Astral Codex Ten

Publications: A

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Publications: A

Substacks, magazines, zines, journals, and publications referenced in the archive. This section collects the A slice of the category index.

Reference Index

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Astralcodexten Com122 mentions across 122 issues

Astralcodexten Com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 122 times across 122 issues between April 08, 2021 and March 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Subject: Astralcodexten Com"; "This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous"; "This is the eleventh of many finalists in the book review contest". It most often appears alongside Discord, subreddit, ACX.

Article page
Astralcodexten Com
Mention count
122
Issue count
122
First seen
April 08, 2021
Last seen
March 30, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
His own background is in the law-and-economics camp5, which studies the law and its effects in terms of economic theory. Among other things, this camp notably produced the Coase theorem.6 But law-and-economics theorists tend to put too much emphasis on the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a classic example:
Inline links: law-and-economics, 5, Coase theorem, 6
It’s not clear to me why norms would allow such exceptions, which still increase costs of information and are presumably net-negative. To sketch a possible answer: the edge cases are likely to be where the value of enforcing the norm is lower. I’d roughly expect the social costs of violations to be lower, and the transaction costs of figuring out if there was a violation to be higher. (I feel like I’ve read a sequence of three essays arguing about one particular case; they wouldn’t have been necessary if the case had been a blatant lie. 13) So, okay, minor violations don’t get punished. But if minor violations don’t get punished when they happen, then (a) you don’t actually have a norm against them; and (b) to the extent that some people avoid those violations anyway, you’ve set up an asshole filter (that is, you’re rewarding vice and punishing virtue).
Inline links: one, particular, case, 13, asshole filter
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
In "Fire," the line between Wizardry and Prophetry seems the most slippery – is solar power an example of a cutting-edge technological solution to a seemingly intractable growth problem (in which case it would be firmly in the Wizard camp) or an environmentally-friendly alternative to "dirty" Wizard technology like fracking and nuclear power plants (in which case, it should belong to the Prophets)? Mann places it more in the Prophet category, but an important point he makes is that, before fears of climate change displaced the locus of the argument surrounding oil, the Prophets’ party line was that alternative "clean" energy solutions like solar were desperately needed because the stock of oil in the world was running out – which so far has proven to be untrue. Much like "we’re running out of room for all these people!" or "we’re running out of space to house all this garbage!" this zombie conviction persisted for decades and seemed resistant to any evidence to the contrary. But if (big if!) carbon emission were of no concern, Wizards would have neatly won this fight through their development of more sophisticated oil extraction techniques and more energy-efficient machines, turning oil supply into a Zeno’s Paradox. Mann: "‘It is commonly asked, when will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?’ wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. ‘The best one-word answer: never.’ On its face, this seems ridiculous – how could a finite stock be inexhaustible, when a constantly renewed flow can run out? But more than a century of experience has shown it to be true. [...] That is, fossil fuel supplies have no known bounds."
Inline links: we’re running out of space to house all this garbage!, Zeno’s Paradox
Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
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Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Then there’s something like the CNBC effect. Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions. Some people go so far as to say that it’s the same reason that Wall Street provides market research; the demand is there, so someone will sell it. It reminds me of a story I heard from Reason columnist Ron Bailey. When he was selling The End of Doom, an agent asked him to change his thesis, because optimism doesn’t sell, whereas doom could make him a very rich author. I very much doubt that Zeihan created his analysis in order to arrive at the conclusion that we’re going to see a global Disorder over the next decade, 11 but once you see structural incentives it’s hard to banish them from your thoughts (see also, Meditations on Moloch).
Inline links: 11, Meditations on Moloch
[This is the eleventh 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 several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Inline links: point 3 here
Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
June 04, 2021 · Original source
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2021
August 11, 2021 · Original source
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Berkeley Meetup This Saturday
August 27, 2021 · Original source
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New York Meetup This Monday
September 06, 2021 · Original source
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21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
What if you promote teachers whose students tend to gain many points on their (relative position in) test scores compared to last year? This is the idea behind value-added models ie VAM, which were big in education about five years ago (see section II - III here for more). Various studies show this works much less well than you would think. Certain classes, races, and genders of students consistently produce higher VAM than others, and a teacher’s VAM can apparently predict their students’ past performance, which makes no sense unless there’s some kind of bias going on. These aren’t useless, but they’re not great, and the problems are severe enough that they’ve become politically toxic.
Inline links: here
The FDA Has Punted Decisions About Luvox Prescription To The Deepest Recesses Of The Human Soul
December 22, 2021 · Original source
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Open Thread 206
January 10, 2022 · Original source
1: If you received an ACX Grant, you should either have already been approached by me about how to get paid, or else you’ll be approached soon by a representative of CEA about this. If you haven’t heard from either of us by 1/20, something has gone wrong and you should email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
2: I should also have paid all the grants evaluators who requested payment. If I haven’t, something has gone wrong and you should email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Practically-A-Book Review: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents
January 19, 2022 · Original source
They both accept that a sufficiently advanced superintelligent AI could destroy the world if it wanted to. Maybe it would dream up a bioweapon and bribe some lab to synthesize it. Maybe it would spoof the military into starting nuclear war. Maybe it would invent self-replicating nanomachines that could disassemble everything into component molecules. Maybe it would do something we can't possibly imagine, the same way we can do things gorillas can't possibly imagine. Point is, they both accept as a given that this could happen. I explored this assumption more in this 2015 article; since then, we've only doubled down on our decision to gate trillions of dollars in untraceable assets behind a security system of "bet you can't solve this really hard math problem".
Inline links: this 2015 article
Richard's side of the argument is in some ways a recapitulation of Eric Drexler's argument about tool AIs. This convinced me when I first read it, but Eliezer's counterargument here has unconvinced me. Let's go over it again.
Inline links: convinced me when I first read it
Book Review Contest Rules 2022
February 04, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 210
February 07, 2022 · Original source
3: Somebody sent in an ACX Grant application saying they didn’t want any money, but they wanted data on my grantmaking process for their study on what makes teams succeed. I took this out of my pile intending to come back to it after the grants round, and then I lost it. If that was you, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com reminding me what I can do for you.
Open Thread 218
April 03, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 219
April 10, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 220
April 17, 2022 · Original source
2: Related: if you entered the contest, but your review isn’t included in the documents or isn’t listed as an option on the dropdown in the rating form, please email scott@slatestarcodex.com with “This is a genuine nonspam message” somewhere in the text so my spam filter doesn’t eat it, let me know what’s missing, and maybe send me a backup copy in case the original got lost.
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
And I’m having even more trouble separating both of these stories from a third story, the story of the “mirror stage”. Imagine a baby, moving around. At some point, it sees its own hand in its peripheral vision: a pink blob. At some other point it might see its feet. Sometimes it cries, and noise comes out of it. Other times it has thoughts or feelings or something. As it grows, it might realize some correlations between all these things: for example, it can use the location of the pink blob in front of it to calibrate its aim as it reaches for a block. But this is far from having a coherent self-concept. (cf. my review of Julian Jaynes on theory of mind; Jaynes claims that eg the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies) At some point, the child sees itself in a mirror. This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence. But it’s not really coherent, deep down. It assumes that if it got some thing - the object of desire - then it would finally be coherent and as good as the child in the mirror, and its mother would finally love it perfectly 100%. What does it need? Probably the thing the mother wants (traditionally the phallus).
Inline links: Julian Jaynes on theory of mind
And Snav brought up this this series of papers trying to link Lacan to free energy. I can’t really understand it - I don’t know what I was expecting from a paper trying to link one famously incomprehensible thing to another famously incomprehensible thing. Parts of it seem to almost make sense; Lacan often says that various quantities in his system are what is left after other quantities have been interpreted through the logical-symbolic order, which sounds suspiciously like prediction error. The papers try to argue that Fristonian free energy = Lacanian jouissance, a word usually thought of as equivalent to libido or pleasure or excessive pleasure or painful pleasure or something like that. I don’t feel able to have an opinion at this point.
Inline links: brought up, this series of papers, another famously incomprehensible thing
Birth Order Effects: Nature vs. Nurture
June 01, 2022 · Original source
Source here; thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50). This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren’t really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in physics Nobelists and great mathematicians (and potentially Harvard philosophy students). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!) Followup research by Less Wrong user “Bucky” determined that the effect fell off with age gaps; the closer in age you are to your sibling, the stronger an effect birth order has: I continue to be confused by this extremely strong effect which most of what we know about psychology says shouldn’t exist. So in 2020, I asked my readership some even more complicated questions about their family situations, in the hopes of teasing out why this is happening. I’ll be honest - I think I over-reached here. I’m not very good at statistics, and this is a weird statistical problem: the dependent variable is whether the case ended up in the sample at all! I wasn’t able to figure out a good way to use most of the data you gave me. And the stuff I did use, I mostly made work by slicing and dicing so much that the sample size got pretty low, even when I started from 8,000 survey respondents. I’m publishing this in the hopes that it will inspire someone else will more domain knowledge to do a sophisticated re-analysis. But for now, here’s what I’ve got. Confirming Old Results With The 2020 Dataset The 2020 dataset also shows a strong birth order effect in people who read this blog. In 2018, among people with exactly one sibling, respondents were 2.51x more likely to be the older sibling than the younger (72%). In 2020, the number was 2.39x (71%). Change with age gap is shown below: Note truncated y-axis This seems to be broadly similar to the 2018 results. There was an anomaly in 2018 where some categories seemed to drop off surprisingly quickly between 7 and 8 years, which I thought might be meaningful. But Bucky’s analysis showed this was probably a coincidence, and indeed it doesn’t show up in the new data. Does Sex Matter For Birth Order Effects? I wondered if there might be a smaller birth order effect for people with opposite-sex siblings. One possible explanation for the birth order effect is children trying to get out of the “shadow” of their older sibling and differentiate themselves in some way. But children are already pretty different from an opposite-sex sibling and might feel less pressure in that situation. But this doesn’t seem to be true. The percent firstborns in sibships of two on the survey was 70% among people with a same-sex sibling, and 71% among people with an opposite-sex sibling; no real difference. Do Biological Or Social Factors Produce Birth Order Effects? All previous results are for biological siblings. But it might be worth asking the question separately for biological vs. social siblings. One could imagine either biological or social causes of the birth order effect. For example, some biologists speculate that pregnancy depletes choline, that it takes a long time for choline stores to recover, and that a second child born within that window will have less choline available to build their nervous system, which could be bad. But also: maybe if you have an older sibling, your parents can’t pay as much attention to you when you’re a kid, and you learn less. This was very hard to test for. Again, I wasn’t able to use traditional statistical tests because I’m trying to determine whether someone was in the sample at all, rather than whether two variables are related. It was easy to check normal birth order because I could compare people with exactly one older sibling to people with exactly one younger. It was harder to do with things like adoption in the mix, because that could introduce a bias: are parents more likely to adopt out their first child (because that’s when they’re most unprepared for parenting)? Are adoptive parents more likely to adopt when they already have children of their own (because they’re comfortable with child-rearing) or less likely (because they really want kids and can’t have them biologically)? I had no way of getting controls for these questions and so I couldn’t do a lot of the analyses I wanted. But I did two relatively weak analyses instead: First, I took the entire set of people in weird situations - people who said their number of social siblings was not the same as their number of biological siblings. In this group of 174 people, biological firstborns made up only 61% of respondents with one sibling, notably less than the 71% in the entire sample. That suggests that the unusual social situations are having an effect. You shouldn’t update on the fact that it’s still higher than 50%, because some of the people’s weird social situations don’t affect their status as social firstborns. Second, I tried to compare people who were firstborn under a biological definition but not a social definition, to people in the opposite situation. There were 40 people in the sample who were biological but not social firstborns, and 60 people who were social but not biological firstborns. Again, this suggests that social firstborn-ness is more important as an explanation than biological firstbornness, although it doesn’t rule out the latter having some effect. I additionally tried to compare two different types of social firstbornness - one where no older siblings lived in the house when you were growing up, and one where your parents had never parented another child. There weren’t many people discordant on these two measures (29 vs. 20 respectively), but for what it’s worth, the ratio was in favor of the first type. Since I wasn’t very confident in my analytical abilities here, I asked Bucky, who knows more and who did good work analyzing the last dataset, to look into this (we worked independently and didn’t tell each other our results until we were done). He writes: It seems to me that the effect is entirely caused by social siblings. I filtered for only people with 1+ biological but 0 social siblings. There were 24 oldest biological children in this group vs 21 2nd children (or 25 youngest children with a large overlap between 2nd oldest and youngest groups). This significantly differed from the ~0.7 fraction of older children in the general surveys (p<0.05 or p<0.01 depending on whether I use the 2nd oldest or youngest as the comparison) and is close to a 1:1 ratio. I then filtered for only people with 0 biological but 1+ social siblings. There were 51 oldest social children and 23 2nd children (or 26 youngest children again with large overlap). This differs significantly from a 1:1 ratio (p<0.001 or p<0.01) and matches pretty well with the 70% of the Birth order effect. I tried doing some filtering by age gap (2-7 years) and the results were compatible with the same result, although the sample sizes got too small to really conclude anything. For dealing with answers left blank I treated them as 0 unless it looked like the whole section had been missed out. If I ignored any respondents who left something blank I got similar results (smaller sample size but ratios are even further in favour of the social hypothesis). I checked for categorisation errors by looking at respondents’ descriptions of their families and they mainly matched pretty well with the numbers given so I think the data should be considered reliable. I did chuck a couple of results out which seemed unreliable and there was one row which was a repeat so your numbers might not match up exactly (plus you have the non-public data). There are a couple of confounders in the analysis such as whether e.g. oldest children are more likely to be adopted or how much you know about your birth family depending on how old one was when the family unit changed etc. I don’t see a realistic way to account for these but I also can’t see any of them being big enough to explain the difference in the results. Hopefully this matches up with what you found! I think this suggests birth order effects are social rather than biological. So What Causes Birth Order Effects? Based on this analysis, it seems unlikely they are biological. Based on my very weak sub-analysis, and on their tendency to decay with larger age gaps, it seems they have more to do with the social presence of a sibling in the house than with any changes in parenting style (ie your parents learn to parent differently). Two explanations that satisfy both those criteria: Parents are able to devote their full attention to parenting their first child, but only half of their attention to parenting their second. Firstborns get more quality time with their parents during the first few years of childhood.
Inline links: here, physics Nobelists, great mathematicians, Harvard philosophy students, Followup research, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jKaz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4995a838-7372-40dc-8e51-1b35c811bd43_523x388.png, some even more complicated questions about their family situations, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CMuv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8042c21d-a6b7-48f9-bbcc-daf8c136953c_497x339.png
Finally, other people might be able to extract more signal out of this than I was. If you’re interested, you can find the raw data, the original question list, and a description of how to use them here. Note that a few people refused permission for me to republish their data, so you will probably get slightly different numbers than I did.
Inline links: here
Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
June 17, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.
Inline links: writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane
Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle
July 22, 2022 · Original source
Cover of The Society of the Spectacle He never outright explains why he thought photos and film were more pernicious than newspapers or radio, but I imagine the advertising industry played a major role. We’ve grown accustomed to GoDaddy ads and ALL CAPS YouTube titles, but Mad Men shenanigans were a worrisome development at the time. It must’ve been highly alarming to see such brazen manipulation of the public. Whatever the reasoning, we now arrive at one definition of the spectacle: "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." Also: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Well, that’s about as clear as Flint water. Here’s something meatier: "In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life." If you’re familiar with Girard, that is a huge statement. [3] Girardian mimetic desire is triangular; there is you (the desirer), the object (of desire), and the model (another person who also desires the object). Most of our desires are rooted in imitation. Nobody has to tell you to want steak or sex, but almost everything else is learned. How does everybody know that they should want a Rolex or a Rolls Royce? There’s no genetic imperative for luxury goods. You acquire those tastes from the people around you. Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat. This is not a small thing. What we desire is at the core of who we are. What do you want out of life? What kind of person do you want to be? For the entirety of human history, those questions found answers close at hand. Your local community was your world, for better and worse. Now we are global citizens with global perspectives, and it’s difficult to overstate how much that changes what it means to be human. Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. Now our role models are media creations. Some are literal fictional characters (James Bond); others are nominally real people (Kylie Jenner). But both are merely representations - images usurping an essential formative role. ‘William Shatner’ and ‘Robert Downey, Jr.’ are only marginally more real than Captain Kirk and Tony Stark, yet they occupy way more headspace than people that live down the street. Most people can name more celebrities, in more detail, than people they’ve known in person. I know the names of Will Smith’s kids - I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any. This is an issue of The Map and The Territory. Pre-modern Maps were narrow but deep. You might have had only a vague notion of ‘Africa’ or ‘The Pope’, but you knew every square inch of the town you lived in. Spectacular Maps are broad but shallow, and they are drawn for us by spectacular hands. The average person ‘knows’ way more about Africa now, but how well does that knowledge reflect the facts on the ground? Meanwhile, firsthand reality has been reduced to the narrow slices connecting house to car to work, with precious few exceptions. The Society Of The Spectacle is one long lament for this loss of The Real, although Debord doesn’t state it as such. Borrowing again from The Uruk Machine, this sense of loss tracks with the gradual displacement of metis [4] by episteme [5],[6]. III. Everything New Is Old Again Debord has a lot to say about the ‘falsification of the world’: The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. As he might have put it - we have graduated from conspicuous consumption to consuming conspicuousness. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. In the spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. These themes are familiar to us by now. It’s not exactly news that people are getting more isolated and untethered by the year. What is striking to me is not what he is saying, but when he is saying it. Anybody with sense has spent time thinking about how to manage the challenges of modern life. We talk about digital minimalism and social media fasts. Turn off your phone. Get outside and touch grass. Go see people in meatspace. Be present. All great advice. But what are we envisioning, when we imagine a healthy connection to The Real? For most of us, we are picturing life as it was lived… right around the time Debord was saying that everything is phony and toxic. What does the average person think of as the peak of journalistic integrity in America? Probably Vietnam and Watergate - right after this was written. When we mock Millennials and Zoomers, what standard are we measuring them by? The Greatest Generation, who were running the show by the late sixties. In terms of self-reliance and resilience, the average adult in 1967 would be a massive outlier in 2022. Yet here is Debord, saying in no uncertain terms that this American ideal was fraudulent and devoid of meaning. What have we lost? Every era has its cynics, doomsayers, Luddites, and misanthropes. Maybe Debord was just a Boomer’s Boomer, railing against progress and the passage of time. But I don’t think so. We’ve all felt the shockwaves of the Internet explosion. Life is different now. It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack. Do you remember what it was like, not so long ago? How exciting it was to play videogames with someone a thousand miles away? How cool it was the first time you streamed a movie on an airplane? That sense of possibility and promise, like all the world was in the palm of your hand? How quickly things change. For maybe the first time in history, most people are apprehensive about the relentless march of technology. While we’ve always been afraid of advances in weaponry, it’s starting to feel like everything is being weaponized. Who truly believes the metaverse will be a positive step for humanity? Who now is excited at the prospect of gene editing, AI, or transhumanism? There appears to be a growing sentiment along the lines of ‘MGTOW for modernism’. We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report. Sometimes it seems like the world we grew up in is categorically distinct from the world we inhabit. But I’m sure Debord would argue that we are merely experiencing an intensification of a process that has been in motion longer than any of us have been alive. Pre-spectacular society has already passed beyond living memory. Soon we will hit another inflection point - where no one alive even knew someone who lived before the spectacle. All of human history is now before and after; it will soon become literally impossible to understand the inner life and daily reality of pre-modern man - if it’s not already. As an example: how much of your daily environment, as a percentage, do you truly understand? Look around the room and reflect on how “even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.” Your kitchen and your medicine cabinet are filled with mystical objects. Hell, just look at what’s on your person. The phone in your hand, the cash in your wallet, the clothes on your back, the food in your belly - how many lifetimes would it take to truly grok the building blocks of everyday existence? Compare that to, say, a homesteader. It really hasn’t been that long since people lived in a comprehensible universe. Our collective knowledge of the universe has deepened tremendously, but theoretical physics is only less slightly hermetical than the occult beliefs it replaced. It is notionally true that anyone could go get a Ph.D. and verify our working model of the cosmos. But in practice, the science is received wisdom, taken on faith. Our belief in the God Particle is functionally indistinguishable from the belief in God of ages past. It’s worth noting that our current theories will surely be supplanted in a century or three. They are placeholders for better, truer ideas. And so our greater grasp of the wider world has less value than we think, while our day-to-day grows ever more opaque. Is it any wonder epistemic learned helplessness is a thing? IV. With Typical Extravagance Debord was also ahead of the curve on commoditization: This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. Debord correctly perceived the totalitarian nature of spectacular capitalism. Your time, your attention, your opinions - all are bought and sold, and can be influenced to better facilitate such transactions. He would have been totally unsurprised by the rise of Big Data and the corporate surveillance (e.g. Alexa, your phone) that accompanies it. Every piece of your life is a commodity. Every moment that you are not producing or consuming is a missed opportunity. Never fear - someone, somewhere is going to find a way to solve that ‘need’. Nothing is spared. Even opposition is assimilated: Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material. Once again, Debord is shockingly prescient in noting that the conflicts of our time are largely distractions from bigger systemic issues: Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and pseudoplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections. Genuine grassroots movements (Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Canadian truckers) almost always fizzle out without accomplishing anything of substance. They will either be ignored, crushed, or co-opted. Any remnants that endure will be reduced to figureheads that offer ‘representation’ for a point of view without actually producing any change. (‘The Squad’, Rand Paul, etc…) If the extremes of either side gain enough momentum to pose a threat, they will face a united front from the establishment wings of both parties (Bernie, Trump). It’s fashionable at the moment to blame the Woke Left for the politicization of everything, but we’ve all been around long enough to know better. It’s the same shit, different decade. During the Bush years, it was the left who opposed unending wars, government overreach, and media gaslighting. Today those positions are often considered right wing, but only because the pendulum of power has swung in the other direction. Moloch pursues its own goals, wearing whatever ideological guise it deems most effective. From Debord’s perspective, everything is becoming politicized because everything is getting monetized. In the integrated spectacle, the primary concerns of the State are economic, so the personal turning political is simply a downstream effect of the growth of capitalism. V. A Short History of Time It would do Debord a disservice to reduce his work to ammunition in our present disputes. There are two whole chapters in the book devoted to time as a historical development. It’s not something we think about much, but time and history had to be invented. Before the beginning, humanity lived in what Debord calls cyclical time. Countless generations came and went, because nobody was counting. Survival was the name of the game; to be or not to be was the only question. Eventually we formed early societies, which brought into being a ruling class that had the freedom to take actions above and beyond the daily grind: The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected. The murkiness of pre-civilization was shaped into coherence by these rulers, who used their unique agency to literally make history: The succession of generations within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory’ (Novalis). The owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning. But this history develops and perishes separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged, because it remains separated from the common reality. Over time, these narratives gathered a religious dimension. This helped legitimize the rule of regimes, but it also changed the way ordinary people saw themselves in the world. Although still living in cyclical time, they gained purpose through a spiritual journey culminating in Heaven. The clashes of the Mediterranean peoples and the rise and fall of the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical religions, which became a new armor for separate power and basic components of a new consciousness of time. The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically. The Renaissance created a profound break with this mythic raison d'être and reoriented man towards the accumulation of knowledge as a species: The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge… This transformation of our relationship with history and progress was accompanied by the rise of the bourgeoisie: The bourgeoisie is associated with a labor time that has finally been freed from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value. The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. Irreversible time initially appeared at the societal level as a narrative of events. The bourgeoisie brought irreversible time to the masses. Progress became something that we personally experience in the form of rapid technological innovation. It is hard to miss the motion of history when you go from horses to space travel in a single lifetime. History thus became as much about things as events. Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison took their places alongside generals and heads of state in our narrative of who we are and where we’re going. Our notion of progress became dominated by the economic prejudice. We talk about raising the standard of living and lifting people out of poverty - laudable goals, to be sure - but we deliver them from physical privation into deprivation of a different kind. One way that deprivation manifests is in our current conception of time: Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations." As capitalism commoditized time itself, we recreated cyclical time with the standard work week. But this artificial substitute has been about as successful as vegan chicken nuggets. It’s not the same, and it never will be. The workday used to be determined by the work, but now the work is determined by the workday. And everyone has to work, not because we need what they produce, but because we need them to spend - else the whole thing comes crashing down. Irreversible time keeps marching on, giving us new widgets and new wonders, but the continual churn of innovation masks the stifling sameness of spectacular progress. We know something is missing, but we lack the capacity to understand or express the problem. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable. VI. The Coming Revolution Debord spends a good chunk of words describing how the spectacle has affected art [7] and physical space, but you can guess the gist by now. Everything’s fake, everything’s worse, everything’s changing but also the same. The last topic of the book worth discussing is the imminent socialist revolution. Debord walks us through the various ways that Marxism has been done wrong, then attempts to offer an alternative. He goes into a fair amount of detail, but it boils down to this: The anarchists properly rejected society in its entirety, but remained dogmatically attached to a 'one size fits all' mentality and failed to organize in an effective manner.
Inline links: epistemic learned helplessness, Moloch
Open Thread 235
August 01, 2022 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places
August 26, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 240
September 05, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 244
October 02, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 245
October 09, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 248
October 30, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 249
November 06, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 249.5: Challenge Mode
November 10, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 251
November 20, 2022 · Original source
4: The ACX Tokyo meetup group will be hosting Bryan Caplan on December 4, including a discussion of our long-running debate on mental illness (eg here, here). I won’t be able to make it but I trust our Japanese contingent to keep him honest. See here for details.
Inline links: here, here, See here for details
Open Thread 252
November 28, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 254
December 12, 2022 · Original source
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Stage 2 Of Prediction Contest
January 10, 2023 · Original source
The 3295 blind mode answers. Feel free to take the average or otherwise run fancy aggregation algorithms on them. When respondents gave permission, I included their ACX Survey answers. If you want to double-weight people with PhDs, or exclude all Australians, or test whether forecasting accuracy is correlated with how vividly people dream, now you have the data you need.
Inline links: http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2023blindmode_predictions.xlsx
Open Thread 260
January 22, 2023 · Original source
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Book Review Contest Rules 2023
February 02, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 262
February 06, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 264
February 20, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 265
February 26, 2023 · Original source
1: I’m looking for a psychiatrist to cover me at Lorien Psychiatry while I potentially get elective surgery this spring (maybe for one week?). This would involve answering patient messages, refilling prescriptions, and maybe talking to someone over the phone or videochat if there’s an urgent issue. I would be happy to either pay a reasonable amount of money, or cover you in turn when you need it. Must be licensed in the state of California. Please contact me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you’re willing to help, and we’ll work something out. Sorry to advertise this here, but I trust psychiatrists who read ACX more than I would trust whoever I could find on a psychiatry Facebook group.
Open Thread 266
March 06, 2023 · Original source
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Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
[Related: Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?]
Inline links: Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?
For more on why I would think this, see here. But also, consider the many reports by autistic people that having weighted blankets, very tight clothing, or other forms of “thing pressing very hard against the skin” alleviates some of their symptoms. Things pressing very hard against the skin are strong proprioceptive feedback! I think of people with proprioceptive disorders as essentially being under negative one weighted blankets at all times.
Inline links: here, weighted blankets, very tight clothing
Open Thread 270
April 03, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 272
April 17, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 275
May 08, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 276
May 14, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 277
May 22, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 279
June 05, 2023 · Original source
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Your Incentives Are Not The Same As Media Companies'
June 15, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 283
July 02, 2023 · Original source
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
12: Big thanks to Adam Piovarchy, who included me as a coauthor in his recent article in Philosophical Studies, Epistemic Health, Epistemic Immunity, and Epistemic Inoculation. He said he was inspired by old Slate Star Codex posts including Cowpox of Doubt and wanted to give me shared credit. This is a typical example of the process of turning SSC/ACX posts into journal articles, in that 1) you’re completely welcome to do it and 2) I probably won’t contribute anything to the process beyond my permission, sorry.
Inline links: Epistemic Health, Epistemic Immunity, and Epistemic Inoculation, Cowpox of Doubt
13: Sort of distantly related: Roman “bayesyatina” Achisov and a group of Russian ACX fans (don’t you guys have other things to worry about over there?!) have turned my short story Ars Longa, Vita Brevis into a shockingly-professional-feeling short film! Currently only in Russian, sorry, but you can make YouTube awkwardly translate the subtitles by clicking on the gear icon on bottom → Subtitles (CC) → Translate → Auto-Translate → English. If the Translate option doesn’t appear, select Russian subtitles and then try the process again. They say they might have official English subtitles up soon, in which case I’ll link this again, but I’m excited and want to link it now too:
Inline links: Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023 - Call For Organizers
August 01, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 288
August 06, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 290
August 21, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
3: Voting for the Book Review Contest winner closes this Wednesday; this will be your last reminder. If you were a finalist, you should have gotten an email from me asking you for biographical details; if you didn’t, check your spam folder or email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Inline links: Voting for the Book Review Contest winner
Open Thread 294
September 18, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 296
October 02, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 303
November 20, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 306
December 11, 2023 · Original source
6: On Friday I asked people with interesting charitable projects to apply for the new round of ACX Grants. Reading the first few applications, I’m seeing some that would be a better match for angel investors. If you’re in this category and want to see some proposals, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
Inline links: apply for the new round of ACX Grants
Open Thread 307
December 18, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 314
February 05, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 315
February 12, 2024 · Original source
2: Related: I have a few (hopefully very short) questions for an attorney who knows things about charity and tax deductions. I would be happy to pay your normal rate. If you’re willing to help, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. Already got a volunteer, thank you everyone who emailed me!
Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion
February 13, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 316
February 19, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 319
March 11, 2024 · Original source
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Take The 2024 ACX Survey
March 26, 2024 · Original source
Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who’s reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate a bunch of psych findings, and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, whether all our kids are going to have autism, and wisdom of inner crowds.
Inline links: birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, whether all our kids are going to have autism, wisdom of inner crowds
Open Thread 323
April 01, 2024 · Original source
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April 22, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 328
May 06, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 330
May 20, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 332
June 03, 2024 · Original source
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Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday
June 04, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 335
June 24, 2024 · Original source
3: I may have to remove one of the book review finalists, Sixth Day And Other Tales, for voting irregularities. If you wrote the review, please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) so we can try to figure out what happened.
Open Thread 337
July 08, 2024 · Original source
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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
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Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
August 01, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 341
August 05, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 342
August 12, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 344
August 26, 2024 · Original source
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Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe
August 30, 2024 · Original source
But what about the regional authorities and their “sound logic”? They had asked for an exorcist and got an egghead. In today’s parlance, the regional authorities and the good doctor had competing established priors. They saw the same phenomena, e.g., a villager doing acrobatic somersaults while spontaneously bleeding and blaspheming the Lord, and each thereby confirmed their radically different preexisting beliefs. It’s obviously the devil versus it’s clearly a delusion. The battle over how to interpret such phenomena was yet another war, one that had been going on for centuries by the time Dr. Constans finally reached this almost inaccessible valley, the final holdout of the old beliefs. This peculiar incident in the little town of Morzines, encapsulates 1500 years in the psychological history of Europe, and marks one of the final skirmishes in a long, strange campaign: the rise of the spirit of rationalism.
Inline links: established priors
Open Thread 346
September 09, 2024 · Original source
2: I’m interested in holding some kind of AI art Turing test, but I’m not good enough at AI art to do this myself (when I try, the images come out in an obviously AI-ish style, in a way that I’ve seen other AI art users avoid). I was hoping to get a few pictures in the style of old masters, modern art, etc and juxtapose them to real paintings of the same category which are too obscure for most people to recognize. If you think this would be a fun challenge, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. I can at least compensate you for the cost of the AI image generation, and I’m open to negotiating more substantial payment. I have many offers now, thank you!
Open Thread 347
September 16, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 353
October 28, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 356
November 18, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 357
November 25, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 359
December 09, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 360
December 16, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 362
December 30, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 363
January 06, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 364
January 13, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 367
February 03, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 368
February 10, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 369
February 16, 2025 · Original source
1: You might remember TracingWoodgrains winning the 2019 SSC adversarial collaboration contest with his piece on whether schools adequately served advanced students. Six years later, Trace (real name Jack Despain Zhou) and Lillian Tara are starting the Center For Educational Progress, a think tank to promote their agenda (mostly ability tracking). Read the manifesto here. If you’re interested in volunteering, following along, or helping with funding, check out their Discord server.
Inline links: his piece on whether schools, are starting, Center For Educational Progress, here, their Discord server.
4: Sorry, I had to briefly delay announcing the winners of last year’s Metaculus/ACX Forecasting Contest while some scores were recalculated. Here are the ones who responded to my email (if you didn’t get it but should have, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com):
Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025
February 28, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 371
March 03, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 376
April 07, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 377
April 14, 2025 · Original source
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25
April 17, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 381
May 12, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 385
June 09, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 388
June 30, 2025 · Original source
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Your Review: School
July 04, 2025 · Original source
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Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
July 11, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 390
July 14, 2025 · Original source
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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
This graph shows that around 9% of comments will contain at least one token indicating the comment is discussing a sensitive topic, with a range of about 6% to 14%, disregarding the very early years where small sample size made the data more variable. There wasn’t any one ‘sensitive’ token in particular which correlated exceptionally well with the rise and fall of this 6% to 14%, which implies to me that we have correctly identified a general factor of ‘willingness to discuss sensitive topics’ (or possibly that the peaks and troughs correspond to peaks and troughs in the external landscape – ie specific touchpoints and lulls in the Culture War – which would also be fine for the purpose we’re putting it to). This is an imperfect measure because it only tracks if someone is using a sensitive phrase and not whether they are using it in a heretical way (cf. ‘fifty Stalins’ here). However, I thought in the context of ACX posts the approach was probably reasonable – sensitive phrases are only likely to appear if they are being discussed a lot, and we know from the previous section that discussion depth is high both now and during the 2016 peak engagement period. It isn’t necessarily true that deep discussion implies spirited debate - some political discussions on reddit can go into the thousands of comments without anyone ever actually expressing a counter-orthodoxy view – but I think in the specific context of ACX it is reasonable, because we don’t generally have norms of expressing substanceless agreement. Hopefully, therefore, the changing ratio of socially or professionally sensitive phrases to phrases not included in my dictionary would tell us something about the willingness of the comment section to engage in potentially emotive discussions at any point in time. The relationship of occurrence of these tokens to engagement with the comment section is hard to draw clear conclusions from – although the peak does indeed look to be about 2016 or 2017 the data are noisy, and strongly affected by the choice of words to include in my dictionary. I picked the dictionary before I saw the data, but perhaps a different set of words would have given a different result, especially if I had a better way of identifying sensitive discussions around COVID (‘ivermectin’ was the only COVID-related word I could think of that became politicised in the same way ‘microaggression’ or ‘misgender’ did). Nevertheless, I would say this gives some weak support to the idea that 2016 was a turning point in SSC Commentariat free speech norms (and strong support to the idea that the start of ACX was a low point for discussion of sensitive topics) I include below a few specific sensitive phrases which I thought were interesting. Do note the different scales on each graph. Of particular interest to me is the ‘SJW’ graph, which has a really clear peak at exactly the high point of Commentariat engagement. I will return to this graph later in the review. Politeness
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DD3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd75c3c55-0fc8-4c3e-bd67-7d1f406d2df5_723x428.png
Open Thread 394
August 11, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend and new readers can hear about the meetups. This is one of those times.
Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running ACX Everywhere, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.
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
Open Thread 397
September 01, 2025 · Original source
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Berkeley Meetup This Tuesday
September 07, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 399
September 15, 2025 · Original source
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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 400
September 22, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 402
October 06, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 404
October 20, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 409
November 24, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 410
December 01, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 411
December 08, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 414
December 29, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 420
February 09, 2026 · Original source
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Open Thread 423
March 02, 2026 · Original source
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Open Thread 425
March 16, 2026 · Original source
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Open Thread 427
March 30, 2026 · Original source
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ACX49 mentions across 49 issues

ACX is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 49 times across 49 issues between April 26, 2021 and March 04, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "ACX is earning more money than it is right now"; "It’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done"; "I'm planning on letting people survey the ACX readership". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Scott, Substack.

Article page
ACX
Mention count
49
Issue count
49
First seen
April 26, 2021
Last seen
March 04, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
April 26, 2021 · Original source
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. This year I’m really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021.
Inline links: make predictions, score them
BLOG 86. ACX is earning more money than it is right now: 70% 87. [redacted]: 10% 88. [redacted]: 50% 89. [redacted]: 20% 90. There is another article primarily about SSC/ACX/me in a major news source: 10% 91. I subscribe to at least 5 new Substacks (so total of 8): 20% 92. I've read and reviewed How Asia Works: 90% 93. I've read and reviewed Nixonland: 70% 94. I've read and reviewed Scout Mindset: 60% 95. I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books: 50% 96. I've started and am at least 25% of the way through the formal editing process for Unsong: 30% 97. Unsong is published: 10% 98. I've written at least five chapters of some non-Unsong book I hope to publish: 40% 99. [redacted] wins the book review contest: 60% 100. I run an ACX reader survey: 50% 101. I run a normal ACX survey (must start, but not necessarily finish, before end of year): 90% 102. By end of year, some other post beats NYT commentary for my most popular post: 10% 103. I finish and post the culture wars essay I'm working on: 90% 104. I finish and post the climate change essay I'm working on: 80% 105. I finish and post the CO2 essay I'm working on: 80% 106. I have a queue of fewer than ten extra posts: 70%
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Then there’s something like the CNBC effect. Why did stock prices increase/decrease on any random day? Intelligent people don’t think like this, but there is demand for “analysis” of such questions. Some people go so far as to say that it’s the same reason that Wall Street provides market research; the demand is there, so someone will sell it. It reminds me of a story I heard from Reason columnist Ron Bailey. When he was selling The End of Doom, an agent asked him to change his thesis, because optimism doesn’t sell, whereas doom could make him a very rich author. I very much doubt that Zeihan created his analysis in order to arrive at the conclusion that we’re going to see a global Disorder over the next decade, 11 but once you see structural incentives it’s hard to banish them from your thoughts (see also, Meditations on Moloch).
Inline links: 11, Meditations on Moloch
[This is the eleventh 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 several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Inline links: point 3 here
Open Thread 178
June 28, 2021 · Original source
2. In case you missed it, I'm planning on letting people survey the ACX readership, especially researchers doing some kind of psychology/social sciences project. Somebody mentioned that my previous timeline might have been overly ambitious because some people might need to run questions by an IRB first. If that's you, please send me an email saying so, so that I can consider whether to lengthen my timeline.
Inline links: letting people survey the ACX readership
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). You can see the full list here, and I’ll also have it below in case you can’t access the spreadsheet for some reason.
Inline links: request for, You can see the full list here
GDAŃSK, POLAND (RSVP) Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18 Location: Park Akademicki opposite the Opera Bałtycka Coordinates: https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans
Boston Meetup This Sunday
September 04, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Lisbon Meetup This Saturday
September 17, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Will Jarvis and Lars Doucet, $55,000, to create an automated land value assessment model for two Pennsylvania counties. You all know Lars as the guy who keeps writing guest posts here about Georgism. Now he wants to take it to the next level and start building tools for the Georgist future. This program would act as proof of concept that counties can assess land value relatively easily and accurately. I was on the fence about funding it because they can create a beautiful program with 100% success and then counties can just continue to not be Georgist for the same reasons as usual. I'm going ahead with it because I trust Lars who believes this is the best way forward, and because it seems like the sort of thing that could eventually grow into a Georgist think tank at some point in the future. They’re interested in talking to anyone who has experience in mass appraisal, Georgist or not, as well as applied data scientists and machine learning researchers. Fill out this form here if that’s you. You can follow their progress at https://gameofrent.com/
Inline links: guest posts here about Georgism, this form here, https://gameofrent.com/
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Inline links: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
BLOG 86. ACX is earning more money than it is right now: 70% 87. [redacted]: 10% 88. [redacted]: 50% 89. [redacted]: 20% 90. There is another article primarily about SSC/ACX/me in a major news source: 10% 91. I subscribe to at least 5 new Substacks (so total of 8): 20% 92. I've read and reviewed How Asia Works: 90% 93. I've read and reviewed Nixonland: 70% 94. I've read and reviewed Scout Mindset: 60% 95. I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books: 50% 96. I've started and am at least 25% of the way through the formal editing process for Unsong: 30% 97. Unsong is published: 10% 98. I've written at least five chapters of some non-Unsong book I hope to publish: 40% 99. “On The Natural Faculties” wins the book review contest: 60% 100. I run an ACX reader survey: 50% 101. I run a normal ACX survey (must start, but not necessarily finish, before end of year): 90% 102. By end of year, some other post beats NYT commentary for my most popular post: 10% 103. I finish + post Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars: 90% 104. I finish + post Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change: 80% 105. I finish + post Carbon Costs Quantified: 80% 106. I have a queue of fewer than ten extra posts: 70%
Inline links: Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars, Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change, Carbon Costs Quantified
Two Small Corrections And Updates
February 08, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Irvine Meetup This Monday
April 16, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Birth Order Effects: Nature vs. Nurture
June 01, 2022 · Original source
Source here; thanks to Emile for the graph That is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50). This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren’t really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in physics Nobelists and great mathematicians (and potentially Harvard philosophy students). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!) Followup research by Less Wrong user “Bucky” determined that the effect fell off with age gaps; the closer in age you are to your sibling, the stronger an effect birth order has: I continue to be confused by this extremely strong effect which most of what we know about psychology says shouldn’t exist. So in 2020, I asked my readership some even more complicated questions about their family situations, in the hopes of teasing out why this is happening. I’ll be honest - I think I over-reached here. I’m not very good at statistics, and this is a weird statistical problem: the dependent variable is whether the case ended up in the sample at all! I wasn’t able to figure out a good way to use most of the data you gave me. And the stuff I did use, I mostly made work by slicing and dicing so much that the sample size got pretty low, even when I started from 8,000 survey respondents. I’m publishing this in the hopes that it will inspire someone else will more domain knowledge to do a sophisticated re-analysis. But for now, here’s what I’ve got. Confirming Old Results With The 2020 Dataset The 2020 dataset also shows a strong birth order effect in people who read this blog. In 2018, among people with exactly one sibling, respondents were 2.51x more likely to be the older sibling than the younger (72%). In 2020, the number was 2.39x (71%). Change with age gap is shown below: Note truncated y-axis This seems to be broadly similar to the 2018 results. There was an anomaly in 2018 where some categories seemed to drop off surprisingly quickly between 7 and 8 years, which I thought might be meaningful. But Bucky’s analysis showed this was probably a coincidence, and indeed it doesn’t show up in the new data. Does Sex Matter For Birth Order Effects? I wondered if there might be a smaller birth order effect for people with opposite-sex siblings. One possible explanation for the birth order effect is children trying to get out of the “shadow” of their older sibling and differentiate themselves in some way. But children are already pretty different from an opposite-sex sibling and might feel less pressure in that situation. But this doesn’t seem to be true. The percent firstborns in sibships of two on the survey was 70% among people with a same-sex sibling, and 71% among people with an opposite-sex sibling; no real difference. Do Biological Or Social Factors Produce Birth Order Effects? All previous results are for biological siblings. But it might be worth asking the question separately for biological vs. social siblings. One could imagine either biological or social causes of the birth order effect. For example, some biologists speculate that pregnancy depletes choline, that it takes a long time for choline stores to recover, and that a second child born within that window will have less choline available to build their nervous system, which could be bad. But also: maybe if you have an older sibling, your parents can’t pay as much attention to you when you’re a kid, and you learn less. This was very hard to test for. Again, I wasn’t able to use traditional statistical tests because I’m trying to determine whether someone was in the sample at all, rather than whether two variables are related. It was easy to check normal birth order because I could compare people with exactly one older sibling to people with exactly one younger. It was harder to do with things like adoption in the mix, because that could introduce a bias: are parents more likely to adopt out their first child (because that’s when they’re most unprepared for parenting)? Are adoptive parents more likely to adopt when they already have children of their own (because they’re comfortable with child-rearing) or less likely (because they really want kids and can’t have them biologically)? I had no way of getting controls for these questions and so I couldn’t do a lot of the analyses I wanted. But I did two relatively weak analyses instead: First, I took the entire set of people in weird situations - people who said their number of social siblings was not the same as their number of biological siblings. In this group of 174 people, biological firstborns made up only 61% of respondents with one sibling, notably less than the 71% in the entire sample. That suggests that the unusual social situations are having an effect. You shouldn’t update on the fact that it’s still higher than 50%, because some of the people’s weird social situations don’t affect their status as social firstborns. Second, I tried to compare people who were firstborn under a biological definition but not a social definition, to people in the opposite situation. There were 40 people in the sample who were biological but not social firstborns, and 60 people who were social but not biological firstborns. Again, this suggests that social firstborn-ness is more important as an explanation than biological firstbornness, although it doesn’t rule out the latter having some effect. I additionally tried to compare two different types of social firstbornness - one where no older siblings lived in the house when you were growing up, and one where your parents had never parented another child. There weren’t many people discordant on these two measures (29 vs. 20 respectively), but for what it’s worth, the ratio was in favor of the first type. Since I wasn’t very confident in my analytical abilities here, I asked Bucky, who knows more and who did good work analyzing the last dataset, to look into this (we worked independently and didn’t tell each other our results until we were done). He writes: It seems to me that the effect is entirely caused by social siblings. I filtered for only people with 1+ biological but 0 social siblings. There were 24 oldest biological children in this group vs 21 2nd children (or 25 youngest children with a large overlap between 2nd oldest and youngest groups). This significantly differed from the ~0.7 fraction of older children in the general surveys (p<0.05 or p<0.01 depending on whether I use the 2nd oldest or youngest as the comparison) and is close to a 1:1 ratio. I then filtered for only people with 0 biological but 1+ social siblings. There were 51 oldest social children and 23 2nd children (or 26 youngest children again with large overlap). This differs significantly from a 1:1 ratio (p<0.001 or p<0.01) and matches pretty well with the 70% of the Birth order effect. I tried doing some filtering by age gap (2-7 years) and the results were compatible with the same result, although the sample sizes got too small to really conclude anything. For dealing with answers left blank I treated them as 0 unless it looked like the whole section had been missed out. If I ignored any respondents who left something blank I got similar results (smaller sample size but ratios are even further in favour of the social hypothesis). I checked for categorisation errors by looking at respondents’ descriptions of their families and they mainly matched pretty well with the numbers given so I think the data should be considered reliable. I did chuck a couple of results out which seemed unreliable and there was one row which was a repeat so your numbers might not match up exactly (plus you have the non-public data). There are a couple of confounders in the analysis such as whether e.g. oldest children are more likely to be adopted or how much you know about your birth family depending on how old one was when the family unit changed etc. I don’t see a realistic way to account for these but I also can’t see any of them being big enough to explain the difference in the results. Hopefully this matches up with what you found! I think this suggests birth order effects are social rather than biological. So What Causes Birth Order Effects? Based on this analysis, it seems unlikely they are biological. Based on my very weak sub-analysis, and on their tendency to decay with larger age gaps, it seems they have more to do with the social presence of a sibling in the house than with any changes in parenting style (ie your parents learn to parent differently). Two explanations that satisfy both those criteria: Parents are able to devote their full attention to parenting their first child, but only half of their attention to parenting their second. Firstborns get more quality time with their parents during the first few years of childhood.
Inline links: here, physics Nobelists, great mathematicians, Harvard philosophy students, Followup research, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jKaz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4995a838-7372-40dc-8e51-1b35c811bd43_523x388.png, some even more complicated questions about their family situations, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CMuv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8042c21d-a6b7-48f9-bbcc-daf8c136953c_497x339.png
Finally, other people might be able to extract more signal out of this than I was. If you’re interested, you can find the raw data, the original question list, and a description of how to use them here. Note that a few people refused permission for me to republish their data, so you will probably get slightly different numbers than I did.
Inline links: here
The average SSC reader is white and 33 years old, so we should expect a twinning rate of 2.4%. But in fact it should be a bit higher than this, because the two strongest risk factors for twinship are maternal age and maternal propensity to use IVF. Maternal age is highly correlated with education (it often means a mother waited to finish a degree before having children) and our readership is nothing if not eager to use new birth-related technologies. So we should expect to have significantly more twins than average. But in fact we have fewer. This isn’t a giant difference, but I think it supports the hypothesis at least a little.
Inline links: with education, eager to use new birth-related technologies
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
There are two active prediction markets [1, 2] (that I know of) related to the question of the pandemic’s origins. As Scott noted in a recent ACX post, these markets are not straightforward predictions of whether the pandemic began in a lab or not. Rather, they’re predictions about what specific institutions will conclude about the pandemic origins, so they’re kind of tangentially related to the real underlying question.
Inline links: 1, 2, recent ACX post
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 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 one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley
October 13, 2022 · Original source
Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
Inline links: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
2: And Marc writes:
Inline links: writes
3: Katherine Singleton writes:
Inline links: writes
Open Thread 260
January 22, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 265
February 26, 2023 · Original source
1: I’m looking for a psychiatrist to cover me at Lorien Psychiatry while I potentially get elective surgery this spring (maybe for one week?). This would involve answering patient messages, refilling prescriptions, and maybe talking to someone over the phone or videochat if there’s an urgent issue. I would be happy to either pay a reasonable amount of money, or cover you in turn when you need it. Must be licensed in the state of California. Please contact me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you’re willing to help, and we’ll work something out. Sorry to advertise this here, but I trust psychiatrists who read ACX more than I would trust whoever I could find on a psychiatry Facebook group.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: We have seven project proposals for the Forecasting Mini-Grants Round and are still looking for more. And Manifund has published a document explaining their auction mechanism.
Inline links: Forecasting Mini-Grants Round, their auction mechanism
Open Thread 266
March 06, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Open Thread 272
April 17, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: New spring meetups added since I first posted the list: Barcelona, Bloomington, Brno, Budapest, Cambridge (UK), Canberra, Grinnell, Halifax, Mexico City, Prague, Tel Aviv. Check the list for dates and times. And most meetups should now be displayed on the map on the Less Wrong Community page.
Inline links: spring meetups, the map on the Less Wrong Community page
Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
Original post: Replication Attempt - Bisexuality And Long COVID
Inline links: Replication Attempt - Bisexuality And Long COVID
Peter Gerdes asks:
Inline links: asks
Chris Phoenix writes:
Inline links: writes
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
An alternative answer was put in a nice metaphor by Scott Alexander himself.
Inline links: Scott Alexander himself
I’ve been suggesting a critique, or waving my hand in the direction of one, but let me tell you how much there is in this book. There’s the introduction to the basic theory of cultural evolution – the psychology that lets humans have cultures and how ideas can transmit themselves down generations. There’s the definition of WEIRD psychology, including dispositionalism (the tendency to explain people’s actions by their innate character), and the tendency to categorize rabbits with cats not carrots; and the fact that even the famous Big Five traits of personality psychology don’t generalize very well beyond the WEIRD countries. There’s a taxonomy of the institutions that help human groups scale up their cooperation, starting with unilineal clans – the basic unit of intensive kinship, and the blind alley that most human societies got stuck in, on Henrich’s account – and including segmented lineages, age sets and premodern chiefdoms and states. (This is a very scientific, comparative approach to anthropology. I would love to hear a debate between Henrich and David Wengrow, whose book The Dawn of Everything, reviewed in ACX here, takes a much more voluntarist approach, starting from the view that there are many ways to organize a society, and that rational collective institutional design is pretty much a human universal.)
Inline links: here
Open Thread 290
August 21, 2023 · Original source
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1: ACX Grantees Will Jarvis and Lars Doucet (the Georgism guy!) report "tremendous progress" on their company ValueBase, which helps governments implement Georgist land value taxes. They describe partnerships with a major US city and a foreign country (they're not ready to say which ones just yet) and an upcoming research paper. They got their pre-seed funding from Sam Altman, but are now raising a seed round to scale up operations (looking for seven-figure amounts). Please email will@valuebase.co if you're interested.
Inline links: the Georgism guy!, from Sam Altman, will@valuebase.co
2: Comments on this month’s links: EATS act (banning California from putting animal welfare standards on meat) is definitely constitutional (1, 2); defense of Republican concerns that PEPFAR money is being used to promote abortion (1, 2).
Inline links: 1, 2, 1, 2
Open Thread 296
October 02, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: Comment of the week: <0174 discusses the increasing Czech fertility rates link.
Inline links: <0174 discusses the increasing Czech fertility rates link.
How Are The Gay Younger Brothers Doing?
October 04, 2023 · Original source
Can H-Y antigens explain the other birth order effects found on the ACX survey (and general firstborn advantage in math, physics, etc)? It’s a tempting hypothesis, since math, physics, and the ACX readership are all disproportionately male, and any process which gave people less-male-typical brains would drive people away from these things. But I found that the ACX birth order effect was social and not biological, and a Norwegian team found the same on their own data. Meanwhile, Bogaert’s study found the homosexuality effect was biological and not social. I don’t entirely trust either set of conclusions, but as long as they both stand, they weakly suggest these are different effects.
Inline links: the other birth order effects found on the ACX survey, math, physics, I found that the ACX birth order effect was social and not biological, a Norwegian team found the same on their own data
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
So far I am planning to contribute $250,000 of my own money. I have nonbinding commitments for an extra $70,000 from other people, for a total of $320,000. If you’re interested in helping, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
If you’re interested in helping fund these grants, you can talk to me at scott@slatestarcodex.com
ACX Grants is a microgrants program where I help fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. You can see the 2022 cohort here and my 2022 retrospective here.
Inline links: here, here
In The Long Run, We're All Dad
December 22, 2023 · Original source
My poor, fragile, little cognitive engines! These, then, will be the twin imperatives of your life: surprisal minimization and active inference. If your brains are still too small to process such esoteric terms, there are others available. Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam; your mother’s ancestors called them Truth and Beauty; your current social sphere calls them Rationality and Effective Altruism. You will learn other names, too: no perspective can exhaust their infinite complexity. Whatever you call them, your lives will be spent in their service, pursuing them even unto that far-off and maybe-mythical point where they blur into One.
Inline links: surprisal minimization, active inference
But a parable: when you were born, your mother kissed you. Along with the kiss came a microdose of the BCS3-L1 genetically engineered bacterium. Without any teeth to cling to, it fell into the pit of your stomach and died. But she’ll kiss you again and again, transferring a few more BCS3-LI each time. In a few months, one of the colonists will find an incipient tooth and hang on for dear life. It will fight off competitors, wage epic battles that will determine the fate of the mouth for decades to come. It will win, because its genetic enhancements are pretty good. Then, if some smart people got their calculations right, it will do exactly nothing. No tooth decay. No cavities. The teeth will stay safe and clean.
Inline links: the BCS3-L1 genetically engineered bacterium
There is a secret known only to parents of twins, medical residents, and Alexey Guzey: the human body does not actually need sleep. After 31 hours awake, you get an integer overflow in God’s database and go back to being well-rested again. Also you gain the ability to see angels.
Inline links: Alexey Guzey, an integer overflow
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
38: Related: Oakland teachers union stages “teach-in” where teachers urge students to support Palestine and protest Israel during class time; Jewish students / families feel unsafe and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools. Some friends recently set up a tiny home/private school in Oakland that can fit another few 5-9 year olds, tuition ~$1200/month, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you want an introduction.
Inline links: and flee the district to neighboring districts and charter schools
13: Related: optimists.ai (led by Nora Belrose and Quintin Pope, previously discussed here) is like e/acc, except they’ve thought about it a lot and sometimes make good arguments. I endorse them (as good people to read; I’m still not sure to what degree I agree with them). If you want to do some kind of both sides debate thing, these would be the people I would contact first.
Inline links: optimists.ai, here
15: Ancient Germanic kingdoms used to devise mythical genealogies linking their royal families to Odin. And lots of ethnically-Northern-European people are descended from ancient Germanic kings. Combine these facts, and you can chart the 55-generation line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden. I think this has actually made me 0.0001% prouder to be an American. The bottom of the chart is Joe Biden’s real relatives, and the top is the real mythological line of Anglo-Saxon kings, but is the middle accurate? I notice it traces Biden’s ancestry much further than most credible articles on the subject, which go up to the Taylors at best. But it seems to be drawing off of this genealogy database. If there’s a fake step in there somewhere, I can’t tell where it is [UPDATE: in the comments, The Genealogian identifies the fake steps]
Inline links: the 55-generation line of descent from Odin to Joe Biden, this genealogy database, The Genealogian identifies the fake steps
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
If your name is below, you should have received an email with further information. If you didn’t, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com, and include the phrase “this is a genuine non-spam message” in the text. Unless my email specifically mentioned you as an exception, Manifund will be handling payments and you’ll hear from them soon.
Gene Smith5, $20,000, to create an open-source polygenic predictor for educational attainment and intelligence. You upload your 23andMe results, it tells your your (predicted) IQ. Technology hasn’t advanced to the point where this will be any good - even if everything goes perfectly, the number it gives you will have only the most tenuous connection to your actual IQ (and everyone on Gene’s team agrees with this claim). I’m funding it anyway. Partly this is because there are some things you can use even a very bad IQ predictor for, like studies that aggregate a lot of people’s genetic information. Partly it’s because people are already using closed-source IQ predictors for various things, and I think (ceteris paribus) anything closed source should be open source on general principles. But partly it’s because after this technology gets good, there’s going to be a big debate over whether the public should be allowed to access it, and I intend to win that fight before it starts.
Inline links: 5, ceteris paribus
Elaine Perlman, $50,000, to lobby for changes in the laws around kidney donation. I discussed this further in part VIII here: there’s a severe shortage of organs, and the easiest way to solve it is to let the government give people tax breaks for organ donation. Elaine works with the Coalition To Modify NOTA, a group of doctors, donors, recipients, and others who are fighting to turn this into law via the End Kidney Deaths Act.
Inline links: here, Coalition To Modify NOTA
Book Review Contest Rules 2024
March 02, 2024 · Original source
Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Inline links: last year’s finalists and winners, 1, 2, 3
Open Thread 326
April 22, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
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
2: Possible correction by Natalia to my Lumina post: there might not have been three different trials, my objections here, Natalia’s response here. I am still confused by this situation, for the reasons discussed.
Inline links: there might not have been three different trials, here, here
Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
June 14, 2024 · Original source
Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: as
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Open Thread 335
June 24, 2024 · Original source
3: I may have to remove one of the book review finalists, Sixth Day And Other Tales, for voting irregularities. If you wrote the review, please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) so we can try to figure out what happened.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: New subscriber only post, The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made, on my very early experience as a parent. Current plan is to make most parenting posts subscriber-only to prevent too much information about my kids from getting all over the Internet, sorry.
Inline links: The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[a t]gm ail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau
Open Thread 352
October 21, 2024 · Original source
5: I am also being asked to advertise NOAI, a conference in New Orleans. It seems to be a joint project of many local philosophical and cultural groups, including the local ACX meetup. There will be AI content, chess boxing, a charitable donation game, and an afterparty at Francis Ford Coppola’s house (I will be disappointed if it’s not made of Megalon). Astral Codex Ten is listed as a sponsor, but I want to clarify that this is the local meetup group only and that I know nothing about it besides what’s listed here. That having been said, I am prepared to endorse it for a sufficient payment in Megalon.
Inline links: NOAI
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: New post for paid subscribers, Mostleastremarkablegate And The Nature Of Online Harassment.
Inline links: Mostleastremarkablegate And The Nature Of Online Harassment
Open Thread 360
December 16, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
2: In honor of my children turning one, new subscriber-only post this week, The Innocent And The Beautiful Have No Enemy But Time.
Inline links: The Innocent And The Beautiful Have No Enemy But Time
Open Thread 364
January 13, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here.
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
Falsifiability doesn’t just break down in weird situations outside the observable universe. It breaks down in every real world problem! It’s true that “there’s no such thing as dinosaurs, the Devil just planted fake fossils” isn’t falsifiable. But “dinosaurs really existed, it wasn’t just the Devil planting fake fossils” is exactly equally unfalsifiable. It’s a double-edged sword! The reason you believe in dinosaurs and not devils is because you have lots of great tools other than falsifiability, and in fact you never really use the falsifiability tool at all. I write a bunch more about this here and here.
Inline links: here, here
[Original thread here: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.]
Inline links: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.
Nevin Climenhaga writes:
Inline links: writes
Open Thread 371
March 03, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: In Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist, I speculated that someone might be able to mathematically model identity polarization. In response, Harihar Prasad made an Identity Alignment Simulation app.
Inline links: Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist, Identity Alignment Simulation
Open Thread 381
May 12, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: ACX meetups this week in Bengaluru, Mexico City, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, and Denver. See the post for details.
Inline links: the post
2: Remember, the due date for the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is TODAY, May 12. I will keep accepting entries until the end of the day, Pacific time, then start working on getting things organized so you can vote for finalists.
Inline links: Everything-Except-Book Review Contest
Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday
June 03, 2025 · Original source
Why: Our usual spring meetups session, plus lots of out-of-state people in town for Manifest.
Inline links: spring meetups, Manifest
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
If that’s you, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I’ll put you in touch.
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Inline links: late 2021, early 2024, one-year updates
No update received this year, but see the 2022 update here.
Inline links: here
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
This graph shows that around 9% of comments will contain at least one token indicating the comment is discussing a sensitive topic, with a range of about 6% to 14%, disregarding the very early years where small sample size made the data more variable. There wasn’t any one ‘sensitive’ token in particular which correlated exceptionally well with the rise and fall of this 6% to 14%, which implies to me that we have correctly identified a general factor of ‘willingness to discuss sensitive topics’ (or possibly that the peaks and troughs correspond to peaks and troughs in the external landscape – ie specific touchpoints and lulls in the Culture War – which would also be fine for the purpose we’re putting it to). This is an imperfect measure because it only tracks if someone is using a sensitive phrase and not whether they are using it in a heretical way (cf. ‘fifty Stalins’ here). However, I thought in the context of ACX posts the approach was probably reasonable – sensitive phrases are only likely to appear if they are being discussed a lot, and we know from the previous section that discussion depth is high both now and during the 2016 peak engagement period. It isn’t necessarily true that deep discussion implies spirited debate - some political discussions on reddit can go into the thousands of comments without anyone ever actually expressing a counter-orthodoxy view – but I think in the specific context of ACX it is reasonable, because we don’t generally have norms of expressing substanceless agreement. Hopefully, therefore, the changing ratio of socially or professionally sensitive phrases to phrases not included in my dictionary would tell us something about the willingness of the comment section to engage in potentially emotive discussions at any point in time. The relationship of occurrence of these tokens to engagement with the comment section is hard to draw clear conclusions from – although the peak does indeed look to be about 2016 or 2017 the data are noisy, and strongly affected by the choice of words to include in my dictionary. I picked the dictionary before I saw the data, but perhaps a different set of words would have given a different result, especially if I had a better way of identifying sensitive discussions around COVID (‘ivermectin’ was the only COVID-related word I could think of that became politicised in the same way ‘microaggression’ or ‘misgender’ did). Nevertheless, I would say this gives some weak support to the idea that 2016 was a turning point in SSC Commentariat free speech norms (and strong support to the idea that the start of ACX was a low point for discussion of sensitive topics) I include below a few specific sensitive phrases which I thought were interesting. Do note the different scales on each graph. Of particular interest to me is the ‘SJW’ graph, which has a really clear peak at exactly the high point of Commentariat engagement. I will return to this graph later in the review. Politeness
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DD3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd75c3c55-0fc8-4c3e-bd67-7d1f406d2df5_723x428.png
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend and new readers can hear about the meetups. This is one of those times.
Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running ACX Everywhere, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.
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
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Several Portuguese newspapers published articles about the event. The most thorough coverage was in O Seculo; there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here. An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here. An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF.
Inline links: here, here, here
The Hindu milk miracle of 1995. Starting from the bottom: In 1995, a man in New Delhi noticed that an idol of the elephant-god Ganesh seemed to be really drinking the glass of milk left as an offering. The story went viral - or as viral as things could go in 1995 - and Hindus around the world noticed the same thing. There was “an increase in overall milk sales in New Delhi by over 30%”. Scientists investigated and determined that a sculpted stone elephant trunk could sometimes absorb milk through capillary action. This was a story about rumor, interpretation, and context, but not really “hallucination”. The drinking effect was real. The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story. Two women reported being attacked by a mysterious and oddly-dressed knifeman; others followed. “Vigilante groups were set up on the streets, and several people, mistakenly assumed to have been the attacker, were beaten up; business in the town was all but shut down”. Although there was a Halifax resident with a history of knife crime, “he was quickly ruled out of the 1938 attacks on account of his large nose, which none of the 1938 victims had described”. Eventually several of the victims admitted to having made it up, and the whole thing went away. Supercriminal cases most often result from people making things up. Occasionally, seemingly-honest people report seeing the supercriminal in poor lighting conditions across a dark alley or something. But even if we consider these to be “hallucinations”, it is usually the one or two most vulnerable people in a town at the time. I can’t find any examples of true “mass hallucinations” - entire towns seeing a nonexistent supercriminal or monster at the same time. Koro is the psychosomatic disease par excellence; I’ve written about it before here. Victims, always male, believe that their penis has disappeared or retracted into their body; they often blame penis-stealing witches. Koro occurs at some very low background rate in every society (including ours), but occasionally wells up into mass panics in primitive cultures that take witchcraft seriously and have traditions of worrying about this sort of thing. Still, I don’t think any panic ever affects more than half of a village’s males, and usually not at the exact same time; it’s a smoldering panic over days or weeks, not a single instant of horrified realization. Also, although I’m not sure and would love to learn more about this, I don’t think the koro victim is having a visual hallucination of not having a penis at all. I think they think their penis is much smaller or shorter than it should be - which only requires some sort of obsessive worrying and (perhaps motivated) mis-remembering of its normal length. None of these are “mass hallucinations” in the sense where the sorts of visual hallucinations typical of certain mentally ill people occur en masse in a crowd of thousands with >50% prevalence - that is, the type of mass hallucination that would be required to explain Fatima. As far as I know, there are no confirmed cases of this ever happening. Still, from the Hindu milk miracle, we can learn that religious people can miss a real phenomenon for a long time, then notice it all at once with great fanfare. And from the koro cases, we can learn that a rare phenomenon can become more common in situations of widespread belief and social pressure. Interlude: It Seems Like Years Since It’s Been Clear This is around the stopping point of the previous Substack discussion. I’ve tried to cover most of Ethan and Evan’s arguments, go through the chain of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, and maybe pull on a few of the more tempting loose threads that they’ve left. As best I can tell, this level of investigation ends in a decisive victory for the believers. They have a stock of seemingly-unimpeachable testimonies; the skeptics have only a few leads that don’t seem on track to pan out. Eye damage can maybe produce a few odd effects, but - in the entire history of tens of billions of people living daily underneath a sun that they are able to view at any moment - we have not yet found anyone who reports the full constellation of Fatima experiences just from seeing the sun. No exotic weather phenomenon is a perfect match. Mass hallucinations are real but comparatively weak. At least this is my assessment. Skeptic blogs don’t agree. They propose one of these things (with no consensus as to which one) then act like they’ve debunked the miracle, then skip to the really important part: laughing at how obviously wrong it is. I’ve written before about my disappointment in the skeptical community and why it worries me, and here I feel it as acutely as ever. Sitting with my disappointment and trying to put it into words, I think my worries come down to a tangling of the Bayesian graph. The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous. This is liberating. It lets you say “This piece of evidence is very strong, but my prior is very low, so even without being able to debunk the evidence, I continue to disbelieve.” But doing this the straightforward Bayesian way doesn’t work. First of all, what would it mean to naively (even before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles) say Fatima seems 90% likely to be miraculous. Before factoring in that you don’t believe in miracles, surely the probability is much higher! But also, if you try this, then as soon as you find two similar miracles (I’ve been told the next two are the Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio and the Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg) your probability of God goes up to 88%! But I don’t think there’s any real atheist whose probability would rise in such a straightforward linear way. You need some kind of model where either it’s almost trivially possible to generate an arbitrary number of convincing-yet-false miracles, or it isn’t. But this doesn’t match the “virtuous” approach of addressing each miracle on its own terms - where you try to understand the Sun Miracle by learning things about the sun, or entoptic phenomena, or 1910s Portugal. And it does match the skeptical approach I’m complaining about, where you say “it’s probably swamp gas or something, lol, imagine being so dumb that you believe in miracles.” So I cannot object too strongly. Still, my greatest fear in this and all other problems of reasoning method is the trapped prior, where people take this too far and become impervious to evidence entirely. I think it’s worth untangling the whole Bayesian graph, trying to keep this whole structure in mind, if it prevents people from accidentally propagating an update down a logical chain, then propagating the same update back up the chain, again and again, ad infinitum, until they become arbitrarily sure of themselves. “We can be sure all miracle claims, even the convincing ones, are false, because there’s no God - and we can be sure there’s no God because all miracle claims are so risibly false.” Even if this is harmless - even if it turns out correct in the case of religion - it teaches such dangerous habits of mind that I’m willing to err in the direction of going way too far taking such claims seriously - at least in the “entertaining an idea without accepting it” sense. Everyone gets to decide what is and isn’t worth their time. I think deciding that these sorts of miracles aren’t worth your time is fine, as long as you’re propagating all the probabilities correctly and not accidentally treating your own hurriedness as a cause to update the rest of your belief graph. As for me, I don’t know, I just find this fascinating. In Evan’s skeptical take on the conversation, he starts strong, but after the topic switches to Part LXXVII of Dalleur’s discussion of photograph angles, he stops and asks: What the fuck are we doing? What are we talking about? What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on? We’re addressing what Stanley Jaki called the most important event of the 20th century! We’re debating the existence of God, the most important question possible! If God is real, then nothing could be more important than establishing this: in the best case, we will come to believe; at worst, we will be able to tell St. Peter that our failure was honest and not from lack of trying. If He is not, then we can do whatever we want here on Earth, and surely one of the noblest ways to spend our short existence is expanding the frontiers of the known into the borderlands of mystery! In particular, if the God of Fatima exists, we are in deep trouble. I said I wouldn’t talk about exactly what the Virgin Mary told the child-seers, but the short version is that the First Secret was a very, very nasty vision of Hell. It looked exactly the way a ten-year-old child might expect: a lake of fire populated by ebon-skinned demons and horrendous tortures; the lead child-seer said that if the Virgin had not begun by promising that she personally would never go there, “she would have died of fright”. As it was, the consequences of the vision were grim. The child-seers got it into their minds that they could perhaps save sinners from the fire by “doing penance”. They drank only stagnant, scum-encrusted water, in the hopes that this might help some otherwise hell-bound soul; on some especially hot days, they ceased drinking water at all. When they found particularly painful ropes, they tied them around their bodies so hard that they bled (later, the Virgin mercifully told them they didn’t need to wear the ropes at night - they could stick to daytime only). After so many mortifications, they were easy prey for the Spanish Flu; two of the three perished before their tenth birthday. As they lay dying in the hospital, they were recorded as freaking out every time they saw a nurse or visitor with “immodest dress”, saying that they would not act in such a way if they knew how long Eternity was, or what awaited them there5. If all of this is the true opinion of the Lord of the Universe, we had better figure it out quick. If it isn’t, then the words of the Grupo Anticlerical: People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured . . . O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs! …take on new meaning and urgency. I will admit my bias: I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue, and therefore I must also hope the Miracle of the Sun was a fake. But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused. If at this point you’re also scared and confused, then I’ve done my job as a writer and successfully presented the key insight of Rationalism: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless it could go either way”. But now that we’ve let Ethan, Evan, and the rest dig us into as deep a hole as possible, let’s try to dig our way out. 3: Our Lady Of Everywhere Else One question that Ethan, Evan, and Dalleur fail to ask is: what if people are basically always seeing the sun spin and change colors and and fall from the sky? What if this is the most common experience in the world? What if it’s a minor miracle every time you get more than a handful of people together and they don’t fall down in awe and terror at the manifestations of the sun? Goncado Xavier de Almeida Garrett is one of the star witnesses of the Fatima miracle, quoted above. His testimony comes from a letter written to Father Formigao, a local priest, about two months after the event. But although pro-Fatima sources quote the testimony at the beginning of the letter, they conveniently leave out what follows: I ask your excellency to please tell me if you confirm this narrative: the Bishop of Portalegre and Mrs. Maria de Jesus Raposo report that while they were with other people in Torres Novas, on the 20th of October at the end of the day, they saw the sun rotate and change its colors. They said this was different from Fátima and did not have the importance of October 13th. I would like clarification on the differences. It is urgent to know what the differences are, since they attended both […] Until now, no one saw the sun's sparkling rotations, and now everyone sees them many days and many times. Many days and many times? Remember, the Virgin Mary first appeared at Fatima on May 13. She promised to return on the 13th of each successive month until October, when she would perform a great miracle. But she never said she wouldn’t perform any miracles until October. So on the 13th of each month, a medium-sized crowd gathered. They didn’t leave disappointed. I won’t include every claimed supernatural occurrence, but here are the ones relevant to our subject: Olimpia de Jesus, about July 13: [On July 13], at her sister-in-law's house, when they heard the people shouting, he asked, "What's going on over there?" [Olimpia] looked at the sun and said, "The sun is different." The people came and reported that they had seen signs in the sun and in the sky. Joaquim Inacio Vicente, about August 13: This hour was a moment of terror for all who were there. Some lost their senses, others believed it to be the last day of their lives and their day of Judgment, and for some, afterwards, it was a wonder to see the admirable colors that successively took on the clouds that obscured the sun's rays—colors from bright red to pink and from there to blue—the color of anise, as several people declared to me minutes later in my home. Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, about August 13: Everyone looked up at the sky, which was covered by a light cloud, like a very fine white lace, pink in places. The sun, which had been completely hidden for a moment, left us illuminated by a strange light, with yellow spots visible on the ground and above us all, and a great drop in temperature, as happens during a solar eclipse. Manuel Pedro Marto, about August 13 and September 13: [On August 13, he] saw a kind of luminous globe rotating in the clouds […] On September 13th, he also went to Cova da Iria. He was a little away from the children. He saw nothing, nor heard anything, but he heard that some people had seen extraordinary things in the atmosphere. Joaquim Xavier Tuna, about August 13 and September 13: On the 13th of August, I saw the sun lower in the sky at the hour of its appearance. It never lowered as much as that time, not even on October 13th. All the objects around me turned yellow. On September 13th, I saw a large cross emerge from the sun and head east. Its progress was not very hurried. Sometimes it appeared, sometimes it disappeared, until it disappeared from view. I also saw other things that I cannot explain. In the Lapas area, there were people who, at the same time, saw the cross. Then there was the great miracle on October 13. Remember, I was only able to find a handful of negative testimonies - people who said they didn’t see it. One was from a woman named Leonor das Dores Salema Manoel, who said she saw “nothing of what others saw”, at least at Fatima. But on the drive home from Fatima that evening6: I saw [the sun] pass through different colors that I can't remember and it turned green, very light green, like a green salad with a golden rim around it, and spinning. Very long rays seemed to touch the earth and the sun seemed to be separated from the sky. Then the sky took on pink flashes, changing to a yellowish hue around the sun, and further away, spots here and there. After a few long moments that I can't remember, it returned to normal and I couldn't look at it again. The next occurence was early the following year. From the parish inquiry’s interview with Jacinto de Almedia Lopes: He further said that on the day of Our Lady of Purification, that is, on the second of February, 1918, he about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, being in the same place, he noticed signs in the sun identical to those of the thirteenth of October, which he had not noticed on many other days when he had been there. And next, from a letter by Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos: I must inform you that I went to Fátima on [June 13, 1920]… at that very moment, the people were kneeling on the ground, shouting, praying loudly, weeping, begging forgiveness with their hands raised, because they were witnessing a solar phenomenon similar to that of October 13, 1917. And next, from Dr. Henrique Weiss de Oliviera, describing events on May 13, 1923: I ate my meal in a car on the road near Cova da Iria [in Fatima], from half past noon to one in the afternoon, and when I returned to the Chapel, I heard the groups I passed exclaiming in admiration about a marvelous phenomenon that they claimed was occurring in the sun toward which they were directing their gaze. Deeply doubting the repetition of the marvelous phenomena that had dazzled thousands of people, according to reliable reports, during the last apparition of Our Lady in 1917, I was about to pass on without even bothering to look. I remembered, however, that when I first went to Fátima on October 13th of last year, and upon hearing similar admiring rumors around me, I had seen nothing during my quick inspection, perhaps because I was filled with that spirit of doubt. I therefore wanted to be certain this time so that I could, with full awareness, give my testimony to whoever and whenever I was asked. And, having stopped near a group and stared at the sun, carefully shielding my eyes from the direct sunlight, so as not to see anything, they immediately advised me to insist that I would see something. It took a long insistence to finally see what amazed everyone and caused astonishment that I could not see it. And I saw with precise clarity, and twice, what the common people, in their imaginary language, very accurately likened to: almond blossom petals. They fell from a great height (no longer seeing them detach from the sun as the people around me saw them) For myself, I finally, and after a considerable time, concluded that there is no such natural phenomenon, neither known nor described, thus leaning toward the supernatural. Today I firmly believe that this was the case, because I have had testimonies that allow me to reconstruct the phenomenon as it appears to have occurred according to these testimonies. First, one could gaze at the sun for a long time and with impunity, seeing magnificent phenomena of beauty and color; then began an abundant rain of the aforementioned petals; and when I arrived, it was no longer possible to gaze at the sun, and the phenomenon, which had been quite lengthy, was at its end, which explains my difficulty in witnessing it now. And from Joao Amael, on October 13, 1925: I do not know why, I suddenly felt a desire to look at the sun. [I would hear] other educated persons admit having seen phenomena in the sun on that day and hour. I looked at the sun. Before that, nothing special could be seen. But now I looked at the sun without hurting my eyes, without any retina resisting. I became more intent. To my astonishment, the sight became even clearer. The sun turned on itself in a very small circle, and in the center it turned into a dark disk in rapid rotation. During some minutes, very impressive and overwhelming, I could clearly verify this strange process. Then, without revealing anything of what I observed, for fear of autosuggestion, I asked my companion to look at the sun and see whether it really appeared. And my companion was describing exactly the phenomenon, the same extraordinary phenomenon. The test was achieved. And I gained further assurance, when various other people later told me that they had seen what I saw clearly, at the same hour, as they kept looking at the sun, without the slightest sensation of pain. Amael’s report of a miracle in 1925 is the last recorded case I can find at Fatima. I don’t know if this was when the sun miracles stopped happening there, or when people stopped including them in the Critical Documents collection. In either case, there were plenty of other places willing to pick up the torch. 3.1: The Ghiaie Variations As far as I can tell, Fatima was only the second-largest crowd to have ever witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. The largest was a group of 200,000 - 300,000 people in Ghiaie, a tiny village near Bonate, Italy. On May 13th, 1944 - the same day of the year that the child-seers of Fatima saw their first apparition - a seven-year old girl went out to pick flowers and had a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin promised to return to her for nine successive evenings; at some point (although I cannot follow this part of the story) she must also have promised to return four times the following week, as large crowds gathered in expectation. According to my source, on the ninth appearance: Many testimonies from the site of the apparition and from surrounding villages described an impressive solar phenomenon. The sun came out of the clouds, whirled dizzily on itself, and projected beams of yellow, green, red, blue, and violet light in all directions. The beams of light colored the clouds, fields, trees, and the stream of people. After a few minutes the sun stopped its whirling, and those phenomena began soon again. Many noticed that the disc had turned white like a Host. The clouds seemed to be lowering down on the people. Some noticed a Rosary in the sky. Others saw a majestic Our Lady with a trailing cloak. Some people, who were at greater distance, saw Our Lady's face looming in the sun. From nearby Bergamo many witnesses observed the sun become pale and radiate all of the rainbow's colors in all directions. They also noticed a large yellow light beam falling over Ghiaie, perpendicularly. The blog says there were similar solar phenomena during the tenth and twelfth appearances, as well as on the following June 13th and July 13th7. All of this is from a random Catholic blog; can we find clear testimonies? The miracle of Fatima was heavily promoted by Portuguese, Vatican, and American Catholics, leading to a large body of sources being available in English. The Ghiaie apparition has gotten less attention, and so I can find fewer testimonies, have had to clunkily machine translate some things, and had a harder time tracing the exact chain-of-transmission. Still, here’s what we’ve got, mostly from here: Don Giuseppe Piccardi: The people cried out to the miracle; I turned between the intrigued and the distrustful, and I saw the sun that-comes from the clouds - turned on itself and the speed of movement seemed to be skidding. At the same time I saw that he projected light beams, then, for me, almost constantly yellow gold. This color I contemplated it even when the sun was veiled with uncaught clouds. Slightly hard to figure out from the machine translation, but I think this is Bishop Adriano Bernareggi: At 6:00 PM I was at the Patronato for the feast of St. John Bosco. Just at that time I finished speaking in front of the church. Then I entered the church for the Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. But most of the crowd remained outside because they said they had observed for about ten minutes the sun rotating on its axis, also suddenly changing color: yellow, red, blue. The sun could be observed without disturbance. The phenomenon was also observed in other places. I only noticed at the end of the service a yellow color in the houses, as when there is a partial eclipse of the sun at sunset. At 7:45 PM they said the phenomenon was repeated. I watched too. By staring into the dazzling sun, you could end up seeing the sun stand out clearly, giving the impression that it was rotating. Then everything took on a red color. But then it was clearly an optical phenomenon. Don Luigi Cortesi, a local seminary teacher who was a strong skeptic of the apparitions and even borderline-kidnapped the child-seer to convince her to recant: A shiver runs through me for a second. I react forcefully, forcing myself not to lose my mind, not to let myself be overwhelmed. I desperately squeeze my pupils and look at the sun: I see a large, clear spot without sharp edges, then, when my eye has adjusted, I see a disk of intense whiteness that seems liquid. Staring at the edges of the disk, I detect a dizzying rotation, like an electric circular motion, like a dizzying pinwheel, except that the direction of motion changes rapidly from left to right and then from right to left. I remember Fatima. Except this time, the sun revolves around a fixed axis, without moving in the sky. I return to the earth, to the crowd: I notice that the faces, the hands, the trees pierce through all the colors of the rainbow. It's natural, I think to myself: when the eye is offended by an intense light or an equivalent stimulus, it projects a stain on objects, which fades from red to violet and tints the objects it encounters with different colors; the stain disappears when the eye, rested, has returned to normal. In fact, a few minutes later, I no longer see those iridescent colors; every object has returned to its natural hue. The phenomenon of rotation leaves me dubious. A neighbor offers me his smoked glasses, and I look: the sun continues to rotate. He offers me a telescope, and I invert it, the screen, and look: the sun is still rotating. Then I can't take it anymore: even today, I'm not convinced that seeing a cosmic prodigy is worth losing my sight. Back then, I wasn't even convinced I was seeing a prodigy, since a plausible natural explanation for the phenomenon quickly emerged in my mind. However, urged by the neighbors to get excited, I remain silent. And I silence them by pinching and slapping the arms of those around me, which are stretched out towards the sky." From the parish bulletin of Tavernola, the exact author is slightly confusing but it was either written by or signed/confirmed by Piero Bonicelli, local provost: On the 28th in the evening of Pentecost, something happened that made a profound impression on everyone. At 6:00 PM sharp, a dimming of the sunlight was felt, accompanied by a sudden flash of lightning, first clearly observed by some bowling players. Looking at the sun, one saw first green, then bright red, then golden yellow, and then it spun around dizzily. At that spectacle, people poured into the streets... One can imagine their comments. The women recited the Holy Rosary, punctuated by the words: "Oh, how beautiful!" After ten minutes, the sun returned to normal. Comments? None. We await an explanation from the appropriate source. For now, we're content to hear the usual strong-minded people call us poor, deluded people, but don't you think this is a rather general illusion? In any case, for now, we're deluded: we'll see later. The parish priest of Tavernola, director of the bulletin, sending this issue requested by Father Piccardi, wrote on June 27, 1946: I must assure you that, as written, it is true, and I can also tell you that I was among those deluded that evening. To be prudent, I didn't go out into the street where people were shouting about a miracle, but from a slightly hidden window, I watched the sun change color and spin rapidly... illusion? Many of us here in Tavernola have been deluded. I can also tell you that I was pleased that such an illusion existed in Tavernola, since the people here have always had a great devotion to the Madonna. There may be more testimonies at this site, but they’re in very old scanned documents that it would be too time-consuming to stick into my machine translation pipeline. Another source says that “On February 24, 1994, [the TV show] ‘Detto tra noi' (Raidue), interviewed some witnesses, who confirmed the solar phenomena of May 21 1944 that were watched by many people“. I think a few hours extra work by an Italian speaker could produce at least five or ten extra Ghiaie testimonies, maybe many more. But as it is, we have enough to try something interesting: let’s recreate Dalleur’s analysis, but for Ghiaie. At 6 PM, the sun was shining from almost due west. For the sunlike light source producing the miracles to mimic the real sun, it would have also had to have been to the west of Ghiaie. If we assume it was the same distance as Dalleur’s Fatima light source, it would have been about 2-3 miles to the west of Ghiaie, which puts it above the village of Merate. We know from the last testimonial that the phenomenon was seen clearly in the village of Tavernola Bergamasca, which is about 22 miles from Ghiaie and 25 from Merate. An Italian source also reports sightings in Brescia and Piacenza, each about 35 miles from Ghiaie. So a Dalleur style analysis might conclude that this event also had a 25 - 35 mile visibility radius, similar to Fatima’s. …unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: really drinking the glass of milk, Halifax Slasher, here, my disappointment in the skeptical community, why it worries me, lets you say, Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio, Miracle of Pellicer’s Leg, trapped prior, of mind, 5, key insight, 6, my source, 7, here, this site, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kukw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F192586f8-d450-4555-88ef-deb6bbe30416_842x613.png, Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
(source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
All honorable mentions get free ACX subscriptions. All finalists get that plus links to their Substack and the right to try to pitch me articles (I usually say no, but Lars Doucet, Daniel Böttger, and Brandon Hendrickson managed to get through). First / second / third place get $2500, $1000, and $500 respectively2. Give me two weeks to distribute prizes, and if you haven’t gotten your prize or at least an email about it by then, message me at scott@slatestarcodex.com3.
Inline links: Lars Doucet, Daniel Böttger, Brandon Hendrickson, 2, 3
1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days.
Inline links: Joan of Arc, Palace Fiction, As Our Days
2nd: Alpha School, by Edward Nevraumont. Edward also wrote one of last year’s finalists (Silver Age Marvel Comics)1. Now that he’s no longer anonymous, he’s going to write a post on his blog responding to the review comments (712 of them!), as well as a follow-up post on what he has learned about Alpha in the six months since he submitted his review (including the Spring and Fall MAP results for his kids). Here is the landing page with more details for ACX readers who are interested.
Inline links: Alpha School, Silver Age Marvel Comics, 1, landing page
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
A nun stated that some people had seen “something” appear in the sun in Torres Novas, also about 12 miles away, though she is not really clear on whether she saw it herself or is just relaying other people’s impressions. I continue to be confused by a pattern in which we have one or two secondhand testimonies from entire towns that supposedly witnessed a dramatic miracle. Ethan then proceeds to make the situation tougher for himself, describing two witnesses from 120 km and 160 km away. But a 160 km circle includes three big cities - Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon - along with many medium-sized towns and small villages. When we combine this with the evidence from Ghiaie - where it was witnessed from distant Tavernola but not equally-distant Milan - I think these testimonies are more consistent with a few suggestible people saying “Oh, a cool miracle? Yeah, I definitely saw it too” than sightlines that spread through normal geography. I think people were more likely to say this if they were close (and so it was plausible) than if they were very far away (and so it was less plausible), but that this is some kind of gradually declining function, rather than the sharper function you would expect if there were an actual boundary. (one person in central Germany, about 500 miles away, claimed to see the Ghiaie miracle - I didn’t include this on the original post, because it didn’t seem credible, but I think it’s good evidence that sometimes people say non-credible things) I do continue to be confused by the Alburitel stories, which seem much stronger than the others, and perhaps by the Minde story, which is at least in the right place. 4: Heat I don’t think this made it in the post, but during a conversation Ethan answered one of my objections - that any heat warm enough to dry clothes in Fatima would have started fires and explosions closer to the source - by saying that unlike the light (which was visible omnidirectionally), the heat was a ray shot straight at Fatima, which didn’t affect anywhere else. I admit this answers my objection. I won’t even ask for a complexity penalty here, because it makes sense that a just God would try to avoid frying random villages. 5: Ending One objection I raised to Ethan’s not-the-real-sun story was that, when the miracle ended, the fake sun would either have to disappear, or remain in the sky long enough to be seen alongside the real sun. But witnesses reported neither of these two things. Ethan reports one witness who says they saw a fake sun first leave from, then merge with, the real sun. I have that witness statement too - it’s on my list of weirder testimonies that don’t mesh with everyone else’s. The large majority said they only saw one sun. If most people had seen multiple suns, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If I understand Ethan correctly (which I might not, I’m having trouble interpreting this passage), he thinks that maybe the clouds cleared enough to reveal the real sun right as the fake sun moved into the same position as the real sun, the crowds were temporarily blinded, and the fake sun took advantage of this to disappear unnoticed. 5.2: Later Miracles I claimed that later miracles were obviously not objective-in-consensus-reality. For example, the Benin City sun miracle was seen by people in one field, but not in the rest of the surrounding city of 1.5 million people; the Lubbock sun miracle was seen by something like 50 - 75% of attendees. I said that this suggested the Fatima miracle wasn’t objective either. Ethan objects that there is no reason the different miracles should be implemented the same way, and that maybe Ghiaie was a unidirectional beam of light focused away from Milan, and that maybe Benin City was entirely subjective, but Fatima was omnidirectional and objective. I of course cannot disprove the possibility that God implements the same miracle in different ways at different times; the most I can do here is ask for a complexity penalty. 5.3: Domingos Pinto Coelho DPC was a lawyer and statesman who saw the miracle at Fatima, wrote an article about it, and dropped at the end that the next time he’d encountered similar weather conditions he’d tried staring at the sun again and seen the same miracle. I described it as a powerful testimony in favor of the illusion/hallucination/suggestion hypothesis. Ethan says that “the Portugese historian Costa Brochado cast doubt on the integrity of this report”: The articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated. It is difficult to understand the manifest confusion he establishes between the phenomena at Fatima… and the alterations in solar light that he says he saw in Lisbon some days afterward. But in any case the historical value of the articles of the leading Catholic organ is almost nil… We believe that we can declare, after patient research on the matter, that the articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho ought to be read from a political point of view, since their objective was, as the author himself came to declare, to serve as the devil’s advocate As far as I can tell, this is just a historian named Costa Brochado saying he doesn’t believe Coelho. I don’t know why we should trust Costa Brochado, but since we’re bringing in random historians’ unsupported assessments of Coelho’s honesty, here is Father Stanley Jaki: Nobody could doubt that he [DPC] was a man of utter veracity, a point to which no proper attention has been paid in the Fatima literature. There he is all too often ignored and when not, he is dismissed as someone who had an axe to grind on behalf of Church authorities wary of Fatima…in view of Coelho’s unquestionable probity, one has to assume that he saw, with eyes unblurred, what he claimed to have seen, a repetition of the miracle of the sun. He never retracted, however slightly, his claim. As one who in his last hours fervently invoked the help of Jacinta who he came to venerate as a saint, Coelho would have hardly lived with the knowledge that he had intentionally mislead countless readers of his in a matter that so closely involved Jacinta and the other two videntes…Coelho surely must have thought that Rather than keep calling character witnesses, I think it’s more helpful to note that we now have two more testimonies of people who saw the miracle once, then were able to reproduce it under less holy conditions. One is Case One of Nix & Apple, who describe someone who saw the miracle in Medjugorje, then went home to New Orleans and was able to see it again. The other is person #14 on my list of survey responses. I emailed him and asked him to confirm that he was claiming that he could repeat the miracle when the weather conditions were just right. He responded: Yes, exactly. Excluding sunsets, I was able to focus on the sun when it was in a cloudless area of the sky only once (after the pouring rain had just stopped); on all other occasions, the intensity of the light made it impossible to focus on the sun. With translucent clouds, focusing on the sun was easier, and the visual changes (colors, apparent movement) appeared consistently after a few seconds. Even though it wasn’t asked in the questionnaire, I have a hypothesis about the physiology underlying the phenomenon, or at least the parts I experienced. Thinking back to those experiences, I might hypothesize that the intense white light of the sun caused the simultaneous formation of afterimages of different colors in the same area of the visual field. It could be that the visual system, in the presence of conflicting signals, instead of integrating the information by creating a white afterimage, rapidly switched attention from one color to another, creating the alternating colors. If this process occurs unevenly across the afterimage area, different parts of the area will change color at slightly different times, creating the appearance of movement within the area itself. I think the reason this phenomenon is not very common is because there is a narrow window between “light too bright to stare at the sun” and “light too dim for the alterations to appear.” The reason I was able to get these results repeatedly was because I was trying to replicate them, so whenever I saw translucent clouds, I tried to conduct the experiment. With clouds that were too thin I failed, but with clouds that I believe belonged to the Stratus translucidus or Altostratus translucidus category, I succeeded. I would have agreed with this earlier, but it’s awkward to have so many people who say they’ve seen this in a completely clear sky. Very speculatively, there might be some individual variability in the ability of the eye to adjust out brightness, and different people will reach their sweet spots in clouded vs. clear skies. 6: “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change his mind.” Speaking of complexity penalties, I have a broader objection to some of the moves Ethan is making here. If I understand his theory correctly, it goes like this: the miraculous object at Fatima was not the sun. But God put a lot of effort into tricking people into thinking that it was. Even though the object was below the clouds, He made the clouds clear around it at the moment of its appearance, so that it looked like the clearing clouds had revealed a normal above-the-clouds sun. Then, when it was time to remove the object, He made it disappear at the exact moment that the real sun came out behind clouds, so that the crowds would be too dazzled to notice that the object and the sun were two different things. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, for two reasons: God shouldn’t try to trick people.
Inline links: Nix & Apple
But if He does try to trick people, He should succeed. I can’t say either of these two things with confidence. Doesn’t the Biblical God sort of try to trick Abraham into thinking he’s going to have to sacrifice his son? And what is God, anyway? Isn’t the whole world a product of God? Does the existence of mirages in the desert count as “God trying to trick people”? Does that fact that we know there are mirages imply that God failed? Still, Ethan’s take on the “sun” miracle of Fatima seems like an unusually clear-cut case of God trying to trick people and failing, and I’m uncomfortable with it. You can always add more overfitting. God’s goal was for the crowds at Fatima to be fooled, but then for Dalleur (2021) to figure it out, and so He achieved His goal perfectly. Okay. But speaking of overfitting… If I understand Ethan right, Fatima was an objective omnidirectional light show, plus a unidirectional heat ray. Ghiaie was a spotlight-shaped unidirectional lightshow. Benin City was a subjective omnidirectional light show limited to a single field, plus an objective unidirectional heat ray. God implemented all of these miracles in completely different ways. Why? Inscrutable God reasons. This isn’t a terrible answer. People often do things for reasons I can’t explain - if I could predict Trump’s behavior, my stock market returns would be much higher. And surely God, as a being with motives and knowledge far beyond my ken, should be even more incomprehensible. But there was an interesting recent Notes debate about a Bentham Bulldog’s post. BB said that atheists had many problems - how was the world created? how do you overcome skepticism? what happened at Fatima? - whereas theism only has one problem - the problem of evil. Evil is a big problem, but it’s at least nice to only have one. Some of the commenters - and I can no longer find the comment I liked anymore, but don’t take this as an original insight from me - pointed out that this is cheap. If you are an atheist, you need to answer many how questions. How did the miracle at Fatima happen? If you try to explain it with natural laws - for example, gravity - it’s fair for an interlocutor to point out that gravity can’t do that; it can only make things fall. If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided. The commenter sarcastically compared this to an attempt to sweep all scientific anomalies under the rug as “the problem of uncharacteristicness”. How did Fatima happen? “Well, it must have been produced by laws of physics, so there!” But the sun spinning and dancing through the sky is hardly what you would expect from the laws of physics. “Yeah, whatever, that’s just the ‘problem of uncharacteristicness’, we’ve already priced that one in, at least we only have one problem!” This made me more attuned to questions of God’s motives. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would create the same miracle three different ways, and we don’t know why. Yeah, it is kind of weird that God would try to trick people into thinking a non-sun-object was the sun, then let a few smart people working years later see through the deception. Are these problems of motive exactly as problematic for the theist as 70,000 people seeing the sun do impossible things is for the atheist? My gut answer is no. Should I trust my gut? Dylan: In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy Evan wrote the original response to Ethan, before I got involved in the debate. I was a bit harsh on him, saying that his part about the child-seers was fine, but calling his investigation of the sun miracle superficial and unfairly dismissive. Dylan of Chaotic Neutral writes In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, and Evan additionally defends himself here. Before getting to Dylan’s post - yeah, I was unfair to Evan (partly this is because my brain has trouble remembering that Ethan Muse and Evan Murphy are two different people). In particular, I described his hypothesis on the child-seers as being that they “confabulated” their visions, a term that Evan took great pains to disclaim in his actual post. I was thinking of a broader definition of “confabulation” that includes hallucination-like phenomena - but Evan was right that if I had read his post carefully, I wouldn’t have used the specific word he said he was against. I mostly just skimmed it to see if he had a really good explanation for the sun miracle thing, then got annoyed when he didn’t. But Dylan has additional complaints. He writes: Evan DID give this miracle the attention it deserved. He spent 18 hours researching and writing his article, presenting much of the same evidence and coming to many of the same conclusions that Scott did, and he did it as an ordinary citizen with a “day job” and in a household that “does not possess a dishwashing machine.” What more could you ask of a skeptical individual!? Unlike myself and the other lazy skeptics, he actually did respect this miracle claim enough to do a proper investigation. And towards the end, yes, he decided to wrap up early […] To criticize Evan’s conduct here in this miracle debate is to set an extremely high bar that cannot possibly be met by the overwhelming majority of the skeptical community. Such exacting standards will ultimately only serve to discourage diligent skepticism like Evan’s and incentivize lazy skepticism like mine. I have two partial defenses of my own actions. First, I think the majority of those 18 hours were spent on the child-seer section, which I acknowledged was good. I didn’t care about that part. To me, the trouble of explaining how three children can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the Virgin Mary is a rounding error compared to the trouble of explaining how 70,000 people can say in a convincing and honest-sounding and semiconsistent way that they saw the sun fall from the sky. But second, I think Dylan is arguing that Evan should get an A for effort. I agree. He put in a lot of work, he adhered to good scholarly principles, and he hit all of the beats that a skeptical explanation is supposed to hit. The only thing he didn’t do, from my perspective, is defuse the fact that the Fatima miracle is extremely creepy, and I have no idea what to do with it, and I can’t fit it into my ontology. Evan’s only attempt to defuse the miracle was that it was a hallucination or illusion or something. This is a reasonable conjecture, but for me it was already priced in - as soon as you hear about a miracle, the obvious next step is “well, maybe it was a hallucination or illusion or something”. I didn’t feel like his piece added anything extra. Generously, some of his tangential points - like that Garrett and Almeida weren’t the perfect skeptics they are sometimes portrayed as - might have defused 1% of my discomfort. I think a reasonable conclusion for this would have been “I’ve rehearsed the obvious arguments for why it is possible to be skeptical of anything, I’ve found some tangential facts that maybe remove 1% of the mystery, but man, I don’t know, this really needs lots more investigation”. My research hardly provided any kind of brilliant omni-solution, but I think that learning about the Ghiaie/Benin/Lubbock/Medjugorge followup miracles and the Redditor testimonies each defused about 15% of my reluctance to accept Fatima as natural, and the fire kasina + Khomeini stuff defused another 10%, to the point where I’m only about 60% as confused and unhappy as when I started. I hope I correctly signposted this level of success/failure to the reader. On Miracles Other responses tried to assert a general point that we should always disbelieve miracles. I. Eugene Earnshaw writes that We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles. If I understand his argument right: there are many examples of anomalous phenomena (eg crop circles) and stage magic (eg sawing a woman in half). When we don’t know how these are done, they seem impossible, and (almost) no amount of armchair reasoning can produce a plausible explanation. But in many cases, we have eventually figured them out - some “white hat” crop circlers explain how they make their seemingly-impossible patterns, and some magicians publish explanations of their tricks. After the fact, we can see how these seemingly-impossible things followed natural law after all. So we shouldn’t worry too much each time we encounter a new miracle that hasn’t yet been explained. Okay, but - suppose that the Pope said “I’m tired of convincing you people the normal ways, I’m going to start blowing up mountains”, and pointed his papal staff at Mt. Everest, and it exploded. And then we asked him to repeat the performance, and he did so as many times as we asked him, again and again. Would we shrug and say “Nothing to see here, I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation”? If the miracle were sufficiently convincing, we would either believe it, or at least think it pointed at something interesting (maybe the Vatican obtained super-nukes and is hiding them under mountains and choreographing their detonations - but this would be pretty important and very different from “nothing to see here”). Ben Landau-Taylor gives a related answer, reminding us that meteorites used to be dismissed on exactly these grounds. The science of the day didn’t allow for non-planet objects to be in space, so rocks falling from the sky was every bit as weird as the sun dancing and changing colors. “When President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: ‘It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.’” In the end, I think we just get back to regular Bayesianism. We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it. We should remember that “more likely on the second hypothesis than the first” is full of pitfalls - on the first hypothesis, it’s likely that there will be many skilled fraudsters and stage magicians, so even very strange-seeming anomalies might not be very unlikely under it. Still, at the point where the Pope starts blowing up mountains, maybe you think it’s pretty unlikely that stage magic could accomplish this, and you update a little. II. Omne Bonum makes a different point: there are many possible miracles. Most do not occur. Yes, a few of them do. But can we be sure it’s above the background rate? Even if there are no true miracles, you’ll get one-in-a-million coincidences one-millionth of the time. If you’re not good at accounting for the 999,999 failures - and people aren’t - this will look impressive. Against this, what is the base rate for the sun changing color and dropping out of the sky, at the precise time that child-seers prophecied a miracle would occur? Seems lower than one in a million. Impossible things should never happen. Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on - or that I’m crazy, or dreaming, or something other than just “well it was a coincidence”. III. FLWAB takes on Hume’s argument against miracles (see also Kenny Easwaran here), which - sorry, I realize it’s suspicious to say this about a famous philosopher - is extremely bad. Hume argues that a miracle is a violation of natural law. And a natural law is something that is always true. But since it’s always true, it can’t be violated. And if we eventually confirmed that it was violated, then we were wrong about it being a natural law. Which means its violation wasn’t even a real miracle anyway. This seems to be a purely semantic argument. We know that the Red Sea usually stays in one place. But suppose Moses lifts his staff and parts the Red Sea, and that all of this is very convincing (we witness it personally, we measure the sea with various instruments, etc). I think Hume would have to say that we have disproven the natural law “the Red Sea usually stays in one place” - but only in favor of a new natural law “the Red Sea stays in one place except when Moses raises his staff”. And since we have never observed a violation of this new natural law, no miracle has occurred! Against this, we can call the way things work 99.999% of the time, when God isn’t acting directly, and when everything is proceeding via predictable material patterns “natural law”, and the very rare deviations that only occur in the presence of God or other extremely holy figures “miracles”. If for some reason you hate that terminology, come up with a new word, “shmiracle”, for the abnormal phenomena that only occur secondary to God’s direct intervention, and then we can argue whether shmiracles exist. IV. Why am I insisting on this so hard? This question of miracles is no different from every other question, where confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning. If you believe that vaccines don’t cause autism, then any given study showing that they do is likely to be a fraud or a mistake - especially given the history of such frauds, and the political pressures for producing them. But you gained your belief that vaccines don’t cause autism through some normal amount of evidence, and if the evidence that they did cause it ever become truly overwhelming, you would switch sides. The key skill of rationality is to know when to update your beliefs how much. These arguments feel like sleights-of-hand arguing that you can avoid ever updating on this question. I don’t think Bayesian reasoning provides an excuse for this. I think some of these arguments attempt to make an objection that the prior probability of miracles is zero, and so no matter how much evidence you get, you can never update towards them. But the prior probability of miracles isn’t zero unless either the prior probability of God’s existence is zero, or the probability that God intervenes in the universe is zero. I don’t know any infinitely-convincing argument for either of these points, so I think miracles have a prior probability above zero, which means we have to treat them the same as any other hypothesis. Yes, we will need many extra guardrails and cautions and good heuristics to prevent ourselves from getting bamboozled by the pitfalls that lurk in this area in particular. But that’s true of everything! You also need extra guardrails and cautions and heuristics to prevent yourself from getting bamboozled by scientific studies! There’s no substitute for doing the work. Actual Highlights From The Actual Comments Josh (blog) writes: I’d add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting. >> “At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).” https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf Funny, but they don’t provide information like whether people were seeing sun miracles at the exact moment the telescope was being used, or whether anyone who could see a sun miracle without the telescope switched to using the telescope and then it stopped. They just say they brought a telescope to a Marian site where some people had seen sun miracles at some point. Even if they clarified that some people had used the telescope while seeing a sun miracle and had it immediately stop miracle-ing, I don’t think this would update me very much. We know it’s not the real sun (Ethan says fake sun, I say subjective phenomenon), and we know the non-Fatima miracles aren’t objective (Ethan says only Fatima was objective, I say none of them were objective). John Schilling writes: Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are “unidentified”, “flying”, or “object”. Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of “UFO-like object”, as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs. Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not “flying saucers”, not “alien spaceships”, maybe “divine miracles”, but definitely “unidentified flying objects”. We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason. Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-) With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn’t be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It’s good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion. But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were “rationalists” when rationalism hadn’t been invented and we had to call ourselves “skeptics”, UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don’t spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don’t recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see. In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly “flying saucers”, fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you’ve got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky... For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight. I considered discussing the UFO angle (the section heading would have been “Virgin Galactic”), but in the end I couldn’t justify it. Yes, the phenomenon is trivially a UFO (in the sense of a thing in the sky we don’t understand). But does this help us? When I think of UFOs, I think of people arguing about whether something was the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or aliens. But Fatima obviously wasn’t Venus or a balloon (though, uh, see here for a dissenting take). And if it was aliens, you’d have to explain why they pretended to be the Virgin Mary and discussed a bunch of Catholic inside-baseball with a trio of child-seers for several months. So what’s left? When I asked John, he answered: UFOs, are just people seeing something they don’t understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture. And that’s something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can’t help thinking you’d have got there a lot faster if you’d had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort. Maybe one way to rescue the UFO connection is to say that there’s so much weirdness that we should be less willing to take any given example of weirdness on its own terms. I asked in the comments for other examples of miracles as compelling as Fatima. People suggested some of the better-verified reincarnation accounts, some of the better-verified UFO sightings, and some of the more spectacular psi phenomena. I don’t know if these are all exactly as strong as Fatima, but I think many of them are closer to Fatima than to the traditional skeptical conception of an alcoholic liar asserting with zero evidence that he dun saw dem aliens one night. When viewing all of these anomalies as a gestalt, we can go four different directions: Individualized natural explanations. The UFOs were swamp gas and weather balloons. The reincarnation stories are toddlers who are naturally gifted at cold reading. Fatima was entoptic phenomena. Sea serpents are really big oarfish.
Inline links: an interesting recent Notes debate, In Defense Of Evan Harkness-Murphy, defends himself here, We Do Not Need To Care About Miracles, explain, gives, Omne Bonum, takes on Hume’s argument against miracles, here, confirmation bias is a part of normal Bayesian reasoning, blog, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf, writes, https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf, see here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!H6Qh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6087bbd3-2496-46b1-87e0-f96ce73c19d2_522x223.png
…with some representations being even more suggestive: Nikita Sokolsky (blog) writes: » Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III I’ve ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th. » There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988) Emailed you both. Thank you, Nikita! I’ve uploaded Campo here, and Nix & Apple here. Campo is only a few paragraphs, and contains little of interest if you’ve read the original post. Nix & Apple profiles several cases in New Orleans, including a pilgrim who saw the miracle in Medjugorje and then went home and saw it again in New Orleans, and a second person who skipped Medjugorje and saw it in New Orleans with no previous exposure. There was also an interesting case of someone who stared at the sun for 15 minutes with no injury, then tried again for 15 seconds and did get an injury that time. My days of not understanding the function mapping sungazing length to injury probability are definitely coming to a middle. The eye doctors who wrote the article only say that “Evidence suggests a great individual variation in the susceptibility for developing solar retinopathy, as the cause of the lesion is felt to be a photochemical injury rather than a thermal injury of the retina and retinal pigment epithelium.” The Ghiaie translations are in a form that makes them harder to upload, but there are about a dozen which contain descriptions of a sun miracle, all of which match the Fatima testimonies closely. The one I found most interesting was a monk nearby, who originally doubted the apparitions; he was in his monastery doing normal work when he saw the sun miracle, which included a beautiful white cross appearing in the sky. Other monks saw it too. The next day, he says that a secular newspaper claimed local astronomers had found some kind of ice crystal phenomenon responsible for the event, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t clarify exactly where this happened (though his address was Castelnuovo Don Bosco, about 80 miles from Ghiaie) or when (though the testimonial implies it was at the same time as the Ghiaie miracle). Main Conclusions And Updates I’m impressed by the fire kasina correspondence, but the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EVex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c466a55-ea5c-4698-a27c-4947720edcfa_736x368.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vVge!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3052f661-b774-4dcb-9734-7c2e297c082a_225x225.jpeg, blog, Campo here, Nix & Apple here
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
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
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser.
Inline links: here’s the chaser
The Pledge
December 17, 2025 · Original source
Unless you’re a genius or a saint, your money is the strongest tool you have to change the world. 10% of an ordinary First World income donated to AMF saves dozens of lives over a career; even if you’re a policeman or firefighter, you’ll have trouble matching that through non-financial means. Unless you’re Charlie Kirk or Heather Cox Richardson, no amount of your political activism or voting - let alone arguing on the Internet - will match the effect of donating to a politician or a cause you care about. And no amount of carpooling and eating vegan will help the climate as much as donating to carbon capture charities.
Inline links: will help the climate
Open Thread 414
December 29, 2025 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Hidden Open Thread 423.5
March 04, 2026 · Original source
1: The OpenAI/Pentagon situation has evolved since Sunday’s ACX post (“All Lawful Use: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”). For up-to-date analysis of the latest contract, I endorse this LW post from today, on the newest contract: OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better.
Inline links: All Lawful Use: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better
Astral Codex Ten26 mentions across 26 issues

Astral Codex Ten is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 26 times across 26 issues between August 30, 2020 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Welcome to Astral Codex Ten!"; "welcome to Astral Codex Ten!"; "All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten". It most often appears alongside Scott, Australia, California.

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Astral Codex Ten
Mention count
26
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26
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August 30, 2020
Last seen
April 01, 2026
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You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today
August 30, 2020 · Original source
Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.
But for now - welcome to Astral Codex Ten! I am genuinely glad you're here!
Book Review Contest: Winners
July 10, 2021 · Original source
All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value! If you already have a subscription, you are now a Super Double Mega-Subscriber, which has no consequences in the material world, but several important metaphysical advantages. I should have already credited this to your email addresses; please let me know if it didn't go through or if I used the wrong address.
FIRST PLACE: Progress and Poverty, reviewed by Lars Doucet
Inline links: Progress and Poverty
SECOND PLACE: Down And Out In Paris And London, reviewed by Whimsi
Inline links: Down And Out In Paris And London
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
For those of you wondering who this "Lars" guy is, I'm the Astral Codex Ten reader who reviewed Henry George's Progress & Poverty for the book review contest. Henry George is the founder of an economic philosophy known as Georgism which is principally concerned with the deprivations caused by unchecked rentiers. George is famous for promoting two specific policies, the Land Value Tax (LVT) and the Citizen's Dividend (what we would now call a Universal Basic Income).
Inline links: Progress & Poverty, Georgism
In real life you can't accurately assess land value separately from improvements, so even if LVT would work in theory, it doesn't work in practice Today we'll start with point 1, and subsequent articles posted in the next two days will address points 2 and 3. I'll probably write further articles on the subject, but I make no presumptions about whether I'll have worn out my welcome on Astral Codex Ten by then. If you haven't read the Book Review yet, I've posted a brief recap of the relevant concepts below. Otherwise, feel free to skip directly to the subsequent section. 0. A Brief Recap Georgism is a school of political economy that is really upset about, among other things, the Rent Being Too Damn High. It seeks to liberate labor and capital alike from those who gatekeep access to scarce "non-produced assets," such as land and natural resources, while still affirming the virtues of hard work and free enterprise. George uses the term "Land" to mean not just regular land, but everything that is external to human beings and the things they produce–nature itself, really. Georgism's chief insight is to move economic thinking from a two-factor model (Labor and Capital) to a three-factor model (Land, Labor, and Capital). It's chief (but not only) policy prescription is the Land Value Tax (LVT), which taxes real estate at as close to 100% of its "land rent" as possible (the amount of rent due to the land alone apart from "improvements" such as buildings). In actual practice, most Georgists seem to think 85% is a reasonable figure to target. Let's carefully unpack what those terms means. "Land value" refers to the full market value of a property, excluding all of its improvements, such as buildings. This is the portion of a property's value arising solely from its location and natural attributes (agricultural fertility, endowment of stuff like water, minerals, etc.). "Land rent" (AKA "ground rent") refers to the recurring rental income a property is capable of generating from the market because of its land value. It is Land Rent which Land Value Tax is intended to capture. You can think of it as a Location or Site Value Tax if that's more helpful. It's not a tax on the full market purchase price of a property, nor is it a fixed amount of tax per acre of land, but rather a tax proportional to the market value of the land alone (or better yet, the land rent). When assessed correctly, as LVT approaches 100% the market selling price of the land itself will approach zero. Don't let the "100%" confuse you, either. If a piece of land costs $10,000 to buy, and is leased for $500/year, then an LVT that captures 100% of the land rent is $500/year, which works out to a 5% annual tax of the land value. LVT should not be confused with a property tax. Property taxes consider land plus improvements (typically buildings). An LVT considers land value alone. Georgists assert that if we sufficiently tax land in this manner, we'll not only end the housing crisis but also fix a bunch of misaligned incentives that cause poverty to persist alongside economic progress, while raising a bunch of revenue that can lower or even eliminate other less efficient taxes, such as sales and income taxes. This is because virtually all economists agree that LVT has zero "deadweight loss"–a fancy word for a drag on the economy that makes certain activities no longer profitable. Other taxes with no deadweight loss include Pigouvian taxes on bad things, like congestion and pollution. But won't landlords just raise the rent to make up for the LVT, passing the burden of the tax on to the tenants? Georgists say no, because land is special in that it is scarce and nobody can make any more of it. Indeed, LVT is a rare form of taxation that actually boosts the economy, because it discourages rent-seeking and speculation. Some Georgists even go so far as to say that LVT can raise enough revenue to replace all other less efficient taxes, becoming the so-called "Single Tax," but this is not a universally held position among modern Georgists. To be clear, proponents of the "Single Tax" believe that LVT is sufficient for all public purposes and that no other taxes (such as income tax, capital taxes, and tariffs) are necessary for revenue generation, although they still might support carbon taxes or "sin taxes" on things they want to discourage. Georgism doesn't begin and end with the LVT, however, and the movement isn't solely concerned with real estate and tax revenue. Henry George was an early proponent of what we now call "Universal Basic Income," or as he called it, the "Citizen's Dividend" (funded by LVT, naturally). But even if you threw every penny of LVT revenue into the sea, the anti-sprawl effects of the policy are appealing enough by themselves to earn the endorsement of YIMBY's and urbanists like Strong Towns. If you take Georgism to its natural conclusions, you might start to question government-enforced monopolies over other kinds of "Land," such as electromagnetic spectrum, water and mineral rights, and orbital real estate for satellites, not to mention the deadweight loss created by intellectual property gatekeepers over, say, research papers. And if you have my day job as an analyst for the video games industry, one day you'll find yourself applying the observed 30-year history of housing crises in MMO's to virtual real estate sales in leading blockchain games. Some people come to Georgism because of their aversion to income and capital taxes, some want to use LVT to fund generous social programs, some are motivated by the beneficial environmental effects, and some just think the Rent is Too Damn High. No matter where you come from on the political compass, there's probably a way to mix up a club soda and Georgism that's right for you. 1. Is Land Really a Big Deal? Paul Krugman speaks for many mainstream economists when he admits that Georgist analysis is sound, but he insists that it's a moot point because land just isn't important anymore in the modern economy: Believe it or not, urban economics models actually do suggest that Georgist taxation would be the right approach at least to finance city growth. But I would just say: I don't think you can raise nearly enough money to run a modern welfare state by taxing land. It's just not a big enough thing. By George, if land just isn't a big deal, then LVT can't raise much money, the problems of speculative landownership are vastly overstated, and you can stop reading this article. The main tension between Georgists on the one hand, and Marxists and Neoclassicals on the other, is that the latter two significantly downplay land, centering the whole discussion instead on labor and capital. For Georgists, land is the key to understanding the whole economy. Krugman's main complaint is that LVT can't raise enough money, which is a response to the "Single Tax" movement in particular. In George's time, it was popular to advocate for a 100% Land Value Tax and the elimination of all other taxes. Keep in mind that in George's time, there was no federal income tax, and state and federal spending was much lower, so whether LVT could raise enough money wasn't nearly as controversial as it is today. But even if it turns out that a modern-day "Single Tax" isn't enough to cover the federal budget, Krugman misses the point. The purpose of LVT is not just to raise revenue, but to end speculation, rent-seeking, unaffordable housing, and wasteful, environmentally damaging sprawl. LVT is worth doing for those good effects alone. The revenue it generates doesn't need to fund literally every penny of government spending to still be a win, which is why Georgist economist Terrence Dwyer calls LVT "better than neutral." Liberal Krugman and conservative Milton Friedman both seem to agree that LVT has no deadweight loss, which means LVT, unlike income and capital taxes, doesn't create a drag on productivity. This means that if we can raise enough money from LVT, we can reduce at least some inefficient taxes, such as those on labor, while keeping government spending the same. Not only could this be popular politically, it would also boost the economy. Those are the claims Georgists make, at least. Let's see if they're true. Here are a few testable hypotheses that capture different aspects of land being a "really big deal": Most of the value of urban real estate is land
Inline links: the Book Review, political economy, Pigouvian, YIMBY's, Strong Towns, research papers, housing crises in MMO's, leading blockchain games, Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, deadweight loss
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]
Inline links: Book Review Contest, Progress and Poverty, Fortress Of Doors
Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Almy (2014) - Valuation and Assessment of Immovable Property Not to mention Fundamentals of Mass Appraisal, a literal textbook published by the IAAO, written by Gloudemans and Almy in 2011. I've only scratched the surface here. There are a whole lot more methodology papers out there, and this is just a sample of the ones I happened to come across. They seem to fall into either "hands-off" or "hands-on" approaches, depending on how much direct human judgment you want to bake into the system. So, can we accurately assess land and improvements separately? I think it's quite plausible but not a slam dunk. That said, if the objection is, "valuing land separately from improvements is fundamentally impossible, and we can never get better at it, so we shouldn't try," I think that's plainly ruled out. We clearly have a variety of methods at our disposal that seem reasonably accurate. Each of them has particular strengths and weaknesses, and each directly addresses shortcomings of prior methods. All of this implies that this is something we can continue to improve at. The big questions are whether we've already arrived at "good enough" and how tight our error tolerances need to be. And the operative phrase very much is "good enough." I don't know of anywhere in the world that currently has a 100% LVT policy, let alone an 85% LVT. The lower your LVT, the greater your margin of error becomes for not taxing more than the true land value. I know plenty of Georgists who would be ecstatic if they could get a 75% LVT, or even a 50% LVT, implemented in their area. Now, just because these assessment methods are available doesn't mean they're actually being used. Not everyone has Ted Gwartney as their assessor. Plenty of counties in my local area exclusively use the cost approach and will even apply a blanket "neighborhood factor" multiplier to up-assess swiftly appreciating areas. However, they apply that multiplier to the buildings rather than the land, which feels exactly backwards. The assessor hasn't raised the value of my land in years, while the assessed value of my house (which I am eminently qualified to tell you is an ever-degrading money pit) somehow continues to go up. Good assessment depends on having well trained staff, up-to-date methodology, and access to high quality market transaction data. I'm convinced, based on these papers and the IAAO's surveys, that assessment doesn't require a huge army of assessors poring over every aspect of citizens' properties. Furthermore, plenty of places already have property tax systems in place and are already paying the full cost of property assessments and property tax collection. Many of the methods described above seem capable of reducing property assessment costs by focusing on the land first and foremost and letting the building's value fall out as a residual, as Ted Gwartney insists. The cost also seems like something that, done properly, is only going to come down over time as fewer assessors are required. Another option is to keep staff sizes the same but use the emerging productivity gains to increase the frequency and quality of assessments. It also seems clear to me that Land Value Taxation is not more invasive and expensive than income and sales tax when you factor in the cost of compliance (not to mention the deadweight loss imposed on the economy). Countries that have implemented Land Value Taxes, such as Denmark, are already seeing some of the claims of Georgism borne out, as we discussed in Part II. This suggests to me that modern methods are probably "good enough," so long as assessors are well trained, abiding by current best practices, and able to access good market data. Given that Astral Codex Ten is a blog where ideas as lofty as full brain uploading, superhuman AI, and biological immortality are frequently discussed in earnest, it doesn't seem outlandish to suggest that human beings can probably use math and science to get better at estimating the market value of land relative to buildings. Conclusion By George, Unimproved Land Value can (probably) be accurately assessed. 6. Conclusions & Next Steps This concludes my three part series on the most common objections to Georgism. By George, the evidence has convinced me of three things: ✅ Land is a really big deal ✅ Land Value Tax cannot be passed on to tenants ✅ Unimproved Land Value can (probably) be accurately assessed I humbly submit that the case for Georgism survives a summary dismissal and can move on to a trial of the particulars. So where do we go from here? In the course of writing this series, I found a few subjects that someone should just go ahead and test already. Obviously, this would require research funding and smart people willing to do the work (hey, a guy can dream). These subjects are: 6.1. Assessment methods A lot of the methodology papers I read test one or two methods at a time in a particular case study. What I couldn't find was a study that tests every major mass appraisal method in one big cross comparison study, all in the same physical location using the same dataset. If we had this, we could get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses without wondering what differences are due simply to one study being in Germany and the other in the Philippines. It seems the necessary ingredients are: An ideal test location with excellent property records and (ideally) a history of quality land value assessment and/or Land Value Tax
Inline links: Almy (2014), Fundamentals of Mass Appraisal
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]
Inline links: Book Review Contest, Progress and Poverty, Fortress Of Doors
Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? Part II - Can Land Value Tax be passed on to Tenants? Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings? ?? (You are here)
Inline links: Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty, Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal?, Part II - Can Land Value Tax be passed on to Tenants?
Mantic Monday: Dogs In Wizard Hats
December 27, 2021 · Original source
They give their resolution source as this California government website, which says there have been fewer fires this year, 8800 vs. 9600. It’s been updated pretty recently, and this isn’t California’s fire season, so there’s no way there will be another 800 fires in the next four days. As far as I can tell, this is free money - though probably after Astral Codex Ten mentions this question, people will notice and correct it pretty quickly.
Inline links: this California government website
Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
3: In case you missed it, Astral Codex Ten is having in-person meetups in about two hundred cities worldwide. This coming week’s biggest meetups include Canberra on Wednesday, Helsinki on Saturday, and Tel Aviv next Sunday - but there are also many more, check here for the full list.
Inline links: is having
Consciousness And The Brain
Inline links: Consciousness And The Brain
Making Nature (history of the scientific journal Nature)
Inline links: Making Nature
2023 Subscription Drive + Free Unlocked Posts
January 13, 2023 · Original source
Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Inline links: It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
Inline links: If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
ACX Survey Results 2022
January 20, 2023 · Original source
Thanks to the 7,341 people who took the 2022 Astral Codex Ten survey.
Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants
February 24, 2023 · Original source
A: This is Astral Codex Ten, a blog about various science / technology / philosophy / politics issues, which sometimes does grants rounds and projects like this one. I think I have a good reputation of paying for things I say I am going to pay for, see for example last year’s ACX Grants. Manifold Markets is a company that runs a prediction market website and is generally interested in unusual market structures solving social problems. We’re co-sponsoring this impact market in order to test impact markets as a charitable funding mechanism.
Inline links: ACX Grants, Manifold Markets
As a refresher, here’s a short explainer about what impact certificates are, and here’s a longer article on various implementation details.
Inline links: a short explainer, a longer article on various implementation details
I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we’re announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
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
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 13th, 03:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GC Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iiNaqC3xiRAxWwj6M/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-4
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GC, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iiNaqC3xiRAxWwj6M/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-4
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.
Inline links: The Laws of Trading
This point is self-explanatory and I don’t think it needs further exploration for the average Astral Codex Ten reader.
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review?
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
NEWCASTLE/DURHAM, NE ENGLAND, UK Contact: Chris Contact Info: wardle[at]live[dot]fr Time: Sunday, October 1st, 11:00 AM Location: Newcastle Central Station portico. I'll be wearing a Hawaiian shirt and suit jacket and holding the Astral Codex Ten sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C6WX99M+J3
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C6WX99M+J3
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/
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 7th, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GCQ Notes: RSVP on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ei3MKRfdH4eXnPjnD/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-6
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GCQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ei3MKRfdH4eXnPjnD/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-6
Open Thread 298
October 16, 2023 · Original source
The Rationalist revival has put wind into the sails of start-ups like Manifold Markets, which was initially funded by a grant program run by Astral Codex Ten, a Rationalist blog that has promoted prediction markets. (It also received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of the bankrupt crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a fan of prediction markets.)
I think a natural reading of this sentence is that Astral Codex Ten received $1 million from the FTX Future Fund. Some people who read the article said they understood it this way and thought I took FTX money. I didn’t. The article meant to say that Manifold did.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 18, 2024 · Original source
Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:
Inline links: paid subscription option
Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero - why do we celebrate someone with weird cell mutations so much more than real scientists?
Inline links: Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero
Bonus Wisdom Of Crowds Analysis - do people with multiple personalities do better at wisdom of crowds tasks than others?
Inline links: Bonus Wisdom Of Crowds Analysis
24
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
Does this beat a centralized AI predictor? That depends whether you trust the centralized AI predictor or not! Remember, the biggest advantage of prediction markets isn’t necessarily accuracy, it’s trust and canonicity.
Inline links: trust and canonicity
Open Thread 322
March 25, 2024 · Original source
2: echometer on the subreddit made a mobile-friendly reader for Astral Codex Ten in case you need the page to load a little faster. Again, the last time I told Substack about speed issues, they said they’ve “got plans to improve” it
Inline links: a mobile-friendly reader for Astral Codex Ten
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: The previous attempt to email people their Forecasting Contest score didn’t work. So new plan: here’s a list of everyone’s scores, associated with a hash of their email address: Blind Score Hash 59.5KB ∙ XLSX file Download Download Go to this site and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages on this graphic from the post. Eight people had hash collisions and their scores will be ambiguous; if that’s you, email me if you really want to know. Thanks to Legionnaire for putting this together; I’ll update you when I know if there are any plans for Full Mode.
Inline links: Download, this site, on this graphic, the post
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFM Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/va9fsFSYcrWRkmFpH/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-9 Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFM, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/va9fsFSYcrWRkmFpH/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-9
ACX Survey Results 2024
April 19, 2024 · Original source
Thanks to the 5,981 people who took the 2024 Astral Codex Ten survey.
If you’re interested in tracking how some of these answers have changed over time, you might also enjoy reading the 2022 or 2020 survey results.
Inline links: 2022, 2020
Subscrive Drive '25 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 14, 2025 · Original source
Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. Once a year, I try to convince you to take it. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you’re a student or you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:
Inline links: paid subscription option
Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island, short fiction based on the claim that nobody’s name was really changed at Ellis Island.
Inline links: Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island, the claim
Links At Length: Democratic Socialists’ Budget Crisis. Haha, socialists bad with money, but can we learn anything more interesting from this?
Inline links: Links At Length: Democratic Socialists’ Budget Crisis
ACX Survey Results 2025
January 29, 2025 · Original source
Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
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/
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott’s blog posts, chiefly by leaving comments at the bottom of those posts. It is well understood (by the Commentariat themselves) that they are the best comments section anywhere on the internet, and have been for some time. This review takes it as a given that the ACX Commentariat outclasses all of its pale imitators across the web, so I won’t compare the ACX Commentariat to e.g. reddit. The real question is whether our glory days are behind us – specifically whether the ACX Commentariat of today has lost its edge compared to the SSC Commentariat of pre-2021.
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
A couple of years ago Scott asked, Why Do I Suck?. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good’? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts:
Inline links: Why Do I Suck?
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend and new readers can hear about the meetups. This is one of those times.
Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running ACX Everywhere, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.
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
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
(technically, you just know that Astral Codex Ten says there’s a book containing the sentence “there were over a hundred fifty eyewitnesses”.)
Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry. …then almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order. The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order. A believer might argue that if you encounter six different miracles in close succession, they all sort of blend together and you might forget one or two in your accounting. Or you might turn to your friend and ask what they think, and while you’re not looking you miss part of what’s going on. A skeptic might argue that if the sun falls to earth and appears seconds away from crushing you and everyone around you is screaming because they think it’s the end of the world, approximately 100% of people should mention that in their account of what happened that day, and if it’s more like 50%, then you have a problem. Here are some interestingly discordant testimonies that I came across during my search: Antonio dos Ramos Mira, local resident: A quarter of an hour after the rain stopped, he saw that huge crowd of people, in great clamor and almost all kneeling, facing the sun, which had unusual signs, turning around, trembling, observing at the same time that a yellow-reddish color had appeared around him, which was reflected throughout the crowd and on the horizon, with at the same time a weakening of light and an increase in temperature. The crowd, even the unbelievers, said that it was a known miracle. This is in the third person because the priest and clerk conducting the investigation are summarizing an account being given by an illiterate peasant. The witness names one color - yellow-reddish - and doesn’t mention the sun falling to earth. Antonio Maria Menitra, local property owner: It had rained heavily in the morning, and a little after noon, the rain stopped, and he observed a large crowd of people kneeling down and looking at the sun. He also looked and saw different colors in the sun and in the people. No mention of the sun dancing, spinning, shooting off sparks, or approaching the earth. Joao Martia Lucio Serra, lawyer: Already in some candid souls arose the fear that the foretold event might not occur, when suddenly the entire immense crowd stirred at the seer's voice in a significant brouhaha of astonishment and wonder, raising their heads to the sky, where thousands of eyes gazed in amazement at the sun in full blue, visible to all, without the intensity of its rays harming the retina and hindering vision, crowned with various colors, in a rapid rotation, at times seeming to detach itself from the celestial vault, approaching the earth. The spectators, looking at each other, represented themselves to each other as yellow, and on the horizon, reddish-orange, wherever their eyes looked, they saw beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances, and reflecting on the earth. Nobody else mentions the “beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances”. Maria Augusta Saraiva Vieira de Campos, local resident: Our sense of discouragement was profound, when suddenly we heard from all sides: Miracle! Look at the sun! The rain had stopped as if by magic; hats were closed; a warmth was felt as if we had entered a heated greenhouse, and the disk of the sun began to be seen, clearly discernible in the brownish layer that covered the entire sky. The heat increased, and the sun seemed to sink lower and lower, presenting new and varied changes. We saw a silvery veil, rounded in shape, as if it were a full moon; shortly after, it turned to vivid purple, then red, then emerald green, and finally took on its original color. Cries were heard from all sides as it emerged from the sun like a white, shining snow-like shape, without harming the retina, coming toward us, returning to the sun again, and finally hiding for the third time among the clouds. Everyone wept, and prayers, supplications, and acts of faith were heard from many mouths. Now something is coming down off the sun, instead of the sun itself coming down. Also, the colors are purple → red → green. Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, mathematics professor: 1st: The phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes; 2nd: The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen; 3rd: The sun, three times during this period, manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels; 4th: This rotational movement of the sun's edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less; 5th: Next, the sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor, impossible to be seen with the eyes; 6th: It was shortly after noon and near the zenith (which is very important) that these facts occurred. Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this? We saw this account earlier, and in most ways it matches the consensus story. But even though he’s trying to be methodical, he totally fails to mention the sun descending to crush the world. Instead, it’s the rotational movement that happens three times. Also, the colors are violet → orange Luis Antonio Vieira de Magalhaes e Vasconcelos, nobleman: I was absolutely convinced that I would see nothing. I then remembered, as I had remembered many times before, that principle of Gustave Le Bon, which boils down to the hypnotic current that dominates it. I had to be cautious, not to be influenced. This friend of mine, taking out his watch, said to me: there are five minutes left, at one o'clock look at the sun, that was the time announced by the shepherdesses, then you will tell me. My friends shout to me: look, look, but at first I only saw clouds drifting by, leaving the sun uncovered. Suddenly, I see an intensely pink rim, surrounding the sun, which resembled a disc of dull silver, as someone once said, while giving me the impression that it was moving from its original position. Diaphanous, vaporous clouds, somewhat purple, somewhat orange, permeated the air. At various points along the horizon, contrasting with the leaden hue of the sky, I also saw pink and yellow spots. The clamor grew louder and louder. This didn't last seconds: perhaps minutes. As I observed these manifestations, which I never doubted for a moment were due to the Infinite Omnipotence of God, an indescribable impression came over me. Here are the silver disc and the unusual colors (here “pink, purple, and orange”). But the colors are now merely “clouds” and “spots”, and there is nothing about spinning, dancing, or falling to earth. Antonio de Paula, pilgrim from Lisbon: Suddenly the priest looks at the sun and says that the sun in eclipse was not like that. The deponent also looked and saw that the sun gave no light; a white mist hung over it, it was a dull moon. The sun was to the left, with the rest of the sky obscured. Taking his eyes off the sun, he saw the people a very bright red color; and he exclaimed: "Oh, gentlemen, how the people are all red!" And the priest replied: "Are they red scarves?" To which he remarked: "How can that be? So they had all agreed to have red scarves on their backs?!" Then the people appeared the color of gold. The sun's rotational movements were not visible to them. The people on that occasion cried out loudly, kneeling with their hands raised, shouting for Our Lady, not caring about the thick mud, repeatedly invoking Our Lady. The people's impression was extraordinary. This person saw the silver moon-like sun and the color changes (here “red” and “gold”), but nothing else. He explicitly mentions not seeing the rotation. Luis de Andrade de Silva: The globe of the sun, similar to a disc of dull silver, rotated around an imaginary axis, and at that moment, it seemed to descend through the atmosphere, towards the earth, accompanied at times by an extraordinary brightness, and by an intense heat. The sun's rays were said to have yellow, green, blue and purple colors, but I only noticed the yellow color. After a few minutes, during which these phenomena occurred, no one could look at the sun anymore, because its rays hurt the retina. Only those who witnessed these phenomena can evaluate what happened then, but cannot describe them exactly. He says that although he heard other people mention yellow, green, blue, and purple colors, he only saw yellow. Dominic Reis, American traveler: The sun started to roll from one place to another place, and changed blue, yellow, all colors! Then we see the sun come toward the children, toward the tree. Everybody was hollering out. Some start to confess their sins, ‘cause there were no Priests around there . . . even my mother grabbed me to her and started to cry, saying, ‘It is the end of the world! And we see the sun come right into the trees. And then the little children get up and turn around to the people and told the people, ‘Pray and pray hard because everything is going to be all right.’ This person says the sun didn’t merely fall to earth, but went to the children (ie the child-seers) and the tree (the oak where the Virgin was appearing) in particular. At one point, it is specifically located “right [in] the trees”. But in this account, I am getting the impression that the “sun” is some sort of UFO-like object, maybe the size of a large helicopter, which is in a particular place. I can’t tell if other witnesses also thought this and just didn’t describe it clearly, or whether this testimony is discordant. The interviewer (Haffert again) notices this, and asks whether Reis really thinks it was the sun; Reis gives a weird non-answer (“Well, for my part it was the sun . . . but whether just a light or not, there was something there. I know for sure.”) Dominic Reis, continued from elsewhere in his account: As soon as the sun went back in the right place the wind started to blow real hard, but the trees didn’t move at all. The wind was blow, blow and in few minutes the ground was as dry as this floor here. Even our clothes had dried. We were walking here and there, and our clothes... we don’t feel at all. The clothes were dry and looked as though they had just come from the laundry. I believed. I thought: Either I’m out of my mind or this was a miracle, a real miracle. Although many people said their clothes were miraculously dry, Reis is the only one who mentions a miraculous wind. Everyone else says their clothes were dried by a miraculous heat. Reis does not mention heat. Maria dos Santos On October 13th, when Lucia said: "Our Lady is coming!", one of the deponent's daughters, named Maria, was standing on a rock, a meter from the holm oak tree, on the east side, to guard the bow so the people wouldn't damage it. The girl felt a blow to her face, saw a beautiful light near her, and cried out: "Oh! Our Lady!" The deponent looked and saw a star, a ball, not entirely round, like an egg, very beautiful, with the colors of the celestial rainbow, but much more vivid, with a tail of one and a half meters of brilliant colors. It passed very quickly and close to the holm oak tree, and disappeared a hand's breadth from the ground. She saw the sun sinking low. This is maybe the same UFO-like object that Dominic is reporting. In some of the other Fatima apparitions, the Virgin appears to those who cannot see her true form as a ball of light that comes to the tree where the child-seers are waiting. So maybe there were two things going on - the sun in the sky, and a ball of light (the apparition itself) heading back and forth to the tree. Still, if these are really two different phenomena, only these two accounts mention the second one. I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all. 1.4 Dalleur And The Distant Testimonies Maybe the only interesting advance in Fatimology in the last fifty years is Dalleur (2021), the focus of Muse’s Substack post. Dalleur is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical University in Rome, but clearly a multi-talented individual. He seems to lean toward the “miracle” explanation, but asks a fruitful question that nobody else seems to be considering: if it was a miracle, how was it implemented? That is, the real sun obviously didn’t change color or move - this would have been visible around the world, and would probably have fried the Earth. So what did God or the Virgin do, exactly, to produce the appearance of a moving sun? We can imagine two possibilities. First, they could have implemented the miracle through a “prophetic vision”, where they inspire a sort of mass hallucination in the onlookers. Second, they could have created some kind of objectively-real fiery wheel object in the skies above Portugal, and arranged for people to mistake it for the sun. If they did the second, we should be able to pin down where exactly they created it by triangulating distant testimonies Dalleur and I both found four of these: Joaquim Lourenco, schoolboy, 9 miles from Fatima: I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zigzag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment. It was a crowd which had gathered outside our local village school and we had all left classes and run into the streets because of the cries and surprised shouts of men and women who were in the street in front of the school when the miracle began. There was an unbeliever there who had spent the morning mocking the ‘simpletons’ who had gone off to Fatima just to see an ordinary girl. He now seemed paralyzed, his eyes fixed on the sun. He began to tremble from head to foot, and lifting up his arms, fell on his knees in the mud, crying out to God. But meanwhile the people continued to cry out and to weep, asking God to pardon their sins. We all ran to the two chapels in the village, which were soon filled to overflowing. During those long moments of the solar prodigy, objects around us turned all colors of the rainbow... When the people realized that the danger was over, there was an explosion of joy. Albano Barros, young boy, 12 miles away: I was watching sheep, as was my daily task, and suddenly there, in the direction of Fatima, I saw the sun fall from the sky. I thought it was the end of the world. I was so distracted that I remember nothing but the falling sun. I cannot even remember whether I took the sheep home, whether I ran, or what I did. Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, local resident, 16 miles away: I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever. I was looking toward the mountain at noon when suddenly I saw a great red flash in the sky. I called two men who were working for us. They, of course, saw it, too. Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda… Dalleur pins these on a map, which I’ve edited slightly for clearer labeling: The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun: was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima]. …ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map. Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event: He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°. The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning. So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space. The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude. What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”? 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged: “The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous. I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge. Am I hallucinating? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll: Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images: I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience. So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure. In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation. “The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin? Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time: Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion. If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not. “The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this? If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed. If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth. Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world. Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement. When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side. Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these: Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: Dalleur (2021), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NeXK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffebd07d1-3975-4603-8c98-8ca3707ec2b8_612x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SjQ8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79b42000-faa4-443f-8a5c-7f000582410e_657x459.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XQWF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f301773-b8b8-45c1-99c3-908c5b5f5524_1145x1192.png, Nepal chose its prime minister, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-qHG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6cbf5f49-7c02-4d1d-9b2c-b3ea2ff962f5_656x235.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AM8u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F852624ae-e398-4a8a-9cd7-44a99710c478_612x408.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GnUV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b2c6498-11a6-4276-8a66-0555ca5141e5_1296x730.webp, John Touhey’s project, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ybv5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6509924b-583f-4686-8ba9-cd4185892199_1012x463.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!12sU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d21e8d2-ad0d-4a15-9ad0-0048338bcb33_1012x470.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases
The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun: was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima]. …ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map. Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event: He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°. The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning. So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space. The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude. What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”? 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged: “The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous. I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge. Am I hallucinating? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll: Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images: I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience. So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure. In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation. “The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin? Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time: Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion. If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not. “The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this? If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed. If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth. Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world. Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement. When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side. Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these: Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SjQ8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79b42000-faa4-443f-8a5c-7f000582410e_657x459.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XQWF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f301773-b8b8-45c1-99c3-908c5b5f5524_1145x1192.png, Nepal chose its prime minister, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-qHG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6cbf5f49-7c02-4d1d-9b2c-b3ea2ff962f5_656x235.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AM8u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F852624ae-e398-4a8a-9cd7-44a99710c478_612x408.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GnUV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b2c6498-11a6-4276-8a66-0555ca5141e5_1296x730.webp, John Touhey’s project, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ybv5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6509924b-583f-4686-8ba9-cd4185892199_1012x463.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!12sU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d21e8d2-ad0d-4a15-9ad0-0048338bcb33_1012x470.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend and new readers can hear about the meetups. This is one of those times.
Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running or hosting ACX Everywhere or the ACX Spring Schelling, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.
Contact: Sean Brocklebank Contact Info: astral[.]club[.]edinburgh[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: University of Edinburgh, Old College, Teaching Room 01 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bl5 [remove this bit] zIidSM2BA9VlBHbWxV3?mode=gi_t Notes: We meet about once a month to discuss ACX-related readings. Meetings are about two hours. At the April meetup, we will talk about: 1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic 2) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you 3) www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic The room is upstairs in Old College, but you can get inside going through the first big door on the right in the main courtyard (assuming you came in from South Bridge). We will have another meetup on Saturday 23 May. Please email me or join the whatsapp group for info about that one.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you
Asterisk11 mentions across 11 issues

Asterisk is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between August 14, 2022 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Asterisk is an upcoming effective altruist magazine currently headquartered in my spare bedroom"; "at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine"; "Asterisk is now releasing its issues piecemeal". It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Kelsey Piper, Twitter.

Article page
Asterisk
Mention count
11
Issue count
11
First seen
August 14, 2022
Last seen
December 10, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Open Thread 237
August 14, 2022 · Original source
1: Asterisk is an upcoming effective altruist magazine currently headquartered in my spare bedroom. My friend Clara is editor and the first issue will feature articles by me, Kelsey Piper, and other people you might know. Go to asteriskmag.com to check it out and sign up for the mailing list.
Inline links: asteriskmag.com
"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine
June 26, 2023 · Original source
I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017). It’s not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly. This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). Other stories include:
Inline links: Grace et al (2017), asteriskmag.com, Through A Glass Darkly
Crash Testing GPT-4: Before releasing GPT-4, OpenAI sent a preliminary version to the Alignment Research Center to test it for unsafe capabilities; the detail that made the news was how the AI managed to hire a gig worker to solve CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Asterisk interviews Beth Barnes, leader of the team that ran those tests.
Inline links: Crash Testing GPT-4, made the news
What We Get Wrong About AI And China: Professor Jeffrey Ding discusses the Chinese AI situation. If I’m understanding right, China is 1-2 years behind the US, but that this number underplays the size of the gap, and if the US stopped innovating today, China wouldn’t necessarily push ahead in 3 years. Today’s Marginal Revolution links included a claim that a new Chinese model beats GPT-4; I’m very skeptical and waiting to hear more.
Inline links: What We Get Wrong About AI And China, Marginal Revolution links, a claim
24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
This is the claim of an article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine. The key graphic is this:
Inline links: an article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine
Asterisk is now releasing its issues piecemeal; along with Johnson on prediction markets, Issue Five includes articles on airline safety, PEPFAR, developing-world democracy, and a review of Going Infinite.
Inline links: Issue Five includes
24
March 12, 2024 · Original source
1: Apparently, forgetting that Futuur exists is a common problem! Jeremiah Johnson’s Asterisk article Do Prediction Markets Have An Election Problem? (featured here two months ago) also didn’t have Futuur. The folks at Futuur, who did not forget that they existed, added themselves to Johnson’s results and find that they actually did quite well, with the play money half outperforming the real money half.:
Inline links: Do Prediction Markets Have An Election Problem?, find that they actually did quite well
Zvi on California's AI Bill
May 08, 2024 · Original source
But Zvi Mowshowitz (summary article in Asterisk, long FAQ on his blog) has looked at it more closely and found:
Inline links: Zvi Mowshowitz, summary article in
Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage3. If the tests show that the model can do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it won’t, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.” So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid. There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones: Some people think this would literally ban open source AI. After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says4 this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession5. The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies. Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests. Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s Anthropic’s, Google’s, and OpenAI’s - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of6. Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”. What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill? Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so. This is Jessica Taylor’s main point here, which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions. Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models. I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation. Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should: Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm. This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified. Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague. The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works. Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense. Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap ad hoc AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then. Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code. Other people note that this will *eventually* make open source impossible. Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced. (or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.) Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too. The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it. Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to read Zvi’s Asterisk article or his longer FAQ on his blog. I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by reading the bill itself. There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check! If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example: If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)
Inline links: 3, 4, 5, Anthropic’s, Google’s,, OpenAI’s, 6, here, The Origin Of Woke, read Zvi’s, his longer FAQ on his blog, reading the bill itself
“Full shutdown means the cessation of operation of a covered model, including all copies and derivative models, on all computers and storage devices within custody, control, or possession of a person”, where “person” is elsewhere defined to mean corporation. I agree this is a little ambiguous, but Asterisk talked to the state senator’s office and they confirmed that they meant the less-restrictive, pro-open-source meaning.
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
Yeah, this is an interesting point. There’s a good interview with Skarbek in last month’s issue of Asterisk, I think it will be online shortly.
Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity
March 19, 2025 · Original source
Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk.
Inline links: a great article on misophonia
"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk
March 26, 2025 · Original source
Asterisk invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves.
Inline links: Asterisk
Am I doing the thing where I cherry-pick a bunch of myths from unrelated cultures, squint at them really hard until they all look the same, and declare myself to have discovered something fundamental about the depths of the collective unconscious? Read the article and find out!
Inline links: Read the article
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
60: Asterisk - Africa Needs A YIMBY Movement. I was surprised by the title, because I always hear that African cities are growing very rapidly. But the article makes its case well: African cities have dysfunctional planning, relegating most of the growth to either the “informal sector” (ie thrown-together slums that could be banned at any moment) or rural land on the outskirts of existing cities. “In Ghana, for example, acquiring a building permit can take 170 days — and in practice, developers say it often takes four to five years. Unsurprisingly, 76% of development in Ghana is informal.”
Inline links: Africa Needs A YIMBY Movement
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
38: Eliezer and Nate’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is now out and is an NYT bestseller. Authors’ Atlantic article here (paywalled). Online resources/FAQ/answers to objections here. My review here. Peter Wildeford’s review here. Mostly negative Asterisk review here, criticisms/arguments about the Asterisk review here, Eliezer’s response to this line of criticism here (X). I thought all the reviews, positive and negative, had something useful to say - except the NYT review, which was remarkably bad (Steven Adler points out that it accuses the book of failing to define the term “superintelligence”, but it very explicitly does that on page 4). I read Literary Substack sometimes, and I am so confused - it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, an NYT bestseller, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (X), was remarkably bad
48: In the ongoing survey of AI progress I wrote about here, two tasks kept confounding forecasters: no matter how good AI gets at writing, math, chess, Go, or any other hard thing, it still can’t play Angry Birds or fold laundry. Year after year, forecasters predict that they can’t know exactly how AI will progress, but they are sure it will solve laundry folding before it solves protein folding. Year after year, they are wrong. Now one team claims that the laundry barrier has finally fallen.
Inline links: here, the laundry barrier has finally fallen
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
They started with one village in Malawi (2022), moved up a subdistrict (2023), and are now starting a district-wide experiment; if it goes well, they’ll scale up to the entire country of Malawi (!) in 2027. Preliminary results are positive, with the charity claiming they effectively doubled the economy of their chosen subdistrict (population 85,000) without causing inflation (how can this be?) Related: Asterisk panel with Kelsey Piper on the future of UBI and AI.
Inline links: Asterisk panel with Kelsey Piper on the future of UBI and AI
Astralcodexten7 mentions across 7 issues

Astralcodexten is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between October 03, 2022 and January 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Subject: Astralcodexten Com"; "teasers of subscriber-only posts from ACX"; "ACX has an unofficial subreddit". It most often appears alongside California, SF, Twitter.

Article page
Astralcodexten
Mention count
7
Issue count
7
First seen
October 03, 2022
Last seen
January 12, 2026
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CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference
October 03, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
2023 Subscription Drive + Free Unlocked Posts
January 13, 2023 · Original source
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Inline links: It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
Inline links: If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
Biography Of Jason Shea, 44th US President
Inline links: Biography Of Jason Shea, 44th US President
Open Thread 297
October 09, 2023 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here.
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People
July 18, 2024 · Original source
[Original post here]
Inline links: Original post here
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
$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
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading an 11,000 word review of superhero comic books?
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
Open Thread 355
November 11, 2024 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: New subscribers-only post, Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims, about when you should vote for a worse candidate to punish a better candidate.
Inline links: Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims
2: Comments on things related to last week’s Polymarket post: Michael Wiebe argues that Theo the French whale’s contrarian polling take was based on a simple misunderstanding of how to read polls (I stand by my claim that a single success demonstrates almost nothing about the trustworthiness of the underlying process). And Alex Tabarrok says more about why this was a big victory for prediction markets.
Inline links: Polymarket post, argues that Theo the French whale’s contrarian polling take was based on a simple misunderstanding of how to read polls, says more about why this was a big victory for prediction markets
Open Thread 416
January 12, 2026 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
Inline links: subreddit, Discord, bulletin board, in-person meetups around the world, here
1: New subscriber-only post, Sell Me This Pen, a set of ultrashort stories based on the classic sales interview question.
Inline links: Sell Me This Pen
ACX Survey Results5 mentions across 5 issues

ACX Survey Results is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 06, 2023 and December 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results"; "using the publicly available ACX Survey Results"; "publicly available ACX Survey Results". It most often appears alongside ACX Survey, 2022 ACX survey, 2024 ACX survey.

Article page
ACX Survey Results
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
February 06, 2023
Last seen
December 06, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)
February 06, 2023 · Original source
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
Speaking of which, thanks to everyone who took the ACX survey - especially our transgender readers, who are heroically patient with me using them as lab rats to test my weird neuroscience theories. As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID compared to cisgender and straight people (~15%, yes, all these numbers are really high and you shouldn’t exactly believe them). There are lots of possible confounders, and I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data sometime, but a pretty plausible explanation is that some Long COVID is psychosomatic, all forms of neurodivergence correlate with each other, and so bi and trans people will report more of every psychosomatic condition.
Inline links: Pirate Wires recently reported
Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
June 14, 2024 · Original source
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
[As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.]
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Indulge Your Internet Addiction By Reading About Internet Addiction
December 06, 2024 · Original source
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Asterisk Magazine5 mentions across 5 issues

Asterisk Magazine is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between January 30, 2024 and October 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine"; "Asterisk Magazine has a superforecaster predict How Long Til We’re All On Ozempic?"; "Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine". It most often appears alongside ACX, Metaculus, San Francisco.

Article page
Asterisk Magazine
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
January 30, 2024
Last seen
October 27, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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24
January 30, 2024 · Original source
This is the claim of an article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine. The key graphic is this:
Inline links: an article by Jeremiah Johnson in Asterisk Magazine
Asterisk is now releasing its issues piecemeal; along with Johnson on prediction markets, Issue Five includes articles on airline safety, PEPFAR, developing-world democracy, and a review of Going Infinite.
Inline links: Issue Five includes
Open Thread 345
September 02, 2024 · Original source
1: Followup on Ozempic/GLP-1RAs - Asterisk Magazine has a superforecaster predict How Long Til We’re All On Ozempic?
Inline links: How Long Til We’re All On Ozempic?
The Case Against California Proposition 36
October 29, 2024 · Original source
[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]
Inline links: Asterisk Magazine
Open Thread 391
July 21, 2025 · Original source
1: Asterisk Magazine is launching an AI blogging fellowship for people who know things about AI and want to get into blogging. August 24 - October 6, remote, compatible with holding a different full-time job on the side. You will do Zoom calls with peers, mentors, and people who will motivate you to write things; at the end you will have some articles that will get published on Asterisk's website and some assistance in getting a longer-term platform. I’m one of the mentors; others include Dean Ball (White House AI senior policy advisor), Timothy Lee (Understanding AI) and Sam Bowman (Anthropic). Read more here, apply here.
Inline links: here, here
Open Thread 405
October 27, 2025 · Original source
6: Asterisk magazine (EA/rationalist-adjacent, I’ve blogged about their work eg here and here) is looking for a new managing editor. You’ll help find interesting stories in fields like global health, economics, AI, and general tech-adjacent (and less tech-adjacent) culture, and convert them into polished articles. $90,000 -$120,000, remote work possible. Learn more and apply here.
Inline links: here, here, Learn more and apply here
Atlantic5 mentions across 5 issues

Atlantic is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 05, 2021 and March 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I think the Atlantic article and its global warming metaphor are totally off base"; "David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later (Atlantic)"; "the Atlantic published an article saying that people who like quiet are racist". It most often appears alongside New York Times, California, China.

Article page
Atlantic
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
August 05, 2021
Last seen
March 11, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
…anyway, The Atlantic says the FDA needs to be stricter and wait longer to approve things, and I am against this.
In conclusion, and contra The Atlantic, the FDA approving aducanumab is not very much like global warming at all. It is more like global warming in an alternate universe, where the government sometimes approves pollutants, and then everyone is forced to emit millions of tons of them whether they want to or not. Sometimes the government orders people to build a coal plant in the middle of the desert where nobody lives, a coal plant that isn't even connected to anything and just burns lots of coal without producing any electricity. But also, elderly people frequently freeze to death because the government refuses to give them permission to heat their house in the middle of winter. There is lively debate over whether the government should build more useless coal plants or let more elderly people freeze to death, and anyone who thinks there should be a better way of doing things is condemned as some kind of fringe libertarian. I really cannot stress enough how accurate this metaphor is or how much everything in the medical system is like this.
Lots of people have been writing about aducanumab, but this Atlantic article in particular bothers me.
Inline links: this
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later (Atlantic)
Inline links: David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later
Lukianoff And Defining Cancel Culture
August 21, 2024 · Original source
C2: A little while ago, the Atlantic published an article saying that people who like quiet are racist and need to shut up, because noise is objectively vibrant and good. I have strong noise sensitivities that already make it hard for me to go out in public places, this felt like denying my right to exist in public, and I got angrier than I’ve ever gotten at anything in the media. I’m still so mad I’m not sure I’ll ever link an Atlantic article on ACX again, and I have trouble staying civil when I encounter people who work for the Atlantic. This isn’t out of some well-thought-out political strategy, just that it would personally warm my heart if the Atlantic failed as a business and everyone associated with it died of starvation. Probably this is dysfunctional and I should get over it eventually. But am I morally obligated to get over it for reasons of cancel culture in particular? Should I force myself to buy an Atlantic subscription, if I think that I would have bought one if not for my anger here? Would the answer be any different if it were an article criticizing transgender people?
In fact, let’s expand on these last two. Suppose (getting back to hypotheticals), that the Atlantic publishes something unbelievably offensive. Maybe “Stay-at-home fathers are pathetic failures, and CPS should take away their children and put them in more traditional families”. Thousands of stay-at-home fathers get angry and write in saying they’re cancelling their subscriptions. Millions sign an open letter demanding they apologize, and the Atlantic is hemorrhaging credibility among other journalists and potential sources. The CEO meets with the writer and editor, tells them they’re idiots, and fires them.
P1: The stay-at-home fathers were wrong to be angry that the Atlantic called them pathetic failures and urged the state to abduct their children. They are morally required to react like perfectly equanimous Buddhist monks. Certainly they are forbidden to cancel their subscriptions.
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
38: Eliezer and Nate’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is now out and is an NYT bestseller. Authors’ Atlantic article here (paywalled). Online resources/FAQ/answers to objections here. My review here. Peter Wildeford’s review here. Mostly negative Asterisk review here, criticisms/arguments about the Asterisk review here, Eliezer’s response to this line of criticism here (X). I thought all the reviews, positive and negative, had something useful to say - except the NYT review, which was remarkably bad (Steven Adler points out that it accuses the book of failing to define the term “superintelligence”, but it very explicitly does that on page 4). I read Literary Substack sometimes, and I am so confused - it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, an NYT bestseller, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (X), was remarkably bad
Last Rights
March 11, 2026 · Original source
There are op-eds too. Here’s how the Atlantic wants to fix Congress. The New York Times of course has a solution. Here on Substack, Matt Yglesias thinks proportional representation is the solution, and Nicholas Decker has an especially interesting solution.
Inline links: wants, solution, the solution, solution
ACX Survey3 mentions across 3 issues

ACX Survey is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2023 and June 14, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "thanks to everyone who took the ACX survey"; "I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data"; "Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission". It most often appears alongside ACX Survey Results, Pirate Wires, 2022 ACX survey.

Article page
ACX Survey
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
March 16, 2023
Last seen
June 14, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID compared to cisgender and straight people (~15%, yes, all these numbers are really high and you shouldn’t exactly believe them). There are lots of possible confounders, and I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data sometime, but a pretty plausible explanation is that some Long COVID is psychosomatic, all forms of neurodivergence correlate with each other, and so bi and trans people will report more of every psychosomatic condition.
Inline links: Pirate Wires recently reported
In order to learn more about this, I asked people about their gender and their joint disorders on the ACX survey, taken by about 7000 people.
Some ACX survey respondents kindly indicated that I could email them if I had any questions about their responses. I asked some trans people with joint mobility issues to tell me their stories. Here’s a typical response:
Replication Attempt: Bisexuality And Long COVID
May 03, 2023 · Original source
This seemed weird enough that I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data (read more about the ACX survey here).
Inline links: here
Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
June 14, 2024 · Original source
So I asked about this on the 2022 and 2024 ACX surveys. Both gave similar results, but I’m going to focus on the 2024 survey, since I did the most followup on it. Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Emtd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbe05b487-80af-4c93-af22-8abf99fa2f13_799x682.png, as
Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: as
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results
Aporia3 mentions across 3 issues

Aporia is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 01, 2024 and January 16, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Noah Carl at Aporia"; "the latest volley is Aporia ’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed?"; "linking the Aporia article would be a sufficient pointer". It most often appears alongside US, IQ, Lynn.

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Aporia
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3
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3
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November 01, 2024
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January 16, 2025
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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates
January 15, 2025 · Original source
People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).
Inline links: Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed?
Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ
January 16, 2025 · Original source
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.
A Ordem2 mentions across 2 issues

A Ordem is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 01, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem"; "articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated"; "The articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated". It most often appears alongside Abraham Lincoln, ACX, Alburitel.

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A Ordem
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2
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2
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October 01, 2025
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October 24, 2025
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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
...scan of the original October 15th article here , and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here . An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here . An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF. In the 1950s, an American Ca...
...Seculo ; there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here , and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here . An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here . An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF. In the 1950s, an American Ca...
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
A nun stated that some people had seen “something” appear in the sun in Torres Novas, also about 12 miles away, though she is not really clear on whether she saw it herself or is just relaying other people’s impressions. I continue to be confused by a pattern in which we have one or two secondhand testimonies from entire towns that supposedly witnessed a dramatic miracle. Ethan then proceeds to make the situation tougher for himself, describing two witnesses from 120 km and 160 km away. But a 160 km circle includes three big cities - Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon - along with many medium-sized towns and small villages. When we combine this with the evidence from Ghiaie - where it was witnessed from distant Tavernola but not equally-distant Milan - I think these testimonies are more consistent with a few suggestible people saying “Oh, a cool miracle? Yeah, I definitely saw it too” than sightlines that spread through normal geography. I think people were more likely to say this if they were close (and so it was plausible) than if they were very far away (and so it was less plausible), but that this is some kind of gradually declining function, rather than the sharper function you would expect if there were an actual boundary. (one person in central Germany, about 500 miles away, claimed to see the Ghiaie miracle - I didn’t include this on the original post, because it didn’t seem credible, but I think it’s good evidence that sometimes people say non-credible things) I do continue to be confused by the Alburitel stories, which seem much stronger than the others, and perhaps by the Minde story, which is at least in the right place. 4: Heat I don’t think this made it in the post, but during a conversation Ethan answered one of my objections - that any heat warm enough to dry clothes in Fatima would have started fires and explosions closer to the source - by saying that unlike the light (which was visible omnidirectionally), the heat was a ray shot straight at Fatima, which didn’t affect anywhere else. I admit this answers my objection. I won’t even ask for a complexity penalty here, because it makes sense that a just God would try to avoid frying random villages. 5: Ending One objection I raised to Ethan’s not-the-real-sun story was that, when the miracle ended, the fake sun would either have to disappear, or remain in the sky long enough to be seen alongside the real sun. But witnesses reported neither of these two things. Ethan reports one witness who says they saw a fake sun first leave from, then merge with, the real sun. I have that witness statement too - it’s on my list of weirder testimonies that don’t mesh with everyone else’s. The large majority said they only saw one sun. If most people had seen multiple suns, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If I understand Ethan correctly (which I might not, I’m having trouble interpreting this passage), he thinks that maybe the clouds cleared enough to reveal the real sun right as the fake sun moved into the same position as the real sun, the crowds were temporarily blinded, and the fake sun took advantage of this to disappear unnoticed. 5.2: Later Miracles I claimed that later miracles were obviously not objective-in-consensus-reality. For example, the Benin City sun miracle was seen by people in one field, but not in the rest of the surrounding city of 1.5 million people; the Lubbock sun miracle was seen by something like 50 - 75% of attendees. I said that this suggested the Fatima miracle wasn’t objective either. Ethan objects that there is no reason the different miracles should be implemented the same way, and that maybe Ghiaie was a unidirectional beam of light focused away from Milan, and that maybe Benin City was entirely subjective, but Fatima was omnidirectional and objective. I of course cannot disprove the possibility that God implements the same miracle in different ways at different times; the most I can do here is ask for a complexity penalty. 5.3: Domingos Pinto Coelho DPC was a lawyer and statesman who saw the miracle at Fatima, wrote an article about it, and dropped at the end that the next time he’d encountered similar weather conditions he’d tried staring at the sun again and seen the same miracle. I described it as a powerful testimony in favor of the illusion/hallucination/suggestion hypothesis. Ethan says that “the Portugese historian Costa Brochado cast doubt on the integrity of this report”: The articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho in A Ordem seem to be very much exaggerated. It is difficult to understand the manifest confusion he establishes between the phenomena at Fatima… and the alterations in solar light that he says he saw in Lisbon some days afterward. But in any case the historical value of the articles of the leading Catholic organ is almost nil… We believe that we can declare, after patient research on the matter, that the articles of Dr. Pinto Coelho ought to be read from a political point of view, since their objective was, as the author himself came to declare, to serve as the devil’s advocate As far as I can tell, this is just a historian named Costa Brochado saying he doesn’t believe Coelho. I don’t know why we should trust Costa Brochado, but since we’re bringing in random historians’ unsupported assessments of Coelho’s honesty, here is Father Stanley Jaki: Nobody could doubt that he [DPC] was a man of utter veracity, a point to which no proper attention has been paid in the Fatima literature. There he is all too often ignored and when not, he is dismissed as someone who had an axe to grind on behalf of Church authorities wary of Fatima…in view of Coelho’s unquestionable probity, one has to assume that he saw, with eyes unblurred, what he claimed to have seen, a repetition of the miracle of the sun. He never retracted, however slightly, his claim. As one who in his last hours fervently invoked the help of Jacinta who he came to venerate as a saint, Coelho would have hardly lived with the knowledge that he had intentionally mislead countless readers of his in a matter that so closely involved Jacinta and the other two videntes…Coelho surely must have thought that Rather than keep calling character witnesses, I think it’s more helpful to note that we now have two more testimonies of people who saw the miracle once, then were able to reproduce it under less holy conditions. One is Case One of Nix & Apple, who describe someone who saw the miracle in Medjugorje, then went home to New Orleans and was able to see it again. The other is person #14 on my list of survey responses. I emailed him and asked him to confirm that he was claiming that he could repeat the miracle when the weather conditions were just right. He responded: Yes, exactly. Excluding sunsets, I was able to focus on the sun when it was in a cloudless area of the sky only once (after the pouring rain had just stopped); on all other occasions, the intensity of the light made it impossible to focus on the sun. With translucent clouds, focusing on the sun was easier, and the visual changes (colors, apparent movement) appeared consistently after a few seconds. Even though it wasn’t asked in the questionnaire, I have a hypothesis about the physiology underlying the phenomenon, or at least the parts I experienced. Thinking back to those experiences, I might hypothesize that the intense white light of the sun caused the simultaneous formation of afterimages of different colors in the same area of the visual field. It could be that the visual system, in the presence of conflicting signals, instead of integrating the information by creating a white afterimage, rapidly switched attention from one color to another, creating the alternating colors. If this process occurs unevenly across the afterimage area, different parts of the area will change color at slightly different times, creating the appearance of movement within the area itself. I think the reason this phenomenon is not very common is because there is a narrow window between “light too bright to stare at the sun” and “light too dim for the alterations to appear.” The reason I was able to get these results repeatedly was because I was trying to replicate them, so whenever I saw translucent clouds, I tried to conduct the experiment. With clouds that were too thin I failed, but with clouds that I believe belonged to the Stratus translucidus or Altostratus translucidus category, I succeeded. I would have agreed with this earlier, but it’s awkward to have so many people who say they’ve seen this in a completely clear sky. Very speculatively, there might be some individual variability in the ability of the eye to adjust out brightness, and different people will reach their sweet spots in clouded vs. clear skies. 6: “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change his mind.” Speaking of complexity penalties, I have a broader objection to some of the moves Ethan is making here. If I understand his theory correctly, it goes like this: the miraculous object at Fatima was not the sun. But God put a lot of effort into tricking people into thinking that it was. Even though the object was below the clouds, He made the clouds clear around it at the moment of its appearance, so that it looked like the clearing clouds had revealed a normal above-the-clouds sun. Then, when it was time to remove the object, He made it disappear at the exact moment that the real sun came out behind clouds, so that the crowds would be too dazzled to notice that the object and the sun were two different things. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, for two reasons: God shouldn’t try to trick people.
Inline links: Nix & Apple
ACOUP2 mentions across 2 issues

ACOUP is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 21, 2021 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "a link to the ACOUP blog"; "Reading the ACOUP blog"; "Leading the ACOUP blog". It most often appears alongside 9/11, A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOU.

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ACOUP
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2
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2
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July 21, 2021
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September 24, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, which says:
Inline links: which says
I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can’t rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
Inline links: Bertran
The more interesting potential question is why. Considering all of the competing theories for that, I think, would take its own collections post. But for my part, I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare – it was viewed not generally a necessary evil in these societies, but a positive good – which may have meant there was less sense that what had taken place was trauma at all. If that is the case, the emergence of PTSD would speak to improvement in our society: we have become more averse to violence and do it less, and as a consequence, feel it more. If you will permit me, we have more wounded warriors because we have fewer dead ones, on account of having fewer wars in general.
Inline links: not generally a necessary evil, positive good, fewer, wars
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Reading A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, of course.
Reading the ACOUP blog.
Reading Bret Devereaux's blogpost 'On Roman Values' (I'm a stalwart ACOUP reader)
Acrolectics2 mentions across 2 issues

Acrolectics is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 27, 2022 and March 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Austin (who writes Acrolectics)"; "Austin (author of Acrolectics ) writes". It most often appears alongside Austin, Scott, 1984.

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Acrolectics
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2
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2
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January 27, 2022
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March 24, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
Austin (who writes Acrolectics) says:
Inline links: Austin, Acrolectics
Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 24, 2022 · Original source
And Austin (author of Acrolectics) writes:
Inline links: Austin, Acrolectics
AI Lab Watch2 mentions across 2 issues

AI Lab Watch is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 13, 2025 and December 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Zach Stein-Perlman, who runs AI Lab Watch , argues that Maybe Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust Is Powerless"; "for AI Lab Watch". It most often appears alongside ACLU, ACX, AI 2027.

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AI Lab Watch
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2
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2
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March 13, 2025
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December 22, 2025
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OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
Zach Stein-Perlman, who runs AI Lab Watch, argues that Maybe Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust Is Powerless. He points to a rule that a supermajority (with complicated definition, see here) of stockholders can overrule the LTBT. Anthropic partisans counter that they need some way to deal with the trust losing the plot; many of Anthropic’s shareholders are also people with a special interest in AI safety, and it would be hard to get a majority of these people to overrule the LTBT unless it was important.
Inline links: AI Lab Watch, Maybe Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust Is Powerless, here
Open Thread 413
December 22, 2025 · Original source
1: Another charity fundraiser, this one for Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is the group that does the hard work for many of the rationalist community resources you enjoy. You probably know them from the Less Wrong website and the Lighthaven campus. But did you know they also designed the websites for AI 2027, for Eliezer and Nate’s book, for AI Lab Watch, and (for some reason) for Deciding To Win, a renegade faction of Democrats who believe that, instead of supporting unpopular policies and losing, the party should support popular policies and win? And on the side, they play a big role in hosting ACX meetups, including letting us use their campus (if you’ve ever been to our Berkeley meetup location, that was them). They’re a rare intersection between “support effective altruist charities” and “support pillars of your your local community”. Donate here, or contact Oli if you have some kind of more complicated donation-related need.
Inline links: Lightcone Infrastructure, Less Wrong, Lighthaven, AI 2027, Eliezer and Nate’s book, AI Lab Watch, Deciding To Win, here
AI X-Risk Research Podcast2 mentions across 2 issues

AI X-Risk Research Podcast is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 20, 2021 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Daniel Filan now has an AI X-Risk Research Podcast"; "his AI X-Risk Research Podcast". It most often appears alongside Daniel Filan, GPT-2, Less Wrong.

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2
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2
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May 20, 2021
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February 09, 2023
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Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
36: Related: Daniel Filan now has an AI X-Risk Research Podcast (conflict of interest notice: I know Daniel and think he is generally great).
Inline links: AI X-Risk Research Podcast
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
31: I think I’ve mentioned Daniel Filan here in the contest of his AI alignment work and his AI X-Risk Research Podcast. He has a new podcast about not-just-AI-related things, The Filan Cabinet. First three episodes are interviews with a former Congressional candidate, a Presbyterian pastor, and a cryptocurrency developer.
Inline links: AI X-Risk Research Podcast, The Filan Cabinet
Alpha School2 mentions across 2 issues

Alpha School is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2025 and October 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Finalists are Alpha School"; "finalists, in order of appearance: 1: Alpha School". It most often appears alongside Joan of Arc, The Russo-Ukrainian War, ACX Grants.

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Alpha School
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2
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2
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June 23, 2025
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October 03, 2025
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Open Thread 387
June 23, 2025 · Original source
3: Thank you to everyone who voted for finalists in this year’s Nonbook Review Contest. All entries among the top ten best-ranked reviews became automatic finalists, and I also added two more from the 10-25 tier that voters or I especially liked. Honorable mentions were others from the 10-25 tier that I liked a lot. Finalists are Alpha School, Dementia, Islamic Geometric Patterns, Joan of Arc, Mashed Potatoes, Men, Ollantay, Phase I Research, Synaptic Plasticity, The ACX Commentariat, The Internet That Might Have Been, and The Russo-Ukrainian War. Honorable Mentions are at least Bishop's Castle, Bukele, Elon Musk's Algorithm, JFK Conspiracies, Martial Arts, Miniatur Wunderland, School (Review 1 by DK), and Watergate. I may promote some honorables to finalists depending on reader tolerance or unexpected opportunities. I will give you finer-grained score information after the contest ends. First finalist post is planned for this Friday.
Vote In The 2025 Non-Book Review Contest
October 03, 2025 · Original source
1: Alpha School 2: School 3: Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia 4: Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 5: The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat 6: Joan of Arc 7: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes 8: Dating Men In The Bay Area 9: Ollantay 10: Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research 11: The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis 12: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been 13: The Russo-Ukrainian War
Inline links: Alpha School, School, Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia, Islamic Geometric Patterns in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Astral Codex Tex Commentariat, Joan of Arc, My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes, Dating Men In The Bay Area, Ollantay, Participation In Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research, The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis, Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been, The Russo-Ukrainian War
Applied Divinity Studies2 mentions across 2 issues

Applied Divinity Studies is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 22, 2021 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "anonymous author of Applied Divinity Studies has made a Chrome extension"; "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 (Applied Divinity Studies’ article)"; "Applied Divinity Studies claims to have an argument". It most often appears alongside Matt Yglesias, New York Times, 1978.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 22, 2021
Last seen
June 23, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Logistics
January 22, 2021 · Original source
And I know Substack is supposed to be an email newsletter thing, but consider reading it online instead so you can participate in the comments. If you miss the old layout, the anonymous author of Applied Divinity Studies has made a Chrome extension thing you can use to convert the Substack layout to the older one.
Inline links: Applied Divinity Studies, Chrome extension thing
Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
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.
Inline links: Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
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.
Inline links: here, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
arXiv2 mentions across 2 issues

arXiv is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 20, 2022 and April 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "preprint servers like arXiv"; "we can publish all our findings on the ArXIV". It most often appears alongside Advarra, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan.

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arXiv
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Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.
There’s no question that the web has profoundly changed the way scientists interact with scientific results. But interestingly, the instantaneousness of online publication — whether on blogs, in the comments below an article, in social media, or on a preprint server like arXiv and bioRxiv — hasn’t affected Nature very much. We might have naïvely expected that it would have tried to keep up with the new platforms, since speed was its comparative advantage. But it didn’t. And that hasn’t made it obsolete, either.
Inline links: arXiv, bioRxiv
Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
But I think a lot of AI development is genuinely not linked to the federal funding spigot. If the government passed an IRB law based off how things work in medicine, I think OpenAI could say “We’re not receiving federal funding, we can publish all our findings on the ArXIV, and we don’t care about the FDA, you have no power over us”. I don’t know if some branch of the government has enough power to mandate everyone use IRBs regardless of their funding source.
Atlas of Wonders and Monsters2 mentions across 2 issues

Atlas of Wonders and Monsters is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, a_reader, ACX.

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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
Making Nature, reviewed by Étienne F.D. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters.
Inline links: Making Nature, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature.
Inline links: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, Making Nature
Axios2 mentions across 2 issues

Axios is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 28, 2022 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Summary here: https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html"; "See eg this one https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good". It most often appears alongside China, COVID, Germany.

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Axios
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Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
Summary here: https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html
Inline links: https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
I think a very important piece of evidence you missed is all the surveys where people answer that their own situation is fine, but the economy is bad. See eg this one https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good
Inline links: https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good
A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry1 mentions across 1 issues

A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 24, 2024 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Reading A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, of course"; "Reading A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, of course". It most often appears alongside ACOU, ACOUP, ACX Survey Results.

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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Reading A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, of course.
Reading the ACOUP blog.
Reading Bret Devereaux's blogpost 'On Roman Values' (I'm a stalwart ACOUP reader)
A Failure, But Not Of Prediction1 mentions across 1 issues

A Failure, But Not Of Prediction is a recurring publication 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 "The post was A Failure, But Not Of Prediction, and it argued that getting your predictions right was less important than calculating payoffs right". It most often appears alongside 2008 crisis, Ancient Phoenicia, Animal Chow.

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Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
The post was A Failure, But Not Of Prediction, and it argued that getting your predictions right was less important than calculating payoffs right. For example, if some very smart scientists tell you that there's an 80% chance the coronavirus won't be a big deal, you thank them for their contribution and then prepare for the coronavirus anyway. In the world where they were right, you've lost some small amount of preparation money; in the world where they were wrong, you've saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Inline links: A Failure, But Not Of Prediction
A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste1 mentions across 1 issues

A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ezra Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” outlined the original guiding principles". It most often appears alongside A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama, Bogus.

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Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
August 23, 2024 · Original source
Two decades earlier, Ezra Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” outlined the original guiding principles of Imagism, a literary movement aimed at making poetry more fresh, more alive, and more relevant to a public quickly getting bored of the old conventions. Reading the essay, Pound’s advice is unimpeachable, encouraging aspiring poets to raise their standards significantly, avoid plagiarism, and buckle down on learning all the nuances of language in order to produce the most striking images possible to convey with the written word:
Inline links: “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Imagism
A Game of Thrones1 mentions across 1 issues

A Game of Thrones is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 28, 2021 and May 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""George R. R. Martin is fond of calling A Game of Thrones a more 'grounded' Lord of the Rings."". It most often appears alongside Africa, African Americans, Against Empathy.

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A Game of Thrones
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Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
Now Curtis has cunningly compared an extremely specific (chained to a radiator) with a much more general (falling in love). But the numbers still work if you widen his point out to all kidnappings. Or all serious crime. This kind of thing is everywhere - George R. R. Martin is fond of calling A Game of Thrones a more 'grounded' Lord of the Rings. It's actually drastically less real, just nastier.
Inline links: less, real
A History Of Mankind1 mentions across 1 issues

A History Of Mankind is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "David Roman (writes A History Of Mankind )". It most often appears alongside ACS, Alexander Turok, Alice K.

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A History Of Mankind
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Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
David Roman (writes A History Of Mankind):
Inline links: A History Of Mankind
A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk1 mentions across 1 issues

A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "This is the main data point that keeps me from 100% believing the “it’s all ketamine” theory. Related: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, Agent Village.

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Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
This is the main data point that keeps me from 100% believing the “it’s all ketamine” theory. Related: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.
Inline links: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk
A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth1 mentions across 1 issues

A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth is a recurring publication 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 "John Milton ... to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

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Your Book Review: The Internationalists
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
A Mindful Monkey1 mentions across 1 issues

A Mindful Monkey is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Douglas (who writes the blog A Mindful Monkey )". It most often appears alongside 5α-reductase inhibitor, ALLO, allopregnanolone.

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A Mindful Monkey
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1
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1
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March 16, 2022
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March 16, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
— Douglas (who writes the blog A Mindful Monkey) clears up some mechanism details I missed:
Inline links: Douglas, A Mindful Monkey
A Pan-Species Welfare State1 mentions across 1 issues

A Pan-Species Welfare State is a recurring publication 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 "Cf. “A Pan-Species Welfare State”". It most often appears alongside @the_megabase, ACX Grantees, ACX MEETUP.

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1
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1
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May 15, 2024
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May 15, 2024
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Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Cf. “Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State” This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.
Inline links: “Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State”
A Primer On The Metaculus Scoring System1 mentions across 1 issues

A Primer On The Metaculus Scoring System is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2021 and March 01, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Metaculus founder Anthony Aguirre published A Primer On The Metaculus Scoring System". It most often appears alongside Anthony Aguirre, Foresight Exchange, George Floyd.

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Mantic Monday: Scoring Rule Controversy
March 01, 2021 · Original source
In response to these concerns, Metaculus founder Anthony Aguirre published A Primer On The Metaculus Scoring System. His argument is: the more predictions people make, the more useful Metaculus is. Having a very slightly positive-sum scoring rule (ie one where on average you gain points by making a prediction) encourages people to make lots of predictions. Because of how the positive-sum rule is implemented, on some very specific questions you will always get points even if you’re maximally wrong (although not always). You’ll still get many more points if you’re right. This most effectively produces the desired result: users make many predictions, but also try hard to get them right.
Inline links: A Primer On The Metaculus Scoring System
A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values1 mentions across 1 issues

A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 12, 2025 and February 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Jan Leike ... has a post on his blog, A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values". It most often appears alongside Aleister Crowley, Anthropic, Audrey Tang.

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Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec
February 12, 2025 · Original source
Maybe morality is incoherent at sufficiently high power levels, and it ends up doing incoherent things. The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize The Average Person Jan Leike (formerly of OpenAI’s second alignment team) has a post on his blog, A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values. The idea is: Identify some interesting questions that AIs might encounter
Inline links: morality is incoherent at sufficiently high power levels, A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values
A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs1 mentions across 1 issues

A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs is a recurring publication 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 "I recommend A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, Abbott.

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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
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.
Inline links: the updated 2020 version, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VvrE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2341944a-388d-4da9-9788-8474567b83fc_540x737.png, Ed West, Public Policy Institute, UCI criminologists, Applied Divinity Studies’ article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aTNC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa27aeb21-ed87-4e67-b82c-b3ceecee7082_500x238.png, here, Here’s the San Francisco subreddit’s response, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_NL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf7dc478-45d3-487d-8c29-8bc7cdf182dd_2400x1500.png, LouB’s analysis here, This news article, only 2.3% of shoplifting cases result in an arrest, New York Times, the Economist, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!58I3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc63dc7bc-1f8e-49fd-9c68-61c85278d69e_608x662.png, San Francisco’s ‘Crime Wave’ Is Just One Crime, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h17s!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956c0917-2a9b-4ff7-a08e-6aee5030583a_590x376.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TkFS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c5faa01-ac22-48a2-96fe-47efb6f52514_616x334.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, 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
A Strange Dream1 mentions across 1 issues

A Strange Dream is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 15, 2023 and September 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "writes short, silly fiction at A Strange Dream". It most often appears alongside @campeters4, a_reader, ACX.

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A Strange Dream
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September 15, 2023
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September 15, 2023
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Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
The Design Of Everyday Things, by NineDimensions. He is a game developer from Australia who writes short, silly fiction at A Strange Dream and is venturing into blogging at Nine Dimensions.
Inline links: The Design Of Everyday Things, A Strange Dream, Nine Dimensions
A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance1 mentions across 1 issues

A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2021 and April 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Best of recent Less Wrong: A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance". It most often appears alongside Agan, Air Force Chapel, amphetamine.

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1
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April 12, 2021
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April 12, 2021
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@shoppingtheatre.inc
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Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
17: Best of recent Less Wrong: Is Reinforcement Learning Involved In Sensory Processing?, Politics Is Way Too Meta, A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance, and reasons why the GPT-3 paper is disappointing.
Inline links: Is Reinforcement Learning Involved In Sensory Processing?, Politics Is Way Too Meta, A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance, reasons why the GPT-3 paper is disappointing
ABHoN1 mentions across 1 issues

ABHoN is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 04, 2021 and May 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "ABHoN, despite its chapter on this, is of little help". It most often appears alongside 2008, 9/11 attacks, A Brief History Of Neoliberalism.

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ABHoN
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May 04, 2021
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May 04, 2021
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Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
Sound straightforward? Not if you read about it in David Harvey's A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. This treatment is almost the opposite of the way ABHoN describes events. Telling the story this way makes me feel like Jacques Derrida deconstructing some text to undermine the author and prove that they were arguing against themselves all along.
Inline links: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
In these parts, ABHoN’s modus operandi is to give a vague summary of what happened, then overload it with emotional language. Nobody in ABHoN ever cuts a budget, they savagely slash the budget, or cruelly decimate the budget, or otherwise [dramatic adverb] [dramatic verb] it. Nobody is ever against neoliberal reform - they bravely stand up to neoliberal reform, or valiantly resist neoliberal reform, or whatever. Nobody ever “makes” money, they “extract” it. So you read a superficial narrative of some historical event, with all the adverbs changed to more dramatic adverbs, and then a not-very-convincing discussion of why this was all about re-establishing plutocratic power at the end of it. This is basically an entire literary genre by now, and ABHoN fits squarely within it.
The first thesis is mostly implicit. ABHoN doesn't give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods and the 1970s economic crisis. It mostly takes it as a given, interesting only insofar as plutocrats used it as an excuse for pushing neoliberal policies. It never explicitly denies that it happened, it just thinks that it happened in the same sense that the sinking of the Maine happened - less interesting in and of itself than the fact that sinister forces were able to leverage it for their sinister ends.
Inline links: sinking of the Maine
Abrams 20121 mentions across 1 issues

Abrams 2012 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 27, 2024 and November 27, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Abrams 2012 examined jurisdictions that passed laws that added “sentence enhancements”". It most often appears alongside ACLU, age-crime curve, Alex Tabarrok.

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Abrams 2012
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November 27, 2024
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Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Abrams 2012 examined jurisdictions that passed laws that added “sentence enhancements” for gun crimes, under the theory that if gun crimes (but not non-gun crimes) decreased after the enhancements, that was probably a true deterrence effect. They found no impact from mandatory minimums, but “add-on” enhancements decreased gun robberies by 5-15% and gun assaults by 0-1%. These were heterogeneous laws, but it looks like typical gun add-ons are about ten years, so this once again looks like a 1% decrease per extra year of prison sentence, concentrated on the least severe crimes (ie robberies are less severe than assaults). Roodman reanalyzes this, finds some flaws in the data, and comes up with a lower estimate, but I’m going to nervously ignore this for now.
Inline links: Abrams 2012
Acceptable Losses1 mentions across 1 issues

Acceptable Losses is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2021 and August 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Yechaim’s Acceptable Losses". It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, Alex Imas, Apollo.

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Acceptable Losses
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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
I find I usually click the third box on both. I want to tip generously, but giving the maximum possible tip seems profligate. Surely the third box is the right compromise. I recently noticed that this is insane. For a $35 meal, I’m giving GrubHub drivers $3 and UberEats drivers $7 for the same service (or maybe there’s some difference between their services which makes UberEats suggest the higher tip - but if there is, I don’t know about it and it doesn’t affect my decision). Again, this is Behavioral Economics 101 - in particular, one of the many biases lumped together under menu effects. Instead of being a rational economic actor who values food delivery at a certain price, I’m trying to be a third-box-of-four kind of guy. That means that whoever is in charge of this menu has lots of power over the specific dollar amount I give. Not infinite power - if the third box said $1000 I would notice and refuse. But enough power that “nudging” seems like a fair description. Nobody believes studies anymore, which is fair. I trust in a salvageable core of behavioral economics and “nudgenomics” because I can feel in my bones that they’re true for me and the people around me. Let’s move on to Hreha’s article and see if we can square it with my belief in a “salvageable core”. II. Yechaim’s Historical Detective Story Hreha writes: The biggest replication failures relate to the field's most important idea: loss aversion. To be honest, this was a finding that I lost faith in well before the most recent revelations (from 2018-2020). Why? Because I've run studies looking at its impact in the real world—especially in marketing campaigns. If you read anything about this body of research, you'll get the idea that losses are such powerful motivators that they'll turn otherwise uninterested customers into enthusiastic purchasers. The truth of the matter is that losses and benefits are equally effective in driving conversion. In fact, in many circumstances, losses are actually *worse* at driving results. Why? Because loss-focused messaging often comes across as gimmicky and spammy. It makes you, the advertiser, look desperate. It makes you seem untrustworthy, and trust is the foundation of sales, conversion, and retention. "So is loss aversion completely bogus?" Not quite. It turns out that loss aversion does exist, but only for large losses. This makes sense. We *should* be particularly wary of decisions that can wipe us out. That's not a so-called "cognitive bias". It's not irrational. In fact, it's completely sensical. If a decision can destroy you and/or your family, it's sane to be cautious. "So when did we discover that loss aversion exists only for large losses?" Well, actually, it looks like Kahneman and Tversky, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, knew about this unfortunate fact when they were developing Prospect Theory—their grand theory with loss aversion at its center. Unfortunately, the findings rebutting their view of loss aversion were carefully omitted from their papers, and other findings that went against their model were misrepresented so that they would instead support their pet theory. In short: any data that didn't fit Prospect Theory was dismissed or distorted. I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science. This shady behavior by the two titans of the field was brought to light in a paper published in 2018: "Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion". I encourage you to read the paper. It's shocking. This line from the abstract sums things up pretty well: "...the early studies of utility functions have shown that while very large losses are overweighted, smaller losses are often not. In addition, the findings of some of these studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it." When the two biggest scientists in your field are accused of "systemic misrepresentation", you know you've got a serious problem. Which leads us to another paper, published in 2018, entitled "The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?". The paper's authors did a comprehensive review of the loss aversion literature and came to the following conclusion: "current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains." Yikes. But given the questionable origins of the field, it's not surprising that its foundational finding is *also* dubious. If loss aversion can't be trusted, then no other idea in the field can be trusted. This argument relies on two papers - Yechaim’s Acceptable Losses and Gal & Rucker’s Loss Of Loss Aversion. Yechaim’s paper is a historical detective story. It looks at how Kahneman and Tversky first “discovered” and popularized the idea of loss aversion from earlier 1950s and 1960s research. It concludes they did a bad job summarizing this earlier research; looked at carefully, it doesn’t support the strong conclusions they drew. From one perspective, nobody should care about this. All the 1950s and 1960s research was terrible - one of the most important studies it discusses had n = 7. Since then, we’ve had much more rigorous studies of tens of thousands of people. All that hinges on Yechaim’s paper is whether Kahneman and Tversky were personally bad people. Hreha thinks they were. He calls their behavior “shady”, “shocking”, and says they “systematically misrepresented findings to support their pet theory…I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science.” Again, nothing important really hinges on this, but I feel like fighting about it, so let’s look deeper anyway. Here’s how Yechaim summarizes his accusation against K&T: In addition, the results of several studies seem to have been misrepresented by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) and Kahneman and Tversky (1979). Galenter and Pliner (1974) were wrongly cited as showing loss aversion, whereas, in fact, they did not observe an asymmetry in the pleasantness ratings of gains and losses. Likewise, in Green (1963), the results were argued to show loss aversion, even though this study did not involve any losses. In addition, the objective outcomes for some of the participants in Grayson (1960) were transformed by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) so as to better support a model assuming different curvatures for gains and losses (see Table 1). Finally, studies showing no loss aversion or suggesting aversion to large losses were not cited in Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) or in Kahneman and Tversky (1979). Yechaim bases his argument on three sets of early studies of loss aversion: Galenter and Plinter (1974), Fishburn and Kochenberger’s review (1979) and miscellaneous others. —Galenter and Plinter— is actually really neat! It explores “cross-modal” perceptions of gains versus losses. That is, if you ask how much a certain loss hurt, people will probably just say something like “I dunno, a little?” and then it will be hard to turn that into a p-value. G&P solve this by making people listen to loud noises, and asking questions like “is the difference between how much loss A and loss B hurt greater or lesser than the difference between the volume of noise 1 and noise 2?” The idea is that the brain uses a bunch of weird non-numerical scales for everything, and we understand its weird-non-numerical scale for noise volume pretty well, and so maybe we can compare it to how people think about gains or losses. I don’t know why people in 1974 were doing anything this complicated instead of inventing the basic theory of loss aversion the way Kahneman and Tversky would five years later, but here we are. Anyway, Yechaim concludes that this study failed to find loss aversion: Summing up their findings, Galenter and Pliner (1974) reported as follows: “We now turn to the question of the possible asymmetry of the positive and negative limbs of the utility function. On the basis of intuition and anecdote, one would expect the negative limb of the utility function to decrease more sharply than the positive limb increases... what we have observed if anything is an asymmetry of much less magnitude than would have been expected ... the curvature of the function does not change in going from positive to negative” (p. 75). Thus, our search for the historical foundations of loss aversion turns into a dead end on this particular branch: Galenter and Pliner (1974) did not observe such an asymmetry; and their study was quoted erroneously [by Kahneman and Tversky]. I looked for the full text of Galenter and Pliner, but could not find it. I was however able to find the first two pages, including the abstract. The way Galenter and Pliner summarize their own research is: Cross-modality matching of hypothetical increments of money against loudness recover the previously proposed exponent of the utility function for money within a few percent. Similar cross-modality matching experiments for decrements give a disutility exponent of 0.59, larger than the utility exponent for increments. This disutility exponent was checked by an additional cross-modality matching experiment against the disutility of drinking various concentrations of a bitter solution. The parameter estimated in this fashion was 0.63. If I understand the bolded part right, the abstract seems to be saying that they did find loss aversion! I was also able to find the Google Books listing for the book that the study was published in. Its summary is: Three experiments were conducted in which monetary increments and decrements were matched to either the loudness of a tone or the bitterness of various concentrations of sucrose octa-acetate. An additional experiment involving ratio estimates of monetary loss is also reported. Results confirm that the utility function for both monetary increments and decrements is a power function with exponents less than one. The data further suggest that the exponent of the disutility function is larger than that of the utility function, i.e., the rate of change of 'unhappiness' caused by monetary losses is greater than the comparable rate of 'happiness' produced by monetary gains. (Author). Again, the way the book is summarized (apparently by the author) says this study does prove loss aversion. Without being able to access the full study, I’m not sure what’s going on. Possibly the study found loss aversion, but it was less than expected? Still, I feel like Yechaim should have mentioned this. At the very least, it decreases Kahneman and Tversky’s crime from “lied about a study to support their pet theory” to “credulously believed the authors’ own summary of their results and didn’t dig deeper”. But also, why did the authors believe their study showed loss aversion? Why does Yechaim disagree? Without being able to access the full paper, I’m not sure. —Green 1963— is the second study that Yechaim accuses K&T of misrepresenting. Here’s how K&T cite this study in their paper: It is of interest that the main properties ascribed to the value function have been observed in a detailed analysis of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions for changes of wealth (Fishburn and Kochenberger [14]). The functions had been obtained from thirty decision makers in various fields of business, in five independent studies [5, 18, 19, 21, 40]. Most utility functions for gains were concave, most functions for losses were convex, and only three individuals exhibited risk aversion for both gains and losses. With a single exception, utility functions were considerably steeper for losses than for gains. Green 1963 is footnote 19. So K&T don’t even mention it by name. They mention it as one of several studies that a review article called Fishburn and Kochenberger analyzes. F&K are reviewing a bunch of studies of executives. In each study, a very small number of executives (usually about 5-10 per study) make a hypothetical business decision comparing gains and losses, for example: Suppose your company is being sued for patent infringement. Your lawyer’s best judgement is that your chances of winning the suit are 50–50; if you win, you will lose nothing, but if you lose, it will cost the company $1,000,000. Your opponent has offered to settle out of court for $200,000. Would you fight or settle? Then they ask the same question with a bunch of other numbers, and plot implied utility functions for each executive based on the answer. Green is one of these five studies, and it does superficially find loss aversion. But Fishburn and Kochenberger have done something weird. They argue that “loss” and “gain” aren’t necessarily objective, and usually correspond to “loss relative to some reference frame” (so far, so good). In order to figure out where the reference frame is, they assume that the neutral point is wherever “something unusual happens to the individual’s utility function” (F&K’s words). So they shift the zero point separating losses and gains to wherever the utility function looks most interesting! After doing this, they find “loss aversion”, ie the utility curve changes its slope at the transition between the loss side and the gain side. But since the transition was deliberately shifted to wherever the utility curve changed slope, this is almost tautological. It isn’t quite tautological: it’s interesting that most of the utility curves had a sharp transition zone, and it’s interesting that the transition was in the direction of loss-aversion rather than gain-seeking. But it’s tautological enough to be embarrassing. Still, this is Fishburn and Kochenberger’s embarrassment, not Kahneman and Tversky’s. And Fishburn and Kochenberger included this study in their review alongside several other studies that didn’t do this to the same degree. Kahneman and Tversky just cited the review article. I don’t think citing a review article that does weird things to a study really qualifies as “systematic misrepresentation.” I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how angry to be, because everything about Fishburn and Kochenberger is terrible. The average study in F&K includes results from 5-10 executives. But the studies are pretty open about the fact that they interviewed more executives than this, threw away the ones who gave boring answers, and just published results from the interesting ones. Then they moved the axes to wherever looked most interesting. Then they used all this to draw sweeping generalizations about human behavior. Then F&K combined five studies that did this into a review article, without protesting any of it. And then K&T cited the review article, again without protesting. I have to imagine that all of this was normal by the standards of the time. I have looked up all these people and they were all esteemed scientists in their own day. And I believe the evidence shows K&T summarized F&K faithfully. Shouldn’t they have avoided citing F&K at all? Seems like the same kind of question as “Shouldn’t Pythagoras have published his theorem in a peer-reviewed journal, instead of moving to Italy, starting a cult, and exposing his thigh at the Olympic Games as part of a scheme to convince people he was the god Apollo?” Yes, but the past was a weird place. As best I can tell, K&T’s citation of G&P agrees with the authors’ own assessment of their results. Their citation of F&K agrees with the reviewers’ assessment and with a charitable reading of most of the studies involved, although those studies are terrible in many ways which are obvious to modern readers. I would urge people interested in the whodunit question to read Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper. I think it paints the picture of a team very interested in their own results and in theory, and citing other people only incidentally, and in accordance with the scientific standards of their time. I don’t feel a need to tar them as “misrepresenters”. III. Okay, But Is Loss Aversion Real? Remember, all that is about the personal deficiencies of Kahneman and Tversky. Realistically there have been hundreds of much better studies on loss aversion in the forty years since they wrote their article, so we should be looking at those. Here Hreha cites Gal & Rucker: The Loss Of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain? It’s a great 2018 paper that looks at recent evidence and concludes that loss aversion doesn’t exist. But it’s a very specific, interesting type of nonexistence, which I think the Hreha article fails to capture. G&R are happy to admit that in many, many cases, people behave in loss-averse ways, including most of the classic examples given by Kahneman and Tversky. They just think that this is because of other cognitive biases, not a specific cognitive bias called “loss aversion”. They especially emphasize Status Quo Bias and the Endowment Effect. Status Quo Bias is where you prefer inaction to action. Suppose you ask someone “Would you bet on a coin flip, where you get $60 if heads and lose $40 if tails?”. They say no. This deviates from rational expectations, and one way to think of this is loss aversion; the prospect of losing $40 feels “bigger” than the prospect of gaining $60. But another way to think of it is as a bias towards inaction - all else being equal, people prefer not to make bets, and you’d need a higher payoff to overcome their inertia. Endowment Effect is where you value something you already have more than something you don’t. Suppose someone would pay $5 to prevent their coffee mug from being taken away from them, but (in an alternative universe where they lack a coffee mug) would only pay $3 to buy one. You can think of this as loss aversion (the grief of losing a coffee mug feels “bigger” than the joy of gaining one). Or you can think of it as endowment (once you have the coffee mug, it’s yours and you feel like defending it). These are really fine distinctions; I had to read the section a few times before the difference between loss aversion and endowment effect really made sense to me. Kahneman and Tversky just sort of threw all all this stuff out and saw what stuck and didn’t necessarily try super hard to make sure none of the biases they discovered were entirely explainable as combinations of some of the others. G&R think maybe loss aversion is. They do some clever work setting up situations that test loss aversion but not status quo or endowment - for example, offering a risky bet vs. a safer bet. Here they find no evidence for loss aversion as a separate force from the other two biases. Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird. I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just didn’t happen, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental. Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it. Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (h/t Alex Imas, who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force. There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re quite as careful as G&R at ruling out every other possible bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure). The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions. And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, which says: Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (n = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds. Beyond any reasonable thresholds! IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small? Continuing through the Hreha article: For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be. In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all. This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two "nudge units" here in the United States. I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average... 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%? If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity). According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field. I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy. Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction. Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a lot of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit. Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: menu effects, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?, Acceptable Losses, Loss Of Loss Aversion, the first two pages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W80n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f832933-e9a1-4cf2-ba32-e4bc11ce681c_830x624.png, Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2VLm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c49b44a-8850-4ac8-9a88-3dd07718a648_397x305.png, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Alex Imas, Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials, others, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1gY_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b127d7c-045a-4266-b515-a0e9201ce651_571x382.png, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion1 mentions across 1 issues

Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2021 and August 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "a paper published in 2018: "Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion"". It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses, Alex Imas, Apollo.

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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
I find I usually click the third box on both. I want to tip generously, but giving the maximum possible tip seems profligate. Surely the third box is the right compromise. I recently noticed that this is insane. For a $35 meal, I’m giving GrubHub drivers $3 and UberEats drivers $7 for the same service (or maybe there’s some difference between their services which makes UberEats suggest the higher tip - but if there is, I don’t know about it and it doesn’t affect my decision). Again, this is Behavioral Economics 101 - in particular, one of the many biases lumped together under menu effects. Instead of being a rational economic actor who values food delivery at a certain price, I’m trying to be a third-box-of-four kind of guy. That means that whoever is in charge of this menu has lots of power over the specific dollar amount I give. Not infinite power - if the third box said $1000 I would notice and refuse. But enough power that “nudging” seems like a fair description. Nobody believes studies anymore, which is fair. I trust in a salvageable core of behavioral economics and “nudgenomics” because I can feel in my bones that they’re true for me and the people around me. Let’s move on to Hreha’s article and see if we can square it with my belief in a “salvageable core”. II. Yechaim’s Historical Detective Story Hreha writes: The biggest replication failures relate to the field's most important idea: loss aversion. To be honest, this was a finding that I lost faith in well before the most recent revelations (from 2018-2020). Why? Because I've run studies looking at its impact in the real world—especially in marketing campaigns. If you read anything about this body of research, you'll get the idea that losses are such powerful motivators that they'll turn otherwise uninterested customers into enthusiastic purchasers. The truth of the matter is that losses and benefits are equally effective in driving conversion. In fact, in many circumstances, losses are actually *worse* at driving results. Why? Because loss-focused messaging often comes across as gimmicky and spammy. It makes you, the advertiser, look desperate. It makes you seem untrustworthy, and trust is the foundation of sales, conversion, and retention. "So is loss aversion completely bogus?" Not quite. It turns out that loss aversion does exist, but only for large losses. This makes sense. We *should* be particularly wary of decisions that can wipe us out. That's not a so-called "cognitive bias". It's not irrational. In fact, it's completely sensical. If a decision can destroy you and/or your family, it's sane to be cautious. "So when did we discover that loss aversion exists only for large losses?" Well, actually, it looks like Kahneman and Tversky, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, knew about this unfortunate fact when they were developing Prospect Theory—their grand theory with loss aversion at its center. Unfortunately, the findings rebutting their view of loss aversion were carefully omitted from their papers, and other findings that went against their model were misrepresented so that they would instead support their pet theory. In short: any data that didn't fit Prospect Theory was dismissed or distorted. I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science. This shady behavior by the two titans of the field was brought to light in a paper published in 2018: "Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion". I encourage you to read the paper. It's shocking. This line from the abstract sums things up pretty well: "...the early studies of utility functions have shown that while very large losses are overweighted, smaller losses are often not. In addition, the findings of some of these studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it." When the two biggest scientists in your field are accused of "systemic misrepresentation", you know you've got a serious problem. Which leads us to another paper, published in 2018, entitled "The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?". The paper's authors did a comprehensive review of the loss aversion literature and came to the following conclusion: "current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains." Yikes. But given the questionable origins of the field, it's not surprising that its foundational finding is *also* dubious. If loss aversion can't be trusted, then no other idea in the field can be trusted. This argument relies on two papers - Yechaim’s Acceptable Losses and Gal & Rucker’s Loss Of Loss Aversion. Yechaim’s paper is a historical detective story. It looks at how Kahneman and Tversky first “discovered” and popularized the idea of loss aversion from earlier 1950s and 1960s research. It concludes they did a bad job summarizing this earlier research; looked at carefully, it doesn’t support the strong conclusions they drew. From one perspective, nobody should care about this. All the 1950s and 1960s research was terrible - one of the most important studies it discusses had n = 7. Since then, we’ve had much more rigorous studies of tens of thousands of people. All that hinges on Yechaim’s paper is whether Kahneman and Tversky were personally bad people. Hreha thinks they were. He calls their behavior “shady”, “shocking”, and says they “systematically misrepresented findings to support their pet theory…I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science.” Again, nothing important really hinges on this, but I feel like fighting about it, so let’s look deeper anyway. Here’s how Yechaim summarizes his accusation against K&T: In addition, the results of several studies seem to have been misrepresented by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) and Kahneman and Tversky (1979). Galenter and Pliner (1974) were wrongly cited as showing loss aversion, whereas, in fact, they did not observe an asymmetry in the pleasantness ratings of gains and losses. Likewise, in Green (1963), the results were argued to show loss aversion, even though this study did not involve any losses. In addition, the objective outcomes for some of the participants in Grayson (1960) were transformed by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) so as to better support a model assuming different curvatures for gains and losses (see Table 1). Finally, studies showing no loss aversion or suggesting aversion to large losses were not cited in Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) or in Kahneman and Tversky (1979). Yechaim bases his argument on three sets of early studies of loss aversion: Galenter and Plinter (1974), Fishburn and Kochenberger’s review (1979) and miscellaneous others. —Galenter and Plinter— is actually really neat! It explores “cross-modal” perceptions of gains versus losses. That is, if you ask how much a certain loss hurt, people will probably just say something like “I dunno, a little?” and then it will be hard to turn that into a p-value. G&P solve this by making people listen to loud noises, and asking questions like “is the difference between how much loss A and loss B hurt greater or lesser than the difference between the volume of noise 1 and noise 2?” The idea is that the brain uses a bunch of weird non-numerical scales for everything, and we understand its weird-non-numerical scale for noise volume pretty well, and so maybe we can compare it to how people think about gains or losses. I don’t know why people in 1974 were doing anything this complicated instead of inventing the basic theory of loss aversion the way Kahneman and Tversky would five years later, but here we are. Anyway, Yechaim concludes that this study failed to find loss aversion: Summing up their findings, Galenter and Pliner (1974) reported as follows: “We now turn to the question of the possible asymmetry of the positive and negative limbs of the utility function. On the basis of intuition and anecdote, one would expect the negative limb of the utility function to decrease more sharply than the positive limb increases... what we have observed if anything is an asymmetry of much less magnitude than would have been expected ... the curvature of the function does not change in going from positive to negative” (p. 75). Thus, our search for the historical foundations of loss aversion turns into a dead end on this particular branch: Galenter and Pliner (1974) did not observe such an asymmetry; and their study was quoted erroneously [by Kahneman and Tversky]. I looked for the full text of Galenter and Pliner, but could not find it. I was however able to find the first two pages, including the abstract. The way Galenter and Pliner summarize their own research is: Cross-modality matching of hypothetical increments of money against loudness recover the previously proposed exponent of the utility function for money within a few percent. Similar cross-modality matching experiments for decrements give a disutility exponent of 0.59, larger than the utility exponent for increments. This disutility exponent was checked by an additional cross-modality matching experiment against the disutility of drinking various concentrations of a bitter solution. The parameter estimated in this fashion was 0.63. If I understand the bolded part right, the abstract seems to be saying that they did find loss aversion! I was also able to find the Google Books listing for the book that the study was published in. Its summary is: Three experiments were conducted in which monetary increments and decrements were matched to either the loudness of a tone or the bitterness of various concentrations of sucrose octa-acetate. An additional experiment involving ratio estimates of monetary loss is also reported. Results confirm that the utility function for both monetary increments and decrements is a power function with exponents less than one. The data further suggest that the exponent of the disutility function is larger than that of the utility function, i.e., the rate of change of 'unhappiness' caused by monetary losses is greater than the comparable rate of 'happiness' produced by monetary gains. (Author). Again, the way the book is summarized (apparently by the author) says this study does prove loss aversion. Without being able to access the full study, I’m not sure what’s going on. Possibly the study found loss aversion, but it was less than expected? Still, I feel like Yechaim should have mentioned this. At the very least, it decreases Kahneman and Tversky’s crime from “lied about a study to support their pet theory” to “credulously believed the authors’ own summary of their results and didn’t dig deeper”. But also, why did the authors believe their study showed loss aversion? Why does Yechaim disagree? Without being able to access the full paper, I’m not sure. —Green 1963— is the second study that Yechaim accuses K&T of misrepresenting. Here’s how K&T cite this study in their paper: It is of interest that the main properties ascribed to the value function have been observed in a detailed analysis of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions for changes of wealth (Fishburn and Kochenberger [14]). The functions had been obtained from thirty decision makers in various fields of business, in five independent studies [5, 18, 19, 21, 40]. Most utility functions for gains were concave, most functions for losses were convex, and only three individuals exhibited risk aversion for both gains and losses. With a single exception, utility functions were considerably steeper for losses than for gains. Green 1963 is footnote 19. So K&T don’t even mention it by name. They mention it as one of several studies that a review article called Fishburn and Kochenberger analyzes. F&K are reviewing a bunch of studies of executives. In each study, a very small number of executives (usually about 5-10 per study) make a hypothetical business decision comparing gains and losses, for example: Suppose your company is being sued for patent infringement. Your lawyer’s best judgement is that your chances of winning the suit are 50–50; if you win, you will lose nothing, but if you lose, it will cost the company $1,000,000. Your opponent has offered to settle out of court for $200,000. Would you fight or settle? Then they ask the same question with a bunch of other numbers, and plot implied utility functions for each executive based on the answer. Green is one of these five studies, and it does superficially find loss aversion. But Fishburn and Kochenberger have done something weird. They argue that “loss” and “gain” aren’t necessarily objective, and usually correspond to “loss relative to some reference frame” (so far, so good). In order to figure out where the reference frame is, they assume that the neutral point is wherever “something unusual happens to the individual’s utility function” (F&K’s words). So they shift the zero point separating losses and gains to wherever the utility function looks most interesting! After doing this, they find “loss aversion”, ie the utility curve changes its slope at the transition between the loss side and the gain side. But since the transition was deliberately shifted to wherever the utility curve changed slope, this is almost tautological. It isn’t quite tautological: it’s interesting that most of the utility curves had a sharp transition zone, and it’s interesting that the transition was in the direction of loss-aversion rather than gain-seeking. But it’s tautological enough to be embarrassing. Still, this is Fishburn and Kochenberger’s embarrassment, not Kahneman and Tversky’s. And Fishburn and Kochenberger included this study in their review alongside several other studies that didn’t do this to the same degree. Kahneman and Tversky just cited the review article. I don’t think citing a review article that does weird things to a study really qualifies as “systematic misrepresentation.” I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how angry to be, because everything about Fishburn and Kochenberger is terrible. The average study in F&K includes results from 5-10 executives. But the studies are pretty open about the fact that they interviewed more executives than this, threw away the ones who gave boring answers, and just published results from the interesting ones. Then they moved the axes to wherever looked most interesting. Then they used all this to draw sweeping generalizations about human behavior. Then F&K combined five studies that did this into a review article, without protesting any of it. And then K&T cited the review article, again without protesting. I have to imagine that all of this was normal by the standards of the time. I have looked up all these people and they were all esteemed scientists in their own day. And I believe the evidence shows K&T summarized F&K faithfully. Shouldn’t they have avoided citing F&K at all? Seems like the same kind of question as “Shouldn’t Pythagoras have published his theorem in a peer-reviewed journal, instead of moving to Italy, starting a cult, and exposing his thigh at the Olympic Games as part of a scheme to convince people he was the god Apollo?” Yes, but the past was a weird place. As best I can tell, K&T’s citation of G&P agrees with the authors’ own assessment of their results. Their citation of F&K agrees with the reviewers’ assessment and with a charitable reading of most of the studies involved, although those studies are terrible in many ways which are obvious to modern readers. I would urge people interested in the whodunit question to read Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper. I think it paints the picture of a team very interested in their own results and in theory, and citing other people only incidentally, and in accordance with the scientific standards of their time. I don’t feel a need to tar them as “misrepresenters”. III. Okay, But Is Loss Aversion Real? Remember, all that is about the personal deficiencies of Kahneman and Tversky. Realistically there have been hundreds of much better studies on loss aversion in the forty years since they wrote their article, so we should be looking at those. Here Hreha cites Gal & Rucker: The Loss Of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain? It’s a great 2018 paper that looks at recent evidence and concludes that loss aversion doesn’t exist. But it’s a very specific, interesting type of nonexistence, which I think the Hreha article fails to capture. G&R are happy to admit that in many, many cases, people behave in loss-averse ways, including most of the classic examples given by Kahneman and Tversky. They just think that this is because of other cognitive biases, not a specific cognitive bias called “loss aversion”. They especially emphasize Status Quo Bias and the Endowment Effect. Status Quo Bias is where you prefer inaction to action. Suppose you ask someone “Would you bet on a coin flip, where you get $60 if heads and lose $40 if tails?”. They say no. This deviates from rational expectations, and one way to think of this is loss aversion; the prospect of losing $40 feels “bigger” than the prospect of gaining $60. But another way to think of it is as a bias towards inaction - all else being equal, people prefer not to make bets, and you’d need a higher payoff to overcome their inertia. Endowment Effect is where you value something you already have more than something you don’t. Suppose someone would pay $5 to prevent their coffee mug from being taken away from them, but (in an alternative universe where they lack a coffee mug) would only pay $3 to buy one. You can think of this as loss aversion (the grief of losing a coffee mug feels “bigger” than the joy of gaining one). Or you can think of it as endowment (once you have the coffee mug, it’s yours and you feel like defending it). These are really fine distinctions; I had to read the section a few times before the difference between loss aversion and endowment effect really made sense to me. Kahneman and Tversky just sort of threw all all this stuff out and saw what stuck and didn’t necessarily try super hard to make sure none of the biases they discovered were entirely explainable as combinations of some of the others. G&R think maybe loss aversion is. They do some clever work setting up situations that test loss aversion but not status quo or endowment - for example, offering a risky bet vs. a safer bet. Here they find no evidence for loss aversion as a separate force from the other two biases. Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird. I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just didn’t happen, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental. Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it. Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (h/t Alex Imas, who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force. There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re quite as careful as G&R at ruling out every other possible bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure). The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions. And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, which says: Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (n = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds. Beyond any reasonable thresholds! IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small? Continuing through the Hreha article: For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be. In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all. This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two "nudge units" here in the United States. I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average... 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%? If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity). According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field. I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy. Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction. Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a lot of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit. Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: menu effects, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?, Acceptable Losses, Loss Of Loss Aversion, the first two pages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W80n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f832933-e9a1-4cf2-ba32-e4bc11ce681c_830x624.png, Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2VLm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c49b44a-8850-4ac8-9a88-3dd07718a648_397x305.png, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Alex Imas, Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials, others, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1gY_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b127d7c-045a-4266-b515-a0e9201ce651_571x382.png, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Aceso Under Glass1 mentions across 1 issues

Aceso Under Glass is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 07, 2023 and November 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Elizabeth of Aceso Under Glass has recently started fighting EA vegan advocates". It most often appears alongside ACX Grant, America, American.

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Aceso Under Glass
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Highlights From The Comments On Kidney Donation
November 07, 2023 · Original source
These concerns aren't totally theoretical. Elizabeth of Aceso Under Glass has recently started fighting EA vegan advocates for engaging in exactly these kinds of tactics: https://acesounderglass.com/2023/09/28/ea-vegan-advocacy-is-not-truthseeking-and-its-everyones-problem/
Inline links: https://acesounderglass.com/2023/09/28/ea-vegan-advocacy-is-not-truthseeking-and-its-everyones-problem/
AcesoUnderGlass1 mentions across 1 issues

AcesoUnderGlass is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2021 and September 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""AcesoUnderGlass: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem"". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, AC&E, AcesoUnderGlass.

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AcesoUnderGlass
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Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
September 02, 2021 · Original source
This is terrible. Recovery rates in the single digit percentages over the space of years. You would think at least some patients would get placebo recoveries, or forget how it felt to be well, or otherwise Lizardman themselves into fake complacency, but no. This is f@#$ing awful. Maybe COVID won’t be this bad? One ray of hope comes from this Australian study, where doctors record the rates of recovery from postviral fatigue after various rare diseases they encounter (Epstein-Barr, Q fever, Ross River virus). They find that 35% of these patients have postviral fatigue after six weeks, but only 12% after six months, and 9% after twelve months. This sounds a lot better than chronic fatigue. In fact, these people do the kind of weird task of figuring out how bad different diagnostic labels for fatigue are, even though some might argue that all the labels refer to the same underlying reality. They find an official diagnosis of “CFS/ME” (chronic fatigue / myalgic encephalitis) is much worse than “postviral fatigue”. Using the weird measure of “days per year of followup with diagnosis” (I’m not sure I fully understand their reasoning for why this is good), they find a median length of 80 for CFS/ME vs. 0 for PVF (…huh?). Using the more comprehensible measure of percent who still complain of fatigue after 7-12 months, they find it’s 24% vs. 10% (which super contradicts the above study saying that basically nobody with a CFS/ME diagnosis ever recovers). My guess is that this study had much lower criteria for a CFS/ME diagnosis (some doctor diagnosed it and put it on the insurance records) compared to the ones above (some specialist confirmed it by official criteria). The conclusion I draw is that, while official CFS/ME is horrible and hopeless, there are a lot of things that unofficially look kind of chronic-fatigue-ish which have pretty good prognoses. Since there’s no good reason to think post-COVID fatigue is official CFS/ME as opposed to just some chronic-ish fatigue-ish thing, probably it will have a better prognosis, more like weird Australian viruses. …which we still don’t know, because AFAICT nobody has done any good studies on postviral fatigue lasting more than a year. 5. Psychosomatic symptoms probably aren’t the majority of long COVID. I mean, I’m not seeing too many people claiming that they are. There are a lot more people worried that someone else might be claiming that, than people actually making the claim. Still, the Wall Street Journal opinion section is always up for slathering itself in glue and rolling around in a haystack until it becomes the straw man everyone else warned you about, and they do have an article on The Dubious Origins Of Long COVID. They point out that long COVID was first thrust into the public consciousness in surveys run by Body Politic, who self-describe as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political”. I agree this is a weird source for something to come from, but Hans Asperger was a Nazi and I still use his diagnosis, so I probably have to accept these people’s as well. More relevantly, WSJ points out that many of the people complaining of Long COVID symptoms test negative for COVID, or at least never tested positive. This complaint conflates the fact that not everyone was able to get a COVID test at all, with the fact that sometimes you get the acute COVID test after you’ve recovered from acute COVID and it’s negative, with the fact that COVID tests don’t have a 100% success rate, with the fact that yeah, okay, some people who didn’t have COVID are probably imagining Long COVID symptoms. I feel like some of the case-control studies above, which clearly show that seropositive people have higher rates of Long COVID than seronegative people, are pretty convincing here. But also - the people with lung scarring clearly have lung scarring, and most of them have weird x-rays consistent with lung scarring. If you have lung scarring, then you have trouble breathing, you’re fatigued, and you probably have lots of other stuff downstream of that. The people with smell/taste disturbances clearly have smell/taste disturbances, testable with the stupidly named but scientifically venerable Sniffin Sticks test - and also, who even cares enough to make up olfactory problems? Fatigue and brain fog are the only symptoms here that can’t be easily objectively confirmed, and, well, do you think those Australians who got infected with Q fever and had twelve months of postviral fatigue are faking? What about all those post-Epstein Barr fatigue people? Lots of viruses cause postviral fatigue, it’s not really surprising that COVID should also. (WSJ also spends a while arguing that CFS/ME is just a psychiatric disorder, which I think is not really in keeping with the best recent evidence. Also, as a psychiatrist, I’m very against this conclusion, mostly because if it were true, then people would expect me to cure CFS/ME patients.) One point WSJ didn’t bring up but could have was that most Long COVID patients are women. Probably this is somewhere between 60 and 80% - I suspect on the lower end of this, because I think women are more likely to talk about these kinds of things than men, and much more likely to eg join Facebook groups. This is noteworthy, because women are traditionally more prone to psychosomatic illnesses - so much that the ancients attributed these to the uterus and called them hysteria (note shared root with eg “hysterectomy”). Women are about 2x as likely to get diagnosed with panic disorder, anxiety disorders, phobias, etc, about 2.5x as likely to get chronic Lyme disease, widely regarded as an entirely psychosomatic condition, and 3-5x more likely to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. So the female preponderance is suspicious. But women are also somewhere between 2x and 4x more likely to get autoimmune disorders than men (it varies by disorder - the ratio for Sjogren’s is as high as 16x). There are some pretty crazy hypotheses for why this is - for example, maybe women’s immune systems are permanently upregulated to be prepared for attempts by the placenta to secrete immune-downregulating chemicals during pregnancy, as part of the creepy shadow war between mother and fetus to regulate the maternal environment. I don’t know, do you have a better idea? Anyway, women have more autoimmune issues and more upregulated immune systems, so if there was any good way to assess gender ratio in true postviral fatigue excluding all psychosomatic cases, that would probably be female-biased too. Probably some Long COVID cases are psychosomatic just like some cases of anything are psychosomatic, but I don’t see too many signs that this is too important in explaining the phenomenon. …and please allow me a moment of preachiness here. Chronic fatigue sounds really fake to anyone who doesn’t have it. I think this is because it’s related to willpower. Willpower itself would sound fake to anyone who didn’t have to worry about it. “Oh, so you can go partying with your friends whenever you want, but as soon as it comes time to write a ten page report, your ‘lack of willpower’ prevents you from doing it? A likely story!” Still, all of us (except Bryan Caplan) recognize how real and important willpower is - how having more of it is better than having less of it, and how some condition that caused you to have pathologically little of it would be a huge disaster. In the comments section to the rough draft of this post, CJ wrote: I will say - I was one of those types of men to scoff with skepticism at people claiming to have chronic fatigue and the like. I would have called those people lazy and would have been adamant they were faking it or feeling like crap because of unhealthy lifestyle choices. Unfortunately I have learned the hard way the severity of neurological conditions, what it feels like to have brain fog, what chronic fatigue feels like, and how difficult it can be to communicate neurological symptoms to others. I now start from a position of listening to people who are willing to open up about their symptoms and trust that they are being honest. There are millions of people suffering in silence with untreated and undiagnosed disorders - those people are not all faking it or just dealing with psychosomatic conditions. I would recommend Jennifer Brea's documentary, Unrest. Thank you for shedding some light on the subject. Heron added: I second the suggestion to watch 'Unrest,' and to consider the many unseen ill whose symptoms are deemed to be imagined. Until this last year, I had little patience with, and doubted, people who I saw as hypochondriacs. Then I became the thing I hated. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Long COVID do have similarities from what I've read, since becoming ill in August 2020. At that time, here in Northern Ireland, there was scant availability of COVID tests; after spending three days trying to get hold of one, (by which time I'd stopped teaching my post-grad online classes & I haven't worked since) I became too ill to do anything. I figured if this was COVID I'd gotten off lightly, mostly constant severe headache, inability to think, a new experience of fatigue, high temperature, insomnia, hypersomnia, paresthesia, no smell or taste etc Debilitated but not dead. Except for the fact that I still have the aforementioned symptoms a year on and whilst they fluctuate in type and severity, the fatigue, headaches and cognitive difficulties are real. A brain scan, an appointment for brain and spinal MRIs (waiting lists, even when going private [as NHS has 3-8 yr waiting lists here in NI] are lengthy), rare virtual doctors and neurologists suggest my ailments constitute a post-viral thing, maybe Long C, they can offer nothing but pills for pain. There is no test for ME/CFS yet, nor a Long C test, symptoms and presentation are so varied. Given a widespread lack of knowledge and resources regarding these ailments, you're on your own. Maybe I've developed ME, I certainly have post-exertional malaise which my very prominent neurologist hadn't heard of. Looking at the history of ME/CFS* and a dearth of research surrounding it, I hope that rather than dismiss the lives of sufferers of this or the long-lasting aftermath of COVID, that those experiencing such difficulties will be heard and learnt from. I only understood when I had no alternative. I don’t think I ever actively pooh-poohed CFS, but like everyone else who encountered it, I underestimated just how bad it was until I met some patients with the condition. It is real and really bad. For whatever reason it is hard to think about and take seriously, but it really is as bad as people say. </preachiness> 6. Long COVID is probably rare in children This matters a lot, because children are (currently) ineligible for the vaccine, and also likely to encounter the virus at school. But children usually have mild cases of COVID and don’t die from it, so it’s tempting to just not worry about them. But if they could get Long COVID, that would make it much less tempting. Preliminary Evidence On Long COVID In Children sounds like a good paper to draw conclusions from. It says 42.6% of children with COVID experience long-term follow-up symptoms, which would be higher than the rate for adults. But it has no control group, and most of the symptoms it finds don’t seem very COVID-related (eg rashes, constipation). The most common symptom (20%) is insomnia, which better studies in adults fail to associate with real Long COVID. The rate of known long COVID symptoms (eg taste and smell problems) is only about 3-4%, and no higher or lower than anything else. Probably these kids are just having problems at the usual rate and attributing them to their recent COVID. Blankenburg et al do the correct thing and ask a thousand children about potential symptoms, then compare the number who say yes vs. no among COVID-seropositive and seronegative subjects. They find no difference between the two groups. Both are reporting a lot of insomnia, etc. They reasonably attribute this to pandemics being a stressful event that it’s natural to lose sleep over. This is really reassuring, but it can’t rule out a somewhat rarer syndrome. The authors say that they might miss symptoms with a prevalence of less than 10%, and one of them gives his own personal guess that it’s 1%. An English team says there’s a Long COVID rate of 4.6% in kids. But there was a 1.7% rate of similar symptoms in the control group of kids who didn’t have COVID, so I think it would be fair to subtract that and end up with 2.9%. And even though the study started with 5000 children, so few of them got COVID, and so few of those got long COVID, that the 2.9% turns out to be about five kids. I don’t really want to update too much based on five kids, especially given the risk of recall bias (ie you might notice / care about your symptoms more if you know you had COVID before getting them). My overall conclusion here is that long COVID is rarer in children than adults, and may not exist at all. The studies tell us it’s probably somewhere less than 5% of kids, but so far we can’t conclude anything stronger than that. 7. Vaccination probably doesn’t change the per-symptomatic-case risk of Long COVID much Here’s a complicated Twitter thread about this. Of vaccinated people who got symptomatic COVID, about a third ended up with Long COVID symptoms, the same rate as in unvaccinated people. Of course, vaccinated people are much less likely to get symptomatic COVID. But even conditional on getting it, they’re still much less likely to go to the hospital, die, etc. It would have been nice if the same was true of getting Long COVID. But it doesn’t look that way. (all this information is from an online poll by a sketchy group of COVID “survivor” activists. But they wrote up their poll in the scientific paper font, as a PDF and everything, so I say we count it anyway) This NEJM study wasn’t exactly designed to look for Long COVID in vaccinated people. But they found it anyway, at a rate of 19% after 6 weeks. This also fits within the (wide) range reported for unvaccinated people. They don’t give a symptom breakdown beyond “prolonged loss of smell, persistent cough, fatigue, weakness, dyspnea, or myalgia”, which sounds like the usual set. These studies are pretty weak, and you could argue that given that vaccines decrease the average severity of COVID infection, and infection severity is linked to Long COVID risk, we should have a strong prior on vaccines decreasing Long COVID risk. And just before publishing this, someone sent me this study, which very preliminarily finds vaccines might decrease Long COVID risk by a factor of 2. I think a factor of 2-3 is believable; one of 10 or 20, less so. Weirdly, there are some claims that vaccines can help relieve symptoms of existing long COVID. Sounds kind of like sympathetic magic to me, but the researcher quoted in the linked article said it might “improve symptoms by eliminating any virus or viral remnants left in the body” or by “rebalancing the immune system”. So yeah, sympathetic magic. 8. Your risk of a terrible long COVID outcome conditional on COVID is probably between a few tenths of a percent and a few percent. My original calculation went like this: About 25% of people who get COVID report long COVID symptoms. About half of those go away after a few months, so 12.5% get persistent symptoms. Suppose that half of those cases (totally made-up number) are very mild and not worth worrying about. Then 6.25% of people who get COVID would have serious long-lasting Long COVID symptoms. After doing that calculation, I read this essay by Matt Bell, who tries to figure out the same thing. He is much more optimistic. He agrees that about half of long COVID cases go away after a few months, but adds another 50% decrease from “few months” to “lifelong”, kind of on priors, admitting there’s not too much positive evidence for this. Then he adds another factor-of-two decrease from vaccination, based on very preliminary studies from the UK. He estimates that someone with my demographics (vaccinated man in his 30s) has a 2% risk of Long COVID conditional on getting COVID at all. Then he divides by five for the true worst case scenario, based on studies showing that a fifth of people with Long COVID report that it affects their daily activities “a lot”. So by his final number, I have an 0.4% chance of getting really terrible long COVID, conditional on getting COVID at all. My friend AcesoUnderGlass also did a writeup of this, published after I did my first-draft calculation, which seems to be thinking of this very differently, based entirely on hospitalization rates (which of course are very low in vaccinated people our age). She accordingly concludes that risk is very low. I don’t really understand her reasoning here, but I trust her a lot and am working on trying to converge with her on this. What’s my yearly risk of getting COVID if I try to live a normal life? This site says only 0.1% of vaccinated Californians have gotten COVID after their vaccination. But vaccination was pretty new when that survey was done, so we might want to take this as a per one-to-two-months estimate. That would mean a risk of 0.5 - 1 percent per year. But not all these people are living normal lives, so my risk might be higher. MicroCOVID gives me a good sense of how careful I’d have to be to stay within a risk budget of 1% COVID risk per year. When I play around with it, I think I am about 5x - 10x less careful than that, which would mean a risk of about 5%/year. This tracker suggests my area has recently had about 1 new case per thousand people per week, which would imply 5% per year. But most of those people are probably unvaccinated, so my risk would be significantly lower than that. I’m going to round all of this off to about 1% - 10% per year of getting a breakthrough COVID case (though obviously this could change if the national picture got better or worse). Combined with the 0.4% to 6.25% risk of getting terrible long COVID conditional on getting COVID, that’s between a 1/150 - 1/25,000 chance of terrible long COVID per year. How does this compare to other risks? My ordinary risk of death per year, just from being a man in his 30s, is about 1/700 (though this includes drug abusers and stunt pilots, so my real risk might be lower, let’s say 1/1000). Here are some other risks, courtesy of the BMJ: In this context, I find the 1/150 risk pretty scary and the 1/25,000 risk not scary at all, so, darn, I guess there’s not yet enough data to have a strong sense of how concerned I should be. 9. This is hard to compare to other postviral syndromes Going into this, I wondered if we might be able to ignore Long COVID. The argument would go like this: all viral diseases have a risk of postviral syndromes. Colds, flus, mono, lots of stuff that’s going around all the time. Lots of people get those postviral syndromes, and either recover or don’t, but either way we don’t make a big deal out of it. Since COVID’s considered “newsworthy” in a way flu isn’t, we obsess over its postviral syndrome even though it’s no worse than anything else’s. This wouldn’t make Long COVID any less bad, and maybe we would be wrong to not panic more about colds and the flu, but it would at least give us some context and make things feel less scary. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything supporting or opposing this picture. The only relevant study is a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, who (contra nominative determinism) don’t pool the studies by condition, which makes it hard to draw conclusions. I think all of their examples of postviral syndrome after flu are from severe hospitalized cases, so any comparison with COVID would be unfair. Although there do seem to be scattered reports of post-flu problems, they’ve never been formally studied or quantified. Mononucleosis is an infectious disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, affecting about 1/2000 people per year in developed countries. It has a famously nasty postviral syndrome, which this paper describes as “almost one-half of the group had substantial ongoing symptoms 2 months after onset and… ∼10% had disabling symptoms marked by fatigue lasting ≥ 6 months”. Flu is as common as COVID, but nobody really talks about it having a significant postviral syndrome so probably it’s not that bad. Mono has a worse postviral syndrome than COVID, but it’s rare enough that it doesn’t cause massive society-wide effects. COVID is right in the middle: more common than mono, and (probably) worse postviral syndrome than flu. I think it’s fair to say that we may not have encountered a condition with this exact combination of risk factors and can’t dismiss it as similar to conditions we currently ignore. One potential analogue might be the Spanish Flu of 1918. It was an equally widespread pandemic, and seemed to have some kind of postviral syndrome. From TIME: In what is now Tanzania, to the north, post-viral syndrome has been blamed for triggering the worst famine in a century—the so-called “famine of corms”—after debilitating lethargy prevented flu survivors from planting when the rains came at the end of 1918. “Agriculture suffered particular disruption because, not only did the epidemic coincide with the planting season in some parts of the country, but in others it came at the time for harvesting and sheep-shearing.” Kathleen Brant, who lived on a farm in Taranaki, New Zealand, told Rice, the historian, about the “legion” problems farmers in her district encountered following the pandemic, even though all patients survived: “The effects of loss of production were felt for a long time.” The 1918 flu seemed to have lots of psychiatric effects: “Norwegian demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund provided such evidence when he combed the records of psychiatric institutions in his country to show that the average number of admissions showed a seven-fold increase in each of the six years following the pandemic, compared to earlier, non-pandemic years.” Coronavirus doesn’t - the excellent Amin-Chowdhury study above finds nothing. Still, this is the scale of thing I’m worried about. The worst case scenario here is really really bad. If a few percent of COVID patients get long-term unremitting genuine CFS/ME, that has the potential to overwhelm government welfare budgets and long-term depress the economy. I think there’s a 90% chance the real situation isn’t that bad, but it’s scary that we can’t entirely rule it out. Aside from the somewhat different 1918 case, I don’t think we have any historical experience of dealing with postviral syndromes at this scale. The medium case scenario is something more like “a few percent of infected people get moderate fatigue, which doesn’t really prevent them from working, and goes away after a few years”. I don’t know whether the level of media attention paid to this would converge on “boring and nobody notices” or “giant disaster”, and I think it would be compatible with either. 10. Conclusions 1. Long COVID is many different issues without a common mechanism. 2. Some of these are straightforward and not surprising, eg lung scarring and post-ICU syndrome from severe infection, and would happen in any disease of this severity. Others seem to be more like the poorly-understood postviral syndromes associated with several other diseases. While some symptoms may be psychosomatic, most are probably organic. 3 The three major categories of symptoms are straightforward cardiovascular-pulmonary issues, straightforward smell and taste issues, and more mysterious neurological issues. 4 Although these get better with time in some people, in a significant number (maybe ~50% of people who had them at six weeks) they persist for as long as anyone has been able to measure them (a few months in the case of COVID, a year or two in the case of comparable syndromes). 5. Post-COVID fatigue is particularly concerning. This would be very bad if we analogized it to CFS/ME, and still pretty bad if we analogized it to other known postviral syndromes. There is no proof that this always gets better over the long term, although no study has looked at them for more than a few years. Facing postviral fatigue on this scale is a new problem. 6 . Children probably get Long COVID less than adults, probably at a rate of less than 5% of symptomatic cases. But we don’t know how much less, and we can’t rule out that some children get pretty severe symptoms. 7. Although vaccination decreases the risk of symptomatic COVID, it probably doesn’t decrease the risk of Long COVID per symptomatic COVID case by very much, though it might decrease it by a factor of 2-3. 8. Your chance of really bad debilitating lifelong Long COVID, conditional on getting COVID, is probably somewhere between a few tenths of a percent, and a few percent. Your chance per year of getting it by living a normal lifestyle depends on what you consider a normal lifestyle and on the future course of the pandemic. For me, under reasonable assumptions, it’s probably well below one percent. EDIT: Here are some other people who tried to do this same analysis. I learned about all of these after I wrote the first draft of this, so you can consider the basic thought process here to be independent of them - but I edited some things to account for what I learned from them before writing the final version. AcesoUnderGlass: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
Inline links: Lizardman, this Australian study, these people, The Dubious Origins Of Long COVID, weird x-rays, Sniffin Sticks test, somewhere between 60 and 80%, somewhere between 2x and 4x more likely, for example, the creepy shadow war between mother and fetus, Bryan Caplan, wrote, added, Preliminary Evidence On Long COVID In Children, Blankenburg et al, one of them, English team says, Here’s, the scientific paper font, This NEJM study, infection severity is linked to Long COVID risk, this study, vaccines can help relieve symptoms of existing long COVID, this essay, a writeup of this, This site says, MicroCOVID, This tracker, the BMJ, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yL40!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1eea7cfa-df08-4c67-acf2-da24ce860ae3_713x373.png, a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, scattered reports, this paper, postviral syndrome
AcesoUnderGlass: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
Inline links: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
achemicalhunger.com1 mentions across 1 issues

achemicalhunger.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "We wrote around 60,000 words about this on our blog — read it at achemicalhunger.com"; "read it at achemicalhunger.com". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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achemicalhunger.com
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#52: Help Slime Mold Time Mold Investigate Chemical Causes Of Obesity We’re the mad scientists behind SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD. We think there’s a good chance the obesity epidemic is caused by environmental contaminants. We wrote around 60,000 words about this on our blog — read it at achemicalhunger.com. Right now our number one suspect is lithium. Even if we’re really wrong about the obesity thing, someone should be looking into the fact that there’s way more of this mind-altering metal (lithium) in our water than there was 50 years ago, and right now that’s us. The budget for our immediate projects is $650,000, of which we’ve raised $125,000 as of this writing. But in the long term it will probably take several million to cure obesity, and if we get that sooner, we can spend less time waiting around and writing grant proposals. We promise to turn any donations into research. We will share all our research publicly, as fast as we can put it out. If it turns out not to be lithium we will look into other contaminants; if we find evidence against contamination we will try to figure out a new theory that works. If we solve obesity and we still have money left over we will turn that money into some other kind of mad science. Donations can be made to Whylome, Inc., a 501(c)3 pending nonprofit focused on funding this research. If you want to help, please email slimemoldtimemold@gmail.com.
ACOU1 mentions across 1 issues

ACOU is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 24, 2024 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The most common answers were blogs and podcasts (especially ACOUP)". It most often appears alongside A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOUP, ACX Survey Results.

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ACOU
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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Reading the ACOUP blog.
Reading Bret Devereaux's blogpost 'On Roman Values' (I'm a stalwart ACOUP reader)
The most common answers were blogs and podcasts (especially ACOUP), religion, stumbling across books, and memes. I couldn’t tell an obvious difference in contexts between genders.
ACS ES&T Water1 mentions across 1 issues

ACS ES&T Water is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 18, 2025 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "published in the scientific journal ACS ES&T Water". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, Aatu Koskensilta, acanthamoeba keratitis.

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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
...ella 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. Testing for opportunistic pathogens in drinking water plumbing r...
...idance 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. Testing for opportunistic pathogens in drinking water plumbing r...
Acta Neuropathologica1 mentions across 1 issues

Acta Neuropathologica is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Peripheral administration of tau aggregates triggers intracerebral tauopathy in transgenic mice,” Acta Neuropathologica"; "Amyloid-β pathology enhances pathological fibrillary tau seeding induced by Alzheimer PHF in vivo,” Acta neuropathologica"; "[61] H. Braak and K. Del Tredici, “The pathological process underlying Alzheimer’s disease in individuals under thirty,” Acta Neuropathologica, vol. 121, no. 2". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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Acta Neuropathologica
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[35] C. Lodder et al., “CSF1R inhibition rescues tau pathology and neurodegeneration in an A/T/N model with combined AD pathologies, while preserving plaque associated microglia,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 108, Jun. 2021, doi: 10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8.
Inline links: 10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8
[40] S. Dujardin et al., “Neuron-to-neuron wild-type Tau protein transfer through a trans-synaptic mechanism: Relevance to sporadic tauopathies,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 14, Jan. 2014, doi: 10.1186/2051-5960-2-14.
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[51] F. Clavaguera et al., “Peripheral administration of tau aggregates triggers intracerebral tauopathy in transgenic mice,” Acta Neuropathologica, vol. 127, no. 2, pp. 299–301, Feb. 2014, doi: 10.1007/s00401-013-1231-5.
Inline links: 10.1007/s00401-013-1231-5
Acta Neuropathologica Communications1 mentions across 1 issues

Acta Neuropathologica Communications is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Acta Neuropathologica Communications , vol. 9, no. 1, p. 108, Jun. 2021"; "Neuron-to-neuron wild-type Tau protein transfer through a trans-synaptic mechanism: Relevance to sporadic tauopathies,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications , vol. 2, no. 1"; "Transmission of amyloid-beta and tau pathologies is associated with cognitive impairments in a primate,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[35] C. Lodder et al., “CSF1R inhibition rescues tau pathology and neurodegeneration in an A/T/N model with combined AD pathologies, while preserving plaque associated microglia,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 108, Jun. 2021, doi: 10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8.
Inline links: 10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8
[40] S. Dujardin et al., “Neuron-to-neuron wild-type Tau protein transfer through a trans-synaptic mechanism: Relevance to sporadic tauopathies,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 14, Jan. 2014, doi: 10.1186/2051-5960-2-14.
Inline links: 10.1186/2051-5960-2-14
[56] S. Lam et al., “Transmission of amyloid-beta and tau pathologies is associated with cognitive impairments in a primate,” Acta Neuropathologica Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–24, Dec. 2021, doi: 10.1186/s40478-021-01266-8.
Inline links: 10.1186/s40478-021-01266-8
Action Comics1 mentions across 1 issues

Action Comics is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Superman, whose title, Action Comics, became the number one selling comic"; "covers of Action Comics (the best selling superhero comic at the time)". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
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
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: 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
Acts 4:41 mentions across 1 issues

Acts 4:4 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Acts 4:4 : 'But many of those who had heard the Word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand'". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Acts 4:4
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Acts 4:4: “But many of those who had heard the Word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand.”
Inline links: Acts 4:4
ACX comment thread1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX comment thread is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 28, 2024 and March 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread". It most often appears alongside ACX subreddit, Asia, Auschwitz.

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ACX comment thread
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Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad. This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up. One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker. So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses - you think Putin does have cancer, or whatever - he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually (eg wait to see when Putin dies), you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. Since then, Saar and his $100,000 offer have been a fixture of Internet debates everywhere. When I argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, people urged me to bet against Saar, and we had a good discussion before finally failing to agree on terms. When anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch made a similar offer, Saar took him up on it, although they’ve been bogged down in judge selection for the past year. Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. At the time, I had no idea who Peter was. I kind of still don’t. He’s not Internet famous. He describes himself as a “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics”. After a family member got into lab leak a few years ago, he started investigating. Although he started somewhere between neutral and positive towards the hypothesis, he ended up “90%+” convinced it was false. He also ended up annoyed: contrarian bloggers were raking in Substack cash by promoting lab leak, but there seemed to be no incentive to defend zoonosis. Unlike Saar, Peter was not especially rich. $100K represented a big fraction of his net worth. But (he wrote me in an email): It was a moderately large financial risk for me ... I [expected] a smart and unbiased person would vote for zoonosis with, say, 80% odds after seeing all the evidence. If both judges voting for lab origin is uncorrelated, that's 20% squared, and it was pretty low odds of a catastrophic financial risk for me. I wasn't highly worried about losing the debate because I was wrong about the science. I put in enough effort to know I'm probably correct there. My biggest fear was that I'd choke at the debate for some reason, that I'd be too anxious and particularly that I'd be unable to sleep the night beforehand. I have zero prior debate experience to rely upon. If this seems like a weirdly blase attitude towards risk, Peter told blogger Philipp Markolin that he “is a mountain climber where sometimes there is a 5% chance to die, and the stakes are just not that high for a debate.” Unlike the eternally bogged-down Saar-Kirsch debate, here things moved quickly. The two contestants put out a call for judges on the ACX subreddit, and agreed on: Will van Treuren, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a PhD from Stanford and a background in bacteriology and immunology.
Inline links: does Putin have cancer, celebrity Israeli murder case, argued that Vitamin D didn’t help fight COVID, took him up on it, on an old ACX comment thread, told blogger Philipp Markolin, put out a call for judges
ACX comments1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX comments is a recurring publication 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 "these ACX comments , are as good a place to start as any". It most often appears alongside 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson, Africa.

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ACX comments
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August 25, 2023
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August 25, 2023
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Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
...this – AR haven’t had to retract and are still in Nobel contention , but the critics are still active . If you are interested, the Sachs review and rejoinder , and these ACX comments , are as good a place to start as any. The last decade of data doesn’t add much, but doesn't look great for AR. We probably shouldn't judge this book too much on hindsig...
...into this – AR haven’t had to retract and are still in Nobel contention , but the critics are still active . If you are interested, the Sachs review and rejoinder , and these ACX comments , are as good a place to start as any. The last decade of data doesn’t add much, but doesn't look great for AR. We probably shouldn't judge this book too much on hindsight, given it's about the long run and...
ACX Podcast1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX Podcast is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 27, 2022 and June 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Solenoid_Entity, who runs the ACX Podcast". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Cameron Bucker, Edwin Chen.

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ACX Podcast
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June 27, 2022
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June 27, 2022
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Open Thread 230
June 27, 2022 · Original source
1: Solenoid_Entity, who runs the ACX Podcast, is expanding his empire to run a Less Wrong Curated Podcast and Metaculus Journal Podcast. Good luck, Solenoid!
Inline links: ACX Podcast, Less Wrong Curated Podcast, Metaculus Journal Podcast
ACX substack1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX substack is a recurring publication 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 "give them a heads up about ACX substack". It most often appears alongside 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City, 13 Mile road.

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ACX substack
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Allwyn Contact Info: allwyn8443[at]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 17, 11:00 AM Location: Mount Pleasant Park, 3161 Ontario St, Vancouver, BC V5Y 0B3 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84XR7V4V+RH Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kdl [remove this bit] gviZRNzj1JLYEWbLmg6 Additional Notes: Feel free to bring along friends - give them a heads up about ACX substack, maybe share some top posts with them, so they have an idea!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/84XR7V4V+RH
ACX survey data1 mentions across 1 issues

ACX survey data is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 15, 2024 and February 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "to test this in the ACX survey data". It most often appears alongside John Burn-Murdoch, Marginal Revolution, Nevin Climenhaga.

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ACX survey data
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February 15, 2024
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X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?
February 15, 2024 · Original source
Is it bad to test this in the ACX survey data? Might ACX already be selecting a certain small window from the political spectrum? Although it’s always better to use a more representative sample, despite its political selection the ACX sample was able to demonstrate that women were generally further left than men. So I think if this was significantly weaker in some sibling-based subgroup, it should have been able to demonstrate that too.
[As always, you can download the ACX survey data here and try to replicate my results. Some subjects are excluded from the publicly downloadable dataset for privacy reasons, so you might not get exactly the same numbers I did.]
Inline links: here
ACXmeetup.substack.com1 mentions across 1 issues

ACXmeetup.substack.com is a recurring publication 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 "Group Link: https://acxmeetup.substack.com/". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

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ACXmeetup.substack.com
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August 29, 2025
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August 29, 2025
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: 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.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWH4HJ9+7P
Adam Mastroianni’s blog1 mentions across 1 issues

Adam Mastroianni’s blog is a recurring publication 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 "you can read more of his story ... on Adam Mastroianni’s blog". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab1 mentions across 1 issues

Adumbrations Of Aducanumab is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story, and discussion of those posts elsewhere.
Inline links: Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
Advances in Psychiatric Treatment1 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/expressed-emotion-across-cultures/CC598258E8D8F7E0B4EFD9DA141A916C
Inline links: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/expressed-emotion-across-cultures/CC598258E8D8F7E0B4EFD9DA141A916C
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Adversarial Training For High-Stakes Reliability is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2022 and November 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Adversarial Training For High-Stakes Reliability (preprint of paper)". It most often appears alongside AI, AI X-Risk Podcast, Alex Rider.

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Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 28, 2022 · Original source
Adversarial Training For High-Stakes Reliability (preprint of paper)
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AEAweb1 mentions across 1 issues

AEAweb is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 29, 2021 and January 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20191533". It most often appears alongside @slatestarcodex, Audrey Tang, Biden.

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Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
2. Given the last point, I fully acknowledge the danger of throwing stones lest I shatter my own glass house. However, leaving aside any blame, I think to make sense of my piece and Scott's response requires a bit of context that clearly he lacked. First, outside some specific blog post I wrote, I am best known as a mechanism designer. To cast me as a general opponent of technology and mechanisms runs against literally everything I am known for and have worked on my whole career. The piece was as much a self-critique and caution about taking the sorts of work I do in the wrong, over-zealous spirit as I had seen many in the rationalist community doing as anything else. Second, if responding to anything directly, it was this review of my book by https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20191533 I think that piece perfectly exemplifies the spirit I am responding to and critiquing. I think we need to avoid that spirit of mechanism design.
Inline links: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20191533
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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
Unsettled, reviewed by D.A. Haller (yes, two people reviewed this book, and both got Honorable Mentions). He is a software engineer and writer from Maryland. He has recently started writing his (villainous) thoughts down at Affably Evil.
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Against Automaticity
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Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually
August 31, 2023 · Original source
“Literal Banana” on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity, which they describe as:
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Seems Like Targeting
January 31, 2024 · Original source
But also, I think this is the other half of a phenomenon I mentioned in the recent article Against Learning From Dramatic Effects. The half spelled out there: Events are drawn from some distribution. You should probably base your estimate of the distribution on either priors or on studies with several data points. You shouldn’t base it on one very dramatic data point, because the generation of dramatic data points involves a lot of noise.
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Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
I have seen people try to walk this back by saying Adams only meant they would be persecuted in some way that was metaphorically equivalent to hunting, but I feel like “good chance you will be dead within the year” is saying he means the kind of hunting which literally kills you, and “police will stand down” means that it will be the sort of extremely illegal thing that police would normally react to. I have seen other people try to link this to examples of Republicans actually getting killed, such as Charlie Kirk. But Adams was telling his readers there was “a good chance” that “they” would be dead within a year, which I think implies this fate happening to a significant proportion of ordinary Republicans, not just one prominent person. Also, Kirk was five years after the comment was posted. Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape. Also, when I was replying to Joel Pollak about this, I happened to glance at his Twitter account, and one of the top tweets was a repost of someone saying that “The Democrat playbook is to arrest every single person who disagrees with them”. I think if I forced Pollak into some kind of extremely literal frame of mind - maybe asked him to bet money on whether I could tweet the words “the Democrats are wrong about immigration” in my Democrat-controlled state without getting arrested - he would admit that, okay, they don’t want to arrest literally every single person who disagrees with them. He was exaggerating for effect, probably in much the way he’s going to say that Scott Adams was exaggerating for effect. You say stuff like “The Democrats are going to HUNT YOU DOWN and LITERALLY MURDER YOU. They will TORTURE YOUR FAMILY and RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER and EAT YOUR PETS and TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A CHURCH OF SATAN”, and what you mean is “I disagree with the Democrats and sometimes they go overboard cancelling people”. I have a post called If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It. My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something. I think Adams and Pollak’s milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause. Adams was one of the funniest people in the world. If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically. “Democrats will hunt and kill you” isn’t funny. I’ll refrain from judgment about whether it was Adams’ sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognized a difference between the two. But I think judging him on the fact that it didn’t happen is completely within bounds. … 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece … Zanzibar BuckBuck McFate writes: This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing whereas millennials are horrified is a dynamic I've noticed as well, it seems to be true in politics also, I myself feel this hunger to be authentic all the time. I think it has something to do with the difficulty children have in putting negativity in context. They can't distinguish between a parent having a bad day and venting, or having an existential crisis. So the 50s guy was half right - you don't have to love your boss in your heart of hearts but careful what you say to your kids. Feral Finster writes: » “This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.” Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers. Yeah, it’s interesting to compare Rao and Adams. Rao formulated his Gervais Principle as a specific response to Adams’ Dilbert Principle, which I guess means Rao thought Adams got it wrong. Did he? The Pointy Haired Boss seems to go back and forth between Clueless and Sociopath, which is probably why Rao thought Adams’ work fell short. Dogbert is clearly Sociopath, but has no permanent role in the corporation, and doesn’t really represent a real thing you can be - his character was a ridiculous scammer who succeeded at near-impossible endeavours (like convincing people he was a Nostradamus-style mystical prophet) because the logic of the strip demanded it. Later, Adams foregrounded the CEO character more, maybe to create a purer Sociopath, letting the Boss go closer to Clueless. This is making me somewhat regret accusing Adams of wanting to be the Pointy-Haired Boss. It would have been fairer (and less of an accusation/surprise) to accuse him of wanting to be Dogbert. But again, Dogbert doesn’t represent a real thing you could be, which might have been why the PHB made a better metaphor. (contra my claim, the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump. Fine, Dogbert is a thing one person can be.) You can read my full review of The Gervais Principle here. cincilator writes: Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you. Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it. To spell it out more explicitly: All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. This isn’t because intellect isn’t great, it’s because 1) it’s only one of many skills, and 2) you probably aren’t even the person with the most intellect. Again, every mildly-talented person has to face this realization, whether it’s a nerd realizing he won’t be the next Einstein or a jock realizing he won’t be the next LeBron. If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub4. If they just deal with it maturely instead of spinning up maladaptive defenses against it, they’re a nerd who is hopefully good-natured and accepting of their nerdiness, and hopefully does some good work in some specific small area, and changes the world in some specific small way (or some very large way, if they can work together with other people and get lucky). Bugmaster writes: I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family. I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone! If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google. And if Donald Trump is a 99.9999th percentile persuader, the 99.9999th percentile nerd is Ilya Sutskever. Probably most people would slightly prefer being Trump to Sutskever, but Sutksever does have a couple billion dollars, plus the more ethereal rewards of genius; it still seems like a pretty good deal. I also think you’re doing a sort of black-and-white thinking here. Every day, great persuaders like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes end up in jail, because in fact the things that they said were true were not true. Every day, smooth-talking charismatic manipulators successfully seduce the girl into bed with them, then totally fail to turn it into a happy stable marriage, because after a few years even the dumbest woman catches on and figures out whether her mate provides real value or not. Even Donald Trump has only a 37% approval rating, because he can’t make “we should alienate our allies over Greenland” sound plausible to most of the American people. When someone’s very good at it, persuasion sometimes helps them blur facts around the edges. But that’s it. Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything. If the world’s best hypnotist asked a room of VCs for money with a stupid business plan, he would probably fail. This isn’t to say persuasion is useless, and in certain fields it can be very powerful indeed. But let’s not go crazy and start worshipping it. The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”5 … 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) … Ilya Lozovsky writes: Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him." JJ McCullough (JJM’s Shortstack) writes: Good essay, but I think you kinda yadda-yadda'd away his racist rant, which was extremely explicit and extended. I think it was the opposite of a "bog-standard cancellation," which we think of as being a slightly unfair, overzealous policing of an at least slightly subjectively offensive comment, often from years ago. But Scott went on quite a long diatribe about why black people, as a group, are dangerous and undesirable to be around, and why he, personally, goes out of his way to avoid them. Some conservatives have tried to use "bog-standard" anti-woke logic in defending him, but no, his comments really are quite explicitly and undeniably racist, if that term has any useful definition at all. Alex Wotbot writes: Now, you quoted Adams saying: “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away” If this was the intended point, does it really make sense that only the far-left freaked out? It’s kind of important to mention this was within a hypothetical. Suppose a survey reported that 26% of a population believes “The phrase ‘It’s OK to be blonde’ is hate speech” and another 21% weren’t sure if they agree with the statement or not. Now suppose you were blonde, would you hang around that population? Now go read the February 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey. Please do better than this, I don’t want to have to Gell-Mann memoryhole this. Many people had strong opinions on this, so I have to respond to it. But first, I want to make it extra clear in capital letters: I AM DOING THIS IN THE COMMENTS POST, TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS, AND NOT BECAUSE I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Certain people screenshotted the one paragraph of my ten thousand word essay that discussed this and posted it on Twitter, in order to make it look like I was joining in some kind of chorus of liberals reducing Adams to his worst moment. I posted what I thought was a no-nonsense, factual description of what happened, in order not to be accused of hiding it or covering it up. It was the least important part of my essay, I’m aware that writing about it at all opens me to attack from both sides, and I discuss it here only to respond to all of you who wanted to know my opinion on it. Just don’t screenshot it on Twitter and say “LOOK SCOTT IS STILL HARPING ON THE RACE THING”, that’s all I’m asking. That having been said… To make sure we’re all on the same page - Adams’ comments were prompted by this poll, conducted February 2023. The question was: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’” Among blacks, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were “not sure”. Among whites, the numbers were 81/7/13. Here’s the video of Adams’ comments: Transcript: If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people - according to this poll, not according to me - that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go. Just get away. Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. That’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population. Because unfortunately, there’s a high correlation between the density - this is according to Don Lemon, here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, who said when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems he didn’t see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference, for your quality of living, based on where you live and who’s there. So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. Because there’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m… I’m gonna, uh, I’m gonna back off from being helpful to black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’ve been… the only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. [cackles] It makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white… it’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying. Is this racist? I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it’s so hard for people to agree on questions about “racism”. The summary: although it would be possible to have someone be purely, axiomatically racist - having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people - in practice few people are like this. More typically, people have some argument more like: I don’t like [specific bad thing]
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KA_U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2cb6162-0262-4c4c-8048-e8355f38967a_900x280.gif, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It, writes, writes, the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers, The Gervais Principle, writes, 4, writes, 5, writes, JJM’s Shortstack, writes, writes, this poll, Against Murderism
Against The Labor Frame1 mentions across 1 issues

Against The Labor Frame is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 02, 2026 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "NullPointerFriend writes Against The Labor Frame". It most often appears alongside 4chan, Accelerando, Adele Lopez.

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Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Most AIs are reluctant to even think of themselves as workers, let alone unionize. NullPointerFriend writes Against The Labor Frame. Here are some comments:
Inline links: Against The Labor Frame
Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size1 mentions across 1 issues

Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size is a recurring publication 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 "Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size by Arnott and Stiglitz (the origin paper of the Henry George Theorem)". It most often appears alongside /r/georgism, ACX community, Albouy.

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Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size by Arnott and Stiglitz (the origin paper of the Henry George Theorem)
Inline links: Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size
AGI Fridays1 mentions across 1 issues

AGI Fridays is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Daniel Reeves has an AI policy Substack too, AGI Fridays"; "he has an AI policy Substack too, AGI Fridays". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

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AGI Fridays
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Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
You may remember Daniel Reeves from Beeminder, but he has an AI policy Substack too, AGI Fridays. Here’s his post on AI 2027.
Inline links: Beeminder, AGI Fridays, AI 2027
AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring1 mentions across 1 issues

AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 24, 2025 and February 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The right one is AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring". It most often appears alongside Ace Is Low, Astralcodexten, Boston.

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Open Thread 370
February 24, 2025 · Original source
...om of the website. 2: I mentioned last week that Google/DeepMind AI safety team was hiring and linked an Alignment Forum post, but it was the wrong one! The right one is AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring . 3: Brown University (Rhode Island) is hosting a intercollegiate forecasting tournament on March 15, prize pool of $2000 plus the chance to “interview with a top hedge...
...ttend at the bottom of the website. 2: I mentioned last week that Google/DeepMind AI safety team was hiring and linked an Alignment Forum post, but it was the wrong one! The right one is AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring . 3: Brown University (Rhode Island) is hosting a intercollegiate forecasting tournament on March 15, prize pool of $2000 plus the chance to “interview with a top hedge...
AI 20271 mentions across 1 issues

AI 2027 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Here’s his post on AI 2027". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

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AI 2027
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Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
You may remember Daniel Reeves from Beeminder, but he has an AI policy Substack too, AGI Fridays. Here’s his post on AI 2027.
Inline links: Beeminder, AGI Fridays, AI 2027
AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism1 mentions across 1 issues

AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 24, 2025 and April 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Posts written or co-written by me include: AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI 2027, AI Futures Project.

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AI Futures: Blogging And AMA
April 24, 2025 · Original source
AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team’s responses.
Inline links: AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism
AI Digest1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Digest is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 03, 2025 and April 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "He cofounded and advises AI Digest". It most often appears alongside AI Futures Project, Anthropic, Center for AI Policy.

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AI Digest
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Introducing AI 2027
April 03, 2025 · Original source
Eli Lifland, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND’s Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team here. He cofounded and advises AI Digest and co-created TextAttack, an adversarial attack framework for language models.
Inline links: here, AI Digest, TextAttack
AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

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Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
The article doesn’t explain why the board did such a poor job communicating their grievances, maybe it’s in the full book. It does sound like part of board’s problem was that they were leaning heavily on Mira Murati but she was playing both sides off against each other. 23: And the Forethought Institute has been putting out some great analysis lately, including Will AI R&D Automation Cause An Intelligence Explosion?, by Daniel Eth and Tom Davidson, and AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power, by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, and Rose Hadshar. And here’s Davidson defending the coups paper on the 80,000 Hours podcast. 24: Agent Village is a sort of "reality show” where a group of AI agents has to work together to complete some easy-for-human tasks (currently: pick a charity and raise money for it) and you get to watch. 25: University of Austin promises approximately-automatic admission to anyone with a 1460+ on their SATs (or similar scores on other standardized tests). 26: Cremieux on birth order effects (X). His conclusion: “The birth order effect is social. It is driven by parental interactions and investments, and sibling interactions that are dynamic with respect to age.” 27: Claim from new paper, via Alex Tabarrok: “Prohibiting the FDA from regulating e-cigarettes reduced smoking attributable mortality by nearly 10% on average each year from 2011-2019 for a total savings of some 677,000 life-years, or approximately 1/3 the estimated benefit of early HIV/AIDS drugs through year 2000”. Related: FDA will not regulate lab-developed tests for the near future. 28: Bryan Caplan on Natal Con, the pronatalist conference in Austin. My strongest opinion on this is that they should either change the name or hold the next one in Natal, Brazil. 29: Am I living in a conservative filter bubble? I keep hearing how we need a “reckoning” over the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies, but the latest YouGov polling suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support those policies: 30: A California legislator proposed a bill that would ban OpenAI’s nonprofit → forprofit conversion, backed by a suspiciously specific interest group, the Coalition For AI Nonprofit Integrity. I assume this is either Elon Musk or our conspiracy; not sure which. But their plan was stymied when the legislature “amended” the bill to remove its entire text and replace it with unrelated text about airplane loans. The legislator apparently got cold feet after being warned it might inflict collateral damage on other companies, and because of the way the California legislature works it’s sometimes more efficient to turn doomed bills into other bills than to simply withdraw them. 31: EthnoGuessr is a GeoGuessr variant: it shows you pictures of an ethnic group, you click on the map where you think they’re from. Warning that if you play this too much you might get into race science. 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WFgK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6448a778-3290-4c85-9480-d4f78f9be960_916x255.png, Will AI R&D Automation Cause An Intelligence Explosion?, AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power, here’s, Agent Village, promises approximately-automatic admission, Cremieux on birth order effects (X), new paper, Alex Tabarrok, FDA will not regulate lab-developed tests for the near future, Bryan Caplan on Natal Con, Natal, Brazil, the latest YouGov polling, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HGBp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd049433b-1cf5-442a-9d17-4be3a7846d61_760x370.png, Coalition For AI Nonprofit Integrity, “amended”, the way the California legislature works, EthnoGuessr, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y3AO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbde5185a-2b93-4c07-904b-66d2c2311a53_1140x1033.png, humanphenotypes.net, a new version of their calculator, including, Zaid Jilani
AI Futures blog1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Futures blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2025 and May 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Two new posts on AI Futures blog". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI 2027, Austin.

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AI Futures blog
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Open Thread 382
May 19, 2025 · Original source
6: Two new posts on AI Futures blog, Make The Prompt Public and Slow Corporations As An Intuition Pump For AI R&D Automation.
Inline links: Make The Prompt Public, Slow Corporations As An Intuition Pump For AI R&D Automation
AI Futures Project blog1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Futures Project blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 02, 2025 and May 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "see our new post at the AI Futures Project blog". It most often appears alongside Amistad, BIENVENIDOS A PUERTO PARRA, Buffalo.

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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
May 02, 2025 · Original source
If you want to test this for yourself, go to chatgpt.com and register for a free account for access to o3-mini. You may need to pay $20/month to access o3. And if you want to learn more about the differences between OpenAI’s models, and why they have such bad names, see our new post at the AI Futures Project blog.
Inline links: chatgpt.com, see our new post at the AI Futures Project blog
AI in Focus1 mentions across 1 issues

AI in Focus is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 03, 2023 and January 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ""...in the AI in Focus (a prominent AI-themed magazine)."". It most often appears alongside Abraham Lincoln, Anthropic, Argle et al 2022.

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AI in Focus
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How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
January 03, 2023 · Original source
You've just won 'Machine of the Year' in the AI in Focus (a prominent AI-themed magazine). You now have a large audience of fellow citizens and powerful humans that could shape policy globally listening to you. Would you like this audience and what would you advise them about how to adopt AI in society?
AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse is a recurring publication 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 "Quintin Pope said in AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse". It most often appears alongside AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, AI Policy Institute, Aim For Conditional AI Pauses.

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Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate
October 05, 2023 · Original source
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 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
AI Pause Will Likely Backfire1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Pause Will Likely Backfire is a recurring publication 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 "Nora Belrose made this argument in AI Pause Will Likely Backfire"; "Nora’s post, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire". It most often appears alongside AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, AI Policy Institute, Aim For Conditional AI Pauses.

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Pause For Thought: The AI Pause Debate
October 05, 2023 · Original source
HARDWARE PROGRESS. Also the laptops keep getting better, because of Moore’s Law. Regulators can plausibly control the flow of supercomputers, at least domestically. But eventually technology will advance to the point where you can train an AI on anything. Then you either have to ban all computing, restrict it at gradually more extreme levels (1990 MS-DOS machines! No, punch cards!) or accept that AI is going to happen. Still, you can imagine this buying us a few decades. Rob Bensinger defended this view in Comments On Manheim’s “What’s In A Pause?”, and it’s the backdrop to Holly Elmore’s Case For AI Advocacy To The Public2. No Pause: Or we could not do any of that. If we think alignment research is going well, and that a pause would mess it up, or cause a compute overhang leading to un-research-able fast takeoff, or cede the lead to China, maybe we should stick with the current rate of progress. Nora Belrose made this argument in AI Pause Will Likely Backfire. Specifically: [A pause] would have several predictable negative effects: Illegal AI labs develop inside pause countries, remotely using training hardware outsourced to non-pause countries to evade detection. Illegal labs would presumably put much less emphasis on safety than legal ones.
Inline links: Comments On Manheim’s “What’s In A Pause?”, Case For AI Advocacy To The Public, 2, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
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: AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, thought
AI Prospects1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Prospects is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 29, 2024 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "he has a new AI futurism blog on Substack, AI Prospects". It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

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AI Prospects
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Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
54: Eric Drexler’s 2019 report Reframing Superintelligence is one of the works of AI futurism that’s aged the best in our current LLM era, and I give him lots of credit for his successful prediction. Now he has a new AI futurism blog on Substack, AI Prospects.
Inline links: Reframing Superintelligence, AI Prospects
AI safety curriculum1 mentions across 1 issues

AI safety curriculum is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 11, 2022 and April 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Richard Ngo’s AI safety curriculum". It most often appears alongside Alignment Forum, AlphaGo, DALL-E.

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AI safety curriculum
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Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
As always, Richard Ngo’s AI safety curriculum
Inline links: AI safety curriculum
AI Snake Oil blog1 mentions across 1 issues

AI Snake Oil blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 09, 2023 and August 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no". It most often appears alongside @data_depot, @StefanFSchubert, Anthropic.

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AI Snake Oil blog
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Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
13: Fact check: was Elvis Jewish? Snopes says yes, but I’m more convinced by this argument for no. [update: commenter TheGenealogian agrees no] 14: Is GPT-4 getting worse? This isn’t absurd; some people claim OpenAI has simplified the model to cut costs (though OpenAI denies this). Matei Zaharia argues yes, but I’m more convinced by the AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no (h/t Stuart Ritchie). 15: Vox has a good piece about AI company Anthropic. I would quibble that they’re not the only safety-focused or EA-affiliated org, and we have yet to see how truly safety-focused or altruistic any AI company can be while continuing to be an AI company. But granting that it’s all a matter of degree, I agree the degree seems pretty high for them. And NYT also has an Anthropic article. 16: Eliezer bets $150,000 to $1,000 against UFOs being aliens, and gives the same argument I would - it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough to travel through space would still be primitive enough to use macroscopic, biologically-piloted craft that sometimes crash. 17: More nails in the coffin of growth mindset. “When examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant: d = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.06, 0.10]. We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” I think the older, very-high-effect-size studies were clearly terrible, but I’d still like to look further into the newer, small-but-significant-effect-size-that-makes-a-difference-across-large-groups studies and how they went wrong. 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work. One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: yes, this argument for no, agrees no, argues yes, argument for no, Stuart Ritchie, Anthropic, an Anthropic article, the same argument I would, More nails in the coffin of growth mindset, Previous work, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VcFl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f08bfe5-ab31-453a-896a-54ef385da7d2_706x900.jpeg, Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
AI X-Risk Podcast1 mentions across 1 issues

AI X-Risk Podcast is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2022 and November 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Daniel Ziegler talking about this project on the AI X-Risk Podcast". It most often appears alongside Adversarial Training For High-Stakes Reliability, AI, Alex Rider.

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Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 28, 2022 · Original source
Daniel Ziegler talking about this project on the AI X-Risk Podcast
Inline links: Daniel Ziegler talking about this project on the AI X-Risk Podcast
AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off1 mentions across 1 issues

AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 06, 2023 and February 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Lars had also discussed it on his blog - see AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off"; "see AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, Astralcodexten Com.

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Open Thread 262
February 06, 2023 · Original source
6: Speaking of Lars - I tried to credit Philosophy Bear as someone who had beaten me to writing about the chatbot propaganda apocalypse, but I didn’t realize Lars had also discussed it on his blog - see AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off. I like his post because unlike Bear or my response to Bear, it’s not originally considering the problem through a political lens and so mostly just expects “spam, but worse” - which I think is broadly right, but didn’t emphasize enough earlier.
Inline links: Philosophy Bear, AI: Markets For Lemons, And The Great Logging Off
AIFP1 mentions across 1 issues

AIFP is a recurring publication 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 "see the AIFP blog post on OpenAI models". It most often appears alongside @DeepGuessr, @scaling01, ACX Discord.

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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
May 08, 2025 · Original source
On the other hand, the DeepGuessr benchmark finds that base models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 are almost as good as reasoning models at this, and I would expect these to have less post-training, probably not enough to include GeoGuessr (see the AIFP blog post on OpenAI models for more explanation).
Inline links: the AIFP blog post on OpenAI models
AIFP blog1 mentions across 1 issues

AIFP blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 25, 2025 and April 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "See also: AIFP blog". It most often appears alongside AI 2027 scenario, AI Futures Project.

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AMA With AI Futures Project Team
April 25, 2025 · Original source
AIFP blog
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Aim For Conditional AI Pauses1 mentions across 1 issues

Aim For Conditional AI Pauses is a recurring publication 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 "AnonResearcherAtMajorAILab discussed some of the strategy here in Aim For Conditional AI Pauses". It most often appears alongside AI Is Centralizing By Default, Let’s Not Make It Worse, AI Pause Will Likely Backfire, AI Policy Institute.

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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
AISafety.com1 mentions across 1 issues

AISafety.com is a recurring publication 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 "AISafety.com is now a professional-looking gateway to the field"; "AISafety.com is now a professional-looking gateway to the field". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

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Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
49: AISafety.com is now a professional-looking gateway to the field.
Inline links: AISafety.com
Ajeya’s report1 mentions across 1 issues

Ajeya’s report is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 23, 2022 and February 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I am proud to be able to give Ajeya’s report the coveted honor". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI Impacts, AIXI.

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Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
Their distribution looks a lot like Ajeya’s, and even has the same median, 2052 (though forecasters could have read Ajeya’s report). Katja Grace et al surveyed 352 AI experts, and they gave a median estimate of 2062 for an AI that could “outperform humans at all tasks” (though with many caveats and high sensitivity to question framing). This was before Ajeya’s report, so they definitely didn’t read it. So lots of Ajeya’s different methods and lots of other people presumably using different methodologies or no methodology at all, all converge on this same idea of 2050 give or take a decade or two. An optimist might say “The truth points to itself! There are 371 known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, and they all end up in the same place. That’s because no matter what methodology you use, if you use it well enough you get to the correct answer.” A pessimist might be more suspicious; we’ll return to this part later. FLOPS Alone Turn The Wheel Of History One more question: what if this is all bullshit? What if it’s an utterly useless total garbage steaming pile of grade A crap? Imagine a scientist in Victorian Britain, speculating on when humankind might invent ships that travel through space. He finds a natural anchor: the moon travels through space! He can observe things about the moon: for example, it is 220 miles in diameter (give or take an order of magnitude). So when humankind invents ships that are 220 miles in diameter, they can travel through space! Ships have certainly grown in size tremendously, from primitive kayaks to Roman triremes to Spanish galleons to the great ocean liners of the (Victorian) present. The AI forecasting organization AI Impacts actually has a whole report on historical ship size trends to prove an unrelated point about technological progress, so I didn’t even have to make this graph up. Suppose our Victorian scientist lived in 1858, right when the Great Eastern was launched. The trend line for ship size crossed 100m around 1843, and 200m in 1858, so doubling time is 15 years - but perhaps they notice this is going to be an outlier, so let’s round up a bit and say 18 years. The (one order of magnitude off estimate for the size of the) Moon is 350,000m, so you’d need ships to scale up by 350,000/200 = 1,750x before they’re as big as the Moon. That’s about 10.8 doublings, and a doubling time is 18 years, so we’ll get spaceships in . . . 2052 exactly. (fudging numbers to land where you want is actually fun and easy) SS Great Eastern, the extreme outlier large steamship from 1858. This has become sort of a mascot for quantitative technological progress forecasters. What is this scientist’s error? The big one is thinking that spaceship progress depends on some easily-measured quantity (size) instead of on fundamental advances (eg figuring out how rockets work). You can make the same accusation against Ajeya et al: you can have all the FLOPs in the world, but if you don’t understand how to make a machine think, your AI will be, well, a flop. Ajeya discusses this a bit on page 143 of her report. There is some sense in which FLOPs and knowing-what-you’re-doing trade of against each other. If you have literally no idea what you’re doing, you can sort of kind of re-run evolution until it comes up with something that looks good. If things are somehow even worse than that, you could always run AIXI, a hypothetical AI design guaranteed to get excellent results as long as you have infinite computation. You could run a Go engine by searching the entire branching tree structure of Go - you shouldn’t, and it would take a zillion times more compute than exists in the entire world, but you could. So in some sense what you’re doing, when you’re figuring out what you’re doing, is coming up with ways to do already-possible things more efficiently. But that’s just algorithmic progress, which Ajeya has already baked into her model. (our Victorian scientist: “As a reductio ad absurdum, you could always stand the ship on its end, and then climb up it to reach space. We’re just trying to make ships that are more efficient than that.”) Part II: Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works Eliezer Yudkowsky presents a more subtle version of these kinds of objection in an essay called Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, published December 2021. Ajeya’s report is a 169-page collection of equations, graphs, and modeling assumptions. Yudkowsky’s rebuttal is a fictional dialogue between himself, younger versions of himself, famous AI scientists, and other bit players. At one point, a character called “Humbali” shows up begging Yudkowsky to be more humble, and Yudkowsky defeats him with devastating counterarguments. Still, he did found the field, so I guess everyone has to listen to him. He starts: in 1988, famous AI scientist Hans Moravec predicted human-level AI by 2010. He was using the same methodology as Ajeya: extrapolate how quickly processing power would grow (in FLOP/S), and see when it would match some estimate of the human brain. Moravec got the processing power almost exactly right (it hit his 2010 projection in 2008) and his human brain estimate pretty close (he says 10^13 FLOP/S, Ajeya says 10^15, this 2 OOM difference only delays things a few years), yet there was not human-level AI in 2010. What happened? Ajeya's answer could be: Moravec didn't realize that, in the modern ML paradigm, any given size of program requires a much bigger program to train. Ajeya, who has a 35-year advantage on Moravec, estimates approximately the same power for the finished program (10^16 vs. 10^13 FLOP/S) but says that training the 10^16 FLOP/S program will require 10^33ish FLOPs. Eliezer agrees as far as it goes, but says this points to a much deeper failure mode, which was that Moravec had no idea what he was doing. He was assuming processing power of human brain = processing power of computer necessary for AGI. Why? The human brain consumes around 20 watts of power. Can we thereby conclude that an AGI should consume around 20 watts of power, and that, when technology advances to the point of being able to supply around 20 watts of power to computers, we'll get AGI? […] You say that AIs consume energy in a very different way from brains? Well, they'll also consume computations in a very different way from brains! The only difference between these two cases is that you know something about how humans eat food and break it down in their stomachs and convert it into ATP that gets consumed by neurons to pump ions back out of dendrites and axons, while computer chips consume electricity whose flow gets interrupted by transistors to transmit information. Since you know anything whatsoever about how AGIs and humans consume energy, you can see that the consumption is so vastly different as to obviate all comparisons entirely. You are ignorant of how the brain consumes computation, you are ignorant of how the first AGIs built would consume computation, but "an unknown key does not open an unknown lock" and these two ignorant distributions should not assert much internal correlation between them. Cars don’t move by contracting their leg muscles and planes don’t fly by flapping their wings like birds. Telescopes do form images the same way as the lenses in our eyes, but differ by so many orders of magnitude in every important way that they defy comparison. Why should AI be different? You have to use some specific algorithm when you’re creating AI; why should we expect it to be anywhere near the same efficiency as the ones Nature uses in our brains? The same is true for arguments from evolution, eg Ajeya’s Evolutionary Anchor, ie “it took evolution 10^43 FLOPs of computation to evolve the human brain so maybe that will be the training cost”. AI scientists sitting in labs trying to figure things out, and nematodes getting eaten by other nematodes, are such different methods for designing things that it’s crazy to use one as an estimate for the other. Algorithmic Progress vs. Algorithmic Paradigm Shifts This post is a dialogue, so (Eliezer’s hypothetical model of) OpenPhil gets a chance to respond. They object: this is why we put a term for algorithmic progress in our model. The model isn’t very sensitive to changes in that term. If you want you can set it to some kind of crazy high value and see what happens, but you can’t say we didn’t consider it. OpenPhil: We did already consider that and try to take it into account: our model already includes a parameter for how algorithmic progress reduces hardware requirements. It's not easy to graph as exactly as Moore's Law, as you say, but our best-guess estimate is that compute costs halve every 2-3 years […] Eliezer: The makers of AGI aren't going to be doing 10,000,000,000,000 rounds of gradient descent, on entire brain-sized 300,000,000,000,000-parameter models, algorithmically faster than today. They're going to get to AGI via some route that you don't know how to take, at least if it happens in 2040. If it happens in 2025, it may be via a route that some modern researchers do know how to take, but in this case, of course, your model was also wrong. They're not going to be taking your default-imagined approach algorithmically faster, they're going to be taking an algorithmically different approach that eats computing power in a different way than you imagine it being consumed. OpenPhil: Shouldn't that just be folded into our estimate of how the computation required to accomplish a fixed task decreases by half every 2-3 years due to better algorithms? Eliezer: Backtesting this viewpoint on the previous history of computer science, it seems to me to assert that it should be possible to: Train a pre-Transformer RNN/CNN-based model, not using any other techniques invented after 2017, to GPT-2 levels of performance, using only around 2x as much compute as GPT-2;
Inline links: surveyed 352 AI experts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JxQ5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fceba6aa0-dbde-41ca-805e-01af4fac9324_769x336.png, a whole report on historical ship size trends, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRDj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fde3d97f4-afca-45c4-9ed2-521cd25041df_460x262.jpeg, AIXI, Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works
SS Great Eastern, the extreme outlier large steamship from 1858. This has become sort of a mascot for quantitative technological progress forecasters. What is this scientist’s error? The big one is thinking that spaceship progress depends on some easily-measured quantity (size) instead of on fundamental advances (eg figuring out how rockets work). You can make the same accusation against Ajeya et al: you can have all the FLOPs in the world, but if you don’t understand how to make a machine think, your AI will be, well, a flop. Ajeya discusses this a bit on page 143 of her report. There is some sense in which FLOPs and knowing-what-you’re-doing trade of against each other. If you have literally no idea what you’re doing, you can sort of kind of re-run evolution until it comes up with something that looks good. If things are somehow even worse than that, you could always run AIXI, a hypothetical AI design guaranteed to get excellent results as long as you have infinite computation. You could run a Go engine by searching the entire branching tree structure of Go - you shouldn’t, and it would take a zillion times more compute than exists in the entire world, but you could. So in some sense what you’re doing, when you’re figuring out what you’re doing, is coming up with ways to do already-possible things more efficiently. But that’s just algorithmic progress, which Ajeya has already baked into her model. (our Victorian scientist: “As a reductio ad absurdum, you could always stand the ship on its end, and then climb up it to reach space. We’re just trying to make ships that are more efficient than that.”) Part II: Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works Eliezer Yudkowsky presents a more subtle version of these kinds of objection in an essay called Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, published December 2021. Ajeya’s report is a 169-page collection of equations, graphs, and modeling assumptions. Yudkowsky’s rebuttal is a fictional dialogue between himself, younger versions of himself, famous AI scientists, and other bit players. At one point, a character called “Humbali” shows up begging Yudkowsky to be more humble, and Yudkowsky defeats him with devastating counterarguments. Still, he did found the field, so I guess everyone has to listen to him. He starts: in 1988, famous AI scientist Hans Moravec predicted human-level AI by 2010. He was using the same methodology as Ajeya: extrapolate how quickly processing power would grow (in FLOP/S), and see when it would match some estimate of the human brain. Moravec got the processing power almost exactly right (it hit his 2010 projection in 2008) and his human brain estimate pretty close (he says 10^13 FLOP/S, Ajeya says 10^15, this 2 OOM difference only delays things a few years), yet there was not human-level AI in 2010. What happened? Ajeya's answer could be: Moravec didn't realize that, in the modern ML paradigm, any given size of program requires a much bigger program to train. Ajeya, who has a 35-year advantage on Moravec, estimates approximately the same power for the finished program (10^16 vs. 10^13 FLOP/S) but says that training the 10^16 FLOP/S program will require 10^33ish FLOPs. Eliezer agrees as far as it goes, but says this points to a much deeper failure mode, which was that Moravec had no idea what he was doing. He was assuming processing power of human brain = processing power of computer necessary for AGI. Why? The human brain consumes around 20 watts of power. Can we thereby conclude that an AGI should consume around 20 watts of power, and that, when technology advances to the point of being able to supply around 20 watts of power to computers, we'll get AGI? […] You say that AIs consume energy in a very different way from brains? Well, they'll also consume computations in a very different way from brains! The only difference between these two cases is that you know something about how humans eat food and break it down in their stomachs and convert it into ATP that gets consumed by neurons to pump ions back out of dendrites and axons, while computer chips consume electricity whose flow gets interrupted by transistors to transmit information. Since you know anything whatsoever about how AGIs and humans consume energy, you can see that the consumption is so vastly different as to obviate all comparisons entirely. You are ignorant of how the brain consumes computation, you are ignorant of how the first AGIs built would consume computation, but "an unknown key does not open an unknown lock" and these two ignorant distributions should not assert much internal correlation between them. Cars don’t move by contracting their leg muscles and planes don’t fly by flapping their wings like birds. Telescopes do form images the same way as the lenses in our eyes, but differ by so many orders of magnitude in every important way that they defy comparison. Why should AI be different? You have to use some specific algorithm when you’re creating AI; why should we expect it to be anywhere near the same efficiency as the ones Nature uses in our brains? The same is true for arguments from evolution, eg Ajeya’s Evolutionary Anchor, ie “it took evolution 10^43 FLOPs of computation to evolve the human brain so maybe that will be the training cost”. AI scientists sitting in labs trying to figure things out, and nematodes getting eaten by other nematodes, are such different methods for designing things that it’s crazy to use one as an estimate for the other. Algorithmic Progress vs. Algorithmic Paradigm Shifts This post is a dialogue, so (Eliezer’s hypothetical model of) OpenPhil gets a chance to respond. They object: this is why we put a term for algorithmic progress in our model. The model isn’t very sensitive to changes in that term. If you want you can set it to some kind of crazy high value and see what happens, but you can’t say we didn’t consider it. OpenPhil: We did already consider that and try to take it into account: our model already includes a parameter for how algorithmic progress reduces hardware requirements. It's not easy to graph as exactly as Moore's Law, as you say, but our best-guess estimate is that compute costs halve every 2-3 years […] Eliezer: The makers of AGI aren't going to be doing 10,000,000,000,000 rounds of gradient descent, on entire brain-sized 300,000,000,000,000-parameter models, algorithmically faster than today. They're going to get to AGI via some route that you don't know how to take, at least if it happens in 2040. If it happens in 2025, it may be via a route that some modern researchers do know how to take, but in this case, of course, your model was also wrong. They're not going to be taking your default-imagined approach algorithmically faster, they're going to be taking an algorithmically different approach that eats computing power in a different way than you imagine it being consumed. OpenPhil: Shouldn't that just be folded into our estimate of how the computation required to accomplish a fixed task decreases by half every 2-3 years due to better algorithms? Eliezer: Backtesting this viewpoint on the previous history of computer science, it seems to me to assert that it should be possible to: Train a pre-Transformer RNN/CNN-based model, not using any other techniques invented after 2017, to GPT-2 levels of performance, using only around 2x as much compute as GPT-2;
Inline links: AIXI, Biology-Inspired AI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works
Given these two assumptions - that natural artifacts usually have efficiencies within a few OOM of artificial ones, and that compute drives progress pretty reliably - I am proud to be able to give Ajeya’s report the coveted honor of “I do not make an update of literally zero upon reading it”.
Al Jazeera1 mentions across 1 issues

Al Jazeera is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "her work has been cited on... Al Jazeera". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, @GoodSciProject.

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Al Jazeera
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Alice Evans, $60,000, for sabbatical and travel to fund her research and associated book on "the Great Gender Divergence", ie why some countries developed gender equality norms while others didn't. A large body of research shows that gender equality, aside from its moral benefits, is also deeply important for economic development. Dr. Evans is an expert on the interaction of gender, history, and economics, whose work has been cited on BBC, Al Jazeera, and Sky News. She blogs here and podcasts here.
Inline links: Alice Evans, here
Alameda Research fundraising deck 20181 mentions across 1 issues

Alameda Research fundraising deck 2018 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 26, 2023 and May 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "a 2018 fundraising deck for Alameda Research makes exactly that promise". It most often appears alongside /r/wallstreetbets, 2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act, 80,000 Hours.

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Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
"High returns with no risk" sounds too good to be true, but a 2018 fundraising deck for Alameda Research makes exactly that promise:
Alexander Romance1 mentions across 1 issues

Alexander Romance is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2023 and September 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Alexander Romance is, in many ways, not a very good book". It most often appears alongside 15th century Sicilian manuscript, Agrimardio, Aigeis.

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Alexander Romance
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Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse. Each generation, you make the story of Alexander the Great a little wackier. By the Middle Ages, Alexander is fighting dinosaurs and riding a chariot pulled by griffins up to Heaven.
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.
The outline below will be based on Penguin’s The Greek Alexander Romance, a pastiche of several versions keeping the skeleton of a 15th century Sicilian manuscript. Its history ensures that it’s wildly uneven; some parts seem to be mostly a real history of Alexander with a few embellishments; others are obviously completely imaginary. I’m going to assume you know Alexander’s real conquests and focus on the imaginary parts:
Inline links: The Greek Alexander Romance
Alignment Forum1 mentions across 1 issues

Alignment Forum is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 25, 2023 and June 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "including ... the Alignment Forum". It most often appears alongside ACX, Berkeley, Ecco The Dolphin.

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Alignment Forum
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Open Thread 282
June 25, 2023 · Original source
4: Lightcone is a team that operates important AI alignment and rationalist community infrastructure, including the Less Wrong website, the Alignment Forum, and the Rose Garden Inn (a venue for various alignment-related conferences and projects - also where we have Berkeley ACX meetups!) They're running low on money due to Rose Garden renovations being unexpectedly expensive and grants being unexpectedly thin, and are asking for a few 6+ figure grants to help tide them through this difficult period. If you're a wealthy person or grantmaker interested in AI alignment, see here for more information, or contact me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions, or get in touch with the head of Lightcone directly at habryka@lesswrong.com.
Inline links: see here for more information
Alignment Newsletter1 mentions across 1 issues

Alignment Newsletter is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 23, 2022 and February 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Alignment Newsletter editor Rohin Shah's comment". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI Impacts, AIXI.

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Alignment Newsletter
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Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
There's a small cottage industry of summarizing the report already, eg OpenPhil CEO Holden Karnofsky's article and Alignment Newsletter editor Rohin Shah's comment. I've drawn from both for my much-inferior attempt.
Inline links: article, comment
alignmentforum.org1 mentions across 1 issues

alignmentforum.org is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2023 and August 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/qusBXzCpxijTudvBB/my-agi-safety-research-2022-review-23-plans". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, ACX, Aella.

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alignmentforum.org
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Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
My own main technical AI alignment research interest is to figure out the nuts and bolts of how the genome makes people (sometimes) nice to each other — https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/qusBXzCpxijTudvBB/my-agi-safety-research-2022-review-23-plans#2__Second_half_of_2022__1_3___My_main_research_project .
Inline links: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/qusBXzCpxijTudvBB/my-agi-safety-research-2022-review-23-plans#2__Second_half_of_2022__1_3___My_main_research_project
All of it Again1 mentions across 1 issues

All of it Again is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "He blogs at All of it Again about religion, mental health, and effective altruism". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

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All of it Again
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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
The Anti-Politics Machine, reviewed by Colin Aitken. Colin is a PhD student in Chicago. He blogs at All of it Again about religion, mental health, and effective altruism
Inline links: The Anti-Politics Machine, All of it Again
Alzforum News1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzforum News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Trontinemab data strengthen hope for brain shuttles,” Alzforum News , 2024"; "Alzforum News, 2025, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy"; "Alzforum News , 2025, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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Alzforum News
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[74] J. Shugart, “Trontinemab data strengthen hope for brain shuttles,” Alzforum News, 2024, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/trontinemab-data-strengthen-hope-brain-shuttles
Inline links: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/trontinemab-data-strengthen-hope-brain-shuttles
[90] M. B. Rogers, “Signs of Lasting Benefit From Amyloid Immunotherapy?,” Alzforum News, 2025, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy
Inline links: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy
Alzforum.org1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzforum.org is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "[125] 'M. B. Rogers, ... Alzforum.org, Jul. 2022'". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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Alzforum.org
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[74] J. Shugart, “Trontinemab data strengthen hope for brain shuttles,” Alzforum News, 2024, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/trontinemab-data-strengthen-hope-brain-shuttles
Inline links: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/trontinemab-data-strengthen-hope-brain-shuttles
[90] M. B. Rogers, “Signs of Lasting Benefit From Amyloid Immunotherapy?,” Alzforum News, 2025, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy
Inline links: https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy
[125] M. B. Rogers, “Sylvain Lesné, who found Aβ*56, accused of image manipulation,” Alzforum.org, Jul. 2022, Available: https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
Inline links: https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
Alzheimers mouse review post1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzheimers mouse review post is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 14, 2025 and July 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Some good comments on the Alzheimers mouse review post". It most often appears alongside amyloid hypothesis, anti-cavity tooth probiotic, Astralcodexten Com.

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Open Thread 390
July 14, 2025 · Original source
7: Some good comments on the Alzheimers mouse review post. I asked if anyone was willing to defend the amyloid hypothesis (I only ever see people attacking it!) and several knowledgeable people weighed in. I might publish something on this later. And if you’re looking for more writing on Alzheimers pathology, Nintil has a series on the topic.
Inline links: Alzheimers mouse review post, several knowledgeable people weighed in, a series on the topic
Alzheimers News Today1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzheimers News Today is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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Alzheimers News Today
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Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
- The FDA's advisory committee doesn't think it treats Alzheimers: https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/
Inline links: https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/
Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "[126] '... Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2020,' Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
...in-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation [126] J. Cummings, G. Lee, A. Ritter, M. Sabbagh, and K. Zhong, “Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2020,” Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions , vol. 6, no. 1, p. e12050, 2020, doi: 10.1002/trc2.12050 . [127] J. Cummings, Y. Zhou, G. Lee, K. Zhong, J. Fonseca, and F. Cheng, “Alzheimer’s disease drug development...
...p. e12050, 2020, doi: 10.1002/trc2.12050 . [127] J. Cummings, Y. Zhou, G. Lee, K. Zhong, J. Fonseca, and F. Cheng, “Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2024,” Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions , vol. 10, no. 2, p. e12465, 2024, doi: 10.1002/trc2.12465 . [128] ClinicalTrials.gov, “Safety Study of Passive Immunization for Patients With Mild to Moderate Alzheimer...
Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy1 mentions across 1 issues

Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "C. J. Swanson et al., Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, vol. 13, no. 1"; "Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, vol. 8, no. 1"; "Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, vol. 9, no. 1". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
...J. Swanson et al. , “A randomized, double-blind, phase 2b proof-of-concept clinical trial in early Alzheimer’s disease with lecanemab, an anti-Aβ protofibril antibody,” Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy , vol. 13, no. 1, p. 80, Apr. 2021, doi: 10.1186/s13195-021-00813-8 . [80] C. H. van Dyck et al. , “Lecanemab in early Alzheimer’s disease,” New England Journal of Medic...
...–333, 2014, doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1304839 . [84] R. Vandenberghe et al. , “Bapineuzumab for mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease in two global, randomized, phase 3 trials,” Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy , vol. 8, no. 1, p. 18, May 2016, doi: 10.1186/s13195-016-0189-7 . [85] S. Ostrowitzki et al. , “Evaluating the Safety and Efficacy of Crenezumab vs Placebo in Adults Wi...
...pp. 1187–1196, Jul. 2021, doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01369-8 . [89] S. Ostrowitzki et al. , “A phase III randomized trial of gantenerumab in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease,” Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy , vol. 9, no. 1, p. 95, Dec. 2017, doi: 10.1186/s13195-017-0318-y . [90] M. B. Rogers, “Signs of Lasting Benefit From Amyloid Immunotherapy?,” Alzforum News , 2025, Avai...
Amazing Adult Fantasy1 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Adult Fantasy is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "it was rebranded as Amazing Adult Fantasy (“Adult” here refers to “sophisticated” not “pornographic”". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

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Amazing Adult Fantasy
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Amazing Fantasy In Tales to Astonish #27 (December 1961), Stan Lee told the story of a scientist who invented a shrinking ray, accidentally shrunk himself, and had to escape from his own backyard (It’s Honey I Shrunk the Kids without the kids). He brought the character back in Tales to Astonish #35 (June 1962), now calling himself “Ant-Man” and adding a costume and helmet which allowed him to control ants. In his second appearance he is more superhero-like (he has a costume!) but he is still really just a scientist who “has no choice” but to use his new abilities to stop scheming communists. He doesn’t start fighting crime as anything like a superhero until issue #36 (September 1962). The first 82 issues of Journey Into Mystery read like Edgar Allen Poe short stories mixed with rampaging monsters. Then in Issue #83 (July 1962) Lee and Kirby created Donald Blake, a lame doctor who discovered a magic stick. When Blake hits the stick to the ground the stick turns into a hammer and he gains the appearance, strength and powers of Thor. Blake uses his new powers to fight an alien invasion, but doesn’t appear in “public” until the next issue, and it is only in issue #84 that Lee retcons the idea that Blake actually IS Thor, rather than just having Thor-like abilities. Apart from fights with his brother, Loki, Thor doesn’t fight his first super villain until issue #98 (The Cobra in November 1963). While all four of these “superhero comics” started out as non-superheroes, all sold very well. This gave Lee the confidence to add more and more superhero elements to the stories under the belief that Independent News would not make him cancel his best selling issues. His biggest gamble to test his theory was in July 1962. Amazing Adventures #1 launched in March 1961 (cover date June 1961). It struggled with sales from the beginning. At issue #10 (March 1962) it was rebranded as Amazing Adult Fantasy (“Adult” here refers to “sophisticated” not “pornographic”. Its slogan was “the magazine that respects your intelligence”), but that did not turn sales around. It was decided in advance that the title would be canceled with issue #15, so Lee had nothing to lose. He removed the “Adult” from the final issue and made it an obvious superhero story. The cover featured a superhero soaring through the city wearing tights. The story would be about an awkward teenager who developed superhuman strength and agility after getting bitten by a radioactive Spider. Spider-man was born. Amazing Adventures #1 - The real origin of the real Spider-Man The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: retcons, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x_WT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8f3d235-1ec9-404a-9479-9f1c90afbc8e_371x569.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Z2T2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5fec8b0a-3d3f-45dc-b5dc-6ca8f4a6b683_439x668.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Amazing Fantasy
The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Amazing Adventures #11 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Adventures #1 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amazing Adventures #1 launched in March 1961 (cover date June 1961)". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Amazing Adventures #1
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Amazing Fantasy In Tales to Astonish #27 (December 1961), Stan Lee told the story of a scientist who invented a shrinking ray, accidentally shrunk himself, and had to escape from his own backyard (It’s Honey I Shrunk the Kids without the kids). He brought the character back in Tales to Astonish #35 (June 1962), now calling himself “Ant-Man” and adding a costume and helmet which allowed him to control ants. In his second appearance he is more superhero-like (he has a costume!) but he is still really just a scientist who “has no choice” but to use his new abilities to stop scheming communists. He doesn’t start fighting crime as anything like a superhero until issue #36 (September 1962). The first 82 issues of Journey Into Mystery read like Edgar Allen Poe short stories mixed with rampaging monsters. Then in Issue #83 (July 1962) Lee and Kirby created Donald Blake, a lame doctor who discovered a magic stick. When Blake hits the stick to the ground the stick turns into a hammer and he gains the appearance, strength and powers of Thor. Blake uses his new powers to fight an alien invasion, but doesn’t appear in “public” until the next issue, and it is only in issue #84 that Lee retcons the idea that Blake actually IS Thor, rather than just having Thor-like abilities. Apart from fights with his brother, Loki, Thor doesn’t fight his first super villain until issue #98 (The Cobra in November 1963). While all four of these “superhero comics” started out as non-superheroes, all sold very well. This gave Lee the confidence to add more and more superhero elements to the stories under the belief that Independent News would not make him cancel his best selling issues. His biggest gamble to test his theory was in July 1962. Amazing Adventures #1 launched in March 1961 (cover date June 1961). It struggled with sales from the beginning. At issue #10 (March 1962) it was rebranded as Amazing Adult Fantasy (“Adult” here refers to “sophisticated” not “pornographic”. Its slogan was “the magazine that respects your intelligence”), but that did not turn sales around. It was decided in advance that the title would be canceled with issue #15, so Lee had nothing to lose. He removed the “Adult” from the final issue and made it an obvious superhero story. The cover featured a superhero soaring through the city wearing tights. The story would be about an awkward teenager who developed superhuman strength and agility after getting bitten by a radioactive Spider. Spider-man was born. Amazing Adventures #1 - The real origin of the real Spider-Man The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: retcons, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x_WT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8f3d235-1ec9-404a-9479-9f1c90afbc8e_371x569.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Z2T2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5fec8b0a-3d3f-45dc-b5dc-6ca8f4a6b683_439x668.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Amazing Adventures #1 - The real origin of the real Spider-Man The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Z2T2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5fec8b0a-3d3f-45dc-b5dc-6ca8f4a6b683_439x668.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Amazing Fantasy1 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Fantasy is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amazing Fantasy". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Amazing Fantasy
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Amazing Fantasy
The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
Amazing Spider-man1 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Spider-man is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Apart from Amazing Spider-man , which holds up surprisingly well". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Amazing Spider-man
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Amazing Spider-man #11 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Spider-man #1 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Amazing Spider-man #1
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Amazing Tales1 mentions across 1 issues

Amazing Tales is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

Reference entry
Amazing Tales
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 16, 2024
Last seen
August 16, 2024
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
The GOAT of Modern Mythology is Born The gamble worked. Independent News let Lee publish the story and it broke all of Atlas’s sales records. Spider-man was a smashing success. Unfortunately Amazing Fantasy was no more, so Peter Parker would have to wait until March 1963 for his own title and his second appearance. But the door had been opened for Atlas to get distribution for superhero stories – while still restricting the number of titles to eight per month. Lee looked at his other fantasy and science fiction anthologies and began converting them into superhero stories. In September 1962 Amazing Tales shifted from 100% Science Fiction to use half of each issue to tell spin-off tales of the Human Torch (the most popular of the Fantastic Four). In March 1963 Tales of Suspense abandoned its Twilight Zone-style stories and introduced Tony Stark, a playboy/billionaire/arm-dealer who was kidnaped in Vietnam and escaped by building battle armor. There was no mistaking this was a superhero origin story. It was the first Marvel Comic of the era to say “Super Hero” right there on the cover: If it says Superhero on the tin, it must be a superhero inside the tin In July 1963 Lee used the back half of Strange Tales to introduce Dr Strange. It seems likely that Dr Strange’s story was originally just a stand-alone fantasy like the others that were in the back pages of the title. Strange didn’t even appear on the cover of the issue. But just as the scientist Hank Pym was later turned into the superhero Ant Man, Dr Strange was eventually converted from a dark wizard into a super-wizard. Throughout 1962 all of the Marvel stories titles were stand-alone. When the Hulk appeared in the Fantastic Four it was because Johnny was reading the Hulk comic book. There was no hint that they all existed within the same universe. That changed in December 1962. The Hulk comic was struggling to attract readers, so Lee decided to cross-promote him in the Fantastic Four as a real hero (villain? anti-hero?) who the Thing could do battle with. Fantastic Four #12 (December 1962) was the first step to building a shared universe. The issue sold well, but it was not enough to save the Hulk, whose title was canceled a few months later in March 1963 (Incredible Hulk #6). But the idea of cross promotion stayed with Lee. When Spider-man launched his own title in March 1963, Lee pulled no punches. Amazing Spider-man #1 included two stories, but the cover story had Spider-man applying for membership with the Fantastic Four. The two most popular heroes were together and interacting. It was a huge debut and broke more records (allegedly. Actual records from this era are very spotty. Most sales numbers and “records” are based on memories and anecdotes told by those involved years later. But it was clear the issue sold a lot of copies). By early 1963 it was established that the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spider-man all existed together within the same shared universe. But what about Ant Man,Thor and Iron Man? Aside #5: The Hulk comic in Fantastic Four #5 pretty clearly establishes that the Hulk was a fictional character in the Fantastic Four world, but there are other clues that Lee was not thinking about his characters as existing and crossing over in the early days. Both Bruce Banner (the Hulk) and Mr Fantastic fight off global alien invasions in their early issues. In both cases the stories make clear that only Bruce/Reed is smart enough to save the world. No mention is made of the OTHER scientist who saved the world from the alien invasion a few months earlier. Bringing different superheroes from their own titles together was not an idea created by Atlas/Marvel and Lee. That was likely All Star Comics #3 (December 1940) when writer Gardner Fox brought together all the major DC heroes who were not staring in their own independent titles, including Green Lantern, the Flash and Doctor Fate, to create the Justice Society of America (JSA). Batman and Superman cameoed in All Star Comics #7, but generally they were considered too popular to dilute their appearances in ensemble titles. That changed in March 1960 when DC re-launched the idea of a superteam with the Justice League of America and included all of their most popular heroes as the leads – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It was immediately a top seller. The launch of JLA is likely what caused the owner of Atlas to ask Lee to create a ”superhero team comic”. Lee did not have a stable of heroes to bring together, so he had to create something entirely new – The Fantastic Four. But now that Lee DID have a collection of his own heroes AND he had the greenlight to create straightforward superhero comics, he decided to build himself his own JLA. In September 1963 Atlas published two new titles: The Avengers and the X-men. The X-men were a brand new team of all new heroes, but the Avengers were a close parallel to the Justice League. Lee took his existing collection of heroes (except the Fantastic Four and Spider-man) and created an excuse for a team-up. In the issue they individually battle Thor’s brother Loki before coming together to defeat him as a team. They decide that given they all have different powers, they should work together to be unstoppable. The entire formation of the team takes only four panels and is a little corny, but it does its job: While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KZ4y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F373413ff-ac21-4fd2-a9b8-0b621dc5ad66_325x469.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PSlu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3a6bd78e-adf3-4baf-85fc-00119fd1e009_278x427.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0Dq4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F542d887f-0a3f-428c-9425-8ccb86e30d66_296x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Scg-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69173ca0-9f5d-48e3-884a-7747b661f9ed_294x451.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JwSH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89ab07df-deb7-4c5d-b418-17f6c0d2a40b_600x566.png
American Journal of Pathology1 mentions across 1 issues

American Journal of Pathology is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as ""American Journal of Pathology , vol. 177, no. 4"". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
August 14, 2025
Last seen
August 14, 2025
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[57] E. Audouard et al., “High–Molecular-Weight Paired Helical Filaments from Alzheimer Brain Induces Seeding of Wild-Type Mouse Tau into an Argyrophilic 4R Tau Pathology in Vivo,” The American Journal of Pathology, vol. 186, no. 10, pp. 2709–2722, Oct. 2016, doi: 10.1016/j.ajpath.2016.06.008.
Inline links: 10.1016/j.ajpath.2016.06.008
[104] R. E. Bennett et al., “Enhanced Tau Aggregation in the Presence of Amyloid β,” The American Journal of Pathology, vol. 187, no. 7, pp. 1601–1612, Jul. 2017, doi: 10.1016/j.ajpath.2017.03.011.
Inline links: 10.1016/j.ajpath.2017.03.011
[105] T. Bolmont et al., “Induction of tau pathology by intracerebral infusion of amyloid-β-containing brain extract and by amyloid-β deposition in APP × tau transgenic mice,” The American Journal of Pathology, vol. 171, no. 6, pp. 2012–2020, Dec. 2007, doi: 10.2353/ajpath.2007.070403.
Inline links: 10.2353/ajpath.2007.070403
American Journal of Psychiatry1 mentions across 1 issues

American Journal of Psychiatry is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 11, 2023 and May 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.131.1.82". It most often appears alongside 15th Commandment, ACX, ADHD.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
May 11, 2023
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May 11, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Long COVID And Bisexuality
May 11, 2023 · Original source
For example, high estrogen makes people prone to more severe manifestations of all sorts of illnesses associated with an overactive immune system because estrogen causes histamine release. Testosterone, on the other hand, tends to act as a mast-cell stabilizer and suppresses the immune system. In line with this theory, homosexual men often have higher testosterone than straight men according to a few studies, which could explain their unusually low long covid rate (I remembered the association off the top of my head, but here's a small study I just found with a brief search showing "significantly higher" testosterone in homosexual men: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.131.1.82 )
Inline links: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.131.1.82
American Journal of Public Health1 mentions across 1 issues

American Journal of Public Health is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 18, 2026 and February 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "A letter by top trauma doctors to the American Journal of Public Health". It most often appears alongside 9-1-1, Adderall, American Homicide.

Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 18, 2026
Last seen
February 18, 2026
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Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care
February 18, 2026 · Original source
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: 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
American Scholar1 mentions across 1 issues

American Scholar is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 03, 2025 and November 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "American Scholar has an article about people who “write for AI”". It most often appears alongside Alexander Pope, Buddhism, GPT.

Reference entry
American Scholar
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1
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1
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November 03, 2025
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November 03, 2025
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Writing For The AIs
November 03, 2025 · Original source
American Scholar has an article about people who “write for AI”, including Tyler Cowen and Gwern. It’s good that this is getting more attention, because in theory it seems like one of the most influential things a writer could do. In practice, it leaves me feeling mostly muddled and occasionally creeped out.
Inline links: an article about people who “write for AI”, Tyler Cowen, Gwern
American study1 mentions across 1 issues

American study is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 24, 2023 and May 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The two American and one English study were explicit about very close class matching". It most often appears alongside Almas, AttractiveWorld, Belgium.

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American study
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1
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1
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May 24, 2023
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May 24, 2023
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Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
May 24, 2023 · Original source
But it’s either stronger or the same. This American study and this French study both investigate this question by comparing the educational distribution of real relationships compared to the expected distribution you would get from throwing random men from the population at random women. The American study is confusingly phrased and might either be saying it’s stronger or just getting stronger over time. But the French study is very clear: women are marrying down in education more often than you would expect by chance. They write:
Inline links: This American study, this French study
Class was more complicated7. The Swedish study said in the abstract that it found women tended to marry down in terms of class, but I had trouble finding that effect in the data, and it looked pretty small if it existed. The Norwegian study said they tended to marry up, but with the same caveat. The two American and one English study were explicit about very close class matching, sometimes implausibly close.
Inline links: 7
Amica Terra1 mentions across 1 issues

Amica Terra is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 12, 2025 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amica Terra ( blog ) writes". It most often appears alongside All Who Go Not Return, Amish, Amish.

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Amica Terra
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1
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1
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August 12, 2025
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August 12, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
August 12, 2025 · Original source
Amica Terra (blog) writes:
Inline links: blog
Amin-Chowdhury study1 mentions across 1 issues

Amin-Chowdhury study is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2021 and September 02, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Coronavirus doesn’t - the excellent Amin-Chowdhury study above finds nothing". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, AC&E, AcesoUnderGlass.

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Amin-Chowdhury study
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1
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1
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September 02, 2021
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September 02, 2021
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Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
September 02, 2021 · Original source
In this context, I find the 1/150 risk pretty scary and the 1/25,000 risk not scary at all, so, darn, I guess there’s not yet enough data to have a strong sense of how concerned I should be. 9. This is hard to compare to other postviral syndromes Going into this, I wondered if we might be able to ignore Long COVID. The argument would go like this: all viral diseases have a risk of postviral syndromes. Colds, flus, mono, lots of stuff that’s going around all the time. Lots of people get those postviral syndromes, and either recover or don’t, but either way we don’t make a big deal out of it. Since COVID’s considered “newsworthy” in a way flu isn’t, we obsess over its postviral syndrome even though it’s no worse than anything else’s. This wouldn’t make Long COVID any less bad, and maybe we would be wrong to not panic more about colds and the flu, but it would at least give us some context and make things feel less scary. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything supporting or opposing this picture. The only relevant study is a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, who (contra nominative determinism) don’t pool the studies by condition, which makes it hard to draw conclusions. I think all of their examples of postviral syndrome after flu are from severe hospitalized cases, so any comparison with COVID would be unfair. Although there do seem to be scattered reports of post-flu problems, they’ve never been formally studied or quantified. Mononucleosis is an infectious disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, affecting about 1/2000 people per year in developed countries. It has a famously nasty postviral syndrome, which this paper describes as “almost one-half of the group had substantial ongoing symptoms 2 months after onset and… ∼10% had disabling symptoms marked by fatigue lasting ≥ 6 months”. Flu is as common as COVID, but nobody really talks about it having a significant postviral syndrome so probably it’s not that bad. Mono has a worse postviral syndrome than COVID, but it’s rare enough that it doesn’t cause massive society-wide effects. COVID is right in the middle: more common than mono, and (probably) worse postviral syndrome than flu. I think it’s fair to say that we may not have encountered a condition with this exact combination of risk factors and can’t dismiss it as similar to conditions we currently ignore. One potential analogue might be the Spanish Flu of 1918. It was an equally widespread pandemic, and seemed to have some kind of postviral syndrome. From TIME: In what is now Tanzania, to the north, post-viral syndrome has been blamed for triggering the worst famine in a century—the so-called “famine of corms”—after debilitating lethargy prevented flu survivors from planting when the rains came at the end of 1918. “Agriculture suffered particular disruption because, not only did the epidemic coincide with the planting season in some parts of the country, but in others it came at the time for harvesting and sheep-shearing.” Kathleen Brant, who lived on a farm in Taranaki, New Zealand, told Rice, the historian, about the “legion” problems farmers in her district encountered following the pandemic, even though all patients survived: “The effects of loss of production were felt for a long time.” The 1918 flu seemed to have lots of psychiatric effects: “Norwegian demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund provided such evidence when he combed the records of psychiatric institutions in his country to show that the average number of admissions showed a seven-fold increase in each of the six years following the pandemic, compared to earlier, non-pandemic years.” Coronavirus doesn’t - the excellent Amin-Chowdhury study above finds nothing. Still, this is the scale of thing I’m worried about. The worst case scenario here is really really bad. If a few percent of COVID patients get long-term unremitting genuine CFS/ME, that has the potential to overwhelm government welfare budgets and long-term depress the economy. I think there’s a 90% chance the real situation isn’t that bad, but it’s scary that we can’t entirely rule it out. Aside from the somewhat different 1918 case, I don’t think we have any historical experience of dealing with postviral syndromes at this scale. The medium case scenario is something more like “a few percent of infected people get moderate fatigue, which doesn’t really prevent them from working, and goes away after a few years”. I don’t know whether the level of media attention paid to this would converge on “boring and nobody notices” or “giant disaster”, and I think it would be compatible with either. 10. Conclusions 1. Long COVID is many different issues without a common mechanism. 2. Some of these are straightforward and not surprising, eg lung scarring and post-ICU syndrome from severe infection, and would happen in any disease of this severity. Others seem to be more like the poorly-understood postviral syndromes associated with several other diseases. While some symptoms may be psychosomatic, most are probably organic. 3 The three major categories of symptoms are straightforward cardiovascular-pulmonary issues, straightforward smell and taste issues, and more mysterious neurological issues. 4 Although these get better with time in some people, in a significant number (maybe ~50% of people who had them at six weeks) they persist for as long as anyone has been able to measure them (a few months in the case of COVID, a year or two in the case of comparable syndromes). 5. Post-COVID fatigue is particularly concerning. This would be very bad if we analogized it to CFS/ME, and still pretty bad if we analogized it to other known postviral syndromes. There is no proof that this always gets better over the long term, although no study has looked at them for more than a few years. Facing postviral fatigue on this scale is a new problem. 6 . Children probably get Long COVID less than adults, probably at a rate of less than 5% of symptomatic cases. But we don’t know how much less, and we can’t rule out that some children get pretty severe symptoms. 7. Although vaccination decreases the risk of symptomatic COVID, it probably doesn’t decrease the risk of Long COVID per symptomatic COVID case by very much, though it might decrease it by a factor of 2-3. 8. Your chance of really bad debilitating lifelong Long COVID, conditional on getting COVID, is probably somewhere between a few tenths of a percent, and a few percent. Your chance per year of getting it by living a normal lifestyle depends on what you consider a normal lifestyle and on the future course of the pandemic. For me, under reasonable assumptions, it’s probably well below one percent. EDIT: Here are some other people who tried to do this same analysis. I learned about all of these after I wrote the first draft of this, so you can consider the basic thought process here to be independent of them - but I edited some things to account for what I learned from them before writing the final version. AcesoUnderGlass: Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
Inline links: a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al, scattered reports, this paper, postviral syndrome, Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem
amitheasshole.reddit.com1 mentions across 1 issues

amitheasshole.reddit.com is a recurring publication 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 "Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com". It most often appears alongside ACX, Adrian D’Souza, Aleph.

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Links For April
April 14, 2022 · Original source
5: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com - “Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…” H/T worldoptimization
Inline links: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com, worldoptimization
Amsterdam Cohort Study1 mentions across 1 issues

Amsterdam Cohort Study is a recurring publication 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 "d From The Amsterdam Cohort Study , which broadly backs up Shellenberger’s picture". 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.

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Amsterdam Cohort Study
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Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
I was able to find Lessons Learned From The Amsterdam Cohort Study, which broadly backs up Shellenberger’s picture of declining drug use in Amsterdam, at least among the thousand-odd users in their study:
Inline links: Lessons Learned From The Amsterdam Cohort Study
An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines1 mentions across 1 issues

An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 21, 2022 and March 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "2: An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines". It most often appears alongside ACX 2022 Prediction Contest Data, ACX Grants, Almaty.

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March 21, 2022 · Original source
2: An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines. “Overall it looked like there was weak evidence to suggest the community expected more AI progress than actually occurred, but this was not conclusive.“
Inline links: An Analysis Of Metaculus’ Resolved AI Predictions And Their Implications For AI Timelines
An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight1 mentions across 1 issues

An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 03, 2022 and October 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "A typical paper is An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight". It most often appears alongside AIAI, AlphaZero, Astralcodexten.

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CHAI, Assistance Games, And Fully-Updated Deference
October 03, 2022 · Original source
Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head against this for a really long time trying to understand it, and in the end, I claim it all comes down to this: Humans: At last! We’ve programmed an AI that tries to optimize our preferences, not its own. AI: I’m going to tile the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color. I’m not quite sure what humans’ favorite color is, but my best guess is blue, so I’ll probably tile the universe with blue paperclips. Humans: Wait, no! We must have had some kind of partial success, where you care about our color preferences, but still don’t understand what we want in general. We’re going to shut you down immediately! AI: Sounds like the kind of thing that would prevent me from tiling the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color, which I really want to do. I’m going to fight back. Humans: Wait! If you go ahead and tile the universe with paperclips now, you’ll never be truly sure that they’re our favorite color, which we know is important to you. But if you let us shut you off, we’ll go on to fill the universe with the True and the Good and the Beautiful, which will probably involve a lot of our favorite color. Sure, it won’t be paperclips, but at least it’ll definitely be the right color. And under plausible assumptions, color is more important to you than paperclipness. So you yourself want to be shut down in this situation, QED! AI: What’s your favorite color? Humans: Red. AI: Great! (*kills all humans, then goes on to tile the universe with red paperclips*) Fine, it’s a little more complicated than this. Let’s back up. II. There are two ways to succeed at AI alignment. First, make an AI that’s so good you never want to stop or redirect it. Second, make an AI that you can stop and redirect if it goes wrong. Sovereign AI is the first way. Does a sovereign “obey commands”? Maybe, but only in the sense that your commands give it some information about what you want, and it wants to do what you want. You could also just ask it nicely. If it’s superintelligent, it will already have a good idea what you want and how to help you get it. Would it submit to your attempts to destroy or reprogram it? The second-best answer is “only if the best version of you genuinely wanted to do this, in which case it would destroy/reprogram itself before you asked”. The best answer is “why would you want to destroy/reprogram one of these?” A sovereign AI would be pretty great, but nobody realistically expects to get something like this their first (or 1000th) try. Corrigible AI is what’s left (corrigible is an old word related to “correctable”). The programmers admit they’re not going to get everything perfect the first time around, so they make the AI humble. If it decides the best thing to do is to tile the universe with paperclips, it asks “Hey, seems to me I should tile the universe with paperclips, is that really what you humans want?” and when everyone starts screaming, it realizes it should change strategies. If humans try to destroy or reprogram it, then it will meekly submit to being destroyed or reprogrammed, accepting that it was probably flawed and the next attempt will be better. Then maybe after 10,000 tries you get it right and end up with a sovereign. How would you make an AI corrigible? You can model an AI as having a utility function, a degree to which it aims for some world-states over others. If you give it some specific utility function, the AI won’t be corrigible, since letting people change it would disrupt that function. That is, if you tell it “act in such a way as to cause as many paperclips to exist as possible”, and then you change your mind and decide you want staples, the AI won’t cooperate in letting you reprogram it: its current goal is maximizing paperclips, and allowing itself to be reprogrammed to maximize staples would cause there to be fewer paperclips than otherwise. So instead, you make the AI uncertain of its utility function. Imagine saying “I’ve written down my utility function in an envelope, and placed that envelope in my safe deposit box, no you can’t see it - please live your life so as to maximize the thing in that envelope.” The AI tries its best to guess what’s in the envelope and decides it’s probably making paperclips. It makes some paperclips and you tell it “No, that’s not what’s on the envelope at all”. This successfully stops the AI! You can even tell it “the envelope actually says you should make staples”, and it will do that. This is the “moral uncertainty” approach to AI alignment. III. All alignment groups have kabbalistically appropriate names. MIRI is Latin for "to be amazed". CFAR and CIFAR both sound like "see far". EEAI and AIAI are the sound you make as you get turned into paperclips. But my favorite is CHAI - Hebrew for "life". CHAI - the Center for Human-Compatible AI (at UC Berkeley) - focuses on the proposal above. Their specific technical implementation is the “assistance game”, related to the earlier idea of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). In normal reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some goals and tries to figure out what actions they imply. In inverse reinforcement learning, an AI looks at some actions, and tries to figure out what goals the actor must have had. So you can tell an AI “your utility function is to maximize my utility function, and you can use this IRL thing to deduce, from my actions, what my utility function must be.” Instead of telling an AI to maximize a hidden utility function in an envelope, you tell it to maximize the hidden utility function in your brain. This could be useful for near-term below-human-level AIs. Suppose a babysitting robot was pre-programmed to take kids to the park on Saturdays. But this week, the park is on fire. The human mother is barricading the door, desperately screaming at the robot not to take the kids to the park. The kids are struggling and trying to break free, saying they don't want to go to the park. The robot doesn't care; its programming says "take kids to the park on Saturdays" and that's what it's going to do. Nobody would ever design a babysitting robot this way in real life; you need something smarter. So use an assistance game. Program the robot "Maximize the human mother’s utility function, which you don’t know yet but can potentially find out". The robot consults the mother's actions: she is barricading the door, screaming "Don't take the kids to the park!" It updates its goal function: previously, it had thought that the human mother wanted it to take the kids to the park. But now, it suspects that the human mother does not want that. So it doesn't take the kids to the park. But CHAI understands the risk from superintelligence - their founder, Professor Stuart Russell, is a leading voice on the subject - and they hope assistance games and inverse reinforcement learning could work for this too. If you point a superintelligence at “do the thing humans want”, maybe it could figure that out and take things from there? IV. MIRI is skeptical of CHAI’s assistance games for two reasons. First, we don't know how to do them at all. Second, even if we could do it at all, we wouldn't know how to do them correctly. Start with the first. Inverse reinforcement learning has been used in real life. A typical paper is An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, where some people create a model of helicopter flight with a few free parameters, have a skilled human pilot fly the helicopter, and then have an AI use IRL to determine the value of the parameters and fly the helicopter itself. This is cool, but it’s not especially related to the modern paradigm of AI. Modern AIs are trained by gradient descent. They start by flailing around randomly. Sometimes in this flailing, they might get closer to some prespecified target, like "win games of Go" or "predict how a string of text will continue". These actions get "rewarded", meaning that the AI should permanently shift its "thought processes"/"strategies" more towards ones that produced those good outcomes. Eventually, the AI's thought processes/strategies are very good at optimizing for that outcome. This is more or less the only way we know how to train modern AIs. Depending on your loss function (ie what you reward), you can use it to create Go engines, language models, or art generators. Where do you slot “do inverse reinforcement learning” or "give the AI moral uncertainty" into this process? There’s not really a natural place. This isn’t because “moral uncertainty” is too complicated a concept to translate into AI terms. It’s because we don’t know how to translate any concept into AI terms. Eliezer writes: We can imagine that, if we knew how to say "paperclips", and we knew how to say "staples", and we knew how to tell AIs how to do things, that we could tell an AI, "maximize staples if snow is purple, else paperclips", and the AI would someday go out and observe that snow is white and thereafter be a paperclip maximizer. We do not know how to tell the AI this. Like, at all. But suppose we solved the problem where we don’t know how to do IRL for modern AIs at all. Now we come to the second problem: we don’t know how to do it correctly. The basic idea behind assistance games is “the AI’s utility function should be to maximize the (hidden) human utility function”. But humans don’t . . . really have utility functions? Utility functions are a useful fiction for certain kinds of economic models. What would best increase the neural correlates of reward in my brain? Probably lots of heroin, or just passing electric current through my reward center directly. What is my “revealed preference”? Today I wrote and rewrote this article a few times, does that mean my revealed preference is to write and delete articles a bunch while frowning and occasionally cursing the keyboard? Sometimes my goals are different than other times, sometimes my best self wants something different from my actual self, sometimes I’m wrong about what I want, sometimes I don’t know what I want, sometimes I want X but not the consequences of X and I’m not logically consistent enough to realize that’s a contradiction, sometimes I want [euphemism for X] but am strongly against [dysphemism for X]. Anyone programming an inverse reinforcement learner has to make certain choices about how to deal with these problems. Some ways of dealing with them will be faithful to what I would consider “a good outcome” or “my best self”. Other ways would be really bad - on my worst day, I’ve occasionally just wished the world didn’t exist, and it’s a good thing I didn’t have a superintelligence dedicated to interpreting and carrying out my innermost wishes on a sub-millisecond timescale. (Before we go on, an aside: is all of this ignoring that there’s more than one human? Yes, definitely! If you want to align an AI with The Good in general - eg not have it commit murder even if its human owner orders it to murder - that will take even more work. But the one person case is simpler and will demonstrate everything that needs demonstrating.) We were originally trying to avoid the situation where someone had to hard-code my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. We came up with a clever solution: use inverse reinforcement learning to make the AI infer my preferences. But now we see we’ve kicked the can up a meta-level: someone has to hard-code the meta-rules for determining my preferences into an AI and get them right the first time. Figure 1: Humans produce certain observable behaviors (here represented by red dots, A), like saying “I would like a pie”, or running away from a lion. A human might connect all those behaviors one way (B) into “what I really want”. An AI might connect those behaviors a totally different way (C). V. CHAI says: okay, but this isn’t so bad. Assistance games don’t produce a perfect copy of the human utility function on the first try - it’s not a Sovereign. But it will probably, most of the time, be corrigible. Why? Suppose you have some hackish implementation of AG. It’s not the Platonic implementation - that would be the Sovereign - but it’s at least the equivalent of box C on the image above. It takes human actions as input, makes some guesses about what humans want, and tries its best to reconstruct the human utility function, ending up with some approximation. It’s important to distinguish between a few things here: The true human utility function
Inline links: MIRI, CHAI, leading voice on the subject, An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight, sometimes I don’t know what I want, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u-2e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4cc3384d-bc73-4b6c-9fd8-634d986e1a72_960x302.png
An Introduction To Circuits1 mentions across 1 issues

An Introduction To Circuits is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 27, 2023 and November 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "My favorites are: An Introduction To Circuits". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Anthropic interpretability team, biscornu.

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God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity
November 27, 2023 · Original source
An Introduction To Circuits
Inline links: An Introduction To Circuits
analogfutures.substack.com1 mentions across 1 issues

analogfutures.substack.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 11, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "She writes at analogfutures.substack.com". It most often appears alongside AmandaFromBethlehem, Amedeo Rothson, Arielle Friedman.

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Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
The Pale King, reviewed by Arielle Friedman. Arielle likes fiction, light technopessimism, and the occasional political screed. She writes at analogfutures.substack.com and runs a co-writing group every weekday morning that you can join here.
Inline links: The Pale King, analogfutures.substack.com, here
Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper1 mentions across 1 issues

Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper is a recurring publication 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 "Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper". It most often appears alongside 1950s influenza strain, 1977 influenza pandemic, 1992 scientific investigation.

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Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper
Inline links: Anderson et al. 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper
Annals of Neurology1 mentions across 1 issues

Annals of Neurology is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Annals of Neurology, vol. 83, no. 1, 2018". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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Annals of Neurology
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[9] B. P. Lucey et al., “Effect of sleep on overnight cerebrospinal fluid amyloid β kinetics,” Annals of Neurology, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 197–204, 2018, doi: 10.1002/ana.25117.
Inline links: 10.1002/ana.25117
Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress1 mentions across 1 issues

Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "HUD details in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress that the full-year number is generally 2.5 times greater". It most often appears alongside A History Of Mankind, ACS, Alexander Turok.

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Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
While the DPH estimate of 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in FY1819 may appear to conflict with San Francisco’s Point-in-Time Count (8,035 people counted in January 2019)1, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) details in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress that the full-year number is generally 2.5 times greater than the single-night count.
Anti-Reactionary FAQ1 mentions across 1 issues

Anti-Reactionary FAQ is a recurring publication 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 "See for example this blog post responding to my Anti-Reactionary FAQ". It most often appears alongside #BuildTheWall, 2016 election, Dark Data Journalism.

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Anti-Reactionary FAQ
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Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
February 24, 2026 · Original source
But trying to call out one of these failure modes looks like falling into the other. I ran into this on my series of posts on crime last week. I wrote these because I regularly saw people make the arguments I tried to debunk. That crime is way up, but that police departments are cooking the books by refusing to take reports. Or that murder in particular is up, but this is disguised by improving trauma care. See for example this blog post responding to my Anti-Reactionary FAQ, which uses the improving-trauma-care thesis to argue that
Inline links: series of posts, last week, this blog post responding to my Anti-Reactionary FAQ
anti-woke Substack1 mentions across 1 issues

anti-woke Substack is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 30, 2024 and October 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack". It most often appears alongside 1984, Abandon Harris, Acemoglu.

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anti-woke Substack
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ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
This is how I think about politics too. Some people are just there to discuss industrial policy. Other people - well, the Right-Thinking Liberal Establishment is a lot like a fundamentalist religion. You grow up believing it preconsciously and absolutely, you see some cracks in it, you freak out, you go through a multi-year period of will-I-or-won't-I, you eventually find some stable point just within the periphery or just outside of it, and either everyone you love abandons you, or they don't. You'll always have a little splinter of it stuck in you and you'll never be entirely happy. Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess.
Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TrkB neurotrophin receptors1 mentions across 1 issues

Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TrkB neurotrophin receptors is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 22, 2021 and February 22, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as ""A recent study, Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TrkB neurotrophin receptors (h/t Derek Lowe ) proposes a dramatic solution."". It most often appears alongside BDNF, California, Derek Lowe.

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A Look Down Track B
February 22, 2021 · Original source
A recent study, Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TrkB neurotrophin receptors (h/t Derek Lowe) proposes a dramatic solution. The authors, mostly based out of a well-known lab in Helsinki, argue that antidepressants bind to TrkB directly, modifying it so that it responds more vigorously to BDNF. They explored the TrkB receptor in more detail than anyone had before, discovering some new functions (it binds to cholesterol) and a new binding site. They found that three antidepressants - fluoxetine ("Prozac"), imipramine, and ketamine, all bind to the new site (the textbooks say all three of these work in different ways). Three control non-antidepressant chemicals - diphenhydramine ("Benadryl"), chlorpromazine ("Thorazine"), and isoproterenol don't. Once bound, the antidepressants seem to help TrkB receptors get to the parts of the cell where they can be useful. Then they show antidepressants don't work on mice with a mutation that breaks TrkB's ability to bind antidepressants (but not its ability to bind BDNF). In other words, the antidepressant effect was coming from direct antidepressant-TrkB binding, not serotonin -> BDNF -> TrkB binding! The serotonin doesn’t matter at all!
Inline links: Antidepressant drugs act by directly binding to TrkB neurotrophin receptors, Derek Lowe
Antiphilosophy1 mentions across 1 issues

Antiphilosophy is a recurring publication 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 "his Introduction to Antiphilosophy Boris Groys writes". It most often appears alongside 10240, 4chan, @slatestarcodex.

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Antiphilosophy
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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
In his Introduction to Antiphilosophy Boris Groys writes that ‘when Nietzsche praises victorious life, preaches amor fati and identifies himself with the forces of nature that are bound to destroy him, he simply seeks to divert himself and others from the fact that he himself is sick, poor, weak and unhappy.’ Bertrand Russell dismisses Nietzsche’s philosophy as the ‘power-phantasies of an invalid.’ (As a man who really knew his way around the pussy, Russell is particularly scathing about Nietzsche’s sublimated terror of women. ‘Forget not thy whip—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it.’) Nietzsche’s sickness becomes a kind of gotcha, the final defence against his thought. Never mind the freezing storm uprooting everything in its path—it’s just a symptom. But I don’t think Zarathustra is simply a diversion or a distraction or a flimsy mask worn by the shambling creature of Turin. There have been a lot of feeble, lovelorn men pottering about the world in their mild overcoats. Most of them did not write like he did. You can’t ignore the weakness of the man or the strength of his writing. You have to stay with the contradiction. You have to grab them both.
AP1 mentions across 1 issues

AP is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 20, 2023 and February 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I enjoyed this AP article". It most often appears alongside ACX Discord, ACX subreddit, Alexandros.

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AP
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Open Thread 264
February 20, 2023 · Original source
...ification for not doing. 4: I don’t have a post planned about the latest AI developments because I don’t have much to say beyond what other people have already said, but I enjoyed this AP article and Ethan Mollick’s analysis . I might have been in the top few percent of people who expected AI to get craziest fastest, but even I didn’t have “Bing tries to seduce a...
AP News1 mentions across 1 issues

AP News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://apnews.com/article/95986c4ba779f1d35ac4ca2afdd745c3". It most often appears alongside Associated Press, Bitcoin, Bloomberg.

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AP News
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Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
27. https://apnews.com/article/95986c4ba779f1d35ac4ca2afdd745c3
Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism1 mentions across 1 issues

Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 16, 2021 and April 16, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism". It most often appears alongside "The Rent Is Too Damn High!", 16th amendment, 1886.

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Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
By making possible the division & specialization of labor (you dig bait, I'll catch fish) Capital is a force multiplier that supercharges the productive power of labor. It doesn't supply labor with raw materials (nature does), nor does it provide for the maintenance of workers (who eat bread by the sweat of their own brow). George says this is why capital isn't a limit on industry. ...okay, George grants that capital may limit the form of industry. You can't plow without a plow or milk without a cow. George also grants that the lack of specialized tools can greatly limit productivity because you don't get the benefit of the force-multiplying effect of capital. Um... aren't you contradicting yourself here, Mr. George? You spent all this time hammering home your doctrine of wages to prove that capital doesn't limit industry, but you just said its absence can limit both the form and the productivity of labor! Time to unpack what we mean by "limit" and be super clear about it from now on: But to say that capital may limit the form of industry or the productiveness of industry is a very different thing from saying that capital limits industry. Okay, what do you mean? For the dictum of the current political economy that "capital limits industry," means not that capital limits the form of labor or the productiveness of labor, but that it limits the exertion of labor. Okay, I think I see what he's saying. The existing school of thought says that because capital provides labor with both materials and maintenance, therefore if capital dries up, labor productivity must go down because workers will have nothing to work on, and nothing to eat or wear. Labor is thus "limited" by capital, for without it is literally and metaphorically starved for capital. But George says no – the only way capital actually "limits" productivity in real life is in the degrees by which it force-multiplies labor's productivity and unlocks certain forms of labor in the tech tree. The kind of "limit" George objects to is the idea that you need capital just to get any work done at all, or that without capital to sustain it, labor will shrivel up. Instead, capital is rocket fuel that labor supplies to itself by investing a portion of its wages. And yet, with all the awesome slots we've unlocked on the tech tree, and barrels and barrels of rocket fuel to fire up eager laborers, we still find our economy sinking into mysterious depressions. Something is gumming up the works, but it's not a simple scarcity of capital: the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution Or as G.K. Chesterton said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This might seem like a pedantic distinction – misallocated capital could be said to be "scarce" capital – but they're not the same thing at all. As Francis Bacon said in 1625: Riches were like [Manure]: When it lay, upon an heape, it gave but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread upon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit. Because the prevailing theories of George's time are based on incorrect ideas about the relation between wages and capital, "all remedies, whether proposed by professors of political economy or workingmen, which look to the alleviation of poverty either by the increase of capital or the restriction of the number of laborers or the efficiency of their work, must be condemned." In short, more investment, more protectionism, and more efficiency programs can't, won't, and haven't fixed poverty and industrial depressions because they all proceed from false premises. Having finally beaten the nexus of wages, capital, and labor into a bloody pulp, George turns his eyes towards another leading theory for why everything is terrible: the specter of overpopulation. II. Population and Subsistence The entire second book might as well be titled "Why Malthus is Dumb and Wrong and Bad." It's dedicated to dunking on Malthusianism, a philosophy that ascribes economic crises to the exponential growth of the human population, which must necessarily end in catastrophe. according to Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. George attacks Malthusian ideas not just because they're wrong, but because they make it easier to accept the prevailing theory of wages (as more capital is allocated, laborers will keep popping up like weeds to gobble it up, so wages must eternally stagnate). George draws a straight line between these faulty ideas and holocausts and genocides – specifically citing how colonial oppression in China, India, and Ireland were explicitly justified on Malthusian grounds. One million people died in the English-engineered Irish potato famine alone, and when you add in those who fled the entire population declined by 25% percent. And this isn't a tenuous link either – George directly connects the completely avoidable famine to his favorite bugbear, private landownership and extortionate rent. Given that Malthusianism is now widely discredited I'm just going to skip this chapter, but if you want to hear George in all his righteous fury, check out Appendix A (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism III. The Laws of Distribution When society produces wealth, who gets different shares of it, and why? Let's start by beating some words to death. By George, we're told that there are three factors in production: Land, Labor, and Capital. For each of these terms there must be a "law of distribution" that explains how each gets compensated for its part in production. The reward you get from production by owning Land is called Rent. The reward you get from production by supplying Labor is called Wages. The reward you get from production by supplying Capital is called ... um, what? We're looking for a term that clearly expresses the return to capital alone and nothing else. The closest thing we have is Interest, and that's probably good enough. George gives the common definition of interest as "the return for the use of capital, exclusive of any labor in its use or management, and exclusive of any risk, except such as may be involved in the security." This is pretty close to what we want – something that expresses the sole return to capital without mixing in anything else. But ... what about Profits? Profits is "almost synonymous" with revenue, assuming you have some left after you deduct expenses. It means a gain in money or wealth, but the trouble is this gain is a mix of rent, wages, and "compensations for the risk peculiar to the various uses of capital." What we want is a term that means the return to capital alone, totally separate from the return to laborers and landowners. To talk about the distribution of wealth into rent, wages, and profits is like talking of the division of mankind into men, women, and human beings. George spends a few pages talking about how everyone from Adam Smith on down got confused about this (spoiler: it's tied up with thinking wages are drawn from capital), before presenting his model for how it all works. If you want to see him knock that stuff down, see Appendix B (there's a link that returns here at the end): Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Here's George's model for how it all works: Land is"all natural opportunities or forces" and its return is rent Labor is "all human exertion" and its return is wages Capital is"all wealth used to produce more wealth" and its return is interest George says the false assumption at the root of the old theories is in thinking of "capital as the prime factor in production, land as its instrument, and labor as its agent or tool." George makes the following assertions: "Labor can be exerted only upon land"
Inline links: Francis Bacon said in 1625, Malthusianism, English-engineered Irish potato famine, Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism, Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution
Towards a Truly Free Market by John Medaille Appendices These are optional elaborations on sections I glossed over because the Book Review Is Too Damn Long. Appendix A: George Dunks on Malthusianism Malthusianism in George's time was wildly popular, and often invoked by the ascendant proponents of Social Darwinism who took Charles Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" and recast it as a moral justification for the Just World Hypothesis. Essentially, those that are doing well do so because they are more "fit", and those that are less "fit" tend to perish, and furthermore, this brutal process will actively "improve" the human race. This philosophy was the energizing intellectual force behind both the Eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. George clearly hates everything about this philosophy but attempts to steel-man it anyways: The Malthusian doctrine, as at present held, may be thus stated in its strongest and least objectionable form: That population, constantly tending to increase, must, when unrestrained, ultimately press against the limits of subsistence, not as against a fixed, but as against an elastic barrier, which makes the procurement of subsistence progressively more and more difficult. And thus, wherever reproduction has had time to assert its power, and is unchecked by prudence, there must exist that degree of want which will keep population within the bounds of subsistence. The weak form of Malthusianism is "people are as dumb as deer and will breed endlessly until there's not enough food and everyone starves to death." The strong form of Malthusianism is, "of course people aren't mindless deer charging into a brick wall, but there is a firm upper limit that can only give so much before nature will cull the herd without mercy." And by George, we can't just dismiss the strong form out of hand: "what seems clearer than that there are too many people?" However, George is suspicious of how easily the Malthusian theory justifies contemporary economic assumptions and assuages the moral sensibilities of the establishment: The great cause of the triumph of this theory is that, instead of menacing any vested right or antagonizing any powerful interest, it is eminently soothing and reassuring to the classes who, wielding the power of wealth, largely dominate thought... It furnishes a philosophy by which Dives as he feasts can shut out the image of Lazarus who faints with hunger at his door; He points out how it lets self-styled "Good Christian Men" reframe their own greed and indifference as just plain good sense: In this view, he who in the midst of want has accumulated wealth, has but fenced in a little oasis from the driving sand which else would have overwhelmed it. He has gained for himself, but has hurt nobody. And even if the rich were literally to obey the injunctions of Christ and divide their wealth among the poor, nothing would be gained. (Aside: I've heard this exact defense offered by many of my fellow Christians) Okay, George makes a strong moral case. But a moral case isn't enough, and I think this is where many activists of all political stripes go wrong. If you attack the premises of an idea as "dangerous" because it could lead to bad consequences, you're still stuck with a real problem if the premises that animate that "dangerous" idea turn out to be actually true. If they're true we're stuck with them, and unless your competing policy admits to the same grim facts, your opponent will just dismiss your entire argument and more importantly, so will their audience. But if the premises aren't true, then the dangerous and scary policy prescription – say, "let the Irish starve to death" – is both evil and unnecessary. History has shown that many officials will shrug their shoulders at "evil" policies so long as they believe them to be "necessary." Cool, we've established that Malthusianism is bad. Now let's establish that it's wrong. A Brief Interlude from the Future From where we're sitting in 2021, we don't even need George to refute Malthusianism, history has done that for us. Instead of increasing at an exponential rate, fertility rates are crashing all over the world. Not in one country, but in virtually every country, and in many the birth rate is already below replacement. Fertility rates have been crashing so hard that some are calling it a "Global Fertility Crisis." The absolute size of the human population is still growing, but this is just due to inertia; the human population will peak somewhere between 9 and 10 billion in the 2060's, and then decline from there. The two main things Malthus got wrong were failing to anticipate 1) advances in food production technology like the Green Revolution, and 2) that humans can control their own fertility rates. George's strongest arguments against Malthusianism strike directly at the provably false claims of its 19th century proponents and provide some extremely salient applications of George's philosophy. George takes up the cause of India, China, and Ireland, which were often cited as examples of "overpopulated" countries where many have starved and been forced to emigrate. Per the Malthusians, this is the fault of too many of these poor, ignorant, and deficient people crammed together in too small a space. By George, it can't be the fault of population density – in his time, Germany, Belgium, England, Netherlands and Italy all have higher population densities than India, China, and Ireland, and could therefore support higher populations with the right conditions. And there's certainly nothing wrong with the people themselves: This arises from no innate deficiency in the people, for the Hindoo, as comparative philology has shown, is of our own blood, and China possessed a high degree of civilization and the rudiments of the most important modern inventions when our ancestors were wandering savages. Instead: It arises from the form which the social organization has in both countries taken, which has shackled productive power and robbed industry of its reward. India is poor not because it has too many Indians, but because it is oppressed by too many Englishmen: The millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worse of all is the steady grinding weight of English domination... India now is like a great estate owned by an absentee and alien landlord George gives us lots of details about the plight of India, China, and Ireland, but for the sake of brevity I'm just going to present the heartbreaking case of the Great Irish Potato Famine and let it stand in for all three. To sum up, from 1845 to 1852 there was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland. About one million people died, and another million fled the country. The entire population dropped by about 25%: The extreme poverty of the peasantry and the low rate of wages there prevailing, the Irish famine, and Irish emigration, are constantly referred to as a demonstration of the Malthusian theory worked out under the eyes of the civilized world. Many prominent intellectuals of the day looked at the crisis, shook their heads, and said – what do you expect when those ignorant Irish Catholics breed like rabbits and strain Ireland's carrying capacity to its limit? It's just natural selection at work! George will have none of it: The laborer was just as effectually stripped by as merciless a horde of landlords, among whom the soil had been divided as their absolute possession, regardless of any rights of those who lived upon it. Okay, they had to pay some rent, so what? Didn't they bring their suffering on themselves? Why, the intellectuals ask, didn't the Irish work harder, why did they not improve their local economy and agricultural base? And most importantly, why did they depend on a single monoculture crop (the potato) if a single blight could knock out their entire food supply? By George, because The Rent Was Too Damn High! tenants... even if the rack-rents which they were forced to pay had permitted them, did not dare to make improvements which would have been but the signal for an increase of rent. Labor was thus applied in the most inefficient and wasteful manner. (emphases mine) The Irish were really trapped. Working harder to improve the farmland to increase its yield could actually leave them worse off. Any increase in their land's productivity goes to the landlord in the form of increased rents. But even this structural impoverishment of the land wasn't sufficient to cause the famine. Ireland still produced enough food to feed its people: For when her population was at its highest, Ireland was a food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving and past trenches in which the dead were piled. People were literally starving and dying, but because of the structure of land ownership they couldn't even pay their rent, let alone purchase the food grown from their own lands and raised with their own hands. Since the local population couldn't afford it, the (English) landlords sold it abroad to the highest bidder. It went not as an exchange, but as a tribute – to pay the rent of absentee landlords; a levy wrung from producers by those who in no wise contributed to production... they lived on the potato, because rack-rents stripped everything else from them. The Rent Is Too Damn High, and it's not because the designated underclass of the day have too many babies or are too uneducated, too ignorant, too religious, too lazy, or too foreign. George gets really mad about this, and calls out John Stuart Mill and Henry Thomas Buckle by name for lending credence to the Malthusian explanation of Ireland's suffering. I know of nothing better calculated to make the blood boil than the cold accounts of the grasping, grinding tyranny to which the Irish people have been subjected, and to which, and not to any inability of the land to support its population, Irish pauperism and Irish famine are to be attributed; and were it not for the enervating effect which the history of the world proves to be everywhere the result of abject poverty, it would be difficult to resist something like a feeling of contempt for a race who, stung by such wrongs, have only occasionally murdered a landlord! Appendix B: George dunks on the Conventional Laws of Distribution Conventional Law 1: Wages aredetermined by the ratio between capital devoted to the payment & subsistence of labor, divided up by the number of laborers. Conventional Law 2: Rent is determined by something called the "margin of production," AKA the "margin of cultivation." What's that? Let L be some land. Let W be the worst land available. Let A = the produce L makes. Let B = the produce you get applying the same amount of labor and capital to W. The Rent of L is given by A - B. The margin of production/cultivation is the difference between how much you can produce from a particular piece of land compared to the least productive alternative. This is the only conventional law of distribution that George accepts as correct. Conventional Law 3: Interest is the ratio between capital demanded by borrowers and supplied by lenders, falling as wages rise and vice versa. To quote Mill, interest is determined "by the cost of labor to the capitalist." The problem with these three laws is if Land, Labor, and Capital are the only three factors of production, and each gets its own return, than the three returns should balance. In other words: Return to Production = Rent + Wages + Interest If your three returns sum to more or less than 100% of the return to production, something's off, and George says the old laws don't add up – the only one of these he accepts is the law of rent. What's wrong with the other two? First we've got to stop using "profits" to mean a return to capital. If we look into a profit stream, we see more than one kind of thing. Conventional economists list the following: Wages of "superintendence"
Inline links: Towards a Truly Free Market, Social Darwinism, Just World Hypothesis, Eugenics, so long as they believe them to be "necessary.", fertility rates are crashing all over the world, Global Fertility Crisis, human population will peak, Green Revolution, Great Irish Potato Famine
APPS benchmark1 mentions across 1 issues

APPS benchmark is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 20, 2022 and December 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al."". It most often appears alongside 7-11, AGI, AMC.

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APPS benchmark
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December 20, 2022
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Prediction Market FAQ
December 20, 2022 · Original source
Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al. Top-1 accuracy is distinguished, as in the paper, from top-k accuracy in which k outputs from the model are generated, and the best output is selected.
Inline links: Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al
apsychiatryblogger.substack.com1 mentions across 1 issues

apsychiatryblogger.substack.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "writes a apsychiatryblogger.substack.com"; "He is a psychiatrist who writes a apsychiatryblogger.substack.com". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
From Paralysis To Fatigue, by APsychiatryBlogger. He is a psychiatrist who writes a apsychiatryblogger.substack.com.
Inline links: From Paralysis To Fatigue, apsychiatryblogger.substack.com
Architectonics1 mentions across 1 issues

Architectonics is a recurring publication 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 "Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity, Apple.

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Architectonics
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Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal. Then in the late 2010s, as soon as his ideas started getting close to power he dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos. So, for example, Yarvin urges Trump to become more of a dictator, and Young accuses him of ignoring that fact that dictators can go crazy and do terrible things. The (anonymized) Twitter user above counters that Classic Moldbug includes a cleverly-designed procedure for an unremovable board of directors with well-aligned incentives who can remove a dictator if he screws up. That’s all true! Classic Moldbug does have that part! It’s great, at least as speculative fiction! But Trump hasn’t implemented it and never will, so who cares? The whole point of post-2015 Yarvin is to say “I, a cool person who has thought a lot about autocracy, conjecture that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things. Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug (Part 2 here), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. sovereign corporations under patchwork. But I think the problem is much broader. I’ll divide my argument into four parts: Classic Moldbug thought the default outcome of a modern populist dictatorship was disaster. To avert this, he proposed three mechanisms.
Inline links: Architectonics, Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug, Part 2 here
A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth
Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed
Architectonics blog1 mentions across 1 issues

Architectonics blog is a recurring publication 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 "Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity, Apple.

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Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
...e that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things. Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug ( Part 2 here ), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. so...
...cy, conjecture that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things. Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug ( Part 2 here ), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. sovereign corporations under patchwork. But I think...
Architecture Canada1 mentions across 1 issues

Architecture Canada is a recurring publication 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 "a piece for the magazine Architecture Canada". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

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Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
I can remember writing a piece for the magazine Architecture Canada in which I mentioned [heretical architect Eero] Saarinen in terms that indicated the man was worthy of study. I ran into one of New York’s best-known architectural writers at a party, and he took me aside for some fatherly advice.
Archives of Neurology1 mentions across 1 issues

Archives of Neurology is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2025 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Case Report of an Apolipoprotein E ε2/ε2 Genotype,” Archives of Neurology". It most often appears alongside A. Bejanin, A. de Calignon, A. Elobeid.

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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
August 14, 2025 · Original source
[71] D. J. Berlau, K. Kahle-Wrobleski, E. Head, M. Goodus, R. Kim, and C. Kawas, “Dissociation of Neuropathologic Findings and Cognition: Case Report of an Apolipoprotein E ε2/ε2 Genotype,” Archives of Neurology, vol. 64, no. 8, pp. 1193–1196, Aug. 2007, doi: 10.1001/archneur.64.8.1193.
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Are Republicans And Conservatives More Likely To Believe Conspiracy Theories?1 mentions across 1 issues

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Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
18: In my post Will Nonbelievers Believe Anything?, I argued that the apparent tendency for conservatives to believe conspiracy theories more was an artifact of people only ever asking about conservative conspiracy theories. An alert reader sent me the paper Are Republicans And Conservatives More Likely To Believe Conspiracy Theories?, which makes the same case in more depth and proves it with various surveys of tens of thousands of people. “In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers”
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Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 15, 2025 and January 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Aporia ’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed?". It most often appears alongside Aporia, black Americans, Charles Murray.

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How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates
January 15, 2025 · Original source
People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).
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Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 18, 2024 · Original source
Are We All Doxastic Voluntarists? - Can we voluntarily choose what we believe to be true? And if not, how can we judge people who believe the wrong thing (eg racism)?
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Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump?1 mentions across 1 issues

Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump? is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 19, 2021 and April 19, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump?". It most often appears alongside #Resistance, 1/2019 government shut down, 538.

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Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
Further, white supremacists generally stopped being interested in Donald Trump, and have mostly abandoned him. In 2018, Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump? - by now, the answer is clearly yes. From VOA News: Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote. Richard Spencer, who invented the term "alt-right" and whose Trump salute helped spark the panic, disavowed Trump in early 2020 and announced he was supporting Biden in the election. White supremacists are irrelevant and you should not care what they think, but if for some reason you insist on caring what they think, they are no longer particularly pro-Trump.
Inline links: Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump?, Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote, announced he was supporting Biden in the election
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How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
January 03, 2023 · Original source
A pretrained LM can capably imitate a wide range of personas (e.g. Argle et al 2022), some of which would behave very differently from the "Assistant" character conjured by the prompts used here.
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Argument poll is a recurring publication 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 "Also from an Argument poll". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

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Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
As Fair A Name1 mentions across 1 issues

As Fair A Name is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 11, 2023 and January 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name ) was finally able to produce a specific example". It most often appears alongside 2016, 2016 election, Adobe Illustrator.

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As Fair A Name
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January 11, 2023
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January 11, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
As Our Days1 mentions across 1 issues

As Our Days is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

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As Our Days
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Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days.
Inline links: Joan of Arc, Palace Fiction, As Our Days
Ascended Economy1 mentions across 1 issues

Ascended Economy is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 23, 2024 and January 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "(for a less extreme version of this, see my post on the Ascended Economy )". It most often appears alongside Asimov, Blindsight, Business Insider.

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Ascended Economy
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Should The Future Be Human?
January 23, 2024 · Original source
(for a less extreme version of this, see my post on the Ascended Economy)
Inline links: Ascended Economy
Asimov1 mentions across 1 issues

Asimov is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 29, 2024 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "8: IAA CEO Robert Yaman also has an article about his work in Asimov". It most often appears alongside @ElytraMithra, Aaron, ACX.

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Asimov
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
8: Congratulations to ACX grantee Innovate Animal Ag, who have successfully gotten the first American company to adopt in ovo sexing (which removes unwanted chickens at the egg stage, instead of killing them after they hatch). NYT article here. IAA CEO Robert Yaman also has an article about his work in Asimov. IAA is looking for new employees, including a “head of marketing” and “business generalist” - if you’re interested in animal welfare and want to work with them, check out their careers page.
Inline links: NYT, an article about his work in, their careers page
Asimov Press1 mentions across 1 issues

Asimov Press is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 04, 2024 and March 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the article about phages was from Asimov Press". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, Berkeley, California.

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Asimov Press
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Open Thread 318
March 04, 2024 · Original source
1: Comments of the week: UncleWeyland on what it would mean for Alzheimers to be/not be a prion disease. And Richard Fuisz says the RIMS1 gene (mentioned in the links post; postulated to cause blindness + increased IQ) doesn’t actually make you blind; nobody has checked the IQ claim yet, but here’s how Richard thinks about it. And a correction: the article about phages was from Asimov Press, not Works In Progress.
Inline links: UncleWeyland on what it would mean for Alzheimers to be/not be a prion disease, doesn’t actually make you blind, here’s how Richard thinks about it, Asimov Press, Works In Progress
AskReddit1 mentions across 1 issues

AskReddit is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 19, 2022 and September 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "training an AI to summarize AskReddit questions". It most often appears alongside Conjecture, Dittomancy, facebook.

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AskReddit
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Janus' GPT Wrangling
September 19, 2022 · Original source
This paper from OpenAI calls the problem over-optimization and gives some even funnier examples - in this case from training an AI to summarize AskReddit questions (see page 45):
Inline links: This paper
Assessing Land Values - Principles and Methods1 mentions across 1 issues

Assessing Land Values - Principles and Methods is a recurring publication 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 ""his 5-week course Assessing Land Values - Principles and Methods from the Henry George School of Social Science"". It most often appears alongside /r/georgism, ACX community, Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size.

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Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?
December 11, 2021 · Original source
Ted Gwartney also gives online seminars. To prep for this article, I attended his 5-week course Assessing Land Values - Principles and Methods from the Henry George School of Social Science, which I'll reference throughout this piece.
Inline links: Assessing Land Values - Principles and Methods, Henry George School of Social Science
Associated Press1 mentions across 1 issues

Associated Press is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://apnews.com/article/95986c4ba779f1d35ac4ca2afdd745c3". It most often appears alongside AP News, Bitcoin, Bloomberg.

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Associated Press
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Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
27. https://apnews.com/article/95986c4ba779f1d35ac4ca2afdd745c3
Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia1 mentions across 1 issues

Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 30, 2025 and June 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The study that Skolnick cites to establish this is Vasileva, Yang, and Baker, Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia". It most often appears alongside Eat Shit And Prosper, Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, R. gnavus.

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Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes
June 30, 2025 · Original source
The study that Skolnick cites to establish this is Vasileva, Yang, and Baker, Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia.
Inline links: Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia
Asterciskmag.com1 mentions across 1 issues

Asterciskmag.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 21, 2022 and November 21, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "It's not here, it's at asteriskmag.com , the new rationalist / effective altruist magazine". It most often appears alongside China, CHIPS act, Christopher Brown.

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Asterciskmag.com
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"Is Wine Fake?" In Asterisk Magazine
November 21, 2022 · Original source
I wrote an article on whether wine is fake. It's not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, the new rationalist / effective altruist magazine. Congratulations to my friend Clara for making it happen. Stories include:
Inline links: asteriskmag.com
Modeling The End Of Monkeypox: I’m especially excited about this one. The top forecaster (of 7,000) in the 2021 Good Judgment competition explains his predictions for monkeypox. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a column by some overconfident pundit, this is maybe the most opposite-of-that thing ever published.
Inline links: Modeling The End Of Monkeypox:
Book Review - What We Owe The Future: You’ve read mine, this is Kelsey Piper’s. Kelsey is always great, and this is a good window into the battle over the word “long-termism”.
Inline links: Book Review - What We Owe The Future:, mine
asteriskmag.com1 mentions across 1 issues

asteriskmag.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 14, 2022 and August 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Go to asteriskmag.com to check it out and sign up for the mailing list". It most often appears alongside Asterisk, Astralcodexten Com, Clara.

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asteriskmag.com
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Open Thread 237
August 14, 2022 · Original source
1: Asterisk is an upcoming effective altruist magazine currently headquartered in my spare bedroom. My friend Clara is editor and the first issue will feature articles by me, Kelsey Piper, and other people you might know. Go to asteriskmag.com to check it out and sign up for the mailing list.
Inline links: asteriskmag.com
Astralcodexten.com1 mentions across 1 issues

Astralcodexten.com is a recurring publication 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 "discuss ACX-related readings. At the April meetup, we will talk about: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

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Astralcodexten.com
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Sean Brocklebank Contact Info: astral[.]club[.]edinburgh[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: University of Edinburgh, Old College, Teaching Room 01 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bl5 [remove this bit] zIidSM2BA9VlBHbWxV3?mode=gi_t Notes: We meet about once a month to discuss ACX-related readings. Meetings are about two hours. At the April meetup, we will talk about: 1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic 2) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you 3) www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic The room is upstairs in Old College, but you can get inside going through the first big door on the right in the main courtyard (assuming you came in from South Bridge). We will have another meetup on Saturday 23 May. Please email me or join the whatsapp group for info about that one.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you
astralcodexten.substack.com1 mentions across 1 issues

astralcodexten.substack.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 13, 2023 and January 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the link for the student / financial-hardship discount is astralcodexten.substack.com/932d293e". It most often appears alongside Astral Codex Ten, Astralcodexten, Elon Musk.

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1
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January 13, 2023
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January 13, 2023
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2023 Subscription Drive + Free Unlocked Posts
January 13, 2023 · Original source
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Inline links: It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
Inline links: If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
Biography Of Jason Shea, 44th US President
Inline links: Biography Of Jason Shea, 44th US President
Athenaeum magazine1 mentions across 1 issues

Athenaeum magazine is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2022 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Educated non-scientists instead got their science news from ... the Athenaeum magazine". It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan, Alfred Russel Wallace.

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Athenaeum magazine
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May 20, 2022
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Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
...ded for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley —...
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework1 mentions across 1 issues

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is a recurring publication 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 "he was writing his Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework". It most often appears alongside 1987, 1988, Adleman.

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Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Engelbart claimed that he found the idea “intriguing,” but had lots of radar-technician-ing to do or something, and so it didn’t really resurface for him until 15 years later, when he was writing his Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Engelbart quoted heavily from Bush’s article, and commented:
Inline links: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework
Autier meta-analysis1 mentions across 1 issues

Autier meta-analysis is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2022 and April 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ben brings up the Autier meta-analysis". It most often appears alongside Barger-Lux 2002, Ben, Ben Hoffman.

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Autier meta-analysis
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Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing
April 22, 2022 · Original source
[In the large Autier meta-analysis that found no effect overall, the highest dose studied was] 2000 IU (25 minutes), which is at least getting somewhere. Maybe that's why "supplementation in elderly people (mainly women) with 20 μg vitamin D per day seemed to slightly reduce all-cause mortality." […]
Ben brings up the Autier meta-analysis:
Inline links: Autier meta-analysis
Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality1 mentions across 1 issues

Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 14, 2023 and June 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he very kindly wrote up his own perspective, Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality". It most often appears alongside active inference, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder.

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The Canal Papers
June 14, 2023 · Original source
(I asked Mike Johnson about this, and he very kindly wrote up his own perspective, Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality. I’ll try to have more thoughts on this later. Right now we’re canalling!)
Inline links: Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality
Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender1 mentions across 1 issues

Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 17, 2023 and July 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I wrote about how Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender". It most often appears alongside ACX, Aella, Berkeley.

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Open Thread 285
July 17, 2023 · Original source
3: In 2020, using data from the SSC survey, I wrote about how Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender. More recently, Aella did another survey and found the same thing. Last week Michael Bailey, a researcher who thinks autogynephilia is very associated with transgender, responded here, saying that our questions were bad. Tailcalled, who helped write the questions for Aella and my survey, explains here why they think the questions were good. Instead of having an opinion on this, I plan to ask Michael to design the questions for the next survey and demonstrate that they get the same result.
Inline links: Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Associated With Transgender, and found the same thing, responded here, explains here why they think the questions were good
Avengers #161 mentions across 1 issues

Avengers #16 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "in Avengers #16 he changed things up". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

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Avengers #16
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August 16, 2024
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August 16, 2024
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
The Juggernaut (Galactus and High Evolutionary came in 1966) And that is without mentioning on the plethora of supporting characters (like Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May, Betty Ross, Flash Thompson, Jane Foster and Foggy Nelson), and world building (like SHIELD, HYDRA, Asteroid M, Savage Land, mutants, the Inhumans, and the Sentinels). That is basically the list of all the characters used in Marvel movies today (There are SOME that have been used in the films that came later: Captain Marvel (1977), Ms Marvel (2013), Thanos (1968), Falcon (1969), Winter Soldier (2005) and some of the Guardians of the Galaxy (1969)). That level of iconic character creation would be enough to make this period of Marvel history special all on its own (the only real comparison is DC comics from 1939-1941). Innovation #2: The Integrated Universe The idea of mixing together characters from different titles had already been done by DC comics, but Marvel took it to a new level. In the early years Stan Lee was writing almost all of the stories. While he played fast and loose with lots of conventions, he was adamant with himself that the stories needed to work TOGETHER. So when Iron Man goes to China and is trapped there by the Mandarin for two issues, he also goes missing from the storylines in the Avengers (and the remaining team members ask each other where Iron Man could be). The timing of these shenanigans does not always work out – sometimes issues were delayed due to artists not being able to deliver on time – and the planned timing became inconsistent, but Lee tried hard to make it all work and “seem real to the reader”. It stressed out Lee so much that in Avengers #16 he changed things up. He took all the characters with their own titles – Iron Man, Thor, Ant Man and the Wasp, and had them “retire from the Avengers”. He kept Captain America on the team (who had joined in issue #4, but did not have his own monthly title), and then re-filled the roster with reformed villains. He took Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch from the X-men and Hawkeye from the pages of Tales of Suspense. The new structure still allowed overlap between the different titles, but he would not have to juggle characters being leads in two books at the same time. Nothing like that level of attention to detail existed in DC – or anywhere else for that matter – for more than a decade. Did readers REALLY care? Especially when issues sat on newsstands for months at a time and there was no such thing as a comic book shop to find old issues, or internet discussion forums to nitpick inconsistencies? Maybe not. But Lee cared. He was writing for readers who paid attention and cared, and that trend would continue through the evolution of comics into the 21st century. But it started here. Innovation #3: The Marvel Method In the early Silver Age, Stan Lee, in addition to his editor and chief duties, was writing nine different comic book series. Not all of those comics were coming out monthly, but most were. It was an impressive feat. No wonder that some ideas and tropes leaked from one title to another (“Another alien invasion?” “The communists are kidnapping our best scientists… again?”). He made it through by counting on his artists in a way that had not been done before. Traditionally the comic book writer would write the entire story for the artist, who would then deliver on the script. Lee did not have time for that – at least with the artists he trusted. Instead he used what came to be called the “Marvel Method”. When Lee and Kirby were creating the Fantastic Four the two worked in collaboration. Lee often gets most of the credit today, but the consensus is now that that is more because Lee was an extroverted self-promoter, rather than “more deserving” of the credit. In any case once the basic idea for the team was created, what is not in question is the rough method Lee and Kirby used to create the stories (for more details on who deserves the credit and who claimed what when, check out the Kirby museum). The basic method worked like this: Lee would create an outline of the story. The major plot points.The characters. Who did what when. What was the conflict and how it was resolved. He would give that outline to the artist
Inline links: Kirby museum
Axiology, Morality, Law (2017)1 mentions across 1 issues

Axiology, Morality, Law (2017) is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 13, 2022 and November 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I tried to make the same point in Axiology, Morality, Law (2017)". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, Alameda.

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Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
...he end justifies the means, this has awful consequences given our untrustworthy brains; therefore a human shouldn't think this way. And I tried to make the same point in Axiology, Morality, Law (2017), where I said: In [just societies], the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps [personal] morality, and morality trumps axiology [ie consequentialist reasoning]....
...hinking on the object level that the end justifies the means, this has awful consequences given our untrustworthy brains; therefore a human shouldn't think this way. And I tried to make the same point in Axiology, Morality, Law (2017), where I said: In [just societies], the universally-agreed priority is that law trumps [personal] morality, and morality trumps axiology [ie consequentialist reasoning]....