War in Chechnya pissed him off. Ultimately Short acknowledges that Putin became very evil with time, but it's quite a different biography than Gessen's in the aggregate it seemed better researched and more convincing.

Salt Lake2 mentions across 2 issues

Salt Lake is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 22, 2024 and April 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "More meetups this week: ... Salt Lake"; "This week’s meetups include Salt Lake". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Madrid, ACX.

Article page: Salt Lake
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 22, 2024
Last seen: April 07, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 326 April 22, 2024
Open Thread 376 April 07, 2025

Astralcodexten Com 2 shared issues
Madrid 2 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Atlanta 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 326

April 22, 2024 · Original source

1: More meetups this week: NYC, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake, Madrid, Zurich, Hyderabad, Rio, Taipei. And a new meetup has been added for Zwolle. See the list for more information.

Inline links: the list

Open Thread 376

April 07, 2025 · Original source

3: This week’s meetups include Canberra, Munich, Milan, Budapest, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Birmingham, Detroit, Charlotte, Salt Lake, and Toronto. See the list for smaller cities and details. And if you attended and have opinions, there's now a feedback form available here.

Inline links: See the list, here

SALT LAKE CITY, UT2 mentions across 2 issues

SALT LAKE CITY, UT is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 10, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "SALT LAKE CITY, UT". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Ala Moana Beach Park.

Article page: SALT LAKE CITY, UT
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Ala Moana Beach Park 2 shared issues
Alan Enright 2 shared issues
Alcampo Lounge 2 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SALT LAKE CITY, UT Contact: Ross (wearenotsaved@gmail.com) Date: April 23 Time: 3:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VH Location: Liberty Park Just across the parking lot from the ChargePoint stations Group info: Salt Lake City has regular meetups, contact Ross for more info

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VH

Highlights From The Comments On March Links

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.

Salvador2 mentions across 2 issues

Salvador is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 04, 2021 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts"; ""sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons"". It most often appears alongside Biden, China, Trevor Klee.

Article page: Salvador
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 04, 2021
Last seen: April 22, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On March Links March 04, 2021
Links For April 2025 April 22, 2025

Biden 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Trevor Klee 2 shared issues
Trump 2 shared issues
1856 Paris declaration 1 shared issues

Source context

March 04, 2021 · Original source

Local police departments in Brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen.

Links For April 2025

April 22, 2025 · Original source

Their source, humanphenotypes.net, divides humanity into a hundred or so ethnic groups. Although they cite sources, I don’t understand the philosophical basis of the classification. Also, 100 images is so few that you start memorizing them after a while. I hope they move on to real pictures of real people in naturalistic situations. Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK! 32: Farmkind has a new version of their calculator to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week? 33: Not going to waste your time listing every bad thing Trump has done this month, but among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons (including one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back. I have seen a couple of people defend denying immigrants due process; I assume they will not be moved by humanitarian arguments, but I think there are some more practical considerations: Zaid Jilani points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.

Inline links: humanphenotypes.net, a new version of their calculator, including, Zaid Jilani

San Fransicko2 mentions across 2 issues

San Fransicko is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I think San Fransicko gets this mostly right"; "Now let’s see what San Fransicko has to say"; "Continuing in San Fransicko :". It most often appears alongside Amsterdam, Bay Area, California.

Article page: San Fransicko
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 23, 2022
Last seen: June 29, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko June 29, 2022

Amsterdam 2 shared issues
Bay Area 2 shared issues
California 2 shared issues
Chicago 2 shared issues
Dennis Culhane 2 shared issues

Source context

June 23, 2022 · Original source

In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.

Things haven’t always been like this. San Francisco used to be one of the safest and most beautiful cities in the world. Shellenberger opens with the story of a 1970s SF candidate who campaigned on a message of public cleanliness, promising stronger punishments for owners who failed to pick up after their dogs. The message was a hit, so much so that the increased community and social pressure was enough to reverse the dog-poop-in-parks problem with minimal police enforcement.

In 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.”

June 29, 2022 · Original source

I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”

But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From this report, I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence.

Inline links: 70% of SF homeless, this report

Overall these numbers make me a little less worried about this concern. San Francisco is already quite generous, and even if some new policy doubled the absolute number of people who came from elsewhere, it would only increase the total number 10-20%.

San Jose, CA2 mentions across 2 issues

San Jose, CA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 30, 2021 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117"; "SAN JOSE, CA". It most often appears alongside ACX, David Friedman, effective altruism.

Article page: San Jose, CA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: May 30, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 174 May 30, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
David Friedman 2 shared issues
effective altruism 2 shared issues
't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 174

May 30, 2021 · Original source

1: The Bay Area will be having its first post-pandemic ACX meetup in June (fully vaccinated people only, please!) Sunday, June 13, 2 PM. 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence; there will be lots of outdoor space for people who don’t want to socialize indoors). I’ll be there. So will David Friedman and probably a lot of other people. You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.

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.

San Luis Obispo2 mentions across 2 issues

San Luis Obispo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 30, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 4th Ave Food Park, Aachen.

Article page: San Luis Obispo
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

200 Degrees 2 shared issues
4th Ave Food Park 2 shared issues
Aachen 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Denis Contact Info: denis[dot]lantsman[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:00 PM Location: Meadow Park, just south of the public restrooms Coordinates: https://plus.codes/847X789R+4C

Inline links: https://plus.codes/847X789R+4C

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: David Contact Info: ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 01st, 02:00 PM Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will have a rough count of how many we are feeding SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Denis Contact Info: denis[dot]lantsman[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 20th, 06:00 PM Location: Meadow Park. Picnic tables just south of the bathrooms / playground. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/847X789R+593 Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6P, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html, https://plus.codes/847X789R+593

Sandy Hook2 mentions across 2 issues

Sandy Hook is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 29, 2022 and January 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "zero murders in the town of Sandy Hook that year"; "Jones admitting he was lying about Sandy Hook during the lawsuit". It most often appears alongside Adobe Illustrator, COVID, Infowars.

Article page: Sandy Hook
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 29, 2022
Last seen: January 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying December 29, 2022
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying January 11, 2023

Adobe Illustrator 2 shared issues
COVID 2 shared issues
Infowars 2 shared issues
InfoWars 2 shared issues
Jones 2 shared issues

Source context

December 29, 2022 · Original source

I assume there was some right-wing misinformation about this at some point in between the establishment misinformation and the point where it became true-ish, but I can’t find it on a quick search. 4: Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory Ron writes:

Inline links: writes

Your analysis of InfoWars is itself lacking a key piece of context: you are reading its web site after it has declared bankruptcy following a $965 million verdict for defamation for claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and the bereaved parents were all professional actors. (Alex Jones, who runs InfoWars, also recently declared bankruptcy after a separate $473M verdict against himself personally.)

It's entirely reasonable that InfoWars completely revamped its approach to lying after those chickens came home to roost. I suspect that repeating the experiment with archived versions of the InfoWars front page on randomly selected dates in 2016-2021 would yield more examples of outright lies (not just about Sandy Hook), from before the site was deterred by defamation law.

Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying

January 11, 2023 · Original source

So 72% of people agreed that technically true but deliberately misleading things were lies. Could I have saved myself some trouble if I had titled the post “The Media Very Rarely Says False Things”? Or “The Media Very Rarely Makes Up Facts”? I think people would have been equally annoyed that I was using “false things” or “make up facts” in a way that excludes technically-true-but-misleading statements. Someone’s going to argue I should have gone all the way and titled it “The Media Very Rarely Lies, But This Is True Only In The Most Nitpicky Technical Sense Of The World Lie, And In The Normal Sense Of The Word They Definitely Do” - at which point I will remind you that I absolutely did that, I just put the second part in the subtitle instead of the title. If you can’t bring yourself to read the non-bolded gray text, there’s no helping you. 2: Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy Reasoning Other people placed a lot of importance on the specific phrasing in the Infowars birth certificate article where it concluded “therefore, the birth certificate is false”. For example, Bakkot: I'm with you on the general point but I think you're being too charitable to InfoWars (and maybe others) in at least some examples. Take the InfoWars birth certificate one: in addition to all the claims about layers and so on, it says "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax". That is a factual claim which is false. They offer support for that claim which isn't actually convincing, and the support they offer happens to be true but out of context, and I'm with you on calling the supporting evidence "not lies". But "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" is in fact flatly false, and is asserted by the article itself, not just "someone said". This seems wrongheaded to me. Reposting from my own comment there: when I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that. If later it turned out it was a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been lying when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning). Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying". Bakkot is still not happy with this: I don't think you've made a claim with reckless disregard for the truth, whereas I think InfoWars did. I am not at all convinced that InfoWars had a sincere belief that the birth certificate in question was a forgery. I think it is much more likely that they simply didn't care to know the truth of the matter. And I think it's reasonable to say that when someone makes it a false claim without caring whether or not it's true, that's a lie. This is the standard used for defamation in the US ("reckless disregard for the truth" is stock legal phrase), and defamation is usually understood to mean "lying about someone in a harmful way", so I think this is a pretty normal standard. At this point I acknowledge we’re disputing definitions, but I want to stand by mine. I’ve seen, again and again, that people are incapable of understanding that honest disagreement is possible. For example, I wrote about this here in the context of the millions of liberals who insist that conservatives can’t possibly care about fetuses’ lives and anyone who says they does must just be lying about it in order to justify their real program of oppressing women. When someone says “Joe is a liar”, I don’t want to have to ask every time “Do you mean you have some actual evidence for this, or that they said something you disagree with and you instantly leapt to ‘this is reckless disregard for the truth because nobody could ever be so dumb as to honestly disagree with me’?” I think if we let people use the word “lie” this way, then the overwhelming majority of accusations of lying would be false. Why would we want to define a word in a way that dooms it to constantly be used incorrectly to mislead people? I’m kind of sensitive to this because for almost every article I write, people in the comments accuse me of lying, or “pretending” I don’t know why the statements I made are wrong, or some other offense which I plead innocent to. My prior on “a randomly selected egregiously wrong person is lying” is much lower than the sort of people who make these accusations. I think people are just really paranoid about this, and we should use our terms carefully in a way that mitigates this paranoid rather than inflames it. Some of this might be more convincing after you read Part 6 of this post, where I list commenters’ proposed examples of media lies. Eric Newcomer writes: I hope we can all agree that the NYT wouldn't draw such big conclusions from such thin findings. The InfoWars birth certificate article doesn't even really seem internally certain about how PDF layers work. The critique I'm making now falls into the broader "InfoWars is much more egregious in its infractions than the NYT category." But I do think it reveals the slippery line between knowing lies and what one might call "lies of egregious sloppiness." If some serious part of a person knows that they haven't proved what they're claiming but they (or their bosses) insist on claiming that you have proved it, isn't that a form of lying? I’m sorry, but “lies of egregious sloppiness” sounds to me like “physical violence of egregious emotional violence”. Emotional violence and physical violence are both bad. Physical violence probably sounds worse to most people, and so it’s really tempting to, if emotional violence is really bad, say that that makes it a kind of physical violence. But I think that, although this is tempting, it’s false and you shouldn’t do it. I don’t want to say you’re allowed to sound more confident than you are. If you’re 71% confident, and you falsely say you’re 72% confident, then you are lying. But if you are very dumb, and seeing a random piece of toast makes you 100% confident that Obama’s birth certificate is false, and you vomit some random words to that effect onto a page, then you’re an idiot but not a liar. 3: Comments About Whether Infowars Believes Their Own Claims But I guess if you do want to be careful with the definition of the word “lie”, then it becomes important to know whether people at Infowars honestly believe their conspiracy theories or not. I don’t want to defend super-hard the thesis that they do. I’m not sure. If you forced me to guess, I’d say something like for a randomly given Infowars reporter and a randomly selected conspiracy theory they’re reporting on, 40% of the time they think it’s at least plausible enough that they’re doing good work by reporting on it, 20% of the time they know on some level that it’s false and they’re doing something wrong, and 40% of the time they’re in some kind of weird superposition where it seems emotionally true to them and they feel this hard enough that they never get around to asking whether it’s literally true. I’m really not attached to these numbers, but man are a lot of you attached to the claim that they definitely know their theories are false and are consciously lying. My main argument against this is that millions of people believe conspiracy theories - if they didn’t, we wouldn’t care so much about them! - and why shouldn’t some of those people work at Infowars? It would be quite a weird system for the conspiracy ecosystem to be run by an elite who secretly know they’re false, serving up fables to a base who believe them completely. How would you prevent some of the believers from rising into the elite? It would almost take a conspiracy of its own! Eric Newcomer has a more convincing counterargument than I expected: As an aside, I have personally worked at the NYT newsroom (reporting fellow) and at conservative outlet Washington Examiner. And I found the latter to be much sloppier and less worried about thinking through the impression it gave from facts. The Examiner would headline any big budget deficit number etc on my beat whereas the NYT had very detailed copy editors who would spot factual assertions in my copy that I didn't even consider I was making and push back on them. On InfoWars, it seems naive to presume that the outlet pushing the most misleading stories (InfoWars) is acting in good faith rather than just supplying readers with what they want. I get the point (one that Noam Chomsky has made) that outlets can just hire the bias that they want. But I actually think it's fairly hard to staff up true believers who can write and report credibly for conspiracy and super rightwing type stuff -- hence why a bunch of liberals like myself found themselves out of college writing for the local section of the Washington Examiner before it was killed. I find that on an intuitive level, I’m not too surprised to learn this - most journalists seem liberal, it would make sense that conservative papers couldn’t entirely escape this effect. On a more napkin-math level, I’m boggled - isn’t this embarrassing for the Examiner (and the journalists involved?) Wouldn’t they spend a lot of effort avoiding it? In a country with 100 million conservatives, is it really that hard to find a handful of them capable of writing news articles? There are many people writing okay-quality right-wing Substacks that get like five views per article. Are they doing this for the (nonexistent) money, without believing in the cause? If not, why couldn’t these people have been Washington Examiner reporters? Or InfoWarriors? I think Richard Hanania has a theory that a lot of liberals’ political advantage comes from a culture where they are happy to work themselves ragged for minimal compensation as long as it seems like like an impressive job they won’t be embarrassed to tell their friends and family about - ie intellectual college-degree-requiring labor. Maybe this is what the Examiner is taking advantage of? I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of ethical principles Eric considered when he decided to work for the Examiner, but I bet he wouldn’t have agreed to work for Infowars even if they paid him much more money. This should also factor into our calculations about whether Infowars is being staffed by Eric-equivalents. Human writes: There is at least one former infowars employee who alleges that their stories are (at least often) known to be false. The most clear-cut example I can quickly find is here: "Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing. "Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background." See also here for a discussion of Jones admitting he was lying about Sandy Hook during the lawsuit. 4: Comments On Why 8% Of Americans Said They Had Relatives Who Died From The COVID Vaccine Many people, including me, were confused by a poll in which 8% of Americans said they had a relative who died from the COVID vaccine. I speculated that maybe they were reading too quickly and misinterpreted it as “a relative who got the COVID vaccine”. But Tytonidaen wrote: I think a more likely explanation is that many people are choosing to attribute deaths to the vaccine that are not actually from the vaccine. For example, let's say Person A gets vaccinated and dies shortly after of some completely unrelated cause. And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A. In hypothetical reality, Person A lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle, had lots of risk factors for a heart attack, and would have died from a heart attack, regardless of whether they'd gotten the vaccine. Then, when Person A does, indeed, die of a heart attack, and by sheer coincidence had recently gotten vaccinated, Person B blames the COVID vaccine when polled, but it wasn't really the vaccine that killed their loved one. It might be easier to believe that outside forces (like a vaccine) harmed the person than to believe that the loved one's own actions did (like a poor lifestyle, not taking their meds, etc.). That's only one example, but I think the underlying dynamic could easily explain the poll results. None Of The Above wrote: In general, it seems like when you ask a factual question with partisan/CW valence on a poll, and the respondents don't know much about the factual question, they answer the "whose side are you on" question instead. That is, if you ask Republican-voting biologists, they'll nearly all tell you the Theory of Evolution is basically how living stuff came to be, but if you ask Republican-voting normies whose vaguely-remembered high school biology class may have mentioned Darwin a few times, they'll answer that evolution is a lie--they don't really know one way or another, they're just answering the "whose side are you on" question. Democratic normies will far more often tell you evolution is true, but probably could do little better in explaining why than the Republican normies could in explaining why evolution is really an atheist lie of some kind. Zack wrote: I took a time-boxed peek at the Pollfish data. The 1500 results were splint into 3 batches of 500. I arbitrarily selected the Jul 4 file to look at. In that file, there were 36 respondents who reported a household member had died from he vaccine. Focusing on those responses, I noticed a few interesting patterns. Of those 36 respondents, 10 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from COVID and death of a household member from the vaccine. I'm skeptical that 10 out of 500 people were unfortunate enough to have 2 household members die: one from COVID and one from the vaccine. (Especially because these are not large households; 4 of these 10 report that they have 1 other household member, and 5 of these 10 report having 2-4 other household members.) Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves. Of these 36 respondents, there are even 4 who experienced a surprising number of adverse affects from the vaccine (Myocarditis, Pericarditis, AND Bell's Palsy ) requiring hospitalization in addition to having a household member die from the vaccine. Of these 4, 2 selected all of the following: "It will likely shorten my lifespan", "I am now unable to hold a job", "I am now unable to work a full day", "It impacts my personal life", "It is a minor annoyance". Those two are planning to get the vaccine again. There's some overlap between these respondents. Ignoring all of them drops from 36 who had a household member die of the vaccine to 12. I don't see obvious inconsistencies in these responses. However, there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. They look at average time to complete each question, but average doesn't seem like the right measure here (3 people took 10+ minutes to answer; summed, the fastest 250 responses took about as long as those slowest 3). Of the 500 responses, most people seem to answer 7-10 questions. I timed myself just reading those questions silently in my head (not thinking about the answers). Of three attempts, my fastest was a bit over 17 seconds. 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time. It seems like Pollfish's model may encourage hasty, poor quality responses; "Pollfish uses non-monetary incentives like an extra life in a game or access to premium content." (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/) It seems like that creates a misalignment of incentives; the respondent is in a hurry to get back to whatever they were doing. They provide survey fraud protection, and claim it filters suspiciously quick or suspiciously consistent answers (e.g., the same answer for all questions), but it seems to be overlooking obviously problematic responses in this case. (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/) This bothered me enough that I emergency-edited the ACX Survey partway through to include (slightly differently phrased variants of) the two questions on the poll: Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID?

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0sXa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8dd54487-ff00-407a-b7f7-ccc96bde115a_731x141.png, For example, Bakkot, here, writes, has a more convincing counterargument, writes, here, here, a poll in which, wrote, wrote, wrote, https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/, https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA2 mentions across 2 issues

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, GALICIA, SPAIN"; "SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX.

Article page: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Ahmedabad 2 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, GALICIA, SPAIN Contact: Javier Contact Info: javier[dot]prieto[dot]set[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 05:00 PM Location: caféLaMorena. Rúa de San Clemente, 6, 15705 Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña. https://maps.app.goo.gl/FJ9vPnNTXcsvPx4LA. I'll be wearing an EAGx LatAm hoodie and maybe put up an ACX sign or something. Will sit outside, weather permitting, and inside otherwise. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFH3+M76

Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FJ9vPnNTXcsvPx4LA, https://plus.codes/8CJHVFH3+M76

April 01, 2026 · Original source

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 SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA Contact: Manuel Contact Info: carrodetespis[@]hotmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM Location: The Auditorio park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7 Notes: Let me know via email if there’s a chance you will be coming

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FF32CCV+PR, https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7

Saudi2 mentions across 2 issues

Saudi is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2021 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "most Saudi men support women working outside the home"; "he left the comfort of his Saudi home"; "from their Saudi circles". It most often appears alongside Wikipedia, 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11.

Article page: Saudi
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 23, 2021
Last seen: September 13, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For June June 23, 2021
Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

Wikipedia 2 shared issues
1999 apartment bombings 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Abbasid 1 shared issues
Abu Hafs 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For June

June 23, 2021 · Original source

25: Related: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home. But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble! Relevant Scott Aaronson lecture and SSC story.

Inline links: when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home, Scott Aaronson lecture, SSC story

September 13, 2024 · Original source

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.

I was somewhat disturbed reading how many normal Muslims Dean interacted with were on board with all of this in theory. Dean comes from a nice urban middle-class family in Saudi Arabia, and several of his relatives joined the jihad at various points, and all other relatives supported that. His neighborhood Islamic study group, that I imagine as the equivalent of Sunday School, was all in favor of very radical interpretations. Some Muslim communities Dean interacted with in London were even more radical than the ones he grew up with, constantly preaching about Hellfire and the only sure way to avoid it. On a plane from Kuwait to the Philippines, a flight attendant figured out they were traveling to join the jihad, but didn’t turn them in, but instead introduced them to the captain of the plane, because they were both proud supporters of the jihad. People did successful door-to-door fundraising for jihadist causes in Kuwait. Everyone was on board, it was just that not that many took the implications as seriously as Dean.

Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.

SBR2 mentions across 2 issues

SBR is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 10, 2023 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Ares Cafe, SBR"; "Location: Ares Cafe, SBR". It most often appears alongside 47 Clinton Pl., ACX, ACX.

Article page: SBR
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: March 25, 2025

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

47 Clinton Pl. 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Ahmedabad 2 shared issues

Source context

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

March 25, 2025 · Original source

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/7JMJ2FVM+48

Seattle, WA2 mentions across 2 issues

Seattle, WA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "SEATTLE, WA ( RSVP )"; "SEATTLE, WA". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

Article page: Seattle, WA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: April 10, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Alex 2 shared issues
Anastasia 2 shared issues
Austin 2 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SEATTLE, WA (RSVP) Contact: Spencer, speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 15 Location: Volunteer Park, near the amphitheater just north of the reservoir. I'll have an "ACX MEETUP" sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/value.shapes.tracks

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/value.shapes.tracks

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SEATTLE, WA Contact: Nikita (sokolx@gmail.com) Date: May 1st Time: 5:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q Location: Optimism Brewing Company (1158 Broadway, Seattle). There's board games you can borrow and feel free to bring board games (or other cool stuff) of your own. The bar has both beer and non-alcoholic options. The organizer will be wearing an orange hoodie. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or on the Facebook event Group info: Seattle has an active rationality/EA community that meets about twice a week

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q, RSVP on LessWrong, Facebook event, an active rationality/EA community

Secunderabad2 mentions across 2 issues

Secunderabad is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 26, 2022 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India"; "Location: ... Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana 500015, India". It most often appears alongside 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, Aachen, ACX.

Article page: Secunderabad
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

11841 Wagner St., Culver City 2 shared issues
Aachen 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues

Source context

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

March 30, 2024 · Original source

HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal Contact Info: mehra[dot]vatsal[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D-3, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana 500015, India Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J9WFF4X+4P

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7J9WFF4X+4P

Senayan2 mentions across 2 issues

Senayan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Arborea Café, Senayan, DKI Jakarta"; "Location: Workshop Space, Cecemuwe Cafe and Space - Senayan". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX, ACX.

Article page: Senayan
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Alex 2 shared issues

Source context

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

August 25, 2023 · Original source

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

Seongsu2 mentions across 2 issues

Seongsu is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Seoul Brewery in Seongsu". It most often appears alongside 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road, 131 Colonie Center.

Article page: Seongsu
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 25, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 2 shared issues
13 Mile road 2 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 2 shared issues
166 cours de l'Argonne (Maison Internationale) 2 shared issues
200 Degrees 2 shared issues

Source context

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Cyrus Contact Info: ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

SEVILLA2 mentions across 2 issues

SEVILLA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 10, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "SEVILLA, SPAIN". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Ala Moana Beach Park.

Article page: SEVILLA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Ala Moana Beach Park 2 shared issues
Alan Enright 2 shared issues
Alcampo Lounge 2 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SEVILLA, SPAIN Contact: Edu (edur.acx@gmail.com) Date: April 30 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9P92F6+3R 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.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8C9P92F6+3R

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.

Shaanxi2 mentions across 2 issues

Shaanxi is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "deported to the interior province of Shaanxi to work as a farmer"; "Xi was 16 when he got sent to Shaanxi". It most often appears alongside China, Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin.

Article page: Shaanxi
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 06, 2022
Last seen: April 13, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping April 06, 2022
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President April 13, 2022

China 2 shared issues
Hu Jintao 2 shared issues
Jiang Zemin 2 shared issues
Shanghai 2 shared issues
Xi Jinping 2 shared issues

Source context

Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President

April 06, 2022 · Original source

But he was a Shanghaier who could appeal to the CYL. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he was deported to the interior province of Shaanxi to work as a farmer and ditch-digger. His years of hard labor in Chinese flyover country made him more palatable to the hicks of the CYL than the average East Coast elite would be.

April 13, 2022 · Original source

The other thing that didn’t work was the timing. Xi’s father was purged in 1962, which was a little too late for the Red Scare. I moved Xi’s birth back a bit, but I didn’t want to go before World War II. That meant I was a bit coy about how old Shea was when he was sent off to Iowa - if we go by the historic Red Scare, Shea should have been 7ish, but Xi was 16 when he got sent to Shaanxi. Likewise, Xi became President of China in 2012, but the US election that best fit Shea’s story was 2008, so I moved everything forward four years and made him a stand-in for Barack Obama.

Shenzhen special economic zone2 mentions across 2 issues

Shenzhen special economic zone is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 14, 2021 and July 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "When China created the Shenzhen special economic zone"; "The obvious example is that the Shenzhen special economic zone did well enough". It most often appears alongside Central Park, Charter Cities Institute, Ciudad Morazán.

Article page: Shenzhen special economic zone
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: July 05, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021
Model City Monday July 05, 2021

Central Park 2 shared issues
Charter Cities Institute 2 shared issues
Ciudad Morazán 2 shared issues
Dubai 2 shared issues
Europe 2 shared issues

Source context

April 14, 2021 · Original source

When China created the Shenzhen special economic zone, its success didn’t just enrich Shenzhen. It became the evidence that Chinese liberals used to enact reforms across the whole country, and Chinese GDP per capita dectupled over the next thirty years. And Vietnam saw China’s success and liberalized its own markets, and GDP there sextupled. And then Laos saw Vietnam’s success and liberalized its markets, and GDP there tripled. And before you know it, a billion and a half people were lifted out of poverty.

July 05, 2021 · Original source

But they add a caveat: this is just the really direct, easy-to-model effects from the people in the city getting richer. There are still potential indirect effects from charter cities serving as “laboratories of government” (eg one of them might try a new policy, it might be great, and then bigger countries might adopt it). The obvious example is that the Shenzhen special economic zone did well enough that it convinced the Chinese leadership to try capitalism more generally, with world-changing results.

Sheung Wan2 mentions across 2 issues

Sheung Wan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan"; "186 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan". It most often appears alongside 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301, 932 Welch Rd. Java Center, ACX.

Article page: Sheung Wan
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301 2 shared issues
932 Welch Rd. Java Center 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues

Source context

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

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.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+38

Siberia2 mentions across 2 issues

Siberia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 20, 2021 and May 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C"; "But then why don’t we see any effect from excess winter heart attacks in very cold places like Stockholm or Siberia?"; "pictures of streets in Siberia". It most often appears alongside Europe, @DeepGuessr, @scaling01.

Article page: Siberia
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: October 20, 2021
Last seen: May 08, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Chilling Effects October 20, 2021
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr May 08, 2025

Europe 2 shared issues
@DeepGuessr 1 shared issues
@scaling01 1 shared issues
ACX Discord 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

Source context

October 20, 2021 · Original source

You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).

Global warming should theoretically help prevent the excess winter heart attacks, which are a direct effect of cold weather. But then why don’t we see any effect from excess winter heart attacks in very cold places like Stockholm or Siberia? Overall I’m not convinced of this one either.

May 08, 2025 · Original source

I tried to reproduce this on several not-previously-online pictures of streets in Siberia and the results were nowhere as impressive as described in this post. The model seemed to realize it was in Russia when it saw an inscription in Russian or a flag; failing that it didn't even always get the country right. When it did, it usually got the place thousands of kilometers wrong. I don't understand where this discrepancy is coming from. Curious.

After looking through many other user tests, I found this the most insightful rule of thumb on what it gets right vs. wrong. In retrospect, Kelsey’s California beach and my Nepal trekking trail are both very touristy; my house in Michigan and Vadim’s Siberian streets aren’t.

Sierra Leone2 mentions across 2 issues

Sierra Leone is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe,"; "Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination"; "main Sierra Leone country". It most often appears alongside China, 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson.

Article page: Sierra Leone
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail August 25, 2023
25 October 28, 2025

China 2 shared issues
5G 1 shared issues
Acemoglu and Robinson 1 shared issues
ACX comments 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.

Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated

October 28, 2025 · Original source

…with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

SIOUX FALLS, SD2 mentions across 2 issues

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

Article page: SIOUX FALLS, SD
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Alex 2 shared issues
Amsterdam 2 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SIOUX FALLS, SD (RSVP) Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: 6:00 PM, Monday, September 27 Location: McKennan Park, near the stone circle in the center of the park Coordinates: https://w3w.co/aura.escape.buddy

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/aura.escape.buddy

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.

Slovakian area2 mentions across 2 issues

Slovakian area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 14, 2021 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire""; "fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire". It most often appears alongside Albert Einstein, America, Ashkenazi Jews.

Article page: Slovakian area
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: June 14, 2021
Last seen: July 13, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration June 14, 2021
Book Review: The Man From The Future July 13, 2022

Albert Einstein 2 shared issues
America 2 shared issues
Ashkenazi Jews 2 shared issues
Austro-Hungarian Empire 2 shared issues
Emily Greene Balch 2 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Man From The Future

June 14, 2021 · Original source

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years.

July 13, 2022 · Original source

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years.

Solano2 mentions across 2 issues

Solano is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 11, 2023 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Solano 'new city' development"; "part of the Solano 'new city' development"; "many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism". It most often appears alongside California Forever, China, Honduras.

Article page: Solano
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 11, 2023
Last seen: February 03, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023
25 February 03, 2025

California Forever 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Honduras 2 shared issues
Praxis 2 shared issues
Prospera 2 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 11, 2023 · Original source

Original post: Model City Monday 9/4/23 Comments On The Solano County City Ecorche writes:

Inline links: Model City Monday 9/4/23, writes

Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”. No elite wants to live in Solano County (unless it’s their summer ranch home or something). The natural demographic is people priced out of the Bay.

But wait! I can do better! I took the map of plots purchased from the NYTimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html) and combined them with the Travis Air Force Base Sustainability Study (https://www.solanocounty.com/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=36198 or page 41-42 here https://oldcc.gov/sites/default/files/mis-studies/Travis%20Air%20Force%20Base.pdf), to get a map of the overlap.

Inline links: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/business/economy/california-land-solano-county.html, https://www.solanocounty.com/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?blobid=36198, https://oldcc.gov/sites/default/files/mis-studies/Travis%20Air%20Force%20Base.pdf

February 03, 2025 · Original source

They had originally planned to fight NIMBYs in the November election via a ballot initiative which would give them the right to proceed. But after polls suggested they might lose, they instead struck an agreement with the county to delay two years and run through the usual set of environmental impact assessments. The County Supervisor wrote:

Inline links: polls suggested, wrote

I think it signals [project lead] Jan Sramek’s understanding that while the need for more affordable housing and good paying jobs has merit, the timing has been unrealistic. I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a California that builds again. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground.

But in the past few days, the situation has changed. Suisun City, a nearby small town, has announced that it is considering annexing the California Forever land. Since the project was previously blocked by laws restricting building on unincorporated land, getting annexed by a city - and maybe running their project under the Suisun City banner - would solve many of their problems. Suisun City is struggling financially, and it would make sense for them to offer legal protection in exchange for money. The city mayor sort of halfway-kind-of-denies that’s what she’s doing, but California Forever is unpopular among Suisun City voters - if the story were actually false, I would expect her to make stronger denials.

Inline links: it is considering annexing

Songdo2 mentions across 2 issues

Songdo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 12, 2021 and April 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "a similar problem in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo"; "Songdo, a South Korean charter city"; "Songdo, a South Korean charter city which now has 50,000 people". It most often appears alongside China, Marginal Revolution, A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance.

Article page: Songdo
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 12, 2021
Last seen: April 14, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For April April 12, 2021
Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021

China 2 shared issues
Marginal Revolution 2 shared issues
A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance 1 shared issues
Agan 1 shared issues
Air Force Chapel 1 shared issues

Source context

April 12, 2021 · Original source

3: I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad. As a public service, I offer these people this article about a similar problem in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo.

Inline links: a similar problem in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo

Book Review: Why We're Polarized

April 14, 2021 · Original source

Tom Murcott was an investment officer for Songdo, a South Korean charter city which now has 50,000 people, a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper, the headquarters of the UN’s Green Climate Fund, and a pneumatic waste disposal system - instead of leaving cans out for the garbage truck, you throw your trash directly into pressurized tubes that suck it to the recycling center or incinerator.

Inline links: directly into pressurized tubes

South2 mentions across 2 issues

South is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2021 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship"; "the superiority of the American North over the South". It most often appears alongside Christian, First World, Jews.

Article page: South
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: February 09, 2021
Last seen: July 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Why We're Polarized February 09, 2021
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman July 30, 2024

Christian 2 shared issues
First World 2 shared issues
Jews 2 shared issues
Trump 2 shared issues
US 2 shared issues

Source context

February 09, 2021 · Original source

When the North won the Civil War, it had grand plans to remake the South into a paradise of racial equality and universal love. After Lincoln's death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship. That one party called itself "Democrat", but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North. The Southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats") and northern Democrats disagreed on lots of issues, but the South hated the Republicans so much after their experience with Lincoln that they caucused with the northern Democrats anyway. This turned into a stable coalition, with northern Democrats agreeing to support the South against civil rights for blacks, and the Dixiecrats supporting the northern Democrats whenever they needed something.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats' key issue. It wasn't quite as simple as "Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it" - in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year's presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners' defection to the Republican Party.

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

July 30, 2024 · Original source

Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.

It’s Progressive-era propaganda about the superiority of the American North over the South, but I find it most interesting for its list of virtues. It starts with Liberty, then moves on to Free Speech, Intelligence, Obedience To Law, Knowledge, Equal Rights, Free Schools, Contentment, Love Of Country, Philanthropy, Benevolence, Happiness, Patience, Charity, Faith, Hope, Joy, Industry, Sobriety, Morality, Justice, Virtue, Truth, Honor, Peace, Light, and Immortality. I appreciate the Progressive virtues because of how skew they are to most of the ethical systems I encounter. They’re not leftist (Love Of Country? Industry? Morality?) or rightist (Equal Rights? Free Schools?). They’re not Nietzschean master moralist (Philanthropy? Contentment? Benevolence?) or slave moralist (Industry? Knowledge? Honor?). They’re Christian-ish, but not hair-shirts-and-self-flagellation Christian or God-n-guns-megachurch Christian. They’re the kind of Christians who you can kind of tell are going to end up supporting eugenics in a few years. I think I would classify them as a first-form-slave-morality liberalism, whereas most of the liberalism you encounter these days drifted at least a little into the second form. I’m not 100% on Team Early 20th Century Progressive, but they give me hope that there are weird-yet-coherent groupings of virtues we haven’t even imagined. I feel the same way about some old Soviet posters: These are obviously left-wing, in the sense that they’re literal Communist propaganda. But to the modern eye there’s something off about them, something that makes you want to call them right-wing or even fascist. They’re bold and optimistic. Even though the commissars who commissioned them probably rejected some traditional or capitalist conception of virtue, they still firmly insist that there’s something sort of like virtue or power which is attainable and good. I think these are first-form posters, and that most modern leftism is second-form. I think if you had to group barbarian warlords, Puritans, Soviet communists, and modern leftists on a Nietzschean/geneaological/aesthetic axis, it would go: (Barbarian warlords) | (Puritans, Soviet communists) | (modern leftists) So one very weak compromise - hardly even a compromise, since it predates Nietzsche - is to try to stick with first-form slave morality, in the hopes that most of the problems come from the second. VIII. Ayn Rand “Is Ayn Rand a Nietzschean?”- the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12239 pages of heated debate. There’s a real answer here. Rand started out respecting, maybe even loving Nietzsche. She once said that: [Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra is my Bible. I can never commit suicide while I have it. …which maybe reveals more about her psychological situation than I expected from the answer to a “who’s your favorite philosopher” questionnaire. But later on she broke from him. It’s hard to figure out her exact position - she has a bad habit of treating anyone who disagrees with her in any tiny detail as the Antichrist, such that it’s hard to figure out whether she thinks of someone as a 99% fellow traveler or an arch-enemy. Still, there are substantial differences. Nietzsche is more chaotic - he expects the superior man to defy all external rules in favor of his own glorious destiny. But Rand is attached to rules - most of all the epistemic rules of Reason, but also the usual moral tenets like “don’t kill” and “don’t steal”. Nietzsche’s masters take the Ron Swanson approach to justifying their actions: …whereas Rand’s masters are prone to giving twenty-page-long arguments for why whatever they’re doing is the right choice according to Objectively Correct Moral Law. Rand’s approach has lots of advantages. The Nietzschean master, like Andrew Tate, is an awful guy to have around. It’s hard to fit him into a functioning civilization, except maybe an autocracy with him as autocrat. Nietzsche’s pitch is “hey excellent people, you should try to become this guy”, never “hey normal people, you should support my project of creating these guys, out of your own self-interest.” The latter wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Rand’s masters, while still probably very stressful to be around, have been tamed. They follow civilized rules of honesty and nonviolence - not, of course, because they’re too weak to defy them, but because following civilized rules is objectively the coolest thing of all. Instead of competing in battle and leaving a trail of bloody corpses, they compete in Capitalism and leave a trail of high-paying jobs and excellent consumer goods. They’re not doing to serve you - “I should serve the little guy” is slave moralist bulls**t. But, by coincidence, their excellent actions are doing you a service. They might only invent rocket ships to enact their Promethean conquest of nature and prove their own greatness. But you still get to ride in one. Rand also spares more of a thought (or at least an afterthought) for the little guy. Capitalism needs all types - even the company janitor genuinely contributes to whatever glorious accomplishments are going on, and deserves to feel good about themselves. She wants everyone to be the best, most ambitious, and most fighting-for-their-own-aesthetic/moral-vision they can be. But if that means being the company janitor, that’s fine. And if you love rockets and you consummate that love by becoming the janitor for a rocket company, the Objectively Correct Moral Law is 100% on board. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think this is a more productive answer than Nietzsche has for this question. The disadvantage of Rand’s approach compared to Nietzsche’s is that it only works if you believe her proofs about why the Objectively Correct Moral Law is definitely objective and correct - most of which seem to me to be either hand-wavy or balderdash. Otherwise the whole thing breaks down - why is the most masterful thing to be a positive-sum capitalist instead of a negative-sum warlord? Rand really really wants to justify a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, to the exact people most capable of benefiting from defecting against it, without bringing in altruism or the common good at any point. It’s an extremely sympathetic goal. But I don’t think she makes it. Still, this is why I’m fond of her. If you really read her books - as opposed to skimming them while subvocalizing “this is that evil woman who loves selfishness” under your breath the whole time - it’s obvious that she believes, with a deep and burning belief, that good things are good. She really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in. When people react to her books with loathing - without even a hint of fondness - I get suspicious that they’ve gotten so deep into slave morality that thy can’t recognize goodness when it hits them over the head with a sledgehammer. Elsewhere, I wrote: Edward Teach (Sadly, Porn) is famous for making up fake novels to criticize, and it is a little known fact that the "Ayn Rand" character along with all her novels are 100% his work. They operate as a diagnostic test based on his psychodynamic theory of envy. The instrument presents a picture of some exceptional people achieving great things who don't apologize for their greatness, and doesn’t explicitly ask the patient - I mean, reader - for their opinion. If the reader has no strong opinion, or says something like "Good for them, I guess," she passes the test. "I like these people and will use them as a role model" also passes. Some specific criticisms (see below) may also pass. If the reader says "Ah, people who are better than the pathetic sheep around them, just like I'm better than all the pathetic sheep around me!", she . . . still passes the test. That's not what it's testing for! You fail the test if you absolutely freak out about some combination of the Rand characters themselves and the potential existence of arrogant people who identify with the Rand characters. The secret is that it's not a screening test for the kind of people who would get featured on /r/iamverysmart. It's a screening test for the kind of people who would comment on /r/iamverysmart, ie the self-designated Tall Poppy Police, ie the people who build their ego off being the enforcers of the rule that you're not allowed to look better than anyone else. These people's basic mental stance is to hate people who seem too excellent. They don't think of it in these terms. They think of it as calling out arrogance, although if you look too closely you'll find their definition of arrogance covers anyone who seems excellent and but doesn't spend all their time apologizing and abasing themselves and denying it. The brilliance of Teach-Rand is how he-she draws this tendency to the foreground For example, why the whole "Objectivism" thing? Not because value is necessarily completely objective, but because the idea that any value might ever be even partially objective freaks out the Tall Poppy Syndrome people. Mention value at all, and they say you must be trying to secretly smuggle in the assumption that you are more valuable than other people (and therefore you are less valuable than other people, and therefore they are better than you). The same is true of Reason. Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this. (how do you decide what's true without Reason? By bias-based-reasoning - "You say X, but I can imagine a way that would come from a place of believing you're better than other people, therefore, Not-X is true. You say that's a logical fallacy? That must come from a place of believing you're smarter than everyone else and the only person who can use Facts and Logic.") The Teach-Rand test is designed to catch the sort of person who, if someone says that on a right triangle a^2 + b^2 = c^2, responds with "Oh, so you're claiming to be some kind of right triangle expert who's better than the rest of us? You really need to work on that arrogance problem! Super cringe!" Any criticism of the book that doesn't come from this particular place is irrelevant to the test and doesn't count against your grade. (which is good, because the books are bad in a lot of ways. But that's fine - Rorschach blots don't also have to be great art!) Still, I don’t think she’s the superman (superwoman?) who successfully transcends the dichotomy Her philosophy is only as strong as its proofs of Objective Correctness, which I consider weak. Without those, you need some subjective motivation to glue things together - of which altruism is the most popular. But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?” If you force yourself to reject that motivation, to just repeat “no no no, I’m only doing this because rockets are really big and make cool explosions”, aren’t you cutting out a part of yourself, in exactly the way Nietzschean masters are supposed to try to avoid doing? I find something very compelling about Rand. I think she goes some of the way to answering the Andrew Tate objection to master morality. But she’s a means and not an end. A real superman would have to figure out some way to reintroduce basic human kindness. IX. Matt Yglesias Yglesias’s mantra - “good things are good” - is too perfect and profound to come from anyone other than an esoteric master of Nietzschean philosophy. Good Straussians ignore the title and focus on the subtitle. Nietzsche wrote in the 1890s. There were still real nobles and emperors walking around; communists had not yet started calling capitalism “late capitalism”. Sure, his world was probably some sort of weak compromise between master and slave morality, but it was different from our weak compromise. Our weak compromise was forged through dialogue and warfare with fascism’s novel take on master morality and socialism’s novel take on slave morality. I think of Yglesias - who combines an insistence that good things are good and a proclivity for embiggenment with commitments to democracy, the welfare state, and the poorest among us - as one of its most self-conscious proponents. When I first titled this post, I didn’t know that Richard Hanania had come to the same conclusion and created this face-mash-up of Matt Yglesias and Nietzsche. The compromise goes something like: Everyone is equal before the law, before the metaphorical throne of metaphorical God, and in some poorly defined philosophical sense. This is very important. It’s our headline result. Everything else should be interpreted in light of this central fact.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6V8D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f1f70cc-b468-4b04-b894-a8b75b3330e5_1024x683.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FF8B!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a1ac7aa-d19e-43e8-8462-210325b902be_810x545.png, a real answer here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OtNv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ae1aaf2-6cc3-488c-b0a7-5df62eee457b_225x225.jpeg, Elsewhere, Sadly, Porn, /r/iamverysmart, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MzIr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff03d1a9d-5ffc-45ff-84bc-db3388915bbc_259x390.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hYvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0f9b152-da12-4525-b062-b4c14d8b8005_383x373.png

South Bend2 mentions across 2 issues

South Bend is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Chicory Cafe in Downtown South Bend"; "SOUTH BEND". It most often appears alongside 200 Degrees, 47 Clinton Pl., ABUJA.

Article page: South Bend
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 29, 2025

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Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

200 Degrees 2 shared issues
47 Clinton Pl. 2 shared issues
ABUJA 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

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

Highlights From The Comments On March Links

August 29, 2025 · Original source

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+ SOUTH BEND Contact: Gibson Contact Info: gibspaulding17[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 10:00 AM Location: Chicory Cafe in South Bend. 105 E Jefferson Blvd #103, South Bend, IN 46601 I'll try to be at one of the high tops in the northern half of the building if one is open but the place isn't huge so it'll be wherever I can find a spot. I'll have a sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HMMQG2+32

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FMQV26+VQ, https://plus.codes/86HMMQG2+32

Contact: Gibson Contact Info: gibspaulding17[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 10:00 AM Location: Chicory Cafe in South Bend. 105 E Jefferson Blvd #103, South Bend, IN 46601 I'll try to be at one of the high tops in the northern half of the building if one is open but the place isn't huge so it'll be wherever I can find a spot. I'll have a sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HMMQG2+32

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86HMMQG2+32

South China Sea2 mentions across 2 issues

South China Sea is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 04, 2021 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii"; "China’s obsession with small islands in the South China Sea". It most often appears alongside China, facebook, Trump.

Article page: South China Sea
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 04, 2021
Last seen: April 06, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On March Links March 04, 2021
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping April 06, 2022

China 2 shared issues
facebook 2 shared issues
Trump 2 shared issues
1856 Paris declaration 1 shared issues
Alex Passos 1 shared issues

Source context

March 04, 2021 · Original source

- The rest of the world regards privateering as flat-out illegal, so virtually all of the ports of the world will be closed to the privateers *and their prizes*. Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii, without any intermediate bases (what's left of Guam will have its hands full), is going to be logistically challenging to say the least. And the value of that prize ship you just took is greatly diminished if it can only be used in the US coastal trade, its cargo sold only on the US domestic market never to be reexported.

April 06, 2022 · Original source

China’s foreign affairs are equally troubled. Jiang and Hu were careful leaders, aware that China was still new on the global stage and couldn’t afford to make waves. Xi was more confident in China’s Great Power status. But his practical goals were combined with an obsession with showing China was just as good as everywhere else, and avoiding the appearance of humiliation, which made him overly belligerent and started alienating everywhere else. China’s obsession with small islands in the South China Sea alienated the region enough to drive Vietnam into the arms of the US (partly, haltingly). Even beyond these kinds of big things, the general outlook (called “wolf warrior diplomacy” after a Chinese action movie) seems more focused on playing well at home than keeping foreign countries friendly.

Inline links: drive Vietnam into the arms of the US, wolf warrior diplomacy

South Pole2 mentions across 2 issues

South Pole is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 13, 2023 and August 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole"; "organizing the first British expeditions to reach the South Pole". It most often appears alongside Abe Lincoln, AI alignment movement, Ambras.

Article page: South Pole
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: September 13, 2023
Last seen: August 22, 2025

Issue trail

Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023
Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025

Abe Lincoln 1 shared issues
AI alignment movement 1 shared issues
Ambras 1 shared issues
Andes 1 shared issues
Andrew Beal 1 shared issues

Source context

September 13, 2023 · Original source

From that point, the tales of engineers who have interviewed with Musk run the gamut from torturous experiences to the sublime. He might ask one question or he might ask several. You can be sure, though, that he will roll out the Riddle: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” One answer to that is the North Pole, and most of the engineers get it right away. That’s when Musk will follow with “Where else could you be?” The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile. Fewer engineers get this answer, and Musk will happily walk them through that riddle and others and cite any relevant equations during his explanations. He tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about how they describe the problem and their approach to solving it.

Your Book Review: How Language Began

August 22, 2025 · Original source

More well-known for bringing quinine to India and organizing the first British expeditions to reach the South Pole. But he also dabbled as a translator.

Spanish2 mentions across 2 issues

Spanish is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 30, 2021 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "defeated by a US/Spanish alliance in 1803"; "distinguishing E-languages, like English and Spanish and Japanese". It most often appears alongside Brazil, ACX Grants, Aella.

Article page: Spanish
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: December 30, 2021
Last seen: July 19, 2024

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Links For December December 30, 2021
Your Book Review: How Language Began July 19, 2024

Brazil 2 shared issues
ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
AI Alignment 1 shared issues
AI Safety 1 shared issues

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Links For December

December 30, 2021 · Original source

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

July 19, 2024 · Original source

This is what he looks like. According to Wikipedia, the context for this picture is: “Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival” Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas. Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (What Kind of Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16) It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ... there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt in identifying the two. Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No, that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (Language and Responsibility, Ch. 2, pg. 56-57) Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations, intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable, no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so. Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (Language and Mind, third edition, pg, 183-184) An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions. The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form. I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the hard takeoff theory of human intelligence.) Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it. Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they do study all of these, Chomsky and his followers view grammar as by far the most important component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed. It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in order to modify or extend a given sentence. Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (pg. 22), his most cited work: (1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist. (2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist. The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’. One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a different meaning in the second (2a != 2b): (1b) I expected a specialist to examine John. (2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John. In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of deep structure. You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, and the point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most important facts to be explained about language. A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in two important ways. First, he famously distinguishes competence from performance, and identifies the former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 4) The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline. Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 24) A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing E-languages, like English and Spanish and Japanese, from I-languages, which only exist inside human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language, Cook and Newson write: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than something external … Not only should linguistics primarily be interested in studying I-languages, but to try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13) Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10).1 I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually used really of no particular empirical significance? And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim. Cook and Newson continue: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 14) The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible evidence as it is of long-term goals. So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it? The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC), linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view, people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned early in this video.) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human languages, like the fact that some languages don’t appear to have words for relative directions, or “thank you”, or “yes” and “no”. After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists. While you could study language by going out into the field and collecting data, this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork. In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real linguistic data only indirectly reflects it. All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas” of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later. How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work2. The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language, anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other things, was substantially more rudimentary. Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett. How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky. II. THE MISSIONARY We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe. Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the Amazon jungle among the Sateré-Mawé people. At seventeen, Everett became a born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few years, they started a family and prepared to become full-fledged missionaries like Keren’s parents. First, Everett studied “Bible and Foreign Missions” at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After finishing his degree in 1975, the natural next step was to train more specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to learn translation techniques and more viscerally prepare for life in the jungle: They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight. Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett and his wife to work with the Pirahã people (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity. But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons: (Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14) In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would. Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In 1980, he completed Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã, his master’s thesis. He continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax, his dissertation. He continued studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some thirty-odd years. As he notes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: (Prologue, pg. xvii-xviii) I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs. And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me. Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source) Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening, crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years. It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds3. Second, there is no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’, or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188) My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. … As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices. Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the ‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132) Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker. One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196) Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix. Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134) I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders, and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning one of the most unusual languages in the world. People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist

People on the bank of the Maici river. (source) By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible. Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268) When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!” One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269) "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him." "Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration. "Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them." Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was—a good three feet. But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266) Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them. "The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?" They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting. In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking contact with him for a number of years afterward. But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam Chomsky. III. THE WAR In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called ‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response. Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds of things. But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day. Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã: He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on Brazilian languages ignore him. Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist

Inline links: source, Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language

what one means by the statement “All natural human languages have recursion.” Everett generally takes recursion to refer to the following property of many natural languages: one can construct sentences or phrases from other sentences and phrases. For example: “The cat died.” -> “Alice said that [the cat died].” -> “Bob said that [Alice said that [the cat died.]]” In the above example, we can in principle generate infinitely many new sentences by writing “Z said X,” where X is the previous sentence and Z is some name. For clarity’s sake, one should probably distinguish between different ways to generate new sentences or phrases from old ones; Pullum mentions a few in the context of assessing Everett’s Pirahã recursion claims: Everett reports that there are no signs of no multiple coordination (It takes [skill, nerve, initiative, and courage]), complex determiners ([[[my] son’s] wife’s] family), stacked modifiers (a [nice, [cosy, [inexpensive [little cottage]]]]), or—most significant of all—reiterable clause embedding (I thought [ you already knew [that she was here ] ]). These are the primary constructions that in English permit sentences of any arbitrary finite length to be constructed, yielding the familiar argument that the set of all definable grammatical sentences in English is infinite. Regardless of the details, a generic prediction should be that there is no longest sentence in a language whose grammar is recursive. This doesn’t mean that one can say an arbitrarily long sentence in real life4. Rather, one can say that, given a member of some large set of sentences, one can always extend it. Everett takes the claim “All natural human languages have recursion.” to mean that, if there exists a natural human language without recursion, the claim is false. Or, slightly more subtly, if there exists a language which uses recursion so minimally that linguists have a hard time determining whether a corpus of linguistic data falsifies it or not, sentence-level recursion is probably not a bedrock principle of human languages. I found the following anecdote from a 2012 paper of Everett’s enlightening: Pirahã speakers reject constructed examples with recursion, as I discovered in my translation of the gospel of Mark into the language (during my days as a missionary). The Bible is full of recursive examples, such as the following, from Mark 1:3: ‘(John the Baptist) was a voice of one calling in the desert…’ I initially translated this as: ‘John, the man that put people in the water in order to clean them for God, that lived in a place like a beach with no trees and that yelled for people to obey God’. The Pirahãs rejected every attempt until I translated this as: ‘John cleaned people in the river. He lived in another jungle. The jungle was like a beach. It had no trees. He yelled to people. You want God!’ The non-recursive structure was accepted readily and elicited all sorts of questions. I subsequently realized looking through Pirahã texts that there were no clear examples involving either recursion or even embedding. Attempts to construct recursive sentences or phrases, such as ‘several big round barrels', were ultimately rejected by the Pirahãs (although initially they accepted them to be polite to me, a standard fieldwork problem that Jeanette Sakel and I discuss). He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion statement one can make. Chomsky and linguists working in his tradition sometimes write in a way consistent with Everett’s conception of recursion, but sometimes don’t. For example, consider this random 2016 blogpost I found by a linguist in training: For generative linguistics the recursive function is Merge, which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure which can then be the input for further iterations of Merge. Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that expression. For instance the noun phrase “My favourite book” requires two iterations of Merge, (Merge(favourite, book)= [Favourite book], Merge(my, [favourite book])= [my [favourite book]]) and therefore is an instance of recursion without embedding. To be clear, this usage of ‘recursion’ seems consistent with how many other Chomskyan linguists have used the term. And with all due respect to these researchers, I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would imply (i) any language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion, and that (ii) all sentences are necessarily constructed recursively. The first implication means that “All natural human languages have recursion.” reduces to the vacuously true claim that “All languages allow more than one word in their sentences.”5 The second idea is more interesting, because it relates to how the brain constructs sentences, but as far as I can tell this claim cannot be tested using purely observational linguistic data. One would have to do some kind of experiment to check the order in which subjects mentally construct sentences, and ideally make brain activity measurements of some sort. Aside from sometimes involving a strange notion of recursion, another feature of the Chomskyan response to Everett relates to the distinction we discussed earlier between so-called E-languages and I-languages. Consider the following exchange from a 2012 interview with Chomsky: NS: But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar. Chomsky: It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar. That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Chomsky makes claims like this elsewhere too. The argument is that, even if there were a language without a recursive grammar, this is not inconsistent with his theory, since his theory is not about E-languages like English or Spanish or Pirahã. His theory only makes claims about I-languages, or equivalently about our innate language capabilities. But this is kind of a dumb rhetorical move. Either the theory makes predictions about real languages or it doesn’t. The statement that some languages in the world are arguably recursive is not a prediction; it’s an observation, and we didn’t need the theory to make it. What does it mean for the grammar of thought languages to be recursive? How do we test this? Can we test it by doing experiments involving real linguistic data, or not? If not, are we even still talking about language? To this day, as one might expect, not everyone agrees with Everett that (i) Pirahã lacks a recursive hierarchical grammar, and that (ii) such a discovery would have any bearing at all on the truth or falsity of Chomskyan universal grammar. Given that languages can be pretty weird, among other reasons, I am inclined to side with Everett here. But where does that leave us? We do not just want to throw bombs and tell everyone their theories are wrong. Does Everett have an alternative to the Chomskyan account of what language is and where it came from? Yes, and it turns out he’s been thinking about this for a long time. How Language Began is his 2017 offering in this direction. IV. THE BOOK So what is language, anyway? Everett writes: (How Language Began, Ch. 1, pg. 15) Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage (pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organizational principles, information, and gestures. Language is a gestalt—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining individual components. Okay, so far, so good. To the uninitiated, it looks like Everett is just listing all of the different things that are involved in language; so what? The point is that language is more than just grammar. He goes on to say this explicitly: (How Language Began, Ch. 1, pg. 16) Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex. His paradigmatic examples here are Pirahã and Riau Indonesian, which appears to lack a hierarchical grammar, and which moreover apparently lacks a clear noun/verb distinction. You might ask: what does that even mean? I’m not 100% sure, since the linked Gil chapter appears formidable, but Wikipedia gives a pretty good example in the right direction: For example, the phrase Ayam makan (lit. 'chicken eat') can mean, in context, anything from 'the chicken is eating', to 'I ate some chicken', 'the chicken that is eating' and 'when we were eating chicken' Is “chicken” the subject of the sentence, the object of the sentence, or something else? Well, it depends on the context. What’s the purpose of language? Communication: (How Language Began, Introduction, pg. 5) Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to conversation. Did language emerge suddenly, as it does in Chomsky’s proposal, or gradually? Very gradually: (How Language Began, Introduction, pg. 7-8) There is a wide and deep linguistic chasm between humans and all other species. … More likely, the gap was formed by baby steps, by homeopathic changes spurred by culture. Yes, human languages are dramatically different from the communication systems of other animals, but the cognitive and cultural steps to get beyond the ‘language threshold’ were smaller than many seem to think. The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the genus Homo and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but surely progressed until humans achieved language. This slow march taken by early hominins resulted eventually in a yawning evolutionary chasm between human language and other animal communication. So far, we have a bit of a nothingburger. Language is for communication, and probably—like everything else!—emerged gradually over a long period of time. While these points are interesting as a contrast to Chomsky, they are not that surprising in and of themselves. But Everett’s work goes beyond taking the time to bolster common sense ideas on language origins. Two points he discusses at length are worth briefly exploring here. First, he offers a much more specific account of the emergence of language than Chomsky does, and draws on a mix of evidence from paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and more. Second, he pretty firmly takes the Anti-Chomsky view on whether language is innate: (Preface, pg. xv) … I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn. These two points are not unrelated. Everett’s core idea is that language should properly be thought of as an invention rather than an innate human capability. You might ask: who invented it? Who shaped it? Lots of people, collaboratively, over a long time. In a word, culture. As Everett notes in the preface, “Language is the handmaiden of culture.” In any case, let’s discuss these points one at a time. First: the origins of language. There are a number of questions one might want to answer about how language began: In what order did different language-related concepts and components emerge?

Inline links: Pullum, 4, 2012 paper, blogpost, 5, 2012 interview, Riau Indonesian, lack a hierarchical grammar, lacks a clear noun/verb distinction

Sparta2 mentions across 2 issues

Sparta is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 03, 2023 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine"; "This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence"; "This reminded me of Sparta". It most often appears alongside Assyria, Babylon, China.

Article page: Sparta
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 03, 2023
Last seen: January 10, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Against Ice Age Civilizations March 03, 2023
Book Review: Cyropaedia January 10, 2024

Assyria 2 shared issues
Babylon 2 shared issues
China 2 shared issues
Egypt 2 shared issues
Persia 2 shared issues

Source context

Against Ice Age Civilizations

March 03, 2023 · Original source

The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.

Book Review: Cyropaedia

January 10, 2024 · Original source

This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence. Most of what we know of Spartan society, we know from . . . Xenophon, who in addition to spending time in Persia spent time in Sparta and wrote about them too. Maybe Persian society and Spartan society were similar in ways. Or maybe Xenophon just had a virtuous-military-education fetish that he applied to whatever society he was writing about, sort of like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic.

Xenophon’s Cyrus is constantly giving speeches on the virtues of simple living. He is half-Mede, half-Persian, and alternates between the almost-literally-spartan Persian court and the luxurious Median court; in the latter, he monologues about how all of the Medes’ fancy foods and wines are less satisfying than simple bread well-earned after a day of hard labor. “Hunger is the best relish” is practically his catchphrase.

Squirrel Hill2 mentions across 2 issues

Squirrel Hill is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 10, 2022 and August 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Crazy Mocha Coffee in Squirrel Hill"; "Crazy Mocha Coffee on 2100 Murray Ave in Squirrel Hill". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Ala Moana Beach Park.

Article page: Squirrel Hill
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Ala Moana Beach Park 2 shared issues
Alan Enright 2 shared issues
Alcampo Lounge 2 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

PITTSBURGH, PA Contact: Justin (pghacx@gmail.com) Date: April 16 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3PR+QP7 Location: Frick Park, by the Beechwood Gate Entrance IF weather is dry. In the event of rain, the indoor venue will be Crazy Mocha Coffee in Squirrel Hill (2100 Murray Ave) Notes: Please email pghacx@gmail.com to RSVP and be added to the mailing list! If we change venue, an email will go out by noon the day of (>2 hours before the scheduled meetup time).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G2C3PR+QP7

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.

St. Louis, MO2 mentions across 2 issues

St. Louis, MO is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ST. LOUIS, MO ( RSVP ) ... Location: Tower Grove Park"; "ST. LOUIS, MO". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX MEETUP, Alex.

Article page: St. Louis, MO
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: April 10, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Alex 2 shared issues
Anastasia 2 shared issues
Austin 2 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

ST. LOUIS, MO (RSVP) Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 25 Location: Tower Grove Park. Chinese Pavilion. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/fields.flank.feed Notes: All vaguely connected rationalsphere types welcome. I'm not connected to Wash U or SLU. If anyone in the ACX world is, they should do us a favor by promoting the event on campus.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/fields.flank.feed

April 10, 2022 · Original source

ST. LOUIS, MO Contact: John Buridan (littlejohnburidan@gmail.com) Date: May 28 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJM3M+PV Location: The Picadilly at Manhattan

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86CFJM3M+PV

MOBILE, AL Contact: Susan (susanstrum@protonmail.com) Date: April 11 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862HMXV3+FM Location: Greer's St. Louis Market - rooftop deck

Inline links: https://plus.codes/862HMXV3+FM

STATE COLLEGE, PA2 mentions across 2 issues

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

Article page: STATE COLLEGE, PA
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021
Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

ACX 2 shared issues
ACX 2 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 2 shared issues
Alex 2 shared issues
Amsterdam 2 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

STATE COLLEGE, PA (RSVP) Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Sunset Park. I will be wearing a blue hat. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/highs.cooks.later

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/highs.cooks.later

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

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.

sub-Saharan African countries2 mentions across 2 issues

sub-Saharan African countries is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 15, 2025 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs"; "low IQs for all sub-Saharan African countries". It most often appears alongside Aporia, IQ, Lynn.

Article page: sub-Saharan African countries
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: January 15, 2025
Last seen: January 16, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates January 15, 2025
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ January 16, 2025

Aporia 2 shared issues
IQ 2 shared issues
Lynn 2 shared issues
Malawi 2 shared issues
Sub-Saharan Africa 2 shared issues

Source context

January 15, 2025 · Original source

First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?

1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?

Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?

January 16, 2025 · Original source

The concept of IQ is fine, but you are personally miscalibrated about what low IQ means because the only very-low-IQ people in your training set had developmental disorders. I think these probably explain 5%, 5%, 40%, and 50% of the effect respectively, and I should have been more careful to emphasize (3), which I think explains 40% of the effect. The particular way I would flesh out 3 would be something like - if you’re illiterate and (somewhat) innumerate, you probably don’t have enough practice with symbols and complex mental operations to do even a “culture fair” IQ test like Raven’s Matrices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your IQ is higher than the Raven’s Matrices says - the person who underperforms on Ravens for this reason will also underperform on a wide variety of other abstract/intellectual/symbolic tasks, and this is part of what IQ means. But it means that Raven’s IQ won’t predict concrete tasks as well as you would expect. Fujimura writes: The other major factor that I think should be reassuring about Lynn's estimates (and other cross-national IQ estimates) is that when you look at "non-problematic" sources that seem like proxies for IQ (e.g. World Bank data, educational performance), you see the same pattern as Lynn and others' IQ data. It's easy for people to quibble about each and every IQ measure (and so people do), but that we see the same pattern of results using otherwise uncontroversial data sources should be reassuring. Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake. This kind of stuff is why I think simple failures of data collection and analysis are unlikely to explain more than 5% of the gap with our common sense. There’s definitely something weird about these numbers, but it’s got to be more complicated than just “racist people screwed up the test”. But continuing on this subject - if IQ has two components, why would World Bank education data and GDP track the abstract/symbolic component of IQ, rather than the practical component of IQ? Or, rather, it’s obvious why this would happen in education. But why would GDP track abstract/symbolic rather than practical? One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP. Harzerkatze writes: [Your claim that blacks everywhere should have the same genes] is far from true. While "white" may be a descriptor for a group of somewhat similar genetic backgrounds, having common ancestors not too far in the past, "black" is different, grouping populations of similar skin color, but common ancestors diverging way further back in time. Yeah, I didn’t want to get into all of this on the post, but I agree the way I phrased it was misleading. Lynn and other national IQ estimates find very low IQs for all sub-Saharan African countries - I mentioned Malawi at 60 in the post, but Nigeria, on the other side of Africa, is 69. Whatever is going on there is a pan-African problem, such that I don’t think differences between African groups are very relevant. US blacks are mostly descended from people in west Africa, eg Nigeria. Some people also brought up that US blacks have significant white admixture. This is true but it’s still not enough to be relevant to this discussion. If we assumed everything was genetic and US blacks with their ~20% white admixture had genetic IQ of 85, we would still expect African blacks to have IQ in the low 80s. However you parse it, there’s got to be some kind of health/education/environment effect going on there. Africa is extremely genetically diverse, but I think most of the countries measured in the paper, including Malawi, are some variety of Niger-Congo speakers, who I don’t think are that much more diverse than white people or anyone else. The really interesting African ethnicities, like the Khoi-San, don’t show up as much at a national level. Andrew Clough writes: Speaking of charity and IQ, the lowest of low hanging fruit is putting iodine in salt. You can donate to the Global Iodine Network like I do for the long term benefit of poorer countries without worrying you're just delaying Malthus's reemergence. Givewell calls Salt Iodization "slightly below the range of cost-effectiveness of the opportunities that we expect to direct marginal donations to" which in the grand scheme of things is quite good. Yeah, salt iodization is great. I had always heard of iodine related problems being concentrated in central Asia and especially Afghanistan, but looking at the map… (source) … sub-Saharan Africa is also a hot spot. I wonder what’s wrong in Cuba - this is exactly the sort of easily gameable metric I would usually expect them to be good at, or at least carefully faking. If you’re interested, you can donate to Iodine Global Network here. Bob Jacobs writes: > His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like: Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist. No contesting any of this. MM writes: I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap. Calvin writes: I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap. I was concerned to hear this - I have a little experience with the intellectually disabled, but it didn’t involve knowing people’s exact IQ, so I’m not very well-calibrated here. Looking for more information, I found https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, which purports to describe the characteristics of very low IQ people, mostly in the context of criminal justice (where lawyers often try to use a client’s low IQ as a mitigating factor - ie maybe he didn’t truly understand that crime is wrong). The report says things like: Although all persons with mental retardation have significantly impaired mental development, their intellectual level can vary considerably. An estimated 89 percent of all people with retardation have I.Q.s in the 51-70 range. An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade […] Although mental retardation of any degree has profound implications for a person's cognitive and social development, it is a condition which in many cases is not readily apparent. While some of the mentally retarded, such as those whose retardation is caused by Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, have characteristically distinctive facial features, most cannot be identified by their physical appearance alone. Unless their cognitive impairment is unusually severe (e.g. an I.Q. below 40), persons with mental retardation may be thought of as "slow" but the full extent of their impairment is often not readily appreciated, particularly by people who have limited contact with or knowledge of them, including police, prosecutors, judges, and other participants in the criminal justice system. Many capital offenders with mental retardation did not have their condition diagnosed until trial or during post-conviction proceedings. And gave some examples (slightly out of order for this list): Oliver Cruz, who was executed in Texas on August 9, 2000, had an I.Q. that was measured variously at 64 and 76. Cruz nonetheless insisted to reporters that, although he was perhaps "slow in reading, slow in learning," he was not mentally retarded. Mitigation specialist Scharlette Holdman recalled a client who so successfully hid his retardation from his attorneys that he allowed them to sign him up for college-level calculus classes, which he could not comprehend. He had gone through much of his schooling allowing his younger sister to complete his homework for him. When he was given papers to read in connection to his case, he would carefully stare at them. If he was asked a substantive question, he usually responded, "I don't recall." Only when experts in retardation evaluated him and investigators reviewed his school records and spoke to his family did lawyers discover he had mental retardation and had been considered "slow" since his early childhood. Another capital defendant "hid his mental retardation for most of his life by working at a very repetitive job as a switcher on the railroad. He lied about finishing high school. He was actually in special education classes and did not finish the sixth grade. He was drafted into the army and discharged because of his mental retardation. He lied about his service record. He often made things up so that people would not suspect mental retardation." Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York' These people are obviously not going to win Nobels anytime soon. But even the guy with IQ 35 - 45 was still talking to people. I think this supports the thesis that intellectually disabled people without specific syndromes can seem pretty normal most of the time. (though keep in mind that anything from the court system should be treated with a grain of salt - defense attorneys have an incentive to exaggerate the intellectual disability of their clients in the hopes that it gets them a lighter sentence) Lyman Stone writes: Emil's post isn't correct, however. We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan. Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers. Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally. Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy. See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665 We know that people with extremely low IQs in the Flynn sense must be capable of subsistence agriculture, because pre-Flynn Effect, most of the West had extremely low IQs, and they were all doing subsistence agriculture. How is this possible? Responding to Lyman’s comment, I wrote: I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of. You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones. For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction. I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Maybe one way to look at it is to go back to the claim from the justice system document above, saying that people with IQ in the 60s are the mental equivalent of third-graders. The third-graders I know are very into Pokemon, and have all sorts of opinions on how if you add X bonus to a Y strength fire-type Pokemon and then play Z combo, it will [commence six weeks of droning on about different Pokemon cards]. Is this the sort of math/reasoning/strategizing that we don’t expect someone with IQ 60 to be able to do? Does the fact that third-graders can do it mean that we’re miscalibrated? I’m not sure. The part of Lyman’s comment that gives me the most pause is his observation that, if the mean IQ is 60, a decent fraction of people must be 45, and a non-negligible portion 30. At this point, even third-grader comparisons don’t save us. I guess this is where I bring in the claim that IQ breaks down as a guide to practical living skills below some point. You can see several more layers of response between me and Lyman here, but I was especially grateful for him teaching me two things I didn’t already know: First, he corrected my misconception about Reich on ancient European cognitive evolution. Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were “2-3 standard deviations” below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90 (they probably also had lower IQ for environmental reasons).,

Maybe I should have had a stronger opinion on whether Lynn’s exact studies were correct? Certainly lots of commenters had strong opinions that they weren’t. I had hoped that linking the Aporia article would be a sufficient pointer to my opinion that, while Lynn’s work was a first effort and far from perfect, the general thrust (including surprisingly low IQs in sub-Saharan African countries) has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias. Maybe it would have been less controversial if I had just asked why sub-Saharan Africa has surprisingly low school test scores, but then nobody would have a good sense of what school test scores were normal vs. surprising and nobody would have cared.

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

Inline links: source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here

Swarthmore2 mentions across 2 issues

Swarthmore is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 31, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Reason & Rationality summer program ... Swarthmore (July 27 - Aug 2)"; "In 1979, he moved back to Swarthmore with a group of disciples". It most often appears alongside Singapore, 1987, 1988.

Article page: Swarthmore
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 31, 2025
Last seen: September 19, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Open Thread 375 March 31, 2025
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been September 19, 2025

Singapore 2 shared issues
1987 1 shared issues
1988 1 shared issues
Adleman 1 shared issues
AHIRC 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

March 31, 2025 · Original source

4: And there’s a Reason & Rationality summer program for high school students happening at Princeton (June 8-14) and Swarthmore (July 27 - Aug 2), cost is $4300 - $6900. AFAICT this one isn’t associated with our conspiracy, but I see that Amos Wollen (philosophy substack here) is one of the instructors.

Inline links: Reason & Rationality summer program, philosophy substack here

September 19, 2025 · Original source

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

Inline links: 2, would reflect, 3, claims, 4, 5, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wpPj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda43a667-c15b-4626-a0a7-480ad1144dce_1114x1070.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y2jg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96fdc6cc-8ead-4aef-9539-fa421e77c0f9_1600x1299.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png

A pay-per-click system like Nelson described would first be implemented in 1996. Computer Lib/Dream Machines became a cult favorite, and Nelson began to gather a small following. In 1979, he moved back to Swarthmore with a group of disciples, and they got to work. The crack team included:7 Roger Gregory, a University of Michigan graduate and Ann Arbor local who’d been corresponding over telephone with Nelson since reading Computer Lib in 1974. Gregory was a whiz with hardware, but suffered from regular bouts of depression, sometimes so strong they would render him “incapable of working.” Gregory paid for the house in Pennsylvania.

Inline links: 7

Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!

Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan

Syrian2 mentions across 2 issues

Syrian is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 08, 2022 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "or a Syrian"; "In the Syrian version, it took 300 men to drag its body". It most often appears alongside Russia, 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Achilles.

Article page: Syrian
Mention count: 2
Issue count: 2
First seen: March 08, 2022
Last seen: September 19, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Ukraine Thoughts And Links March 08, 2022
Book Review: The Alexander Romance September 19, 2023

Russia 2 shared issues
15th century Sicilian manuscript 1 shared issues
Achilles 1 shared issues
Afghan 1 shared issues
Agrimardio 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

Book Review: The Alexander Romance

September 19, 2023 · Original source

His first night east of India, he was attacked by a triceratops. At least this is how I interpret the odontotyrannus (“tooth-tyrant”), a three-horned monster bigger than an elephant that killed 26 Macedonian warriors. In the Syrian version, it took 300 men to drag its body out of a river; in the Armenian version, 1,300.

There is no single Alexander Romance. Every culture from Ethiopia to Russia added their own bits and adapted it to their own needs. The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia; the Jewish version adds bits about how Alexander knelt before the High Priest of Jerusalem and said that the LORD was the one true God. Someone from Syria added the bits about Gog and Magog; nobody knows who added the parts with the 36-foot-tall giants, the three-eyed lions, the sphere-people, or the headless men. This makes it hard to review “the” Alexander Romance - some historians describe it as more of a genre than a single story.

Saami1 mentions across 1 issues

Saami is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

Reference entry: Saami
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 09, 2023
Last seen: February 09, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For February 2023 February 09, 2023

@moritheil 1 shared issues
ACX Prediction Contest 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
AI X-Risk Research Podcast 1 shared issues

Source context

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

Saarbrücken1 mentions across 1 issues

Saarbrücken is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAARBRÜCKEN, GERMANY". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Saarbrücken
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Dimi Contact Info: dimi[dot]zharkov[a t]gmail[d ot]co m Time: Sunday, September 15th, 07:00 PM Location: Biergarten 'Gutmann am Dutzendteich', outside if the weather allows. I will put a sign on the table saying ACX Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXHC4P8+5Q Notes: We can start at Gutmann's and then go for a walk around Dutzendteich. German, English, and Russian/Ukrainian speakers very welcome! (As well as any other language) SAARBRÜCKEN, GERMANY Contact: Jan Wehner Contact Info: janwehner1[a t]t-online[do t]de Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 07:00 PM Location: Am Staden 16a, 66121 Saarbrücken (Ulanen-Pavillon Beer garden). I'll have a laptop saying ACX MEETUP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG Notes: RSVPs are required. Please use this form: https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FXHC4P8+5Q, https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG, https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7.

Contact: Jan Wehner Contact Info: janwehner1[a t]t-online[do t]de Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 07:00 PM Location: Am Staden 16a, 66121 Saarbrücken (Ulanen-Pavillon Beer garden). I'll have a laptop saying ACX MEETUP Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG Notes: RSVPs are required. Please use this form: https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FX962G4+8GG, https://forms.gle/QwvuVeL4sTQbuQub7.

Sachsen1 mentions across 1 issues

Sachsen 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 "FREIBERG, SACHSEN, GERMANY ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: Sachsen
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

FREIBERG, SACHSEN, GERMANY (RSVP) Contact: Alexander, act[dot]meets[dot]freiberg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, August 28 Location: At the central fountain in the city park just west of the city wall. I'll wear a bright shirt and will put up a sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/salt.diamonds.huddle Notes: English/German bilingual.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/salt.diamonds.huddle

Sacramento River1 mentions across 1 issues

Sacramento River is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: Sacramento River
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

Source context

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

Sacramento Valley1 mentions across 1 issues

Sacramento Valley is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "or the the Sacramento Valley in the north". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry: Sacramento Valley
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF. Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River. It claims that if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be the poorest in America, even worse than Mississippi. This was kind of shocking. I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War. But the Central Valley has none of those things, plus it has extremely fertile farmland, plus it’s in one of the richest states of the country and should at least get good subsidies and infrastructure. How did it get so bad? II. First of all, is this claim true? I can’t find official per capita income statistics for the Central Valley, separate from the rest of California, but you can find all the individual counties here. When you look at the ones in the Central Valley, you get a median per capita income of $21,729 (this is binned by counties, which might confuse things, but by good luck there are as many people in counties above the median-income county as below it, so probably not by very much). This is indeed lower than Mississippi’s per capita income of $25,444, although if you look by household or family income, the Central Valley does better again. I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

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

V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

Inline links: Carolina Demography, Okies

Sacramento, CA1 mentions across 1 issues

Sacramento, CA 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 "SACRAMENTO, CA ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: Sacramento, CA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SACRAMENTO, CA (RSVP) Contact: Andrew, justsomerandomguy[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: Backyard of private home, near the intersection of Garfield and Marconi — address will be provided by email. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/transfers.easy.anyway

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/transfers.easy.anyway

Sahel1 mentions across 1 issues

Sahel is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 27, 2022 and May 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the flattest parts of the Sahel". It most often appears alongside An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins, anti-politics machine, Basotho Congress Party.

Reference entry: Sahel
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 27, 2022
Last seen: May 27, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine May 27, 2022

An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins 1 shared issues
anti-politics machine 1 shared issues
Basotho Congress Party 1 shared issues
Basotho Nationalist Party 1 shared issues
Bazuzi 1 shared issues

Source context

May 27, 2022 · Original source

A story that plausibly explains these numbers (either a potential mechanism for an effect, or an explanation of why the effect turned out to be null) If these stories are challenged, it is not because there is no actual evidence for them, but because an economist in the audience has thought of their own preferred theory. If the speaker can find some data point that contradicts the questioner’s idea, this is thought to “confirm” the original story. Since audience members (who often have little specific knowledge of the region) are unlikely to ask questions like “what if this village just has an incredibly complicated set of social conventions around cattle that prevents their sale even without market barriers in place?” or “do the region’s economic challenges have more to do with this very specific regulation in South African immigration law?”, plausible-sounding stories that explain one or two numerical data points tend to gain traction in the literature whether or not they have anything to do with reality. Mark McGovern famously noted this trend in a review of two of Paul Collier’s books, writing: “Much of the intellectual heavy lifting in these books is in fact done at the level of implication or commonsense guessing. And the common sense is surely not that of the inhabitants of the countries being dissected, but that of the highly educated elite located primarily in Western Europe and North America. In those passages where Collier does lay out the thinking behind his explanations, they are always coherent and plausible, but the chain of causal relations makes it evident how fragile these models typically are.” The World Bank report’s fundamental misdiagnosis of the challenges Lesotho faced formed the basis for a series of failed “development initiatives”, most notably the Thaba-Tseka Development Project, a joint venture funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank, the Government of Lesotho, and the UK Overseas Development Ministry. The project focused on providing technical solutions to the “problems” the World Bank report had identified: better agricultural techniques, easier access to markets, and increased government capacity to provide public goods. Each piece faced serious problems in execution, largely because interventions shown to have the sorts of “positive effects” randomized experiments might demonstrate elsewhere in Africa were not necessarily well suited to Lesotho’s unforgiving, mountainous terrain. But even more seriously, the project was so enveloped in “development discourse” that nobody thought to question whether they were working on problems their “recipients” cared about, or merely the ones the “tools of development” were capable of solving. As Ferguson writes, “The promise that crop farming could be revolutionized through the application of a well-known package of technical inputs was so firmly written into the project’s design that it was difficult for those on the scene to challenge it, or even to confront it.” Perhaps the only thing that has changed since Ferguson wrote is that we have tools to better identify these failures: the development literature continues to be littered with failed trials and interventions based on unchecked assumptions. One of the most famous is the British Department for International Development’s 90 million pound Tuungane project, whose Congolese incarnation sought to rebuild village governing institutions that the country’s civil war had destroyed. One of the most convincing explanations of its failure is that it may not have been necessary to begin with: the implementers do not seem to have checked whether the institutions had actually been weakened by violence, and baseline reports indicated that residents were relatively satisfied with village governance before the project even started! More research is needed to clarify the situation -- research which might have been useful to carry out before spending a £90 million on a “fix”. Part of this, perhaps, comes from the usual overconfidence that other social scientists like to accuse economists of. But there are much bigger systemic problems at play. Development work tends to run on short timelines: grad students and postdocs need to publish quickly for their careers to advance, NGO funding runs on 5-ish year cycles, and charities (particularly in “high-risk” areas) face extremely high employee turnover rates. This simultaneously limits the accumulation of institutional knowledge, while incentivizing practitioners away from the time-intensive process of understanding a particular context in favor of “getting results quick.” Similarly, the recent introduction of experimental evidence to the development field is a wondrous thing, but the revolution has to continue: randomized experiments can tell us about the effect an intervention had somewhere, but even the best methods of applying this kind of evidence to a specific context remain somewhat arbitrary and subjective. As EA begins to fund more complex (but potentially more effective) interventions, a key step will be to get a more systematic handle on how to gather evidence about specific places-- countries, states, even villages -- and how to match the tools we have to people who might benefit from them. II. The Trouble with Technocrats “But even if the project was in some sense a ‘failure’ as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its ‘side effects’ had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. [...] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region” As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned -- not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”? Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better.” Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things. Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems. A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent: “In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. [...] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.” Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure. This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can pull talent away from government jobs. Foreign aid can worsen ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can hurt neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” -- surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible! Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project. Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule. This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages [...] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units. When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures. The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects. As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing,” completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted. Have any EA projects had this sort of unexpected political side effect? I think it’s genuinely hard to tell without further research, but the possibility is frightening. (There’s been a little bit of research on the quantitative side --Recent research has found, for instance, that GiveDirectly’s 2014 unconditional cash transfer trial increased community participation but did not change voting patterns, so at least in 2014 the Kenyan government wasn’t using the program to stay in power. Was this the right question to test? I am not sure, especially without a more qualitative survey to see if there are other avenues we should be worried about.) III. Takeaways for Effective Altruism So what do we do as effective altruists (hereafter “EAs”)? I see three key takeaways. The first is a clear need for more qualitative research. GiveWell makes some qualitative judgments about charities, but Ferguson’s work illustrates the need for qualitative evaluation of the interventions themselves to see if the underlying studies have captured all of the “right” variables. Randomized experiments are really good at testing hypotheses, but by their very nature they can’t tell you about variables you didn’t decide ahead of time to measure. Are there significant side effects (positive or negative) we’ve missed from massive malaria net distributions? I don’t know, but if so they are not likely to be discovered by a bunch of Americans and Europeans sitting in a room and trying to guess the best things to measure. Rather, they’re probably already known (or suspected) by the people experiencing them, and a first step to finding out is going and asking them. (A second step is finding the right people to ask them -- real expertise in qualitative research is a rare and valuable skill.) Of course, qualitative research is messy and sometimes the people you interview are wrong or have other agendas. So once we have an “on-the-ground” hypothesis or concern, there will often be good reason to use a randomized trial or quasi-experimental method to test it or try to understand how much of a concern it might be! This sort of interdisciplinary approach is starting to gain traction in academia, but it has yet to be seriously applied in the EA sphere. There’s another angle to this: Ferguson’s most incisive insights arise not from studying the people being “served”, but by studying the development practitioners themselves. Other social scientists have continued this trend, from McGovern’s An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins and Robinson’s How Different Social Scientists Think to Marchais, Bazuzi, and Lameke’s The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers and Omar Bah’s webcomic Mzungus in Development and Governments. Each new paper illuminates the research process in new ways, and provides tools both to do better research and to identify potential weaknesses in the pre-existing literature. I think one of the highest impact investments an Effective Altruist fund could make right now would be to hire a handful of trained anthropologists (or other outside experts in qualitative research / ethnography) to hang out in places like GiveWell or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for a few years and really study how effective altruism works as a system. How are decisions being made, and how is evidence being used to make them? What does “EA discourse” help make visible and which problems and concerns does it hide from our view? How do the positionalities of typical EA researchers affect their views of what’s important or what’s plausible? I have my guesses, and I’m sure you have yours. But I had my guesses about development economics, too, and I missed nearly everything Ferguson (and the authors mentioned two paragraphs up) uncovered. What more are we missing? The second is an emphasis on local context. As funding gaps for “low hanging fruit” like malaria disappear, EA is going to have to focus on more complicated interventions, which are likely to be fairly context-specific -- after all, why should an agriculture program that works in the flattest parts of the Sahel be expected to work the same way in the Maloti Mountains? Ferguson notes about several of the Thaba-Tseka project’s failed arms: “Tanzania may be very different from Lesotho on the ground, but, from the point of view of a development agency’s head office, both may be simply ‘the Africa desk’. In the Thaba-Tseka case, at least, the original project planners knew little about Lesotho’s specific history, politics, and sociology; they were experts on ‘livestock development in Africa,’ and drew largely on experience in East Africa.” For any sort of context-specific intervention to work, an intimate knowledge of the specific history, needs, and geography of individual villages and regions is necessary. The development world has slowly made steps in this direction, but it’s not clear to me that the EA community has a clear way of acquiring, accessing, or working with this information. I don’t think there’s a magic bullet to solve this problem, but in the long run any solution will probably need to involve a) on-the-ground, qualitative research and b) real representation in the EA network from areas EA organizations are interested in working. The development industry has a shameful history of infantilizing and ignoring the opinions of “locals”, and I think the conversations I’m starting to see in EA about diversity and representation of different parts of the Global South need to continue if we’re going to get enough serious knowledge of local contexts to effectively direct funding. The third is a continued need to take politics seriously. This is one of the most challenging issues in charitable giving: when is it okay to work with a government doing terrible things to deliver humanitarian aid? To what extent does an NGO feeding the hungry lend its legitimacy to or cover for an authoritarian regime’s misdeeds? I don’t have anything close to a full answer (and I don’t think anyone does), but Ferguson’s work exposes a possibility I hadn’t thought of before, in which “technical” and “apolitical” projects can expand the power of the state in unforeseen and potentially dangerous ways. After writing The Anti-Politics Machine, Ferguson largely gave up on the idea of charitable or state-based aid. (Understandably, I think, given that he spent most of a decade watching its most horrific side effects first-hand). It’s ironic, then, that I think his book’s practical value is greatest to those of us who still hold onto hope in its possibilities. May we have ears to hear the voices telling us where our work has fallen short, and eyes to see what it could become. Footnotes Ferguson pg. 55

Inline links: pull talent, worsen, hurt, some, An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins, How Different Social Scientists Think, The Data is Gold, and We Are The Gold-Diggers, Mzungus in Development and Governments

Saint John, Canada1 mentions across 1 issues

Saint John, Canada is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAINT JOHN, CANADA". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Saint John, Canada
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87Q8GC89+37, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia, http://eepurl.com/io5vZM, https://discord.gg/K8gMNzqPVG, https://www.facebook.com/groups/less.wrong.montreal/, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zxcTsabESBbshjA98/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2024-montreal-qc, https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+XJP

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Henri Contact Info: acxmontreal[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 01:00 PM Location: Jeanne-Mance Park, at the corner of Duluth and Esplanade. We'll have an ACX Meetup sign. Note: join our Discord server to receive last-minute information in case of bad weather. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q8GC89+37 Group Link: LessWrong group: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia ; Mailing list: http://eepurl.com/io5vZM ; Discord: https://discord.gg/K8gMNzqPVG ; Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/less.wrong.montreal/ Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zxcTsabESBbshjA98/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2024-montreal-qc SAINT JOHN, CANADA Contact: Sergey Contact Info: spam04321[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 11:30 AM Location: McAllister Place food court, I'll have some kind of a small ACX MEETUP sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87QM8X4M+XJP Notes: Please RSVP if you have any intention of coming as the event will only proceed if there's at least someone interested in coming.

Saint Louis1 mentions across 1 issues

Saint Louis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAINT LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Saint Louis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Alex Hedtke Contact Info: alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 11, 06:30 PM Location: This will take place in the meeting room above the City Market Minsky's Pizza. Tell the host you are here for the meeting room event. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86F74C58+CW Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea Additional Notes: The meeting room we will be in has full waitstaff service, but a maximum tab limit of 5. If you plan to get any food/drink, prepare to share your tab with a small group. Bringing cash is easiest, Venmo is second-easiest. SAINT LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA Contact: Alex Freeman Contact Info: alexrfreeman[at]proton[do t]me Time: Saturday, September 21st, 01:00 PM Location: Gurney Pavilion in Tower Grove Park Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJP4P+CQ Group Link: https://discord.gg/kJvvy6HQ

Inline links: https://www.meetup.com/kc_rat_ea, https://plus.codes/86CFJP4P+CQ, https://discord.gg/kJvvy6HQ

Saint Louis, MO1 mentions across 1 issues

Saint Louis, MO 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 "SAINT LOUIS, MO". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: Saint Louis, MO
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

Saint-Michel1 mentions across 1 issues

Saint-Michel 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 "60 Gd Rue Saint-Michel, 31400 Toulouse". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: Saint-Michel
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA1 mentions across 1 issues

SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SAINT-PETERSBURG, RUSSIA Contact: Mak Contact Info: kellendros95[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 5:00 PM Location: пер. Гривцова 22, открытое пространство "Каледонский Лес", малый или средний зал Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GFGW8H8+8Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9GFGW8H8+8Q

Saket1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Saket
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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

Salem1 mentions across 1 issues

Salem is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 28, 2023 and August 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "traditional forecasting tournaments beat Salem-style prediction market tournaments at identifying superforecasters". It most often appears alongside 2024: Bullish on Blue, ACX forecasting contest, AI Advances by 2025.

Reference entry: Salem
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 28, 2023
Last seen: August 28, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

23 August 28, 2023

2024: Bullish on Blue 1 shared issues
ACX forecasting contest 1 shared issues
AI Advances by 2025 1 shared issues
August 31 1 shared issues
Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology 1 shared issues

Source context

August 28, 2023 · Original source

Kalshi: https://kalshi.com/markets/supercon/roomtemp-superconductor-reported Both reached the 40s to 50s! I think there just wasn’t enough smart money to drown out the people who wanted to bet on an exciting thing being true, or who were unduly influenced by a social media environment optimized to keep their attention by convincing them that an exciting thing was true. I have never claimed prediction markets are always good. All I wrote in the Prediction Market FAQ was that either a prediction market will be good, or you could make lots of free money. In this case, it was the second one. I regret I only made $30. I do hope this situation will improve over time, as over-eager forecasters get burned and dollars flow from dumb money to smarter. [EDIT: I should have included something about Metaculus here, but it’s confusing. I think the most popular Metaculus market was lower because it had stricter resolution criteria (the first replication had to be positive, instead of any replication) but that otherwise Metaculus raw probabilities mirrored everyone else’s. We don’t know how their algorithmically processed probabilities did yet and I’ll report on that information when I get it.] Salem/CSPI Tournament Winners The Salem Center and the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology, two think tanks associated with right-wing intellectual Richard Hanania, sponsored a prediction market tournament last year. Participants got $1000 in play money to bet on selected markets about current events; winners would be interviewed for a well-paying academic sinecure at one of the think tanks. Now the tournament is over. Winners have yet to be announced, but unofficially, everyone knows who they are: First place out of 999 participants is zubbybadger. Zubby is a prediction market veteran who was featured in a Washington Monthly article last year for his great track record in political betting (he’s made > $150,000 on PredictIt). Now he works as a “community manager” for Kalshi (I don’t know what this entails). Second place was Robert from Considerations On Codecrafting. He’s written a detailed reflection on his experience (part one, part two) which is my main source for this section and highly recommended. He describes himself as “having absolutely no experience with prediction markets”. Third place was Johnny Ten-Numbers, about whom I can find no further information. You can see the rest of the top 20 at the very bottom of this post. Reading Robert’s story of his experience, I’m struck by how little of the competition at the top was about predictive accuracy. Everyone in the top 20 was a very accurate predictor (Exactly equally accurate? Hard to tell.) What separated 1st place from 20th, aside from luck, was things like: Ability to move fast - both in responding to news, and in taking the other side of bad bets. Several top performers programmed bots to give them an edge here.

Inline links: Prediction Market FAQ, selected markets about current events, zubbybadger, featured in a Washington Monthly article last year, Robert, part one, part two, Johnny Ten-Numbers

Reading Robert’s logs made me more convinced than ever that the winners are probably brilliant people who deservedly won this 5-dimensional chess game. But only some of their brilliance is concentrated in prediction per se. Seems bad, and makes me think traditional forecasting tournaments beat Salem-style prediction market tournaments at identifying superforecasters.

Congratulations to all winners and participants. Salem still has to decide who gets the research fellowship (I think Robert can win over Richard Hanania by bonding over their shared hobby of writing extremely long things); I’ll report on that when it happens.

Salt Lake City, Utah1 mentions across 1 issues

Salt Lake City, Utah is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: Salt Lake City, Utah
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA Contact: Ross Contact Info: wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Liberty Park North of the Chargepoint Station Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VM

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VM

Salt Lake City, Utah, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Salt Lake City, Utah, 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 "SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

"El Retiro" Park 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street Culver City 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
1906 Rittenhouse Square 1 shared issues
1970 port Laurent 1 shared issues

Source context

Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, USA Contact: Adam Contact Info: adam[dot]r[dot]isom[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 14th, 3:00 PM Location: Liberty Park, west side, just north of Chargepoint Station Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ Group Link: https://discord.gg/3etRHcRs

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ, https://discord.gg/3etRHcRs

Salvadoreans1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Salvadoreans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 24, 2026
Last seen: February 24, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology February 24, 2026

#BuildTheWall 1 shared issues
2016 election 1 shared issues
Anti-Reactionary FAQ 1 shared issues
Dark Data Journalism 1 shared issues
Guatemalans 1 shared issues

Source context

February 24, 2026 · Original source

My “favorite” example, spotted during the 2016 election, was a response to some #BuildTheWall types saying that illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs. Some data journalist got good statistics and proved that the number of Mexicans illegally entering the country was actually quite low. When I looked into it further, I found that this was true - illegal immigration had shifted from Mexicans to Hondurans/Guatemalans/Salvadoreans etc entering through Mexico. If you counted those, illegal immigration through the southern border was near record highs.

Samarkand1 mentions across 1 issues

Samarkand 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 "Our tale begins in Samarkand". It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Allah, Arabian Nights.

Reference entry: Samarkand
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 24, 2021
Last seen: May 24, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Arabian Nights May 24, 2021

Abbasid Caliphate 1 shared issues
Allah 1 shared issues
Arabian Nights 1 shared issues
Arabian Nights 1 shared issues
Arabs 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Arabian Nights

May 24, 2021 · Original source

Our tale begins in Samarkand. One day the king, Shah Zaman, comes home unexpectedly and sees his wife cheating on him with a black man. He kills her in a rage, then falls sick with grief, and is taken to the palace of his brother, King Shahryar of Persia. While there, he sees King Shahryar's wife cheat on him with a black man. He tells King Shahryar, who kills his wife in a rage too, then also falls sick with grief. The two grief-stricken kings decide to wander the world, expecting that maybe this will help in some way.

San Antonio, Texas1 mentions across 1 issues

San Antonio, Texas is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: San Antonio, Texas
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA Contact: Alexander Contact Info: alexander[at]sferrella[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 16th, 12:00 PM Location: "Elsewhere Bar and Grill", at the entrance from the river walk; an 'ACX' sign will be on a table facing the river and I will be wearing a black cowboy hat Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+JM Event Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationality-san-antonio/ Notes: The email address is real; I bought the domain to have it

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+JM, https://www.meetup.com/rationality-san-antonio/

San Antonio, Texas, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

San Antonio, Texas, 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 "SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry: San Antonio, Texas, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

"El Retiro" Park 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street Culver City 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
1906 Rittenhouse Square 1 shared issues
1970 port Laurent 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

August 25, 2023 · Original source

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, USA Contact: Alexander Contact Info: alexander[at]sferrella[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 16th, 12:00 PM Location: Elsewhere Bar and Grill Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+JJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationality-san-antonio/ Notes: I will be wearing a black cowboy hat

Inline links: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+JJ, https://www.meetup.com/rationality-san-antonio/

San Bruno1 mentions across 1 issues

San Bruno is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno"; ""YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once""; "prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno". It most often appears alongside 101, ALUC, Antioch.

Reference entry: San Bruno
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 11, 2023
Last seen: September 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023

101 1 shared issues
ALUC 1 shared issues
Antioch 1 shared issues
Aramco 1 shared issues
Argentina 1 shared issues

Source context

September 11, 2023 · Original source

I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)

YIMBYs already prepped a lawsuit against San Bruno once:

San Diego, California1 mentions across 1 issues

San Diego, California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: San Diego, California
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Julius Contact Info: julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 01:00 PM Location: Bird Park - I will be wearing a red shirt and there will be a sign that says Astral Codex Ten Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+M6

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8544PVQ8+M6

San Fran1 mentions across 1 issues

San Fran is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 15, 2025 and April 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "NGOs in San Fran get paid a lot of money to solve homelessness". It most often appears alongside Affordable Housing Bureau, Ajb, Alienation of labor.

Reference entry: San Fran
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 15, 2025
Last seen: April 15, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID April 15, 2025

Affordable Housing Bureau 1 shared issues
Ajb 1 shared issues
Alienation of labor 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten 1 shared issues

Source context

April 15, 2025 · Original source

the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm And I think it’s the second that’s most relevant to POSIWID. If the system could switch to doing the good without the bad, would it happily make the switch? For the cancer hospital: yes! For NEPA: I think not. This is an interesting test, thanks. My only concern is that “if the system could switch” is kind of meaningless. When we ask whether the purpose of a charity is to help the poor, or just to give high salaries to its CEO, the test urges us to ask “If it could switch to helping the poor just as much without paying its CEO anything, would it do that?” What if the answer is “the board, low-level staff, and donors would support this, but the CEO wouldn’t,” and the charity’s actions come from compromises negotiated among these groups? What is the purpose of the charity then? TimG writes: I've seen reports (don't know how true) that NGOs in San Fran get paid a lot of money to solve homelessness. But after billions spent, homelessness is worse. I thought this saying was a kinda reference to that sort of thing: the NGOs are there to collect money by virtue of the fact that there are homeless. Which is not what they are purported to do. My understanding of the situation is that there are many groups. Some are traditional anti-homelessness groups that try to build homeless shelters or something. Others are homeless-rights-advocacy groups that try to prevent the police from doing things which they think violate homeless people’s rights, like forcing them to go to shelters. It’s true that these two purposes are at odds, and that this conflict prolongs homelessness in San Francisco. But I think that thinking of this as a “system” whose “purpose” is to preserve homelessness (because systems actually act in ways contradictory to their goals) makes you less able to understand the dynamics, not more! The build-shelter groups are mostly building shelters! The fight-against-shelters groups are mostly fighting against shelters! Both of them are doing what they claimed to do, and it’s all canceling out. The more you are tempted to think of [the set of both these groups] as a single “system” fulfilling a single “purpose”, the more confused you’re making yourself. Brett writes: I've always thought of the phrase as an argument against the "no true Scotsman" fallacy when it's used in an organisational setting. When there are significant failings of an organisation, the response (within the organisation) can sometimes be: "there are some bad apples working against the purpose of our system: our system is not supposed to do this and the failings are due to individuals and not the system itself". POSIWID then is applicable: you can't claim a system "isn't supposed to" do something, if it's repeatedly doing it on a large enough scale. I don’t think this works. Often failures are because of incompetent individuals. For example, one reason that UK intelligence agencies did such a bad job fighting Communism in the ‘40s and ‘50s was that lots of their staff, including some leaders, were Soviet spies. When those people were replaced, results improved! And there are plenty of stories of companies that turn around once a few bad executives get fired and replaced (eg Apple after Jobs came back). So why would we want a phrase saying that the failure of systems is never because of incompetent individuals? David Henry (blog) writes: It makes the most sense if you don't take it as having anything to do with intentions. The truth at which it gestures is "This system can be relied upon to consistently produce this outcome, just as if it were designed to do so." The point is to suggest that the "unintended side effects" are a direct result of the "rules" of the system, intentionally so or not, and therefore you can't ignore them as one-off incidents, or hope a minor patch will fix it. The system needs to be abolished, or else given a complete overhaul. Obviously the ambiguous phrasing also allows you to assign insanely hostile and nonsensical motives to the outgroup. I would like to think this was not intention of the people who came up with the phrase, but whether it is or not, it can be relied upon to consistently produce that outcome. I agree this is one of many possible meanings it could have which there are much better ways to phrase. Joost de Wit writes: I’d say the hospital is precisely designed to cure 66% of people because it operates within constraints (financial, #doctors, approved meds). A “system” designed to cure let’s say 99% of people would look wholly different. I have occasionally been a low-level representative in hospital administration meetings. I’m trying to to think of what suggestions I could given to “redesign” the hospital to cure 99% of people. “Hey, guys, have you considered having more money?” I guarantee the hospital has considered this. The reason they don’t have more money is that insurance companies won’t pay more for care and donors won’t donate more. Maybe you could bring it up a level, to the US health care system as a whole? But insofar as anyone is in charge here (maybe the Secretary of Health and Human Services), I guarantee that person has also considered getting more money. The reason they don’t have more money is that Congress and the President set their budget and balance it off against their other priorities. Maybe the system is America as a whole? In this case yeah, you could imagine an America redesigned completely around cancer care, where there are sky-high taxes and all the money goes to cancer hospitals, so much so that bridges collapse and the military can’t defend the country anymore because we’re spending all the money on hospitals. But what does it mean to have a “systems analysis” principle which is incapable of accurately analyzing any system smaller than the whole country? Also, shouldn’t we expect a good theory to yield true predictions? My theory is that cancer hospitals want to cure as many patients as possible (given other constraints). If I recommended them a new policy that would increase their cure rate, they might worry about cost or hassle - but if it were low-cost and low-hassle, they’d eventually implement it. But if you recommended a new policy that brought them closer to 66% (“We’re on track to rise to 70% next year, but if we get Dr. Smith to relapse back into alcoholism, we can go back to 66%!”) they would call you insane and fire you immediately and definitely not agree. Since “make cure rates as high as possible” accurately predicts the hospital’s behavior, but “keep cure rates at exactly 66%” doesn’t, why would you describe the second one as the “purpose”? What use is it to accuse them of having a “purpose” which they will never take any action to achieve? But also, what are even we doing here? In real life, nobody says things like “the purpose of a cancer hospital is to keep cure rates at 66%”. Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing? In this comment thread, people have claimed that the real meaning of POSIWID is: Chesterton’s Fence

Inline links: writes, writes, blog, writes, writes

San Franciscans1 mentions across 1 issues

San Franciscans is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 23, 2021 and July 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences". It most often appears alongside Ace Attorney, Adam Smith, Amazon.

Reference entry: San Franciscans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 23, 2021
Last seen: July 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July July 23, 2021

Ace Attorney 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
Bible 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For July

July 23, 2021 · Original source

23: Like everyone else, I read the Buzzfeed piece claiming that the Michigan governor kidnapping plot was, let’s say, “helped along” by the FBI an inappropriate amount. I came out of it thinking that these were some pretty scary dudes who were the type of people who might kidnap governors, but that it seemed possible they would never have gotten around to starting any particular governor-kidnapping operation if not for FBI entrapment. I’m not sure what to think about that - as a liberal, I want to protect the norm of not punishing people for crimes unless they definitely actually came up with the plan to commit them themselves. But I have trouble feeling as outraged as I’d like to about a plan to get potential-governor-kidnappers off the streets faster by convincing them to commit to an actual governor-kidnapping on some specific date that the FBI can arrest them for. And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often. Anyway, my favorite part of the article was reading about how much all the governor-kidnapper militia people cared about making sure nobody thought they were racist, even while they were plotting domestic terrorism. This definitely feels like a metaphor for life.

Inline links: the Buzzfeed piece claiming

San Francisco Bay1 mentions across 1 issues

San Francisco Bay 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 "where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay". It most often appears alongside African-Americans, Akon, Akon City.

Reference entry: San Francisco Bay
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 28, 2025
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

25 October 28, 2025

African-Americans 1 shared issues
Akon 1 shared issues
Akon City 1 shared issues
American street grid 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues

Source context

October 28, 2025 · Original source

The proposal also moots two additional megaprojects: the Solano Shipyard, where the new city touches the upper tributaries of the San Francisco Bay. American shipbuilding has long been something of an embarrassment, the Trump administration is working on it, and the new city would be strategically placed to benefit if the federal government could remove some of the barriers that make US naval manufacturing unprofitable. And the Solano Foundry would be the “the largest [advanced manufacturing] park in the US”. Many of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ manufacturing startups set up shop in Southern California - for example, Elon Musk’s original base for SpaceX and the Boring Company was in Hawthorne, near LA - just because the Bay has so few good industrial locations. The Foundry aims to change that, and aims for 40,000 new manufacturing jobs. Finally, something nobody else will care about but which is close to my heart - Jan is pursuing a partnership with Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are: Ornament costs too much

San Francisco City Center1 mentions across 1 issues

San Francisco City Center is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "to San Francisco City Center (at the far southwest of this map)". It most often appears alongside 101, ALUC, Antioch.

Reference entry: San Francisco City Center
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 11, 2023
Last seen: September 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023

101 1 shared issues
ALUC 1 shared issues
Antioch 1 shared issues
Aramco 1 shared issues
Argentina 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 11, 2023 · Original source

The pink area is Flannery’s land for the new city (it doesn’t own all of it; their holdings are scattered throughout the area). It’s a 30 minute drive across several inconveniently-located bridges from the center of the city to the nearest BART (Bay Area transit) station in Antioch (orange circle). And from Antioch it’s a 1 hour drive (or 1 hour BART ride) to San Francisco City Center (at the far southwest of this map).

San Francisco metropolitan area1 mentions across 1 issues

San Francisco metropolitan area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "a member in good standing of the San Francisco metropolitan area". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

Reference entry: San Francisco metropolitan area
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2026
Last seen: January 16, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Dilbert Afterlife January 16, 2026

Adams 1 shared issues
Alice 1 shared issues
All-Seeing Eye 1 shared issues
Avatar 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

Source context

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Adams started out by stressing that he was politically independent. He didn’t support Trump, he was just the outside hypnosis expert pointing out what Trump was doing. IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. Indeed, “this person is a charismatic manipulator hacking the minds of irrational sheep” is hardly a pro-Trump take. And he lived in Pleasanton, California - a member in good standing of the San Francisco metropolitan area - and nice Pleasantonians simply did not become Trump supporters in 2016.

Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get really into whale puns.

San Joaquin1 mentions across 1 issues

San Joaquin 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 ""San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue"". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry: San Joaquin
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2022
Last seen: October 13, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022

1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1 shared issues
21st Century Salon 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alex Richard 1 shared issues
Amazon Prime Video 1 shared issues

Source context

October 13, 2022 · Original source

If you look at the counties in the Central Valley, Sacramento's middle-blue, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue, while Madera, Tulare, and Kern are light red. My district has usually been pretty purple, with centrist D's and R's winning, though districts that attach to the mountain areas are red and those that head west get bluer.

San Joaquin River1 mentions across 1 issues

San Joaquin River is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry: San Joaquin River
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF. Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River. It claims that if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be the poorest in America, even worse than Mississippi. This was kind of shocking. I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War. But the Central Valley has none of those things, plus it has extremely fertile farmland, plus it’s in one of the richest states of the country and should at least get good subsidies and infrastructure. How did it get so bad? II. First of all, is this claim true? I can’t find official per capita income statistics for the Central Valley, separate from the rest of California, but you can find all the individual counties here. When you look at the ones in the Central Valley, you get a median per capita income of $21,729 (this is binned by counties, which might confuse things, but by good luck there are as many people in counties above the median-income county as below it, so probably not by very much). This is indeed lower than Mississippi’s per capita income of $25,444, although if you look by household or family income, the Central Valley does better again. I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

San Joaquin Valley1 mentions across 1 issues

San Joaquin Valley is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south"; "San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry: San Joaquin Valley
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

Source context

September 21, 2022 · Original source

You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north. The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF. Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River. It claims that if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be the poorest in America, even worse than Mississippi. This was kind of shocking. I always think of Mississippi as bad because of a history of racial violence, racial segregation, and getting burned down during the Civil War. But the Central Valley has none of those things, plus it has extremely fertile farmland, plus it’s in one of the richest states of the country and should at least get good subsidies and infrastructure. How did it get so bad? II. First of all, is this claim true? I can’t find official per capita income statistics for the Central Valley, separate from the rest of California, but you can find all the individual counties here. When you look at the ones in the Central Valley, you get a median per capita income of $21,729 (this is binned by counties, which might confuse things, but by good luck there are as many people in counties above the median-income county as below it, so probably not by very much). This is indeed lower than Mississippi’s per capita income of $25,444, although if you look by household or family income, the Central Valley does better again. I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

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

V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

Inline links: Carolina Demography, Okies

San Jose, California1 mentions across 1 issues

San Jose, California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: San Jose, California
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA (see Sunnyvale)

San Juan, Puerto Rico1 mentions across 1 issues

San Juan, Puerto Rico 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 "SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

San Marcos, CA1 mentions across 1 issues

San Marcos, CA 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 "SAN MARCOS, CA". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: San Marcos, CA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

San Marino1 mentions across 1 issues

San Marino is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 23, 2021 and March 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "San Marino has been independent for 1500 years". It most often appears alongside 2008 crisis, A Failure, But Not Of Prediction, Ancient Phoenicia.

Reference entry: San Marino
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 23, 2021
Last seen: March 23, 2021

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Issue trail

Book Review: Antifragile March 23, 2021

2008 crisis 1 shared issues
A Failure, But Not Of Prediction 1 shared issues
Ancient Phoenicia 1 shared issues
Animal Chow 1 shared issues
anti-rationalism 1 shared issues

Source context

The Case Against California Proposition 36

March 23, 2021 · Original source

This was also the section with the famous Lindy Effect: if something doesn't have a specific lifespan like humans do, then we should expect older ones to last longer than new ones. For example, people have been reading the Iliad for 2500 years, but Antifragile for only eight years; probably Antifragile will sink out of the popular imagination before the Iliad does. Or: San Marino has been independent for 1500 years, and South Sudan has been independent for nine years; probably San Marino will outlast South Sudan. Judaism has been around for 3000 years and Scientology for 50; probably Judaism will remain when Scientology is relegated to the history books.

San Mateo1 mentions across 1 issues

San Mateo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 29, 2024 and October 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "San Mateo saw a rise of 53%". It most often appears alongside 2010, 2014, 2016.

Reference entry: San Mateo
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 29, 2024
Last seen: October 29, 2024

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The Case Against California Proposition 36 October 29, 2024

2010 1 shared issues
2014 1 shared issues
2016 1 shared issues
2019 1 shared issues
2021 1 shared issues

Source context

October 29, 2024 · Original source

(talking about state averages here is actually slightly misleading: shoplifting is down or static in California's small counties and a few of the larger ones, but very high in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shoplifting rates in San Francisco were 24% higher in 2022 compared to 2019, while San Mateo saw a rise of 53%. This is another indicator that Prop 47 – a statewide measure – isn’t the primary driver of the trend.)

San Pedro Sula1 mentions across 1 issues

San Pedro Sula is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 05, 2021 and July 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "better place to live than San Pedro Sula?". It most often appears alongside Black Hammer, CCI, Central America.

Reference entry: San Pedro Sula
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 05, 2021
Last seen: July 05, 2021

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Model City Monday July 05, 2021

Black Hammer 1 shared issues
CCI 1 shared issues
Central America 1 shared issues
Central Park 1 shared issues
Charter Cities Institute 1 shared issues

Source context

July 05, 2021 · Original source

Paul Romer’s original case for charter cities included the fact that cities are the smallest unit which can have sustained economic growth. Will Ciudad Morazán with 10,000 residents be a better place to live than San Pedro Sula? Probably! Will it generate widespread economic development for Honduras? Probably not.

San Rafael, CA1 mentions across 1 issues

San Rafael, CA 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 "SAN RAFAEL, CA ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: San Rafael, CA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

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Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SAN RAFAEL, CA (RSVP) Contact: Sridhar Prasad, sridhar_90033[at]yahoo[dot]com Time: 4:00 PM, Friday, September 24 Location: Freitas Water Park. I will be wearing scrubs and I’ll bring a sign. I’ll have a cooler with some sparkling water as well. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/code.salads.issue Notes: Kids play in the park and I don’t want to displace them. Still, it should be quite possible for us to have space to hang out and chat, etc.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/code.salads.issue

Sandy Springs1 mentions across 1 issues

Sandy Springs is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2021 and April 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Oliver Porter is the architect of the Sandy Springs model, named after the city of Sandy Springs, Georgia"; "the same company that did a lot of the work in Sandy Springs". It most often appears alongside Alaska, America, Amisulpride.

Reference entry: Sandy Springs
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 14, 2021
Last seen: April 14, 2021

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Prospectus On Próspera April 14, 2021

Alaska 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Amisulpride 1 shared issues
anarcho-capitalist 1 shared issues
Arizona Supreme Court 1 shared issues

Source context

April 14, 2021 · Original source

Oliver Porter is the architect of the Sandy Springs model, named after the city of Sandy Springs, Georgia. This is an interesting rabbit hole in itself - Sandy Springs incorporated in a hurry, didn’t have time to create its own city services, hired private corporations to do everything, then liked it so much that they advertised themselves as a libertarian paradise and a model for everyone else to follow (though see here for another perspective).

Inline links: a model for everyone else to follow, here

- 12% go to Honduras, as their incentive for allowing ZEDEs at all - 44% go to the General Service Provider, a private company that handles things like sanitation and power. This will probably be an HPI subsidiary which subcontracts out to Jacobs Engineering, the same company that did a lot of the work in Sandy Springs. - 44% go to the Próspera municipal government, to handle whatever services they can’t subcontract out.

Inline links: Jacobs Engineering

Santa Barbara1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Barbara is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Santa Barbara
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

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Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Review: Alpha School

March 30, 2024 · Original source

GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)

SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Sean Contact Info: acxsean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:30 PM Location: Tables next to UCSB Lot 10 (near Engineering) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8562C575+XW Group Link: https://discord.gg/vKuJ4NfHkF Notes: Please join the discord to help me coordinate/calibrate group size

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8562C575+XW, https://discord.gg/vKuJ4NfHkF

Santa Barbara, CA1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Barbara, CA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Santa Barbara, CA". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry: Santa Barbara, CA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 27, 2025
Last seen: June 27, 2025

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Issue trail

Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

10,000 hour rule 1 shared issues
2 Hour Learning, Inc 1 shared issues
2-hour Learning 1 shared issues
Alex Amplifier 1 shared issues
Alpha 1 shared issues

Source context

June 27, 2025 · Original source

Santa Barbara, CA

Santa Barbara, California, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Barbara, California, USA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "(duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)"; "SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Santa Barbara, California, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, USA (duplicate of Santa Barbara, California, USA)

SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Sean Contact Info: acxsean[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 7th, 12:30 PM Location: Tables next to UCSB Lot 10 (near Engineering) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8562C575+XW Group Link: https://discord.gg/vKuJ4NfHkF Notes: Please join the discord to help me coordinate/calibrate group size

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8562C575+XW, https://discord.gg/vKuJ4NfHkF

Santa Clara1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Clara is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Kushel study conducted in Santa Clara". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry: Santa Clara
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 23, 2022
Last seen: June 23, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022

1978 1 shared issues
2016 essay 1 shared issues
A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs 1 shared issues
Abbott 1 shared issues
Abstracted Will Of The American People 1 shared issues

Source context

June 23, 2022 · Original source

Continuing from San Fransicko: There is evidence that privacy and solitude created by Housing First make substance abuse worse. A study in Ottawa found that, while the Housing First group kept people in housing longer, the comparison group saw greater reductions in alcohol consumption and problematic drug use, and greater improvements to mental health, after two years. “One reason for the surprising results,” wrote the authors, “may be that aspects of the Housing First intervention, such as the privacy afforded by Housing First and harm reduction approach, might result in slower improvements around substance use and mental health.” Okay, but the next sentence after the one the book quoted was the researchers admitting that oops, we also totally forgot to randomize our groups in any way, so the experimental and control groups had totally different levels of severity and maybe that was why they found this weird thing (this is non-obvious, because we’re looking at change over time rather than raw differences between groups, but the authors discuss some reasons why different groups might change differently over time). A few years later these same researchers did a proper randomized study and it found no difference in drug use between the two groups. Somers, Moniruzzaman and Palepu found no difference in drug use between Housing First and other subjects. Padgett et al found the Housing First group actually did better, although they are another victim of the epidemic of randomization failures in this space. Kirst et al, no difference in drug use, but Housing First better with alcohol. Milby found that housing contigent on abstinence worked better than housing not contigent on abstinence, which Shellenberger could have used to support his thesis, but even Milby found that housing not contingent on abstinence worked better than no housing! To summarize: I can find seven studies on this topic, only one of them agrees with San Fransicko’s thesis, and the authors admit that it’s weak. I accuse San Fransicko of citing only that one and pretending all the others don’t exist. (actually, I accuse it of doing that plus citing a line from a review claiming another study found this, but as far as I can tell that study did not actually find it) This is extra annoying, because all the popular news articles on Housing First gush about how it definitely decreases substance use and everything else bad. Shellenberger could have made the excellent point that all of these progressive journalists were totally wrong! This would have been an interesting, important, and completely true act of virtuous data journalism! Instead he tries to hold up a lonely negative result as representative, and ends up just as wrong but in the opposite direction. Continuing in San Fransicko: Researchers have found ways to use housing to reduce addiction. Between 1990 and 2006, researchers in Birmingham, Alabama, conducted clinical trials of abstinence-contingent housing with 644 homeless people with crack cocaine addictions. Two-thirds of participants remained abstinent after six months, a very high rate of abstinence, compared to other treatment programs. Other studies found that around 40 percent of homeless in abstinence-contingent housing maintained their abstinence, housing, and jobs. In a randomized controlled trial, homeless people were given furnished apartments and allowed to keep them unless they failed a drug test, at which point they were sent to stay in a shelter. Sixty-five percent of participants completed the program. Three similar randomized controlled trials also found moderate to high rates of completion. And participants in abstinence-contingent housing had better housing and employment outcomes than participants assigned housing for whom abstinence was not required. All of this seems basically true. It turns out that over longer periods of time, Housing First may not even outperform contingency in terms of keeping people housed. In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts published the results of a fourteen-year-long study of chronic homeless placed into permanent supportive housing in Boston. Most studies of permanent supportive housing, including the Kushel study conducted in Santa Clara, only study the newly housed homeless for a span of around two years. The study found that 86 percent of the homeless, who were referred based on length of time living on the streets, suffered from “trimorbidity”—a combination of medical illness, mental illness, and substance abuse. The authors found that after ten years, just 12 percent of the homeless remained housed. During the study period, 45 percent died. The authors concluded that, because the chronically homeless had such higher rates of physical and mental illness, “the supportive services, essential to the PSH model, may not have been sufficient to address the needs of this unsheltered population.” This study was done on an especially severe subgroup of homeless people. There was no control group, so Shellenberger shouldn’t claim we have any evidence about whether Housing First can “outperform contingency”. Shellenberger counts people who died as “unhoused” to get his 12% number; if he didn’t do this, the number would be 23%. Only 23% of people given housing retained after ten years sounds bad. But you could change this number to whatever number you wanted by changing the severity of the subgroup selected for the study. Select people who are even crazier and more disturbed than these people, and you can have 0% retained after ten years; select high-functioning people with no problems, and you can get 100% retained after ten years. (or maybe not - the study doesn’t say why people left the program. It mentions that one possible outcome is having to go to a nursing home because they had grown too sick or old to support themselves. I am not sure that “23% stay in this program” means “77% are back on the street and all their care has been a total failure”.) Conclusion: Housing First seems to work in getting people housing. It probably also helps people use fewer medical services, and it might or might not save money compared to not doing it (probably more likely when treating very severe cases, less likely in areas with high housing costs). It probably doesn’t affect people’s overall health or drug use status very much. San Fransicko is right to call out all the people promoting it beyond what the evidence supports, but then goes on to attack it beyond what the evidence supports. Interlude: Why Can’t We Just House All The Homeless? This is the question many of the California gubernatorial candidates asked. California has lots of money. There aren’t that many homeless people. Everyone is already committed to Housing First. So why don’t they have houses already? San Francisco has about 7,000 homeless people. The median SF apartment costs about $3,000 per month (presumably the government officials in charge would be trying to buy cheaper-than-median apartments for this project, but they seem bad at that, so let’s stick with median as a high-end estimate). So that’s $250 million/year to rent every homeless person an apartment. San Francisco has a $14 billion budget, although some of that is locked in nondiscretionary programs. So this effort would take about 2-3% of the city budget. Given how many people have both altruistic and selfish objections to the current level of SF homelessness, I can’t imagine that isn’t a better use of the money than whatever it’s being spent on now. So why hasn’t this happened? The closest thing I can find to the “rent apartments” plan is Governor Newsom’s “rent hotel rooms” plan, Project Roomkey. This was a short-term pandemic program. This article says it cost $4,000 per month, which seems reasonable - it provided residents with a hotel room, meals, security, and “custodial services” for just above a hundred dollars a day. So how come nobody has made it permanent or scaled it up? The homeless themselves don’t seem very positive on the project. They talk about “jail”-like conditions, including curfews and bans on visitors. I don’t know if this is the usual nanny-state-ism, or an attempt to reassure hotel owners / other residents / local communities that the influx of homeless people won’t cause them problems. If the latter, it hasn’t worked. From here: Jenna Abbott, executive director of the River District Business Association, said having a Roomkey motel in her neighborhood has been difficult. The site — which is in an area with large number of unhoused people — has drawn family and friends of Roomkey residents who haven’t been housed but “camp close to that hotel,” some with the goal of gaining a room, Abbott said. That’s led to more loitering, public drunkenness and trash outside the restaurants, gas stations and other businesses in the area, she added. And here’s another article about people objecting to local hotels accepting homeless people, which focuses on some combination of zoning, code, and public safety concerns. Everybody - the homeless, their advocates, various experts - interviewed in the article - agrees that the hotel rooms are kind of dehumanizing and much worse than having real housing. And this article suggests that government budgeters believe it’s not cost-effective compared to alternatives. Since the homeless don’t like it, and it’s expensive, almost everyone seems to agree it made sense as a short-term COVID measure only. The government’s preferred medium-term solution is single resident occupancy (SRO) hotels. These are big apartment/hotel-like structures where everyone has a small bedroom and then there are communal bathrooms and maybe kitchens. These used to be the archetypal living situation for poor Americans (Matt Yglesias talks about them as “boarding houses” here). But moral reformers banned them in the 1900s on the grounds that they were slums - I think this is the usual “surely the reason poor people live bad lives is because capitalists oppress them by selling them cheap low-quality goods, and if we just ban selling people cheap low-quality goods, everyone will have high-quality goods and poor people will live great lives!” argument. Somehow this failed to work and homelessness got worse over this period, but there are still some SRO hotels left, and the government got them and converted them to public housing for homeless people. Shellenberger does not have high opinions of these: The Tenderloin [district of San Francisco]’s single resident occupancy hotels . . . have for decades been dominated by a culture of heavy substance use and prostitution. “Of the people in supportive housing in San Francisco, 93 percent have a major mental illness that we can name,” said a housing policy maker. “That is very, very high. Eighty percent use cocaine, speed, or heroin every thirty days, or get drunk to the point of unconsciousness.” Tom Wolf, a former Salvation Army caseworker and a member of San Francisco’s Drug Dealing Taskforce, says the city’s supportive housing facilities are themselves a major market for illegal drugs. “Go down the street to the Camelot Hotel on Turk Street,” said Wolf. “Almost everyone that I’ve seen in those hotels are using. The last front desk guy that was working there got busted because he was selling crack. The actual guy that works in the single resident occupancy hotel is selling crack! It’s insane, man.” In any case, there are only so many of these still left. The government often announces plans to buy defunct regular hotels and convert them into these structures, which would indeed be a medium-term solution for housing the homeless, except that they usually get bogged down in fights about code. Politico discusses one of these attempts in New York City (h/t Marginal Revolution): “There are very few hotels that physically could be converted and comply with the requirements of today’s zoning and building code without substantial, expansive reconstruction, partial removal or demolition,” said James Colgate, a land use partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP who has advised clients on zoning issues including the conversions of hotels. “That would increase the costs greatly.” For example, a building’s elevators, doorways, or rooms may be slightly short of the size required for a residential structure. Residential buildings are also required to have a certain amount of rear-yard space that a hotel may not have. “You would literally have to be chopping off part of the building,” Rosen said. …The legislation dictates that each unit include a kitchen or kitchenette with a full-sized refrigerator, cooktop and sink — something Rosen said made utilizing the program “simply too expensive.” “This is the classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the possible,” said Mark Ginsberg, a partner at the firm Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, which has worked on hotel conversions. Some advocates who pushed the creation of the program say those provisions were necessary to ensure it didn’t generate substandard housing […] “We didn’t want a program that cut corners to make it more palatable to developers,” said Joseph Loonam, housing campaign coordinator for the progressive advocacy group VOCAL-NY. “We wanted a program that centered the needs of homeless New Yorkers, which is true high quality affordable housing where they can have full autonomy and dignity.” As Marginal Revolution pointed out, Loonam got what he wanted; the expensive, over-regulated program was unpalatable to developers, with only one company putting in an offer; for whatever reason, NYC refused to go with that one company, and no housing was produced. But fine, these are also terrible, and they’re only medium-term solutions anyway. What about building real, long-term apartments for homeless people? Shellenberger tells the story of Los Angeles’ Proposition HHH, which raised $1.2 billion to do exactly this. They hoped to build ~10,000 units for the homeless, at a projected price of $140,000 each; since LA had about 30,000 homeless people at the time, this would solve a third of the problem - a good start. (how do these numbers line up with my back-of-the-envelope calculation for SF above? I talked about renting rather than building, but usually annual rents = 1/20th or so of total prices, so I was estimating about $700,000 per person. This is probably partly because SF costs more than LA, and partly because I was imagining median apartments whereas LA is probably working on very cheap apartments) But in fact, five years later, LA has completed only 700 units, and the cost per unit has spiralled to $531,000 each. Nobody has a good explanation for what happened, with Shellenberger quoting one local service provider who said a lot of it was “bullshit costs”. Now might be a good time to re-read Considerations On Cost Disease. [Update: this might not be accurate - see this comment] This seems to be a general problem: everyone is committed to Housing First and to long-term good solutions rather than short- or medium- term mediocre ones. But that means building housing. And some combination of NIMBYism and over-regulation means building housing is somewhere between ruiniously expensive and impossible. Claim 4: Shelters Are Unpopular Among Progressive Activists And The Homeless Themselves San Francisco doesn’t have more homelessness than eg New York, but almost all the homeless in New York live in shelters and stay off the street. Why doesn’t that work here? Shellenberger: In the context of cities with permissive attitudes toward drugs, like San Francisco, many homeless people stay in [tent] encampments to use illegal substances more freely and easily than they can in the shelters. Many policy makers understand this. “I went out with a team twice to have conversations with people to get an understanding of what they’re dealing with,” said Mayor Breed in 2020. “It was absolutely insane. Most of the people did not take us up on the offer [of shelter and services].” Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. “When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York,” said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, “almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.” In 2016, after the city of San Francisco broke up a massive, 350-person homeless encampment, dozens of the homeless refused the city’s offers of help. Of the 150 people moved during a single month of homeless encampment cleanups in 2018, just eight people accepted the city’s offer of shelter. In 2004, just 131 people went into permanent supportive housing after 4,950 contacts made by then-mayor Newsom’s homeless outreach teams. An article by a former homeless person explains the problems with shelters beyond just “can’t use drugs”. Residents are crammed into a small space with 300 other homeless people. Lice and bedbugs are everywhere. Everybody catches every disease. Everybody has stories about getting raped or beaten up. Invasive moralizing about drugs somehow exists side by side with rampant drug use. Shelters are gender segregated, which means straight people can’t stay with their partner. Most shelters ban children and nobody has any idea what to do with them. Most shelters ban pets - a lot of homeless people have dogs for protection or companionship, and you can’t just store them somewhere while you’re sheltering. Although some lucky people can get 90-day beds, other people need to apply for beds on a day-by-day basis, which requires waiting in line several hours every day. Users talk about rampant cutting in line, denying cutting in line, false accusations of cutting in line, etc. Most shelters kick people out between 9-5, either to save on staffing costs or in the hopes that they’ll get a job. But many have strict curfews requiring people to be back by 5 PM sharp, which can make jobs impossible - if your boss doesn’t let you out until 5 and you have a half-hour commute, how do you get back to the shelter on time? Results of a survey at one of SF’s new Navigation Centers at why their clients refused to go to normal shelters. But even the homeless people who do want to go to shelters mostly can’t get in. This app gives the current status of San Francisco’s homeless shelter waitlist. If you applied today, there would be 900 people ahead of you in line for one of the city’s 1500 - 2500 shelter beds. The app says that the median wait time is 826 days. So however many homeless people don’t want to go to shelters, we’re not building enough shelters to serve the ones who do. Why not? Shellenberger again: In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.” Housing First advocate Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco agreed. “The problem with New York—and I spend a lot of time with people working in the system in New York—is that they spend an estimated $30,000 for each person per year to keep them in shelter. That’s not what we want to do. Because if you create the shelter and you don’t create the housing, then people are just in shelter forever.” Housing First advocates oppose shelter in Los Angeles. “Why haven’t we solved homelessness?” asked Housing First creator Sam Tsemberis. “Because [Los Angeles mayor] Eric Garcetti [has] Andy Bales [saying,] ‘You need emergency housing.’ ‘These people need to be cleaned up.’ ‘They need to be sober.’ ‘They need Jesus before they’ll be ready for housing.’ I said, ‘People should be housed and then maybe they’ll get sobriety and Jesus and the rest.’ We’re definitely on polar opposites of the whole thing.” Advocates for the homeless at the national level similarly oppose more shelters. “I don’t agree that we should be building more transitional housing,” said the head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. […] In other words, the reason that there are so many homeless people on the streets in San Francisco is that both progressive and moderate Democratic elected officials, and the city’s most influential homelessness experts and advocates, have for two decades opposed building sufficient shelters. And that is unlikely to change even after San Francisco starts spending hundreds of millions more per year on the problem and might even get worse. This basically seems true. I found this webpage of a former SF Supervisor candidate a helpful corroborating source. He was running on a platform of “maybe we should build some homeless shelters”. He lost. You can also find a bunch of webpages by the sorts of people Shellenberger is complaining about, for example this site: Sup[ervisor] Rafael Mandelman today pushed his new legislation that would require the city to offer at least temporary shelter to everyone living on the streets, a step that some say would lead to more homeless sweeps and do nothing to create permanently affordable housing . . . [our] Coalition has argued for years that the solution to homelessness is housing—not temporary shelter, which may never lead to housing. The ex-supervisor candidate gives some helpful numbers: permanent housing costs about $600,000 per person housed. Shelters cost between $20,000 and $30,000 per person housed. So SF could build enough shelters to clear its waitlist for about $30 million. More recently, SF has tried a sort of compromise, opening “deluxe” shelters called Navigation Centers which avoid some of the problems of regular shelters. They also cost more than twice as much, and the city has only created about 300 beds. Also, the people in regular shelters are angry, because being in a regular shelter disqualifies you from getting into a (much better) Navigation Center. Some of them are considering leaving their shelter, going back on the streets, then waiting however many months or years it takes to get a Navigation Center bed instead. I’m not at all sure of these numbers, but it looks like of SF’s ~7,000 homeless, about 2,000 are in shelters already, and 1,000 are on the shelter waitlist. I don’t know if the remaining 4,000 have made a specific commitment not to go to shelters, or just have given up on the waitlist process. My conclusion: agree with San Fransicko about the role of progressive activists, but I think it overemphasizes the role of wanting to use drugs in why homeless people themselves sometimes avoid shelters, and underemphasizes the many other problems with them. Claim 5: Drug Decriminalization Isn’t Working California legalized marijuana in 2016. Shellenberger says that San Francisco’s commitment to drugs has gone beyond that: it has effectively decriminalized opioids, cocaine, and the rest. Any attempt to lessen use of these drugs is attacked as “stigmatizing”; instead, government policy centers around providing addicts with needles and other drug paraphernalia under the guise of “harm reduction”. Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes. And when the government was first debating the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, black leaders were among the strongest proponents of both. The talking point at the time - among everyone from black Congressional leaders to black churches - was that the government’s failure to crack down on drug use was racist, borne of them not caring about predominantly black drug victims. And while we’ve been patting ourselves on the back about how enlightened we are for ending the drug war: Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic. Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019). […] There are about twenty-five thousand injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50 percent larger than the number of students enrolled in the city’s fifteen public high schools. San Francisco gives away more needles to drug users, six million per year, than New York City, despite having one-tenth the population. The part of this chapter that stood out to me as most worth looking into deeper was the section on Portugal: For decades, harm reduction and decriminalization advocates have pointed to Portugal as a model, noting that it decriminalized drugs and expanded drug treatment. In 2013, Portugal’s drug-induced death rate was sixty-six times less than that of the United States. The number of people in treatment increased by 60 percent between 1998 and 2011, with three-quarters receiving an opioid substitute like methadone or Suboxone, the brand name of buprenorphine. Drug use among 15- to 24-year-olds actually declined after decriminalization. “All drugs have been legalized,” explained Monique Tula, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. “Their focus is on giving people tools, like job apprenticeships, and the means to support themselves.” […] [But Portugal] never legalized drugs. It only decriminalized them, reducing criminal penalties but maintaining prohibition. Drug dealers were still sent to prison even after the 2001 decriminalization. And Portugal does not let people addicted to hard drugs with behavioral disorders off the hook like progressive West Coast cities have done. It’s true that Portugal massively expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administered “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction,” composed of a social worker, lawyer, and doctor who encourage, push, and coerce drug treatment. And decriminalization doesn’t end drug violence. “Even if trafficking enforcement decreased, like it did in Portugal,” said criminologist John Pfaff, “illegal drug markets would still be forced to rely on violence to resolve disputes.” Indeed, prostitution and violence are ever-present in the open-air drug scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in thirty-three years,” said Rev. Andy Bales, who runs the largest homeless shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature.” People are not dying from drug overdose deaths in San Francisco because they’re being arrested. They’re dying because they aren’t being arrested. Decriminalization reduces prices by lowering production and distribution costs, which increases use. This was also the case for alcohol consumption. It increased after prohibition ended in the United States. Even in Portugal, drug overdose deaths and overall drug use rose after decriminalization. I was most surprised by the claim that Portuguese overdose deaths rose after decriminalization. Uncharacteristically, San Fransicko doesn’t give a citation for it, but we can try to retrace its reasoning. Decriminalization proponents tend to point to these numbers, helpfully converted to per 100,000 population and graphed here: But an anti-drug Australian think tank argues that the peak in 2001 is made up: Claims that there were more than 75 drug-related deaths in 2001 which more than halved to 34 deaths in 2002 use a figure for 2001 for which there is no substantiation. Official drug-related deaths for Portugal, taken from the latest 2018 EMCDDA Statistical Bulletin are copied below. Notice that there is no such figure recorded for 2001. They include a link to EMCDDA, the EU organization charged with monitoring these things. The link contains two datasets, both of which seem to be measuring the same thing but getting different results. One dataset starts in 2002, the other in 2008. I don’t know what the difference here is, but they’re right that neither includes 2001. If you ignore the pre-2002 data, the graph looks like this: They say “opiate”, but AFAICT these numbers are actually about all drugs. But the proponents link to the updated 2020 version of the same website, which all of a sudden does have data from 2001 and before. I don’t know why EMCDDA can’t make up its mind, but I think the Australians are wrong and the original graph is fine. On the other hand, does it really matter? Both of these show drug deaths decreasing until 2005, then going up and down a bit, then going back up again starting in 2011. I think a reasonable interpretation would be that decriminalization in Portugal did decrease overdose deaths a bit, and then they started rising again from that low baseline around the same time other European countries saw rising overdose deaths. I would also accept “these are pretty small effects and we shouldn’t ascribe any significance to them”. But San Fransicko’s claim - that overdose deaths increased after the reform - seems false. The only way I can see justifying it is taking the second graph - the one that wrongly claims there is no pre-2002 data - and then attributing the fact that twelve years after the reform lowered deaths, deaths finally rose above the pre-reform level to be the fault of the reform. This is like saying “people claim the Black Plague killed a lot of Europeans, but the European population actually rose after the Plague”, which is true in the sense that it was above its pre-Plague max by like 1600 or whatever. What about overall drug use? Here I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, which is on exactly this topic of how people keep selectively quoting results from Portugal to prove their point. It argues that drug use is inherently hard to measure. There are four different Portuguese datasets for the time at issue, lots of different drugs, lots of different age/gender combinations, and lots of different ways of measuring drugs (did you use drugs in the past month? the past year? your lifetime?) It’s easy to tell a story of how past-month cocaine use skyrocketed among 14-29 year old males according to X source, or how lifetime marijuana use fell in high school-age women according to Y. The main trick that opponents use is measuring lifetime drug use. Portugal is a very conservative country; drug use is pretty new and most of the older generation wasn’t involved. So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up. This definitely happened but isn’t a fair reflection of any specific reform. The authors find that in the past decade or so, there has been a bit more short-term experimentation with drugs, but less long-run use. They conclude: As shown in Figure 2, general population (aged 15–64) trends for recent and current drug use in Portugal indicate minimal if any changes between 2001 and 2007. Instead, rates of discontinuation of drug use (the proportion of the population that reported ever having used a drug but opting not to in recent years) increased, which reinforces that just as in the school populations, the growth in lifetime-reported use reflected predominantly short-term experimental use. Increases in recent and current drug use were more notable in some cohorts, particularly those aged 25 to 34 (albeit, with a maximum of 7% of any one cohort reporting recent use, absolute levels remained low). But as shown in Figure 3, recent and current drug use declined among those aged 15–24, the population who were most at risk of initiation and long-term engagement. The available evidence thus gives grounds for arguing that while there was some growth in the scale of drug use in post-reform Portugal, there was an overall positive net benefit for the Portuguese community. What about San Fransicko’s main point - that as the US has wound down the War on Drugs, drug overdose rates have sextupled? I think this is mostly not causal. I think the sextupling of overdoses is a combination of expansion in prescription opioid use, various forms of social decay making people less happy and therefore more likely to use drugs, and “improvements” in drug “technology” and the “supply chain” (eg production of fentanyl in China). I don’t know of any source that attempts to tease out the exact contribution of all of these things, but I would note that overdose deaths have risen the most in very conservative Midwestern states that haven’t walked back the drug war as much as California. Conclusion: As usual, I appreciate San Fransicko’s corrections to the prevailing narrative, but its own additions are dubious. Its claim that Portugal saw increased drug-related deaths seems false as far as I can tell. Its claim that it saw increased drug use depends on your definition, but is misleading and not the most natural way to sum up the evidence. Claim 6: San Francisco’s Soft-On-Crime Policies Led To Rising Crime Ten years ago, the news was full of stories about how some teenager stole a gumdrop and was sentenced to nine hundred billion years in jail. At some point, there was a genre shift to stories about how some hardened criminal murdered fifty people with an axe and the judge let him go with a warning because having jails felt racist. Source: Ed West, do note that this example is from the UK How suspicious should we be of each type of story? There will always be an extreme right tail of overly harsh sentences, and an extreme left tail of overly lenient ones. Were the 2000s really as draconian as they felt? Is the modern era really as pathetic? Or is it all just a function of who you read and what agenda they’re pushing? Shellenberger: During California governor Jerry Brown’s time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible. Upon taking office in January 2020, [famously soft-on-crime San Francisco district attorney Chesa] Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money? […] Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. “Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling,” said Boudin in a statement, “these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines.” Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. “When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem,” said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. “Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people.” Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and “people in desperate economic circumstances.” Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. “We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically,” she said. But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. “The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that’s all because of drug use,” said Tom. “I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That’s what you do. You ‘boost.’ And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza,” an open-air drug scene. In a May 2021 city supervisors’ meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco “the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country” and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise. The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year’s Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted. The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. “I blame the DA,” said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, “was someone who was out in the public who shouldn’t have been in the public. It was completely avoidable.” Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. “Drug dealing is unabated and it’s not one guy, it’s fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth,” he said. “And it’s going unabated because the district attorney says, ‘These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,’ and ‘I’m not going to prosecute them.’” [..] District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. “There’s a defense attorney who said, ‘It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don’t say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, “How about thirty days in jail?”’” Vicki laughed. “You really can do anything in San Francisco,” she said. “If you do get arrested, chances are you’re going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It’s hard to say at this point.” Taking each of these points individually: Proposition 47 There are two good big studies on the effects of Prop 47, one by Public Policy Institute and one by some UCI criminologists. The PPI study finds that the proposition increased theft and car break-ins by about 10%. The UCI study finds the same, but notes that under different assumptions the effects wouldn’t quite obtain statistical significance. This seems a bit too much like post hoc trying to get rid of an inconvenient effect, plus an effect on the border of statistical significance is different from positively finding no effect. I think a reasonable interpretation is that theft and car break-ins rose about 10% because of the proposition, just as Shellenberger says. Some pro-47 sites note that most states have some limit on how much you to have to shoplift before it’s a felony, and Prop 47 brought California closer to the national average, rather than turning it into an outlier. Chesa Boudin Chesa Boudin took office two months before the COVID pandemic began. Any attempt to separate the effect of Chesa Boudin from the effect of the pandemic is doomed. Shoplifting definitely plummeted when Boudin took office, but that’s because all the stores were closed. Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide. Percent of criminals caught definitely fell when Boudin took office, but that’s because various aspects of the justice system were closed for COVID (I will grudgingly entertain speculation that a further decrease in arrest rates from 2020 to 2021 may have been a genuine Boudin effect). In the absence of any real way to judge his performance, I think San Fransicko’s points about Boudin are plausible, though speculative. Shoplifting This one is terrible. There’s a surprisingly spirited debate here (some of you may have already read Applied Divinity Studies’ article). The debate is: everyone on the ground in San Francisco - store owners, security guards, customers, random citizens - say that shoplifting has increased massively over the past decade. But statistics mostly say it hasn’t. Source here. This is shoplifting crimes per 100,000 people. Kern County is a deep red county in California (including Bakersfield) that is known for being tough on crime. Against this, seriously, everyone says that shoplifting has obviously increased. I had a patient who worked in shoplifting prevention, he told me - his psychiatrist! Who he had no reason to lie to! - that he was constantly stressed dealing with the shoplifting surge devastating the stores he covered. Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response to someone posting the data showing shoplifting hasn’t risen - it’s just a lot of people laughing hysterically. What’s going on? I was able to find a different set of statistics that does seem to show a longer-term increase in shoplifting (source): The very big spike at the end might be a change in reporting by one or two stores - you can find the argument here. But it does look like shoplifting went from about 125 incidents/month in the early 2010s to more like 250/month just before the pandemic. Why is this graph so different from the other one? It looks like the top one came from the Department of Justice, and the bottom one came from SFPD. I’m not sure why these report differently. When you multiply out by 800K people in SF, by 12 months/year, and 30ish days/month, the first graph corresponds to 4 shoplifting incidents per day, and the second to 6. As LouB’s analysis here points out, that seems suspiciously low for a city of 800,000 people where stores are constantly closing because of shoplifting. Maybe off by a factor of a few hundred from what we’d expect. LouB writes: The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic. In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco. (this would also explain why one or two stores changing their reporting policy can produce a spike equal to everyone else in San Francisco combined) But comparing incident reports from 2010 to incident reports from 2020 should still be apples-to-apples, unless the likelihood of reporting any given incident changed in the meantime. Did it? This news article quotes a San Franciscan who says that when they try to report shoplifting incidents, the cops tell them not to because “it doesn’t make a difference”. If cops say that now more often than they used to, it would make all these statistics meaningless. (Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument that shows this can’t be true. It goes something like: if San Francisco was a better place to shoplift than its neighbors - eg Oakland - then shoplifters would leave Oakland to go to San Francisco, and we would see Oakland shoplifting rates falling. Oakland shoplifting rates are falling, but no more so than the rest of the state, so there can’t be increased tolerance for shoplifting in San Francisco. I find this dubious for many reasons. First of all, many of the same reasons shoplifting is up in San Francisco - like Prop 47 or soft-on-crime progressive policies - also apply to Oakland. Second, given that shoplifting fell massively everywhere because of the pandemic, it feels dubious to try to compare different cities; maybe one city had stricter pandemic lockdowns than others. Third, do criminals really shop around for friendly jurisdictions? If so, why are so many crimes like car break-ins, concentrated in “the bad part of town”? Why wouldn’t criminals leave the bad part of town for under-exploited areas with richer residents and less competition? Maybe criminals in fact aren’t very strategic or mobile? Maybe they don’t want to stand in the BART station and then take a half-hour train ride holding a bag of stolen goods?) Maybe a better argument against this being true is how stable the shoplifting rates have been over time. Wouldn’t it be weird if (let’s say) a tripling of the real shoplifting rates was matched by a third-ing of the reporting rates (rather than a halving or a quartering or whatever)? On the other hand, here’s Shellenberger with some helpful data: Some of this is probably because of Proposition 47, which made some forms of shoplifting punishable with citation rather than arrest (but wouldn’t that be a clear discontinuity rather than a gradual trend?) But overall it sure seems like shoplifting is being taken less seriously, which might encourage people to report less. Another statistic I see is that only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest; I don’t know how this is different from the graph above with numbers in the 30s; maybe it involves different levels of what makes something a “case”. I accept that the data don’t consistently show a spike in shoplifting. But what’s the alternative? My patient who works in loss prevention in SF stores is lying to me? The nice elderly Chinese man who sold me my last pair of glasses and chatted to me about the rampant shoplifting in his mall was lying? The San Francisco police are lying? Walgreens pretends to be concerned about shoplifting as part of a dastardly plot to close a bunch of stores for no reason? Target and CVS pretend to care about shoplifting as part of a plot to restrict their stores’ opening hours for no reason? Every big store near me has suddenly gotten a security guard at the front as part of some corporate-sponsored jobs program? Maybe the conservative narrative that soft-on-crime San Francisco must be experiencing rising crime rates took on a life of its own. Maybe it infiltrated not just the usual suspects like the SF police unions, but even such supposedly-liberal bastions as the New York Times. Maybe lots of big corporations took advantage of the fake narrative to make unpopular business decisions they were planning on making anyway. And maybe ordinary San Franciscans, confronted with everyone telling them they were in a shoplifting epidemic, started paying more attention to security guards and petty criminals who had always been there, a sort of mass hallucination that gripped everyone in the city. I can’t rule this out. Americans thought crime was rising all throughout the early 2000s, when it was in fact way down. Or maybe some statistics that we already know are off by several orders of magnitude got off by an additional factor of two or so. I think this one is more likely, but I’m genuinely not sure. Other Crime From the Economist: The Center on Juvenile And Criminal Justice puts it even more starkly, arguing that “San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime”: This are potentially susceptible to the same reporting bias as shoplifting. So what about homicide? Homicide is practically always reported and investigated, making it a gold standard in crime measurement. (source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.

Santa Claus, Arizona1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Claus, Arizona is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hence the towns of Santa Claus, Arizona". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: Santa Claus, Arizona
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

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Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

July 06, 2023 · Original source

1: Throughout history, men of all lands and eras have asked “what if I name a town after Santa Claus and try to pitch it as a tourist attraction?” Hence the towns of Santa Claus, Arizona, and Santa Claus, Georgia. The origins of Santa Claus, Indiana are murkier, but the town does boast “the world’s first theme park” (Christmas-themed, of course)

Inline links: Santa Claus, Arizona, Santa Claus, Georgia

Santa Claus, Georgia1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Claus, Georgia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hence the towns of Santa Claus, Arizona , and Santa Claus, Georgia". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: Santa Claus, Georgia
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

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Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

July 06, 2023 · Original source

1: Throughout history, men of all lands and eras have asked “what if I name a town after Santa Claus and try to pitch it as a tourist attraction?” Hence the towns of Santa Claus, Arizona, and Santa Claus, Georgia. The origins of Santa Claus, Indiana are murkier, but the town does boast “the world’s first theme park” (Christmas-themed, of course)

Inline links: Santa Claus, Arizona, Santa Claus, Georgia

Santa Claus, Indiana1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Claus, Indiana is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The origins of Santa Claus, Indiana are murkier". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: Santa Claus, Indiana
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

July 06, 2023 · Original source

1: Throughout history, men of all lands and eras have asked “what if I name a town after Santa Claus and try to pitch it as a tourist attraction?” Hence the towns of Santa Claus, Arizona, and Santa Claus, Georgia. The origins of Santa Claus, Indiana are murkier, but the town does boast “the world’s first theme park” (Christmas-themed, of course)

Inline links: Santa Claus, Arizona, Santa Claus, Georgia

Santa Cruz Mountains1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Cruz Mountains is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2023 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains". It most often appears alongside Abe Lincoln, AI alignment movement, Ambras.

Reference entry: Santa Cruz Mountains
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2023
Last seen: September 13, 2023

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Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023

Abe Lincoln 1 shared issues
AI alignment movement 1 shared issues
Ambras 1 shared issues
Andrew Beal 1 shared issues
Android 1 shared issues

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September 13, 2023 · Original source

As a bonding exercise one weekend, Musk, Ambras, a few other employees [of Zip2, his first startup] and friends took off for a bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Most of the riders had been training and were accustomed to strenuous sessions and the summer’s heat. They set up the mountains at a furious pace. After an hour, Russ Rive, Musk’s cousin, reached the top and proceeded to vomit. Right behind him were the rest of the cyclists. Then, fifteen minutes later, Musk became visible to the group. His face had turned purple, and sweat poured out of him, and he made it to the top. “I always think back to that ride. He wasn’t close to being in the condition needed for it,” Ambras said. “Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”

Santa Cruz, California1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Cruz, California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: Santa Cruz, California
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Dan Contact Info: thehalliard[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 29th, 12:30 PM Location: We'll meet at Garfield Park, either at the picnic tables or on a blanket in a sunny spot somewhere. I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX54+2VC

Inline links: https://plus.codes/848VXX54+2VC

Santa Cruz, California, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Cruz, California, USA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Santa Cruz, California, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Gregg Contact Info: gregg[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 28th, 1:30 PM Location: NE corner of University Terrace Park, Meder St, Santa Cruz Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXWFW+X6

Inline links: https://plus.codes/848VXWFW+X6

Santa Rosa1 mentions across 1 issues

Santa Rosa is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "SANTA ROSA". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry: Santa Rosa
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 25, 2025
Last seen: March 25, 2025

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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
133 SE Madison Street, Portland, OR 97214 1 shared issues

Source context

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ron Contact Info: mitts[dot]ashrams-3j[at]icloud[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 27, 01:00 PM Location: This will be in a private home. Sign up for the address. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX72+75 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can send you the address. SANTA ROSA Contact: Mike Contact Info: semanticprion[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, May 12th, 6:00 PM Location: Brew Coffee House, 555 Healdsburg Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CVC7VJ+8Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CVC7VJ+8Q

Contact: Mike Contact Info: semanticprion[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, May 12th, 6:00 PM Location: Brew Coffee House, 555 Healdsburg Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CVC7VJ+8Q

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84CVC7VJ+8Q

Sao Pedro de Moel1 mentions across 1 issues

Sao Pedro de Moel is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "A poet in Sao Pedro de Moel (25 miles away)". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

Reference entry: Sao Pedro de Moel
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 01, 2025
Last seen: October 01, 2025

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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know October 01, 2025

1910s Portugal 1 shared issues
1999 British eclipse 1 shared issues
2017 US eclipse 1 shared issues
A Ordem 1 shared issues
Abraham Lincoln 1 shared issues

Source context

October 01, 2025 · Original source

A poet in Sao Pedro de Moel (25 miles away) who saw it from his veranda.

Sao Tome & Principe1 mentions across 1 issues

Sao Tome & Principe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2025 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Africa, African small-plot subsistence agriculture.

Reference entry: Sao Tome & Principe
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2025
Last seen: January 16, 2025

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Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ January 16, 2025

Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African small-plot subsistence agriculture 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Andrew Clough 1 shared issues

Source context

January 16, 2025 · Original source

...dized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are...

...sing all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an ex...

Sapporo1 mentions across 1 issues

Sapporo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sapporo, in northern Japan, doesn’t [have a city region]". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: Sapporo
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

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The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GCSd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9012632f-bf92-4318-9c85-e4b95826dd50_300x450.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

Sar-i-Sang1 mentions across 1 issues

Sar-i-Sang is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 01, 2025 and April 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang"; "story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, AI, anime.

Reference entry: Sar-i-Sang
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 01, 2025
Last seen: April 01, 2025

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The Colors Of Her Coat April 01, 2025

Afghanistan 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
anime 1 shared issues
Badakhshan 1 shared issues
Ballad of the White Horse 1 shared issues

Source context

The Colors Of Her Coat

April 01, 2025 · Original source

Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? Climb 7,000 feet through the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to mine a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world.

This painting tears me apart. I - confession - am the type of person who, after hearing the story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang and medieval European art economics - would be tempted to buy lapis lazuli and stare at it longingly, trying to recapture the awe that Joe Peasant must have felt staring at the Virgin’s coat. But I’m also the type of person who, if I ran across Klein in a gallery, would frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff. Should I feel bad about this?

Sarajevo1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Sarajevo
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Yugoslavia Humanitarian Intervention (1995, 1999): UNSC sanctioned NATO’s intervention against ethnic Serbs’ massacre of ethnic Bosnians in Srebrenica and Sarajevo in 1995, but not the so-called “illegal but legitimate” 1999 bombing of Kosovo to stop the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnians as NATO would have been vetoed by Russia and China.

Saratoga1 mentions across 1 issues

Saratoga is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2025 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Hackers Conference in Saratoga". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

Reference entry: Saratoga
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 19, 2025
Last seen: September 19, 2025

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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been September 19, 2025

1987 1 shared issues
1988 1 shared issues
Adleman 1 shared issues
AHIRC 1 shared issues
Andy van Dam 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

September 19, 2025 · Original source

Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!

Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan

Saratoga Gap trail1 mentions across 1 issues

Saratoga Gap trail is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2023 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains". It most often appears alongside Abe Lincoln, AI alignment movement, Ambras.

Reference entry: Saratoga Gap trail
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2023
Last seen: September 13, 2023

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Issue trail

Book Review: Elon Musk September 13, 2023

Abe Lincoln 1 shared issues
AI alignment movement 1 shared issues
Ambras 1 shared issues
Andrew Beal 1 shared issues
Android 1 shared issues

Source context

There's A Time For Everyone

September 13, 2023 · Original source

As a bonding exercise one weekend, Musk, Ambras, a few other employees [of Zip2, his first startup] and friends took off for a bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Most of the riders had been training and were accustomed to strenuous sessions and the summer’s heat. They set up the mountains at a furious pace. After an hour, Russ Rive, Musk’s cousin, reached the top and proceeded to vomit. Right behind him were the rest of the cyclists. Then, fifteen minutes later, Musk became visible to the group. His face had turned purple, and sweat poured out of him, and he made it to the top. “I always think back to that ride. He wasn’t close to being in the condition needed for it,” Ambras said. “Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”

Sardinia1 mentions across 1 issues

Sardinia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 12, 2022 and January 12, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "a year later they ran off to Sardinia together and got married". It most often appears alongside Aella, Alexander, Chris Olah.

Reference entry: Sardinia
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 12, 2022
Last seen: January 12, 2022

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There's A Time For Everyone January 12, 2022

Aella 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues
Chris Olah 1 shared issues
COVID 1 shared issues
Darwin 1 shared issues

Source context

January 12, 2022 · Original source

But everyone’s story is weird. During college, my father moonlighted as a juggling instructor. My mother signed up for his class, one thing led to another, and a year later they ran off to Sardinia together and got married. My best man met his wife when she dropped out of philosophy grad school to join the transhumanist compound he was staying at. Darwin spends five billion years optimizing your genes for reproduction, and God laughs and decides that whether or not you mate will depend on which weird parties you go to, or whatever.

Satuye1 mentions across 1 issues

Satuye is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 04, 2023 and September 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Satuye, the industrial mainland half of Prospera". It most often appears alongside Africa, Beyabu, Bildod.

Reference entry: Satuye
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 04, 2023
Last seen: September 04, 2023

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23: California Dreamin' September 04, 2023

Africa 1 shared issues
Beyabu 1 shared issues
Bildod 1 shared issues
Bolivia 1 shared issues
California 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

September 04, 2023 · Original source

Satuye, the industrial mainland half of Prospera, “is almost fully subscribed”, with a major client being healthcare manufacturer CIGA

Inline links: “is almost fully subscribed”

Saude, Iowa1 mentions across 1 issues

Saude, Iowa is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 30, 2021 and April 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm"; "on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa". It most often appears alongside AI, AI research, Air.

Reference entry: Saude, Iowa
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 30, 2021
Last seen: April 30, 2021

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Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet April 30, 2021

AI 1 shared issues
AI research 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Air 1 shared issues
Alice Waters 1 shared issues

Source context

April 30, 2021 · Original source

Borlaug’s section, in contrast, begins not in the rarefied world of middle-class New York, but on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm. He comes of age at roughly the same time as Vogt, but his early life may as well be mid-1800s Little House on the Prairie: Borlaug and his siblings literally have to walk three miles in the snow to get to their one-room schoolhouse. Fortunately, he is freed from a life of subsistence farming and given the chance to go to high school and college by his family’s purchase of a Ford tractor, which nicely sets up his lifelong optimism about the ability of technology to improve lives. While attending college in Minneapolis at the height of the Great Depression, Borlaug sees a crowd of striking dairy farmers being beaten by police and National Guardsmen for protesting the drop in the price of milk by surrounding a scab-driven milk truck. "Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized," Mann writes. "Some of them were just hungry – famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want." Where Vogt might have curled his lip in distaste and gone home to write a pamphlet about this scene as an illustration of humanity’s taxing the earth’s carrying capacity and reaping the consequences, for Borlaug this was the catalyst for homing in on solving the problem of hunger. Mann: "Something must be done, he thought. Those famished people were ready to tear apart the world, and who could blame them? Here began, or so he said afterward, the work that would make him the original Wizard."

Saudis1 mentions across 1 issues

Saudis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2022 and August 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Saudis are big investors in hyperloops". It most often appears alongside AI, CFTC, Connor Leahy.

Reference entry: Saudis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2022
Last seen: August 08, 2022

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Open Thread 236 August 08, 2022

AI 1 shared issues
CFTC 1 shared issues
Connor Leahy 1 shared issues
Dubai 1 shared issues
Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry 1 shared issues

Source context

Open Thread 236

August 08, 2022 · Original source

2: Comments of the week: John Schilling tries to calculate the cost of building Neom, and comes up with an optimistic estimate of $4 trillion (compared to its $0.5-1 trillion budget). But he uses the cost of WTC1 as a base; this is unfair because it’s one of the costliest skyscrapers ever. If we use the similarly-sized Princess Tower in Dubai, one of the cheapest, we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale, and ??? afterwards (potentially much less because they can mass produce, or potentially much more because they exhaust the global concrete market). But the $1 trillion Neom budget also has to cover the Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry, the giant ski resort, etc, so it’s still a long shot. Also, Reader talks about his experience working in one of the companies that designed Neom. And Honourary notes that the Saudis are big investors in hyperloops, and a working hyperloop could make good on Neom’s otherwise-hyperbolic transportation claims. Maybe one way to think about Neom is as the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops, in the same way that Levittown was the first city designed from the ground up around cars. This makes me update very slightly towards plausibility - but it’s still based around combining ~5 things that have never been tried before, and hoping none of them goes wrong or exceeds projected costs.

Inline links: tries to calculate, talks about his experience, notes that

Sault Ste. Marie1 mentions across 1 issues

Sault Ste. Marie 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 "SAULT STE. MARIE". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry: Sault Ste. Marie
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 01, 2026
Last seen: April 01, 2026

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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

1108 R St 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
18 An Nhơn 3, An Hải, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng 1 shared issues
2, Church Street, Brigade Rd 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Tess Contact Info: rational[.]ottawa[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, May 22nd, 6:00 PM Location: The 2026 Spring ACX Meetups Everywhere in Ottawa will be on Friday, May 22nd, at 6pm! Location: The rooftop patio of the National Art Centre (NAC), 1 Elgin St. The patio can be accessed from the street via exterior stairs (which I will label with a yellow sign reading “ACX”), or by going through the NAC to the upper levels with exits to the rooftop patio. If there is any difficulty finding the meetup, go to the Equator Coffee just inside the entrance to the NAC, contact Tess, and someone will be down to collect you. If it rains on the 22nd, we will reconvene inside the NAC atrium (ground floor area with the colourful couches). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q6C8F4+CH Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4 (Attend a meetup for a link to our discord, where all the active online conversation takes place) Notes: Come on out to encounter ACX readers, and to find out what our Rational Ottawa weekly meetup group is like/is all about! Past years have seen attendance range from 1-2 dozen at these events, and I would expect that to continue. Please feel welcome to join us even if you’re not quite sure you fit the crowd, or feel awkward about doing meetups! Food to be provided at the event! SAULT STE. MARIE Contact: Kevin Macmichael Contact Info: kvnmac1[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 1:00 PM Location: We’ll be at Kiwanis park, by the benches. I’ll have an ACX Meetup sign with me. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86RQGMFP+VJ Group Link: https://discord.gg/YfY [remove this bit] acWJu Notes: Please join the discord or email me so I know how much food to bring

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87Q6C8F4+CH, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4, https://plus.codes/86RQGMFP+VJ

Scandinavian countries1 mentions across 1 issues

Scandinavian countries is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 05, 2023 and September 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scandinavian countries are currently beating us in the all-important social science wars". It most often appears alongside America, ASVAB, Athens.

Reference entry: Scandinavian countries
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 05, 2023
Last seen: September 05, 2023

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My Presidential Platform September 05, 2023

America 1 shared issues
ASVAB 1 shared issues
Athens 1 shared issues
British 1 shared issues
Bureau of Indian Affairs 1 shared issues

Source context

My Presidential Platform

September 05, 2023 · Original source

Scandinavian countries are currently beating us in the all-important social science wars. Their universal military service means they do psychological and medical tests on every 18-year old male in the country, which can then be correlated with various health and economic outcomes years later.

Schenectady1 mentions across 1 issues

Schenectady is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 27, 2023 and March 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "living in Schenectady, New York"; "I TOLD YOU there was no such place as “Schenectady”!". It most often appears alongside Air, Alan Serzynski, Albany.

Reference entry: Schenectady
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 27, 2023
Last seen: March 27, 2023

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Issue trail

Turing Test March 27, 2023

Air 1 shared issues
Alan Serzynski 1 shared issues
Albany 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
AnswerBot 1 shared issues

Source context

Turing Test

March 27, 2023 · Original source

EARTH: My name is Maria Kolorova. I’m a 29 year old mother of two, living in Schenectady, New York. In my spare time, I like to cook and play RPGs.

SPIRIT: No way “Schenectady” is a real city. She’s the AI!

SPIRIT: I TOLD YOU there was no such place as “Schenectady”!

Schlettstadt1 mentions across 1 issues

Schlettstadt is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2022 and October 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "near the town of Schlettstadt". It most often appears alongside 15th century, Adam, Almighty God.

Reference entry: Schlettstadt
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 28, 2022
Last seen: October 28, 2022

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Issue trail

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum October 28, 2022

15th century 1 shared issues
Adam 1 shared issues
Almighty God 1 shared issues
anarchy 1 shared issues
Anomalous Woman 1 shared issues

Source context

October 28, 2022 · Original source

“Here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements” “Sweet Jesus!” So you have your three witnesses. You’ve questioned them separately, to see if their stories match, then questioned the suspect separately a bunch of times to see if she changes her story. All the witnesses agree, and the suspect still seems suspicious. Now you can burn her as a witch, right? Wrong. The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”. You may, if you wish, transport the suspect to some kind of weird far-off castle (this is the Middle Ages, they have so many weird far-off castles they don’t know what to do with them). Keep her there for a while until she thinks everyone has forgotten about her and the witch trial is over. Have all the ladies and servants of the castle be very friendly to her. One day the lord of the castle will be gone on some errand, and one of the ladies who has befriended her will say: I hear you were a witch once, I really need to bewitch someone, would you mind telling me how to cast a spell? And everyone there has always been so nice, and the witch trial is long forgotten, so she’ll say yeah, sure, and explain how to cause a hailstorm or something. And then you can jump out from behind a tapestry or something and say “Ha! We got you!” Does this really work? Quite lately a witch was detained in the Castle of Königsheim near the town of Schlettstadt in the Diocese of Strasburg, and could not be induced by any tortures or questions to confess her crimes. But at last the castellan used the method we have just described. Although he was himself present in the castle, the witch thought he was away, and three of his household came in to her and promised they would set her free if she would teach them how to do certain things. At first she refused, saying that they were trying to entrap her; but at last she asked what it was that they wanted to know. And one asked how to raise a hailstorm, and another asked about carnal matters. When at length she agreed to show him how to raise a hailstorm, and a bowl of water had been brought in, the witch told him to stir the water with his finger, and herself uttered certain words, and suddenly the place which he had named, a wood near the castle, was visited by such a tempest and storm of hail as had not been seen for many years. Caught red-handed! The third and final way this rule is extremely fake is that, if none of this makes the suspect confess, the judge can turn her over to the secular courts to be tried for witchcraft-as-a-secular-crime. He is supposed to recommend mercy, but realistically the secular courts will kill her anyway. So do all witch trials end in death? No. If a judge wants a witch trial to end in death, he has plenty of ways to make it happen. But the Malleus gives a list of scenarios (some evidence + no witnesses; some evidence + many witnesses, etc, etc) and most end in “acquittal”. I use the quotes because there is one more hurdle: a ritual called “purgation”, where the suspect brings X witnesses of her same station (eg lord for lord, peasant for peasant) to the town square. There, the witnesses publicly vouch for her good character, and she swears that she is not a witch and forsakes all witchcraft forever. Then everything’s good - but the key is that the more suspicious you seem, the higher the judge will set X. And if you can’t find X people to vouch for your good character, you’re in contempt of court and probably a witch. Also, except in the most cut-and-dry cases of innocence, suspects are released on something like probation: any further accusations of witchcraft will be taken much more seriously. Since people were already willing to falsely accuse you of witchcraft once, good luck with the probation, I guess. Other highlights of this section: Question IX: What Kind Of Defense May Be Allowed, And Of The Appointment Of An Advocate All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself. Question XVII: Of Common Purgation, And Especially Of The Trial Of Red-Hot Iron, To Which Witches Appeal It might seem that you should give witches trial by ordeal, because that way God can decide their guilt or innocence, and (as has already been established), God really hates witches. The most common trial by ordeal is the trial by iron, where the suspect must hold a red hot iron, and if she drops it, she’s guilty. Unfortunately, witches can use witchcraft to hold the iron, so this doesn’t work. Witches always ask for this kind of trial and are always found innocent, so best to give them a normal trial with witnesses and stuff. Question XXII: Of The Third Kind Of Sentence, To Be Pronounced On One Who Is Defamed, And Who Is To Be Put To The Question Kramer advises: “Let not the Judge be too willing to subject a person to torture, for this should only be resorted to in default of other proofs”. He then goes on to explain that torture usually doesn’t work, because “some are so soft-hearted and feeble-minded that at the least torture they will confess anything, whether it be true or not” and “others are so stubborn that, however much they be tortured, the truth is not to be had from them.” But his conclusion is only that “there is need for much prudence in the matter of torture”, and he goes on to talk a lot about how to torture people. He seems to think of false confessions (and false silence) as minor issues that deserve some attention but shouldn’t keep a judge from torturing someone if he really wants. It’s actually worse than this, because he goes on to say that the Devil often makes witches immune to torture. If someone doesn’t seem to mind being tortured at all, they’re probably a witch. If someone doesn’t cry when being tortured, that’s another red flag, because witches can’t cry (source: everyone knows this). To Kramer’s credit, he is willing to follow the logical implications of his belief: he agrees that if a suspect does cry, that means she’s innocent. Being really mean, trying to make her cry, and then letting her go if she does is . . . actually a valid witch trial method! But you have to be careful: sometimes witches try to game the system by carrying a concealed pouch of noxious herbs to make their eyes tear up. You should only release someone for crying if you’re sure they haven’t done this. Also interesting in Part 3: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Inline links: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Scotland, UK1 mentions across 1 issues

Scotland, UK is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 14, 2022 and February 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Pontifex Minimus on “Scotland, UK, and the world”". It most often appears alongside ACX Bot, Alexander Cube, Augur.

Reference entry: Scotland, UK
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 14, 2022
Last seen: February 14, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold February 14, 2022

ACX Bot 1 shared issues
Alexander Cube 1 shared issues
Augur 1 shared issues
Clay Graubard 1 shared issues
Connor 1 shared issues

Source context

Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold

February 14, 2022 · Original source

Some more New Years’ predictions: Pontifex Minimus on “Scotland, UK, and the world”; Slime Mold Time Mold on 2050 (and 1950?), sorry if I’m missing somebody.

Inline links: Pontifex Minimus, 2050, 1950

Scottish1 mentions across 1 issues

Scottish is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 15, 2024 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "All you need to do is find the right Scottish person". It most often appears alongside @the_megabase, A Pan-Species Welfare State, ACX Grantees.

Reference entry: Scottish
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 15, 2024
Last seen: May 15, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Profile: The Far Out Initiative May 15, 2024

@the_megabase 1 shared issues
A Pan-Species Welfare State 1 shared issues
ACX Grantees 1 shared issues
ACX MEETUP 1 shared issues
Apimostinel 1 shared issues

Source context

Profile: The Far Out Initiative

May 15, 2024 · Original source

Pearce’s old friend Nick Bostrom imagines a future of superintelligence. But Pearce will count his own contribution complete if he gives us superhappiness, supermeaning, superbeauty, and superspirituality. And why shouldn’t he? People on LSD and MDMA have all of these things. All we need to do is figure out how to do it without the trippy hallucinations, urge to go to raves, and occasional neurotoxicity. Don’t say it’s impossible! All you need to do is find the right Scottish person!

Inline links: and occasional neurotoxicity

My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.

Scottish Highlands1 mentions across 1 issues

Scottish Highlands is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Scottish Highlands, where a technological innovation was introduced"; "like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: Scottish Highlands
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

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Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

May 19, 2023 · Original source

An oversized technology force creates a clearance region. The example here is the Scottish Highlands, where a technological innovation was introduced in the late 18th century: a new breed of sheep. (Technically this was a rural invention, but the introduction to Scotland was devised by businessmen in London.) The new sheep greatly improved the yields from the land, but at the cost of violently displacing a large number of poor tenant farmers to make room for pastures. So it goes for other technologies, like farm machinery: when they are introduced to a poor rural region that isn’t integrated into an import-replacing economy, they just replace workers and leave them idle, poorer than before, or forced to emigrate.

… 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.

Scottsdale, AZ1 mentions across 1 issues

Scottsdale, AZ 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: Cactus Park, 7202 E Cactus Rd, Scottsdale, AZ 85260". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: Scottsdale, AZ
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

August 23, 2021 · Original source

PHOENIX, AZ (RSVP) Contact: Ben Morin & aK, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com & sareenyoga[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: Cactus Park, 7202 E Cactus Rd, Scottsdale, AZ 85260. We will meet under the east ramada closest to the parking lot. aK will be wearing a red t-shirt. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/wages.putty.ground

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/wages.putty.ground

Sea Ranch1 mentions across 1 issues

Sea Ranch 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 "a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch)". It most often appears alongside Alex Poterack, Alexander, America.

Reference entry: Sea Ranch
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 10, 2023
Last seen: May 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices May 10, 2023

Alex Poterack 1 shared issues
Alexander 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Apple 1 shared issues
Ash Lael 1 shared issues

Source context

May 10, 2023 · Original source

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: Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

Sealand1 mentions across 1 issues

Sealand is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 01, 2022 and August 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sealand is an independent nation based out of an old WWII sea fort". It most often appears alongside Aerialoop, Al-Nasr, Bloomberg.

Reference entry: Sealand
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 01, 2022
Last seen: August 01, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

22 August 01, 2022

Aerialoop 1 shared issues
Al-Nasr 1 shared issues
Bloomberg 1 shared issues
Bloomberg View 1 shared issues
British territorial waters 1 shared issues

Source context

August 01, 2022 · Original source

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: 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

Seattle, Washington1 mentions across 1 issues

Seattle, Washington is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: Seattle, Washington
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 15th, 02:00 PM Location: Volunteer Park, by the amphitheater. I'll have a folding table set up, and probably a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJMJM+56

Seattle, Washington, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Seattle, Washington, USA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Seattle, Washington, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

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Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Cedar Contact Info: cedar[dot]ren[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 02:00 PM Location: 1111 110th Avenue NEBellevue, WA 98004 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Alex C Contact Info: biz[dot]alexc[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 19th, 06:00 PM Location: 6717 Roosevelt Way NE Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98115. Armistice Coffee Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35, https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality

Contact: Alex C Contact Info: biz[dot]alexc[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 19th, 06:00 PM Location: 6717 Roosevelt Way NE Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98115. Armistice Coffee Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality

Sebastopol1 mentions across 1 issues

Sebastopol is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 14, 2022 and April 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)?". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adrian D’Souza, Aleph.

Reference entry: Sebastopol
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 14, 2022
Last seen: April 14, 2022

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Issue trail

Links For April April 14, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
Adrian D’Souza 1 shared issues
Aleph 1 shared issues
Alex Wellerstein 1 shared issues
Alexandros Marinos 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London

April 14, 2022 · Original source

3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3.

Inline links: secret plan to resurrect Byzantium

Seine1 mentions across 1 issues

Seine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "he had recently been sleeping under the Seine bridges". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

Reference entry: Seine
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2021
Last seen: June 10, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London June 10, 2021

1984 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
American ‘hobo’ culture 1 shared issues
anarcho-syndicalists 1 shared issues
Animal Farm 1 shared issues

Source context

June 10, 2021 · Original source

All the clothes he now had left were one suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes almost worn out, and a pair of socks, all holes. He had also an overcoat which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a suitcase, a wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the patron of the hotel believed that it was full of clothes—without that, he would probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were the medals and photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles of love-letters. In spite of all this Boris managed to keep a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he produced an ink-bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed through his socks. You would never have thought, when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under the Seine bridges.

Seminyak1 mentions across 1 issues

Seminyak is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia"; "SEMINYAK, BALI, INDONESIA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Seminyak
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

SEMINYAK, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: Maciej Contact Info: maciej[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20, 01:00 PM Location: Ingka Petitenget Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P3Q85G5+XW Additional Notes: Try to drop me an email if you might be coming, so I can estimate if anybody is / how many people are coming

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P3Q85G5+XW

Seongdong-gu1 mentions across 1 issues

Seongdong-gu is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: Seongdong-gu
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Cyrus Contact Info: ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X

Serbian1 mentions across 1 issues

Serbian is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2024 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "against the Serbian oppression and genocidal atrocities". It most often appears alongside 1999 apartment bombings, 9/11, Abbasid.

Reference entry: Serbian
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 13, 2024
Last seen: September 13, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Nine Lives September 13, 2024

1999 apartment bombings 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Abbasid 1 shared issues
Abu Hafs 1 shared issues
Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi 1 shared issues

Source context

September 13, 2024 · Original source

Dean originally joins the jihad because he is horrified by the news of the sometimes genocidal mistreatment of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbian army. But later he gets told off by one of his superiors even for this: what good it is to save the lives of some Muslims, if Bosnia will just have a secular government anyway, that allows “alcohol and nightclubs”? Bosnia will never be the cradle of a new Caliphate, so it’s not important either.

But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in. Dean had already been hanging out for years with al-Qaeda fighters, he had seen Serbian prisoners of war being beheaded with blunt knives, and this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that.

Second, some people really want to be heroes. Dean first joined the jihad because he wanted to defend his Muslim brothers in Bosnia against the Serbian oppression and genocidal atrocities. Many others joined for similar reasons: to help the oppressed in Bosnia, or before that in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation. But there aren’t that many “just wars” going on in the modern world. So these aspiring heroes convince themselves that one side of a horrible-against-horrible civil war is actually the just cause, and join that. Or they just find Islamic Accelerationism, which very conveniently claims that all kinds of new wars are just and heroic, as the instability brings forward the final victory of the Faithful. There is something tragic about the mis-directed energies of all these would-be heroes, and I sometimes wonder if we should stage fake alien invasions to keep these people occupied.

SEWANEE1 mentions across 1 issues

SEWANEE 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 "SEWANEE Contact: Daksh". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry: SEWANEE
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 01, 2026
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

1108 R St 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
18 An Nhơn 3, An Hải, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng 1 shared issues
2, Church Street, Brigade Rd 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dQJLv8ix3mn7f4rq6?g_st=ic, https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP), https://plus.codes/868M45WV+J2, https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP, https://plus.codes/867P634M+39

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Jonah Contact Info: generalpurposeemail1[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 2:00 PM Location: At the outdoor seating area directly in front of Nicholas Zeppos College at Vanderbilt university. Here is a Google map pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/dQJLv8ix3mn7f4rq6?g_st=ic Please join the Group Me (https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP) for pictures of the seating area and to talk to us if you have trouble finding us. Address: 45WV+J3R Nashville, Tennessee Coordinates (36.1466033, -86.8073613). Free parking is a 5-10 minute walk away at Centennial Park and, especially, at Martin’s BBQ Joint on Elliston Place. Paid parking that’s a 2-3 minute walk away can be found along the entire stretch of West End Avenue that overlaps with Vanderbilt’s main campus (on the street facing side of Nicholas Zeppos College). You could also park at the Vanderbilt bookstore parking lot, but parking is limited to an hour and I’ve been towed there before (whereas Martin’s BBQ has never failed me). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/868M45WV+J2 Group Link: https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP Notes: Please join the GroupMe so we can cater for the appropriate number of people and choose foods everyone will enjoy. SEWANEE Contact: Daksh Contact Info: tyagid0[@]sewanee[.]edu Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Stirling’s Coffee House porch Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867P634M+39 Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people to expect and let Stirling’s know in advance if we’re going to be a big group!

Contact: Daksh Contact Info: tyagid0[@]sewanee[.]edu Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM Location: Stirling’s Coffee House porch Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867P634M+39 Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people to expect and let Stirling’s know in advance if we’re going to be a big group!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/867P634M+39

Shady or East Liberty1 mentions across 1 issues

Shady or East Liberty is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "most meetups taking place around Shady or East Liberty". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Shady or East Liberty
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Justin Contact Info: pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 1:30 PM Location: DEFAULT OUTDOOR LOCATION: CMU Campus, Jared L Cohon University Center, at the picnic tables outside the east entrance (the side of the building that faces the track). Look for the "ACX" banner. CONTINGENCY INDOOR LOCATION (in case of rain): Jared L Cohon University Center, Danforth Lounge (upstairs, 2nd floor) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3V5+6C Notes: The Pittsburgh ACX group meets around once a month, with most meetups taking place around Shady or East Liberty. If you'd like to be notified about future meetups, email pghacx[at]gmail[dot]com to be added to the mailing list.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G2C3V5+6C

Shahpur Jat1 mentions across 1 issues

Shahpur Jat is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Spaced Out Cafe, Shahpur Jat". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: Shahpur Jat
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

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

Shaker Heights1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Shaker Heights
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 01, 2022
Last seen: December 01, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise December 01, 2022

Amalgamated Bank 1 shared issues
Andover 1 shared issues
anti-Semitism 1 shared issues
Atlantic 1 shared issues
barberpole theory of fashion 1 shared issues

Source context

December 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Shannara1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Shannara
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 28, 2023
Last seen: April 28, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Psychology Of Fantasy April 28, 2023

Ancient Progenitor Civilization 1 shared issues
Aragorn 1 shared issues
Arya Stark 1 shared issues
Banewreaker 1 shared issues
Brin 1 shared issues

Source context

The Psychology Of Fantasy

April 28, 2023 · Original source

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

The most perfect fantasy series, in the sense of hitting the exact center of every trope, might be Terry Brooks’ Shannara. In the third book, Wishsong of Shannara, a wise wizard tells Brin Ohmsford that because her ancestors used powerful magics, she has had those magics rub off in her blood in the form of the Wishsong, some sort of incomprehensible ability to get anything she wants as long as she can master herself and her emotions enough to use it correctly. She is charged with fighting the Dark Lord, and has various adventures which she can’t really solve with her Wishsong because she’s not able to master her emotions well enough to control it. Finally she confronts the Dark Lord, who tries to corrupt her, but her brother shows up at the last moment, reminds her how much she loves her family, and she realizes this is who she truly is, masters her Wishsong, and destroys the Dark Lord.

Shanxi1 mentions across 1 issues

Shanxi is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "An eminent Chinese official stated that in Shanxi province at the beginning of 1931". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: Shanxi
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021

Alexander Hamilton 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
ASEAN 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues
Association of South-East Asian Nations 1 shared issues

Source context

June 28, 2021 · Original source

It was William Hinton, an American Marxist writer conducting research in the 1940s, who produced the classic outsider-insider’s tale of life in a Chinese farming village [in] Shanxi province. Hinton wrote about the mundane realities of death by starvation during the annual ‘spring hunger’ when food reserves ran out, and of the slavery (mostly of girls), landlord violence, domestic violence, usury, endemic mafia-style secret societies and other assorted brutalities that characterised everyday life. One of the most striking aspects was the attention paid to faeces, the key fertiliser. Children and old people constantly scoured public areas for animal droppings. Landlords demanded that day labourers defecate only in their landlords’ privies; out-of-village labourers were preferred by some because they could not skip off to their own toilets.

R.H. Tawney, the British economic historian, wrote after a visit to China in the late 1920s that the precariousness of Chinese agriculture was such that: ‘There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him ... An eminent Chinese official stated that in Shanxi province at the beginning of 1931, three million persons had died of hunger in the last few years, and the misery had been such that 400,000 women and children had changed hands by sale.’

Shanxi province1 mentions across 1 issues

Shanxi province is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "life in a Chinese farming village [in] Shanxi province". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: Shanxi province
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021

Alexander Hamilton 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
ASEAN 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues
Association of South-East Asian Nations 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Order Without Law

June 28, 2021 · Original source

It was William Hinton, an American Marxist writer conducting research in the 1940s, who produced the classic outsider-insider’s tale of life in a Chinese farming village [in] Shanxi province. Hinton wrote about the mundane realities of death by starvation during the annual ‘spring hunger’ when food reserves ran out, and of the slavery (mostly of girls), landlord violence, domestic violence, usury, endemic mafia-style secret societies and other assorted brutalities that characterised everyday life. One of the most striking aspects was the attention paid to faeces, the key fertiliser. Children and old people constantly scoured public areas for animal droppings. Landlords demanded that day labourers defecate only in their landlords’ privies; out-of-village labourers were preferred by some because they could not skip off to their own toilets.

R.H. Tawney, the British economic historian, wrote after a visit to China in the late 1920s that the precariousness of Chinese agriculture was such that: ‘There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him ... An eminent Chinese official stated that in Shanxi province at the beginning of 1931, three million persons had died of hunger in the last few years, and the misery had been such that 400,000 women and children had changed hands by sale.’

Shasta County1 mentions across 1 issues

Shasta County is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 08, 2021 and April 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers"; "Part one is an in-depth exploration of Shasta County"; "part one is an in-depth exploration of Shasta County". It most often appears alongside ACX, amoral familialism, An Introduction to Law and Economics.

Reference entry: Shasta County
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 08, 2021
Last seen: April 08, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Order Without Law April 08, 2021

ACX 1 shared issues
amoral familialism 1 shared issues
An Introduction to Law and Economics 1 shared issues
anthropology 1 shared issues
Association of American Publishers 1 shared issues

Source context

April 08, 2021 · Original source

[This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack’s, so please don’t hold it against this entry. Oh, and I promise not all of them are this long. - SA] Shasta County Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.

Inline links: 1

Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.

Inline links: 1

Even if they were right about the law, they have insurance for such matters. They’ll tell you that their insurance premiums will rise if the range closes, but insurers don’t adjust their rates on that level of granularity. One major insurer doesn’t even adjust its rates between Shasta County and other counties in California. They might plausibly want to increase their coverage amount, but the cost of that is on the order of $10/year.

Shattuck Street1 mentions across 1 issues

Shattuck Street is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 26, 2021 and February 26, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ike's is located at the intersection of Shattuck and Center Streets in Berkeley". It most often appears alongside American Chinese food, Bay Area, BBQ pork rice.

Reference entry: Shattuck Street
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 26, 2021
Last seen: February 26, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews February 26, 2021

American Chinese food 1 shared issues
Bay Area 1 shared issues
BBQ pork rice 1 shared issues
Berkeley 1 shared issues
Burger King 1 shared issues

Source context

Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews

February 26, 2021 · Original source

Ike's sandwiches have names like "Lex Luthor" and "Chester the Cheetah". Crave's have names like "Iron Man" and "Donald Duck". Both chains offer the same choice of French, sourdough, Dutch cruch, wheat, and gluten-free breads. Both give you a few free lollipops in the bag with every order. Also, Ike's is located at the intersection of Shattuck and Center Streets in Berkeley; Crave's is also located at that intersection, about 400 ft away.

Shen1 mentions across 1 issues

Shen is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Lord Xuan sent Jizi to Qi and had brigands await him at Shen". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: Shen
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023

Outbound links

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10138907/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

Source context

September 01, 2023 · Original source

In summer, in the sixth month, on the yiyou day (26), Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi.

The leaders of Chu presented a large turtle to Lord Ling of Zheng. Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were about to have an audience with the lord. Gongzi Song’s index finger moved involuntarily. He showed it to Gongzi Guisheng and said, “On other days when my finger did this, I always without fail got to taste something extraordinary.” As they entered, the cook was about to take the turtle apart. They looked at each other and smiled. The lord asked why, and Gongzi Guisheng told him. When the lord had the high officers partake of the turtle, he called Gongzi Song forward but did not give him any. Furious, Gongzi Song dipped his finger into the cauldron, tasted the turtle, and left. The lord was so enraged that he wanted to kill Gongzi Song. Gongzi Song plotted with Gongzi Guisheng to act first. Gongzi Guisheng said, “Even with an aging domestic animal, one is reluctant to kill it. How much more so then with the ruler?” Gongzi Song turned things around and slandered Gongzi Guisheng. Gongzi Guisheng became fearful and complied with him. In the summer, they assassinated Lord Ling.

The text says, “Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi”: this is because he fell short in weighing the odds. The noble man said, “To be benevolent without martial valor is to achieve nothing.” In all cases when a ruler is assassinated, naming the ruler [with his personal name rather than his title] means that he violated the way of rulership; naming the subject means that the blame lies with him.

Shenton St1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Shenton St
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

August 26, 2022 · Original source

...ing 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 wa...

Sherbro1 mentions across 1 issues

Sherbro 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 "Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”". It most often appears alongside African-Americans, Akon, Akon City.

Reference entry: Sherbro
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 28, 2025
Last seen: October 28, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

25 October 28, 2025

African-Americans 1 shared issues
Akon 1 shared issues
Akon City 1 shared issues
American street grid 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues

Source context

October 28, 2025 · Original source

…with Rixi Moncada (socialist), Salvador Nasralla (liberal), and Nasry Zablah (right-wing) all making strong showings. My impression is Moncada would be worst for Prospera, Zablah best, and Nasralla somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, my contact in Prospera reports that life in the city continues as normal, with most residents relatively insulated from the lawfare happening around them. They are up to 300 registered companies, a nearly-full office tower, a few residential developments under construction, and frequent conferences on relevant topics like crypto and biotech. From Techbro To Sherbro Sherbro, Sierra Leone. A place synonymous in the popular imagination with the phrase “Sherbro, Sierra Leone”. Population 30,000. Size 230 square miles (or “just a little bit smaller than Singapore”, according to its boosters). There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)

Inline links: source

Shinohata1 mentions across 1 issues

Shinohata is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jacobs summarizes a book about Shinohata, a real Japanese village"; "The growing city markets meant that most families could switch to new cash crops and make more money. ... prompting the remaining farmers to buy labor-saving equipment ... A large food processing factory was transplanted into the village". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: Shinohata
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

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The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

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Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.

Shinohata book cover: from Penguin Random House Canada.

Inline links: Penguin Random House Canada

Shueng Wan1 mentions across 1 issues

Shueng Wan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: The Catalyst art gallery, G/F, 2 Po Yan Street, Shueng Wan". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry: Shueng Wan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 25, 2025
Last seen: March 25, 2025

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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
133 SE Madison Street, Portland, OR 97214 1 shared issues

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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

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PW+7X

Siberian ice1 mentions across 1 issues

Siberian ice is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 15, 2021 and December 15, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice". It most often appears alongside 1918 flu, 1918 Spanish flu, Alaska.

Reference entry: Siberian ice
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 15, 2021
Last seen: December 15, 2021

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Ancient Plagues December 15, 2021

1918 flu 1 shared issues
1918 Spanish flu 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Arkansas 1 shared issues
BBC 1 shared issues

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Ancient Plagues

December 15, 2021 · Original source

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

I think if something goes wrong, the third most likely vector will be curious Siberians who see a corpse half-hidden in the ice and go investigate. The second most likely vector will be archaeologists. And the most likely vector - by far - will be scientists investigating to see whether something could go wrong.

Sichuan1 mentions across 1 issues

Sichuan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: Sichuan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021

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Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021

Alexander Hamilton 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
ASEAN 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues
Association of South-East Asian Nations 1 shared issues

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June 28, 2021 · Original source

A rather typical landlord of the era was Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who owned ten hectares in Paifang village in the hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Deng Wenming lived in a 22-room house on the edge of his village and leased out two-thirds of his fields. He, like so many other landlords, was not a man of limitless wealth. But he controlled the land of more than half a dozen average families.

Sierra1 mentions across 1 issues

Sierra is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2022 and September 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra". It most often appears alongside 1995 to 2000, Arizona, Atonio Avalos.

Reference entry: Sierra
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022

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Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography

September 21, 2022 · Original source

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

Siliguri1 mentions across 1 issues

Siliguri is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 14, 2021 and September 14, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "he found himself travelling via Siliguri". It most often appears alongside Adivasis, affirmative action, Ahmedabad.

Reference entry: Siliguri
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 14, 2021
Last seen: September 14, 2021

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Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography September 14, 2021

Adivasis 1 shared issues
affirmative action 1 shared issues
Ahmedabad 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
Andy Marino 1 shared issues

Source context

September 14, 2021 · Original source

...found himself travelling via Siliguri, as far north-east as Guwahati or even further, and deep in a 'remote jungle'. There, miles from civilization, he stumbled across a hermit or medicant with whom he struct up a friendship. The man was 'very thin, it seemed that he had transparent skin'. There was little sense of urgency in Narendra's journeying, and he spent about a month helping in the ascetic's garden plot, spending time dicussing 'spiritual matters', before he decided to move on.

Sinai1 mentions across 1 issues

Sinai is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 01, 2023 and June 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "kabbalistically equivalent to the 40 years spent wandering in Sinai?". It most often appears alongside 2006 IAU vote, 9/11, Abacha.

Reference entry: Sinai
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 01, 2023
Last seen: June 01, 2023

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Links For May 2023 June 01, 2023

2006 IAU vote 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Abacha 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
AISafetyMemes 1 shared issues

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Links For May 2023

June 01, 2023 · Original source

2: All the ancients, from Darius the Great to Augustus Caesar, agreed that the Nisean horse was the most majestic horse breed, the horse of kings. The Chinese fought a war (the War of Heavenly Horses) just to get access to a breeding stock. Then they sort of ambiguously went extinct during the Middle Ages. But here’s a modern Iranian horse enthusiast talking about which breeds might be its descendants. 3: Remember when the global community banned whaling, but some countries (eg Japan) continued doing it under the facade of “research”? With octopus factory farms under increasing scrutiny, UNAM university in Mexico is operating a “farm disguised as a research center”. 4: Genuinely new (to me) optical illusion: what is this guy is doing with his hands? Here’s a slow motion version that shows how it’s done. And some people in the replies were speculating this only works because of his dark skin, but here’s a white person doing the exact same thing (wait for it). 5: Shingles vaccine probably reduces incidence of dementia, suggesting that VZV (virus behind shingles and chickenpox) is a contributor. Further discussion here that I’m still trying to make sense of. 6: This deserves to go down in history alongside the wittiest Socratic comebacks in the Platonic dialogues: 7: Matt Lakeman: Notes On Nigeria. Great introduction to modern Nigerian history. Read it for the visceral understanding of the “resource curse” and why poor countries stay poor, but also: A savant is basically someone who has innate mental challenges but is extremely competent in a particular narrow domain. Some savants become obsessed with trains and become great engineers. Some become obsessed with computers and build software wonders. One of Abacha’s predecessors said of him: “He might not be bright upstairs, but he knows how to overthrow governments.” Kenyon elaborates: “It was as if Abacha was an idiot savant. Dull, even gormless, he filled his days with cowboy movies and sleeping off the previous night’s indulgences in alcohol and prostitutes. But he was possessed of a prodigious flair when it came to coups.” 8: Related to my previous subscribers-only post on the psychology of fantasy: Balioc’s Taxonomy Of What Magic Is Doing In Fantasy Books. See also Eliezer’s commentary. 9: New study on the timing of human mutations confirms Greg Cochran’s 2012 post about how after leaving Africa, modern humans were limited to “Arabia and surrounding regions” for ~30,000 - 50,000 years, racking up various new mutations and becoming adapted to life outside Africa (kabbalistically equivalent to the 40 years spent wandering in Sinai?). Most mutations in “fat storage, neural development, skin physiology, and cilia function”. 10: Iron Economist on Twitter: “Desalinization was one of the big technological success stories of the 2010s”. 11: Matt Bruenig argues against the Success Sequence, whose proponents (including Bryan Caplan) describe it as: 97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). Bruenig’s argument is mostly a lot of annoying “well maybe it’s just your cultural bias that makes you care about this”, but in the middle of this it mentions some genuinely strong points, especially that the research doesn’t measure “sequence”, but rather “current status”. So if you graduated, got a job, got married, and had children, but then lost your job, your would be counted as “not following the sequence” (same if you get divorced). Also, disabled and old people and their caretakers are excluded from the analysis, which in one sense is fair (your conclusion can be “abled young adults can avoid poverty through this method”) but in another sense risks reducing all of this to the more trivial-seeming statement “if you’re young, healthy, abled, married, don’t have to support anyone else, and have a full-time job, you’re probably not poor”. But the authors (channeled by Caplan) disagree: Some critics of the success sequence have argued that marriage does not matter once education and work status are controlled. The regression results indicate that after controlling for a range of background factors, the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives is significantly associated with their financial well-being in the prime of young adulthood. Simply put, compared with the path of having a baby first, marrying before children more than doubles young adults’ odds of being in the middle or top income. Meanwhile, putting marriage first reduces the odds of young adults being in poverty by 60% (vs. having a baby first). The main thing I would want to look at here is how much of this is causal vs. just class selection: upper-class people are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to wait before having children. Has anyone followed some pre-selected group of equal class people (eg the population of some low-income school district) and seen how their own success varies with sequence compliance? 12: I’ve previously linked claims that vat-grown meat, freed from the tyranny of having to grow inside animals, will include tiger steaks, lion burgers, and the like. Once again global capitalism outpaces my wildest fantasies and offers burgers with woolly mammoth protein (so far just the myoglobin, not the meat). 13: The people who believed there was lots of gender bias in STEM academia, and the people who believed there wasn’t finally did an adversarial collaboration (a study co-conducted by two groups of scientists with conflicting theories, keeping each other honest). The results: Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. For ten years lots of important people told us again and again that discrimination against women in STEM was a massive problem. People who questioned its extent were accused of misogyny and sometimes fired, I got harassed and insulted for pointing out reasons the standard arguments didn’t seem to hold true. Millions of dollars were spent investigating and responding to the problem. And now I expect this pretty strong evidence that women were actually advantaged in hiring and had parity in most other things (the salary is probably just the usual negotiation issue) to produce no publicity, no apologies, and no soul-searching from the people leading the current round of anti-academia and anti-STEM inquisitions. Sorry, yes I am bitter, it just bothers me how much the people claiming that it’s urgently important that nobody is ever allowed to suggest they are wrong have a consistent track record of being totally and inexcusably wrong. 14: In my response to Sam Kriss, I speculated on what would happen if someone rewrote the MCU to sound like ancient myths. Thanks to the many people who reminded me of Star Wars as Icelandic saga and Star Wars as Irish epic. And Sam has a response . 15: @AISafetyMemes on Twitter is exactly what you’d expect from the name. I especially like the fire dogs: More here: 16: More AI links from this month: Can’t even list all the new people who have come out as AI x-risk believers, but you can just read the CAIS statement. The top signatures are Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei; aside from the usual suspects, they also have Bruce Schneier (computer security expert) , Dawn Song (computer scientist and security expert), Andy Clark (professor of cognitive philosophy, wrote Surfing Uncertainty), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he didn't sign the last one because he disagreed with specifics, but he's here), and a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense.

Inline links: the Nisean horse, the War of Heavenly Horses, a modern Iranian horse enthusiast talking about, is operating a “farm disguised as a research center”, what is this guy is doing with his hands?, a slow motion version, here’s a white person doing the exact same thing, Shingles vaccine probably reduces incidence of dementia, here, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EEvz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ecd2933-810f-41dd-af25-71fdf8e8d90f_590x234.png, Notes On Nigeria, Taxonomy Of What Magic Is Doing In Fantasy Books, Eliezer’s commentary, New study on the timing of human mutations, Greg Cochran’s 2012 post, Iron Economist on Twitter, argues against the Success Sequence, describe, tiger steaks, lion burgers, burgers with woolly mammoth protein, an adversarial collaboration, my response to Sam Kriss, Star Wars as Icelandic saga, Star Wars as Irish epic, a response, @, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!korm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e680df9-6385-4a23-91d5-3a5a9f8f9be7_680x343.jpeg, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-Hau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda6b71a4-78a4-4c4a-b755-b8051e7b5539_680x343.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RIF-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F846c32fc-c454-4e7f-b46e-e363cb925a95_1216x613.jpeg, CAIS statement

Sincan1 mentions across 1 issues

Sincan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "tanks and 15 armored vehicles through Sincan as a symbolic warning"; "The rolling of tanks through Sincan"; "20 tanks and 15 armored vehicles through Sincan as a symbolic warning". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry: Sincan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: March 18, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021

Abdullah Gul 1 shared issues
Academy Awards 1 shared issues
Ak 1 shared issues
AKP 1 shared issues
Anatolian 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

The military took matters into their own hands: the [Turkish Armed Forces] sent a contingent of 20 tanks and 15 armored vehicles through Sincan as a symbolic warning against the RP-led borough government. Deputy chief of general staff Cevik Bir characterized this as an act of "recalbrating" democracy. The rolling of tanks through Sincan would trigger a set of events, later dubbed the "soft coup", which culminated in the RP's fall from power.

The [Turkish Armed Forces] sent a contingent of 20 tanks and 15 armored vehicles through Sincan as a symbolic warning against the RP-led borough government. Deputy chief of general staff Cevik Bir characterized this as an act of "recalbrating" democracy. The rolling of tanks through Sincan would trigger a set of events, later dubbed the "soft coup", which culminated in the RP's fall from power. Though the government protested these threats from the military, a week later tens of thousands of women in Ankara held a demonstration against Islamists called the "Women's March Against Sharia", aligning many civil-society groups and opposition leaders with the secular military...Other secular forces began mounting so much pressure on the RP that the party's power started to unravel. Eventually, faced with growing demonstrations by secular NGOs, fierce criticism from the media, rebukes from many members of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (Turkey's club of Fortune 500 billionaires) and last but not least the looming threat of a military coup, the RP reliquished power and the RP-DYP government was dissolved on June 18, 1997.

Sioux Falls1 mentions across 1 issues

Sioux Falls is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: Sioux Falls
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

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Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: The Castrato

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, USA Contact: S.C. Contact Info: Villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 19th, 5:00 PM Location: Picnic shelter at McKennan Park, or tables south of it if it's occupied. Will have a sign saying "ACX." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V Notes: Please RSVP on LW

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86M5G7JH+W5V

Sistine Chapel1 mentions across 1 issues

Sistine Chapel 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 "drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself". It most often appears alongside 18th century, A Eunuch's Dream, Alessandro Moreschi.

Reference entry: Sistine Chapel
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2022
Last seen: June 03, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022

18th century 1 shared issues
A Eunuch's Dream 1 shared issues
Alessandro Moreschi 1 shared issues
American football 1 shared issues
Anna Mons 1 shared issues

Source context

June 03, 2022 · Original source

Photograph of Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) ca. 1900 (author unknown), last surviving castato of the Sistine Chapel's Choir. Note the extended jaw and chin typical of the castrato morphology. Caricature of Bernacchi with belly held aloft by a page (Anton Maria Zanetti, 1735). Castrati were frequently satirized for their unusually large size and tall stature.

Inline links: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/tFrQtqNogiTRp7SEkUh1ZZqZBLD8Dfwgxbf8SBpkNPSMoaRmu3MUCpO4vz5GuDF9bWODFNT3ypr4jO32bfOf01HLibeqXrfCqjYS9LIx108ygvNIAfVEFEwdNjh3hvW6YzbuMetwPkCXKxSLZA

3. From Moreschi’s wikipedia page: “…much of the "difficulty" in listening to Moreschi's recordings stems from changes in taste and singing style between his time and ours. His vocal technique can certainly seem to grate upon modern ears, but many of the seemingly imperfect vocal attacks, for example, are in fact grace notes, launched from as much as a tenth below the note – in Moreschi's case, this seems to have been a long-standing means of drawing on the particular acoustics of the Sistine Chapel itself. The dated aesthetic of Moreschi's singing, involving extreme passion and a perpetual type of sob, often sounds bizarre to the modern listener, and can be misinterpreted as technical weakness or symptomatic of an aging voice.”

Inline links: wikipedia

Sitka1 mentions across 1 issues

Sitka is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2023 and April 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "near Sitka, Alaska". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Alaskan government, Andamanese.

Reference entry: Sitka
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2023
Last seen: April 06, 2023

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Issue trail

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias April 06, 2023

Alaska 1 shared issues
Alaskan government 1 shared issues
Andamanese 1 shared issues
Arctic hysteria 1 shared issues
Bureau of Indian Affairs 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias

April 06, 2023 · Original source

By the eighth grade . . . many youths are sent away from the security of their homes in the village to boarding high schools for American natives, located in various parts of the country. Most go to Mt. Edgecumbe, near Sitka, Alaska, others to Chimawa in Oregon.

Sitka, Alaska1 mentions across 1 issues

Sitka, Alaska is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2023 and April 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mt. Edgecumbe, near Sitka, Alaska". It most often appears alongside Alaska, Alaskan government, Andamanese.

Reference entry: Sitka, Alaska
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2023
Last seen: April 06, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias April 06, 2023

Alaska 1 shared issues
Alaskan government 1 shared issues
Andamanese 1 shared issues
Arctic hysteria 1 shared issues
Bureau of Indian Affairs 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias

April 06, 2023 · Original source

By the eighth grade . . . many youths are sent away from the security of their homes in the village to boarding high schools for American natives, located in various parts of the country. Most go to Mt. Edgecumbe, near Sitka, Alaska, others to Chimawa in Oregon.

SK1 mentions across 1 issues

SK is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2021 and July 01, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "SK and Japan have had this problem with their banks". It most often appears alongside Africa, Allodium, Alvaro de Menard.

Reference entry: SK
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 01, 2021
Last seen: July 01, 2021
Instagram handle: @p.k.81

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" July 01, 2021

Africa 1 shared issues
Allodium 1 shared issues
Alvaro de Menard 1 shared issues
Britain 1 shared issues
Cambodia 1 shared issues

Source context

July 01, 2021 · Original source

In Malaysia, Studwell veers into the shaky ground of being against capital per se. Letting partners get equity in firms is not an issue. Did you know huge percentages of Korean companies were owned by Americans? South Korea was not just stealing their technology, they were moving up the value chain. In partnerships where it didn't make sense, by learning through transfer deals where it didn't. There is, of course, an issue with letting companies offshore high tech work and using your people only as menial labor. But this is an issue of structuring the deals and regulations. But of the successful cases, only China broadly prevents you from owning minority stakes in companies. The rest, at most, limited the percentage of foreign ownership. Which is still admittedly not a full free market policy.

3.) Again, he's ignoring the US here. South Korea's "crazed" borrowing was underwritten by the US for security reasons. The US actually used its might to get SK cheaper debt at some points. Malaysia was on its own.

Then we get the question on how widely his advice could be adopted. He briefly mentions in the Philippines section that, citing from memory, “Some people think they can do nothing, but condemning millions to poverty is no option at all” Well in some moral sense sure, but in a policy sense doing nothing is obviously an option. Elites have almost never pursued industrial policy for altruistic reasons: The success stories are all cases where elite interest lined up with the public interest. For example, South Korea was racially and ideologically homogeneous. Marshall Park in other words required industrialists to make SK rich and defended but didn’t care who they were. Studwell mentions that industrial policy failed in Malaysia in part because of affirmative action, and then ignores that point entirely. The East Asian countries that succeeded only did so because of their homogeneity allowing focus purely on industrialization, plus the fact that the US leaned heavily on them. It’s very unclear that a country could implement the Studwell program against the will of its elites. It isn’t the case that where there’s a will there’s a way. Finally, all of this requires a high quality bureaucracy, which East Asia has a long history of and the rest of the world lacks.

Skid Row1 mentions across 1 issues

Skid Row is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "largest homeless shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry: Skid Row
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 23, 2022
Last seen: June 23, 2022

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Book Review: San Fransicko June 23, 2022

1978 1 shared issues
2016 essay 1 shared issues
A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs 1 shared issues
Abbott 1 shared issues
Abstracted Will Of The American People 1 shared issues

Source context

June 23, 2022 · Original source

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

Skinwalker Ranch1 mentions across 1 issues

Skinwalker Ranch is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: Skinwalker Ranch
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Semaglutide

July 06, 2023 · Original source

The CSS General Price 17: Several people have said nice things about the Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist events space where we hold Berkeley ACX meetups. Mingyuan, who helped decorate it, now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide with what she’s learned about light color temperature, chairs, rugs, and more. 18: Elo Everything is simple: it gives you two random people/objects/concepts, for example “soap” and “Nelson Mandela”, and you pick which one you prefer. Then they have a leaderboard with everything’s Elo (a way of ranking things based on victory in binary contests). The current #1 entity is oxygen; the bottom (#2260) entity is the KKK. 19: Erik Hoel tries to deflate UFO rumors. Although most of the post is the standard “here’s a time someone thought they saw a UFO but it had a reasonable explanation”, the highlight is the dissection of the credulous 2017 NYT article on UFOs, which based on his story sounds totally inexcusable (yes, the government funded a lot of money into UFO research, but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt). Nothing here directly addresses the current spate of UFO rumors, but the silliness of the previous batch is indirect evidence of a sort. One thing he didn’t highlight: the Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts. 20: Related: the most practical demand I’ve heard from people who take the current UFO rumors seriously is that AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group) should get Title 50 authority (the right to demand classified information from intelligence services). Read their campaign (maybe sort of supported by some members of Congress) here. Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”. 21: This month in social justice: New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists; “diverse” patients can jump ahead in the queue compared to other patients who may have waited longer or be sicker. The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more. 22: Related: affirmative action Supreme Court ruling links roundup: Will the ruling really change admissions policies, or will universities find a way around it? Humphrey on DSL works in the field and says he thinks it will produce real change.

Inline links: General Price, Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide, Elo Everything, leaderboard, tries to deflate UFO rumors, Bigelow Aerospace, maybe sort of supported by, here, is named, New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists, various, articles, here, This file, scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups, says he thinks it will produce real change

SLC, UT1 mentions across 1 issues

SLC, UT is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 30, 2022 and November 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "pharmacy in SLC, UT that attempted to compound hcq for COVID". It most often appears alongside Adam, AMG-133, amoxicillin suspension.

Reference entry: SLC, UT
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 30, 2022
Last seen: November 30, 2022

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Semaglutide November 30, 2022

Adam 1 shared issues
AMG-133 1 shared issues
amoxicillin suspension 1 shared issues
amylin analogue cagrilintide 1 shared issues
anorexia 1 shared issues

Source context

November 30, 2022 · Original source

1) I’m not certain where other folks are getting semaglutide, but I would imagine Chinese pharma companies. You may have heard of the pharmacy in SLC, UT that attempted to compound hcq for COVID and sell it to the state of Utah? He bought it from a Chinese pharma company and what he eventually got busted for was false shipping manifests, not the blatant violation of the FDCA. I imagine something similar happened here.

Smyrna1 mentions across 1 issues

Smyrna is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 12, 2024 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156". It most often appears alongside 1 Peter 3, 165 AD, 1990s.

Reference entry: Smyrna
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 12, 2024
Last seen: November 12, 2024

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Issue trail

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity November 12, 2024

1 Peter 3 1 shared issues
165 AD 1 shared issues
1990s 1 shared issues
Adolf von Harnack 1 shared issues
Alexandria 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: 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

November 12, 2024 · Original source

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

Snake Island1 mentions across 1 issues

Snake Island is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 08, 2022 and March 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Snake Island, where Ukrainian soldiers famously defied a Russian warship". It most often appears alongside Achilles, Afghan, America.

Reference entry: Snake Island
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 08, 2022
Last seen: March 08, 2022

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Issue trail

Ukraine Thoughts And Links March 08, 2022

Achilles 1 shared issues
Afghan 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
American conservatives 1 shared issues
American liberals 1 shared issues

Source context

Ukraine Thoughts And Links

March 08, 2022 · Original source

j. In Greek mythology, Snake Island, where Ukrainian soldiers famously defied a Russian warship, is the final resting place of Achilles, who sometimes appears to residents.

Inline links: the final resting place of Achilles

Snake River1 mentions across 1 issues

Snake River is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "with the Columbia and Snake Rivers". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: Snake River
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

Source context

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

Sodom and Gomorrah1 mentions across 1 issues

Sodom and Gomorrah is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "potentially inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah". It most often appears alongside Afrobarometer, AGI, AI 2027.

Reference entry: Sodom and Gomorrah
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 01, 2025
Last seen: July 01, 2025

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Issue trail

Links For July 2025 July 01, 2025

Afrobarometer 1 shared issues
AGI 1 shared issues
AI 2027 1 shared issues
AI Safety Institute 1 shared issues
Allan Shivers 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For July 2025

July 01, 2025 · Original source

20: A journal has retracted the paper claiming that a comet hit a Bronze Age city in Jordan (and potentially inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah); see the PubPeer page for some of the “inappropriate manipulation” that was detected.

Inline links: has retracted, the PubPeer page

SOFIA, BULGARIA1 mentions across 1 issues

SOFIA, BULGARIA 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 "SOFIA, BULGARIA ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: SOFIA, BULGARIA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

SOFIA, BULGARIA (RSVP) Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, September 25 Location: NDK park, the benches behind (south of) the Pillars / Пилоните; I'll be wearing a blue shirt and carrying a sheet of paper with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/noise.bridges.outpost Notes: I am not certain that there's even one other ACX person in the city/country, so if potential attendees could RSVP, that would be grand.

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/noise.bridges.outpost

SoHo1 mentions across 1 issues

SoHo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: SoHo
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

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Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won

May 19, 2023 · Original source

… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.

Solomon Islands1 mentions across 1 issues

Solomon Islands is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "six major naval battles in the Solomon Islands". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

Reference entry: Solomon Islands
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 09, 2024
Last seen: August 09, 2024

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won August 09, 2024

101st Airborne 1 shared issues
Admiral Ernest King 1 shared issues
Albert Speer 1 shared issues
Allied 1 shared issues
Allied bombing 1 shared issues

Source context

August 09, 2024 · Original source

The Japanese navy lost 50% more pilots at the Battle of Santa Cruz (off Guadalcanal) than at Midway—and that was only one of six major naval battles in the Solomon Islands.

SoMa1 mentions across 1 issues

SoMa 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 "a co-working space in SoMa". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry: SoMa
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 01, 2026
Last seen: April 01, 2026

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Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

1108 R St 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
18 An Nhơn 3, An Hải, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng 1 shared issues
2, Church Street, Brigade Rd 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Nate Contact Info: natesternberg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 02, 01:00 PM Location: Mox (first floor), a co-working space in SoMa Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026 Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can email you a door code ahead of time.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026

Somali1 mentions across 1 issues

Somali is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 24, 2022 and March 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Somali orphans to starve to death". It most often appears alongside 1984, Acrolectics, Adnamanil.

Reference entry: Somali
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 24, 2022
Last seen: March 24, 2022

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep March 24, 2022

1984 1 shared issues
Acrolectics 1 shared issues
Adnamanil 1 shared issues
AJPio 1 shared issues
animal justice 1 shared issues

Source context

March 24, 2022 · Original source

This has been brought about through the choices of individuals and governments. Maybe nobody specifically says “I choose for Jeff Bezos to be a billionaire and Somali orphans to starve to death.” But a lot of people keep giving more money to Jeff Bezos and not helping Somali orphans. And governments generally enforce (or at least refuse to intervene against) the economic system that makes this keep happening. And voters keep re-electing the politicians who allow this.

Why do I find this so much easier to swallow than eg climate justice or economic justice? I guess it’s because climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic (me playing computer games, you playing computer games, so on x 1 billion) yet happen to have bad consequences. Economic justice is the same way - I spend my money on things I want and find useful, you spend your money on things you want and find useful, and at the end we find that Jeff Bezos has $200 billion and a Somali orphan has $0. It doesn’t seem intuitively bad to play computer games or to spend your money on things you want and find useful. Whereas the animal problems really are “someone captures and tortures and kills a bunch of animals”. I guess I’m bringing in sketchy stuff like the act/omission distinction and the doctrine of double effect here, but this really does seem pretty different from the other two cases.

Somaliland1 mentions across 1 issues

Somaliland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 02, 2021 and August 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well". It most often appears alongside AgroAlpha, Alex Tabarrok, Amazon.

Reference entry: Somaliland
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 02, 2021
Last seen: August 02, 2021

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Issue trail

21 August 02, 2021

AgroAlpha 1 shared issues
Alex Tabarrok 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues
BBC 1 shared issues
Bible 1 shared issues

Source context

August 02, 2021 · Original source

_ Mark Lutter expands on his disagreements with Rethink Priorities’ report questioning the cost-effectiveness of charter cities. Also useful as a good rundown for what might be in the pipeline: he says he is especially interested in getting charter city legislation for Nigeria, that one additional Latin American country (exact identity currently secret) may follow Honduras in proposing a ZEDE-type law, and that there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well.

Inline links: expands on his disagreements

Song1 mentions across 1 issues

Song is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Hua Yuan [of Song]". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: Song
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023

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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

September 01, 2023 · Original source

In the ninth month, we swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su.

The leaders of Chu presented a large turtle to Lord Ling of Zheng. Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were about to have an audience with the lord. Gongzi Song’s index finger moved involuntarily. He showed it to Gongzi Guisheng and said, “On other days when my finger did this, I always without fail got to taste something extraordinary.” As they entered, the cook was about to take the turtle apart. They looked at each other and smiled. The lord asked why, and Gongzi Guisheng told him. When the lord had the high officers partake of the turtle, he called Gongzi Song forward but did not give him any. Furious, Gongzi Song dipped his finger into the cauldron, tasted the turtle, and left. The lord was so enraged that he wanted to kill Gongzi Song. Gongzi Song plotted with Gongzi Guisheng to act first. Gongzi Guisheng said, “Even with an aging domestic animal, one is reluctant to kill it. How much more so then with the ruler?” Gongzi Song turned things around and slandered Gongzi Guisheng. Gongzi Guisheng became fearful and complied with him. In the summer, they assassinated Lord Ling.

On the eve of battle, Hua Yuan [of Song] had slaughtered a sheep to feed his men, but his chariot driver Yang Zhen had been denied his portion. When it was time for battle, Yang said, “With yesterday’s mutton, you were in charge, but in today’s affair, I am in charge.” He drove the chariot into the ranks of the Zheng army, hence Song’s defeat.

Songhai1 mentions across 1 issues

Songhai is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2024 and May 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "but not Songhai". It most often appears alongside 1984, 1984 Calendar Meme, ACX.

Reference entry: Songhai
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2024
Last seen: May 23, 2024

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Issue trail

A Theoretical "Case Against Education" May 23, 2024

1984 1 shared issues
1984 Calendar Meme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ahab 1 shared issues
Airstrip One 1 shared issues

Source context

May 23, 2024 · Original source

How often do people think about the Songhai Empire? I definitely learned about this one in 7th grade - it was part of the “It’s Very Important That All Of You Know That Africa’s History Existed And Was Very Glorious, Please Believe This” unit. But I forgot about its existence until it got featured in one of the Civ games - I think Civ V. After that I guess I played enough Civilization that it got imprinted in my memory for at least another few years. I think this is a better explanation for why most people remember things about Rome but not Songhai than how many hours their history teacher spent talking about each.

South African1 mentions across 1 issues

South African is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 25, 2021 and February 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "just as South African populist Thabo Mbeki denied HIV/AIDS". It most often appears alongside Akron, Amherst, Ben Carson.

Reference entry: South African
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 25, 2021
Last seen: February 25, 2021

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Issue trail

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class" February 25, 2021

Akron 1 shared issues
Amherst 1 shared issues
Ben Carson 1 shared issues
Berkeley 1 shared issues
Broadway 1 shared issues

Source context

A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"

February 25, 2021 · Original source

Trump outmanuevered the Republican establishment by finding a front where he could go on the offensive. He de-emphasized the unfavorable terrain of race/sex/etc, and focused on class. He didn't use the word "class". But he captured the idea. He implicitly understood that there was some kind of difference between the average working-class voter and the sorts of people who set trends in the media, academia, government, et cetera. Whenever an upper-class institution tried to make him admit that they were the experts and he should bow to them, he spat in their faces instead. This was terrible; he spat in the faces of epidemiologists trying to tell him about an epidemic! But it sent his message loud and clear - just as South African populist Thabo Mbeki denied HIV/AIDS partly as a way of spitting in the face of the rich white countries who wanted him not to.

Inline links: Thabo Mbeki denied HIV/AIDS

South American Andes1 mentions across 1 issues

South American Andes is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 22, 2025 and August 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes". It most often appears alongside Andes, Anti, Anti-suyu.

Reference entry: South American Andes
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 22, 2025
Last seen: August 22, 2025

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Issue trail

Your Review: Ollantay August 22, 2025

Andes 1 shared issues
Anti 1 shared issues
Anti-suyu 1 shared issues
Antonio Arriaga 1 shared issues
Antonio Valdez 1 shared issues

Source context

August 22, 2025 · Original source

Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it’s popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It’s not a particularly long play; a full performance of Ollantay takes around an hour.1

Inline links: 1

El Marcado de la Independencia, by Rugendas in 1843. He did some nice paintings of Lima while on tour. Rugendas asked the monks in the convent to make a copy of Ollantay for him. This copy was rather damaged, having sat in a damp convent for eighty years, but the monks obliged and did the best they could. Rugendas brought this copy back to Germany when he returned to Europe in 1846, where it became a curiosity as an example of the Quechua language. He also brought back word that an undamaged copy existed in some priest’s rectory. An Englishman with an interest in Inca history decided that he was going to find this undamaged version and write an English translation, and so in 1853 Sir Clements Markham9 added “find and translate Ollantay” to his agenda for an upcoming expedition to the Andes. He succeeded, finding that other priest who held that other copy and meticulously copying every word of Ollantay in both Quechua and Spanish, then translating that to English. And so we can read, watch, and perform Ollantay, the play that launched a thousand ships. The Story Ollantay is a love story.10 The lovers are the titular Ollantay and Cusi Coyllur Ñusta - he the chief of the Anti people (to be clear, Anti is the Quechua name of the clan; they’re not anti-people) and she the daughter of the Inca emperor. As the play begins, they have already been clandestine lovers for quite some time and the princess is secretly pregnant by Ollantay. But Ollantay, being simply a regional warlord, is not a suitable match for a princess. The play begins with Ollantay pining to his page - who fills the only role of “comic relief”11 - that he must marry Coyllur: Have I not already said That e’en if death’s fell scythe was here, If mountains should oppose my path Like two fierce foes who block the way, Yet will I fight all these combined And risk all else to gain my end, And whether it be life or death I’ll cast myself at Coyllur’s feet. The two run into the high priest, whose introductory soliloquy is a paean to the blood of llamas: O giver of all warmth and light O Sun! I fall and worship thee. For thee the victims are prepared, A thousand llamas and their lambs Are ready for thy festal day. The sacred fire’ll lap their blood, In thy dread presence, mighty one, After long fast thy victims fall. The priest and Ollantay then discuss how Ollantay can definitely not marry the princess and it’s a really bad idea for him to try. Ollantay reiterates his desires, to which the priest can only give one final warning: Put a seed into the ground, It multiplies a hundredfold; The more thy crime shall grow and swell, The greater far thy sudden fall. Ollantay then approaches the emperor and asks for the hand of his daughter with a long soliloquy. The emperor waves him off in four lines: Ollantay, thou dost now presume. Thou art a subject, nothing more. Remember, bold one, who thou art, And learn to keep thy proper place. And so in the next scene, Ollantay swears vengeance: When flames rise to the heavens. Cuzco shall sleep on a bloody couch, The King shall perish in its fall; Then shall my insulter see How numerous are my followers. When thou, proud King, art at my feet, We then shall see if thou wilt say, ‘Thou art too base for Coyllur’s hand.’ He returns home and gathers an army. The emperor then dispatches his own army to go hunt down Ollantay, but Ollantay’s men successfully ambush them in a mountain pass and destroy the Inca army without losing a man: A rain of stones both great and small Down on the crowd of warriors crashed, On every side destruction flashed, Thy heart the slaughter did appall. Like a strong flood the blood did flow, Inundating the ravine; So sad a sight thou ne’er hast seen— No man survived to strike a blow. Ollantay doesn’t press his advantage, though, and is content instead to build up his base of power in his home province. This proves to be a mistake. General Rumi-Ñaui, the general who lost the battle in the mountain pass, comes up with a different, better plan. He begs the emperor for another chance, and the emperor grants it. Rumi-Ñaui shows up to Ollantay, beaten and bloody, and spins a tale of betrayal by the emperor. Ollantay takes the bait and invites him into his capital, then tells him that they will shut the gates and party for three days straight: It will be so. For three whole nights We drink and feast, to praise the Sun, The better to cast all care aside We shall be shut in Tampu fort. Rumi-Ñaui waits for Ollantay’s whole army to be passed-out drunk. Then he opens the gates and invites his army to come in and kill or capture the lot of them. Ollantay is brought back to Cuzco in chains. Things are looking bad for him. I’ll let the play take it from here (Túpac Yupanqui is the emperor, and tocarpus are execution stakes): TÚPAC YUPANQUI: Know that tocarpus are prepared. Remove those traitors from my sight, Let them all perish, and at once. RUMI-ÑAUI: Take these three men without delay To the dreaded execution stakes; Secure them with unyielding ropes, And hurl them from the lofty rocks. TÚPAC YUPANQUI: Stop! Cast off their bonds. (The guards unbind them. They all kneel.) (To Ollantay, kneeling). Rise from thy knees; come to my side. (Rises.) Now thou hast seen death very near, You that have shown ingratitude, Learn how mercy flows from my heart; I will raise thee higher than before. Thou wert Chief of Anti-suyu, Now see how far my love will go; I make thee Chief in permanence. Receive this plume as general, This arrow emblem of command. That’s right! Ollantay swore eternal vengeance on the emperor, seceded, set himself up as a king, destroyed an entire Inca army, and is rewarded for his betrayal by being made viceroy. Rumi-Ñaui has no problem with this, saying: Prince Ollantay! Incap Ranti! Thy promotion gives me joy. As the play concludes, Ollantay mentions that he would still very much like to marry Coyllur.12 The emperor of course thinks this is a marvelous idea, and so the two are reunited for the first time in ten years and, oddly enough, the first time in the play. Ollantay is the kind of love story where the lovers only actually speak to each other once, at the very end. And so the play concludes with these words from the emperor: Thy wife is now in thy arms; All sorrow now should disappear, Joy, new born, shall take its place. Which is the Inca version of “and they all lived happily ever after”. Ollantay is not a particularly good play. There’s a reason it has only entered the repertoire of Peruvian high school drama. The whole premise that Ollantay is trying to get back to his lover is dropped in Act II and only resurfaces at the very end of the play, almost as an afterthought. None of the characters evolve; Ollantay is the exact same person at the end of the play that he was at the start. And the resolution is comically abrupt. All the foreshadowing, and there is foreshadowing, implies that both Ollantay and Coyllur will end up dead, but instead they end up married and with a ten-year-old daughter. Turns out the priest was wrong! The seed put in the ground that multiplies a hundred fold won’t precipitate a sudden fall after all! Thematically, Ollantay is not thematic. Ollantay acts virtuously and is rewarded for it. Rumi-Ñaui acts wickedly and is rewarded for it. Coyllur acts…well she doesn’t really act, she just bemoans her fate in Act I and then spends the rest of the play literally hidden behind a stone wall. And it’s not like Ollantay tells us anything about Incan society that would make it valuable from an anthropological perspective. Valdez may have been adapting a traditional Quechua play, but his own Spanish and Catholic background definitely seeped in. As we’ll see, there’s an ongoing debate as to how much of the play is Quechua and how much is Valdez.13 The Same Story But even if Ollantay is not that valuable from an artistic perspective or an anthropological perspective, it is valuable from a historic perspective. You may have noticed some similarities between the plot of Ollantay and the story of Túpac Amaru II. By which I mean that it’s beat-for-beat the same story. A powerful local chief despairs of his inability to <marry a princess / lighten the free labor burden>. After consulting with a local priest, he launches an armed rebellion against the imperial authorities in Cuzco from his home base in the mountains, and quickly raises a large army. He easily defeats the initial army sent to capture him, but instead of marching on Cuzco he focuses on building up his own local power base. This proves to be an error, and he loses control of his own army, leading to military defeat and his own capture. He is taken to Cuzco in chains and <forgiven and made viceroy / brutally tortured and executed>. Pretty much all of the questions surrounding the Túpac Amaru rebellion vanish if you assume that Túpac was not fighting a rebellion but following a script. Why did Túpac not immediately attack Cuzco? Because Ollantay didn’t. Why was he seemingly okay with his army losing its discipline? Because Ollantay was. Why did he put his army in a position to lose? Why was he okay with being taken alive, knowing how the Spanish dealt with rebels? Because Túpac was following the path set by Ollantay: First, declare yourself in rebellion.

Inline links: 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

South Bay SF Area1 mentions across 1 issues

South Bay SF Area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "SUNNYVALE (SOUTH BAY SF AREA), CALIFORNIA, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: South Bay SF Area
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

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Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SUNNYVALE (SOUTH BAY SF AREA), CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Allison Contact Info: southbaymeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 29th, 02:00 PM Location: Washington Park (840 W Washington Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94086) We'll be in the northeast end of the park, under the trees in a large grassy area. There will be a folding table with an ACX Meetup sign taped to it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9J Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8v8KcRGRBesXaXeox/south-bay-acx-ssc-spring-meetups-everywhere

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9J, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8v8KcRGRBesXaXeox/south-bay-acx-ssc-spring-meetups-everywhere

South Brisbane1 mentions across 1 issues

South Brisbane is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "58 Mollison St, South Brisbane/West End". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: South Brisbane
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Laura Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, October 1st, 6:00 PM Location: Fourth Monkey Bar and Grill, 58 Mollison St, South Brisbane/West End. We will be in the back courtyard or on the back deck where it tends to be quieter. We will have ACX meetup signs up. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2F6+6W Notes: This event is co-hosted with Effective Altruism Brisbane.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2F6+6W

South China1 mentions across 1 issues

South China is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2024 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "total urban population of South China". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

Reference entry: South China
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2024
Last seen: April 09, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate April 09, 2024

#S14 1 shared issues
2009 flu pandemic 1 shared issues
2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Adam larson 1 shared issues

Source context

April 09, 2024 · Original source

I’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works. Surely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations). The fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID. Or am I missing something here? [The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal). Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products. From a Vox article from March 2023: From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data. Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit. The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts. It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China. “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.” […] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago. “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.” The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this: December: COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies Early January: Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person Late January: Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now. February: Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes. March: COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy. April: Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission. 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation? randomstringofcharacters wrote: Isn't [the pandemic starting near the lab] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past. Many people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away. During the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade). This isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade. 3: Other Points That Came Up 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds quiet_NaN wrote: Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone. The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are): Peter -20.7 Saar 2.7 Eric -3.1 Will -2.5 Scott -1.2 Daniel -1.4 One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it "trolling", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market. I might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying: This is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc. In an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me. Peter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers. Trying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be: During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.

Inline links: a Vox article, wrote, wrote, https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1773797640607850745

South Florida1 mentions across 1 issues

South Florida is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 25, 2021 and November 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "native inhabitants of south Florida". It most often appears alongside Aleksandar Vucic, awanderingmind, Biden.

Reference entry: South Florida
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: November 25, 2021
Last seen: November 25, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For November November 25, 2021

Aleksandar Vucic 1 shared issues
awanderingmind 1 shared issues
Biden 1 shared issues
Big Business 1 shared issues
Boris Johnson 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For November

November 25, 2021 · Original source

25: On the Calusa, the pre-conquest native inhabitants of south Florida:

Inline links: Calusa

South Jakarta1 mentions across 1 issues

South Jakarta is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2024 and March 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Crematology X Senopati (South Jakarta)". It most often appears alongside 1111 Brickell Ave, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City, 1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660.

Reference entry: South Jakarta
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 30, 2024
Last seen: March 30, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024 March 30, 2024

1111 Brickell Ave 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
1970 Port Laurent place, Newport Beach 92660 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
255 White St 1 shared issues

Source context

March 30, 2024 · Original source

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

South Lake Tahoe1 mentions across 1 issues

South Lake Tahoe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Brautovich Park, North Benjamin Drive". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: South Lake Tahoe
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ryan W Contact Info: wiserd[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 2:00 PM Location: My house, back porch Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637673+HF Notes: Kid and small pet friendly. Please rsvp. SOUTH LAKE TAHOE Contact: Isaac Contact Info: cis[a t]sas[period]upenn[period]edu Time: Saturday, September 27th, 03:00 PM Location: Brautovich Park, North Benjamin Drive Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV Group Link: https://discord.gg/en3 [remove this bit] mBMXs8q Notes: Kids and dogs welcome. Please RSVP so I know if anyone is going to show!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85637673+HF, https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV

Contact: Isaac Contact Info: cis[a t]sas[period]upenn[period]edu Time: Saturday, September 27th, 03:00 PM Location: Brautovich Park, North Benjamin Drive Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV Group Link: https://discord.gg/en3 [remove this bit] mBMXs8q Notes: Kids and dogs welcome. Please RSVP so I know if anyone is going to show!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85C2X4P4+FJV

South San Francisco1 mentions across 1 issues

South San Francisco is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 11, 2023 and September 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae)". It most often appears alongside 101, ALUC, Antioch.

Reference entry: South San Francisco
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 11, 2023
Last seen: September 11, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post September 11, 2023

101 1 shared issues
ALUC 1 shared issues
Antioch 1 shared issues
Aramco 1 shared issues
Argentina 1 shared issues

Source context

September 11, 2023 · Original source

I am a Planning Commissioner in San Bruno, and I live less than a mile from the airport, in the Belle Air neighborhood, just across 101. Basically under the deal that the local cities (South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Millbrae) made with the airport some decades back, we're not supposed to let anyone add housing too close to the flight path. (The technical term is "noise contours".)

South San Francisco has recently been trying to build some apartments just at the northwest tip of the area affected. They had thought they were going to be able to reach an agreement where they told the ALUC "hey we know the airport exists, we will build to high noise insulation standards and we agree we can't sue you". But the ALUC so far seems to be saying they don't want to grant an exemption.

South Wales1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: South Wales
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 08, 2025
Last seen: May 08, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr May 08, 2025

@DeepGuessr 1 shared issues
@scaling01 1 shared issues
ACX Discord 1 shared issues
AIFP 1 shared issues
Albania 1 shared issues

Source context

May 08, 2025 · Original source

...Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km - It guessed Packard Building, Detroit, was Ford Piquette plant Detroit. Distance wrong: 3 km - It guessed Fort Fred...

...Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct - It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km - It guessed Packard Building, Detroit, was Ford Piquette plant Detroit. Distance wrong: 3 km - It guessed Fort Frederic...

South Whitehall Tshp1 mentions across 1 issues

South Whitehall Tshp is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Covered Bridge Park, South Whitehall Tshp". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: South Whitehall Tshp
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ed Contact Info: ed[period]lundeen[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, 11th, 10:00 AM Location: Covered Bridge Park, South Whitehall Tshp Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G6JCHM+84

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G6JCHM+84

South-east Asia1 mentions across 1 issues

South-east Asia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 28, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda". It most often appears alongside Alexander Hamilton, America, ASEAN.

Reference entry: South-east Asia
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 28, 2021
Last seen: June 28, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: How Asia Works June 28, 2021

Alexander Hamilton 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
ASEAN 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues
Association of South-East Asian Nations 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House

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.

The rich world cannot be expected to save poor countries from bad politicians. But the likes of Mahathir and Suharto were not so terrible. What seems most wrong in all this is that wealthy nations, and the economic institutions that they created like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, provided lousy developmental advice to poor states that had no basis in historical fact. Once again: there is no significant economy that has developed successfully through policies of free trade and deregulation from the get-go. What has always been required is proactive interventions - the most effective of them in agriculture and manufacturing - that foster early accumulation of capital and technological learning. Our unwillingness to look this historical fact in the face leaves us with a world in which scores of countries remain immiserated; and in which rural poverty nourishes terrorist groups that echo those suppressed in south-east Asian countries, but which now directly threaten the citizens of rich nations. It is not easy to implement the policies discussed in this book, especially land reform. However I repeat what others concluded after the Second World War: that to turn away from such policies indicates that the world is acceptable to us as it is. Take a look at south Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and ask yourself if it is.

Southampton, New York1 mentions across 1 issues

Southampton, New York is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

Reference entry: Southampton, New York
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 04, 2024
Last seen: December 04, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House December 04, 2024

3D printing 1 shared issues
Abercrombie & Fitch 1 shared issues
AI 1 shared issues
Aldo Rossi 1 shared issues
Alessandro Menini 1 shared issues

Source context

December 04, 2024 · Original source

Yamasaki designed it classically Corbu [ie Le Corbusier], fulfilling the master’s vision of highrise hives of steel, glass, and concrete separated by open spaces of green lawn…On each floor there were covered walkways, in keeping with Corbu’s idea of “streets in the air”. Since there was no other place in the project in which to sin in public, whatever might ordinarily have taken place in bars, brothels, social clubs . . . now took place in the streets in the air. Corbu’s boulevards made Hogarth’s Gin Lane look like the oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York. Respectable folk pulled out, even if it meant living in cracks in the sidewalks. Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately. “Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up!”

Southern and Central Europe1 mentions across 1 issues

Southern and Central Europe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the EU and its expansion into Southern and Central Europe". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: Southern and Central Europe
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

Source context

May 21, 2021 · Original source

If you’re a fan of our free-trade world, then you should probably pause to ask some questions about its potential demise. Zeihan notes that nearly all participants in Bretton Woods have suspended military activity (other than in connection with American efforts), allowing small countries to exist and even thrive (citing Slovakia, Macedonia, Korea, and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”), allowing former rivals to focus on development (citing the EU and its expansion into Southern and Central Europe, and Russian firms being able to borrow at favorable rates despite a history of sovereign defaults and fraud), and leading to mass industrialization. In short, “The last seventy years have been incredible.”

southern France1 mentions across 1 issues

southern France is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a small village in southern France". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: southern France
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: 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

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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.

southern Italy1 mentions across 1 issues

southern Italy is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "A larger, less dense area where cities were located around 25 miles apart includes ... parts of southern Italy". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: southern Italy
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

southern Spain1 mentions across 1 issues

southern Spain is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 06, 2021 and May 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "most densely urbanized areas were ... southern Spain"; "In the west, the most densely urbanized areas were ... southern Spain". It most often appears alongside 320 AD, 476 AD, Africa.

Reference entry: southern Spain
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 06, 2021
Last seen: May 06, 2021

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Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle May 06, 2021

320 AD 1 shared issues
476 AD 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African ceramics 1 shared issues
African wines 1 shared issues

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Your Review: Alpha School

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.

Southern US states1 mentions across 1 issues

Southern US states is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2025 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "35% in the Southern US states!". It most often appears alongside 10,000 hour rule, 2 Hour Learning, Inc, 2-hour Learning.

Reference entry: Southern US states
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 27, 2025
Last seen: June 27, 2025

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Your Review: Alpha School June 27, 2025

10,000 hour rule 1 shared issues
2 Hour Learning, Inc 1 shared issues
2-hour Learning 1 shared issues
Alex Amplifier 1 shared issues
Alpha 1 shared issues

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June 27, 2025 · Original source

Take 10% off your time to run a mile Workshops in the afternoons are the “fun” part of school. They are the equivalent of the music, theater and art classes that fill in a traditional school schedule (just more focused, measurable and creative). The check charts both exist to fill in the gaps on important things that are missing from the academic program (like public speaking and typing) and to teach the students the importance of agency – there is no one standing over them with deadlines on the check chart. They just won’t move on to the next level with their friends if they don’t get everything on the list done. All of these elements are held together by the thing that the PR program does not mention – the thing that, when most parents hear about it, they recoil in horror: Incentives (aka, bribes) Part Four: How Alpha Works (Part 2): Incentives People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn. Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided). There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books. So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character. The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”. I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids). Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect. Tell a kid to read a book or show up on time and they know what they need to do to get the money. Tell them to get higher scores on tests and, while they have a rough idea how to do that (pay more attention in class, study longer and more efficiently), the actual things they need to do are not entirely clear and the inputs they put in (studying) are not directly tied to the outputs (test scores) – and the incentives have no impact. As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group. When we pay kids to take on new habits, the habits tend to stick after the incentives go away. Is this that different from incentivizing your kids to eat their vegetables and then rewarding them with dessert? The hope is that they will build the habit of eating vegetables and will eat them without external rewards when they are older and understand the value of the habit you have built for them as children. None of this should not be too surprising for people who have read Anders Ericsson’s work on building expertise. Ericsson is most famous for being the source of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of practice to become an expert” meme. Ericsson was not impressed by Gladwell’s simplification of his findings and he wrote an excellent book detailing what his findings really meant. That book describes the study Gladwell used to get to 10,000 hours. At the elite music school in Berlin, the Hochschule für Musik, Ericsson sorted students into three groups by ability: future soloists, future orchestra professionals, and future teachers. He found that the three groups did not differ systematically in most characteristics. As groups they had the same IQs, the same age of starting music, and the same quality and quantity of instruction. The only measurable difference he found between the groups was the number of lifetime hours they had committed to “deliberate practice”. From age eight onward the future soloists logged almost three times more practice hours per week than the future teachers. On average the soloists had clocked in 10,000 hours of practice by the time they started at their elite music college. That was where Gladwell got his 10,000 hour rule. (One of Ericsson’s problems with Gladwell’s simplification is that he saw nothing special about 10,000 hours. There was a significant range among the elite students – 10,000 was just the average; Also the elite students were still just ‘students’ and while they were on track to become world class, none of them were world class yet. Ericsson estimates that would take another ten years of practice putting most of their total practice time to achieve world class performance well over 20,000 hours) Ericsson’s next question was WHY did some students practice more than others? All of these kids wanted to be great musicians and have careers as musicians and all had dedicated large parts of their life to the craft, so why did some choose to practice more than others? His initial hypothesis is that some people just enjoyed practicing more than others. He dismissed the idea that some kids were just more talented than others, and replaced it with some kids, whether for genetic or environmental reasons, were just more “into practice” than others. But when he questioned the students he found that was not true at all. The future elite soloists of the music world all hated practicing. And so did everyone else. All of the musicians at the school did not like the process of practicing. They enjoyed playing. They enjoyed being good musicians. They just hated the process of practicing to get good. So why did they do it? Because they wanted to be great musicians and they knew that they needed to practice to become great musicians. According to Ericsson, the key to being great is deliberate practice. The key to deliberate practice is motivation. Ericsson dug further to figure out where the motivation came from and he found it grew over three stages: Parental and authority approval: Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don’t. He gives examples of mom saying “if you don’t practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor”.

Inline links: quotes a 2010 Gallup poll, 69% of Americans believe another Civil War, 78% agree that American independence from Britain, excellent book

southern Yunnan1 mentions across 1 issues

southern Yunnan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2024 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

Reference entry: southern Yunnan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 09, 2024
Last seen: April 09, 2024

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate April 09, 2024

#S14 1 shared issues
2009 flu pandemic 1 shared issues
2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Adam larson 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

April 09, 2024 · Original source

1. Xiao et al (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.

Inline links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B

Southfield1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Southfield
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 11, 2021
Last seen: December 11, 2021

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings? December 11, 2021

georgism 1 shared issues
ACX community 1 shared issues
Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size 1 shared issues
Albouy 1 shared issues
Alexandra Elbakyan 1 shared issues

Source context

Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?

December 11, 2021 · Original source

Some friends suggested I get in touch with Ted Gwartney, former professor of Real Estate Appraisal at Baruch College, New York. He has an MAI in Land & Commercial Appraisal from the Appraisal Institute and is former president of the Council of Georgist Organizations. He has a lot of professional experience as an assessor in British Columbia, Southfield in Michigan, and Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich in Connecticut.

Inline links: MAI, Appraisal Institute, Council of Georgist Organizations

Southhaven1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Southhaven
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 21, 2022
Last seen: September 21, 2022

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Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? September 21, 2022

1995 to 2000 1 shared issues
Arizona 1 shared issues
Atonio Avalos 1 shared issues
Avalos 1 shared issues
Bakersfield 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga

September 21, 2022 · Original source

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

southwest Iceland1 mentions across 1 issues

southwest Iceland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2023 and June 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "invites you to stay at his farm the next time you’re in his part of southwest Iceland". It most often appears alongside Aeschylus, Aevar, Althing.

Reference entry: southwest Iceland
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 16, 2023
Last seen: June 16, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga June 16, 2023

Aeschylus 1 shared issues
Aevar 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues

Source context

June 16, 2023 · Original source

You pay Eirik’s kin 425 silver pieces. You embrace Eirik, and declare that you are now the closest of friends, and will defend him to the death from then on. He says the same, and gives you rich gifts, and invites you to stay at his farm the next time you’re in his part of southwest Iceland. Possibly he is so swept up in the excitement of mutual reconciliation that he waives the 425 silver piece fee entirely. You declare him the best and most munificent of men.

Southwest Quarter1 mentions across 1 issues

Southwest Quarter is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 16, 2023 and June 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The book focuses on the Southwest Quarter". It most often appears alongside Aeschylus, Aevar, Althing.

Reference entry: Southwest Quarter
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 16, 2023
Last seen: June 16, 2023

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga June 16, 2023

Aeschylus 1 shared issues
Aevar 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues
Althing 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga

June 16, 2023 · Original source

There are only about 40,000 people in medieval Iceland. The book focuses on the Southwest Quarter, so let’s say 10,000 there. Each of our characters is a large landowning farmer with many children, servants, tenants, etc; if he is patriarch of a 20 person household, then there must be about 500 such patriarchs. Each of these 500 relevant Icelanders is profiled in loving depth. And if there are 500 characters in Njal’s Saga, and n people can have n(n-1)/2 possible two-person feuds, that’s 124,750 possible feuds. Of these, about 124,749 actually take place over the course of the saga (Njal and his friend Gunnar are best buds, and refuse to feud for any reason).

Southwold1 mentions across 1 issues

Southwold is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2021 and June 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "tutoring jobs were found for him near Southwold". It most often appears alongside 1984, American, American ‘hobo’ culture.

Reference entry: Southwold
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2021
Last seen: June 10, 2021

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London June 10, 2021

1984 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues
American ‘hobo’ culture 1 shared issues
anarcho-syndicalists 1 shared issues
Animal Farm 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London

June 10, 2021 · Original source

When Orwell left Paris in December 1929 he did not, in fact, immediately live as a down-and-out in London. Instead, he spent Christmas with his family, whose joy was confined when their penniless son—now aged twenty-six and seemingly an unqualified failure—suddenly reappeared. Defensively he announced to all and sundry that he was working on a book about his time in Paris. But meanwhile he had somehow to earn something and tutoring jobs were found for him near Southwold. Also, he soon began to establish a reputation as a courageously independent-minded reviewer who was not overawed by such ‘Big Names’ as Edith Sitwell or J.B. Priestley.

Soviet Gulag1 mentions across 1 issues

Soviet Gulag 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 "born in 1943 in a Soviet Gulag". It most often appears alongside A Poet in Paradise, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Alfred Adler.

Reference entry: Soviet Gulag
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2023
Last seen: June 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning June 10, 2023

A Poet in Paradise 1 shared issues
Agrippa d'Aubigné 1 shared issues
Alfred Adler 1 shared issues
Art Spiegelman 1 shared issues
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

June 10, 2023 · Original source

The real Guillaume du Vintrais was born in 1943 in a Soviet Gulag. He was conjured up by two people, Yakov Charon and Yuri Weinert. They met in a forced labor camp with an ironic name “Free”, where they were spending ten years each for “counter-revolutionary activity”, a term as loose as it sounds. Charon studied in the Berlin Conservatory, worked as a sound technician in the soviet film industry, spoke perfect German. Weinert played piano since he was a kid, wrote poetry, worked as a translator from French. In 1937 both of them were arrested and sent to the “Free” labor camp. They were the same age, they had the same interests. Naturally, they became friends.

Soviet Russia1 mentions across 1 issues

Soviet Russia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "popular to dunk on Soviet Russia"; "to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: Soviet Russia
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche

August 08, 2024 · Original source

I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.

>>[Ayn Rand] really really wants to think that you can objectively convince people to support a peaceful, glorious, positive-sum society, without any hint of the psychologically-toxic slave morality that typified the USSR she grew up in.

Rand is not so different from USSR's morality. When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I felt a strong sense of deja vu that I couldn't quite place. Only after reading the whole thing I realized I was reading a very typical Soviet book of Rand's time. Yeah, really so. There was a whole sub-genre in Soviet science fiction that was quite like that. Basically, if you take any of these old Soviet books, and change the heroes' speeches from "Communism brings progress" to "I want to be selfish and bring progress", but leave the entire rest the same - you'd get Atlas Shrugged.

Soviets1 mentions across 1 issues

Soviets is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 17, 2023 and August 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the CIA worries that maybe the Soviets psy-oped us somehow". It most often appears alongside Alexander the Great, Amad, Amazon Echo.

Reference entry: Soviets
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 17, 2023
Last seen: August 17, 2023

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Bride Of Bay Area House Party August 17, 2023

Alexander the Great 1 shared issues
Amad 1 shared issues
Amazon Echo 1 shared issues
Automated Land Acknowledger 1 shared issues
Bari Weiss 1 shared issues

Source context

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

August 17, 2023 · Original source

“In fact, it’s even worse than that. When they started seventy-five years ago, they did those Brutalist apartment blocks, which they thought were the ugliest they could possibly get. But then they’d built a lot of them, the landlords who owned the Brutalist blocks became NIMBYs and wanted them not to go down in value, and there were still lots of people who needed new housing. So they spent billions of dollars to gather together all the worst architects in the world, the veterans of those CIA programs where they made bad art to psy-op the Soviets, and did a Manhattan Project to try to design a style even uglier than Brutalism. They came up with that “cute”, “playful” style you’ve been seeing everywhere lately. But it’s not bad enough! Sometimes upper-middle-class professionals who could in theory afford a pre-1950s house still rent them! Nobody knows why! The CIA worries that maybe the Soviets psy-oped us somehow.”

Spanish possessions in the Caribbean1 mentions across 1 issues

Spanish possessions in the Caribbean is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

Reference entry: Spanish possessions in the Caribbean
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 01, 2022
Last seen: July 01, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Internationalists July 01, 2022

1793 1 shared issues
1821 1 shared issues
1847 1 shared issues
1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact 1 shared issues
500 million and not one more 1 shared issues

Source context

July 01, 2022 · Original source

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

Spartan1 mentions across 1 issues

Spartan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 16, 2022 and February 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "conquering Spartan general Lysander". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

Reference entry: Spartan
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 16, 2022
Last seen: February 16, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Sadly, Porn February 16, 2022

Abercrombie & Fitch 1 shared issues
Athenian democracy 1 shared issues
Athenians 1 shared issues
Athens 1 shared issues
Ayn Rand 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Sadly, Porn

February 16, 2022 · Original source

They worshiped [conquering Spartan general Lysander] as a god…not because he spared them but because he was powerful, took away their power and also flattered them, let them believe they had fooled him into thinking they were worth sparing - all of those words are correct, that’s what they wanted from their omnipotent god. He let the people who wanted no part of responsibility for their state take credit for its past while having little they could do but obey. He took their hubris and massaged it into pride, he let them take pride in their hubris and - and they started masturbating ferociously. “Take from us, O Lysander, our beautiful Athens and rape her, rape her before us, slay her with your phallus, remind us of our desire, and failure to satisfy her.”

Spokane1 mentions across 1 issues

Spokane is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 25, 2025 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "SPOKANE Location: New Love Coffee". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

Reference entry: Spokane
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 25, 2025
Last seen: March 25, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places March 25, 2025

10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
133 SE Madison Street, Portland, OR 97214 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://plus.codes/85V4MH6C+VH, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/iKob6Egrp9TT3AcH8

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Spencer Contact Info: speeze[period]pearson[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Wednesday, May 07th, 06:00 PM Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, in the covered outdoor back area. I'll have a sign saying "Astral Codex Ten meetup." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: EA: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists Rationality: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/ SPOKANE Contact: Roland Contact Info: rolandsvsmith[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 12:00 PM Location: New Love Coffee, 1102 W Summit Pkwy Suite 102. Probably sitting in the corner, with a sign that says "ACX Meetup" propped up. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85V4MH6C+VH Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/iKob6Egrp9TT3AcH8

Spokane, Washington, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

Spokane, Washington, USA is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, USA". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Spokane, Washington, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

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Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Class

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Alex C Contact Info: biz[dot]alexc[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 19th, 06:00 PM Location: 6717 Roosevelt Way NE Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98115. Armistice Coffee Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, USA Contact: Roland Contact Info: rolandsvsmith[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 04:00 PM Location: We will be meeting at the Riverfront Park in the city. We will start on the grassy area near the intersection of Stevens St and Spokane Falls Blvd. I will be the tall man who has a sign saying "ACX MEETUP." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85V4MH6J+43 Notes: RSVPs are preferred but not required

Inline links: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ, https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality, https://plus.codes/85V4MH6J+43

Contact: Roland Contact Info: rolandsvsmith[at]gmail[d ot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 04:00 PM Location: We will be meeting at the Riverfront Park in the city. We will start on the grassy area near the intersection of Stevens St and Spokane Falls Blvd. I will be the tall man who has a sign saying "ACX MEETUP." Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85V4MH6J+43 Notes: RSVPs are preferred but not required

Inline links: https://plus.codes/85V4MH6J+43

Springfield1 mentions across 1 issues

Springfield is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 05, 2021 and March 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Springfield is a notoriously crappy town with terrible schools and a years-long tire fire". It most often appears alongside A Real Dog, Americans, Astors.

Reference entry: Springfield
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 05, 2021
Last seen: March 05, 2021

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Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Class March 05, 2021

A Real Dog 1 shared issues
Americans 1 shared issues
Astors 1 shared issues
Bernie Sanders 1 shared issues
Big Tech 1 shared issues

Source context

March 05, 2021 · Original source

Just for kicks, I went looking for a four-bedroom house in the America's various Springfields on Zillow. You can get this one in Springfield, OH for $140K. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2000 sqft, two-car garage, and it even looks a bit like the Simpson house. No trouble affording this for middle proles like the Simpsons.

Inline links: this one in Springfield, OH

Josh M adds: “Springfield is a notoriously crappy town with terrible schools and a years-long tire fire. The dream of homeownership in one America's many dumpy towns is in fact still alive.” And Will: “In the [episode] Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.”

Inline links: Josh M adds, Will

Springfield, OH1 mentions across 1 issues

Springfield, OH is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 05, 2021 and March 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can get this one in Springfield, OH for $140K". It most often appears alongside A Real Dog, Americans, Astors.

Reference entry: Springfield, OH
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 05, 2021
Last seen: March 05, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On Class March 05, 2021

A Real Dog 1 shared issues
Americans 1 shared issues
Astors 1 shared issues
Bernie Sanders 1 shared issues
Big Tech 1 shared issues

Source context

Highlights From The Comments On Class

March 05, 2021 · Original source

Just for kicks, I went looking for a four-bedroom house in the America's various Springfields on Zillow. You can get this one in Springfield, OH for $140K. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2000 sqft, two-car garage, and it even looks a bit like the Simpson house. No trouble affording this for middle proles like the Simpsons.

Inline links: this one in Springfield, OH

Josh M adds: “Springfield is a notoriously crappy town with terrible schools and a years-long tire fire. The dream of homeownership in one America's many dumpy towns is in fact still alive.” And Will: “In the [episode] Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.”

Inline links: Josh M adds, Will

Spruce Knob1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Spruce Knob
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 08, 2025
Last seen: May 08, 2025

Outbound links

https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0090/ea0090p69

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr May 08, 2025

@DeepGuessr 1 shared issues
@scaling01 1 shared issues
ACX Discord 1 shared issues
AIFP 1 shared issues
Albania 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

May 08, 2025 · Original source

It guessed Mt Rogers VA, was Spruce Knob WV. Distance wrong: 280 km

Srebrenica1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Srebrenica
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 24, 2022
Last seen: June 24, 2022

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Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy June 24, 2022

501(c)(3) 1 shared issues
80,000 Hours 1 shared issues
11 1 shared issues
Adam Tooze 1 shared issues
Afghan ambassador to Pakistan 1 shared issues

Source context

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Yugoslavia Humanitarian Intervention (1995, 1999): UNSC sanctioned NATO’s intervention against ethnic Serbs’ massacre of ethnic Bosnians in Srebrenica and Sarajevo in 1995, but not the so-called “illegal but legitimate” 1999 bombing of Kosovo to stop the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnians as NATO would have been vetoed by Russia and China.

Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp1 mentions across 1 issues

Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 15, 2021 and July 15, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp ( source )". It most often appears alongside 1902, 1903, 1906 Japanese neurology journal.

Reference entry: Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 15, 2021
Last seen: July 15, 2021

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Issue trail

Book Review: Crazy Like Us July 15, 2021

1902 1 shared issues
1903 1 shared issues
1906 Japanese neurology journal 1 shared issues
1970s feminists 1 shared issues
Abkhazia 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Crazy Like Us

July 15, 2021 · Original source

Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp (source) Watters compares this to the traditional Sri Lankan approach to trauma. The locals had had ample opportunity to refine this, since the country was in the middle of a horrendous civil war full of child soldiers, torture, and sexual violence. The traditional approach was:

Inline links: source

St James'1 mentions across 1 issues

St James' 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 "If thou art in the environs of St James'". It most often appears alongside 18th century, A Eunuch's Dream, Alessandro Moreschi.

Reference entry: St James'
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 03, 2022
Last seen: June 03, 2022

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Your Book Review: The Castrato June 03, 2022

18th century 1 shared issues
A Eunuch's Dream 1 shared issues
Alessandro Moreschi 1 shared issues
American football 1 shared issues
Anna Mons 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

St Louis1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: St Louis
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 10, 2025
Last seen: December 10, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For December 2025 December 10, 2025

100 Above The Park 1 shared issues
2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction 1 shared issues
23andme 1 shared issues
@StatisticUrban 1 shared issues
A16Z 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For December 2025

December 10, 2025 · Original source

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: 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

St Paul1 mentions across 1 issues

St Paul is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 01, 2026 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Davanni’s Pizza : 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

Reference entry: St Paul
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 01, 2026
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places April 01, 2026

1108 R St 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues
18 An Nhơn 3, An Hải, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng 1 shared issues
2, Church Street, Brigade Rd 1 shared issues

Source context

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Daniel A Contact Info: daniel[.]m[.]adamiak[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 26th, 2:00 PM Location: Moka and Co. Cafe 565 E Grand River Ave Unit 200, East Lansing, MI 48823 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JQPGMF+99 Notes: RSVP so I know big of a table to reserve.I’ll be there with an ACX sign. Minnesota ST PAUL Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: Ironlordbyron[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 4:00 PM Location: Davanni’s Pizza : 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: https://discord.gg/uWz [remove this bit] k93eVp Notes: I will be providing pizza and salad! Vegans can theoretically eat the salad but it’s honestly slim pickings at this chain.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86JQPGMF+99, https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: Ironlordbyron[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 4:00 PM Location: Davanni’s Pizza : 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: https://discord.gg/uWz [remove this bit] k93eVp Notes: I will be providing pizza and salad! Vegans can theoretically eat the salad but it’s honestly slim pickings at this chain.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX

St Paul's1 mentions across 1 issues

St Paul's 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 "Advance Retreat, 18a Backfields Ln, St Paul's, Bristol BS2 8QW". It most often appears alongside 1022 High St. Blue House w/red porches, 11:11 Cafe, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry: St Paul's
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: April 10, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022

red porches 1 shared issues
11:11 Cafe 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
3266 Inglewood Blvd 1 shared issues
60 Grande Rue St. Michel 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry (thegreatnick@gmail.com) Date: April 23 Time: 7:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC66+VG Location: Advance Retreat, 18a Backfields Ln, St Paul's, Bristol BS2 8QW Notes: Small venue, will mostly be Rats/EAs. The venue is a video game cafe but will be people in attendance who don't care for video games, and lots of of opportunities to socialise. Group info: Bristol Rationality Café is an offshoot of Bristol's very active EA community

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC66+VG, Bristol Rationality Café

St. Lawrence river1 mentions across 1 issues

St. Lawrence river is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: St. Lawrence river
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png

May 19, 2023 · Original source

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

St. Louis, Missouri1 mentions across 1 issues

St. Louis, Missouri is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: St. Louis, Missouri
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA Contact: Sebastian Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday May 20th 12:30pm Location: Compton Hill Reservoir Park. We will be at a picnic setup between the Tower and "The Statue of Naked Truth". Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ76+Q9 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/j4aLpMKKb7eLqjdRw/st-louis-acx-meetups-everywhere-2023 Notes: Some snacks will be provided.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ76+Q9, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/j4aLpMKKb7eLqjdRw/st-louis-acx-meetups-everywhere-2023

St. Louis, Missouri, USA1 mentions across 1 issues

St. Louis, Missouri, 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 "ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

Reference entry: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

"El Retiro" Park 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street Culver City 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
1906 Rittenhouse Square 1 shared issues
1970 port Laurent 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won

August 25, 2023 · Original source

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA Contact: John Buridan Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 11:30 AM Location: Cypress Shelter South Pavilion, Tower Grove Park. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ32+XC Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3 Notes: "Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how much food to get" and "Feel free to bring kids/dogs"

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86CFJQ32+XC, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3

Stalingrad1 mentions across 1 issues

Stalingrad is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2024 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad"; "say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad". It most often appears alongside 101st Airborne, Admiral Ernest King, Albert Speer.

Reference entry: Stalingrad
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 09, 2024
Last seen: August 09, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won August 09, 2024

101st Airborne 1 shared issues
Admiral Ernest King 1 shared issues
Albert Speer 1 shared issues
Allied 1 shared issues
Allied bombing 1 shared issues

Source context

August 09, 2024 · Original source

The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.

The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war. Battles are Overrated Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity. Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal. Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end. Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting? In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on. In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories. The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons. Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk—the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000). In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk—less than a month’s worth of AFV production. If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter—if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter—what did? Allied Air and Sea Operations Won the War In O’Brien’s methodology, we should look at what the Axis spent its productive effort making and consider what Allied actions slowed that productive effort. In both theaters, the answer is shocking. The Germans spent relatively little productive effort on tanks, focusing far more on aircraft, submarines, and vengeance weapons (i.e., proto-cruise missiles and rockets). The Japanese spent heavily on aircraft as well, but also a tremendous amount on freighters and oil tankers. The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield. By 1944-45, the Germans and Japanese could not use their economies to arm and supply their armies on the battlefield, leading to their inevitable defeat. In the European war, American and British airpower: (a) directly destroyed a significant amount of productive capacity, (b) rendered remaining capacity far less efficient, (c) made it impossible for the Germans to defeat western ground forces, and (d) compelled the Germans to waste tremendous resources on air defense and exorbitant, ultimately ineffective vengeance weapons. In the Pacific, the United States used carrier-based airpower, submarines, and bomber-deployed mines to isolate Japan from the resources of the empire it conquered in 1941-42. American bombers also directly destroyed factories and transportation systems, leading to similar levels of economic dysfunction as in Germany. Amateurs Discuss Destruction; Professionals Discuss Non-Operational Losses O’Brien is at his absolute best describing the subtle factors that whittled away Axis combat power. Air and sea power created a situation where the Axis war machine simply could not function anywhere near as efficiently as it needed to. For example, after the Allied air bombings started, Germany built vast underground aircraft factories to protect production. But that move carried a host of negative side effects. To name a few: The direct cost of building new factories in inconvenient places was very manpower intensive.

Stalinist Russia1 mentions across 1 issues

Stalinist Russia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2025 and May 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "the same way he would support Stalin if he were in Stalinist Russia". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity, Apple.

Reference entry: Stalinist Russia
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 07, 2025
Last seen: May 07, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Moldbug Sold Out May 07, 2025

2025-Yarvin 1 shared issues
Antiversity 1 shared issues
Apple 1 shared issues
Architectonics 1 shared issues
Architectonics blog 1 shared issues

Source context

Moldbug Sold Out

May 07, 2025 · Original source

I should end by saying it’s possible that Yarvin hasn’t sold out. He’s previously said things about how a good reactionary has to support the current regime, even if he hates them. He even tongue-in-cheek endorsed Joe Biden, back when he was President. Maybe he actually hates Trump and his movement, but feels duty-bound to support them anyway, the same way he would support Stalin if he were in Stalinist Russia. I don’t know about this one - the pro-Trump stuff seems different in character from the more ironic pro-Biden posts. And he started using X a few months ago to retweet dunks on his political opponents, something that no duty compelled him to do and a sure sign of a deranged mind. If it’s true, all I can suggest is that he find a philosophy which doesn’t force him to do this.

Inline links: tongue-in-cheek endorsed, started using X

Stanislaus1 mentions across 1 issues

Stanislaus 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 ""San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue"". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry: Stanislaus
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2022
Last seen: October 13, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022

1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1 shared issues
21st Century Salon 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alex Richard 1 shared issues
Amazon Prime Video 1 shared issues

Source context

Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate

October 13, 2022 · Original source

If you look at the counties in the Central Valley, Sacramento's middle-blue, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, and Fresno are light blue, while Madera, Tulare, and Kern are light red. My district has usually been pretty purple, with centrist D's and R's winning, though districts that attach to the mountain areas are red and those that head west get bluer.

state of California1 mentions across 1 issues

state of California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 05, 2023 and October 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the state of California has managed to effectively ban building houses". It most often appears alongside AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, AI Policy Institute.

Reference entry: state of California
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 05, 2023
Last seen: October 05, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate October 05, 2023

AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse 1 shared issues
AI Pause Will Likely Backfire 1 shared issues
AI Policy Institute 1 shared issues
Aim For Conditional AI Pauses 1 shared issues
AnonResearcherAtMajorAILab 1 shared issues

Source context

October 05, 2023 · Original source

Third, most participants agree that a pause would necessarily be temporary. There’s no easy way to enforce it once technology gets so good that you can train an AI on your laptop, and (absent much wider adoption of x-risk arguments) governments won’t have the stomach for hard ways. The singularity prediction widget currently predicts 2040. If I make drastic changes to starve everybody of computational resources, the furthest I can push it back is 2070. This somewhat reassures me about my concerns above, but not completely. Matthew Barnett talks about whether a temporary pause could become permanent, and concludes probably not without a global police state. But I think people 100 years ago would be surprised that the state of California has managed to effectively ban building houses. I think if some anti-house radical had proposed this 100 years ago, people would have told her that would be impossible without a hypercompetent police state3.

Inline links: singularity prediction widget, talks about whether a temporary pause could become permanent, 3

State of Lu1 mentions across 1 issues

State of Lu is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The state of Lu’s is special, because Confucius was from Lu". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: State of Lu
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

Source context

September 01, 2023 · Original source

“Spring and Autumn Annals” is a bit of a redundant translation, since ”spring and autumn” was just an old way of saying “year,” and thus, “annals.” And technically, there were multiple Spring and Autumn Annals—every state kept, in addition to court and administrative documents, its own laconic record of each year’s wars, diplomacy, natural phenomena, major rites, and notable deaths. But the state of Lu’s is special, because Confucius was from Lu. He’s said to have personally edited and compiled the extant version of its 242-year-long Spring and Autumn, loading each character with weighty yet subtle moral deliberation. This ensured it a place in the Confucian canon, and its survival where every other state’s annals have been lost to time. The era that it covers is named the Spring and Autumn period after the text, not the other way around.

Scatters of vivid anecdotes sketch out conflicted, impressionistic portraits of the recurring historical figures. While the narrative certainly likes some people better than others, there’s always enough messiness in the events presented, and enough fondness for oblique judgment in the ancient Chinese historical tradition, to leave room for the reader to form their own opinion—even for Confucius himself. His purported judgments are scattered throughout the text of the Zuozhuan, but he also appears as an actual historical figure toward the end, a minister of the state of Lu, navigating between ideals and circumstances just like everyone else. In both cases, he proves more interesting and complex than the common perception of him—to the point of unsettling some commentators from later eras where Confucius had become a nigh-divine figure.

State Of Muskogee1 mentions across 1 issues

State Of Muskogee is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 30, 2021 and December 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "declared independence as the State Of Muskogee". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Aella, AI Alignment.

Reference entry: State Of Muskogee
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: December 30, 2021
Last seen: December 30, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For December December 30, 2021

ACX Grants 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues
AI Alignment 1 shared issues
AI Safety 1 shared issues
Amazon 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For December

December 30, 2021 · Original source

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

state of Washington1 mentions across 1 issues

state of Washington is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: state of Washington
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

Inline links: Twitter thread speculating that the next fight, Chinese drone light show, the Conch Republic, others, seceded in 1961, Battle of Noel, The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, agree on a solution, the governor line-itemed it, banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees, Boris Johnson on semaglutide, Superalignment, LW discussion here

July 06, 2023 · Original source

Twitter thread speculating that the next fight will be over colleges and magnet schools that accept “the top X% of every high school” as a way of getting geographic (and so by proxy racial) diversity. "In the first class admitting using [this policy], the offers made to Asian-American students fell by 19 percentage points, from 73% to 54% of all offers." 23: Chinese drone light show: I feel bad linking this since it’s probably Chinese propaganda to demonstrate their technological superiority, but I think a good compromise would be that Americans are allowed to appreciate their accomplishment, as long as we also get busy finding a way to smuggle in thousands of drones to their next performance that form a giant bald eagle which eats the dragon. 24: Every so often a US city county will go through the motions of “seceding” from the Union to protest some form of mistreatment - the Conch Republic is the most famous, but there are others. When McDonald County, Missouri seceded in 1961 after being unfairly left out of tourism brochures, it caught the attention of some people who considered themselves experts in dealing with secessionists - a local group of Civil War re-enactors. They formed a regiment to defend the Union and marched on McDonald County, leading to the Battle of Noel. 25: The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, although the legislature was eventually able to agree on a solution. 26: The state of Wisconsin is infamous for its very literal line-item veto. This week: a bill increased school funding until the 2024 - 2025 academic year, and the governor line-itemed it to 2024 - 2025 academic year, ie “2425”, thus guaranteeing increased school funding until the year 2425. 27: Did you know: as part of their general program of racial purity, the Nazis banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees. Nazi beekeeping literature (which is apparently a thing that existed) included slogans like "What use is it if one day a Jewish bastard is a genius, but our ethnic purity is destroyed in the process? It is no different with beekeeping!" In 1940, German bees were devastated by an epidemic, which they had insufficient genetic diversity to resist. The government relented and said never mind, please start using impure foreign bees again. "As a result the Old German Dark bee is now considered an endangered sub-species in Germany" 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing, and it’s one of those things you have to force yourself to ignore or risk getting mind-captured. 29: This month’s AI links: OpenAI announces Superalignment, a major investment into alignment research which will include co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, the current alignment team led by Jan Leike, and “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”. At least for me, this is strong evidence that they really care about alignment and aren’t just posturing; this is more resources than would be worth spending on a posture. They’re also hiring for various alignment-related positions; see the link above for more details. And LW discussion here.

state of Wisconsin1 mentions across 1 issues

state of Wisconsin is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The state of Wisconsin is infamous for its very literal line-item veto". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Reference entry: state of Wisconsin
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 06, 2023
Last seen: July 06, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For July 2023 July 06, 2023

2017 NYT article on UFOs 1 shared issues
@ActualNames1 1 shared issues
AARO 1 shared issues
Adam Piovarchy 1 shared issues
Aella 1 shared issues

Source context

July 06, 2023 · Original source

Twitter thread speculating that the next fight will be over colleges and magnet schools that accept “the top X% of every high school” as a way of getting geographic (and so by proxy racial) diversity. "In the first class admitting using [this policy], the offers made to Asian-American students fell by 19 percentage points, from 73% to 54% of all offers." 23: Chinese drone light show: I feel bad linking this since it’s probably Chinese propaganda to demonstrate their technological superiority, but I think a good compromise would be that Americans are allowed to appreciate their accomplishment, as long as we also get busy finding a way to smuggle in thousands of drones to their next performance that form a giant bald eagle which eats the dragon. 24: Every so often a US city county will go through the motions of “seceding” from the Union to protest some form of mistreatment - the Conch Republic is the most famous, but there are others. When McDonald County, Missouri seceded in 1961 after being unfairly left out of tourism brochures, it caught the attention of some people who considered themselves experts in dealing with secessionists - a local group of Civil War re-enactors. They formed a regiment to defend the Union and marched on McDonald County, leading to the Battle of Noel. 25: The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, although the legislature was eventually able to agree on a solution. 26: The state of Wisconsin is infamous for its very literal line-item veto. This week: a bill increased school funding until the 2024 - 2025 academic year, and the governor line-itemed it to 2024 - 2025 academic year, ie “2425”, thus guaranteeing increased school funding until the year 2425. 27: Did you know: as part of their general program of racial purity, the Nazis banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees. Nazi beekeeping literature (which is apparently a thing that existed) included slogans like "What use is it if one day a Jewish bastard is a genius, but our ethnic purity is destroyed in the process? It is no different with beekeeping!" In 1940, German bees were devastated by an epidemic, which they had insufficient genetic diversity to resist. The government relented and said never mind, please start using impure foreign bees again. "As a result the Old German Dark bee is now considered an endangered sub-species in Germany" 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing, and it’s one of those things you have to force yourself to ignore or risk getting mind-captured. 29: This month’s AI links: OpenAI announces Superalignment, a major investment into alignment research which will include co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, the current alignment team led by Jan Leike, and “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”. At least for me, this is strong evidence that they really care about alignment and aren’t just posturing; this is more resources than would be worth spending on a posture. They’re also hiring for various alignment-related positions; see the link above for more details. And LW discussion here.

State Route 991 mentions across 1 issues

State Route 99 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 "know that State Route 99 is significantly less empty". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry: State Route 99
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2022
Last seen: October 13, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022

1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1 shared issues
21st Century Salon 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alex Richard 1 shared issues
Amazon Prime Video 1 shared issues

Source context

Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House

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.

Statue of Liberty1 mentions across 1 issues

Statue of Liberty is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 20, 2021 and February 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "executed him by firing squad in front of the Statue of Liberty". It most often appears alongside Archangel Gabriel, Army Of Public Works, Bonus Army.

Reference entry: Statue of Liberty
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: February 20, 2021
Last seen: February 20, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House February 20, 2021

Archangel Gabriel 1 shared issues
Army Of Public Works 1 shared issues
Bonus Army 1 shared issues
Congress 1 shared issues
Constitution 1 shared issues

Source context

February 20, 2021 · Original source

The handsome male secretary gets a battalion of tanks and drives them to Gangster Headquarters. Inside, we cut to a shot of the head gangster and his flunkies laughing: even though they shot the President's sexy female secretary, he can't do anything because he's hamstrung by his insistence on "laws" and "procedures". Then the President's secretary's tank battalion shells Gangster Headquarters. The headquarters collapses and everyone dies except the head gangster, who is brought out by police. He is still insisting that this doesn't matter because they can't convict him of anything because Procedures. But the handsome male secretary has been appointed head of a special military court, and declares the head gangster guilty. They execute him by firing squad in front of the Statue of Liberty, which the movie plays as patriotic and inspiring and not at all ironic.

Stavropol1 mentions across 1 issues

Stavropol is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 04, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "When we arrived in Stavropol, it turned out our hotel reservations had been canceled". It most often appears alongside Alexander Alexandrov, Berlin, City of Leningrad.

Reference entry: Stavropol
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 04, 2023
Last seen: August 04, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face" August 04, 2023

Alexander Alexandrov 1 shared issues
Berlin 1 shared issues
City of Leningrad 1 shared issues
Communism 1 shared issues
dacha 1 shared issues

Source context

More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"

August 04, 2023 · Original source

Kasparov had flown a chartered plane to the south of Russia, and the plan had been to use it to go from city to city. But after spending most of the day grounded because no airport in the region would give permission to land, the group of thirteen people - Kasparov, his staff, and two journalists - had to switch to cars. When we arrived in Stavropol, it turned out our hotel reservations had been canceled. Standing in the lobby of the hotel, Kasparov’s manager called around to every other hotel in the sleepy city; all claimed to be fully booked. This was when the manager of the hotel showed up.

Sterling1 mentions across 1 issues

Sterling is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 30, 2025 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "she was a schoolchild in Sterling Massachussetts in the 1810s". It most often appears alongside 767 AD, @Scientific_Bird, ACX.

Reference entry: Sterling
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 30, 2025
Last seen: October 30, 2025

Outbound links

Issue trail

Links For October 2025 October 30, 2025

767 AD 1 shared issues
@Scientific_Bird 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX community 1 shared issues
AI 2027 1 shared issues

Source context

Links For October 2025

October 30, 2025 · Original source

1: In 1876, a woman named Mary Tyler claimed to be the Mary of “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. Her story is plausible - she was a schoolchild in Sterling Massachussetts in the 1810s, and the author of the song was a schoolteacher in Sterling in the 1810s - but some key details don’t line up (she remembers her pet lamb being observed by a man, but the author was a woman). After she became famous, she “helped save the Old South Meeting House in Boston by selling fleece from her pet lamb as attachments on autograph cards”.

Inline links: Mary Tyler

Stockholm City1 mentions across 1 issues

Stockholm City is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "iking, Stockholm City". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

Reference entry: Stockholm City
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2024
Last seen: August 29, 2024

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places August 29, 2024

10 N Park Pl 1 shared issues
12th Ave South 1 shared issues
1525 Bank St 1 shared issues
200 Degrees 1 shared issues
3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 1 shared issues

Source context

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/

Contact: Stefan Contact Info: acx_gbg[at]posteo[d ot]se Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 06:00 PM Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Jonatan Westholm Contact Info: jonatanwestholm[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 15th, 03:00 PM Location: Radisson Blu Viking, Stockholm City Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/ Notes: Yes, please RSVP! Depending on how many sign up, I may have to phone the hotel ahead of time. Also note: I have learned from previous meetups that the afternoon sun blinds half the group at Scandic Continental, which is why I decided to give Radisson Blu Viking a try (it's literally 100m from the old place).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F, https://plus.codes/9FFW83J5+J6, https://www.facebook.com/share/g/84RznjYeqCefurUh/

Stockholm djurgården1 mentions across 1 issues

Stockholm djurgården is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Location: Stockholm djurgården". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: Stockholm djurgården
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

Outbound links

Issue trail

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Contact: Marina Contact Info: marina[dot]sharoian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 14th, 01:30 PM Location: Stockholm djurgården Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5 Event Link: https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9FFW84G7+F5, https://fb.me/e/BIw4V0S8

Storrs1 mentions across 1 issues

Storrs 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 "STORRS, CT ( RSVP )". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: Storrs
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day

August 23, 2021 · Original source

STORRS, CT (RSVP) Contact: Isadore J, isadore[dot]johnson[at]uconn[dot]edu, 202-four-nine-five-1332 Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: We'll meet outside Mirror Lake Coordinates: https://w3w.co/songbird.practically.laundry

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/songbird.practically.laundry

Strait of Hormuz1 mentions across 1 issues

Strait of Hormuz is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 03, 2026 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Strait of Hormuz is the waterway between Iran and Arabia". It most often appears alongside 2024 US election, 2026 elections, Agent Economy Of The Future.

Reference entry: Strait of Hormuz
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 03, 2026
Last seen: March 03, 2026

Outbound links

Issue trail

Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day March 03, 2026

2024 US election 1 shared issues
2026 elections 1 shared issues
Agent Economy Of The Future 1 shared issues
Alan Cole 1 shared issues
Alireza Arafi 1 shared issues

Source context

March 03, 2026 · Original source

The Strait of Hormuz is the waterway between Iran and Arabia that many of the world’s oil tanker routes pass through. Iran is already threatening traffic in the strait; if it threatened it more, it might be able to damage the global economy. This wouldn’t really help anything - Iran is part of the global economy too - but it would probably feel good to annoy the US a little more than they could otherwise do. Realistically this all comes down to the resolution criteria - Iran will certainly threaten the Strait, but probably can’t keep it 100% closed forever. The criteria here specify decreasing a seven-day moving average of traffic to below 20% of its usual level, which forecasters seem to think is more likely than not.

Strasbourg1 mentions across 1 issues

Strasbourg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2021 and March 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France". It most often appears alongside Abdullah Gul, Academy Awards, Ak.

Reference entry: Strasbourg
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 18, 2021
Last seen: March 18, 2021

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Issue trail

Book Review: The New Sultan March 18, 2021

Abdullah Gul 1 shared issues
Academy Awards 1 shared issues
Ak 1 shared issues
AKP 1 shared issues
Anatolian 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

Under pressure from the military, the courts banned the now-powerless RP as a "focal point for acts against the secular republic". Erdogan scraped through by quitting the RP and founding the Totally Honestly Not An Islamic Party (FP); he was briefly allowed to remain Mayor of Istanbul. But when the courts and military finished cleaning up after the RP, they went after Erdogan's new bloc too. The FP was shut down, and Erdogan was personally banned from politics for the crime of "reading an incendiary poem". The Islamists appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France, home of laicite and enforced secularism, which ruled that none of this seemed like a human rights violation to them. Erdogan was out.

Strasburg1 mentions across 1 issues

Strasburg is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2022 and October 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "had been burned in the diocese of Strasburg"; "whose aunt also had been burned in the diocese of Strasburg"; "Diocese of Strasburg". It most often appears alongside 15th century, Adam, Almighty God.

Reference entry: Strasburg
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 28, 2022
Last seen: October 28, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum October 28, 2022

15th century 1 shared issues
Adam 1 shared issues
Almighty God 1 shared issues
anarchy 1 shared issues
Anomalous Woman 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum

October 28, 2022 · Original source

What to do? The easiest solution is to kill the witch responsible. If you can’t kill her, search under your doorstep (and other likely spots) for witch charms; if any are found, remove them. If none of these work, try prayer. It doesn’t always work right away, but usually the right kind of holy action will solve the problem. A typical example is in the chapter on erectile dysfunction, where Kramer recommends: …five remedies which may lawfully be applied to those who are bewitched in this way: namely, a pilgrimage to some holy and venerable shrine; true confession of their sins with contrition; the plentiful use of the sign of the Cross and devout prayer; lawful exorcism by solemn words, the nature of which will be explained later; and lastly, a remedy can be effected by prudently approaching the witch, as was shown [in an earlier section] in the case of the Count who for three years was unable to cohabit carnally with a virgin whom he had married. Is it okay to ask other witches to undo the curse of the first witch? Is a good guy with a witch the only way to stop a bad guy with a witch? Kramer spends a lot of thought on this question, in a way that suggests basically everyone in medieval Germany knows at least one witch, and that asking her for advice is most people’s obvious first step. But he concludes that no, this is sinful, we need a full boycott on all witches including supposedly “good” ones. However, ordinary wise women are okay. You can tell a (good) wise woman from a (bad) witch because the wise woman lives a virtuous life, doesn’t invoke devils in her healing rituals, and probably relies on God in some way. Highlights from this section include: Question I: Of Those Against Whom The Power Of Witches Availeth Not At All Some people are immune to witchcraft. The most notable such group are witch-hunters and judges at witch trials. Witch hunters naturally incur the enmity of witches, so without protection all witch hunters would meet a quick bad end. But God, who hates witches more than anything in the world, realizes this, so in order to incentivize witch hunting He grants witch hunters qualified immunity to all black magic. Skeptical? Kramer has proof: This fact is proved also by actual experience. For the aforesaid Doctor affirms that witches have borne witness that it is a fact of their own experience that, merely because they have been taken by officials of public justice, they have immediately lost all their power of witchcraft. For example, a judge named Peter, whom we have mentioned before, wished his officials to arrest a certain witch called Stadlin; but their hands were seized with so great a trembling, and such a nauseous stench came into their nostrils, that they gave up hope of daring to touch the witch. And the judge commanded them, saying: “You may safely arrest the wretch, for when he is touched by the hand of public justice, he will lose all the power of his iniquity.” And so the event proved; for he was taken and burned for many witchcrafts perpetrated by him, which are mentioned here and there in this work in their appropriate places. Also: Not long ago in the town of Ratisbon the magistrates had condemned a witch to be burned, and were asked why it was that we Inquisitors were not afflicted like other men with witchcraft. They answered that witches had often tried to injure them, but could not. And, being asked the reason for this, they answered that they did not know, unless it was because the devils had warned them against doing so. For, they said, it would be impossible to tell how many times they have pestered us by day and by night, now in the form of apes, now of dogs or goats, disturbing us with their cries and insults; fetching us from our beds at their blasphemous prayers, so that we have stood outside the window of their prison, which was so high that no one could reach it without the longest of ladders; and then they have seemed to stick the pins with which their head-cloth was fastened violently into their heads. But praise be to Almighty God, Who in His pity, and for no merit of our own, has preserved us as unworthy public servants of the justice of the Faith. Other people protected against witchcraft include very holy people and those who use certain charms or hear certain sacred words. Kramer has strong scientific evidence for this claim too: There were also three companions walking along a road, and two of them were struck by lightning. The third was terrified, when he heard voices speaking in the air, “Let us strike him too.” But another voice answered, “We cannot, for to-day he has heard the words ‘The Word was made Flesh.’” And he understood that he had been saved because he had that day heard Mass, and, at the end of the Mass, the Gospel of S. John: In the beginning was the Word, etc. Subchapter II: Of The Way Whereby A Formal Pact With Evil Is Made Witches can make two kinds of pacts with the Devil. One kind is relatively low-key: the Devil just kind of appears to them somewhere and asks for their allegiance, and they say yes. The second is more formal, and grants access to more spells. It goes: Witches meet together in the conclave on a set day, and the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance. And the devil asks whether she will abjure the Faith, and forsake the holy Christian religion and the worship of the Anomalous Woman (for so they call the Most Blessed Virgin MARY), and never venerate the Sacraments; and if he finds the novice or disciple willing, then the devil stretches out his hand, and so does the novice, and she swears with upraised hand to keep that covenant. And when this is done, the devil at once adds that this is not enough; and when the disciple asks what more must be done, the devil demands the following oath of homage to himself: that she give herself to him, body and soul, for ever, and do her utmost to bring others of both sexes into his power. He adds, finally, that she is to make certain unguents from the bones and limbs of children, especially those who have been baptized; by all which means she will be able to fulfill all her wishes with his help. As usual, Kramer cites his sources carefully: We Inquisitors had credible experience of this method in the town of Breisach in the diocese of Basel, receiving full information from a young girl witch who had been converted, whose aunt also had been burned in the diocese of Strasburg. And she added that she had become a witch by the method in which her aunt had first tried to seduce her. For one day her aunt ordered her to go upstairs with her, and at her command to go into a room where she found fifteen young men clothed in green garments after the manner of German knights. And her aunt said to her: Choose whom you wish from these young men, and he will take you for his wife. And when she said she did not wish or any of them, she was sorely beaten and at last consented, and was initiated according to the aforesaid ceremony. She said also that she was often transported by night with her aunt over vast distances, even from Strasburg to Cologne. Subchapter VII: How, As It Were, They Deprive Men Of His Virile Member Yup, it’s another section on penis-stealing. Kramer keeps coming back to this subject - not, of course, out of any weird obsession on his part, but because witches just keep doing this, and he as a witch-hunter is duty-bound to be prepared. For example: In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: “If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health.” So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly about her neck, choked her, saying: “Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.” Then she, being unable to cry out, and growing black, said: “Let me go, and I will heal you.” The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: “Now you have what you desire.” And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch. My favorite part of this story is the guy going to a bar and asking women “hey, my penis was stolen by a witch, wanna see?” I think this could be the next hot trend in pickup artistry. And hold on to your seat, this next paragraph is quite a ride: And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil's work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest. Whatever my case was, I hereby rest it. Also interesting in Part 2: How Devils may enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt, when they cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation.

Inline links: How Devils may enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt, when they cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation.

“Here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements” “Sweet Jesus!” So you have your three witnesses. You’ve questioned them separately, to see if their stories match, then questioned the suspect separately a bunch of times to see if she changes her story. All the witnesses agree, and the suspect still seems suspicious. Now you can burn her as a witch, right? Wrong. The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”. You may, if you wish, transport the suspect to some kind of weird far-off castle (this is the Middle Ages, they have so many weird far-off castles they don’t know what to do with them). Keep her there for a while until she thinks everyone has forgotten about her and the witch trial is over. Have all the ladies and servants of the castle be very friendly to her. One day the lord of the castle will be gone on some errand, and one of the ladies who has befriended her will say: I hear you were a witch once, I really need to bewitch someone, would you mind telling me how to cast a spell? And everyone there has always been so nice, and the witch trial is long forgotten, so she’ll say yeah, sure, and explain how to cause a hailstorm or something. And then you can jump out from behind a tapestry or something and say “Ha! We got you!” Does this really work? Quite lately a witch was detained in the Castle of Königsheim near the town of Schlettstadt in the Diocese of Strasburg, and could not be induced by any tortures or questions to confess her crimes. But at last the castellan used the method we have just described. Although he was himself present in the castle, the witch thought he was away, and three of his household came in to her and promised they would set her free if she would teach them how to do certain things. At first she refused, saying that they were trying to entrap her; but at last she asked what it was that they wanted to know. And one asked how to raise a hailstorm, and another asked about carnal matters. When at length she agreed to show him how to raise a hailstorm, and a bowl of water had been brought in, the witch told him to stir the water with his finger, and herself uttered certain words, and suddenly the place which he had named, a wood near the castle, was visited by such a tempest and storm of hail as had not been seen for many years. Caught red-handed! The third and final way this rule is extremely fake is that, if none of this makes the suspect confess, the judge can turn her over to the secular courts to be tried for witchcraft-as-a-secular-crime. He is supposed to recommend mercy, but realistically the secular courts will kill her anyway. So do all witch trials end in death? No. If a judge wants a witch trial to end in death, he has plenty of ways to make it happen. But the Malleus gives a list of scenarios (some evidence + no witnesses; some evidence + many witnesses, etc, etc) and most end in “acquittal”. I use the quotes because there is one more hurdle: a ritual called “purgation”, where the suspect brings X witnesses of her same station (eg lord for lord, peasant for peasant) to the town square. There, the witnesses publicly vouch for her good character, and she swears that she is not a witch and forsakes all witchcraft forever. Then everything’s good - but the key is that the more suspicious you seem, the higher the judge will set X. And if you can’t find X people to vouch for your good character, you’re in contempt of court and probably a witch. Also, except in the most cut-and-dry cases of innocence, suspects are released on something like probation: any further accusations of witchcraft will be taken much more seriously. Since people were already willing to falsely accuse you of witchcraft once, good luck with the probation, I guess. Other highlights of this section: Question IX: What Kind Of Defense May Be Allowed, And Of The Appointment Of An Advocate All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself. Question XVII: Of Common Purgation, And Especially Of The Trial Of Red-Hot Iron, To Which Witches Appeal It might seem that you should give witches trial by ordeal, because that way God can decide their guilt or innocence, and (as has already been established), God really hates witches. The most common trial by ordeal is the trial by iron, where the suspect must hold a red hot iron, and if she drops it, she’s guilty. Unfortunately, witches can use witchcraft to hold the iron, so this doesn’t work. Witches always ask for this kind of trial and are always found innocent, so best to give them a normal trial with witnesses and stuff. Question XXII: Of The Third Kind Of Sentence, To Be Pronounced On One Who Is Defamed, And Who Is To Be Put To The Question Kramer advises: “Let not the Judge be too willing to subject a person to torture, for this should only be resorted to in default of other proofs”. He then goes on to explain that torture usually doesn’t work, because “some are so soft-hearted and feeble-minded that at the least torture they will confess anything, whether it be true or not” and “others are so stubborn that, however much they be tortured, the truth is not to be had from them.” But his conclusion is only that “there is need for much prudence in the matter of torture”, and he goes on to talk a lot about how to torture people. He seems to think of false confessions (and false silence) as minor issues that deserve some attention but shouldn’t keep a judge from torturing someone if he really wants. It’s actually worse than this, because he goes on to say that the Devil often makes witches immune to torture. If someone doesn’t seem to mind being tortured at all, they’re probably a witch. If someone doesn’t cry when being tortured, that’s another red flag, because witches can’t cry (source: everyone knows this). To Kramer’s credit, he is willing to follow the logical implications of his belief: he agrees that if a suspect does cry, that means she’s innocent. Being really mean, trying to make her cry, and then letting her go if she does is . . . actually a valid witch trial method! But you have to be careful: sometimes witches try to game the system by carrying a concealed pouch of noxious herbs to make their eyes tear up. You should only release someone for crying if you’re sure they haven’t done this. Also interesting in Part 3: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Inline links: How the Trial is to be Proceeded with and Continued. And how the Witnesses are to be Examined in the Presence of Four Other Persons, and how the Accused is to be Questioned in Two Ways

Strijp-S1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Strijp-S
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 25, 2023
Last seen: August 25, 2023

Outbound links

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places August 25, 2023

"El Retiro" Park 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street Culver City 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
1906 Rittenhouse Square 1 shared issues
1970 port Laurent 1 shared issues

Source context

August 25, 2023 · Original source

EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Contact: Jelle Contact Info: jelledonderz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, Octover 21st, 3:00 PM Location: Strijp-S feelgood market grass field. Look for a printed sign that says 'ACX' Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F37CFW5+X2 Group Link: https://www.eaeindhoven.nl/ Notes: Effective Altruism Eindhoven has biweekly meetups in the Hubble cafe on the TU/e campus. Rationality-themed conversations are welcome! https://www.eaeindhoven.nl/calendar

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F37CFW5+X2, https://www.eaeindhoven.nl/

Strong Ave1 mentions across 1 issues

Strong Ave 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 "foot entrance around 36 Strong Ave". It most often appears alongside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001, 1022 High St, Madison, 210 Ardmore Avenue.

Reference entry: Strong Ave
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 23, 2021
Last seen: August 23, 2021

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places August 23, 2021

1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001 1 shared issues
1022 High St, Madison 1 shared issues
210 Ardmore Avenue 1 shared issues
2519 E Sunrise Blvd 1 shared issues
2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227 1 shared issues

Source context

August 23, 2021 · Original source

NORTHAMPTON, MA (RSVP) Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com Time: 7:00 PM, Friday, September 10 Location: The Platform Sports Bar 125A Pleasant St, Northampton, MA 01060. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; this is part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to find it is the foot entrance around 36 Strong Ave. (see coordinates; make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to the outdoor seating area. We'll have a sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/soda.frosted.props

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/soda.frosted.props

Strong Ave.1 mentions across 1 issues

Strong Ave. 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 "by its street entrance around 36 Strong Ave., here". It most often appears alongside 't Heem, 10/40 Coffee, 11841 Wagner St., Culver City.

Reference entry: Strong Ave.
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 26, 2022
Last seen: August 26, 2022

Outbound links

Issue trail

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places August 26, 2022

't Heem 1 shared issues
40 Coffee 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St., Culver City 1 shared issues
12 Rotunda Drive Charlottesville, VA 22903 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street 1 shared issues

Source context

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.

Su1 mentions across 1 issues

Su is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

Reference entry: Su
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: September 01, 2023
Last seen: September 01, 2023

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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan September 01, 2023

536 BC 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ai Jiang 1 shared issues
Burton Watson 1 shared issues
Central Plains 1 shared issues

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September 01, 2023 · Original source

In the ninth month, we swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su.

sub Saharan Africans1 mentions across 1 issues

sub Saharan Africans is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2025 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g". It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, Africa, African small-plot subsistence agriculture.

Reference entry: sub Saharan Africans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 16, 2025
Last seen: January 16, 2025

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Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ January 16, 2025

Afghanistan 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
African small-plot subsistence agriculture 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
Andrew Clough 1 shared issues

Source context

January 16, 2025 · Original source

That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?

The concept of IQ is fine, but you are personally miscalibrated about what low IQ means because the only very-low-IQ people in your training set had developmental disorders. I think these probably explain 5%, 5%, 40%, and 50% of the effect respectively, and I should have been more careful to emphasize (3), which I think explains 40% of the effect. The particular way I would flesh out 3 would be something like - if you’re illiterate and (somewhat) innumerate, you probably don’t have enough practice with symbols and complex mental operations to do even a “culture fair” IQ test like Raven’s Matrices. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your IQ is higher than the Raven’s Matrices says - the person who underperforms on Ravens for this reason will also underperform on a wide variety of other abstract/intellectual/symbolic tasks, and this is part of what IQ means. But it means that Raven’s IQ won’t predict concrete tasks as well as you would expect. Fujimura writes: The other major factor that I think should be reassuring about Lynn's estimates (and other cross-national IQ estimates) is that when you look at "non-problematic" sources that seem like proxies for IQ (e.g. World Bank data, educational performance), you see the same pattern as Lynn and others' IQ data. It's easy for people to quibble about each and every IQ measure (and so people do), but that we see the same pattern of results using otherwise uncontroversial data sources should be reassuring. Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake. This kind of stuff is why I think simple failures of data collection and analysis are unlikely to explain more than 5% of the gap with our common sense. There’s definitely something weird about these numbers, but it’s got to be more complicated than just “racist people screwed up the test”. But continuing on this subject - if IQ has two components, why would World Bank education data and GDP track the abstract/symbolic component of IQ, rather than the practical component of IQ? Or, rather, it’s obvious why this would happen in education. But why would GDP track abstract/symbolic rather than practical? One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP. Harzerkatze writes: [Your claim that blacks everywhere should have the same genes] is far from true. While "white" may be a descriptor for a group of somewhat similar genetic backgrounds, having common ancestors not too far in the past, "black" is different, grouping populations of similar skin color, but common ancestors diverging way further back in time. Yeah, I didn’t want to get into all of this on the post, but I agree the way I phrased it was misleading. Lynn and other national IQ estimates find very low IQs for all sub-Saharan African countries - I mentioned Malawi at 60 in the post, but Nigeria, on the other side of Africa, is 69. Whatever is going on there is a pan-African problem, such that I don’t think differences between African groups are very relevant. US blacks are mostly descended from people in west Africa, eg Nigeria. Some people also brought up that US blacks have significant white admixture. This is true but it’s still not enough to be relevant to this discussion. If we assumed everything was genetic and US blacks with their ~20% white admixture had genetic IQ of 85, we would still expect African blacks to have IQ in the low 80s. However you parse it, there’s got to be some kind of health/education/environment effect going on there. Africa is extremely genetically diverse, but I think most of the countries measured in the paper, including Malawi, are some variety of Niger-Congo speakers, who I don’t think are that much more diverse than white people or anyone else. The really interesting African ethnicities, like the Khoi-San, don’t show up as much at a national level. Andrew Clough writes: Speaking of charity and IQ, the lowest of low hanging fruit is putting iodine in salt. You can donate to the Global Iodine Network like I do for the long term benefit of poorer countries without worrying you're just delaying Malthus's reemergence. Givewell calls Salt Iodization "slightly below the range of cost-effectiveness of the opportunities that we expect to direct marginal donations to" which in the grand scheme of things is quite good. Yeah, salt iodization is great. I had always heard of iodine related problems being concentrated in central Asia and especially Afghanistan, but looking at the map… (source) … sub-Saharan Africa is also a hot spot. I wonder what’s wrong in Cuba - this is exactly the sort of easily gameable metric I would usually expect them to be good at, or at least carefully faking. If you’re interested, you can donate to Iodine Global Network here. Bob Jacobs writes: > His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like: Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist. No contesting any of this. MM writes: I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap. Calvin writes: I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap. I was concerned to hear this - I have a little experience with the intellectually disabled, but it didn’t involve knowing people’s exact IQ, so I’m not very well-calibrated here. Looking for more information, I found https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, which purports to describe the characteristics of very low IQ people, mostly in the context of criminal justice (where lawyers often try to use a client’s low IQ as a mitigating factor - ie maybe he didn’t truly understand that crime is wrong). The report says things like: Although all persons with mental retardation have significantly impaired mental development, their intellectual level can vary considerably. An estimated 89 percent of all people with retardation have I.Q.s in the 51-70 range. An I.Q. in the 60 to 70 range is approximately the scholastic equivalent to the third grade […] Although mental retardation of any degree has profound implications for a person's cognitive and social development, it is a condition which in many cases is not readily apparent. While some of the mentally retarded, such as those whose retardation is caused by Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome, have characteristically distinctive facial features, most cannot be identified by their physical appearance alone. Unless their cognitive impairment is unusually severe (e.g. an I.Q. below 40), persons with mental retardation may be thought of as "slow" but the full extent of their impairment is often not readily appreciated, particularly by people who have limited contact with or knowledge of them, including police, prosecutors, judges, and other participants in the criminal justice system. Many capital offenders with mental retardation did not have their condition diagnosed until trial or during post-conviction proceedings. And gave some examples (slightly out of order for this list): Oliver Cruz, who was executed in Texas on August 9, 2000, had an I.Q. that was measured variously at 64 and 76. Cruz nonetheless insisted to reporters that, although he was perhaps "slow in reading, slow in learning," he was not mentally retarded. Mitigation specialist Scharlette Holdman recalled a client who so successfully hid his retardation from his attorneys that he allowed them to sign him up for college-level calculus classes, which he could not comprehend. He had gone through much of his schooling allowing his younger sister to complete his homework for him. When he was given papers to read in connection to his case, he would carefully stare at them. If he was asked a substantive question, he usually responded, "I don't recall." Only when experts in retardation evaluated him and investigators reviewed his school records and spoke to his family did lawyers discover he had mental retardation and had been considered "slow" since his early childhood. Another capital defendant "hid his mental retardation for most of his life by working at a very repetitive job as a switcher on the railroad. He lied about finishing high school. He was actually in special education classes and did not finish the sixth grade. He was drafted into the army and discharged because of his mental retardation. He lied about his service record. He often made things up so that people would not suspect mental retardation." Morris Mason, whose I.Q. was 62-66, was executed in 1985 in Virginia after being convicted of rape and murder. Before his execution, Mason asked one of his legal advisors for advice on what to wear to his funeral As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York' These people are obviously not going to win Nobels anytime soon. But even the guy with IQ 35 - 45 was still talking to people. I think this supports the thesis that intellectually disabled people without specific syndromes can seem pretty normal most of the time. (though keep in mind that anything from the court system should be treated with a grain of salt - defense attorneys have an incentive to exaggerate the intellectual disability of their clients in the hopes that it gets them a lighter sentence) Lyman Stone writes: Emil's post isn't correct, however. We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan. Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers. Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally. Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy. See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665 We know that people with extremely low IQs in the Flynn sense must be capable of subsistence agriculture, because pre-Flynn Effect, most of the West had extremely low IQs, and they were all doing subsistence agriculture. How is this possible? Responding to Lyman’s comment, I wrote: I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of. You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones. For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction. I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Maybe one way to look at it is to go back to the claim from the justice system document above, saying that people with IQ in the 60s are the mental equivalent of third-graders. The third-graders I know are very into Pokemon, and have all sorts of opinions on how if you add X bonus to a Y strength fire-type Pokemon and then play Z combo, it will [commence six weeks of droning on about different Pokemon cards]. Is this the sort of math/reasoning/strategizing that we don’t expect someone with IQ 60 to be able to do? Does the fact that third-graders can do it mean that we’re miscalibrated? I’m not sure. The part of Lyman’s comment that gives me the most pause is his observation that, if the mean IQ is 60, a decent fraction of people must be 45, and a non-negligible portion 30. At this point, even third-grader comparisons don’t save us. I guess this is where I bring in the claim that IQ breaks down as a guide to practical living skills below some point. You can see several more layers of response between me and Lyman here, but I was especially grateful for him teaching me two things I didn’t already know: First, he corrected my misconception about Reich on ancient European cognitive evolution. Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were “2-3 standard deviations” below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90 (they probably also had lower IQ for environmental reasons).,

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

Inline links: source, donate to Iodine Global Network here., writes, writes, writes, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm, writes, https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665, here

Sub-Saharan African states1 mentions across 1 issues

Sub-Saharan African states is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 21, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”". It most often appears alongside 1992 treaty, ACX, Africa.

Reference entry: Sub-Saharan African states
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 21, 2021
Last seen: May 21, 2021

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower May 21, 2021

1992 treaty 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Alaska 1 shared issues
Allen Farrington 1 shared issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche

May 21, 2021 · Original source

If you’re a fan of our free-trade world, then you should probably pause to ask some questions about its potential demise. Zeihan notes that nearly all participants in Bretton Woods have suspended military activity (other than in connection with American efforts), allowing small countries to exist and even thrive (citing Slovakia, Macedonia, Korea, and “a host of Sub-Saharan African states”), allowing former rivals to focus on development (citing the EU and its expansion into Southern and Central Europe, and Russian firms being able to borrow at favorable rates despite a history of sovereign defaults and fraud), and leading to mass industrialization. In short, “The last seventy years have been incredible.”

sub-saharan africans1 mentions across 1 issues

sub-saharan africans is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "300 sub-saharan africans who then go on to murder". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

Reference entry: sub-saharan africans
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 08, 2024
Last seen: August 08, 2024

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche August 08, 2024

10240 1 shared issues
4chan 1 shared issues
@slatestarcodex 1 shared issues
Acemoglu & Robinson 1 shared issues
Achillead 1 shared issues

Source context

August 08, 2024 · Original source

What I am proposing (and what makes my morality superior to both sides) is that good or evil should be judged completely independently of weakness or strength, using objective measurable criteria to determine who is deserving of help and who isn't. The reason rationalists with their "effective altruism" will never be a popular movement is because they do not DESERVE to be popular when they have no logical moral criteria to evaluate whom their altruism should prioritize. When your "effective altruism" saves the lives of 300 sub-saharan africans who then go on to murder gay people indiscriminately because their religion tells them to, or immigrate to Europe and rape and kill twelve year olds, YOU are personally responsible for the deaths they caused. Before you criticize OTHER people's morality, maybe you should consider subscribing to a moral philosophy that actually considers downstream effects, instead of treating the lives of evil people as being equally valuable to the lives of good people. Or do you not BELIEVE in the concept of good and evil?

I calculated it out based on statistics in this article and some wild assumptions, and I think since 2000 there have been a total of about 7,500 sub-Saharan African convicted rapists in Europe. If we assume the total cases are 20x convictions, that’s 150,000 actual sub-Saharan African rapists (for a sanity check, this is about 5% of all male sub-Saharan Africans in Europe.)

Inline links: this article

(as for killing gay people, probably the gay people they kill are also sub-Saharan Africans, and I’m not sure you’re really coming off super credible in your desire to save the lives of sub-Saharan Africans here).

Sudanese1 mentions across 1 issues

Sudanese is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 20, 2023 and April 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "access to social support and benefit programs that Sudanese and Bangladeshis can only dream of". It most often appears alongside 15 minute cities, 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability, 2022 ACX Forecasting contest.

Reference entry: Sudanese
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 20, 2023
Last seen: April 20, 2023

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Issue trail

Links For April 2023 April 20, 2023

15 minute cities 1 shared issues
200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability 1 shared issues
2022 ACX Forecasting contest 1 shared issues
AB 835 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues

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Links For April 2023

April 20, 2023 · Original source

Trevor’s understandably morally anxious about benefiting from his Jewish ethnicity. Should he be? Is this any worse than benefiting from white privilege or male privilege or whatever other forms of privilege they’ve invented since I last checked? Is it any worse than benefiting from being an American, and so having access to social support and benefit programs that Sudanese and Bangladeshis can only dream of? I’m not sure.

Sudetenland1 mentions across 1 issues

Sudetenland is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Austria/Sudetenland/Danzig circa 1938". It most often appears alongside 19th century, 21st century, Africa.

Reference entry: Sudetenland
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 06, 2022
Last seen: April 06, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination April 06, 2022

19th century 1 shared issues
21st century 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Afrikaner volkstaat 1 shared issues
Alex Mennen 1 shared issues

Source context

April 06, 2022 · Original source

Austria/Sudetenland/Danzig circa 1938

Sulawesi1 mentions across 1 issues

Sulawesi is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "research on the islands of ... Sulawesi". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry: Sulawesi
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2022
Last seen: June 10, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

50,000 BC 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Altamira 1 shared issues
Amazonia 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues

Source context

Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples

June 10, 2022 · Original source

research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia.

Sumeria1 mentions across 1 issues

Sumeria is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 17, 2021 and June 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the world’s oldest civilization, the ancient Sumeria population was approximately half a million". It most often appears alongside Africa, antelope, August Hirsch.

Reference entry: Sumeria
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 17, 2021
Last seen: June 17, 2021

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Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples June 17, 2021

Africa 1 shared issues
antelope 1 shared issues
August Hirsch 1 shared issues
Australia 1 shared issues
Australian rabbit populations 1 shared issues

Source context

June 17, 2021 · Original source

Establishing this type of diffusion of disease, he says, requires several thousand years. Through statistical analysis of the modern spread of measles, McNeill claims that the minimum population size to keep a virus going is about half a million people. Coincidentally, the world’s oldest civilization, the ancient Sumeria population was approximately half a million.

Sun1 mentions across 1 issues

Sun is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 23, 2024 and May 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)". It most often appears alongside 1984, 1984 Calendar Meme, ACX.

Reference entry: Sun
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 23, 2024
Last seen: May 23, 2024

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education" May 23, 2024

1984 1 shared issues
1984 Calendar Meme 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Ahab 1 shared issues
Airstrip One 1 shared issues

Source context

A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

May 23, 2024 · Original source

...as) - 19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell) - 16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”) - 10% know the captain’s name in Moby Dick (Ahab) - 7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus) - 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism) - <1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage) Remember, these are university students, so...

Sunghir1 mentions across 1 issues

Sunghir is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 10, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance". It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, Africa, Altamira.

Reference entry: Sunghir
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: June 10, 2022
Last seen: June 10, 2022

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Issue trail

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything June 10, 2022

50,000 BC 1 shared issues
Africa 1 shared issues
Altamira 1 shared issues
Amazonia 1 shared issues
Asia 1 shared issues

Source context

June 10, 2022 · Original source

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

SUNNYVALE, CA1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: SUNNYVALE, CA
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2022
Last seen: April 10, 2022

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Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities April 10, 2022

red porches 1 shared issues
11:11 Cafe 1 shared issues
1548 NE 15th Ave 1 shared issues
3266 Inglewood Blvd 1 shared issues
60 Grande Rue St. Michel 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2022 · Original source

SUNNYVALE, CA Contact: IS (svmeetup@protonmail.com) Date: May 14 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9F Location: Washington Park, 840 W Washington Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94086; On the roundish grassy area in the northeast corner of the park; we'll have a dark blue picnic blanket and a ACX Meetup sign attached to a red camping chair.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+X9F

Sunnyvale, California1 mentions across 1 issues

Sunnyvale, California is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 10, 2023 and April 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "(see Sunnyvale)". It most often appears alongside 100 Alexander St, 10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3, 11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA.

Reference entry: Sunnyvale, California
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: April 10, 2023
Last seen: April 10, 2023

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Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023 April 10, 2023

100 Alexander St 1 shared issues
10004 Jasper Ave, Edmonton, AB T5J 1R3 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner St, Culver City, CA 1 shared issues
1275 1st Street, West Lafayette, IN 47906 1 shared issues
1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104 1 shared issues

Source context

April 10, 2023 · Original source

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA (see Sunnyvale)

Suwalki corridor1 mentions across 1 issues

Suwalki corridor is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2022 and March 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "It could relate to the Suwalki corridor"; "if what he says about the Suwalki Corridor comes to pass". It most often appears alongside ACX, Afghan government, Aleppo.

Reference entry: Suwalki corridor
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: March 01, 2022
Last seen: March 01, 2022

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Issue trail

Ukraine Warcasting March 01, 2022

ACX 1 shared issues
Afghan government 1 shared issues
Aleppo 1 shared issues
America 1 shared issues
American 1 shared issues

Source context

Ukraine Warcasting

March 01, 2022 · Original source

In my simple model, in addition to a partial restoration of the empire, Putin desires a fundamental disruption to the EU and NATO. And much of Ukraine is not worth his ruling. As things currently stand, splitting Ukraine and taking the eastern half, while terrible for Ukraine (and for most of Russia as well), would not disrupt the EU and NATO. So when Putin is done doing that, he will attack and take a slice of territory to the north. It could be eastern Estonia, or it could relate to the Suwalki corridor, but in any case the act will be a larger challenge to the West because of explicit treaty commitments. Then he will see if we are willing to fight a war to get it back. There are fixed costs to mobilization and incurring potential public wrath over the war, so as a leader you might as well “get the most out of it.” Our best hope is that the current Russian operations in Ukraine go sufficiently poorly that it does not come to this.

Inline links: Suwalki corridor

I am mildly annoyed by Tyler being much less clear than (eg) Richard or Anatoly in making specific assertions, yet also claiming the mantle of a prescient predictor. Still, if what he says about the Suwalki Corridor comes to pass, I will give him the mantle.

SV1 mentions across 1 issues

SV 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 "working in biotech & SV". It most often appears alongside 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 21st Century Salon, ACX.

Reference entry: SV
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 13, 2022
Last seen: October 13, 2022

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Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley October 13, 2022

1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1 shared issues
21st Century Salon 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
Alex Richard 1 shared issues
Amazon Prime Video 1 shared issues

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October 13, 2022 · Original source

Fresno native here. While I'm not the biggest fan of the area, I feel I have to push back against this a bit. I left in 92 for college and then a career in Silicon Valley, but my parents stayed here and I was forced to move back 2 years ago to help them out. I hated Fresno as a teenager and dreaded moving back, but it's actually been better than expected. There are several microbreweries and craft beer taprooms now, which creates some semblance of a nightlife. The restaurant scene is mostly terrible, especially relative to SF, but there are some signs of life - I suspect it's on the up. The biggest shock has been real estate prices - I never would have thought of Fresno as an expensive place to live - but that's mostly been a consequence of inflation, COVID, and the Zoom revolution. I suspect the coming recession will pop that particular bubble. If not then the influx of Bay Area remote workers can only be a good thing for the local culture and economy.

Svalbard1 mentions across 1 issues

Svalbard is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 30, 2025 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Svalbard mining baron Sholto Douglas". It most often appears alongside 767 AD, @Scientific_Bird, ACX.

Reference entry: Svalbard
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: October 30, 2025
Last seen: October 30, 2025

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Issue trail

Links For October 2025 October 30, 2025

767 AD 1 shared issues
@Scientific_Bird 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX community 1 shared issues
AI 2027 1 shared issues

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Links For October 2025

October 30, 2025 · Original source

23: I’ve enjoyed following content by Anthropic AI researcher Sholto Douglas, but kept noticing his name in unusual places. Upon further investigation, it looks like in 767 AD, a particularly skilled Scottish warrior got the nickname “Sholto Douglas”, and for the next 1300 years his clan continued to give that name to their children. Aside from the AI researcher, they include WWII air force commander Sholto Douglas, artist Sholto Douglas, and Svalbard mining baron Sholto Douglas. There is also some sort of Californian Gold Rush country local folk hero Sholto Douglas; attempts to determine his exact identity have been confounded by the local tradition of making up facts about him, but he may be the same person as Lord Sholto George Douglas, third son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Even I have trouble believing that the gene for being a particularly skilled warrior can last 1300 years, but for what it’s worth, the AI researcher Sholto Douglas was once ranked the 43rd best fencer in the world.

Inline links: content by Anthropic AI researcher Sholto Douglas, in 767 AD, WWII air force commander Sholto Douglas, artist Sholto Douglas, Svalbard mining baron Sholto Douglas, local folk hero Sholto Douglas, Lord Sholto George Douglas, I, was once ranked the 43rd best fencer in the world

Sverdlovsk1 mentions across 1 issues

Sverdlovsk is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 30, 2022 and July 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In April 1979, anthrax escaped from a biological warfare lab in Sverdlovsk, USSR". It most often appears alongside 1950s influenza strain, 1977 influenza pandemic, 1992 scientific investigation.

Reference entry: Sverdlovsk
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: July 30, 2022
Last seen: July 30, 2022

Issue trail

Your Book Review: Viral July 30, 2022

1950s influenza strain 1 shared issues
1977 influenza pandemic 1 shared issues
1992 scientific investigation 1 shared issues
ACX 1 shared issues
ACX community 1 shared issues

Source context

July 30, 2022 · Original source

In April 1979, anthrax escaped from a biological warfare lab in Sverdlovsk, USSR, resulting in at least 64 deaths. This leak was successfully covered up by the Soviet authorities for more than a decade, with the KGB confiscating hospital records of the victims. The truth was only discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a proper scientific investigation was finally allowed in 1992 and 1993.

Sweden-Norway1 mentions across 1 issues

Sweden-Norway is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

Reference entry: Sweden-Norway
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 19, 2023
Last seen: May 19, 2023

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Issue trail

The Question Of Separatism May 19, 2023

1980 1 shared issues
1980 referendum 1 shared issues
1995 referendum 1 shared issues
A.W. Phillips 1 shared issues
Adam Smith 1 shared issues

Source context

Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?

May 19, 2023 · Original source

When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.

Swiss1 mentions across 1 issues

Swiss is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 19, 2022 and January 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "superficially-similar Swiss, German, and Dutch models". It most often appears alongside Alinea, Alp Blossom, Alpha Tolman.

Reference entry: Swiss
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: January 19, 2022
Last seen: January 19, 2022

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Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care? January 19, 2022

Alinea 1 shared issues
Alp Blossom 1 shared issues
Alpha Tolman 1 shared issues
Amish 1 shared issues
Askinosie 1 shared issues

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January 19, 2022 · Original source

5: Individuals Purchase Private Insurance is typical of the US and Switzerland. Individuals use their own money to buy insurance from private companies, which may be ambiguously-for-profit-but-heavily-regulated (some US companies) or not-for-profit (other US companies, Switzerland). If someone can’t afford to do this, they might get government subsidies (Switzerland) or get shunted to Medicaid / be out of luck (US). Those private insurances negotiate rates with private doctors and hospitals as normal.

The two countries with mostly private systems - Switzerland and the US - are also the two most expensive systems (though see here for a contrarian take on this). But the similarity ends there; Switzerland’s system has one of the highest patient satisfaction ratings, but America has the lowest. When I asked Swiss people about this, they said everyone in Switzerland is rich, which rescues a lot of otherwise-unsustainable systems. Certainly rich people in America get good health care. So maybe Switzerland isn’t as different as the numbers make it look, and these kinds of systems are just bad.

Inline links: see here

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?

Swiss canton of Glarus1 mentions across 1 issues

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

Reference entry: Swiss canton of Glarus
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: May 13, 2022
Last seen: May 13, 2022

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Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain May 13, 2022

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 1 shared issues
Astralcodexten 1 shared issues
attention 1 shared issues
BERN 1 shared issues
Bundespräsident 1 shared issues

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Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain

May 13, 2022 · Original source

But do we have to rely on neural signatures? Can't we generalize and define it by the all-parts-talk-to-each-other-and-there-is-great-coherence-and-Granger-causality-thingy? So if a robot satisfies this criteria, is it/s/he conscious? The book only touches this question lightly, but I'll add a few of my own thoughts. Since the question about robots can become confusing, let me instead discuss the obvious alternative question if and when the Swiss canton of Glarus is conscious.

For such an egalitarian country, it is not surprising that Switzerland is federal, it consists of 26 cantons (similar to US states, just smaller). Of course, every canton can make its own laws, and most cantons have parliaments for that. But the canton Glarus, with a tiny population of 12,000, does not have a parliament. Instead, they have a Landsgemeinde: once a year, the citizens of Glarus assemble at a big open space, and decide jointly on new laws, the tax rates for the next year, and important offices like judges. Every citizen can rise to speak on any of the discussed items, and can propose changes (which even go through sometimes).

Inline links: Landsgemeinde

So should we say that the canton of Glarus becomes conscious once a year? Probably... not. There are similarities, and after reading this review you might understand what I mean if I call the Landsgemeinde a conscious event of Glarus. But in any other context, I would just cause utter confusion. More importantly, it goes against the intuitive meaning of consciousness for 99% of the people. So if we want to describe the concept of "all-parts-communicate-and-are-coherent-and-Granger-causal", then we should better invent a new name for it. Actually, there have been attempts to formalize and measure this, most famously the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. But the hope that this could give a formal definition of consciousness has the same problem as the idea that the Landsgemeinde is conscious. In a great rebuttal, Scott Aaronson has discussed the idea that IIT captures consciousness, and concluded that it "is wrong — demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core. [This] puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness."

Inline links: In a great rebuttal

Syntagma1 mentions across 1 issues

Syntagma is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "only 10 minutes’ walk from Syntagma". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

Reference entry: Syntagma
Mention count: 1
Issue count: 1
First seen: August 29, 2025
Last seen: August 29, 2025

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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places August 29, 2025

"Beer Capital" pub 1 shared issues
100 Black Birch Trail 1 shared issues
11841 Wagner Street, Culver City 1 shared issues
13 Mile road 1 shared issues
131 Colonie Center 1 shared issues

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