Publications: K

Substacks, magazines, zines, journals, and publications referenced in the archive. This section collects the K 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.

Kaiser Health Network

Kaiser Health Network is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 29, 2022 and December 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kaiser Health Network’s Something Much Deadlier Than The Wuhan Virus Lurks Near You". It most often appears alongside Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, Adobe Illustrator, Ahmed Chalabi.

Reference entry
Kaiser Health Network
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1
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1
First seen
December 29, 2022
Last seen
December 29, 2022
December 29, 2022 · Original source
In order to find people who were saying this when it wasn’t true, I restricted my Google search to articles from before June 1 2020. Most of the articles I found were from establishment media sources, for example Los Angeles Times’ The Flu Has Killed Far More People Than Coronavirus. So Why All The Frenzy About COVID-19? or Kaiser Health Network’s Something Much Deadlier Than The Wuhan Virus Lurks Near You. These articles were written before COVID had spread very far in the United States, and were right that it had (thus far) killed far fewer people than the flu that year. This was obviously an idiotic way to think about it, and I yelled at them at the time. Still, they weren’t making anything up, just thinking about the (true) relative death counts in a really dumb way.
Kari Lake Trial Bombshell: Audit Reveals 42.5% of Ballots Randomly Sampled Were ILLEGAL Ballots

Kari Lake Trial Bombshell: Audit Reveals 42.5% of Ballots Randomly Sampled Were ILLEGAL Ballots is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 22, 2022 and December 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Or how about this article: Kari Lake Trial Bombshell: Audit Reveals 42.5% of Ballots Randomly Sampled Were ILLEGAL Ballots". It most often appears alongside Bounded Distrust, Free Market For Education: Economists Don’t Buy It, Infowars.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
December 22, 2022
Last seen
December 22, 2022
December 22, 2022 · Original source
Or how about this article: Kari Lake Trial Bombshell: Audit Reveals 42.5% of Ballots Randomly Sampled Were ILLEGAL Ballots. This describes the results of a real audit. It looks like 42.5% of ballots audited were printed the wrong size (19 inch ballots on 20 inch paper); if there’s some regulation saying the ballots have to be the right size, I guess this might be “ILLEGAL”. The Lake campaign says this proves some kind of foul play. The government argues that maybe they messed up printing the ballots, but it was an honest mistake, and if it rendered the ballots machine-unreadable they would have counted them by hand later, so the results are still fine. Infowars does a terrible job providing balance; they mostly just quote the Lake campaign’s accusations that it was sinister, while ignoring or downplaying the more plausible government statements. Still, on the most nitpicky level, as far as I can tell the article doesn’t say a lot which is literally false. Perhaps great journalism would investigate how the printing process worked and where it went wrong, but as far as I know neither side does that - they just report the relevant officials’ claims in more vs. less accusatory tones and expect you to make a judgment call based on your priors (mine are on “honest mistake”).
Karlin’s blog

Karlin’s blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 30, 2022 and March 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "comment by a reader of Karlin’s blog". It most often appears alongside American Republicans, AP, Bahamas.

Reference entry
Karlin’s blog
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1
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1
First seen
March 30, 2022
Last seen
March 30, 2022
March 30, 2022 · Original source
See also this comment by a reader of Karlin’s blog:
Karlstack

Karlstack is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2022 and August 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "conclusions of this Karlstack article". It most often appears alongside AI, CFTC, Connor Leahy.

Reference entry
Karlstack
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1
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1
First seen
August 08, 2022
Last seen
August 08, 2022
August 08, 2022 · Original source
1: Lots of people have asked for my thoughts on CFTC shutting down PredictIt. I’ll write something on this next Monday, but for now I tentatively agree the conclusions of this Karlstack article. Short version: the guy on Twitter claiming responsibility is probably a troll; more likely this is Kalshi/Sequoia Capital weaponizing the CFTC to shut down competitors and get a monopoly. PredictIt’s parent group has a link to contact your member of Congress and other relevant officials here, but the website doesn’t work very well and I doubt the political campaign will work much better.
Kelly Bets On Civilization

Kelly Bets On Civilization 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 "See also Kelly Bets On Civilization". It most often appears alongside Abraham Davenport, AI Policy Institute, Arizona.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
December 01, 2023
Last seen
December 01, 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
My own response is that “tech is usually good, trying to slow new tech usually puts you on the wrong side of history, but in fact AI will destroy the world” is a perfectly coherent way things can actually be. Having admitted this is a possible world, just saying “BUT TECH IS USUALLY GOOD! IN MOST CASES WANTING TO SLOW DOWN TECH WOULD USUALLY PUT YOU ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY!” in a louder and louder voice does nothing to prove this isn’t the world you’re in. I think it’s tempting, because usually heuristics form bright-line boundaries that save us from having to legislate each individual case. But when a specific individual case might destroy the world, I’m afraid you have to legislate it individually. See also Kelly Bets On Civilization.
Kendler et al 2015

Kendler et al 2015 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 26, 2025 and June 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "These were Kendler et al 2015 (o3 claimed heritability of 0.5 - 0.6)"; "I excluded two studies that o3 said had good data, but where it couldn’t explain its sources well enough to satisfy me. These were Kendler et al 2015 (o3 claimed heritability of 0.5 - 0.6)". It most often appears alongside Aftab, Alex Young, Arthur Jensen.

Reference entry
Kendler et al 2015
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
June 26, 2025
Last seen
June 26, 2025
June 26, 2025 · Original source
Swedish National Sample: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01500-2/tables/2, Table 2B, first column, second and third rows. 11I made this table with the help of the o3 AI. It gave me a longer list of seven studies, but admitted that many of them didn’t list heritabilities and it was calculating them itself based on other statistics that were reported. In some cases, I was able to replicate its calculations; in others, it seemed to be hallucinating the relevant numbers, or had calculations complicated enough that I couldn’t prove that it wasn’t. I excluded two studies that o3 said had good data, but where it couldn’t explain its sources well enough to satisfy me. These were Kendler et al 2015 (o3 claimed heritability of 0.5 - 0.6) and Capron & Duyme 1989 (o3 claimed heritability of 0.4). Here are sources for the remaining: Texas adoption: https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/heritable/adoption/2021-loehlin.pdf , Table 6 . Heritability = 2*correlations. The first row of the table lists three parent-child IQ correlations (IQBM): 0.3, 0.34, and 0.35. I took the median, 0.34, and doubled it to 0.68.
Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon

Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 24, 2025 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "linked me to Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 24, 2025
Last seen
October 24, 2025
October 24, 2025 · Original source
This is probably my leading theory at this point, but I’m still not thrilled with it. Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon The second most interesting response to the post came from sapient_fungus on the subreddit, who linked me to Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon:
The second most interesting response to the post came from sapient_fungus on the subreddit, who linked me to Khomeini’s Face Is In The Moon:
Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020

Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020 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 "see Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020". It most often appears alongside 5HT2A serotonin, acetylcholine, Alice.

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1
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1
First seen
September 30, 2022
Last seen
September 30, 2022
September 30, 2022 · Original source
One neuroscientific perspective on this is that in order for dopamine to track reward prediction *error* (RPE), it is logically necessary that some other piece of neural circuitry track reward prediction *per se*, often called "value." Those of us who think that dopamine is computing RPE on a moment-by-moment basis (the first derivative of value; see Kim, Malik et al., Cell, 2020) therefore generally also believe that some other part of the brain, especially the ventral striatum (aka nucleus accumbens) and perhaps also the prefrontal cortex, maintains an estimate of value that gets updated by dopamine. And indeed, there are dozens of papers reporting that neural firing in these brain regions correlate with value over and above RPE.
King Cnut

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

Reference entry
King Cnut
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
September 15, 2023
Last seen
September 15, 2023
September 15, 2023 · Original source
The Mind of a Bee, reviewed by Peter Curry. Peter is a writer and researcher, and his Substack is King Cnut. He writes about neuroscience there with a specific focus on learning, memory and animal cognition. He's available for research work, so if anyone would like to get in contact, please reach out - there’s a contact page on the blog.
King of Daydreams

King of Daydreams 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 "She’ll be experimenting with more essays on her new blog, King of Daydreams". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry
King of Daydreams
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 17, 2025
Last seen
October 17, 2025
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.
Kiplinger

Kiplinger is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 23, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "using two different sets of price data - one from Kiplinger, one from Zillow"; "using two different sets of price data - one from Kiplinger". It most often appears alongside 1978, 2016 essay, A Resounding Success Or Disastrous Failure: Re-examining The Interpretation Of Evidence On The Portuguese Decriminalisation Of Illicit Drugs.

Reference entry
Kiplinger
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
June 23, 2022
Last seen
June 23, 2022
June 23, 2022 · Original source
I was suspicious of using a state-based analysis to talk about cities, so I repeated her work with the 50 biggest US cities, using two different sets of price data - one from Kiplinger, one from Zillow. I found the Zillow numbers a little more plausible; here they are: This was slightly lower, r^2 = 0.42, but still pretty good! I also don’t think my city homelessness data were perfect (people report homelessness data not by city but by “continuum of care area”, and it’s complicated to figure out what the overall population of each area is), so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s responsible for most of the decay from Alyssa’s analysis to mine. Here you can see that San Francisco has a pretty high homelessness rate, but no worse than some other big cities like DC, Boston, and New York (Shellenberger, to his credit, mentions this in the book). So how come everyone talks about SF all the time? Alyssa gives two main reasons. First, SF homeless tend to concentrate in a few areas downtown; this is also where a lot of the tourists and businesspeople are, so the average tourist or businessperson in San Francisco sees a lot more homeless people than they would if they were evenly distributed throughout the city. And second, SF homeless are less likely to be sheltered than homeless people elsewhere; Shellenberger notes that “over 99% of New York’s homeless have access to shelter. In San Francisco, just 42% do” (see here for other cities). Source is here; I think “street homeless” means the same as “unsheltered” We’ll talk more in Part 4 about why this might be, but one common theory is climate: San Francisco has year-round above-freezing temperatures, so there’s less urgency to shelter everyone. Alyssa shows that the relationship between temperature and percent unsheltered is strong: That regression line looks suspicious, but I hear computers are never wrong. So one possible conclusion is that SF has around the amount of homelessness you would predict from its very high housing prices, and around the percent unsheltered you would predict from its balmy winter weather, and there’s nothing further to be explained. Shellenberger does not like this conclusion. San Francisco’s mild climate alone cannot explain why it has more homeless people than other cities. Miami, Phoenix, and Houston have year-round warm weather and far fewer homeless than San Francisco per capita. Per capita homelessness in San Francisco, Greater Miami, Greater Phoenix, and Greater Houston in 2020 was 9.3, 1.3, 1.6, and 0.8 per 1,000 residents, respectively. And Greater Miami, Greater Phoenix, and Greater Houston saw their per capita homeless population decline from 2005 to 2020 by 39, 17, and 74 percent while San Francisco saw its rise 30 percent. Nor can housing prices explain the discrepancy. Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem. As for the Zillow study that was reported to find a correlation between rising rents and homelessness, a deeper look at the research reveals a more nuanced finding. Homelessness and affordability are correlated only in the context of certain “local policy efforts [and] social attitudes,” concluded researchers. This feels like kind of a shell game. San Francisco’s mild climate alone can’t explain why it has more homeless people per capita than Miami or Houston. But as the graph above shows, housing prices do explain about 75% of the difference between SF and those two cities. But because the book talks about the Miami-SF discrepancy in the paragraph about climate instead of the paragraph about prices, it makes it sound like a mystery that neither prices nor climate can explain. The Zillow article mentioned is Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rents Exceed A Third Of Incomes, which is based on this study. Shellenberger’s summary is not really the researchers’ conclusion. The article does mention “local attitudes” and “social policy” once, but only to explain that the paper includes a term representing “latent factors” that they’re not going to bother distinguishing from each other in their model, and some of those terms could be local policy or social attitudes. Later they mention there are some outliers in their model (eg Houston), and it would be reasonable to assume that the latent factors help explain the outliers, but they don’t give us any reason to think that this is more interesting than the fact that every model ever will have outliers. But also, this is one study by Zillow. Alyssa and I both tried the same analysis, and found the same thing, with a correlation that’s unusually high for this kind of work. Sure, there are outliers, but San Francisco isn’t one of them. San Francisco is only a couple of percent off where the regression line would predict. That leaves the point about Palo Alto and Beverly Hills. They “have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem”. At first I felt like this was cheating - yeah, rich suburbs don’t have lots of homelessness, come on. But “rich” and “high property values” are pretty close to synonyms. If you’re going to say that high property values cause homelessness, isn’t it in fact pretty surprising that rich suburbs don’t have it? In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb? Quieter (so probably easier to sleep at night) more places out of sight to pitch tents, less crime (important if you’re living on the street!), and potentially lower cost of living in terms of food and goods. I tried looking into this issue and found explanations like: Usually it’s poor people who become homeless. Cities have more poor people than suburbs, because they have more rental units, small apartments, public transportation, and blue-collar jobs. Suburbs, by natural consequence of their layout, enforce a certain wealth minimum before people can live there, and people above that wealth minimum rarely lose everything and become homeless. It’s strange that poor people tend to live in cities (ie places with very high land values), and you have to wonder whether there are ways that could be different, but it does seem true.
Kittenlord’s News

Kittenlord’s News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 24, 2022 and March 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Viliam (author of Kittenlord’s News )". It most often appears alongside 1984, Acrolectics, Adnamanil.

Reference entry
Kittenlord’s News
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
March 24, 2022
Last seen
March 24, 2022
March 24, 2022 · Original source
Viliam (author of Kittenlord’s News) tries the same tactic, six hundred comments deep:
Knowledge

Knowledge is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 20, 2022 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "such as Chemical News , Knowledge , and English Mechanic —all boasted more subscribers than Nature ’s estimated 5,000". It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Alexander Macmillan, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Reference entry
Knowledge
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
May 20, 2022
Last seen
May 20, 2022
May 20, 2022 · Original source
Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.
High-profile controversies about homeopathy and cold nuclear fusion in the 1980s. How did Nature become the main scientific forum in the UK and, later, the world? As we saw, the weekly publication schedule was one of the key factors, since discussion requires people to be able to reply to each other in a timely fashion. But speed alone wasn’t sufficient. There were many scientific weekly periodicals in Victorian Britain, and Nature wasn’t even the most popular: in the 1870s, “other weeklies—such as Chemical News, Knowledge, and English Mechanic—all boasted more subscribers than Nature’s estimated 5,000.” Why didn’t one of these magazines become the best venue to discuss science? One answer seems to be that Norman Lockyer personally relished controversy and encouraged “spirited disagreement” within his journal, making it ideal for whoever was itching to pick a fight over scientific ideas. If Lockyer had chosen to dampen the tone of some Letters to the Editor he received, or even reject them for publication, then the debates would have moved elsewhere. Easy enough to make a parallel with the social media that thrive today on what we’ll also politely call “spirited disagreement.” Another answer is that Nature managed to occupy the sweet spot on the tradeoff curve between generalist and specialist publications. Since it covered all fields of science, Nature was a better fit than a magazine like Chemical News to discuss interdisciplinary questions as well as questions on how science should be done. At the same time, it was a specialized journal in terms of its audience and contributors: they were almost all professional scientists. Add the fact that it was read by most scientists in Britain, as well as a significant proportion of non-British scientists, and you get a publication that was widely considered the best means “to get to the right people” as the editor of Chemical News himself admitted in 1895. Establishing this network of “the right people” was an explicit goal of Lockyer from the beginning. One of the first things he did after founding the journal was to ask “men of science—some whom he knew personally, others whom he knew by reputation” (i.e. he cold emailed them) to publish their names as supporters and future contributors. The most important of those names was the aforementioned Thomas Huxley, who was not only a prominent biologist but also a popular essayist in the literary periodicals as well as the leader of an influential group of scientists called the X Club. Huxley was a strong supporter of Lockyer’s project, and he frequently wrote for Nature in the early years, which helped it cement its reputation. Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing a network of other famous Huxleys, such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 report on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 letter proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 work on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. La Nature) and German (e.g. Naturwissenschaften) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called The Reader, which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company still exists and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. (Springer Nature, a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The original mission statement was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The current version is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from a multitude of charts, various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the Wikipedia page of the journal. Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international
Thomas Huxley. Also known for establishing a network of other famous Huxleys, such as his grandson Aldous, the author of Brave New World. Victorian Britain’s most beloved scientist — yes, I’m talking about Darwin again — also enjoyed publishing in Nature. Darwin was an elderly and highly respected scientist by the time of the journal’s founding, and the abstracts and letters he frequently sent to Lockyer’s publication certainly gave it a status boost. And this was only the start of a long list of household names who got involved with Nature at one point or another. In physics, for instance, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner were all important contributors. Some of the most famous papers in the field, such as James Chadwick’s 1932 report on the possible existence of the neutron, or Meitner and Otto Frisch’s 1939 letter proposing the idea of nuclear fission, were published in Nature. In biology, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 work on the structure of DNA is probably the most historic paper to have appeared within its pages. Since Nature in the mid-20th century was popular but still not very prestigious, I’m comfortable assuming that these famous scientists and discoveries helped its reputation rather than the other way around. Today, the arrow of causation is mostly reversed: scientists become influential because they publish research in the most prestigious journal, rather than the journal becoming prestigious because it publishes big names and big papers. Of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps benefiting Nature, thanks to network effects. Finally, a word about language. Nature, obviously, is published in English. But English wasn’t the dominant intellectual language back in the 19th century: French and German were more important. The rise of English as the lingua franca of science occurred during the 20th century, thanks to the political dominance of the British Empire and then the United States. As a result, Nature and its American equivalent Science gained a major advantage over their French (e.g. La Nature) and German (e.g. Naturwissenschaften) counterparts. Making Nature doesn’t belabor this self-evident point, but it’s worth mentioning that Nature benefitted from a global network effect that would have been far less attainable outside the Anglosphere. Survival and Conservatism Speed, elite networks, and English are great, but they won’t help if your publication fails to turn a profit and shuts down. As they say, the lesson of survivorship bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. Thus the story of Nature is also the story of how it managed to stay alive, unlike most of its contemporaries. Nature was (and still is!) a venture of a London publisher called Macmillan and Company. It was very much intended to make money. But Victorian Britain was a crowded market for periodicals. It was common for publications to last just a few years after proving unable to attract enough subscribers. Lockyer himself had been briefly involved as the co-founder and science editor of a generalist magazine called The Reader, which existed only from 1863 to 1867 (and lost its science section in 1865). It would be tempting to contrast this with the popular success of Nature, but as we saw, most of Nature’s target audience couldn’t even understand the journal, and as a result both its subscriber base and revenue remained small. The survival of Nature therefore depended on the goodwill of its owner, Alexander Macmillan. And it took a lot of goodwill! Nature operated at a loss for an entire 30 years. Only at the very end of the 19th century did it manage to turn a profit. This surprising tolerance for financial loss seems to have stemmed from the other activities of Macmillan and Company: they sold scientific books, and Nature was a good way to reach that market. Still, without a wealthy publisher who was committed to back up Lockyer’s project for a long time, it would likely not have survived. Lockyer also displayed impressive commitment. He remained at the helm of the journal for a full half-century, from 1869 to 1919. Although none of his successors would hold the position that long, most would last at least twenty years, resulting in a strikingly short list of eight editors-in-chief over a 153-year history. Meanwhile, the journal was never sold: Macmillan and Company still exists and still owns Nature, even though corporate mergers have made the exact ownership structure difficult to figure out. (Springer Nature, a company created in 2015 by merging some divisions of Macmillan and other entities, is the immediate parent company of Nature.) The picture that emerges is that of a stable, conservative institution, with committed owners and editors, that has changed slowly even as it was a witness to the changes in science itself. This is nicely reflected in the stability of Nature’s mission and visual identity. The original mission statement was left unchanged from 1869 to 2000, including gendered references to “Scientific men” and “men eminent in Science.” The current version is shorter and gender-neutral, but overall similar, although I note that the ordering of the two main aims has been reversed: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life. Similarly, the original masthead image, which dates from the very first issue, appeared at the top of the journal for 89 years, until 1958 (with slight variations). A central point of Making Nature is that Nature co-evolved with the British and international institutions of science. To do so, it had to strike a balance between conservatism and innovation. My impression is that Nature was more often on the conservative end of the spectrum, serving as a rock-solid stage where the rest of science could take place. Such an attitude was helpful from the beginning, but it probably became even more important after the 1970s, when everything changed. III. WTF Happened in the 1970s? A fun puzzle from the social sciences: what happened in the early seventies? As evidenced from a multitude of charts, various patterns in society seem to have veered off course around 1971, including growth in wages, inflation, housing costs, energy consumption, number of lawyers, divorce rates, fertility rates, and meat consumption. Whether it was a coincidence or part of the same mysterious phenomenon, we can add to this list the rise of prestige in the science publishing industry. To be clear, I’m the one who claims that this shift was a specific and momentous event. Melinda Baldwin acknowledges many times that Nature went from a low-grade magazine to a prestigious journal, but she remains vague as to what, exactly, was the turning point. In the chapter on the 1970s, she treats the increased selectivity and reputation as just one of many things that happened during this period. It was only in the course of writing this review — with a deliberate focus on prestige — that I realized something significant had occurred in that decade, and that this something affected more than just Nature. Let’s see what the book does tell us, and then I’ll offer a plausible explanation from elsewhere. Changes to Nature in the 1970s The 1970s mostly coincide with the leadership of Nature’s shortest-tenured editor, David Davies. Davies took over from John Maddox in 1973 and proceeded to make a number of changes. He made Nature a unitary publication again, after a short-lived experiment to split it into three journals. He reformed the style guide for contributors. He allowed for cartoons and some humor in his editorials. He also overhauled the journal’s physical appearance: from now on, Nature’s covers would feature interesting images as opposed to articles or advertisements. Today’s covers are still in that tradition. Here’s the Nature cover from 2016, as used on the Wikipedia page of the journal. Nature under Maddox and Davies followed the same trend of internationalization as in the previous decades, but the seventies saw what was perhaps the fastest growth outside the UK. Consider these approximate statistics on the origin of research articles from the years when there was a change in editorship: 1966 (when Maddox became editor): 40% British and 60% international
Korsmo

Korsmo 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 "You can find a list of them in Table 1 of Korsmo :". It most often appears alongside acetaminophen, ADHD, Arthur Jensen.

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Korsmo
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April 13, 2022
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April 13, 2022
April 13, 2022 · Original source
Luckily, choline supplementation is simple and ethical, which means we can run randomized controlled trials. You can find a list of them in Table 1 of Korsmo:
There are a couple of other weaker signs that 930 mg of choline is better than 480, which you can find scattered throughout the Korsmo review.
Krzyscin 2016

Krzyscin 2016 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 "Krzyscin 2016 tries to estimate how many IU the Hadza are getting from sunlight". It most often appears alongside Autier meta-analysis, Barger-Lux 2002, Ben.

Reference entry
Krzyscin 2016
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April 22, 2022
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April 22, 2022
April 22, 2022 · Original source
Krzyscin 2016 tries to estimate how many IU the Hadza are getting from sunlight, and finds it’s 2,000, not 16,000. I can’t follow their reasoning fully, or figure out exactly where it diverges from Ben’s, but I think it involves them 1) avoiding the midday sun, and 2) being black.
Kvetch

Kvetch is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 09, 2022 and October 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Misha Saul ... has a Substack, Kvetch". It most often appears alongside ACTIV-6, Alexandros Marinos, Astralcodexten Com.

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Kvetch
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October 09, 2022
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October 09, 2022
October 09, 2022 · Original source
7: Misha Saul, who won the Readers’ Choice in last year’s Book Review Contest for his Disunited Nations and Dawn Of Eurasia review, has a Substack, Kvetch, with posts like The Heroes We’re Allowed, Why Practice Judaism, and The Enigma Of Clarence Thomas. Check it out!