Astral Codex Ten

Publications: O

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Publications: O

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

Ozy8 mentions across 8 issues

Ozy is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between December 28, 2022 and December 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "(h/t Ozy )"; "Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams"; "Most recently, Ozy has written a response to Charles". It most often appears alongside Richard Hanania, Twitter, Substack.

Article page
Ozy
Mention count
8
Issue count
8
First seen
December 28, 2022
Last seen
December 29, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
...y. This article describes their struggle to build a grand Central Temple in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, pitting NIMBYs against religious freedom advocates (h/t Ozy ). Has anyone been there? Is it open for tours? I kind of want to check it out. 41: Effective Altruism Forum: The Spanish-Speaking Effective Altruism Community Is Awesome...
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
...oving that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy ( tweet...
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
...“GET TOUGH” plans for dealing with mentally ill homeless people really meant. Later, Charles Lehman wrote a response describing his plan and arguing why it’s necessary. Most recently, Ozy has written a response to Charles , basically expressing fear that Charles’ plan will unnecessarily commit a bunch of harmless well-functioning people. I bet Charles’ response will be that no, this isn’t...
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 414
December 29, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Our World in Data6 mentions across 6 issues

Our World in Data is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 25, 2021 and July 20, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions"; "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950"; "Here are Our World In Data’s projections for US and UK populations". It most often appears alongside Germany, Japan, United States.

Article page
Our World in Data
Mention count
6
Issue count
6
First seen
August 25, 2021
Last seen
July 20, 2023
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
36. https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950
Inline links: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950
Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries
August 04, 2022 · Original source
Here are Our World In Data’s projections for US and UK populations:
Inline links: Our World In Data’s projections
Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 17, 2023 · Original source
This is Our World In Data’s map of plastic waste per capita. It’s actually not a bad match for the geography of sperm count decline, though it’s not amazingly perfect either. Pesticides can also be endocrine disruptors. This is a good match for the “Missouri is worst US state” result, and in fact that same study separates Missourians by pesticide exposure. They find that “cases” with lower-than-average sperm concentration have more than twice the blood level of some pesticides than “controls”, p = 0.0007. But this is in a sample of only 50 people, all in Missouri. Two meta-analyses (1, 2) find that 28 of 37 studies investigating a pesticide/sperm count correlation have found significant results, with some of the others only barely missing significance. The usual study designs are: Compare people occupationally exposed to pesticides (eg farmers) with people who aren’t
Inline links: Our World In Data’s map of plastic waste per capita, that same study, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bPFT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F796b7eac-5bee-42ec-a271-fa21c3b00d61_384x287.png, 1, 2
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
Our World in Data historical GDP charts: from Our World in Data’s article on economic growth.
Inline links: article on economic growth
… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.
Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon
Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline
July 20, 2023 · Original source
Source: Our World In Data Or between 2010 and today: I prefer the Our World In Data graphs since they let you clearly show relative growth, but they only go up to 2018. A World Bank graph requires a little more interpretation, but goes up to 2022: Source: World Bank. Britain is the thick blue line. …and it also shows UK growth being about average. So what’s going on? I asked about this in an Open Thread. Here were some of your responses. Eric Rall writes: There are two different ways of calculating real GDP per capita in an international context, both of which involve converting local currency to dollars and then inflation-adjusting the dollars based on the US's GDP deflator. One uses market exchange rates, while the other uses "Purchasing Power Parity", attempting to optimize the GDP figure as a proxy for standard-of-living by using local prices for equivalent goods and services as the currency conversion factor. For Brexit-related and COVID-related reasons, the relationship between PPP and market exchange rates for Britain have been highly unstable in the period in question: exchange rates have been very volatile (ranging from US$1.08 to US$1.40 per £1.00), and tariffs and COVID disruption have both radically changed the availability and prices of imported goods. Looking at either the PPP or market exchange rate numbers, everyone took a big hit in 2020, while Britain appears to have taken a deeper hit than France and the overall OECD average (the two control groups I picked off the top of my head). The big difference is that in market exchange rate terms, the recovery looks proportionate to the decline (i.e. Britain fell more, but also recovered proportionately faster so as to bounce back to approximately 2019 levels in 2022 the same as France and OECD): (source) But in PPP terms, the UK has recovered at the same rate as France and OECD and thus appears to have permanently (so far) lost ground in standard of living relative to other countries. UK was also growing more slowly in PPP terms between 2015 and 2019 than France, but about the same as the OECD average: (source) Putting some numbers on the second graph: Just before COVID, Britain had 106% the average OECD GDP
Inline links: Our World In Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V5Hz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c58e9b6-9edd-4021-83dc-df0de003eca1_1165x723.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3fAl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2cffb938-e8c2-45b1-9ad2-fe575666403b_811x632.png, World Bank, asked about this in an Open Thread, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ctPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F168f87c7-e9e0-45f8-901c-dd418f541b57_800x617.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AqdU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faae66a91-fc33-43e0-90b9-2ec1a41d5dc8_790x627.png, source
(source) This isn’t the world’s most readable graph, but it suggests UK was no stricter than lots of other places.
Inline links: source
Stagnating UK productivity (source) Smith writes:
Inline links: source, writes
Open Threads3 mentions across 3 issues

Open Threads is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 07, 2022 and October 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "provide updates and advertisements for your project on Open Threads"; "I can put out updates or requests for help on Open Threads"; "And watch Open Threads in case I announce other things in this category". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, #climate24x7, 501(c).

Article page
Open Threads
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
February 07, 2022
Last seen
October 21, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
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Source context
Open Thread 210
February 07, 2022 · Original source
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
4: Remember, if you won an ACX Grant I am willing to provide updates and advertisements for your project on Open Threads. ACX Grants winner Yoram Bauman writes:
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
You will get my support, which is mostly useful in getting me to blog about your project. For example, I can put out updates or requests for help on Open Threads. I can also try to help network you with people I know. Some people who won ACX Grants last year were able to leverage the attention to attract larger grantmakers or VCs.
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
And watch Open Threads in case I announce other things in this category.
Overcoming Bias3 mentions across 3 issues

Overcoming Bias is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 29, 2021 and April 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong"; "Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, a blog my bride and I both read"; "Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work". It most often appears alongside Robin Hanson, 2008 America, @agoodmanbacon.

Article page
Overcoming Bias
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
September 29, 2021
Last seen
April 24, 2024
Outbound links
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Source context
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the “rationalist community” centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka “CFAR”, yes, it’s a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.
Inline links: Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong
Like - a big part of why so many people - the kind of people who would have read Predictably Irrational in 2008 or commented on Overcoming Bias in 2010 - moved on was because just learning that biases existed didn’t really seem to help much. CFAR wanted to find a way to teach people about biases that actually stuck and improved decision-making. To that end, they ran dozens of workshops over about a decade, testing various techniques and seeing which ones seemed to stick and make a difference. Galef is their co-founder and former president, and Scout Mindset is an attempt to write down what she learned.
There's A Time For Everyone
January 12, 2022 · Original source
This is the title image of Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, a blog my bride and I both read. The Greek hero Odysseus is sailing through Siren-infested waters. He knows that the Sirens have hypnotic powers, and that anyone who hears their song will stop thinking straight and probably steer their boat into a rock or something. So before the Sirens appear, he ties himself to the mast, so that the future version of himself who hears the Siren song can’t screw anything up. Hanson uses it as a general symbol of thoughtful precommitment, of taking steps to constrain future selves who might have values unaligned with yours. Marriage - and any other contract - is a deliberate effort to constrain your future actions so that you can make long-term plans that heavily affect other people - your spouse, but also your future children - without them having to constantly worry about you running off to any Siren you hear.
Inline links: Overcoming Bias
Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
April 24, 2024 · Original source
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
Inline links: Overcoming Bias, here,, here, here
Ollantay2 mentions across 2 issues

Ollantay 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: 9: Ollantay"; "Ollantay , by David Speiser". It most often appears alongside Dating Men In The Bay Area, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia.

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Ollantay
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2
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2
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October 03, 2025
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October 17, 2025
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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
Ollantay, by David Speiser. David lives in New Mexico, and he writes about other stories that are 100% true at Rainbows Everywhere.
Inline links: Ollantay, Rainbows Everywhere
Open Thread2 mentions across 2 issues

Open Thread is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 01, 2022 and March 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "mentioned on an Open Thread"; "Next Sunday I’ll put the results on the Open Thread". It most often appears alongside Russia, Ukraine, 2022 Winter Olympics.

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Open Thread
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2
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2
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February 01, 2022
Last seen
March 27, 2022
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Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
The winner will get eternal glory (realistically: mentioned on an Open Thread) and a free ACX subscription.
Open Thread 217
March 27, 2022 · Original source
Metaculus currently has him at 40% to win the primary and 29% to win the general. I’m closer to 60/45. Although he’s getting support from some big funders, campaign finance privileges small-to-medium-sized donations from ordinary people. If you want to support him, you can see a list of possible options here - including donations. You can donate max $2900 for the primary, plus another $2900 for the general that will be refunded if he doesn’t make it. If you do donate, it would be extra helpful if the money came in before a key reporting deadline March 31. 3: Every year in autumn I hold a big Meetups Everywhere event, and every time people tell me I should do it more often than once a year. So this time we’ll hold a mini-Meetups-Everywhere this April. It won’t be any different from your usual meetup schedule except that it’ll be the Schelling time for everyone who only wants to come once every few months to come. If you’re a meetups organizer (or want to become one), please fill in this form with the date of a meetup April 11th or later. Next Sunday I’ll put the results on the Open Thread for people to see. 4: Speaking of meetups, the rationalist/EA establishment is trying to promote local meetups. If you’re a local ACX/LW meetups organizer, you’re potentially invited to attend an all-expenses paid retreat in California in July with our meetups czar Mingyuan. Please read more here, then fill in this form to get on her radar. 5: And speaking of Mingyuan, she is going to inspect - sorry, enjoy the hospitality of - the East Coast meetup groups. She’ll be in DC: 4/11–4/13 Baltimore: 4/14 Philadelphia: 4/15–4/16 NYC: 4/17–4/21 Yale: 4/22–4/23 Northampton: 4/24–4/25 Boston: 4/26–5/1. The local groups have already taken care of having meetups at the right time, but she’s looking for people who could host her and drive her between cities . Email meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com if you can help. 6: Last week I tried to figure out the needs of community members in Russia and Ukraine. There are some great resources on the thread, but issues that still need solving: Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
Inline links: here, donations., fill in this form, here, this form, on the thread, Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
Optimized Dating2 mentions across 2 issues

Optimized Dating is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 27, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Loweren , who writes Optimized Dating"; "or the corresponding blog: https://optimizeddating.substack.com". It most often appears alongside Brazil, Germany, Israel.

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Optimized Dating
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2
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2
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January 27, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
Loweren, who writes Optimized Dating, says:
Inline links: Loweren, Optimized Dating
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#27: Reverse-Engineer Dating Photo Quality I'm Loweren, a biology PhD doing photography and dating advice on the side. Some of you might know me from the Optimized Dating Discord server or the corresponding blog: https://optimizeddating.substack.com A keystone piece of advice in our community is to put more effort into making better dating photos, and to use the photo rating service Photofeeler to quantify the performance of each photo. This advice was helpful for many people, however there's one problem: it's not clear which factors make the photo perform better or worse on Photofeeler, as the developers are not keen on sharing the analytics. I will attempt to reverse-engineer the most important factors that make the dating photo look better by testing various factors (camera distance, focal length, aperture size, smile etc.) against the control photos using multiple subjects. I estimate that for each $80 in donations I can test 2 factors using 3 test subjects. I already have the first batch of photos ready to be tested. Results will be published on the blog as they come, which will hopefully help more people take better dating photos. My PayPal: https://paypal.me/seeelegance
Other Feminisms2 mentions across 2 issues

Other Feminisms is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 16, 2022 and January 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Leah Libresco Sargent (who writes the blog Other Feminisms )"; "Leah Libresco Sargent ( Other Feminisms ) writes". It most often appears alongside Leah Libresco Sargent, Scott, Twitter.

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Other Feminisms
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2
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2
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March 16, 2022
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January 06, 2026
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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
Leah Libresco Sargent (who writes the blog Other Feminisms):
Inline links: Leah Libresco Sargent, Other Feminisms
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
Leah Libresco Sargent (Other Feminisms) writes:
Inline links: Other Feminisms, writes
O Dia1 mentions across 1 issues

O Dia 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 "The newspaper O Dia". It most often appears alongside A Ordem, Abraham Lincoln, ACX.

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O Dia
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1
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1
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October 24, 2025
Last seen
October 24, 2025
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Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
October 24, 2025 · Original source
The newspaper O Dia:
O Seculo1 mentions across 1 issues

O Seculo 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 most thorough coverage was in O Seculo"; "correspondent for the anti-Catholic newspaper O Seculo". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

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O Seculo
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1
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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
Several Portuguese newspapers published articles about the event. The most thorough coverage was in O Seculo; there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here. An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here. An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF.
Inline links: here, here, here
Avelino de Almedia1, correspondent for the anti-Catholic newspaper O Seculo:
Inline links: 1
Obsidian Wings1 mentions across 1 issues

Obsidian Wings 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 "Hilary Bok ... had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings"; "who also had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings". It most often appears alongside 23andme, AB, Abraham Mendelssohn.

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Obsidian Wings
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1
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1
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November 18, 2021
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November 18, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Another relevant family that doesn't have the heredity explanation - Gunnar Myrdal won the Economics Nobel in 1974 (partly for work that influenced the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education), and his wife Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 (the only married couple to win separate Nobels). Their daughter, Sissela, is a moderately known philosopher, who married the President of Harvard, Derek Bok. Their daughter Hilary Bok is another philosopher, who also had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings a decade or so ago.
Odd Lots1 mentions across 1 issues

Odd Lots is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 13, 2026 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots". It most often appears alongside ACX/Metaculus 2026 Prediction Contest, AGI, AI.

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Odd Lots
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1
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1
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January 13, 2026
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January 13, 2026
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Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?
Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?
Odes1 mentions across 1 issues

Odes is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 01, 2023 and September 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "As it says in the Odes"; "Confucius said, “It says in the Odes , When the people have many deviations". It most often appears alongside 536 BC, ACX, Ai Jiang.

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Odes
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1
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1
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September 01, 2023
Last seen
September 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Zuozhuan
September 01, 2023 · Original source
When the noble man calls this ‘proper ritual,’ he is saying that Lord Millet may be closer kin, but the god on high is placed before him. As it says in the Odes,
Ministers with various viewpoints discourse at length upon history, governance, politics, custom, morality, and the nature of ghosts and spirits. Diplomatic envoys exchange veiled remarks with their hosts by singing odes from their shared cultural canon (many of which survive to this day, through another compilation associated with Confucius.)
Confucius said, “It says in the Odes,
Of Aurochs And Angels1 mentions across 1 issues

Of Aurochs And Angels is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 29, 2024 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question". It most often appears alongside @ElytraMithra, Aaron, ACX.

Reference entry
Of Aurochs And Angels
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1
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1
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May 29, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
19: In my review of Origins of Woke, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth.
Inline links: Origins of Woke, The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth
Of Horn & Ivory1 mentions across 1 issues

Of Horn & Ivory is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 20, 2022 and April 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Orion Anderson (writes Of Horn & Ivory ) says:". It most often appears alongside A.E. Waite, Adlerian psychology, AL.

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Of Horn & Ivory
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1
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1
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April 20, 2022
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April 20, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
...w this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?) Orion Anderson (writes Of Horn & Ivory ) says: I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in...
...who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?) Orion Anderson (writes Of Horn & Ivory ) says: I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the wee...
Oh Great Blog Brain1 mentions across 1 issues

Oh Great Blog Brain is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 16, 2026 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "blog titled “Oh Great Blog Brain.”". It most often appears alongside Adams, Alice, All-Seeing Eye.

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Oh Great Blog Brain
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1
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1
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January 16, 2026
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January 16, 2026
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The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
He also turned to Dilbert fans for suggestions on how to use the party room, in a posting on his blog titled “Oh Great Blog Brain.” The Dilbert faithful responded with more than 1,300 comments, mixing interesting ideas (interactive murder-mystery theater) with unlikely mischief (nude volleyball tournaments). Mr. Adams asked his employees to read the comments and is now slowly trying some of them.
Ollantay review1 mentions across 1 issues

Ollantay review is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 11, 2026 and March 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "author of the Ollantay review". It most often appears alongside Atlantic, Bill of Rights, CAA.

Reference entry
Ollantay review
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1
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1
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March 11, 2026
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March 11, 2026
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Last Rights
March 11, 2026 · Original source
[This is a guest post, written by David Speiser, author of the Ollantay review in last year’s Non-Book Review contest. David provided the concept and original draft; Scott edited the final version. Remaining mistakes are likely mine (Scott’s)] The...
On Being1 mentions across 1 issues

On Being is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 03, 2022 and February 03, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Krista Tippett's on Being". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

Reference entry
On Being
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1
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1
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February 03, 2022
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February 03, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#22: Support Zohar Atkins’ Podcast I'm Zohar Atkins (Rabbi, Poet, Rhodes Scholar, Emergent Ventures Winner, and Founder of Etz Hasadeh). I'm seeking $100,000 to support my new podcast, Meditations with Zohar, which I plan to make into a weekly thing over the course of many years. The show needs patronage to support production and editing costs, and, if this is to be a weekly endeavor, my time. The show features a series of conversations with eclectic thinkers, doers, and artists I admire, with a focus on the intersection of philosophy, religion, theology, and personal principles for life. I have 10 guests already signed up and scheduled, and have recorded 3 episodes, including with Noah Feldman, Sheila Heti, and Teresa Bejan. Other guests include Tyler Cowen and Agnes Callard. The show will combine the love of learning of Tyler Cowen's Conversations with Tyler and the personal, and sometimes existential touch of Krista Tippett's on Being. The world needs high level content that is seeking, personal, and meaning-oriented. We need to talk about ideas in a way that is rigorous but also heartfelt, acknowledging our "skin in the game." This endeavor is part of my larger project of bringing the study of great texts and ideas outside academia. See here for one example. Betting on the show is a bet on my attempt to strengthen culture through better discourse, better education, better thinking, and deeper self-understanding.
Inline links: here
#44: Long-Termism Advocacy Org In Israel ALTER, the Associations for Long Term Existence and Resilience, is an academic research and advocacy organization being started in Israel, which hopes to investigate, demonstrate, and foster useful ways to improve the future in the short term, and to safeguard and improve the long-term trajectory of humanity. The founder, David Manheim, has a PhD in public policy and a track record of research in effective altruist priority areas and risk reduction, and in policy engagement. The key goals of the organization will be to foster academic and policy work in key areas in Israel, via organizing conferences, academic engagement, and fostering collaboration with international organizations in this space. If you have connections to interested Israeli academics, experience with making this type of academic outreach successful, or you can provide funding for this work, please contact david@alter.org.il.
On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)1 mentions across 1 issues

On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?) is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 12, 2025 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "A paper by philosopher David Colaço (“On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)”)". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

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1
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1
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September 12, 2025
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September 12, 2025
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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
Apparently there’s some debate over whether immune memory really ‘counts’ as memory, or at least as memory anything like the cognitive forms of memory psychologists study. A paper by philosopher David Colaço (“On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)”), says that there are two common arguments against ‘counting’ immune memory as a cognitive-like form of memory:
Inline links: On Consistently Assessing Alleged Mnemonic Systems (or, why isn’t Immune Memory “really” Memory?)
On Roman Values1 mentions across 1 issues

On Roman Values is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 24, 2024 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "blogpost 'On Roman Values' by Bret Devereaux". It most often appears alongside A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOU, ACOUP.

Reference entry
On Roman Values
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1
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1
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September 24, 2024
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September 24, 2024
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How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Reading Bret Devereaux's blogpost 'On Roman Values' (I'm a stalwart ACOUP reader)
On Unfalsifiable Internal States1 mentions across 1 issues

On Unfalsifiable Internal States is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 11, 2022 and November 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States". It most often appears alongside Aella, astral projection, Bayes.

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1
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1
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November 11, 2022
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November 11, 2022
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Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
November 11, 2022 · Original source
Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States, where he defends his skepticism of jhana and other widely-claimed hard-to-falsify internal states. It’s long, but I’ll quote a part that seemed especially important to me:
Inline links: On Unfalsifiable Internal States
Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote1 mentions across 1 issues

Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 19, 2021 and April 19, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "From VOA News: Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote". It most often appears alongside #Resistance, 1/2019 government shut down, 538.

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1
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1
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April 19, 2021
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April 19, 2021
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Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
Further, white supremacists generally stopped being interested in Donald Trump, and have mostly abandoned him. In 2018, Southern Poverty Law Center wrote Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump? - by now, the answer is clearly yes. From VOA News: Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote. Richard Spencer, who invented the term "alt-right" and whose Trump salute helped spark the panic, disavowed Trump in early 2020 and announced he was supporting Biden in the election. White supremacists are irrelevant and you should not care what they think, but if for some reason you insist on caring what they think, they are no longer particularly pro-Trump.
Inline links: Are White Nationalists Turning On Trump?, Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead Of Presidential Vote, announced he was supporting Biden in the election
Onion1 mentions across 1 issues

Onion is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 05, 2021 and March 05, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire". It most often appears alongside A Real Dog, Americans, Astors.

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Onion
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1
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1
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March 05, 2021
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March 05, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Class
March 05, 2021 · Original source
I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper [and] both generations above mine have already read [Fussell’s book]! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
online magazine1 mentions across 1 issues

online magazine is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 25, 2025 and September 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "a really high-profile case involving a widely-read online magazine". It most often appears alongside Armenians at Harvard, barberpole model of fashion, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg.

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online magazine
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1
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1
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September 25, 2025
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September 25, 2025
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Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Uh, I got to admit we’re having some growing pains. Like, we hadn’t really considered that some people hire witches to curse people for kind of frivolous reasons, but then would be freaked out if they actually got hurt. Which wouldn’t be such a problem - you’d think they’d keep quiet about it - except that the first time this happened it turned out to be a really high-profile case involving a widely-read online magazine.”
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems1 mentions across 1 issues

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 01, 2024 and February 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "see also Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems for more on how I think about these kinds of issues". It most often appears alongside Awais Aftab, birth canal asphyxia, cannabis.

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1
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1
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February 01, 2024
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February 01, 2024
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It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic
February 01, 2024 · Original source
(see also Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems for more on how I think about these kinds of issues)
Inline links: Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Dynamical Systems
Open The Future1 mentions across 1 issues

Open The Future is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "http://www.openthefuture.com/cheeseburger_CF.html". It most often appears alongside AP News, Associated Press, Bitcoin.

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Open The Future
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1
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1
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August 25, 2021
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August 25, 2021
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Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
5. http://www.openthefuture.com/cheeseburger_CF.html
Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents1 mentions across 1 issues

Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 06, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Last week, DeepMind published a paper, Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents". It most often appears alongside AGI, AI, AI Impacts.

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1
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1
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August 06, 2021
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August 06, 2021
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Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
August 06, 2021 · Original source
Right now a lot of research is going into making things that are slightly more general than AlphaZero. For example, could you get something which, in addition to being able to play any board game, can also play any video game? This turns out to be a really different problem; my understanding is that they’re pretty close but not quite there. What about just games in general? Last week, DeepMind published a paper, Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents. They created a simulated 3D physical environment, stuck an AI in a simulated body in that environment, and made it go through various obstacle courses and stuff. They found that the knowledge generalized, so that the AI was eventually able to learn to play games they hadn’t taught it, like hide-and-seek and capture-the-flag, coming up with decent strategies on their first attempt based on the general principles it had learned from other things. Where does this place it on the “it’s just an algorithm” vs. “real intelligence” dichotomy?
Inline links: Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents
OpenAI’s FAQ1 mentions across 1 issues

OpenAI’s FAQ is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2026 and March 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "see the section ‘Comments on OpenAI’s FAQ’". It most often appears alongside ACX, AI, al-Qaeda.

Reference entry
OpenAI’s FAQ
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1
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1
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March 01, 2026
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March 01, 2026
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"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 01, 2026 · Original source
[EDIT: To clarify: The DoW can change their own policies at will, but can’t change laws. In addition to OpenAI’s claim of being robust to changing laws, OpenAI argues that they’re protected against changes to DoW policies because they explicitly reference the relevant policies as they exist today. Based on public information, this argument seems dubious. See ‘Comments on OpenAI’s FAQ’ below.]
For more details on autonomous weapons, see this doc. Comments on OpenAI’s FAQ OpenAI provided an FAQ, which we think is misleading. While we aren’t lawyers, we’ve done our best to lay out our reasoning for this belief, and have also consulted with an expert in national security law on the excerpt of the contract provided in OpenAI’s announcement, and checked that their views were consistent with ours.
Inline links: doc, OpenAI’s announcement
For more, see the section ‘Comments on OpenAI’s FAQ’
OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better1 mentions across 1 issues

OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 04, 2026 and March 04, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I endorse this LW post from today, on the newest contract: OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better". It most often appears alongside ACX, All Lawful Use: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, LW.

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1
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1
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March 04, 2026
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March 04, 2026
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Open Hidden Open Thread 423.5
March 04, 2026 · Original source
1: The OpenAI/Pentagon situation has evolved since Sunday’s ACX post (“All Lawful Use: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”). For up-to-date analysis of the latest contract, I endorse this LW post from today, on the newest contract: OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better.
Inline links: All Lawful Use: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, OpenAI’s Surveillance Language Has Many Potential Loopholes And They Can Do Better
Oppenheim’s International Law1 mentions across 1 issues

Oppenheim’s International Law is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2022 and July 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "In the 1935 edition of Oppenheim’s International Law". It most often appears alongside 1793, 1821, 1847.

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1
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1
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July 01, 2022
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July 01, 2022
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Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
In the 1935 edition [of Oppenheim’s International Law], Lauterpacht added twenty pages on the Peace Pact. In the preface, he justified this major revision by saying that the Pact had “effected a fundamental change in the system of International Law.” In particular, Lauterpacht claimed, the old principle of neutrality had to be abandoned. Under the Pact, “the outbreak of war is no longer an event concerning the belligerent alone." Rather, it is the concern of the entire world. “The guilty belligerents, by breaking the [Pact], violate the rights of all other signatories, who, by way of reprisals, may choose to subject him to measures of discrimination, for instance. by actively prohibiting some or all exports into his territory. (Chapter 10)
Optimize Everything1 mentions across 1 issues

Optimize Everything is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "blogs at Optimize Everything". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, @GoodSciProject.

Reference entry
Optimize Everything
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1
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1
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December 28, 2021
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December 28, 2021
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of high-impact social science papers. Right now, when a new social science paper comes out, we often have to wait as long as several months to discover that it was false. Spencer and his team dream of a world where we can learn that almost immediately, soon enough that it's within the same news cycle and the journals involved feel kind of bad about it. This money will sponsor a pilot, after which he’ll be seeking additional funding - if you think you can help, you can reach him here. Spencer's been involved in rationality and EA about as long as either has existed, blogs at Optimize Everything, is the founder of ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making and happiness) and runs the Clearer Thinking podcast, with guests including Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Inline links: here, Optimize Everything, ClearerThinking.org, Clearer Thinking podcast, Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, Sam Bankman-Fried
Orban: Europe's New Strongman1 mentions across 1 issues

Orban: Europe's New Strongman is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2021 and November 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources". It most often appears alongside Alcsutdoboz, Allied Powers, Angela Merkel.

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1
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1
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November 04, 2021
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November 04, 2021
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Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orban's college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orban in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.
Inline links: Orban: Europe's New Strongman, Orbanland
Orbanland1 mentions across 1 issues

Orbanland is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 04, 2021 and November 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources". It most often appears alongside Alcsutdoboz, Allied Powers, Angela Merkel.

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Orbanland
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1
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1
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November 04, 2021
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November 04, 2021
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Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orban's college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orban in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.
Inline links: Orban: Europe's New Strongman, Orbanland
Ordem1 mentions across 1 issues

Ordem 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 "Domingos Pinto Coelho’s Ordem article". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

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Ordem
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1
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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
Several Portuguese newspapers published articles about the event. The most thorough coverage was in O Seculo; there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here. An eyewitness account was also published in A Ordem; you can find a scan of the original here. An editorial in Correio da Beira is not available as an original scan, but was reprinted in DCF.
Inline links: here, here, here
Domingos Pinto Coelho’s Ordem article (original, English translation)
Inline links: original, English translation
Order Of The Stick1 mentions across 1 issues

Order Of The Stick is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 28, 2023 and April 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Order Of The Stick". It most often appears alongside Ancient Progenitor Civilization, Aragorn, Arya Stark.

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Order Of The Stick
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1
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1
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April 28, 2023
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April 28, 2023
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The Psychology Of Fantasy
April 28, 2023 · Original source
The fantasy universe is so familiar that subverting it has become nearly as big a business as playing it straight. Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm, Jacqueline Carey’s Banewreaker, Order Of The Stick. There are a million jokes along the lines of “what if the Dark Lord’s henchmen unionized?” or “what if there were performance reviews at the Adventurers’ Guild”? Terry Pratchett’s Discworld treats the fantasy universe as a given, something everyone will obviously understand, and then uses it as a foil in order to investigate everything else.
Origins of Woke1 mentions across 1 issues

Origins of Woke is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 29, 2024 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "In my review of Origins of Woke". It most often appears alongside @ElytraMithra, Aaron, ACX.

Reference entry
Origins of Woke
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1
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1
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May 29, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
19: In my review of Origins of Woke, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth.
Inline links: Origins of Woke, The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth
Orkin and Walker’s Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya1 mentions across 1 issues

Orkin and Walker’s Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 27, 2022 and May 27, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "See Orkin and Walker’s Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya". It most often appears alongside An Anthropologist Among the Mandarins, anti-politics machine, Basotho Congress Party.

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1
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1
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May 27, 2022
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May 27, 2022
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Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine
May 27, 2022 · Original source
...chez de la Sierra, a researcher involved in the evaluation. - Ferguson pg. 252-253 - T. Sekhamane, quoted on Ferguson pg. 243 - Ferguson pg. 111 - Ferguson pg. 243 - See Orkin and Walker’s Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya - Ferguson, pg. 258 - See “The Data is Gold” or Omar Bah’s comic, above, for some examples.
...Sanchez de la Sierra, a researcher involved in the evaluation. - Ferguson pg. 252-253 - T. Sekhamane, quoted on Ferguson pg. 243 - Ferguson pg. 111 - Ferguson pg. 243 - See Orkin and Walker’s Unconditional Cash Transfers and Civic Engagement in Kenya - Ferguson, pg. 258 - See “The Data is Gold” or Omar Bah’s comic, above, for some examples.
Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap1 mentions across 1 issues

Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 20, 2022 and October 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "See also Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap". It most often appears alongside Alpha, Andres, Brown noise.

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1
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1
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October 20, 2022
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October 20, 2022
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Book Review: Rhythms Of The Brain
October 20, 2022 · Original source
See also Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap.
Inline links: Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap
Other People Might Just Not Have Your Problems1 mentions across 1 issues

Other People Might Just Not Have Your Problems is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 10, 2025 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Other People Might Just Not Have Your Problems (many such cases)". It most often appears alongside 100 Above The Park, 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, 23andme.

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1
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1
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December 10, 2025
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December 10, 2025
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Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
50: Some good Ozy posts recently, including Other People Might Just Not Have Your Problems (many such cases) and Contra Lyman Stone On Trans People Being A Western Psychosis.
Inline links: Other People Might Just Not Have Your Problems, Contra Lyman Stone On Trans People Being A Western Psychosis
OurWorldInData1 mentions across 1 issues

OurWorldInData is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 29, 2024 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "@BoyanSlat reads 'every page of OurWorldInData'". It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

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OurWorldInData
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1
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1
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February 29, 2024
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February 29, 2024
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Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection. 3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here. 4: Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence. 5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder. 6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job. 7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here. 8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.” 9: @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and lists his favorite discoveries, including: Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
Inline links: Answer here, Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population, Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle, It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart, a new post about polygenic screening, here, @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals, lists his favorite discoveries
Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population1 mentions across 1 issues

Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 29, 2024 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence". It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

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February 29, 2024
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February 29, 2024
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Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection. 3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here. 4: Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence. 5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder. 6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job. 7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here. 8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.” 9: @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and lists his favorite discoveries, including: Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
Inline links: Answer here, Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population, Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle, It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart, a new post about polygenic screening, here, @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals, lists his favorite discoveries
Outlift1 mentions across 1 issues

Outlift is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 07, 2021 and April 07, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "the outlift article is from this year". It most often appears alongside academic science, Ahtiainen et al., Altmetric.

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Outlift
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April 07, 2021
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April 07, 2021
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Metis And Bodybuilders
April 07, 2021 · Original source
The #2 result was Hypertrophy Rest Times: How Long Should You Rest Between Sets at outlift.com. It says:
Inline links: Hypertrophy Rest Times: How Long Should You Rest Between Sets
Henselmans’ article came out in 2019, and the outlift article is from this year, so this is sort of compatible with Henselmans’ claim that people supported shorter rest times when his article was written. Outlift also cites a 2016 study by Fink, Kikuchi, and Nakazato showing clear benefits of shorter rest times, which turns out to be one of the same studies Henselmans cites as not showing clear benefits - I think the difference is that it showed a strong trend towards benefits (in fact, twice as much muscle growth after short rests!) but the study was so small that this wasn’t statistically significant. Not sure what to think here, but it sounds like even this site doesn’t really want to stand by the results of this one.
Inline links: a 2016 study by Fink, Kikuchi, and Nakazato
Owens (2009)1 mentions across 1 issues

Owens (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 "Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law". It most often appears alongside Abrams 2012, ACLU, age-crime curve.

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Owens (2009)
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November 27, 2024
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November 27, 2024
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Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Owens (2009) investigated a Maryland law that caused some criminals to get released early. They found a crime increase corresponding to about 3 crimes per prisoner per year. This is lower than Levitt’s estimate of 7, but crime rates went down in general between Levitt’s study period (the 70s) and Owens’ (the 2000s), so they might both be right.
Owens 20191 mentions across 1 issues

Owens 2019 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 08, 2022 and July 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "See Owens 2019 for a very good short summary on this economic perspective on CJS interventions". It most often appears alongside 1/6 insurrection, ACLU, Artifex0.

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Owens 2019
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July 08, 2022
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July 08, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
However, the problem is that we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking! See the Criminology and Public Policy Volume 18 Issue 1 (2019), particularly Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. The issue is that there's an assumption that arrests (and other CJS interventions) have a UNIFORM marginal effect, but this may not be the case. Instead, imagine that the marginal effects of incrementing/decrementing a(n) arrest/imprisonment/search/stop etc. is conditional on the cumulative exposure, much like a laffer curve! In this case, it is not so clear that reducing police interventions would result in increased crime, as long as the reduction isn't 'too large'. See Owens 2019 for a very good short summary on this economic perspective on CJS interventions.