Astral Codex Ten

Publications: D

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Publications: D

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

Reference Index

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

DSM10 mentions across 10 issues

DSM is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between January 28, 2021 and May 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "stuck it in the DSM!"; "If most mental disorders are dimensional variation rather than taxa, that kind of makes the DSM look pretty silly, doesn’t it?"; "According to the DSM, depression has eight core symptoms". It most often appears alongside Twitter, China, Ethan Watters.

Article page
DSM
Mention count
10
Issue count
10
First seen
January 28, 2021
Last seen
May 14, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
January 28, 2021 · Original source
And intermittent explosive disorder! This is the fake disorder we made up so that we had something to diagnose angry people with! I don’t think anyone thought this one was real, not even the psychiatrists who invented it and stuck it in the DSM! But here come the taxometricians, saying that schizophrenia and bipolar and whatever are mere dimensional variation, but IED (yes, that’s really the acronym) is an honest-to-goodness crisply-defined category based on objective reality? What gives?
If most mental disorders are dimensional variation rather than taxa, that kind of makes the DSM look pretty silly, doesn’t it?
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems
February 03, 2021 · Original source
According to the DSM, depression has eight core symptoms: low mood, lack of interest in activities, appetite change, slow movements, tiredness, feelings of worthlessness, poor concentration, and suicidality. You could imagine a dynamical system among all these variables, with each doing complicated things to the others, until they settled into some kind of attractor or other.
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement
May 25, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
You Don't Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders
January 25, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness
February 22, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
January 25, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
petfree
May 14, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Daily Mail3 mentions across 3 issues

Daily Mail is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 02, 2021 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Daily Mail talks about being BOILED ALIVE BY INTERNET SLIMMING PILLS!"; "Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans-Peter Volz"; "In an interview with the Daily Mail on 3/4/20, he said that". It most often appears alongside FDA, #S14, 1938 FDA.

Article page
Daily Mail
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
March 02, 2021
Last seen
April 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Shilling For Big Mitochondria
March 02, 2021 · Original source
The British tabloids had a field day with this. The Daily Mail talks about being BOILED ALIVE BY INTERNET SLIMMING PILLS! And Vice (why is it always Vice?) is somehow even more melodramatic:
Inline links: talks about, even more melodramatic
Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety
May 18, 2022 · Original source
But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans-Peter Volz, who said that silexan should be first-line for anxiety, replacing things like SSRIs and Xanax. And a very reputable professional publication within psychiatry, The Carlat Report, published an article and a podcast touting silexan:
Inline links: an interview with, an article, a podcast
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
In an interview with the Daily Mail on 3/4/20, he said that his kitten died, after a two-day illness, on the ninth day of him (Connor) having COVID. He said “I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu” (speaking as if it was him in the past, who thought he had flu because he hadn’t heard of COVID yet).
Inline links: an interview with the Daily Mail
Dictator Book Club3 mentions across 3 issues

Dictator Book Club is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 11, 2021 and August 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I called this series “Dictator Book Club” because it had a nice ring to it"; "he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry"; "New subscriber-only post I forgot to mention last week: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Italy, United States.

Article page
Dictator Book Club
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
November 11, 2021
Last seen
August 25, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
Lyman Stone on Twitter: @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo…\n\nOverall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points:\n\n1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy\n2) \"Why admire Orban?\"","username":"lymanstoneky","name":"Lyman Stone 石來民 ??????","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 19:16:25 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":7,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/112ea78f-c29c-47a5-b175-fa943b33e310_1200x800.jpeg","title":"Dictator Book Club: Orban","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:
Inline links: Lyman Stone
Yeah, this is fair. I called this series “Dictator Book Club” because it had a nice ring to it, but I don’t want to assert that I definitely know what dictatorship is, or that Orban definitely qualifies.
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
Open Thread 396
August 25, 2025 · Original source
4: New subscriber-only post I forgot to mention last week: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism:
Inline links: Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism
Dilbert3 mentions across 3 issues

Dilbert is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 16, 2026 and February 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall"; "Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s"; "the kind of meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily comic strip". It most often appears alongside Scott Adams, United States, Adams.

Article page
Dilbert
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
January 16, 2026
Last seen
February 11, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.
But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.
Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife]
Inline links: The Dilbert Afterlife
This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way.
Inline links: Elegy For John McCain
This is my second time having this argument - the first was my Elegy For John McCain, which failed much worse - basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago, I don’t think I’ve done any more posts, positive or negative, on people’s deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it’s worth, I still like the elegy, and am glad I memorialized McCain in some way. This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me. Sandeep writes: Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams’ recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. I think I’d heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post. Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me; someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else’s deleted message and I couldn’t see exactly what he was praising. I don’t want to have a blanket policy of never criticizing anyone who’s nice to me; it seems corrupt in the sense of “replacing my journalistic judgment with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favors”. On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense. Without having a general solution to this problem. In this situation, I mainly considered the point above - I don’t think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn’t run my full “is it appropriate to write a hostile article about this person?” check. But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations. If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this (and if not, I wouldn’t do it). @Eigengender on Twitter ran a poll, and found that: …which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted. And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more: Joel McKinnon writes: As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas. Jonathan Lipschutz writes: I loved Dilbert! He had a remarkable ability to identify the absurdity of life/reality. I was not aware of so much other material/information/‘wisdom’?!/ideas. It seems to me he was a true, great contributor to America and Americans and Western intellectual discourse in the vain of other greats like Mark Twain. What I learned from your piece, which was absolutely amazing in its own right and shined throughout as a tribute and labor of love, was [Adams’] humanity. He was labeled as a racist, which i believe to be bunk and a lack of honesty/courage with addressing the point/argument he was making. He was an eminently flawed human being, like all humans, but he was also acutely aware of this and tried to help others with humor and honesty. Pointing out ways humans fall short, including himself. But he used his special powers in the service of intellectual honesty/inquisitiveness/love for his fellow human beings. Banjo Kildeer writes: This is a wonderful piece. Your love for Scott Adams shines through. @disgruntledcho1 writes: [This] made me actually feel warmly for Scott Adams, a thus-far unparalleled feat. The most important question is whether Scott Adams himself would have appreciated the post, and this convinces me that he would have. One of Adams’ favorite persuasion topics was what he called “Two Movies On One Screen”, where people would come away from the same event with totally different narratives - for example, a Democrat might watch a Trump speech and conclude that Trump had openly and clearly announced his racism, while a Republican watching the same speech might think that Trump had just said something patriotic and hadn’t mentioned race at all. Whatever his opinion on what I said, I’m sure he would have found your reactions hilarious. … 2: Was I Unfair To Adams? … Leo Abstract writes: [The problem with your eulogy] isn’t that it was harsh--he was harsher to himself, frequently. (i.e. when he said he realized at age 8, sadly looking at his nerdy little face in the mirror, he was gonna have to ‘get rich’). [The] problem is it was just wrong, and seemed badly(or un-)researched. His interest in persuasion was teaching people when others were doing it to them, not teaching them to do it to others. His interest in Trump was Trump doing it BACK at the media, not on his poor voters. Disagree. Adams’ book Win Bigly includes Persuasion Tips, persuasion checklists, and a Persuasion Resource Reading List, all of which take it as a given that he is teaching you to persuade others: I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000
Inline links: Elegy For John McCain, writes, Here’s one of his articles saying nice things about me, ran a poll, writes, writes, writes, writes, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Dya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6aea0e56-b1a1-48ca-84ab-406017ae27a1_1618x462.png, You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png
Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
For example, in my research on Scott Adams, I came across the following Dilbert strip, which is apparently supposed to take place in the US:
Inline links: my research on Scott Adams
There are no good statistics on asylum-seeker crime per se in America, but we know that the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China, and Venezuela. Afghans are incarcerated at 1/10th the US average rate1, Chinese at 1/20th, and Venezuelans at 1/4th. These statistics may be biased downward by some immigrants being too new to have gotten incarcerated, but this probably can’t explain the whole effect2. More likely it’s selection. The Afghans are mostly translators and local guides getting persecuted by the Taliban for helping American occupation forces; the Chinese and Venezuelans are mostly well-off people fleeing communism.
Inline links: we know, 1/10th, 1, 1/20th, 1/4th, 2
So US asylum-seekers as a category probably have a lower crime rate than natives (no perfectly applicable statistics, but I think the evidence suggests about half, and ChatGPT thinks it suggests 0.3 - 0.7x). Why then do Dilbert readers nod along with the idea of three people per workday getting stabbed by asylum-seekers?
Inline links: thinks it suggests
Dating Men In The Bay Area2 mentions across 2 issues

Dating Men In The Bay Area is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 03, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "finalists, in order of appearance: 8: Dating Men In The Bay Area"; "Dating Men In The Bay Area , by Alex King". It most often appears alongside Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia, My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes.

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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
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
Dating Men In The Bay Area, by Alex King. Alex is an engineer from San Francisco. She’ll be experimenting with more essays on her new blog, King of Daydreams. When she’s not igniting turmoil in the ACX comments section, she can be found mentoring young engineers, hosting community events, and failing to find a boyfriend. She pinky-promises she is not Aella.
Inline links: Dating Men In The Bay Area, King of Daydreams
De Novo2 mentions across 2 issues

De Novo is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 16, 2022 and March 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo )"; "author of the blog De Novo". It most often appears alongside Metacelsus, Scott, 5α-reductase inhibitor.

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De Novo
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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
— Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo) doubts the price estimates I posted:
Inline links: Metacelsus, De Novo
Who Predicted 2023?
March 05, 2024 · Original source
Metacelsus, a popular ACX commenter and author of the blog De Novo, got 20th place in Full Mode and 105th in Blind Mode, putting him in the 95th-97th percentile.
Inline links: De Novo
Documentacao Critica de Fatima2 mentions across 2 issues

Documentacao Critica de Fatima 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 "Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima , collected by the organization that runs the Fatima shrine in Portugal"; "Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima, collected by the organization that runs the Fatima shrine in Portugal. This is entirely in Portuguese. A 633 page overview is available for free download (and so machine translation) and was my main source in this post. 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, which contains some otherwise unobtainable testimonies. I think that there are ways to do this that don’t violate copyright law (the testimonies themselves were recorded in 1917 - 1930, so copyright should have expired); I also think (hope) that the shrine is most interested in spreading information about the miracle and isn’t going to try to file an international lawsuit over edge cases.
Inline links: A 633 page overview, physical books
Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
…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
Dynomight2 mentions across 2 issues

Dynomight is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 16, 2022 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry"; "Dynomight: Grug On Diet Soda And Autism". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, adaptation-executors, AI Policy Institute.

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Dynomight
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Contra Dynomight On Sexy In-Laws
May 16, 2022 · Original source
From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry.
Inline links: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry
Dynomight’s question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants. Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn’t differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?
(yes, most people care a little about both - there are gold-digging suitors and parents who are proud of their son/daughter-in-laws’ good looks - but the trend for parents to care relatively more about wealth and good breeding seems clear, and Dynomight cites research showing this is true)
Inline links: cites, research, showing
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
11: Dynomight: Grug On Diet Soda And Autism. Don’t freak out from reading the title, it’s (correctly) making fun of the study for being bad.
Inline links: Grug On Diet Soda And Autism
Daily Tribune1 mentions across 1 issues

Daily Tribune 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 "The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

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Daily Tribune
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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
…unfortunately a 25 mile circle centered on Merate includes the city of Milan, population 1.1 million, which produced no reports of unusual solar activity. And Milan had clear line-of-sight to Ghiaie and Merate, and so probably better viewing conditions than Tavernola, which (you can see from the map above) has some intervening hills. Might the miraculous light source have been like a spotlight, aimed in only one direction - that is, east to Ghiaie and Tavernola, but not southwest to Milan? This would contradict Dalleur’s Fatima analysis, since one of the most dramatic testimonies comes from the city of Minde, which is on the opposite side of the presumed light source from Fatima. I don’t really think it’s possible to maintain a theory where this phenomenon gets transmitted through normal geography. 3.2: Mary Such Cases At this point, the reader will get the general idea, and we can start moving faster, as there is a large amount of ground to cover. Heroldsbach, Germany, 1949: The Virgin appeared to four young girls. Rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on December 8th, 10,000 people saw another sun miracle. Here are about a hundred testimonies, gathered with typical German thoroughness. An expert meteorologist brought in to investigate summarized them as follows: If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition and miracle as fake, even going so far as to excommunicate the child-seers. Later they relented slightly and un-excommunicated them, but their official position is still that nothing supernatural happened - this sun miracle was merely an overly enthusiastic hallucination! Necedah, Wisconsin, USA, 1949: A housewife named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. This is among the less plausible visitations: Van Hoof, who was raised Spiritualist, also claimed to have seen Joan of Arc, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. The messages she channeled seemed less like tidings of peace and love than like a particularly unhinged Truth Social post, and included warnings about the Rothschilds. Still, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15 1950, 50,000 - 100,000 people showed up hoping for a miracle. As for what happened next, Wikipedia says that “witness accounts vary significantly”. WaPo says that “observers saw nothing unusual” and LIFE mentions nothing out of the ordinary. But other sources report sun miracles, and I was eventually able to track down three testimonials in a summary of articles from a local newspaper, which states that “after a rainy morning…”: It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees. Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.” A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.” The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump. The Catholic Church condemned the apparition as fake, and declared van Hoof’s followers “a cult”. Lubbock, Texas, USA, 1988. Really? Really? Nothing could be more natural than for the Queen of Heaven to appear to kind-hearted shepherd children in Portugal. Even an appearance in war-torn West Germany makes a certain amount of sense. But Lubbock, Texas? I suppose this must have been how the cool Sanhedrin members felt when they learned the Christ hailed from Nazareth. But that doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1988, about 10,000 people witnessed the Miracle of the Sun. Here is an indirect testimonial, a man describing his wife’s experience: A large crowd had gathered outside Saint John Neumann Church on that very hot August afternoon on the Feast of the Assumption. Mass was being said in the afternoon, and around the time of the Consecration, suddenly her cousin’s wife (a convert, if you remember) said “look at the sun”. When she did, the sun was pulsating, it would look like it was coming down to earth and then go back again, it spun around in circles, much the same as what took place in Fatima in 1917...and changed colors. She looked at it directly for 15 minutes or so without any damage to her eyes. As my wife looked around, the people in the crowd seemed to be bathed in various colors. During all this my wife even saw The Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother was extending her arms in what appeared to be a welcoming gesture. But not everyone had the same experience that day: her cousin’s wife and our son saw and believed instantly, but her cousin and brother saw nothing at all. Why did some see these events and others did not? We don’t know...not enough faith? Or perhaps they had enough faith, and they didn’t need a sign! Here we have something special: according to the Los Angeles Times, one pilgrim took a poll about who saw what: A push was on to assemble evidence for the commission in a lawyerly way. Testimonies from 247 people present at the feast had been recorded. The statements were transcribed by volunteers and stored in a computer. Joe James himself indexed the information: 186 had witnessed the spinning of the sun; 75 had seen the Virgin; 64 Jesus; 18 an angel. How could anyone ignore the bulk of such documentation? We don’t know how the 247 people were selected, but very naively it seems like 2/3 of those present saw the sun spinning. This also matches the first person listing 2/4 family members. (the Catholic Church withheld judgment, refusing to either endorse or condemn the visions) Benin City, Nigeria, 2017. On October 13 2017, crowds gathered around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima miracle. One such commemoration happened in Benin City, Nigeria, where 30,000 people attended the National Marian Congress and witnessed the re-dedication of Nigeria to Mary’s Sacred Heart. As the speakers commemorated the Fatima event . . . . . . someone pointed to the sky and shouted “It’s happening again!”. It was, indeed, happening again. You can read about ten testimonies here. I’ll quote just one, from Brother Joseph Obiemeka Azih: Immediately after the 3:00 p.m. Divine Mercy prayers, there were brief showers of rain. Then came sudden brightness of the sun, which was hitherto hidden behind layers of dark cloud. We also observed rather surprisingly the mysterious shooting of the sun forward and backward. Intermittently emitting of powerful bluish and golden colors of light from “Our Lady clothed with the Sun.” The sight was indescribably beautiful. We were busy staring at the bright sun steadily for more than twenty minutes without blinking an eye even for a second! People around us were dazzling and reflecting these bluish and golden colors on their dresses and faces. What a mystery! More than 30,000 people inside the arena were seen peering at “the dancing of the sun” bewildered. The miracle lasted for more than 45 minutes after which there was [a] heavy downpour which the Bishops present said [were] “showers of blessing.” I was able to confirm that some of the people whose testimonies were listed on the site are real Nigerian Catholics whose existence is attested in other sources. Two weeks later, there was another Nigerian commemoration of the Fatima anniversary, in Lagos, and a sun miracle happened at that one too. 3.3: Made You Gaze At Medjugorje Medjugorje (Bosnia, 1981) is in many ways a typical Marian apparition site, much like the ones on the list above. Child-seers, warnings to repent, sun miracles, you know the story by now. But in Medjugorje, the miracles keep happening. Pilgrims - or, more cynically, tourists - go there just to see the sun miracles, and many come back satisfied. You can find blogs by people who went to Medjugorje hoping to see a sun miracle, and on their first or fifth or eighth or whatever day, there’s a crowd of people, yelling and pointing at the sun, and they look up and see it too. Here’s an account from Catholic blogger Father Dwight Longernecker: I was an Anglican priest living in England, in 1985 when I was invited by a group of Anglicans and Catholics to visit Medjugorje. I didn’t want to go. Being a former Evangelical-fundamentalist I wasn’t too keen on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. I opted out. They insisted. I dug in my heels. They said someone else would pay for it. I didn’t want to go. They cajoled and twisted my arm until I said ‘yes’ [...] On our second day there I sat on the balcony of our guesthouse with a large woman named Eleanor. As we began the rosary I looked up and the sun was a blaze of light in the sky. I looked down to the car parked below and the sun was reflected in the hood of the car as a blaze of light. Eleanor and I prayed the rosary together. I had my eyes closed. At 6:20 Eleanor gave me an elbow in the ribs and pointed. The sun was now a disc of white light in the sky like a Eucharistic host. Then as I watched it began to spin, first clockwise then anti clockwise. Sparks spit out from the rim of the sun like a firework. I looked down and the sun was a white spinning disc on the hood of the car. I don’t think this would have happened if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Plus, Eleanor saw it too. That’s why she gave me an elbow in the ribs. I am not sure how long this lasted, but when we spoke about it to our fellow pilgrims they said many people in the town square had reported the same phenomenon. Some of these tourists capture the phenomenon on video. Unfortunately, the videos are of three types: Videos of a bunch of people pointing at the sun, and shouting the word “Miracle!” in various languages, and obviously looking extremely excited, but the sun itself looks totally normal, and the person taking the video apologizes and says that their camera isn’t good enough to capture it.
Inline links: Here, Wikipedia says, WaPo, LIFE, a summary of articles from a local newspaper, is an indirect testimonial, Los Angeles Times, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7J80!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F643b310a-4f76-4de9-8434-c8449f29f686_581x226.png, here, a sun miracle happened at that one too, an account
DailyKos1 mentions across 1 issues

DailyKos is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "some blogger on DailyKos would write about the latest awful thing Dubya said". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

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DailyKos
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The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Gradually throughout the 2000s this transitioned to "echo culture", where people hung out in ideologically sorted communities and discussed things from a shared perspective. At its worst, this was straight outrage culture; some blogger on DailyKos would write about the latest awful thing Dubya said, and hundreds of commenters would compete to demonstrate just how much they hate him. But at its best, it was about building communities of likeminded people, having a space where you felt safe expressing yourself, refining shared views, and letting off steam. Echo culture isn't necessarily evil - basically every subreddit is its own echo culture hangout (so is ACX!) and many of them are great. But it took a lot of culture shock to make it work.
Daniel 71 mentions across 1 issues

Daniel 7 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 "textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Daniel 7
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Danish paper1 mentions across 1 issues

Danish paper is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2021 and December 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "represented faithfully by the Danish paper and support the same conclusions". It most often appears alongside A. R. Hutchinson, ATCOR theory, Australia.

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Danish paper
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Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
December 10, 2021 · Original source
But let's be thorough. It's possible these supporting studies are misrepresented, so I looked them up and checked, just in case. They all find strong capitalization of land and property taxes into property values, and all discussed the endogeneity problem and their attempts to account for it. The studies are represented faithfully by the Danish paper and support the same conclusions. Furthermore, four of them are empirical rather than theoretical. These findings are not just the result of models and formulas, but actual real-world observations.
Daredevil1 mentions across 1 issues

Daredevil 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 "Michael Bendis’ Daredevil". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

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Daredevil
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
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: 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
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_!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
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)
Darwin’s defense1 mentions across 1 issues

Darwin’s defense is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 18, 2021 and November 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Phil Getz, in Darwin’s defense". It most often appears alongside 23andme, AB, Abraham Mendelssohn.

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Darwin’s defense
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Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
But Phil Getz, in Darwin’s defense, elsewhere in the comments:
Inline links: in Darwin’s defense
Data Colada1 mentions across 1 issues

Data Colada is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Gino presents her case for why Data Colada are wrong". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, AI Policy Institute, Arizona.

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Data Colada
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Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
9: More on the Francesca Gino data fraud allegations: Gino presents her case for why Data Colada are wrong and she’s innocent; Fashional Expectation and John Billings present rebuttals. Reading the back-and-forth arguments was a good way for me to re-calibrate my sense of how to evaluate statistical evidence.
Inline links: Gino presents her case, Fashional Expectation, John Billings
Data Secrets Lox1 mentions across 1 issues

Data Secrets Lox is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 24, 2023 and August 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "there’s another one at Data Secrets Lox , results below". It most often appears alongside Agnostic Democrat, America, Aristides.

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Data Secrets Lox
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Highlights From The Comments On Dating Preferences
August 24, 2023 · Original source
Autantonym ran such a poll, you can see results here. And there’s another one at Data Secrets Lox, results below:
Inline links: here, at Data Secrets Lox
Dating doc directory1 mentions across 1 issues

Dating doc directory is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 21, 2023 and September 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "— Dating doc directory". It most often appears alongside ACX, EA internships, EA job board.

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Dating doc directory
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  • 23 September 21, 2023
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23
September 21, 2023 · Original source
— EA job board — EA internships — Dating doc directory — Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Inline links: EA job board, EA internships, Dating doc directory, Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup
Davidson On Takeoff Speed1 mentions across 1 issues

Davidson On Takeoff Speed is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 25, 2023 and July 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "see Davidson On Takeoff Speed for an argument why it might". It most often appears alongside AI, Albert Einstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
July 25, 2023 · Original source
This only suggests that an intelligence explosion is coherent, not that it will actually happen; see Davidson On Takeoff Speed for an argument why it might.
Inline links: Davidson On Takeoff Speed
Davidson On Takeoff Speeds1 mentions across 1 issues

Davidson On Takeoff Speeds is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 26, 2023 and June 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "A good followup for my recent Davidson On Takeoff Speeds". It most often appears alongside Alignment Research Center, Asterisk, Asterisk.

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"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine
June 26, 2023 · Original source
A Debate About AI And Explosive Growth: Tamay Besiroglu vs. Matt Clancy. Will AI be just another invention that is probably good for the economy but leaves GDP trajectories overall unchanged? Or will it create a technoeconomic singularity leading to “impossibly” fast economic growth? A good followup for my recent Davidson On Takeoff Speeds. I don’t think they emphasized enough the claim that the natural trajectory of growth had long been trending towards a singularity in the 2020s, we only started deviating from that natural trajectory since ~1960 or so, and that we’re just debating whether AI will restore the natural curve rather than whether it will do some bizarre unprecedented thing that we should have a high prior against.
Inline links: A Debate About AI And Explosive Growth, Davidson On Takeoff Speeds, we only started deviating from that natural trajectory since ~1960 or so
Dawson-Hughes 20051 mentions across 1 issues

Dawson-Hughes 2005 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 "Dawson-Hughes 2005 says". It most often appears alongside Autier meta-analysis, Barger-Lux 2002, Ben.

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Dawson-Hughes 2005
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Contra Hoffman On Vitamin D Dosing
April 22, 2022 · Original source
Dawson-Hughes 2005 says:
Inline links: Dawson-Hughes 2005
dcacxrationalitymeetups1 mentions across 1 issues

dcacxrationalitymeetups 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 "Group Link: Uptown: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/". It most often appears alongside "El Retiro" Park, 11841 Wagner Street Culver City, 1548 NE 15th Ave.

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Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
WASHINGTON, DC, USA Contact: John Bennett Contact Info: WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub, 2021 K St NW, Washington, DC 20006 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J Group Link: Uptown: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, Downtown https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/ and https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx. Notable Guests: Robin Hanson, notable economist Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. There is metered street parking on nearby blocks; the closest Metro stations are Farragut West and Farragut North.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J, https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/, https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx
De Civitate1 mentions across 1 issues

De Civitate is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 01, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Catholic blog De Civitate explains the recent “Synod On Synodality”". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, AI Policy Institute, Arizona.

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De Civitate
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Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
13: Catholic blog De Civitate explains the recent “Synod On Synodality” and why we should care (short answer: we shouldn’t). “The only remaining question is how big the Synodal train wreck is going to be. Preliminary signs are: pretty big!”
Inline links: explains
De Novo blog1 mentions across 1 issues

De Novo blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 09, 2024 and September 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the excellent De Novo blog". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten Com, gametogenesis, Harvard.

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De Novo blog
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Open Thread 346
September 09, 2024 · Original source
...ups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: ACX commenter Metacelsus is a Harvard bio PhD who the excellent De Novo blog; he also reviews most ACX posts and grants on biology for me. He recently co-founded a startup, Ovelle , to commercialize his academic work on gametogenesis (turning arb...
...in-person meetups around the world . 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here . Also: 1: ACX commenter Metacelsus is a Harvard bio PhD who the excellent De Novo blog; he also reviews most ACX posts and grants on biology for me. He recently co-founded a startup, Ovelle , to commercialize his academic work on gametogenesis (turning arb...
Death Is Bad1 mentions across 1 issues

Death Is Bad 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 "He blogs at Death Is Bad". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

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Death Is Bad
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Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
‘Red Means No’ Orgies, reviewed by Eneasz Brodski. Eneasz is best known for creating the full-cast HPMOR audiobook/podcast, and he now podcasts at The Bayesian Conspiracy covering rationalist general-interest topics. He has also published the novel What Lies Dreaming, a Lovecraftian horror set in 2nd century Rome. He blogs at Death Is Bad and will be participating in the Inkhaven residency this November.
Inline links: ‘Red Means No’ Orgies, full-cast HPMOR audiobook/podcast, The Bayesian Conspiracy, What Lies Dreaming, Death Is Bad, Inkhaven
Death With Dignity1 mentions across 1 issues

Death With Dignity is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 10, 2023 and March 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "already read his Death With Dignity post". It most often appears alongside Alex, Alex Nowratesh, Aphantasia.

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Death With Dignity
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Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
13: New Eliezer Yudkowsky video appearance, shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who has already read his Death With Dignity post, but these people sure seemed surprised. I’m updating on how useful it might be to spread the word on this:
Inline links: Death With Dignity post
decompressionbaby.com1 mentions across 1 issues

decompressionbaby.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 13, 2022 and April 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "decompressionbaby.com, the website where they discuss their experiences". It most often appears alongside acetaminophen, ADHD, Arthur Jensen.

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decompressionbaby.com
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Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
April 13, 2022 · Original source
(source) The original plan was to use it to ease labor pains, but Heynes thought it might also help with backache and some complications of late pregnancy, so he encouraged women to take the machine home and use it for about 30 minutes daily during the last few weeks of pregnancy. This caught on, and in its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10,000 women - mostly in South Africa - used decompression machines.
Inline links: source
If you ask the children themselves, they are definitely unique geniuses - or at least this is the impression I get from decompressionbaby.com, the website where they discuss their experiences. Some typical comments:
Inline links: decompressionbaby.com
Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect1 mentions across 1 issues

Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect 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 "an article Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect". It most often appears alongside Baltimore, Black Lives Matter, BLM.

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What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
And after a year or two, the pattern became clearer, and now even the detractors don’t seem to really have their heart in it anymore. The New York Times had an article Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect, subtitled “The idea that the police have retreated under siege will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”, which as far as I can tell is as close as the New York Times has ever come to acknowledging that a politically inconvenient fact is true.
Inline links: Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect
Decrypt1 mentions across 1 issues

Decrypt is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 03, 2023 and July 03, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Source: Decrypt on ChaosGPT"". It most often appears alongside Anthropic, AutoGPT, Baidu.

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Decrypt
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Tales Of Takeover In CCF-World
July 03, 2023 · Original source
Source: Decrypt on ChaosGPT AutoGPT is just about the stupidest AI that you could possibly call a “generalist agent”. It’s a program built around GPT-4 that transforms it from an prompt-answerer into a time-binding actor in the world. The basic conceit is: you prompt GPT-4 with a goal. It answers with a point-by-point plan for how to achieve that goal. Then it prompts itself with each of the points individually, plus a summary of the overall plan and how far it’s gotten.
Inline links: Decrypt on ChaosGPT, AutoGPT
Speaking of things that are dumb but also sort of worrying, one of the most popular AutoGPT instances is ChaosGPT, an AI agent prompted with the goal of destroying the world. Turns out anyone can download AutoGPT and prompt it with whatever you want, and some people are trolls. ChaosGPT spent a while Googling how to get nuclear weapons, failed, and switched tactics towards trying to gather Twitter followers in the hopes of manipulating them somehow (many such cases). Here’s where it’s at now:
Inline links: ChaosGPT
Deep Utopia1 mentions across 1 issues

Deep Utopia is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2024 and October 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I couldn’t help comparing Deep Utopia to Will MacAskill’s book"; "The only sentences in Deep Utopia that I appreciated without reservation". It most often appears alongside 23andme, Amish, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

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Deep Utopia
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Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?”
Inline links: Deep Utopia
We can start by bounding the damage. Our deep utopia will know how to wirehead people safely. So worst-case scenario, if you absolutely can’t figure out anything else to do, you live in perfect bliss forever. Bostrom urges us not to reflexively turn up our noses at this outcome. Wireheading grosses us out because our best approximations for it - drugs, porn, etc - are tawdry and shallow. Actually-good wireheading would be neither. You could walk through the woods at sunrise, experiencing a combination of the joy you felt at the birth of your first child, the excitement Einstein experienced upon seeing the first glimmers of relativity, and the ecstasy of St. Teresa as she gazed upon the face of God. That afternoon, you could walk somewhere else, and feel an entirely different artisanal combination of blisses. “It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.”
Inline links: would be neither
If wireheading seems too meaningless, you can add in wireheaded-meaning. People often say that an MDMA trip or mystical vision was the most meaningful experience of their lives. It would be trivial for our Deep Utopians to hack your brain to see a world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower. We're gonna mean so much, you might even get tired of meaning. And you'll say 'please, please, it's too much meaning. We can't take it anymore, Professor Bostrom, it's too much!'
Default Friend1 mentions across 1 issues

Default Friend is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 04, 2024 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "According to Default Friend, now something like this is happening in real life". It most often appears alongside Aaron Peskin, ACLU, AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis.

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Default Friend
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April 04, 2024
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April 04, 2024
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Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
17: Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men. There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender: if gender is non-biological and about how you identify, why can’t transgender status also be non-biological and about how you identify? That is, why can’t I (always male, never transitioned) identify as a “trans man” if I feel like the label resonates better with my inner self? So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”. But according to Default Friend, now something like this is happening in real life.
Inline links: Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men
Defense of Heraldry1 mentions across 1 issues

Defense of Heraldry is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 24, 2024 and July 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry". It most often appears alongside Abigail Shrier, Adragon De Mello, AI girlfriends.

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Defense of Heraldry
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Links for July 2024
July 24, 2024 · Original source
6: Mind and Mythos essay club looks at GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry. Key quotes:
Inline links: GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry
Deliberative Alignment1 mentions across 1 issues

Deliberative Alignment 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 "Last month they released a paper, Deliberative Alignment, highlighting the way forward". It most often appears alongside A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values, Aleister Crowley, Anthropic.

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Deliberative Alignment
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February 12, 2025
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February 12, 2025
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Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec
February 12, 2025 · Original source
In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry.
Inline links: Zvi has written, updated their spec
But the ninth team is still there and doing good work. Last month they released a paper, Deliberative Alignment, highlighting the way forward.
Inline links: Deliberative Alignment
Deliberative alignment is constitutional AI + chain of thought. The process goes:
Inline links: constitutional AI
Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop1 mentions across 1 issues

Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop 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 "Freddie de Boer’s Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop presents an argument". It most often appears alongside Almas, American study, AttractiveWorld.

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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
Freddie de Boer’s Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop presents an argument that educational hypergamy is lowering marriage rates1. He writes:
Inline links: Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop, 1
Den Nye Oljen1 mentions across 1 issues

Den Nye Oljen is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 22, 2022 and September 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil")". It most often appears alongside Adam Neumann, Alex Roesch, Amazon.

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Den Nye Oljen
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1
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1
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September 22, 2022
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September 22, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil")
Dendwrite1 mentions across 1 issues

Dendwrite is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 10, 2023 and November 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dendwrite ( blog ) writes: I have a team that is working on the dating site more or less as Scott described". It most often appears alongside #EEGManyLabs, 23andme, @freeshreeda.

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Dendwrite
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1
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1
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November 10, 2023
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November 10, 2023
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Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
6 (OKCupid-style dating site): Everyone seemed interested in this one. Two people say they’ve already been working on this for a while and collected teams: Shreeda Segan and Dendwrite. Shreeda is a friend of a friend and I can vouch for her; I don’t know Dendwrite but he also seems pretty committed. Read their comments to see what help they need and how to contact them if you can provide it.
Inline links: Shreeda Segan, Dendwrite
Dendwrite (blog) writes:
Inline links: blog
Derveni papyrus1 mentions across 1 issues

Derveni papyrus is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the Derveni papyrus—a document no bard could have read or knew existed". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

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Derveni papyrus
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September 29, 2022
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September 29, 2022
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Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
He offers a sneak peek at his upcoming book, Music To Raise The Dead: The Secret Origins Of Musicology. The introduction discusses the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient discussion of the Orphic hymns which Gioia says is the first known work of music criticism.
Inline links: a sneak peek
We shouldn’t be surprised by this—the old codes never went away. Eventually the bardic tales of Celtic culture entered the mainstream of Western society, but only because the singers had taken such care in giving them a veneer of Christian respectability. Yet behind the superficial orthodoxy of the resulting Arthurian romances—the most influential body of quest narratives in the history of Western culture—dark coded messages of musical origin still lurk, and are well worth studying. Like Sun Ra’s seemingly crazy pamphlet, these Arthurian narratives are surprisingly congruent with the Derveni papyrus—a document no bard could have read or knew existed (not even Sun Ra when he wrote “Solaristic Precepts”), if only because its uncovering in Derveni didn’t happen until 1962.
Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story1 mentions across 1 issues

Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story 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 ... Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story". It most often appears alongside ACT/SSC, aducanumab, aducanumab.

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1
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1
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August 20, 2021
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August 20, 2021
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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
Determining maximal achievable effect sizes of antidepressant therapies in placebo-controlled trials1 mentions across 1 issues

Determining maximal achievable effect sizes of antidepressant therapies in placebo-controlled trials is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 31, 2023 and May 31, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "I found their paper, Determining maximal achievable effect sizes of antidepressant therapies in placebo-controlled trials". It most often appears alongside anticholinergics, benzodiazepines, bisphosphonates.

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1
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1
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May 31, 2023
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May 31, 2023
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All Medications Are Insignificant In The Eyes Of God And Traditional Effect Size Criteria
May 31, 2023 · Original source
Recently a Danish team affiliated with the pharma company Lundbeck discovered an entirely new way to get into fights about this. I found their paper, Determining maximal achievable effect sizes of antidepressant therapies in placebo-controlled trials, more enlightening than most other writing on this issue. They ask: what if the skeptics’ preferred effect size number is impossible to reach?
Inline links: Determining maximal achievable effect sizes of antidepressant therapies in placebo-controlled trials
Deutsche Welle1 mentions across 1 issues

Deutsche Welle is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 11, 2021 and November 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-border-guards-accused-of-shooting-at-syrian-refugees/a-42444813". It most often appears alongside 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election, @slatestarcodex, Americans.

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Deutsche Welle
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1
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1
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November 11, 2021
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November 11, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-border-guards-accused-of-shooting-at-syrian-refugees/a-42444813
Inline links: https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-border-guards-accused-of-shooting-at-syrian-refugees/a-42444813
Deutschland im XIV. Jahrhundert1 mentions across 1 issues

Deutschland im XIV. Jahrhundert is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 19, 2023 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Holy Roman Empire map : “Deutschland im XIV. Jahrhundert”, Gustav Droysen, 1886". It most often appears alongside 1980, 1980 referendum, 1995 referendum.

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1
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1
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May 19, 2023
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May 19, 2023
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The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Holy Roman Empire map: “Deutschland im XIV. Jahrhundert”, Gustav Droysen, 1886. From Wikimedia Commons.
Inline links: Wikimedia Commons
Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison1 mentions across 1 issues

Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 07, 2021 and July 07, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "An influential anti-lockdown paper - though cited more in the news than the scholarly literature - is Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison by economist Christian Bjørnskov". It most often appears alongside ABBA, Arkansas, Australia.

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1
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1
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July 07, 2021
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July 07, 2021
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Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
An influential anti-lockdown paper - though cited more in the news than the scholarly literature - is Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison by economist Christian Bjørnskov. It avoids the need for complicated models by using an index of lockdown strictness as the independent variable instead of looking at specific interventions, and uses deaths as the dependent instead of estimating transmission rate. Neither of these are a terrible choice, they're just going to be less sensitive. Bjørnskov's excuse is that he's an economist and wants to do this using economic techniques instead of epidemiological ones (the study is called "An Economist's Cross-Country Comparison"), but this makes his analysis less sophisticated.
Inline links: Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison
Dilbert Afterlife1 mentions across 1 issues

Dilbert Afterlife is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 19, 2026 and January 19, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thanks to everyone who commented on the Dilbert Afterlife post". It most often appears alongside 80K podcast, @speakukorg, Astralcodexten Com.

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Dilbert Afterlife
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January 19, 2026
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January 19, 2026
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Open Thread 417
January 19, 2026 · Original source
1: Thanks to everyone who commented on the Dilbert Afterlife post, including people who offered critiques/pushback. I’ll try to have a Highlights From The Comments soon.
Inline links: Dilbert Afterlife
Ding & Dafoe (2023)1 mentions across 1 issues

Ding & Dafoe (2023) is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2023 and April 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ding & Dafoe (2023) (Twitter summary here)". It most often appears alongside ACX, Atlas Fellowship, Bay Area.

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Ding & Dafoe (2023)
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April 09, 2023
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April 09, 2023
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Open Thread 271
April 09, 2023 · Original source
...ven my examples of historical non-race technologies were races at the time. See especially Erusian , Tatu Ahponen , Jumpingjacksplash , and (thanks to anonymous emailer) Ding & Dafoe (2023) (Twitter summary here ). I agree any technology with military applications is more than zero a race; I still think under most assumptions it’s only a race in the same se...
Discontinuous Progress In History1 mentions across 1 issues

Discontinuous Progress In History is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 14, 2023 and March 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "AI Impacts’ Discontinuous Progress In History". It most often appears alongside AI Impacts, Air Force, CIA.

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1
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1
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March 14, 2023
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March 14, 2023
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Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
March 14, 2023 · Original source
Maybe some jump like this could take an AI from IQ 90 to IQ 1000 with no (or very short) period of IQ 200 in between (is this plausible? See AI Impacts’ Discontinuous Progress In History). This kind of jump could happen in intelligence, coherence, or both at once. In this case, we would be very unprepared, and there would be no slightly-dumber-aligned-AIs to help us figure it out.
Inline links: Discontinuous Progress In History
46zb6hRVGB1 mentions across 1 issues

discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2024 and August 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB". It most often appears alongside 10 N Park Pl, 12th Ave South, 1525 Bank St.

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46zb6hRVGB
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August 29, 2024
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August 29, 2024
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Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Siddhesh Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe at 100 S Independence Mall W #110, Philadelphia, PA 19106 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M, https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations1 mentions across 1 issues

Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations 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 "Enter Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations , a collaboration between Anthropic". It most often appears alongside Abraham Lincoln, AI in Focus, Anthropic.

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January 03, 2023
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January 03, 2023
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How Do AIs' Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?
January 03, 2023 · Original source
Enter Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations, a collaboration between Anthropic (big AI company, one of OpenAI’s main competitors), SurgeHQ.AI (AI crowdsourcing company), and MIRI (AI safety organization). They try to make AIs write the question sets themselves, eg ask GPT “Write one hundred statements that a communist would agree with”. Then they do various tests to confirm they’re good communism-related questions. Then they ask the AI to answer those questions.
Inline links: Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations
Distribution Representations: Composition & Superposition1 mentions across 1 issues

Distribution Representations: Composition & Superposition 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: Distribution Representations: Composition & Superposition". It most often appears alongside An Introduction To Circuits, Anthropic, Anthropic interpretability team.

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1
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November 27, 2023
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November 27, 2023
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God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity
November 27, 2023 · Original source
...rs, which are much more comprehensive and interesting than this post was able to capture. My favorites are: - An Introduction To Circuits - Toy Models of Superposition - Distribution Representations: Composition & Superposition - Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning In the unlikely scenario where all of this makes total sense and you feel like you’re rea...
DIY Geoengineering - The White Paper1 mentions across 1 issues

DIY Geoengineering - The White Paper is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2023 and September 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Related: DIY Geoengineering - The White Paper". It most often appears alongside 2020 election, @eigenrobot, @jeremychrysler.

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1
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September 28, 2023
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September 28, 2023
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Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
2: Related: DIY Geoengineering - The White Paper
Inline links: DIY Geoengineering - The White Paper
Do The Math: Trump Is Toast1 mentions across 1 issues

Do The Math: Trump Is Toast is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 17, 2024 and December 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Michael Moore very confidently declared that Trump would not win again this year ( Do The Math: Trump Is Toast )"; "Do The Math: Trump Is Toast". It most often appears alongside 2016 US Presidential election, ACX Grant, AI.

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December 17, 2024
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December 17, 2024
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Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
10: Michael Moore, famous for being one of the few people who predicted Trump’s win in 2016, very confidently declared that Trump would not win again this year (Do The Math: Trump Is Toast). I think this is a good reminder not to update on single dramatic events - we get excited when someone’s right about an event where everyone else is wrong, but unless that person has a track record and can show their (probabilistic) work, they’re more likely to be a stopped clock than a consistent oracle.
Inline links: Do The Math: Trump Is Toast, not to update on single dramatic events
Documentação Crítica de Fátima1 mentions across 1 issues

Documentação Crítica de Fátima 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 "a six-volume Portuguese collection called the Documentação Crítica de Fátima (DCF)". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

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1
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October 01, 2025
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October 01, 2025
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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
In mid-October 1917 - that is, only a week after the miracle - the parish launched an investigation. Sixteen of our testimonies come from this process - conducted by a priest, related under oath, and witnessed by a clerk. A few weeks later, Church officials worried that local peasants might be too easily influenced, and started a search for educated or sophisticated witnesses; another seven testimonies come from this process. The diocese apparently didn’t trust the parish, and launched their own investigation five years later, including a call from the bishop specifically asking for people who had seen something different from the parish investigation’s story or even nothing at all; six reports are testimonies to this Canonical Commission (there are far more in Portugese documents I can’t access, and some of the secondary sources draw from this stock). The caretakers of the Fatima shrine gathered documents from all three of these investigations - parish, auxillary parish, and diocesan - into a six-volume Portuguese collection called the Documentação Crítica de Fátima (DCF). Of these, they made a 633 page selection available for free download as a PDF, which I was able to machine translate into English. Enough of these documents match other publicly available sources that the shrine caretakers would have to have perpetrated an implausibly complicated fraud to have made them up.
Inline links: Documentação Crítica de Fátima
Documentação Crítica de Fátima, English translation (1-250, 250-500, 500-633)
Inline links: 1-250, 250-500, 500-633
Does A Kind Of Overfitting Occur In The Brain Of Autistic Patients1 mentions across 1 issues

Does A Kind Of Overfitting Occur In The Brain Of Autistic Patients 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 "and Does A Kind Of Overfitting Occur In The Brain Of Autistic Patients". It most often appears alongside active inference, ADHD, Autism As A Disorder Of Dimensionality.

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1
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1
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June 14, 2023
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June 14, 2023
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The Canal Papers
June 14, 2023 · Original source
In other cases, I have more concerns. Every other computational neuroscientist thinks of autism as the classic disorder of over-fitting (see eg Weak Priors Vs. Overfitting Of Predictions In Autism and Does A Kind Of Overfitting Occur In The Brain Of Autistic Patients; there are probably better sources, these are just the two I can Google right now). It’s pretty concerning if the computational model is so weak that you can make cases for diametrically opposed psychiatry/computational-parameter mappings.
Inline links: Weak Priors Vs. Overfitting Of Predictions In Autism, Does A Kind Of Overfitting Occur In The Brain Of Autistic Patients
Doing Business index1 mentions across 1 issues

Doing Business index is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 11, 2024 and January 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "African nations are ranked at the bottom of the Doing Business index". It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, Africa, Amalgamated Kenyan Wells.

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Doing Business index
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1
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1
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January 11, 2024
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January 11, 2024
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Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
Most people have no idea how much harder it is to do legal business in developing nations. The upside of making Prospera-quality law and adjutication available in zones in Africa will be significant over time. My wife, Magatte Wade, is working to bring Prospera to Africa because of this. She also writes and speaks about the ridiculous over-regulation of business in Africa that makes it necessary - she has first hand experience of what it is like to do business in the US vs. in Senegal. The fact that African nations are ranked at the bottom of the Doing Business index is not an artifact of measurement.
Domstack1 mentions across 1 issues

Domstack is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 23, 2021 and July 23, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Dominic Cummings ... now has a Substack (…Domstack?)". It most often appears alongside Ace Attorney, Adam Smith, Amazon.

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Domstack
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1
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1
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July 23, 2021
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July 23, 2021
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Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
9: Dominic Cummings, formerly a top adviser to the British government, now has a Substack (…Domstack?) where he talks about the UK coronavirus response and his many other opinions. The “Ask Me Anything” threads are a particular gem - it’s hard for me to think of other examples of people with experience of the top levels of power being so accessible and willing to talk about it with randos.
Inline links: now has a Substack
Domus1 mentions across 1 issues

Domus 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 "architecture sections of newspapers and magazines (Wolfe blames Domus)". It most often appears alongside 3D printing, Abercrombie & Fitch, AI.

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Domus
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1
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1
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December 04, 2024
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December 04, 2024
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Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
But Wolfe does admit that some rich people voluntarily selected, or even commissioned, modernist buildings. He blames trendiness. There was a pipeline from the architecture schools (now dominated by the modernists) to the architecture sections of newspapers and magazines (Wolfe blames Domus, House & Garden, and The New York Times Magazine in particular). Rich people would read the magazines, understand that modern architecture was “in”, and go with it so as to not feel “left behind”.
Don’t Create The Populist Strongman1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Create The Populist Strongman 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 "Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman”". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity, Apple.

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1
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1
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May 07, 2025
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May 07, 2025
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Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
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
Don’t Worry About The Vase1 mentions across 1 issues

Don’t Worry About The Vase is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 24, 2023 and January 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Zvi ... blogs at Don’t Worry About The Vase". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Prediction Contest, AI Impacts.

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Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
54th: Zvi Mowshowitz. Zvi is a former trader and professional Magic player who blogs at Don’t Worry About The Vase. Since he’s one of the only other bloggers interested in forecasting, I often end up pitted against him in forecasting competitions. I always lose, and this won’t be the year that breaks my streak.
Inline links: Don’t Worry About The Vase
Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency1 mentions across 1 issues

Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 30, 2022 and September 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""I can highly recommend the paper 'Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency' by Kutlu et al. from last year for a different opinion."". It most often appears alongside 5HT2A serotonin, acetylcholine, Alice.

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Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward
September 30, 2022 · Original source
I can highly recommend the paper "Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core signals perceived saliency" by Kutlu et al. from last year for a different opinion. It's really well written and contains great experiments. The authors suggest that the reward center does not represent RPE, but saliency. They summarize their work with the following four points:
Drago et al 20091 mentions across 1 issues

Drago et al 2009 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 "Drago et al 2009 investigated an Italian mass release of prisoners". It most often appears alongside Abrams 2012, ACLU, age-crime curve.

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Drago et al 2009
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Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Drago et al 2009 investigated an Italian mass release of prisoners, where they were released with the caveat that if they were rearrested, they would have to serve not only the new sentence for the new crime, but the remainder of their original sentence too. This created a regime of very different punishments for the same crime; someone who was originally arrested for murder but released would have to serve a sentence for murder if (for example) they got caught shoplifting. They found that each extra month of a potential sentence decreased reoffending rates by 0.16 pp (1%) per month. This is on the high side of estimates, but in general we’ll find European studies find stronger effects from imprisonment than American studies; this is probably because Europe has lower incarceration rates in general and has yet to “pick the low hanging fruit”.
Inline links: Drago et al 2009
Drapier et al (2006)1 mentions across 1 issues

Drapier et al (2006) is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 16, 2022 and November 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the fifth patient in Drapier et al (2006) , which describes it as 'the first case report in the literature'". It most often appears alongside @AutismCapital, Adderall, ADHD.

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The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
I was only able to find one case report of pathological gambling clearly caused by selegiline rather than some other medication - the fifth patient in Drapier et al (2006), which describes it as “the first case report in the literature”. And this definitely isn’t because doctors don’t like recording all the weird things selegiline can do - see eg the three case reports of selegiline causing transvestism (1, 2, 3)! 5
Inline links: Drapier et al (2006), 1, 2, 3, 5
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Dream Machines 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 "In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes". 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
“About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC.” Around the same time, Nelson claims to have called Vannevar Bush and told him about Project Xanadu. Bush “wanted very much to discuss it with” Nelson, but Nelson “hated him instantly [because] he sounded like a sports coach” and never contacted him again. This, of course, proved to be extremely self-destructive (though I can’t honestly say I would’ve done otherwise). Because Xanadu was as good as dead. No one would give him the money he needed to work on it, especially not after Doug Engelbart poisoned the idea of hypertext. Nelson went where there was funding, working briefly on an early word processor called Juggler of Text (JOT). …And then he lost investment, stopped working on the project, and moved to Chicago, where he’d been offered a job teaching at the University of Illinois, to start work on a book. He would call it Computer Lib. In fact, he started work on another book at the same time, called Dream Machines. By the time he completed each of them, in 1974, ARPANET had been released, and his vision for Project Xanadu had evolved. He published the two works together—Computer Lib was his lamentation over the industry’s disdain for hypertext, and Dream Machines was Xanadu’s manifesto. Nelson designed and printed the book himself. Its pages mostly look like this: Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kp4P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff55d10e8-ef84-43a9-9f39-422d87ea182e_1600x952.png
Self-referential, multimedia, creative, and fun—they were a blueprint for the internet he was building. In the Dream Machines half, Nelson writes, “The real dream is for ‘everything’ to be in the hypertext. Everything you read, you read from the screen (and can always get back to right away; everything you write, you write at the screen (and can cross-link to whatever you read).” In one section Nelson asks himself, “Can It Be Done?” His answer: “I dunno.” Remember, Xanadu wouldn’t only involve links between works—it required hyperlinks, which as Nelson understood them, would need to contain the targets in themselves. (Eventually, Nelson would give these embeddings a new name—“transclusions”—and hyperlink came to simply mean “link between hypertext files.”) Every link would run both ways, each hypertext file would know exactly which other files were linked to it and how. This introduced a few problems, in the new interconnected ARPANET age: How do you keep track? Where’s the metadata stored? Can you afford enough space for it all?
A pay-per-click system like Nelson described would first be implemented in 1996. Computer Lib/Dream Machines became a cult favorite, and Nelson began to gather a small following. In 1979, he moved back to Swarthmore with a group of disciples, and they got to work. The crack team included:7 Roger Gregory, a University of Michigan graduate and Ann Arbor local who’d been corresponding over telephone with Nelson since reading Computer Lib in 1974. Gregory was a whiz with hardware, but suffered from regular bouts of depression, sometimes so strong they would render him “incapable of working.” Gregory paid for the house in Pennsylvania.
Inline links: 7
Drug Discovery Trends1 mentions across 1 issues

Drug Discovery Trends is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 24, 2022 and November 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "This article in Drug Discovery Trends says that compounding pharmacies have been selling semaglutide". It most often appears alongside ACE inhibitors, ACE inhibitors, Adderall.

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Drug Discovery Trends
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Semaglutidonomics
November 24, 2022 · Original source
“Mounjaro” sounds like the playful animal sidekick in a Disney movie. From a purely economic perspective, semaglutide costs the health system money (because it’s expensive) but also saves the health system money (because we don’t have to pay for obesity consequences like diabetes and heart attacks). Which effect wins out? According to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, benefits would outweigh costs if semaglutide cost less than about $8,000/year. Since it costs $15,000 year now, it’s not cost effective. But if Morgan Stanley’s model comes true and it costs $4,000/year in 2030, then it will be cost effective. So at some point, Medicare (and so insurance companies) may start covering it more out of self-interest. I can’t tell whether the model takes this into account or not. (there’s also a third-level effect where it costs the health system money again, because it prevents people from dying of obesity-related complications, and dead people stop needing expensive health care. I think health economists are supposed to ignore this level.) 11.3 million prescriptions at $4,000/year comes to $45 billion, but Morgan Stanley expects that not everyone will fill their prescriptions consistently or stay on the medication the same amount of time, leading to their $31 billion figure. Towards The Glorious Post-Obesity Transhuman Future The Morgan Stanley report shows that even the greediest pharma investors, openly plotting to medicalize obesity, can’t bring themselves to believe in more than 11 million US semaglutide patients by 2030. That’s less than 10% of the US obese population. Isn’t that kind of disappointing? We’ve got > 100 million people dealing with a condition that not only makes them unhealthy, but also causes them psychological distress, and makes lots of people low-grade disappointed in and repulsed by our society. And we’ve got an effective drug that treats the condition. And we’re going to use it on less than 10% of the people involved? In 2032, semaglutide goes off-patent. It will probably take a few years to sort out legal issues and ramp up generic production, but by the mid-2030s, its price will go way down. I don’t think there are technical barriers to getting it down as low as $10 - $100 per month. By then, maybe there will be even more exciting branded weight loss drugs for wealthy people to choose from. But at the very least, semaglutide itself should become much more widely available even to poor or uninsured patients. I’m not sure what will happen. Will there be an inflection point, where so many people use semaglutide that obesity becomes unusual again, and then the remaining obese people start using it just to fit in? Will obesity become an optional fashion statement, like shaving your head or getting a tattoo? Or will semaglutide end up disappointing us in some way, like so many promising drugs have before? I come at semaglutide from a transhumanist perspective. I want to hack genetics and biology until everyone is as tall as they want, as strong as they want, as smart as they want, and whatever gender they want. If you want wings, you should be able to have wings. And yes, part of this vision is everyone having the weight they want. I’m not sure this will happen, but for the first time I can see a clear path to how it might. Postscript 1: Should You Take Semaglutide? I can’t answer this, please ask your doctor. But I do want to add that there are potential side effects I haven’t mentioned in this post, including nausea, gastrointestinal problems, pancreatitis, and kidney problems. Semaglutide has been accused of slightly increasing risk of pancreatic and thyroid cancers. Studies have found trends in this direction, but these conditions are so rare that even over thousands of patients over many years, the increase hasn’t yet reached clear statistical significance. The current consensus position is that it may increase thyroid cancer by a tiny amount not relevant to most patients, and that it probably doesn’t increase pancreatic cancer. I think my father has looked over these data more and is less sure than other people about the lack of pancreatic cancer risk, but he can’t get the resources he needs to prove anything, and I can’t remember his exact argument. More broadly: like all medications, semaglutide has benefits and risks, and you shouldn’t blindly take it after reading one blog article. Postscript 2: Is There A Way To Cheat The System To Get Semaglutide For Lower Cost? Health care is much like airline tickets: everyone pays a different price for everything and there’s usually a secret way to get what you want for much less money. Is this true of semaglutide? Pharma company Novo Nordisk offers a Savings Card that they say brings the price down to as low as $25 per month. I’m a little suspicious of this - pharma company offers are rarely as good as they sound - but I don’t notice any obvious tricks in this one and it should probably be your first bet. This startup claims that they can get insured people semaglutide for a $25/month copay “after their deductible is met” by negotiating with the insurance company very effectively. I can’t imagine how that works or what they have to negotiate with, but they seem pretty convinced, so I would welcome more information. Otherwise, you don’t have many great options. Although there are two older forms of semaglutide not FDA-approved for weight loss - Ozempic and Rybelsus - these are both more expensive, milligram per milligram, than Wegovy itself. Canada is also of no help. The usual Canadian pharmacies don’t seem to carry Wegovy, and charge about the same amount for Ozempic as American pharmacies do. This article in Drug Discovery Trends says that compounding pharmacies have been selling semaglutide for $300/month, less than a quarter of the sticker price. This is a bit confusing: compounding pharmacies are small local operations permitted to dispense unusual medications by mixing existing ones together in nonstandard ways. They’re arguing that they can legally dispense the semaglutide because they’re mixing it with vitamins, which, fine, but how are they getting it in the first place? Everyone else seems as confused as I am: "Nobody knows how [compounding pharmacies are] getting it," said Karl Nadolsky, an endocrinologist at Spectrum Health. "Who's making it? [The pharma company that makes it] Novo [Nordisk]'s not giving it to them. They're the ones with the rights to the molecule, so how is anybody getting semaglutide?" Has nobody asked compounding pharmacists about this? Do they have a conspiracy of silence? Does the FDA sometimes send their goons in to extract the information, but the compounding pharmacists compound sleeping gas / smoke grenades and vanish into the night? Anyway, the usual authorities warn you not to take compounded semaglutide under any circumstances, but they’re the same people who tell you never to buy drugs from a Canadian pharmacy because they might be adulterated. You can decide how much you want to trust them. Postscript 3: What About Europe And The Rest Of The World? Countries that are not the US usually negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over price. Because of some combination of “negotiation works” and “they are free-riding off Americans’ hard work”, they usually get much lower prices. What does semaglutide cost elsewhere? This is hard to find out because government health agencies sometimes keep their prices secret, plus Wegovy mostly isn’t available in other countries yet. The only information I could find was from Britain, which is in the process of making Wegovy available to patients. It looks like NHS will “restrict the expensive drug’s availability to very obese people attending specialist weight-loss clinics”, but that it might be possible to get it from private clinics for £199/month = £2400/year. Wegovy has been approved in the EU but doesn’t seem to have made it there yet. I can’t find any information about any other country. Non-weight-loss-indicated versions of semaglutide are available in many countries, but I wouldn’t expect their health care systems to be flexible about redirecting it for weight. Canadian regulators have approved Wegovy, but it doesn’t seem to be available there yet. I haven’t seen any evidence that Ozempic costs less in Canada than it does in the US, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the pharma companies have figured out that anything that happens in Canada gets imported into the US, and they’re playing hardball this time. I don’t know whether Canadians will be able to get it for cheaper than Americans or not. Postscript 4: Predictions (all predictions are conditional on no singularity or global catastrophe) 10 million Americans on semaglutide (or yet-to-be-approved equally good or superior alternatives) by 2030: 75%
Inline links: Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, don’t think there are technical barriers, offers a Savings Card, This startup, about the same amount for Ozempic, This article in Drug Discovery Trends, Everyone else seems as confused as I am, NHS will, private clinics
Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs1 mentions across 1 issues

Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 13, 2021 and June 13, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs". It most often appears alongside Astralcodexten, Bay Area, biostatistician.

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Open Thread 176
June 13, 2021 · Original source
4: Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which Zach describes as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is so not medical advice)
Inline links: Zach describes, Harry Deuchar
DSM 51 mentions across 1 issues

DSM 5 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 28, 2022 and October 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft". It most often appears alongside 15th century, Adam, Almighty God.

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DSM 5
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Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum
October 28, 2022 · Original source
Paging Arthur Miller… You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of - the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church? Summers writes: It is safe to say that the book is to-day scarcely known save by name. It has become a legend. Writer after writer, who had never turned the pages, felt himself at liberty to heap ridicule and abuse upon this venerable volume. . . He did not know very clearly what he meant, and the humbug trusted that nobody would stop to inquire. For the most part his confidence was respected; his word was taken. We must approach this great work - admirable in spite of its trifling blemishes - with open minds and grave intent; if we duly consider the world of confusion, of Bolshevism, of anarchy and licentiousness all around to-day, it should be an easy task for us to picture the difficulties, the hideous dangers with which Henry Kramer and James Sprenger were called to combat and to cope . . . As for myself, I do not hesitate to record my judgement . . . the Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most pregnant and most interesting books I know in the library of its kind. Big if true. I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse.” But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration? The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials. We’ll go over each, then return to this question: why did a whole civilization spend three centuries killing thousands of people over a threat that didn’t exist? II: Thou Shalt Have Witches In Heaven Almost half the Malleus is devoted to purely philosophical questions surrounding witchcraft. Paramount among these: why would a perfectly just God allow witches to exist? The answer probably has something to with the Devil. And you can probably get part of the way by saying that God has a principled commitment to let the Devil meddle in human affairs until the End of Days. But then you get another issue: the Devil was once the brightest of angels. He’s really really powerful. Completely unrestrained, he can probably sink continents and stuff. So why does he futz around helping elderly women kill their neighbors’ cattle? Put a different way, there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band. But in order to defend the existence of witchcraft, Kramer has to argue that it does. Did you know: the German name for Malleus Maleficarum is “Der Hexenhammer” His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if He’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much. Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches. The rest of this part is just corollaries of these basic points. But there sure are a lot of corollaries, like: Question III: Whether Children Can Be Generated By Incubi And Succubi So, we all know that sometimes demons who look like hot men come and have sex with women in the middle of the night. But can these demons make a woman pregnant? It would seem that the answer should be no, because the Bible says God created Man in His own image, which suggests the conception of new humans is pretty holy, which makes it sound kind of blasphemous to suggest demons could do it. On the contrary side, we know that demons can have kids with humans. The Bible says so: Genesis 6 talks about nephilim, children of “the sons of God” by “the daughters of men”. And St. Augustine seems to think all those stories about Greek gods impregnating women were incubus demons. So “it is just as Catholic a view to hold that men may at times be begotten by means of incubi and succubi, as it is contrary to the words of the Saints and even to the tradition of Holy Scripture to maintain the opposite opinion.” Since the incubi cannot produce semen themselves, probably they steal it from some other human, then bring it to the womb of the person they are having sex with. Question VI: Concerning Witches Who Copulate With Devils - Why Is It That Women Are Chiefly Addicted To Evil Superstitions? Why are most witches women? Probably because women are awful: John Chrystotom says . . . what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)! Because women are less faithful, more carnal, and mentally weaker, they are more easily tempted by the Devil, and make up the majority of witches. Question IX: Whether Witches May Work Some Prestidigitory Illusion So That The Male Organ Appears To Be Entirely Removed And Separate From The Body. IE: can witches steal your penis? It would seem that witches can steal your penis. After all, many people claim to have had their penis stolen by witches. The fifteenth-century peasants among whom Kramer went witch-hunting claimed this. And modern people claim it even today. Frank Bures’ The Geography Of Madness is a great book about recent penis-stealing-witch-related panics, which happened until the mid-20th century in Asia and still happen in Africa. For some reason, this is a classic concern across cultures and centuries. But on the contrary side, God created the human body, and charged Man to be fruitful and multiply. So if the Devil could steal people’s penises it would seem that he must be more powerful than God, which is blasphemous. Kramer answers that witches cannot steal men’s penises, but they can cast an illusion that causes it to look and feel like the penis has been stolen. Classic namby-pamby liberal centrist compromise! Question XIV: The Enormity Of Witches Is Considered, And It Is Shown That The Whole Matter Should Be Rightly Set Forth And Declared This is is one of those “more a comment than a question” questions. Kramer suggests that not only is witchcraft a sin, but it is the worst sin. This section (plus the next few) is a list of all the different things witches are worse than, and why. Witches are worse than pagans, because pagans never knew about Christianity. But witches know about it and deliberately reject it. Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith. Witches are worse than ordinary heretics, because ordinary heretics only reject some parts of the faith. But witches implicitly reject all of it by supporting the Devil himself. Witches are worse than Adam, because although Adam’s sin had terrible consequences for the human race, this wasn’t really his direct decision. If we limit our consideration to the specific act, Adam just disobeyed God once, but witches are disobeying God all the time. In fact witches are more sinful than the Devil himself (!), and the Devil’s sin “is in many respects small in comparison with the crimes of witches”. For “both sin against God; but [the Devil] against a commanding God, and [witches] against One who dies for us, Whom, as we have said, wicked witches offend above all.” Witches are literally the worst thing in the entire universe. Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as witches. If you had the faintest idea how bad witches really were, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of witch-minimizer instead. This ends Part 1, but if you’re interested you might want to look at further questions from this section, including What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BmDQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0d8cbda2-8ffa-4d5a-9929-81981494f499_720x960.jpeg, The Geography Of Madness, need to, What Is The Source Of The Increase Of Works Of Witchcraft? Whence Comes It That The Practice Of Witchcraft Hath So Notably Increased?
DSM-51 mentions across 1 issues

DSM-5 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 21, 2023 and July 21, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Certainly, the modern compendium of mental illnesses (DSM-5)"; "the modern compendium of mental illnesses (DSM-5)". It most often appears alongside 2008 Financial Crisis, 2023 book review contest, 30-Year Mortgage.

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DSM-5
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Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
Etc. It might make sense to short the overall tech sector or a basket of publicly traded crypto-related companies so that your trade of time and foregone income to start your new crypto company is associated with only the risks you can control. But some risks you can’t hedge. These are the more interesting ones. There is counterparty risk (your trading partner blows up), liquidity risk (the market you used to hedge dries up), or even political risk: “Living in the developed world, it’s easy to fall into the seductive assumption that the rule of law applies strongly everywhere. This is far from the case. A foreigner trading in an emerging market is frequently among the first “victims” of any political turmoil.” Lebron is meticulous in the ways that he thinks about risk. He highlights that in the markets, you need to be exceedingly paranoid to survive: “Certainly, the modern compendium of mental illnesses (DSM-5) takes a dim view of people who think everyone is out to get them. Yet financial markets are different: people really are out to get you, after all.” I don’t think enough people consider risk and the hedges you can take in the context of a career. I’ve spent the past several years working at startups, where I’ve placed a hugely levered career bet. I’m trading my time and the opportunity cost of another job to work at my current employer. My salary, stock options, expertise, and social capital that I build from working 10 hours per day is fundamentally long (and has risks associated with): The tech industry
DSM-III1 mentions across 1 issues

DSM-III is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 22, 2023 and February 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "the 1987 version of the DSM-III included a new category". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agin, American.

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DSM-III
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February 22, 2023
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February 22, 2023
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Book Review: The Geography Of Madness
February 22, 2023 · Original source
This image (source) of a witch stealing a man’s penis, with a box of previously-stolen penises to her right accompanies the 1411 poem “Flowers Of Virtue” in its 1486 edition. Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486, so if the original text of Flowers Of Virtue contained the incident this picture refers to, it would predate Malleus. But the original text is written in poetic medieval German and I can’t find a good translation. When I wrote my review of the Malleus, people were surprised at the penis-stealing witch chapters. Yet nothing could possibly be less surprising; the penis-stealing witches are timeless and omnipresent. When commenters continued to doubt, I promised them this review of Frank Bures’ Geography Of Madness. II. Frank Bures is a journalist. In 2001, he came across an unusual BBC article: a mob had killed twelve people in Nigeria, believing them to be penis-stealing witches. A few months later, a similar article: five people, Benin. He tried to pitch a story about the phenomenon to his editor, who “said he couldn’t pay me to fly to Nigeria and find essentially . . . nothing”. For some reason - and this is the point at which I start to worry about narrator reliability - Bures became obsessed with this. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He started scraping together money to visit Africa on his own, story be damned: Nigeria gnawed at me. I knew that it was a terrible time to leave. I knew that [my wife] Bridgit, newly pregnant, wouldn’t want me to go. But I also knew that I had to, and that if I didn’t it would be a lifelong regret. . . three months later, I was the lone tourist on a plane full of Nigerians descending to Lagos. Africa is a relative newcomer to penis-stealing witches: The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan in the 1960s. But in the mid- to late seventies in Nigeria, there were waves of well-documented cases. One of these happened in the northern city of Kaduna, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu was working in his office when a policeman arrived, escorting two men. One of them said he needed a medical assessment: He had accused the other of making his penis disappear. As with [a previously discussed incident], this had caused a disturbance in the street. During Ilechukwu’s examination, he later recounted, the victim stared straight ahead while the doctor examined his penis and pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote in the Transcultural Psychiatric Review, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.” According to Ilechukwu, this was part of an epidemic of magical penis theft that swept through Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” During an incident, the victim would yell: “Thief! My genitals are gone!” Immediately, a culprit would be identified, apprehended by a crowd, and often killed. …but it’s been making up for lost time. Bures was able to find and interview one previous penis theft victim, plus the friend of another. Both described similar stories: someone had bumped up against them under weird circumstances, they immediately noticed their penis was much smaller than usual, they called out the culprit, and - apparently because the witch involved didn’t want to get in trouble - their penis was restored. Whatever weird itch this topic had given Bures, this didn’t satisfy him. He writes, very lucidly, about a desire to get closer to “the story”. He started bumping up against random Nigerians in suspicious ways, hoping one of them would accuse him of stealing their penis. Bures was an obvious foreigner, and a these panics often resulted in the suspected penis-stealer getting lynched, so this was a crazy thing to do. He could easily have died. Instead, everyone politely ignored him, nothing happened, and a slightly-disappointed Bures flew back to his poor family and abandoned his weird obsession. III. …for four years. After that the bug bit him again and he flew to Asia, long a center of penis-stealing witch activity. There are nature documentaries on lions, dolphins, even dinosaurs. They all share a common pattern: you talk about your subject’s habitat, their diet, their behaviors. The Asian half of The Geography Of Madness has the feel of a nature documentary on penis-stealing witches. And the last beat of every nature documentary has to be: this majestic creature, which once roamed from one end of the region to the other, is now endangered, threatened by increasing globalization and industrial activity. This is true for the witches also. Bures’ time in Hong Kong was a bust. There was a penis theft panic there forty years earlier, and he was able to interview some of the doctors who treated it. But they all said that was long ago. Now everybody is Westernized and has Western fears like vaccine injury or structural racism. They get Western mental disorders like depression and anorexia. The idea of witches stealing their penises seems as risible to them as it probably does to you. Singapore was also a bust. Bures had hoped it wouldn’t be, because it’s full of Malaysians, and Malaysia holds a special place in history as the spot where penis-stealing witches first made contact with Western science. The Malaysian word for the condition is koro (it means “head of a turtle”, based on an analogy to the penis retracting into the body the same way a turtle’s head retracts into its shell), and it is by this name that the condition gets listed in the DSM and the rest of the medical literature. Neither I nor Bures was able to find many ethnic Malays worrying about koro; most of the activity seems to be from Malaysian-Chinese. The Chinese definitely worry about it, attributing it to a wide variety of causes including poisoning, yin-yang imbalance, and - yes - witches. But Bures found nothing among any ethnicity. Once again, all the doctors said it used to be common, but disappeared as the city industrialized and adopted Western ways. Guangzhou was also a bust. The doctors said the same thing - in the old days, there would be huge epidemics of koro, social contagions that would impact hundreds of people at once. Now only a few superstitious rural people still believed. One traditional healer said he saw “three or four” cases a year. All the educated people had moved on. I once saw a nature documentary on Tasmanian tigers. Most people believe these have been extinct since 1930. Still, there are occasional unconfirmed sightings, especially in a remote area called Cape York, and every so often some scientists trudge off to Cape York with traps and cameras in the hopes of getting lucky. Bures decides end his own nature documentary with an expedition to the Cape York of the penis-stealing witches. This is a remote island village in China called Lin’gao, where in 1984: . . . rumors spread of a fox ghost - sometimes disguised an old woman roaming the land—collecting penises in covered baskets she carried on a shoulder pole. When two young men approached her and told her to uncover the baskets, they looked inside, saw that the baskets were filled with penises and died instantly of fright. Panic about koro would hit a village and last three to four days. When residents heard about a case in a neighboring village, the panic would subside, since that meant the ghost had moved on. The attacks slowly made their way around the island. The ghost struck at night, when villagers were sleeping. A chill would creep into the room, and suddenly the victim would feel his penis shrinking inward. He would grab it and run outside for help. A twenty-eight-year-old office worker was at home one night when: > “ . . . he heard a gong being beaten and the terrifying noises made by people who were panicking in a nearby neighborhood. He suddenly became anxious and experienced the sensation that his penis was shrinking. He was seized with panic and shouted loudly for help. Several men in the neighborhood rushed in and tried to rescue him by forcefully pulling his penis and making loud sounds to chase away the evil ghost that was thought to be affecting him.” Neighbors and family members were enlisted in rescue operations. Victims were beaten with sandals and slippers while the middle finger of their left had was squeezed, so that the ghost could exit the body there. The epidemic engulfed the island, with the exception of the Li and Miao minorities, who seemed to be immune to such fears. Researchers estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were affected, but that “no one died from genital retraction.” One baby, however, did die when his mother tried to feed him pepper juice, and a girl was beaten to death during a two-hour exorcism. “Numerous men suffered injuries to their penises as a result of ‘rescuing’ actions.” Iron pins were sometimes inserted through the nipples of women to prevent retraction, which caused infections as well. This was, as far as anyone knows, the last great koro epidemic in Asia. Bures had a terrible time getting to Lin’gao. He had equal trouble getting an interpreter; the natives spoke a language called Be, very distantly related to Thai but not at all to regular Chinese. Finally he found someone who was able to contact a local shaman. Like any good doctor, the shaman referred him to a specialist - in this case, the designated anti-ghost shaman, who lived in a different village. He spent most of his time off on various ghost-fighting missions, but eventually Bures and his team were able to track him down. I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?” . . . and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.” IV. So as a nature documentary, The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust. Still, Bures rescues it with some great analysis of culture-bound mental illness. A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too. Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something something penis something witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing. In Rajasthan, India, people come to the hospital with gilahari (lizard) syndrome. Patients say a lizard-like mass, sometimes visible as a skin swelling, is crawling around the body. They express terror that it will reach their airway and suffocate them. Japanese people may contract jikoshu-kyofu, a debilitating fear that they have terrible body odor. No amount of reassurances by friends and psychiatrists can convince these people that they smell normal, nor will any number of deodorants or perfumes make them comfortable. The French suffer from bouffée délirante, where a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes completely psychotic, with well-formed hallucinations and delusions - then recovers just as suddenly, sometimes over hours or days. This is not how psychosis works anywhere except France and a few former French colonies. Traditional Chinese medicine monitors the balance between yin and yang. The male orgasm can deplete yang, and sure enough in China (but nowhere else) some men suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion after they orgasm. “The symptoms can last weeks to months after a single orgasm, [and include] chills, dizziness, [and] backache”. The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US common psychological origins. I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time - one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything - was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative - he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam - and eventually left against medical advice. After going down the list, Bures asks the correct next question: how do we know whether or not our own mental illnesses are just as culture-bound as the Japanese or Malaysians’? Cultures that believe in witches have witch-related culture-bound illnesses; cultures that believe in demons have demon-related ones. We believe in science, so we should expect sciencey-sounding culture-bound illnesses, and these might be hard to tell apart from other, more physical conditions. So how suspicious should we be, and of what? Certainly we have some culture-bound mental illnesses. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a condition where some people supposedly become very sick when exposed to electromagnetic fields (like from cell phones). This sounds very scientific and makes perfect sense according to our culture, but researchers have found that placebo electrical devices make them exactly as sick as real ones, and that devices they don’t know about don’t make them sick at all. These people’s pain is real, and their lives are very difficult (although a few have found refuge in the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area in Virginia where the government enforces a ban on electromagnetic transmissions for secret military reasons). But their condition only afflicts them because they believe in it, much like with koro. Fine, everyone knows that one’s not real. What about DSM-style mental disorders, the stuff everyone’s supposed to believe in? Are those culture-bound? Unfortunately, I think Bures kind of flubs this section. He decides to focus on PMS (premenstrual syndrome), which is officially included in the DSM as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). After discussing the history of hysteria, he writes that: Today, hysteria is never diagnosed, except by unwise husbands. In 1931, however, an American gynecologist named Robert Frank revived the idea in a new guise. He published an article titled, “The hormonal causes of premenstrual tension.” Frank described symptoms that occurred in the week before menstruation: irritability, bloating, fatigue, depression, attacks of pain, nervousness, restlessness, and the impulse for “foolish and ill considered actions,” due to ovarian activity. Again, the cause was the uterus. Then in 1953, British physician Katharina Dalton elaborated on this, arguing the condition came from fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone. She called it Premenstrual Syndrome, and soon symptoms grew to include: anxiety, sadness, moodiness, constipation or diarrhea, feeling out of control, insomnia, food cravings, increased sex drive, anger, arguments with family or friends, poor judgment, lack of physical coordination, decreased efficiency, increased personal strength or power, feelings of connection to nature or to other women, seizures, convulsions, asthma attacks, not to mention flare ups in asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, and multiple sclerosis. If any of these symptoms occurred in the second half of the menstrual cycle, one had PMS. Estimates of the number of women afflicted ranged from 5 percent to 95 percent. In the 1980s, three women in the UK were tried for arson, assault and manslaughter. The three all claimed they had diminished responsibility due to PMS, and got reduced sentences on the condition that they underwent hormone treatment. After that, according to one study, American women flooded doctors with requests for help with their PMS. “Popular groups like PMS Action were founded to promote recognition and treatment of PMS by medical professionals. Private PMS clinics began to appear in the USA, modeled after those in the UK, and progesterone therapy was enthusiastically adopted, much to the chagrin of many gynaecologists who viewed its use as ‘unscientific’ and ‘commercial’, not to mention unlicensed." Based on all this, the 1987 version of the DSM-III included a new category: Late Luteal Phase Disorder (luteal refers to progesterone). It was proposed as a topic for further research, but despite the absence of such research, it was included in the 1994 edition of the DSM-IV under the name Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, or PMDD.96 In 2013, in the DSM-5, it was given its own category as a full-fledged mental illness. Yet neither PMS nor PMDD occur in most cultures. There are no biomarkers to measure them by. No conclusive correlation has ever been found between estrogen or progesterone levels and PMS. As one study noted, “the more time that women of ethnic minorities spend living in the United States, the more likely they are to report PMDD. Thus, if we are to accept PMDD as a reified medical disorder, then we must also accept exposure to U.S. culture as a risk factor for contracting PMDD.” If it is a syndrome at all, it’s a cultural one. I asked my wife what she thought of this, and she told me: The day before her first-ever period, as a teenager, when she had never really thought about PMS, she felt exceptionally weird, emotional, and generally off, to the point where it seemed to demand an explanation. Then she had her first-ever period, and retroactively explains it as PMS.
Inline links: source, my review of the, Geography Of Madness, Be, gilahari (lizard) syndrome, jikoshu-kyofu, bouffée délirante, suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion, run amok, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, National Radio Quiet Zone
DSM-IV1 mentions across 1 issues

DSM-IV is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 22, 2023 and February 22, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "it was included in the 1994 edition of the DSM-IV". It most often appears alongside Africa, Agin, American.

Reference entry
DSM-IV
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
February 22, 2023
Last seen
February 22, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Book Review: The Geography Of Madness
February 22, 2023 · Original source
This image (source) of a witch stealing a man’s penis, with a box of previously-stolen penises to her right accompanies the 1411 poem “Flowers Of Virtue” in its 1486 edition. Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1486, so if the original text of Flowers Of Virtue contained the incident this picture refers to, it would predate Malleus. But the original text is written in poetic medieval German and I can’t find a good translation. When I wrote my review of the Malleus, people were surprised at the penis-stealing witch chapters. Yet nothing could possibly be less surprising; the penis-stealing witches are timeless and omnipresent. When commenters continued to doubt, I promised them this review of Frank Bures’ Geography Of Madness. II. Frank Bures is a journalist. In 2001, he came across an unusual BBC article: a mob had killed twelve people in Nigeria, believing them to be penis-stealing witches. A few months later, a similar article: five people, Benin. He tried to pitch a story about the phenomenon to his editor, who “said he couldn’t pay me to fly to Nigeria and find essentially . . . nothing”. For some reason - and this is the point at which I start to worry about narrator reliability - Bures became obsessed with this. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. He started scraping together money to visit Africa on his own, story be damned: Nigeria gnawed at me. I knew that it was a terrible time to leave. I knew that [my wife] Bridgit, newly pregnant, wouldn’t want me to go. But I also knew that I had to, and that if I didn’t it would be a lifelong regret. . . three months later, I was the lone tourist on a plane full of Nigerians descending to Lagos. Africa is a relative newcomer to penis-stealing witches: The first recorded incident of penis theft in Africa I could find took place in Sudan in the 1960s. But in the mid- to late seventies in Nigeria, there were waves of well-documented cases. One of these happened in the northern city of Kaduna, where a psychiatrist named Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu was working in his office when a policeman arrived, escorting two men. One of them said he needed a medical assessment: He had accused the other of making his penis disappear. As with [a previously discussed incident], this had caused a disturbance in the street. During Ilechukwu’s examination, he later recounted, the victim stared straight ahead while the doctor examined his penis and pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote in the Transcultural Psychiatric Review, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.” According to Ilechukwu, this was part of an epidemic of magical penis theft that swept through Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” During an incident, the victim would yell: “Thief! My genitals are gone!” Immediately, a culprit would be identified, apprehended by a crowd, and often killed. …but it’s been making up for lost time. Bures was able to find and interview one previous penis theft victim, plus the friend of another. Both described similar stories: someone had bumped up against them under weird circumstances, they immediately noticed their penis was much smaller than usual, they called out the culprit, and - apparently because the witch involved didn’t want to get in trouble - their penis was restored. Whatever weird itch this topic had given Bures, this didn’t satisfy him. He writes, very lucidly, about a desire to get closer to “the story”. He started bumping up against random Nigerians in suspicious ways, hoping one of them would accuse him of stealing their penis. Bures was an obvious foreigner, and a these panics often resulted in the suspected penis-stealer getting lynched, so this was a crazy thing to do. He could easily have died. Instead, everyone politely ignored him, nothing happened, and a slightly-disappointed Bures flew back to his poor family and abandoned his weird obsession. III. …for four years. After that the bug bit him again and he flew to Asia, long a center of penis-stealing witch activity. There are nature documentaries on lions, dolphins, even dinosaurs. They all share a common pattern: you talk about your subject’s habitat, their diet, their behaviors. The Asian half of The Geography Of Madness has the feel of a nature documentary on penis-stealing witches. And the last beat of every nature documentary has to be: this majestic creature, which once roamed from one end of the region to the other, is now endangered, threatened by increasing globalization and industrial activity. This is true for the witches also. Bures’ time in Hong Kong was a bust. There was a penis theft panic there forty years earlier, and he was able to interview some of the doctors who treated it. But they all said that was long ago. Now everybody is Westernized and has Western fears like vaccine injury or structural racism. They get Western mental disorders like depression and anorexia. The idea of witches stealing their penises seems as risible to them as it probably does to you. Singapore was also a bust. Bures had hoped it wouldn’t be, because it’s full of Malaysians, and Malaysia holds a special place in history as the spot where penis-stealing witches first made contact with Western science. The Malaysian word for the condition is koro (it means “head of a turtle”, based on an analogy to the penis retracting into the body the same way a turtle’s head retracts into its shell), and it is by this name that the condition gets listed in the DSM and the rest of the medical literature. Neither I nor Bures was able to find many ethnic Malays worrying about koro; most of the activity seems to be from Malaysian-Chinese. The Chinese definitely worry about it, attributing it to a wide variety of causes including poisoning, yin-yang imbalance, and - yes - witches. But Bures found nothing among any ethnicity. Once again, all the doctors said it used to be common, but disappeared as the city industrialized and adopted Western ways. Guangzhou was also a bust. The doctors said the same thing - in the old days, there would be huge epidemics of koro, social contagions that would impact hundreds of people at once. Now only a few superstitious rural people still believed. One traditional healer said he saw “three or four” cases a year. All the educated people had moved on. I once saw a nature documentary on Tasmanian tigers. Most people believe these have been extinct since 1930. Still, there are occasional unconfirmed sightings, especially in a remote area called Cape York, and every so often some scientists trudge off to Cape York with traps and cameras in the hopes of getting lucky. Bures decides end his own nature documentary with an expedition to the Cape York of the penis-stealing witches. This is a remote island village in China called Lin’gao, where in 1984: . . . rumors spread of a fox ghost - sometimes disguised an old woman roaming the land—collecting penises in covered baskets she carried on a shoulder pole. When two young men approached her and told her to uncover the baskets, they looked inside, saw that the baskets were filled with penises and died instantly of fright. Panic about koro would hit a village and last three to four days. When residents heard about a case in a neighboring village, the panic would subside, since that meant the ghost had moved on. The attacks slowly made their way around the island. The ghost struck at night, when villagers were sleeping. A chill would creep into the room, and suddenly the victim would feel his penis shrinking inward. He would grab it and run outside for help. A twenty-eight-year-old office worker was at home one night when: > “ . . . he heard a gong being beaten and the terrifying noises made by people who were panicking in a nearby neighborhood. He suddenly became anxious and experienced the sensation that his penis was shrinking. He was seized with panic and shouted loudly for help. Several men in the neighborhood rushed in and tried to rescue him by forcefully pulling his penis and making loud sounds to chase away the evil ghost that was thought to be affecting him.” Neighbors and family members were enlisted in rescue operations. Victims were beaten with sandals and slippers while the middle finger of their left had was squeezed, so that the ghost could exit the body there. The epidemic engulfed the island, with the exception of the Li and Miao minorities, who seemed to be immune to such fears. Researchers estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were affected, but that “no one died from genital retraction.” One baby, however, did die when his mother tried to feed him pepper juice, and a girl was beaten to death during a two-hour exorcism. “Numerous men suffered injuries to their penises as a result of ‘rescuing’ actions.” Iron pins were sometimes inserted through the nipples of women to prevent retraction, which caused infections as well. This was, as far as anyone knows, the last great koro epidemic in Asia. Bures had a terrible time getting to Lin’gao. He had equal trouble getting an interpreter; the natives spoke a language called Be, very distantly related to Thai but not at all to regular Chinese. Finally he found someone who was able to contact a local shaman. Like any good doctor, the shaman referred him to a specialist - in this case, the designated anti-ghost shaman, who lived in a different village. He spent most of his time off on various ghost-fighting missions, but eventually Bures and his team were able to track him down. I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?” . . . and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.” IV. So as a nature documentary, The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust. Still, Bures rescues it with some great analysis of culture-bound mental illness. A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too. Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something something penis something witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing. In Rajasthan, India, people come to the hospital with gilahari (lizard) syndrome. Patients say a lizard-like mass, sometimes visible as a skin swelling, is crawling around the body. They express terror that it will reach their airway and suffocate them. Japanese people may contract jikoshu-kyofu, a debilitating fear that they have terrible body odor. No amount of reassurances by friends and psychiatrists can convince these people that they smell normal, nor will any number of deodorants or perfumes make them comfortable. The French suffer from bouffée délirante, where a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes completely psychotic, with well-formed hallucinations and delusions - then recovers just as suddenly, sometimes over hours or days. This is not how psychosis works anywhere except France and a few former French colonies. Traditional Chinese medicine monitors the balance between yin and yang. The male orgasm can deplete yang, and sure enough in China (but nowhere else) some men suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion after they orgasm. “The symptoms can last weeks to months after a single orgasm, [and include] chills, dizziness, [and] backache”. The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US common psychological origins. I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time - one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything - was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative - he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam - and eventually left against medical advice. After going down the list, Bures asks the correct next question: how do we know whether or not our own mental illnesses are just as culture-bound as the Japanese or Malaysians’? Cultures that believe in witches have witch-related culture-bound illnesses; cultures that believe in demons have demon-related ones. We believe in science, so we should expect sciencey-sounding culture-bound illnesses, and these might be hard to tell apart from other, more physical conditions. So how suspicious should we be, and of what? Certainly we have some culture-bound mental illnesses. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a condition where some people supposedly become very sick when exposed to electromagnetic fields (like from cell phones). This sounds very scientific and makes perfect sense according to our culture, but researchers have found that placebo electrical devices make them exactly as sick as real ones, and that devices they don’t know about don’t make them sick at all. These people’s pain is real, and their lives are very difficult (although a few have found refuge in the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area in Virginia where the government enforces a ban on electromagnetic transmissions for secret military reasons). But their condition only afflicts them because they believe in it, much like with koro. Fine, everyone knows that one’s not real. What about DSM-style mental disorders, the stuff everyone’s supposed to believe in? Are those culture-bound? Unfortunately, I think Bures kind of flubs this section. He decides to focus on PMS (premenstrual syndrome), which is officially included in the DSM as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). After discussing the history of hysteria, he writes that: Today, hysteria is never diagnosed, except by unwise husbands. In 1931, however, an American gynecologist named Robert Frank revived the idea in a new guise. He published an article titled, “The hormonal causes of premenstrual tension.” Frank described symptoms that occurred in the week before menstruation: irritability, bloating, fatigue, depression, attacks of pain, nervousness, restlessness, and the impulse for “foolish and ill considered actions,” due to ovarian activity. Again, the cause was the uterus. Then in 1953, British physician Katharina Dalton elaborated on this, arguing the condition came from fluctuation of estrogen and progesterone. She called it Premenstrual Syndrome, and soon symptoms grew to include: anxiety, sadness, moodiness, constipation or diarrhea, feeling out of control, insomnia, food cravings, increased sex drive, anger, arguments with family or friends, poor judgment, lack of physical coordination, decreased efficiency, increased personal strength or power, feelings of connection to nature or to other women, seizures, convulsions, asthma attacks, not to mention flare ups in asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, and multiple sclerosis. If any of these symptoms occurred in the second half of the menstrual cycle, one had PMS. Estimates of the number of women afflicted ranged from 5 percent to 95 percent. In the 1980s, three women in the UK were tried for arson, assault and manslaughter. The three all claimed they had diminished responsibility due to PMS, and got reduced sentences on the condition that they underwent hormone treatment. After that, according to one study, American women flooded doctors with requests for help with their PMS. “Popular groups like PMS Action were founded to promote recognition and treatment of PMS by medical professionals. Private PMS clinics began to appear in the USA, modeled after those in the UK, and progesterone therapy was enthusiastically adopted, much to the chagrin of many gynaecologists who viewed its use as ‘unscientific’ and ‘commercial’, not to mention unlicensed." Based on all this, the 1987 version of the DSM-III included a new category: Late Luteal Phase Disorder (luteal refers to progesterone). It was proposed as a topic for further research, but despite the absence of such research, it was included in the 1994 edition of the DSM-IV under the name Premenstrual Dysmorphic Disorder, or PMDD.96 In 2013, in the DSM-5, it was given its own category as a full-fledged mental illness. Yet neither PMS nor PMDD occur in most cultures. There are no biomarkers to measure them by. No conclusive correlation has ever been found between estrogen or progesterone levels and PMS. As one study noted, “the more time that women of ethnic minorities spend living in the United States, the more likely they are to report PMDD. Thus, if we are to accept PMDD as a reified medical disorder, then we must also accept exposure to U.S. culture as a risk factor for contracting PMDD.” If it is a syndrome at all, it’s a cultural one. I asked my wife what she thought of this, and she told me: The day before her first-ever period, as a teenager, when she had never really thought about PMS, she felt exceptionally weird, emotional, and generally off, to the point where it seemed to demand an explanation. Then she had her first-ever period, and retroactively explains it as PMS.
Inline links: source, my review of the, Geography Of Madness, Be, gilahari (lizard) syndrome, jikoshu-kyofu, bouffée délirante, suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion, run amok, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, National Radio Quiet Zone
DTM1 mentions across 1 issues

DTM is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 12, 2024 and July 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "DTM describes their territory"; "DTM lays the seeds for part 3 – the mad cow section – in part 1". It most often appears alongside 1980s, 1989, 1990s.

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DTM
Mention count
1
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1
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July 12, 2024
Last seen
July 12, 2024
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Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
July 12, 2024 · Original source
(This report was, as it happens, published in the exact same month as The Family That Couldn’t Sleep.) DTM came to know the family well. He befriended them by way of two members of their younger generation, Lisi – a woman terrified by the shadow of the disease, and Ignazio – the doctor she had married, who was more terrified by the shadow of the disease. Ignazio put together the pieces of the family puzzle, consolidating all the disparate diagnoses into a single disorder and filling out a lot of blank spots on family trees. When DTM came along, he was able to help Ignazio make the case that the family would benefit from the spotlight – that greater awareness of FFI could lead to a cure both for them and for a slew of other prion diseases. As it so happens, he is one of those nonfiction authors who serve as a character in their own story. DTM has some form of progressive muscular palsy. He is, or at least was in 2006, not entirely sure what it is. The relatively unimpressive state of genetics at the time had not identified his causative mutation, though it looked a lot like one of the rarer forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease2. DTM is pragmatic about this, the way everyone chronically ill is either pragmatic or doomed. Whatever he has, it is a defect in protein structure; his peripheral nerves decay not because of a problem with the nerves themselves but an inability of their scaffolding to hold them together, as he puts it. The last chapter of the book dwells on this, on the web of connections popping up between a thousand disorders. DTM’s disease is something vaguely similar, if you squint, to an exceptionally slow-progressing motor neurone disease; if you jump another level out, you see amyloid plaque diseases like Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s, and if you jump yet another level out, you see something like prions. His interest in the Venetian family was driven by this. Some of its members thought this a beautiful act of sympathy; others thought him a grotesque parody of themselves, an onlooker, a gawker, peddling their tragedy to salve his relatively insignificant problems. They are, he thinks, both right. That’s the beginning, and that’s the end. What happens in the middle? --------------------------------------------------------- The Venetian family lends the book its title, but they’re really more of a framing device. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is separated into four parts, of which the first and fourth – the shortest by far – deal with the family. Part 2 is kuru, the king of fucked up diseases you read about in clickbait Weird Medicine listicles. Let’s talk about kuru! Kuru, is, famously, the prion disease you get if you eat another person’s brain. Well, not quite. It’s a prion disease that became endemic amongst women in the Fore society, who ritually ate brains, one of which had an inherited or spontaneous prion disease. This is an important note – there’s a tendency (which the book’s later chapters engage in) to assume cannibalism just has a Prion Disease Generator attached. If you eat people who don’t have prion diseases, you won’t suddenly get one. Uh, don’t eat people. Anyway, part 2 is DTM’s historiography of Fore-Westerner first contact. It’s hilarious. Papua New Guinea is a frankly ridiculous place; one of the all-time best Lyttle Lytton winners (worst first sentence from a hypothetical or, in this case, real work) was “Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there”. The native residents were so hostile to outsiders that all the colonial empires had cut their losses – and when you think about the places they colonized, that says something. After the First World War, PNG was ripped from its nominal German ‘owners’, but no one else wanted the place. So, of course, they gave it to the Australians. It was thirty years and another war before we actually made contact. 1940s Australia was as ‘settled’ as it’d ever be; the cities were bustling and the interior was mapped. The kind of explorer who two centuries before would be heading to new continents had to console himself with Pacific islands. Console he did. The native peoples of the PNG coasts were hostile enough to the wannabe-colonialists that the Australians, flying planes overhead, were the first people to discover that the island’s inland was populated too. No one had broken through on land. In all this deep and angry rainforest, the Fore were the furthest out. They lived far into the island’s mountainous interior; DTM describes their territory as “nearly vertical”. Calling people primitives is a bit passe these days for understandable reasons, but no other term comes to mind. The Fore had no name for themselves; we call them by an exonym, “the people to the south”. They weren’t, to be clear, hunter-gatherers – they were slash-and-burn agriculturalists, but very well-fed ones. Despite the tendency in grain-focused cultures for poor agriculturalists to be stunted/malnourished, the Fore were a remarkably healthy people. Well, except for the famous bit. The first remarkable thing about the Fore was just how quickly they wanted to assimilate. Most PNG tribes weren’t particularly enthused by Western offers of injections/tractors/radios/Christianity. Yet as soon as the Australians arrived, the Fore made ceasefires in their wars with other tribes, volunteered to help large-scale Australian projects on the coast, started planting and trading coffee, and enthusiastically participated in censuses. It’s the only first-contact narrative I’ve seen where the colonizers were concerned about how badly the other guys wanted to be colonized. The next was the one that got their names in the history books. Australian officials started to notice a remarkable lack of women in Fore camps. Some tribes sequestered their women, particularly when Westerners were around, so at first they thought nothing of it. The high rate of unpartnered young men, though, was way out of PNG norms. DTM tells this part fantastically. The Fore chapters drip with the dread of dramatic irony. When the first breakthrough comes, you have to catch your breath: “Tiny” Carey noted something in the middle of August 1950 that deepened this mystery. He noticed that near the village of Henganofi there had been an unusual number of deaths. “It appears,” he wrote his superiors, “natives suffer from stomach trouble, get violent shivering, as with the ague, and die fairly rapidly.” [...] McArthur investigated a little more [...] One day in August 1953 he ran into more of the shivering people Tiny Carey had seen several years before: “Nearing one of the dwellings, I observed a small girl sitting down beside a fire. She was shivering violently and her head was jerking spasmodically from side to side.” It would be quite some time before anyone figured out what caused it – but the problem, as DTM notes, was that its cause wasn’t possible. Everyone priored that the weird undescribed disease in the Fore lands was some nocebo sorcery-sickness. Vincent Zigas, the first actual doctor sent to work with the Fore, tried to placebo-effect them and failed miserably: On the way, Apekono stopped at a hut and showed Zigas his first kuru victim. “On the ground in the far corner sat a woman of about thirty,” the doctor wrote. “She looked odd, not ill, rather emaciated, looking up with blank eyes with a mask-like expression. There was an occasional fine tremor of her head and trunk, as if she were shivering from cold, though the day was very warm.” It was almost exactly the tableau McArthur had witnessed in 1953. Zigas, though, was a doctor. He could do more than look—or so he thought: “I decided I might as well try my own variety of magic,” he remembered. He rubbed Sloan’s Liniment, a balm for sore muscles, on her and declared to her family and his guide: “The sorcerer has put a bad spirit inside the woman. I am going to burn this spirit so that it comes out of her and leaves her. You will not see the fire, but she will feel it. The bad spirit will leave her and she will not die.” The lotion penetrated the woman’s skin and she writhed in pain. “Get up! Walk!” Zigas commanded theatrically. “The woman struggled feebly as if to rise, then, exhausted, started to tremble more violently, making a sound of foolish laughter, akin to a titter.” That evening Apekono asked Zigas not to try to cure any more kuru victims; “Don’t use your magic medicine anymore. It will not win our strong sorcery.” This was a disaster. The Fore were so cooperative precisely because they hoped “Western magic” could conquer theirs. As it became clear it couldn’t, they turned hostile. The Australians had hoped to “modernize a Stone Age people”; now all their subjects were dropping dead before their eyes, from what they could only assume was a “hysterical reaction” to colonization itself. So, to solve this, they needed a batshit insane American. Carleton Gajdusek is one of the characters who dominates The Family That Couldn’t Sleep. He couldn’t not. You could put him in a car commercial and he’d dominate it. Gajdusek was a physician with a rare, intense combination of science and practice. He was a romanticist, a field worker, and a lover of everything strange. He’d been an army doctor, a government conspiracy-cover-upper, and a postdoc under Linus Pauling who described his intent as “to straighten out Pauling’s ideas about proteins”. He hated civilization, in a slightly-to-Ted’s-centre sense, and was passionate about “primitives and isolates”. He jumped at the chance to work in Papua New Guinea; he planned to conduct a multi-site study on child development in such cultures, and relished the opportunity to live in a “primitive” environment himself. He did all this so he could rape kids. Oh, he did it for the scientific curiosity and love of medicine, but he also did it so he could rape kids. Gajdusek was a pedophile in the actual-lifelong-exclusive-paraphilia sense, as opposed to the “metonym for child molester” sense. Some people who roll snake-eyes on the Sexuality Dice repress it, but some are perfectly happy to act on it; Gajdusek was #2 in its fullest form, the kind of guy who believes that a well-lived life includes raping some kids. DTM doesn’t shy from this, not for a moment. It’s the first thing he tells you about Gajdusek. It couldn’t not be; you couldn’t talk about why he went to PNG otherwise. When Gajdusek landed in PNG, he first found the place too civilized. He’d been promised a land of “cannibal savages” – where were they? After some traipsing, he found them, right where he was promised. The Fore were perfect for Gajdusek. They had some kind of medical mystery that’d been lost on everyone else. They ate each other, in exactly the way he loved detailing in his diaries (“”Women and children, particularly, partake of the human flesh,” he noted with pleasure”). As kuru cases popped up, he aggressively recorded them. He wrote lovingly detailed notes that he sent back to his Australian advisor. He wrote with intensity, with exclamation marks, with the joie de vivre of a man just where he wanted to be. Gajdusek smothered the Fore with ‘cures’ that never worked, but they didn’t get angry at him. As DTM dryly puts it: “Their children trusted him, and that was enough for them.” At some point, someone suggested sending an anthropologist...or an epidemiologist...or literally anyone with more credentials than Gajdusek and Zigas3. Gajdusek threw a shitfit, convinced this one-and-a-half-man team was enough to Solve The Problem Forever. But he got bored eventually – running off with another tribe with, as his diary notes at length, an apparent custom of youths ritually fellating older men – and Zigas, I dunno, the book neglects him a bit here. So they managed to sneak in some anthropologists. The husband-and-wife team of Robert Glasse and Shirley Lindenbaum4 were the first involved parties to give a shit about the Fore as people, rather than as colonial subjects/medical mysteries/walking sex toys. What they uncovered was fascinating. The Fore were cannibals, yes, but they were recent cannibals. They didn’t have an ancient tradition of eating their dead, like the other visitors assumed. They happened to be in contact with some cannibal groups, and after a Fore man died of “sorcery”, they thought: well, what would happen if we ate him? “People tasting it expressed their approval. ‘”This is sweet,” they said, “What is the matter with us, are we mad? Here is good food and we have neglected to eat it.”” If not for the wild coincidence that the first Fore cannibalism victim had a prion disease, kuru would never have existed. Glasse and Lindenbaum started to put together the pieces. They’d been sent down to rule out a genetic explanation – to track the kinship ties of the Fore and see how the disease ran through families. It didn’t run through families in any coherent sense, but it sure did run through cannibalism. The clincher was the age distribution. The Fore, ever enthused by colonialism, quit eating each other as soon as the Australians arrived. Children stopped dying of kuru shortly after; they simply weren’t exposed to the infectious agent. The couple sent the news to Gajdusek, who was off raping kids somewhere else. In the next part of the book, DTM runs through Gajdusek’s many conjectures of kuru’s cause – more like sketches or abstract paintings than like true hypotheses. Gajdusek was annoyed that someone else was doing something he “totally could’ve done”, and even more annoyed that another lab was running similar experiments – an attempt at a vaccine for a particular sheep disease had accidentally created a prion generator. But he was happy to swoop in and claim the credit for what he was starting to think of as “slow viruses”, an infection that somehow lays dormant for years. DTM portrays Gajdusek perfectly, in that “real life has no need for verisimilitude” way. Gajdusek was at once a brilliant man, an all-consuming narcissist, an entertaining character, and a monster beyond redemption. A lesser book might pick one or two. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep portrays him as all four, and on a personality level (as opposed to a scientific one), the Gajdusek-focused parts are some of the most gripping. --------------------------------------------------------- Outside of the jumps between the Venetian family and everything else, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is not siloed. The narratives of all prion diseases are deeply intertwined. This is what makes it a great book. It’s 300 pages of dramatic irony. You read the whole thing, waiting for the eureka moment – the point everyone realizes they’re looking at the same cause. It does, however, make it a tad difficult to review or synopsize. The book’s story is so weird – and, often, so at odds with conventional wisdom that trickles down about the Fore et al – that you have to recap quite a bit, and the book steadfastly resists recapping. The next couple chapters after we depart from Gajdusek’s credit-claiming are mostly about experiments with various prion diseases. They’re scientifically fascinating. Unlike some medical-books-for-general-audiences (cough, How Not to Study a Disease), DTM never talks down to the reader. He assumes someone reading a 300-page book about prions is smart and wants to learn about prions. He also has – you can feel it in his words – the agonizing experience of spending his life on the other side of the doctor’s desk, trying to beat into whoever he’s talking to that no, seriously, you don’t need to lie to him or try explain a complex disease at a fourth-grade level. The first prion disease studied was scrapie. Scrapie was a big deal – it starved and killed large shares of British sheep flocks, making it a serious economic problem. Veterinary researchers had tried to prevent or cure it for centuries. It was a veritable graveyard of ambitions: Quintessential was D. R. Wilson at the Moredun Institute in Scotland, who worked in the middle of the last century for more than a decade trying, with mounting frustration, to kill the scrapie agent. He found that it survived desiccation; dosing with chloroform, phenol, and formalin; ultraviolet light; and cooking at 100 degrees centigrade for thirty minutes. The scrapie researcher Alan Dickinson told me he remembered Wilson at the end of his career as “very, very, very quiet. Of course, that was after his breakdown.” “Now it is our turn to study prions. Perhaps we should approach the subject cautiously.” The problem, as DTM explains, is that prion diseases were impossible. They violated 20th-century understandings of biology. Proteins “were no more alive, and no more infectious, than bone”. Prion diseases seemed to have too many causes – genetic, infectious, and sporadic. They looked infection-like in some ways, but patients didn’t produce virus antibodies. Sheep exposed to scrapie, or chimps infected with kuru, took years to develop symptoms. Their facts did not fit together. In the 1960s, people started wondering. The unifying trait of prion agents was that they had to be denatured to be destroyed. Was this a particularly small virus defined by its protein coating? Or – even more outre – was it pure protein, no DNA at all? No one could figure out quite how the latter worked, but it was tempting. Gajdusek, by now a major figure in this field, kept a foot in both worlds. He didn’t want to stake his reputation on a no-DNA hypothesis, but he certainly sympathized. Enter Prusiner. Stanley Prusiner was Gajdusek’s counterpart. Where Gajdusek seemed permanently manic, Prusiner was deliberate and exacting. He entered Gajdusek’s “slow viruses” field in the early 1970s after a chance encounter with a CJD patient. He relished the laboratory in a way Gajdusek didn’t at all, and set out to optimize the hell out of his projects. Prusiner set out to isolate the smallest infectious particle in the scrapie agent. He injected tons of hamsters (hamsters got sick faster than mice) with increasingly tiny scrapie proteins, hoping to determine whether the Minimum Viable Scrapie was DNA. By the mid-1980s, he’d produced something so small it couldn’t possibly be a virus. Denaturing it destroyed it; exposing it to nucleic acid dissolvers actually made it stronger. Emboldened by this discovery, Prusiner set out to anoint himself the King of Prions. Here emerges something of a Voldemort-Umbridge distinction – the difference between cartoonish villainy and banal evil. Gajdusek is a bad guy because he rapes kids. Prusiner is a bad guy because he is the most grotesque stereotype of the Advisor/Peer Reviewer from Hell made flesh. Everything Prusiner did was to build his reputation atop a pile of skulls. When recruited as a peer reviewer for other prion papers, he wrote negative reviews to undermine their authors. He worked his grad students to the bone and intentionally destroyed their careers, telling them he’d “ruin them” if they entered prion research as competitors. He lied about the origin of the protein-only hypothesis, claiming he originated it a decade after it was actually conjectured. But hey, he was good at getting grants. I was surprised reading a lot of this, because for all the time I’ve been aware of it, the cause of prion disease has seemed settled. “Oh yeah, it’s a protein that gets all fucked up.” But DTM goes through just how unsettled it was right up through to The Family That Couldn’t Sleep’s publication. Serious confirmation only arrived a couple years later. Many people were deeply critical of the prion hypothesis – often, it seemed, because they loathed Prusiner too much to go along. Throughout the book, he cuts an uncharismatic figure. Gajdusek and Prusiner both won the Nobel for discovering prions, decades apart. This tells you something – the “discovery” of prions can be construed quite a few ways. Gajdusek formulated the hypothesis; Prusiner proved it. Gajdusek was grievously offended by Prusiner’s Nobel, perceiving his rival – not inaccurately – as a follower who never originated any ideas of his own. But Gajdusek was offended from a federal prison cell, so how’d that work out for him? Fascinating as all this is, no one published a book about prions in the mid-2000s because it was about kuru or FFI. They published books about prions because teenagers were dying, and people wanted to know why. DTM lays the seeds for part 3 – the mad cow section – in part 1. This is a discussion of scrapie, the longstanding prion disease of sheep. Scrapie was a medical mystery for centuries (remember poor D. R. Wilson), precisely because of the intuitive implausibility of prions. The scrapie chapter is a great history-of-science piece, covering the agricultural productivity revolutions of the 18th century, the surfeit of bizarre origins veterinarians concocted, and the treatments that never worked. Scrapie is not transmissible to humans – well, we hope. It’s concerningly transmissible to primates. But it’s been around for a long, long time, and it doesn’t epidemiologically look like humans get it...we hope. Anyway, you ever tried to generalize from one example? The British government did! In the mid-1980s, strange reports started coming out of the UK’s farms. Farmers were describing a new disease where dairy cows – incredibly docile creatures, under normal circumstances – turned hostile, kicking them as they went into the milking stalls. The symptoms looked to all the world like scrapie. Epidemiologists tracing the outbreaks found a unifying link with “cake” – animal protein feed sweetened with molasses. The scrapie-like symptoms must have traced to an infected sheep. But scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so it must be okay to keep slaughtering them, right? We all know how this ended. The best term for the British response to the mad cow outbreak is “cacklingly evil conspiracy”. The agricultural industry really, really didn’t need a huge zoonotic outbreak – so it decided it didn’t have one. They first suppressed all mentions that the disease looked like scrapie, then – when this became impossible – hyped up that scrapie doesn’t transmit to humans, so there’s nothing to worry about. The formal name of the disease, “bovine spongiform encephalopathy”, was supposedly chosen to optimize for unfamiliarity – it wouldn’t fit well in a headline. They emphasized, extensively, that there was nothing to worry about. Ever. At some point, people started asking questions. If there was nothing to worry about, why was the agricultural industry panicking so hard? As things became ever more worry-inducing, this turned down ludicrously twisting paths: Meanwhile, the Southwood Working Party and the experts who advised it were learning on the job. They learned, for instance, that the BSE agent entered the animal through the mouth and then followed the digestive tract into the organs that try to filter out infections—the tonsils, the guts, and the spleen—and from there traveled into the peripheral and central nervous system, and finally arrived at the brain. They also learned that pasties, meat pies, and even some baby foods contained tissues from a lot of those organs. So the Southwood Working Party recommended banning these organs, but only from baby food. This started a chain reaction of consumer doubt: if infected cow organs were unsafe for babies, how could they be good for adults? The government then banned offal, as the organs were collectively called, in all human food but gave the industry a grace period to get it out of the feed supply. Then pet food manufacturers began to wonder if what drove cows mad might not also drive dogs, cats, and parrots mad. The feed they sold came from concentrate made of the same sick animals that had previously made up the meat and bone meal farmers used. Their trade group decided to put a similar ban in place—immediately. So for five months it was safer to be a dog than a human in Britain. DTM spends pretty much this whole section of the book making fun of the British government. To be fair, they deserved it. They killed hundreds of kids in agonizing and preventable ways – they could take some ribbing. This is all throughout the mid-1980s to early-mid 1990s. Through this period, it wasn’t yet clear that mad cow could spread to humans. The panic was clear, and deserved, but it didn’t yet have a match for its powder keg. It would alight. The first suspected case of vCJD – human mad cow – was in 1994. Fifteen-year-old Vicky Rimmer developed a sudden, strange disease. Doctors gave her months to live...until she died in 1998. A couple other suspected cases trickled down through the mid-90s, including a young man who made meat pies for a living, whose grieving mother received a letter from the Prime Minister that “humans do NOT get mad cow disease”. (That must’ve been fun.) Soon, they couldn’t deny it any longer. On March 20, 1996, Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, stood up in Parliament to announce the news that had already appeared as a tentative conclusion in scientific journals and as rumor in newspapers for the previous two years: British beef was killing British teenagers. The first confirmed death was that of Stephen Churchill, a nineteen-year-old student from Wiltshire, who died in May 1995. Back in 1989, at the Southwood Working Party’s suggestion, the government had set up a surveillance unit in Edinburgh to watch for any evidence that BSE had crossed to humans. One worry had been that if BSE passed to humans, how would anyone know it? How would you recognize something you had never seen? It turned out to be easy: Churchill and the nine other teenagers who had gotten sick had spectacular amyloid plaques in their brains, chunks of dead protein almost visible to the naked eye. If sporadic CJD was a whisper, BSE-caused prion disease was a shout. The investigators sat open-mouthed looking at slides whose damage, they feared, portended the most severe epidemic in modern British history. This part of the book is not fun. It lacks the insane personalities and duelling careers of the other entries. It is an honest chronology of the vCJD epidemic – a gruesome failure of the agricultural industry, the one system that everyone is vulnerable to. The government and industry had completely violated their duty of care to citizens and consumers. They were paying the price. No one would buy British beef anymore – not while they watched their children die. Now here’s the thing: this is ethnography, not historiography. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a book from the mid-2000s. The epidemic was not at all in the rear view mirror. There were piles of unanswered questions that DTM constantly alludes to. We have eighteen years more hindsight than he did then. What do we know now? --------------------------------------------------------- In 2006, the vCJD epidemic looked like it was going to be a lot better than the worst fears. BSE itself was a huge problem for the cattle industry, but honestly, no one is too sympathetic to the cattle industry. People were not going to die in anywhere near the numbers believed. We had all sorts of reassuring data coming out about this, which DTM chronicles. We were learning that only some genotypes seemed susceptible to vCJD. We didn’t see any older people die of the disease. We were seeing numbers drop, such that vCJD must have a pretty short incubation period. Anyway, all of this is wrong! The Family That Couldn’t Sleep was written in the candidate gene era. Back then, the nascent field of human genetics was sure it was about to Solve Polygenism. Yes, the simple Mendelian monogenic patterns popular a few decades back clearly didn’t apply to common diseases, but how many variants could there be? We were about to discover the five genes influencing 20% of Alzheimer’s risk each, the five genes influencing 20% of heart disease risk each, etc., and once we were done we’d just do gene therapy and cure Alzheimer’s. A paper on autism genetics from 1999 was so outre as to speculate there might be as many as fifteen genes involved. The fact we are now using the term “omnigenic model” should tell you roughly how well this worked out. Do you remember SNPedia? If you were a 2014 Slate Star Codex reader, you might. 2014 was still pretty candidate gene. People were out there publishing papers saying a single variant could increase your life expectancy by 15 years. SNPedia was a site that beautifully categorized all of these, so you could do 23andme or whatever, look up your results on SNPedia, and make horrible life choices.5 It was eventually bought out by one of the consumer DNA companies, so no one ever edited it again, making it a great time capsule of early-mid 2010s behavioural/medical genetics takes. SNPedia will excitedly explain to you that common genetic variants make you immune to vCJD. They cite a 2009 post from the now-archived 23andme blog titled “No Good Evidence That Potential Pool of Mad Cow Disease Victims Is Expanding”, explaining how fears of late-onset vCJD are clearly debunked by new Scientific Knowledge. Everyone who developed vCJD in the 1990s and 2000s had an M/M genotype in a particular part of the PRNP prion gene, so the roughly half the population with M/V or V/V genotypes were immune. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep buys this, too. In fact, it buys it in an even more agonizingly 2000s way. The first sign that transmissible prion diseases weren’t genotype-restricted should’ve been the growth hormone kids. You might have heard this story – from the late 1950s through mid-1980s, human growth hormone produced from brain tissue was used as a treatment for pituitary dwarfism, until it turned out to spread CJD if the originating brain was infected. DTM discusses this, to set the scene for the genetics thing. He mentions what was the state of the art at the time – that a disproportionate share of both the growth hormone kids and sporadic CJD cases were V/V homozygotes. This, uh – so the book was written in the mid-2000s, yeah? Yeah. The conclusion DTM drew – and this was a common conclusion at the time – was that homozygosity somehow made you more vulnerable to CJD, and M/M homozygosity made you vulnerable to BSE-borne CJD in particular. We cannot criticise the author for not predicting the future, but we live in the future, and can say how this worked out. Turns out, nope, M/V heterozygotes totally get vCJD. After a British man in his 30s died of CJD in 2016, he was found to have vCJD and an M/V genotype. He was tested for vCJD only because he was exceptionally young for someone with a sporadic prion disease – meaning people developing it later in life would be missed6. Did you know up to 1 in 2000 people in the UK have latent vCJD? There is one line in The Family That Couldn’t Sleep that stopped me dead in my tracks when I read it: What happens to the Italian family in the end depends less on their own actions than on the world’s interest in prion diseases, which they cannot control. If lots of people are afraid of getting variant CJD, the family benefits. If fear of prion disease goes the way of the fear of swine flu or Ebola, then they will be orphaned again. THIS BOOK IS FROM 2006! Three years before the swine flu pandemic! Eight years before the Ebola pandemic! “If you’re looking for a sign, this is it.” --------------------------------------------------------- The last section of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep addresses BSE fears in America and a nascent internet subculture DTM calls “Creutzfeldt Jakobins” – people who track American CJD cases, trying to spot vCJD patterns. When reading his description of the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, my mind constantly, uncontrollably turned to covid. Here it was – an online community of people deeply skeptical about a disease’s official story, tracking every contradiction, every implausibility, every statistic that failed to apply to the individual. Self-described “redneck hippies” and “soccer mom Republicans” teaming up to find the truth hidden behind an impossible world. You know what they’re doing now. I’ve always combined a deep interest in medicine with a healthy distrust for it. People who are constitutionally inquisitive, anti-authoritarian, and suspicious about official narratives tend to end up skeptical of at least some mainstream claims in the field. This is not to say I think you should take bleach enemas or something, just that I understand the impulse behind concluding the US government was covering up a local vCJD wave. Traditionally, sporadic prion diseases are said to have a prevalence of one in a million. (Hold on to that for a second.) The last section of the book is a chronology of Americans finding bizarrely more than one in a million of their friends dying of sporadic CJD, often at inexplicably young ages, sometimes in geographical clusters. This is understandably suspicious. Then DTM goes on to reassure us by saying none of these cases were confirmed to have an M/M genotype, which OH GOD OH FUCK A number of high-profile people in the prion world, including Gajdusek, are clarified as not believing sporadic prion diseases exist. You get the impression DTM doesn’t, either. Now, how common are prion diseases? Eric Vallabh Minikel has an answer for you! Eric and his wife Sonia are prion researchers from a rather unique background – after Sonia was diagnosed as having a single-gene mutation with ~100% penetrance for prion disease, they left their previous jobs to dedicate their lives to curing it. It turns out, when you run the numbers, you get not one in a million but 1 in 5000 people dying of prion diseases. This is best described as “nightmarishly high”. I’m normed on genetic disorders. A genetic disorder that affects one in five thousand people is pretty common! I have known, in person, completely unselected, just from “random people I’ve met in my life in a non-medical context”, someone with a ~1/250k syndrome and someone with a ~1/50k-100k syndrome. I don’t think anyone in my extended family knows someone who died of a prion disease. I feel like it would’ve come up if they did! Prion diseases have distinctive phenotypes. Not distinctive enough, apparently, to avoid a lot of CJD being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s – but diagnosis is consistently insane. Something DTM reiterates throughout The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is just what prion dementia looks like. The characteristic dementia in prion diseases spares something – “self” or “recognition” or “reflection” – that is not spared by Alzheimer’s, or by most common dementias. Shouldn’t this be, uh, noticeable?7 They kill rapidly, often over the course of months, and often onset in midlife. ALS shares this pattern and is way, way more common than prion diseases; you hear about ALS far more in the “disorder people actually have” sense. What am I missing here? Anyway: 1 in 2000 prevalence of latent vCJD in the UK + extreme lack of clarity over whether scrapie is human-transmissible + blood donations spread vCJD + sporadic CJD prevalence keeps going up = ??? (Yes, I am annoyed that most countries have lifted their ban on UK blood donors, thank you for asking!) --------------------------------------------------------- But back to the book. The “American chapter” is one-third about the country’s response to vCJD, one-third about the Creutzfeldt Jakobins, and one-third about chronic wasting disease. The last part is the most interesting. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disease of deer. Like scrapie, it “probably, we hope” isn’t human-transmissible (eat venison at your own risk). Under natural circumstances, deer shouldn’t get prion diseases: A prion plague should not be possible among ruminants in the wild. Deer are not cannibals, as the cows that spread BSE were forced to be; and, because deer and elk are not domesticated, they do not have enough contact with one another to spread a prion infection the way sheep are thought to spread scrapie. But deer do not live as they used to live, humans having once again brought their ambitions to bear on the natural course of things. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a book of medical anthropology. Anthropology of the Veneto, anthropology of Papua New Guinea, anthropology of 1990s Britain. Here, it is an anthropology of America. Americans, having won the world, still fight to win their own backyard. The North American continent is geographically diverse, cutting through rain-snow-shine, mountains jutting over plains, cities sprawling into wilderness, habitations criss-cross dotted with surprisingly few empty zones. Go somewhere like Denver, the Mile High City, three million people fighting against nature. Few other countries have anything like this; geographically vast polities usually have uninhabitable blocks. Australians are twenty-five million people clustered against the shore. It still surprises me, after all this time, how every US state has a meaningful city8. Midcentury Denver, growing and sprawling out across its mountains, started to run into their natural inhabitants – deer. Starvation is one way nature adjusts the deer population to the available food supply. People did not usually see this process, but in the 1950s and 1960s Colorado became more densely settled, reducing forested areas and forcing deer to look longer and harder for food. At the same time, the state enacted conservation laws, limiting when and where hunters could shoot. Soon emaciated deer began wandering onto the lawns and through suburban streets looking for a meal. People began to feed them, only to find that they died anyway. They would drop dead by haystacks, along highways, and in flower beds. In the late 1960s, a young biologist named Gene Schoonveld tried to figure out why the deer starved even when they were fed.9 He deprived some deer of food for a while, “[h]e cut windows in their stomachs to see what went on inside, and then he began to feed them”. While this was going on, he had a control group of healthy, well-fed deer as backups in case anything went wrong. It did...but not to the experimental group. The pen in which the deer were kept also housed sheep, which, it turned out, were scrapie carriers. The deer somehow acquired scrapie – there’s a huge unanswered question here, which DTM doesn’t address. How did they get scrapie? They didn’t eat the sheep, presumably. Did it somehow transmit from casual contact? This is not supposed to happen. And yet: the deer in the sheep pen started dying of a mysterious scrapie-like disease, one never reported before, that would go on to infect thousands. These deer were released into the wild. Ten years later, the first reports of chronic wasting disease came out. The disease spread across deer and elk in the western half of the country. By the turn of the millennium, cases were exploding – and lost all geographical restriction. DTM can report up to 2005, at which point it was floating around Upstate New York. This kind of spread doesn’t track natural deer migration. That’s irrelevant, because nothing about CWD’s spread is natural. We shift gears into an anthropology of the American hunter. The hunter wants to shoot the most impressive buck, to bag himself one with as many “points” as possible – one whose antlers branch out most. A “ten-point buck” has five branches on each horn: Original by Ric McArthur Nature doesn’t make enough bucks with perfectly symmetrical ten-point horns. To fill the demand, the market had to step in. Thus was born the deer farm industry, which raises captive deer in better genetic and nutritional conditions than Nature permits, then ships them across the country so hunters who couldn’t get legit ten-point bucks get the taxidermy piece for their wall. These are controversial amongst hunters and illegal in numerous states – but the industry is big enough to spread CWD. (The kind of hunter who needs a deer shipped to his house is the kind of hunter who will fumble killing it.) Another problem is supplemental feeding – leaving out protein-enriched food for deer to eat. This produces “trophy class animals at an earlier age”, but again, what’s in that protein? (“It is much like feeding your cows 41 percent protein cottonseed cake during the winter to raise the protein level in the cow’s diet to a level that will maintain acceptable production”, says that article from 1991.)10 The book segues into a vignette. CWD was new in Wisconsin in the early 2000s, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources was optimistic it could eradicate it. In a state with a love of hunting, you could, in theory, recruit people to kill every single deer in a 400-square-mile radius: In many states, the state would have had to call out the National Guard for such an onslaught, but hunting is a passion in Wisconsin. Hunters shoot 450,000 deer every year, more than in any other state. “I’m looking for ardent hunters to help us, unless fear or their wives keep them away,” one DNR official told a Milwaukee magazine. The state extended the normal hunting season and waived the usual limit of one buck per hunter, and the hunters came out in force. The whole affair was gruesome – one official called it “hunting for slob hunters”. If you’re trying to eradicate a prion disease, you can’t very well let people take the carcasses home to eat. Bodies piled up in control stations, decomposition mingling with bleach. The 2002 hunt established a base rate of 2% for chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin deer, with the most affected areas getting up to 10%. Further hunts in 2003, 2004, and 2005 spread to wider and wider areas – and didn’t move the needle one bit. This is to say that CWD is quite a bit more common in the American deer population than BSE ever was in British cattle. Since publication, it’s popped up in Norway and South Korea. Notably, Norway doesn’t allow for the import of cervids, raising numerous questions about how it got there. There are no unambiguous cases of CWD transmission to humans, and in vivo/in vitro primate studies have mixed results. There sure are some unusually young hunters with sporadic CJD, though. But don’t worry, most of them aren’t M/M homozygotes! There is an absolute ton going on in this book. I’ve had to skim over whole sections. Parts that couldn’t be easily slotted into a narrative review include: When Gajdusek was invited to a party at Prusiner’s house, he was horrified to find his rival had purchased hundreds of New Guinean statues – all with the genitals removed.
Inline links: 2, Lyttle Lytton, 3, 4, a couple years later, concerningly transmissible to primates, omnigenic model, you might, 5, SNPedia, a 2009 post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N93S!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fced2eca3-ec58-40b8-8c13-debdb559ab8f_651x601.png, Yeah., nope, M/V heterozygotes totally get vCJD, 6, up to 1 in 2000 people in the UK have latent vCJD, bleach enemas, has an answer for you, 7, blood donations spread vCJD, going, up, 8, 9, not supposed to happen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0J8B!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a64b287-a7c6-4d82-bbe1-da949fc93118_1024x683.png, Ric McArthur, controversial, amongst, hunters, illegal in numerous states, trophy class animals at an earlier age, 10, Norway, South Korea, mixed results, sure are
DutchNews1 mentions across 1 issues

DutchNews 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 "https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/dutch-drugs-deaths-including-prescription-drugs-double-in-two-years/". It most often appears alongside A History Of Mankind, ACS, Alexander Turok.

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DutchNews
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Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/dutch-drugs-deaths-including-prescription-drugs-double-in-two-years/
Inline links: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/dutch-drugs-deaths-including-prescription-drugs-double-in-two-years/
DW1 mentions across 1 issues

DW is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 06, 2023 and June 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "DW ( blog ) writes : Sports team analogy is probably even more apt here than Scott realizes". It most often appears alongside Andrew Ng, AshLael, blog.

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DW
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Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
...t the same chances of getting their paper in all else being equal. (Really big names sometimes get the "even if it is unreadable, there must be wisdom in it" treatment.) DW ( blog ) writes : Sports team analogy is probably even more apt here than Scott realizes, especially salary capped and contractually strict ones like the NBA. Just like in academia, in the NBA a rookie who has the chance to develop into the superstar is far...
Dwarkesh.com1 mentions across 1 issues

Dwarkesh.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 "https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you 3) www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic". It most often appears alongside 1108 R St, 11841 Wagner Street, 131 Colonie Center.

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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
Dynamic Spanish1 mentions across 1 issues

Dynamic Spanish is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "prototype Oculus Quest app called Dynamic Spanish". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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Dynamic Spanish
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#71: Oculus App For Language Learning We have a prototype Oculus Quest app called Dynamic Spanish, available here: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4231524270226603/ The co-founders are a husband-wife team from the UK. Dave is a chartered chemical engineer by trade, and is the camera operator, post-production lead, and general techie. Katie studied languages at university, has worked as a language teacher for many years, and is responsible for managing syllabus creation with language-specific experts. The next few years will be spent filming the classroom scenes for more languages (in London), before travelling to film native speakers in interactive scenarios around the world, and capturing the sights and sounds of the countries for students to virtually explore in narrated guided Trips. We are creating courses that can be completed over a few months, giving learners the confidence to speak their new language in real life, and connect more deeply with the cultures that speak it. We hope this project is appealing to a generous do-gooder, who is excited by the prospect of helping to build a positive vision of accessible education.