Astral Codex Ten

Publications: R

289 min read

Publications: R

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

Reddit4 mentions across 4 issues

Reddit is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 02, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "My only real source of information is this Reddit post"; "reddit thread on MacAskill"; "The linked Reddit answer names a factory in Switzerland". It most often appears alongside Amazon, America, FDA.

Article page
Reddit
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
August 02, 2021
Last seen
March 03, 2026
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
21
August 02, 2021 · Original source
I’m not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won’t let me access it). My only real source of information is this Reddit post by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:
Inline links: this Reddit post
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
Stealing my own comment from a related reddit thread on MacAskill: "The thing I took away from [his profile in the New Yorker] is that contrary to "near-termist" views, longtermism has no effective feedback mechanism for when it's gone off the rails.
The Compounding Loophole
August 22, 2024 · Original source
They say it’s through the same factories that make the official version for Big Pharma. If I understand the situation, nameless Chinese factories1 make the chemical itself, and Novo Nordisk (the pharmaceutical company that owns the official patent) does some fancy encapsulation work at their own plants. But they have a permanent capacity problem because of logistical and regulatory issues, so the nameless Chinese factories sell the extra to the compounding pharmacies on the side.
Inline links: They say, 1
The other safety concern is the salt form. FDA-approved semaglutide is the free base2 (ie the semaglutide molecule not attached to anything). Some suppliers sell the salt version (ie semaglutide attached to an ion like sodium). The FDA has issued warnings saying that the salt version isn’t approved, that any supplier caught using the salt will be shut down, and that you should avoid compounding pharmacies because you can never be sure they’re not offering the dreaded salt form. The commentary I’ve read from chemists is that none of this matters because the salt form dissolves into the free base as soon as it’s in water (which it always is before you inject it), although other people point out that maybe there could still be some theoretical concerns about shelf life and stability. Still, the FDA is legally allowed to shut down anyone offering the salt, and all the compounding pharmacies have switched to the free base.
Inline links: 2, issued warnings, The, commentary, other people
I’m less convinced by any of this than I am by the existence of several big online communities of compounded GLP-1 drug users (eg r/compoundedsemaglutide) who overall seem pretty happy and don’t report any unusual side effects.
Inline links: r/compoundedsemaglutide
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
This could have been a mixed blessing - Anthropic was previously trying to stand out as a B2B company while letting OpenAI have the dubious honor of producing consumerslop. But early signs suggest they might be winning over some companies too. From a Reddit thread on the topic:
Inline links: a Reddit thread
Reuters4 mentions across 4 issues

Reuters is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 20, 2021 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G"; "March 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/"; "There was a Reuters story that the firing was precipitated by a breakthrough". It most often appears alongside COVID, Biden, COVID-19.

Article page
Reuters
Mention count
4
Issue count
4
First seen
August 20, 2021
Last seen
April 09, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
- The trial was halted for futility: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G
Inline links: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
If I’m understanding this site right, the likely explanation is that the spike represents Milwaukee reporting its absentee ballots. Milwaukee usually reports precinct by precinct, but it reported all its absentee ballots at once, and this was during COVID when lots of people voted absentee. Milwaukee is a dense city full of black people, so its votes were overwhelmingly Democrat. So Vote Pattern Analysis is right that there was a weird sudden spike in Biden votes in the middle of the night much bigger than any plausible precinct size. It just has an innocent explanation.
Inline links: this site
March 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/
Inline links: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/
The first article is titled Russia Running Out Of Precision Munitions In Ukraine War - Pentagon Official. It states that Undersecretary of Defense Policy Colin Kahl claimed Russia was running out of precision munitions. I have no doubt that Undersecretary of Defense Policy Colin Kahl did in fact claim that, so the media isn’t lying.
Inline links: Russia Running Out Of Precision Munitions In Ukraine War - Pentagon Official
23
December 05, 2023 · Original source
The only problem is that here it looks like the probability gradually declined from October to late November, whereas on the Manifold site itself it’s clear that it was steady during that time and then collapsed on the day he was fired. I think this is a bug in the embed. There was a Reuters story that the firing was precipitated by a breakthrough in a model called Q*, which had learned to do math. The market seems to think Q* exists, but is not a breakthrough, and wasn’t involved in the firing.
Inline links: a Reuters story
There was a Reuters story that the firing was precipitated by a breakthrough in a model called Q*, which had learned to do math. The market seems to think Q* exists, but is not a breakthrough, and wasn’t involved in the firing.
Inline links: a Reuters story
1: Last month, we talked about the CFTC (regulatory body) denying Kalshi’s request to have election questions on their prediction market. Kalshi is now suing the CFTC to reverse their decision, saying that “the contracts contain no unlawful acts prohibited under the Commodity Exchange Act and therefore, the CFTC has no power to block them”. I have to admit I’m surprised by this - I thought Kalshi was trying to cultivate good will with the CFTC, and this seems pretty adversarial. Also, if they win, what’s left of the CFTC’s ability to regulate prediction markets at all? Any regulation experts want to weigh in?
Inline links: denying, is now suing the CFTC to reverse their decision
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
This collapses the ‘extreme coincidence’ claim, which as explained above, turns lab-leak into the leading hypothesis. My strongest disagreement is with his Point 3 - the inference from other seafood-market-based COVID spread events. Saar writes: A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%. Most of these outbreaks have been traced back to either a migrant worker (eg a fisherman from a country with COVID sells fish at the market of a country with Zero COVID) or a cold chain product. For example, here’s Dai et al on the Xinfadi outbreak, the most important event of this type: According to a joint publication by the Beijing CDC and 13 research institutions, the outbreak at Xinfadi Market was likely to be initiated by fomite transmission from contaminated foods imported via cold-chain logistics (Pang et al., 2020; Beijing Daily, 2020b). Based on the epidemiological investigations at the Xinfadi Market, the researchers preliminarily concluded that booth #S14 in the aquaculture product selling area on the basement floor of the primary trading hall was the source of the initial transmission. Specifically, five customers were tested positive for IgG/IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in serological screenings, all of whom visited booth #S14 on May 30 and 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, the owner of booth #S14 procured imported and fully packaged salmon from a company's cold storage warehouse, then cut and processed the salmon for sale at the Xinfadi Market. Laboratory tests showed that sample swabs from five salmon fish from this supplier were tested positive by examining all salmon in the original sealed packages (n = 3582) in the cold storage facility. Viral genome sequencing showed that the viral strain isolated from one of the positive salmon swabs was homologous to that isolated from the infected persons and environmental samples at the Xinfadi Market (Beijing Daily, 2020b). The joint study reported that an ancestral strain isolated from the Xinfadi Market in Beijing was markedly different from the strains identified in two preceding outbreaks in China and the sequences obtained in March 2020 in Beijing. Phylogenetic analysis assigned the ancestral Xinfadi strain to clade B.1.1. Given the fact that the ancestral sequences were mainly identified in Europe, the strain was more likely to be imported to Beijing rather than derived from strains previously circulating in China (Pang et al., 2020). I know China has a bias towards believing frozen food COVID explanations, but this all sounds pretty convincing to me. Why is it more often markets than other places with cold chain products? Partly it’s the migrant workers - a lot of seafood markets are right next to seaports, and the contact tracing eventually traces back to a fisherman who came in through the seaport - I don’t think this is any more mysterious than epidemics often starting via airport or any other transportation hub. But even just keeping the focus on cold chain products, - there have also been outbreaks in seafood distribution warehouses, on docks, and in a seafood processing work area. Markets have many more people than any of those locations, and maybe (total speculation) cutting on cutting boards could aerosolize bits of fish. The strongest evidence that the Wuhan / Huanan Seafood Market epidemic wasn’t caused by migrant workers or imported seafood products is that there was no previous COVID-infected source of workers or seafood. If there had been, we would have noticed when the outbreak there spread (see Section 1.4 on Brazil). Responses to a few of Saar’s other points below: How many locations other than markets provide an interface with wildlife? Were markets actually identified in advance to be high-risk spillover locations or only in retrospect? I think scientists had called wet markets as an especially dangerous potential transmission location in advance. See for example Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets, published in 2006, which says: » “In Chinese wet-markets, unique epicenters for transmission of potential viral pathogens, new genes may be acquired or existing genes modified through various mechanisms such as genetic reassortment, recombination and mutation. The wet-markets, at closer proximity to humans, with high viral burden or strains of higher transmission efficiency, facilitate transmission of the viruses to humans.” In 2004, a paper on an emerging bird flu expressed hope that it would not spread too widely, but concluded that: » “Even in the event of yet another lucky escape, more measures must be taken to limit the amplification of viruses with pandemic potential in the wet markets around the world.” In 2007, Reuters published an investigation: Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses, which said things like: » “We face similar threats from other viruses and such epidemics can happen because we continue to have very crowded markets in China," said Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong. "Even though official measures are in place, they are not faithfully followed. We are not talking about just civet cats, but all animals," he added.” Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza, published 2004, is admittedly focusing on the next SARS1 outbreak instead of on SARS2, but gets bonus points for mentioning both wet markets and labs as likely causes of the next pandemic: » “Will SARS reappear? This question confronts public-health officials worldwide, particularly infectious disease personnel in those regions of the world most affected by the disease and the economic burden of SARS, including China, Taiwan, and Canada. Will the virus re-emerge from wet markets or from laboratories working with SARS CoV, or are asymptomatic infections ongoing in human beings? Similar questions can be asked about a pandemic of influenza that is probably imminent. Knowledge of the ecology of influenza in wet markets can be used as an early-warning system to detect the reappearance of SARS or pandemic influenza.” Saar mentions that there are several other possible sources like restaurants or farms. I think Peter demonstrated during the debate that pandemics are unlikely to start in rural areas, so farms aren’t that important. Restaurants mostly source their products from wet markets. During SARS1, some pandemics started in restaurants because they kept the civets in cages next to the diners (like how some Western restaurants keep lobsters). After SARS1, restaurants stopped doing that and became a less likely spillover location. Saar again: Scott quotes Peter, who implies that under the lab-leak hypothesis, we would expect the confirmed early cases to be centered around the WIV. However, cases are not expected to center on the lab. The lab is not spraying viruses into the air or hosting thousands of locals daily. If a worker gets infected, they spread the virus to their friends and family at completely different locations. In most places with an outbreak of known origin, epidemics show some geographic clustering. This has been true ever since the very beginning of epidemiology, when John Snow successfully traced a cholera outbreak back to its origin at a contaminated water pump by taking the center of the map of cholera cases. This isn’t a 100% law of nature; an infected lab worker might get lucky and not pass it to any of his lab co-workers. Still, we might expect him to infect his family, the stores he went to, or the restaurants he went to. If he lived near his workplace, these might also be near the lab. If he didn’t - let’s say he lived on the other side of town and had a long commute - he would start a cluster near his house, or his favorite store, or his favorite restaurant. Then the people there would infect their families/co-workers/stores/restaurants. The cluster would start somewhere! Sure, some people would infect nobody close to their work or home, and instead just infect one person a hundred miles away who they breathed on during a trip - but this is the exception, not the rule. So you wouldn’t expect a totally random distribution of cases all around Wuhan. There would be one center, or maybe several centers. But none of the claims that COVID was quietly spreading for months before the wet market have pointed to some alternate center of cases. If COVID was spreading for months before the lab, it somehow spread in a completely diffuse geographical pattern, with people exactly as likely to infect people far away from them as close to them - until it reached the wet market in December, and then spread in the normal center-radiating-outward way that every other infection spreads. All the evidence trying to support a spillover at the market is based on complex models with many single points of failure, built from unreliable and biased data. Therefore, it is difficult to give this evidence significant weight as there is always a possibility of errors in the data or its interpretation. More on this in the UFO comment below. Disagree. “First known case was at a wet market” is as simple as it comes. Certainly it’s less complex than “the virus has a 12 nucleotide insertion at the furin cleavage site, and even though those sometimes happen by natural recombination probably this one didn’t, and even though it looks out of frame maybe there was some weird thing going on with serine that made it in frame this one time only”, which is Saar’s star piece of evidence. I understand Saar thinks he can come up with lots of objections to “seen near wet market is suspicious for wet market origin”, then claim that getting over those objections requires “complexity”. But if Peter had no dignity, he could also come up with lots of objections to “seen in same city as Wuhan Institute of Virology is suspicious". He could say that maybe the civet farms of Hubei province were uniquely blah blah blah, and then Saar would have to prove that the civet farms weren’t uniquely blah blah blah, and then he could say “Oh, sure seems like you have a complex model with lots of unique points of failure, it all depends on fifty facts about the regulation of civet farms.” To illustrate what a market looks like in a real zoonotic pandemic, consider this study from SARS1. The researchers went to a random market and sampled the wildlife sold there. 4 of 6 civets sampled were positive, and 3 of them were phylogenetically distinct (i.e. infected in completely different places). A scientist I talked to says the 3 phylogenetically distinct lineages were most likely sampling errors. Still, this seems irrelevant to me since, again, no raccoon-dogs were tested. Scott explains that Covid’s closest known relative, BANAL-52, is rare and so it’s highly unlikely the WIV would’ve had it available as the starting point to engineer Covid . . . This is a basic mistake. SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here. No BANAL-52 relative close enough to create COVID from has ever been discovered. By mentioning BANAL-52, I was trying to be maximally charitable to the lab leak side. In order to create COVID, they would need a virus very close to COVID. But in years and years of searching, nobody has ever discovered a virus like this. Therefore it must be rare. As a way of bounding how rare, let’s see how rare the closest virus ever discovered is. That’s BANAL-52. It is very rare. Therefore, the COVID ancestor must be rarer than that. I don’t know how strong this argument is, because maybe there are millions of rare viruses capable of becoming pandemics, such that getting any one of them is very easy, even though each one individually is rare. The version of this I find convincing is that it should be a probabilistic cost to say that WIV did gain-of-function on a seemingly undiscovered and so-far-very-hard-to-discover rare virus instead of on any of the usual SARS-like viruses that people do their gain-of-function research on. Overall, all attempts to portray [Connor Reed] as an unstable, delusional person were unsuccessful. He is an ordinary person who very accurately described Covid-19 symptoms in real-time and claims to have received a positive test result. The timing and location matches the lab leak hypothesis and is impossible for the HSM claim. Therefore, they must discredit him. It is worth noting here the biased evidentiary standards used by zoonotic proponents. Reed’s testimony about his sickness, given on camera to multiple outlets, is deceitful and should be ignored. Yet, an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication is definitely identified as Mr. Chen (another possible pre-HSM case) and should be considered reliable. See above for why I don’t trust Connor Reed. I’m not sure why Saar attributes Mr. Chen to “an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication”. When I looked for Chen information, I got this thread, where it’s attributed to two Chinese hospital doctors, cross-checked with the Chinese COVID data repository, and double-cross-checked with the supplementary table in a peer-reviewed paper published by a team of Wuhan doctors. To understand how ridiculous the claim is that the HKU1 insertion looks just as engineered as SARS2’s, here are their alignments. Hopefully that should be enough. COVID: HKU1: I’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works. Surely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations). The fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID. Or am I missing something here? [The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal). Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products. From a Vox article from March 2023: From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data. Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit. The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts. It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China. “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.” […] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago. “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.” The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this: December: COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies Early January: Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person Late January: Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now. February: Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes. March: COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy. April: Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission. 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation? randomstringofcharacters wrote: Isn't [the pandemic starting near the lab] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past. Many people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away. During the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade). This isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade. 3: Other Points That Came Up 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds quiet_NaN wrote: Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone. The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are): Peter -20.7 Saar 2.7 Eric -3.1 Will -2.5 Scott -1.2 Daniel -1.4 One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it "trolling", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market. I might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying: This is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc. In an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me. Peter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers. Trying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be: During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.
Inline links: Dai et al, Pang et al., 2020, Beijing Daily, 2020b, seafood distribution warehouses, on docks, a seafood processing work area, Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets, a paper on an emerging bird flu, Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses, Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza, this study from SARS1, this thread, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dcI7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc5aabd26-d70b-4f35-97cb-96d351bb52fd_552x920.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UQ14!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2411167c-1405-4fde-914b-6388ee498523_935x851.jpeg, a Vox article, wrote, wrote, https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1773797640607850745
Real Raw News3 mentions across 3 issues

Real Raw News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 26, 2024 and October 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "welcome to Real Raw News"; "Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion"; "The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value". It most often appears alongside Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan.

Article page
Real Raw News
Mention count
3
Issue count
3
First seen
July 26, 2024
Last seen
October 11, 2024
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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Real Raw News.1
Inline links: Real Raw News., 1
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.
At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.
Vote In The 2024 Book Review Contest
September 27, 2024 · Original source
1: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa 2: Dominion 3: Don Juan 4: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep 5: How Language Began 6: Real Raw News 7: Two Arms And A Head 8: How The War Was Won 9: Silver Age Marvel Comics 10: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book 11: The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe 12: The Pale King 13: Nine Lives 14: The Ballad Of The White Horse
Inline links: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, How Language Began, Real Raw News, Two Arms And A Head, How The War Was Won, Silver Age Marvel Comics, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary And Poet’s Craft Book, The History Of The Rise And Influence Of The Spirit Of Rationalism In Europe, The Pale King, Nine Lives, The Ballad Of The White Horse
Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
October 11, 2024 · Original source
Real Raw News, reviewed by Blake Neff. Blake is a producer for an American conservative podcast and radio show, and previously wrote the scripts for Tucker Carlson's Fox show, so feel free to blame him for the present state of American politics. He doesn't have a Substack as of yet, but does take commissions and he'll respond to your email if you send one.
Inline links: Real Raw News, he'll respond to your email
Ramblings Of A Pharmacist2 mentions across 2 issues

Ramblings Of A Pharmacist is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 27, 2022 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "author of Ramblings Of A Pharmacist"; "Benjamin Jolley (who writes the blog Ramblings Of A Pharmacist )". It most often appears alongside Benjamin Jolley, Scott, 5α-reductase inhibitor.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 27, 2022
Last seen
March 16, 2022
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Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
And Benjamin Jolley (author of Ramblings Of A Pharmacist) writes:
Inline links: Benjamin Jolley, Ramblings Of A Pharmacist
Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
— Benjamin Jolley (who writes the blog Ramblings Of A Pharmacist), has a couple interesting comments:
Inline links: Benjamin Jolley, Ramblings Of A Pharmacist
Rational Psychiatry2 mentions across 2 issues

Rational Psychiatry is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 16, 2022 and February 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Thomas Reilly has a new blog Rational Psychiatry"; "Thomas Reilly (author of Rational Psychiatry ) writes". It most often appears alongside Thomas Reilly, 12th-century England, 21st-century America.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
March 16, 2022
Last seen
February 27, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Zulresso
March 16, 2022 · Original source
— Thomas Reilly has a new blog Rational Psychiatry where he’s written up some more info on premenstrual dysphoria and progesterone. For example:
Inline links: Rational Psychiatry, some more info
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
Thomas Reilly (author of Rational Psychiatry) writes:
Inline links: Rational Psychiatry, writes
rationalitysalon.substack.com2 mentions across 2 issues

rationalitysalon.substack.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 25, 2025 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo"; "Group Link: rationalitysalon.substack.com/". It most often appears alongside 131 Colonie Center, 200 Degrees, 2740 Telegraph Ave.

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March 25, 2025
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April 01, 2026
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Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: JT Contact Info: rationalitysalon[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 10:00 AM Location: Tokyo-to Meguro-ku chuo-cho 2-4-18 Shiki Residences. Enter from the door on the north side; we'll meet you, but if you're late, ask for the party in the first suite. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMJR+PV Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo Notes: Please subscribe to the substack feed for updates to the meetup details and for future events. Applications open for 5 min lightning talks, email us at the substack.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMJR+PV, https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: HG Contact Info: rationalitysalon[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 9th, 10:00 AM Location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xyYpv3fihuvNSBaR7 (Enter the forboding street-level doorway, climb the sketchy stairs to the 3rd floor, enter the dim hallway, and listen for the sounds of laughter) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+RG3 Group Link: rationalitysalon.substack.com/ Notes: RSVPs are helpful but not necessary
Inline links: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xyYpv3fihuvNSBaR7, https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+RG3
Reason2 mentions across 2 issues

Reason is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 21, 2021 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "articles about me in Reason"; "the *Reason* article is from 2021". It most often appears alongside California, 7500 people signed a petition, A History Of Mankind.

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Reason
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2
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2
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January 21, 2021
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June 29, 2022
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Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
Inline links: deleted my blog
But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe from impoverished pushcart vendor Mohammed Bouazizi. He couldn't afford it. She confiscated his goods, insulted him, and (according to some sources) slapped him. He was humiliated and destitute and had no hope of ever getting back at a police officer. So he made the very reasonable decision to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in the public square. One thing led to another, and eventually a mostly-peaceful revolution ousted the government of Tunisia. I am very sorry for Mr. Bouazizi and his family. But he did find a way to make the offending policewoman remember the day she harassed him as something other than Tuesday. As the saying goes, "sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation".
Inline links: ousted the government of Tunisia
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
“That will definitely happen,” said Berg. “And it’s not ‘What if,’ it’s ‘That will definitely happen.’ If you don’t deal with the reasons people are losing their housing then the system will never be able to keep up. Communities did really well getting people off the streets but they haven’t really thought about the inflow of people.”
Hi Scott. You write: "The researchers do not use the terms “local policy” or “social attitudes” in the paper itself." But in the paper it states: "To account for these unobserved local covariates, we include a CoC-level dynamic latent factor F 0 iβi,t, allowing for small departures from the cluster-level regression that may be due to local policies, cultural attitudes toward homelessness, affordable housing initiatives, and many other difficult to observe local factors." Doesn't take away from your main point, but they do mention local policy, and "cultural" attitudes seems like a reasonable proxy for "social" attitudes.
I think the ~400 discrepancy might be that the *Reason* article is from 2021, and the comptroller's report from 2022.
Recursive Adaptation2 mentions across 2 issues

Recursive Adaptation is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 13, 2024 and January 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I highly recommend the Recursive Adaptation blog"; "Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025". It most often appears alongside FDA, GLP-1, Ozempic.

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2
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August 13, 2024
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January 17, 2025
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Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
August 13, 2024 · Original source
If you want to learn more about GLP-1 receptor agonists and addiction, including the application to public policy, I highly recommend the Recursive Adaptation blog.
Inline links: Recursive Adaptation
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
I agree with this solution. 3: Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman: The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance 4: This month in nominative determinism: NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, by Victor Mather (h/t Yafah Edelman). 5: Someone is working on a dating site that uses your conversations with Claude to find a match. Link here, although so far it’s just a landing page where you can register interest (h/t @venturetwins) 6: The Lyttle Lytton Contest searches for the worst possible opening line for a novel; it’s been going on since 2001 and this year’s results are in. 7: Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress. I agree with @tamaybes and others in saying that Miles let Gary off too easily; Gary’s public statements all sound like “modern AI is mostly hype, it doesn’t really do anything like thinking”, but the bet is about things like “will AI make a Nobel Prize caliber scientific discovery by 2027?” and “will AI write Pulitzer-quality books by 2027?” I don’t blame Gary for taking the best terms he could find. But I am worried that if AI makes a Nobel-quality scientific discovery in 2026, but doesn’t quite write the Pulitzer-quality book, then Gary will get to claim victory over the AI optimists, whereas in fact that would be at probably the 95th percentile of fast timelines by most people’s estimate. 8: “The probability that cows (or other non-human animals) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering), or are "enlightened by default" is, by my estimation, very low”. 9: Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025. 75% of FDA approval of GLP-1 for a substance use disorder by 2029! 10: In my post on the economics of GLP-1 receptor agonists (eg Ozempic), I wrote about how they’re currently widely available because of a loophole suspending patents during a shortage, and predicted there would be a big fight when the shortage was over. Sure enough, the FDA tried to declare that the shortage of tirzepatide (a next-generation Ozempic relative) was over, compounding pharmacies sued, and tirzepatide is still available while the issue goes through the courts (and will the administration have an opinion?) Also, compounding pharmacy access startup Mochi says that they will continue to prescribe even if the shortage is over, using another loophole saying doctors can do this for specific individual patients in cases of medical necessity. This is an extremely fake use of this loophole, but will the government be willing to call their bluff? 11: Jacob Falkovich has a blog on dating advice, which he plans to turn into a book of dating advice. I can’t really comment on the accuracy (my dating strategy tends to look more like waiting for women to send me emails saying “I like your blog, would you like to go on a date?” which probably doesn’t generalize), but I’ve had many good interactions with Jake, and he has a beautiful family which means he must be doing something right. Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma! 12: Christ And Counterfactuals is a blog on effective altruism from a Christian perspective. Some previous attempts at this have felt kind of forced, but the first post I read here was actually pretty interesting. Richard Swinburne (apparently “the world’s best Christian philosopher”), thinks that: “[One] reason why it is good that the human race should sometimes be in an initial situation of considerable ignorance about the causes and effects of our actions, is this. If God abolished the need for rational inquiry and gave us from childhood strong true beliefs about the causes of things, that would make it too easy for us to make moral decisions. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions. I do not know for certain that if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that if I do not give money to some charity, people will starve. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer), or that someone will starve if I do not give. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (the decision which you have a strong desire to make). And even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act which, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all.” (Could a Good God Permit so Much Suffering? A Debate, pp. 52-53.) This is pretty galaxy-brained, but something galaxy-brained must be going on for God to tolerate the existence of evil at all, and this is a surprisingly natural extension of some common premises on the subject. 13: Swedish study: diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse. Of the two mechanisms they looked at, stigma seems more involved than drug side effects. My opinion: this study was done on conscripts undergoing a mandatory psych evaluation for the army, who had no previous reason to think they had a psych disease and had not sought treatment. This is a different situation from somebody who comes to a psychiatrist asking for relief from specific symptoms they have noticed. Also, Sweden c. 2005 is a different culture from America 2025 in terms of how much stigma a psych diagnosis carries. I think it’s possible that if you never considered that you had psychiatric problems, and were suddenly given a diagnosis in 2005 Sweden and told you couldn’t serve in the army, that’s likely to destabilize your self-image more than a person who knows they’re depressed going to a psychiatrist in 2025 US and getting antidepressants. 14: RIP Felix Hill, research scientist at DeepMind and mentor to many in the AI community. You can read his suicide note here, though the obvious content warning applies. He says he took ketamine for mild anxiety and it plunged him into an incredibly deep depression that he couldn’t get out of; he leaves his story behind as a warning for others. I appreciate his warning, but I wish he had said more about what dose he used; different people’s ketamine doses vary by almost two orders of magnitude, I’d previously thought that the low doses were pretty safe and the high doses were sketchy, and I would like to know whether I should update or not. 15: RIP Max Chiswick, professional poker player, effective altruist, and ACX reader. 16: Adrian Dittman, a Twitter account widely accused of being Elon Musk’s alt, has been revealed to be . . . a guy named Adrian Dittman. Congrats to Maia Crimew and the Spectator for actually investigating this, unlike many other news sources which spread the Musk conspiracy theory. Also, the people involved got banned from X for some reason, maybe because this qualified as doxxing Dittman. 17: Related: Musk claims to be among the top players in the world at several computer games. A veteran Path of Exile gamer presents evidence that Musk faked his PoE2 accomplishments by hiring a Chinese guy to play on his account. Some Musk supporters in the comments suggest that maybe he hires the Chinese guy to level up his account, but his accomplishments (eg speedruns) are still his own? 18: Related: Sam Harris says he has been friends with Musk since 2008, but he noticed a sudden shift for the worse in his personality around 2020 which made it impossible to stay friends with him. He gives the example of Musk losing a bet with him that there would be 35,000+ COVID cases in the US, refusing to pay up, and launching personal attacks on Sam when asked to do so. What happened? Some theories: Musk turned right-wing, which ended his friendship with Sam for the same reason political differences have always ended friendships (but then what about the bet, which seems like objectively bad behavior?)
Inline links: this, The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance, NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, here, @venturetwins, this year’s results are in, Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress, @tamaybes, by my estimation, Recursive Adaptation, my post on, the FDA tried to declare, will continue to prescribe, a blog on dating advice, Christ And Counterfactuals, the first post I read here, diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse, RIP, here, RIP, a guy named Adrian Dittman, got banned from X for some reason, presents evidence
Red Scare2 mentions across 2 issues

Red Scare is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 04, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "even the alternative media that has done the most to popularize the idea... - Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, etc"; "Red Scare". It most often appears alongside Boston, Chapo Trap House, COVID.

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Red Scare
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2
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2
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December 04, 2025
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December 31, 2025
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Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
December 04, 2025 · Original source
(source) It seems to have been declining since about 2010! Why? The government’s biggest student loan program is capped at $31,000, most people started hitting that max around 2010, the government never changed the cap, and the value of $31,000 goes down with inflation every year. (does this prove that the root cause of rising college prices was government loans all along?) Meanwhile, credit card debt, etc, are rounding errors in comparison. So the vibecession can’t be a debt trap. The Brooklyn Theory Of Everything In modern America, people in a tiny number of cities - NYC, SF, DC - dominate elite conversations. We have long since priced in that all the prestige information sources - New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Review Of Books - share a certain perspective. But even the alternative media that has done the most to popularize the idea of the modern economy as hellworld for the young - Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, etc - grew out of the same New York environment. So how have rents changed in New York? Surprisingly, they’ve done no worse than the US average. Aside from the post-pandemic spike, they tracked cost of living. And their post-pandemic spike is comparatively modest. Does this disprove the Brooklyn Theory of Everything? Not necessarily. The new revised version says that the concentration of young elites and would-be elites in NYC and SF is itself a new phenomenon. Source: BLS, counting occupation code 27 as “the creative class” Since life in SF, DC, and NYC is especially pricy… Rent-to-income ratio of various metro areas (source) (source) …someone who moves from a counterfactual life in Boston to New York City has effectively had rent increase from 30% to 58% of income, even before we get to the secular trend! Then these people think “My life and that of everyone I know is unaffordable! It must be a generational crisis!” Then they write about it in the New York Times and The New Yorker, and their readers - including the average people who take the consumer sentiment surveys - believe the economy is uniquely awful. This isn’t the same as saying “it’s all vibes, there’s no crisis”. The crisis is that young people who want to join the elite are being forced into places they can’t afford. Would-be financial elites must spend years of misery chasing a lottery ticket that might not pay off; would-be cultural elites face the same challenge, plus their economic situation may not improve even if they win the culturally-prestigious (but low-paying) positions they seek. A natural test for this hypothesis would be to check economic sentiment in Brooklyn vs. the rest of the country. But this wouldn’t necessarily work: the hypothesis predicts that malaise will spread from Brooklyn to everywhere else. More Work To Stay In The Same Place Brenda Boomer applied to a local business she liked at age 18. She got hired, worked her way up from the bottom, and by age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,000 per year. Martha Millennial lost her adolescence to endless lessons in Mandarin, water polo, and competitive debate, all intended to pad her college resume; her only break was the three months she spent building houses in Rwanda to establish her social justice credentials. She eventually got accepted to Penn and earned a 4.2 in her college classes, despite having to complete several of them remotely from the Google campus where she was doing a simultaneous internship. After graduation, she applied to twenty-eight grad schools but was rejected from all of them, so she instead got two half-time jobs, one as a waitress and one at a startup that pitched itself as “Uber for humidifiers”. The humidifier startup failed, reducing her equity to $0, but she had only been in it for networking anyway, and by attending industry conferences every weekend she had collected the right contacts to get a warm introduction to the vice-president of their biggest competitor, “Uber for dehumidifiers”. She joined the dehumidifier startup, rose to associate manager, bumped up against a local ceiling (“we don’t promote from inside”), and successfully got herself poached by an air purifier startup, where at age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,001 per year. Technically Martha did better than Brenda at the same age. But she might still yearn for simpler times. (source) (source) What causes this one? It must be something big: after all, we see the same trend in college admissions, job applications, and (really!) dating, where matches that used to happen naturally have turned to an endless grind through hundreds of rejections and near-misses. The most likely explanation is technology removing frictions: when it’s easy to apply en masse to every opportunity in the world, every opportunity in the world gets thousands of applicants. They search for the best based on formal qualifications, so the value of formal qualifications goes up, so there’s an increasing arms race to achieve them. The only problem with this theory is that it doesn’t entirely match people’s complaints. They don’t complain that it was too hard to achieve their success, they complain that they are not achieving success, or that it feels hopeless. Speculatively, maybe people complain that they are not getting the level of success they expected based on their qualifications. That is, the same average-talent person is getting the same average-salary job they would have forty years ago. But since they have a masters’ degree and five internships and 12,000 LinkedIn contacts, they expected to get a better-than-average job. When they don’t, it feels like success slipping away. Conclusion Until now, we’ve tried to take disillusioned young people at their word. If instead we lean towards the economists, what might be ruining the vibes? The obvious answer is increasing negative bias in the media. I didn’t expect that Googling “graph about how negative media is over time” would work. We really do live in an age of wonders (source). This measure likely underestimates the trend towards negativity, because it only tracks a specific basket of media outlets. But the change could also have included viewers shifting consumption from more mainstream outlets towards more conspiratorial ones, including social media and blogs. (my Substack is tagged Science, but I hear the real money is in the Health Politics tag, where top performers feature articles like The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions and Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis) So, is that all there is? I think the strongest case for an economic crisis beyond vibes would be: Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HbCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83925817-3c85-4a63-83a7-8d0f622c398b_900x453.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Io3M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9d6d900-7d07-47c3-bc38-24731eead8ee_509x422.png, BLS, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hImJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Febd7f229-69cb-40df-952c-77c61cc30619_722x348.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hi4e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e8438f-82d9-4db1-b730-edc9f5cedc30_742x323.webp, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!33ZC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fbed681-cd12-4f7d-9b42-1c98019eae4d_518x797.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!06v5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9fd4d840-0d95-402a-81e6-ff444ef09316_848x480.jpeg, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HlGa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c9d01fd-1834-41bd-abb7-5b935149bd17_726x227.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ll2f!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0095e4e7-7e15-4bcf-b64a-534e75fe0f3d_1080x884.jpeg, The most likely explanation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N2xe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c6ff762-10f4-4022-a759-206d873c2ec1_1456x807.webp, source, The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions, Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
I appreciate this guide to the original intent of the word, but I claim ‘death of the author’ - it seems to me this is more than just a two-year problem. I remember people complaining about hellworld, the broken social contract, the Boomers tearing up the bridge behind them, vanishing opportunities for the young, the blackpill of modern life, etc, well before 2022. Memory can be faulty, but don’t we need something like this to explain the Trump campaign, the Sanders campaign, Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, 4chan, and all the other mid-2010s politicians and media telling us that things were worse than they’d ever been and outrage was the only acceptable response?
Reframing Superintelligence2 mentions across 2 issues

Reframing Superintelligence is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 11, 2022 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "see eg my review of Reframing Superintelligence"; "my review of Reframing Superintelligence"; "Eric Drexler’s 2019 report Reframing Superintelligence". It most often appears alongside FDA, @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot.

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2
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April 11, 2022
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February 29, 2024
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Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It
April 11, 2022 · Original source
Prosaic alignment is hard… “Prosaic alignment” (see this article for more) means alignment of normal AIs like the ones we use today. For a while, people thought those AIs couldn’t reach dangerous levels, and that AIs that reached dangerous levels would have so many exotic new discoveries that we couldn’t even begin to speculate on what they would be like or how to align them. After GPT-2, DALL-E, and the rest, alignment researchers got more concerned that AIs kind of like current models could be dangerous. Prosaic alignment - trying to align AIs like the ones we have now - has become the dominant (though not unchallenged) paradigm in alignment research. “Prosaic” doesn’t necessarily mean the AI cannot write poetry; see Gwern’s AI generated poetry for examples. … because OOD behavior is unpredictable “OOD” stands for “out of distribution”. All AIs are trained in a certain environment. Then they get deployed in some other environment. If it’s like the training environment, presumably their training is pretty relevant and helpful. If it’s not like the training environment, anything can happen. Returning to our stock example, the “training environment” where evolution designed humans didn’t involve contraceptives. In that environment, the base optimizer’s goal (pass on genes) and the mesa-optimizer’s goal (get genital friction) were very well-aligned - doing one often led to the other - so there wasn’t much pressure on evolution to look for a better proxy. Then 1957, boom, the FDA approves the oral contraceptive pill, and suddenly the deployment environment looks really really different from the training environment and the proxy collapses so humiliatingly that people start doing crazy things like electing Viktor Orban prime minister. So: suppose we train a robot to pick strawberries. We let it flail around in a strawberry patch, and reinforce it whenever strawberries end up in a bucket. Eventually it learns to pick strawberries very well indeed. But maybe all the training was done on a sunny day. And maybe what it actually learned was to identify the metal bucket by the way it gleamed in the sunlight. Later we ask it to pick strawberries in the evening, where a local streetlight is the brightest thing around, and it throws the strawberries at the streetlight instead. So fine. We train it in a variety of different lighting conditions, until we’re sure that, no matter what the lighting situation, the strawberries go in the bucket. Then one day someone with a big bulbous red nose wanders on to the field, and the robot tears his nose off and pulls it into the bucket. If only there had been someone with a nose that big and red in the training distribution, so we could have told it not to do that! The point is, just because it’s learned “strawberries into bucket” in one environment, doesn’t mean it’s safe or effective in another. And we can never be sure we’ve caught all the ways the environment can vary. …and deception is more dangerous than Goodharting. To “Goodhart” is to take advantage of Goodhart’s Law: to follow the letter of your reward function, rather than the spirit. The ordinary-life equivalent is “teaching to the test”. The system’s programmers (eg the Department of Education) have an objective (children should learn). They delegate that objective to mesa-optimizers (the teachers) via a proxy objective (children should do well on the standardized test) and a correlated reward function (teachers get paid more if their students get higher test scores). The teachers can either pursue the base objective for less reward (teach children useful skills), or pursue their mesa-level objective for more reward (teach them how to do well on the test). An alignment failure! This sucks, but it’s a bounded problem. We already know that some teachers teach to the test, and the Department of Education has accepted this as a reasonable cost of having the incentive system at all. We might imagine our strawberry-picker cutting strawberries into little pieces, so that it counts as having picked more strawberries. Again, it sucks, but once a programmer notices it can be fixed pretty quickly (as long as the AI is still weak and under control). What about deception? Suppose the strawberry-picker happens to land on some goal function other than the intended one. Maybe, as before, it wants to toss strawberries at light sources, in a way that works when the nearest light source is a metal bucket, but fails when it’s a streetlight. Our programmers are (somewhat) smart and careful, so during training, they test it at night, next to a streetlight. What happens? If it’s just a dumb collection of reflexes trained by gradient descent, it throws the strawberry at the streetlight and this is easily caught and fixed. If it’s a very smart mesa-optimizer, it might think “If I throw the strawberry at the streetlight, I will be caught and trained to have different goals. This totally fails to achieve my goal of having strawberries near light sources. So throwing the strawberry at the light source this time, in the training environment, fails to achieve my overall goal of having strawberries thrown at light sources in general. I’ll do what the humans want - put the strawberry in the bucket - for now.” So it puts the strawberry in the bucket and doesn’t get caught. Then, as soon as the humans stop looking, it throws strawberries at the streetlight again. Deception is more dangerous than Goodharting because Goodharting will get caught and trained away, and deception might not. I might not be explaining this well, see also Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think: We prevent OOD behavior by detecting OOD and obtaining more human labels when we detect it… If you’re (somewhat) careful, you can run your strawberry-picking AI at night, see it throw strawberries at streetlights, and train it out of this behavior (ie have a human programmer label it “bad” so the AI gradient-descends away from it) …and we eliminate the incentive for deception by ensuring that the base optimizer is myopic A myopic optimizer is one that reinforces programs based only on their performance within a short time horizon. So for example, the outside gradient descent loop might grade a strawberry picker only on how well it did picking strawberries for the first hour it was deployed. If this worked perfectly, it would create an optimizer with a short time horizon. When it considered deceiving its programmers in order to get a payoff a few days later when they stopped watching it, it wouldn’t bother, since a few days later is outside the time horizon. …and implements a decision theory incapable of acausal trade. You don’t want to know about this one, really. Just pretend it never mentioned this, sorry for the inconvenience. There are deceptively-aligned non-myopic mesa-optimizers even for a myopic base objective. Even if the base optimizer is myopic, the mesa-optimizer might not be. Evolution designed humans myopically, in the sense that we live some number of years, and nothing that happens after that can reward or punish us further. But we still “build for posterity” anyway, presumably as a spandrel of having working planning software at all. Infinite optimization power might be able to evolve this out of us, but infinite optimization power could do lots of stuff, and real evolution remains stubbornly finite. Maybe it would be helpful if we could make the mesa-optimizer itself myopic (though this would severely limit its utility). But so far there is no way to make a mesa-optimizer anything. You just run the gradient descent and cross your fingers. The most likely outcome: you run myopic gradient descent to create a strawberry picker. It creates a mesa-optimizer with some kind of proxy goal which corresponds very well to strawberry picking in the training optimization, like flinging red things at lights (realistically it will be weirder and more exotic than this). The mesa-optimizer is not incentivized to think about anything more than an hour out, but does so anyway, for the same reason I’m not incentivized to speculate about the far future but I’m doing so anyway. While speculating about the far future, it realizes that failing to pick strawberries correctly now will thwart its goal of throwing red things at light sources later. It picks strawberries correctly in the training distribution, and then, when training is over and nobody is watching, throws strawberries at streetlights. (Then it realizes it could throw lots more red things at light sources if it was more powerful, achieves superintelligence somehow, and converts the mass of the Earth into red things it can throw at the sun. The end.) III. You’re still here? But we already finished explaining the meme! Okay, fine. Is any of this relevant to the real world? As far as we know, there are no existing full mesa-optimizers. AlphaGo is kind of a mesa-optimizer. You could approximate it as a gradient descent loop creating a good-Go-move optimizer. But this would only be an approximation: DeepMind hard-coded some parts of AlphaGo, then gradient-descended other parts. Its objective function is “win games of Go”, which is hard-coded and pretty clear. Whether or not you choose to call it a mesa-optimizer, it’s not a very scary one. Will we get scary mesa-optimizers in the future? This ties into one of the longest-running debates in AI alignment - see eg my review of Reframing Superintelligence, or the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue. Optimists say: “Since a goal-seeking AI might kill everyone, I would simply not create one”. They speculate about mechanical/instinctual superintelligences that would be comparatively easy to align, and might help us figure out how to deal with their scarier cousins. But the mesa-optimizer literature argues: we have limited to no control over what kind of AIs we get. We can hope and pray for mechanical instinctual AIs all we want. We can avoid specifically designing goal-seeking AIs. But really, all we’re doing here is setting up a gradient descent loop and pressing ‘go’. Then the loop evolves whatever kind of AI best minimizes our loss function. Will that be a mesa-optimizer? Well, I benefit from considering my actions and then choosing the one that best achieves my goal. Do you benefit from this? It sure does seem like this helps in a broad class of situations. So it would be surprising if planning agents weren’t an effective AI design. And if they are, we should expect gradient descent to stumble across them eventually. This is the scenario that a lot of AI alignment research focuses on. When we create the first true planning agent - on purpose or by accident - the process will probably start with us running a gradient descent loop with some objective function. That will produce a mesa-optimizer with some other, potentially different, objective function. Making sure you actually like the objective function that you gave the original gradient descent loop on purpose is called outer alignment. Carrying that objective function over to the mesa-optimizer you actually get is called inner alignment. Outer alignment problems tend to sound like Sorcerer’s Apprentice. We tell the AI to pick strawberries, but we forgot to include caveats and stop signals. The AI becomes superintelligent and converts the whole world into strawberries so it can pick as many as possible. Inner alignment problems tend to sound like the AI tiling the universe with some crazy thing which, to humans, might not look like picking strawberries at all, even though in the AI’s exotic ontology it served as some useful proxy for strawberries in the training distribution. My stand-in for this is “converts the whole world into red things and throws them into the sun”, but whatever the AI that kills us really does will probably be weirder than that. They’re not ironic Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style comeuppance. They’re just “what?” If you wrote a book about a wizard who created a strawberry-picking golem, and it converted the entire earth into ferrous microspheres and hurled them into the sun, it wouldn’t become iconic the way Sorcerer’s Apprentice did. Inner alignment problems happen “first”, so we won’t even make it to the good-story outer alignment kind unless we solve a lot of issues we don’t currently know how to solve. For more information, you can read: Rob Miles’ video above, direct link here, channel here.
Inline links: this article, Gwern’s AI generated poetry, electing Viktor Orban prime minister, Goodhart’s Law, Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers? It’s More Likely Than You Think, my review of, Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Ngo dialogue, here, here
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
54: Eric Drexler’s 2019 report Reframing Superintelligence is one of the works of AI futurism that’s aged the best in our current LLM era, and I give him lots of credit for his successful prediction. Now he has a new AI futurism blog on Substack, AI Prospects.
Inline links: Reframing Superintelligence, AI Prospects
Resident Contrarian2 mentions across 2 issues

Resident Contrarian is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "other reviews, which I mostly avoided reading until done with mine, to prevent information cascades: Resident Contrarian"; "2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here ( Hoel , Roger’s Bacon , Resident Contrarian". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

Mention count
2
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2
First seen
February 16, 2022
Last seen
September 02, 2022
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Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
[other reviews, which I mostly avoided reading until done with mine, to prevent information cascades: Resident Contrarian, Zero HP Lovecraft]
Inline links: Resident Contrarian, Zero HP Lovecraft
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
God-Emperor Of Dune, reviewed by Resident Contrarian. RC is a rapidly aging father from Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs at residentcontrarian.com and is available for freelance work
Inline links: God-Emperor Of Dune, residentcontrarian.com, freelance work
I was happy with my decision to keep this contest anonymous, because the most “famous” person to enter won first place, and if it had been open-identity I would have wondered whether he was drawing on a pre-existing fan base. But no, Erik can rest assured he is actually very good at writing (which he probably already knew, being a novelist and all, but you never know). In fact, 2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here (Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, and the extra 0.5 is for Etienne who I didn’t know about before this week but just saw his post Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards on the subreddit). I’m always suspicious that everything is fake and good writers aren’t actually good and it’s just a social conspiracy to believe that they are, but these results are a vote in support of our existing writer-identification-institutions (are they all Substack? I guess it’s just Substack) - although many unknown people also did very well, including the 2nd place winner (I didn’t get a response to my email asking how I should reveal his identity, so I’m defaulting to initials, but I don’t recognize his real name either).
Inline links: Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards
Rolling Stone2 mentions across 2 issues

Rolling Stone is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 06, 2021 and January 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version"; "It was “too good to check”. The media was already looking to discredit ivermectin. So the report of one doctor - without even a phone call to confirm - was good enough for Rolling Stone"; "Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media". It most often appears alongside COVID, Donald Trump, Twitter.

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Rolling Stone
Mention count
2
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2
First seen
September 06, 2021
Last seen
January 11, 2023
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Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts
September 06, 2021 · Original source
In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know. The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it "a horse dewormer” (it is used to deworm horses, but it’s also FDA-approved for humans, but lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way. Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version, but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc. Which brings us to the Sequoyah Hospital letter on the right. They released a statement saying that Dr. McElyea hasn’t worked there in two months, they haven’t had any ivermectin overdose cases, and they don’t know what he’s talking about. In the comments, author Virginia Hume sums up the situation nicely: I’ve recently been reading Scout Mindset (expect a review soon), which is kind of the rationalist movement in book form. It focuses on the difference between how we treat ideas that conform to our biases versus those that contradict them. If they conform, we ask “Are we allowed to accept this?” and wave them through, like a small town police chief dealing with a case involving the mayor’s son. If they contradict, we subject them to the harshest inquisition possible, like a small town police chief dealing with a guy named “Abdullah” with a sinister-looking beard. The media was already looking to discredit ivermectin. So the report of one doctor - without even a phone call to confirm - was good enough for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, BBC, etc. It was “too good to check”. II. Did you believe that? I did, briefly. Then I remembered the Law Of Rationalist Irony: the smugger you feel about having caught a bias in someone else, the more likely you are falling victim to that bias right now, in whatever way would be most embarrassing. So, quick check: am I doing this? I notice this story is exactly tailored to appeal to me and people like me. It discredits the media establishment, who I don’t like. It’s a great argument for why we need more rationality, something I’ve been trying to push. It lets me feel superior to everyone: I am properly skeptical of ivermectin, but also I haven’t become a contemptible propagandist who joins in mass media smear campaigns. And I didn’t even take a second to check if it was true! I’m relying entirely on the word of a Twitter bluecheck I’ve never heard of before, whose profile picture is some kind of dog (an Australian sheepdog? maybe some kind of weird collie?) Forget making a phone call to a hospital, I didn’t even read the original article! The story was “too good to check”! So I tried checking, and noticed that the third reply to the original tweet was this: In case you’re as confused as I am, NHS here = “Northeastern Health System”, an Oklahoma health care group. Britain is not involved. This…turns out to be completely true. The story never mentions Sequoyah Hospital! Dr. McElyea has worked at Sequoyah in the past, but he’s a traveling doctor and works lots of places. Plausibly Sequoyah just wanted to clarify that they weren’t like the hospitals in the story, they’re not turning away gunshot victims, and if you happen to be a gunshot victim you’re still welcome to go to Sequoyah and can expect timely care. Apparently I’m not the only person who doesn’t scroll down to the third tweet. The right-wing Washington Examiner has an article on how Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media. Fox has an article on Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False. One Redditor puts it more bluntly: “Dr. Jason McElyea, who has been claiming that emergency rooms have been turning away gunshot victims because of Ivermectin overdoses, is a liar.” None of these sources mentioned that the original article had never claimed Sequoyah Hospital was involved. Their story was - I guess - too good to check. III. Did you believe that? I mean, that’s also a pretty cool story, isn’t it? Right-wing news outlets accuse the so-called “liberal media” of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admitted I’m probably biased here? Sequoyah Hospital might not be the particular hospital that the doctor in the story was thinking of. But isn’t it suspicious that other hospitals are so packed with ivermectin cases that they have to delay care to gunshot victims, yet Sequoyah says that it “has not treated any patients due to complications of treating ivermectin”? Seems weird for there to be that much difference. Okay, this time I promise I’m not trying to psych you out. Here’s what I’ve actually been able to figure out about this situation: Rolling Stone seems to think that the Sequoyah Hospital statement casts doubt on their account. They changed the title of their article to “One Hospital Denies Oklahoma Doctor’s Story…” and edited in a long prologue about the hospital’s statement in a way that suggests they feel bad about their reporting. They say that they have reached out to various relevant doctors and hospitals for comments but have not heard back from them - which I guess is good, because if your hospital is so busy that you don’t have time to treat gunshot victims, you really shouldn’t have time to give interviews to Rolling Stone.
Inline links: the, The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!50Ju!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6a65950a-1232-4977-ace5-71b13c4ab83f_726x156.png, Scout Mindset, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cSE3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe530cd25-fde9-4b98-b7d8-a1143ee0e026_722x187.png, Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media, Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False, puts it more bluntly
Rolling Stone seems to think that the Sequoyah Hospital statement casts doubt on their account. They changed the title of their article to “One Hospital Denies Oklahoma Doctor’s Story…” and edited in a long prologue about the hospital’s statement in a way that suggests they feel bad about their reporting. They say that they have reached out to various relevant doctors and hospitals for comments but have not heard back from them - which I guess is good, because if your hospital is so busy that you don’t have time to treat gunshot victims, you really shouldn’t have time to give interviews to Rolling Stone.
Inline links: One Hospital Denies Oklahoma Doctor’s Story
In an unrelated issue, the photo on top of their article was previously a bunch of Oklahoman-looking people standing in a long line outside a building. This had a caption, in small print, saying that it was of Oklahomans waiting for the COVID vaccine. Critics pointed out that in context, people would have interpreted it as being a picture of people waiting outside a hospital which had long lines because it was too full of ivermectin victims. Whether or not that criticism was fair, Rolling Stone has taken down that photo and replaced it with a photo of ivermectin pills.
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
Russia Today2 mentions across 2 issues

Russia Today is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 21, 2021 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Russia Today wrote an article about my situation as part of their propaganda campaign"; "Russia Today wrote an article about my situation as part of their propaganda campaign"; "obvious Russian accounts like the Russia Today newspaper". It most often appears alongside Alex Tabarrok, Bitcoin, California.

Article page
Russia Today
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2
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2
First seen
January 21, 2021
Last seen
February 09, 2023
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Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
Eventually it became kind of overwhelming. 7500 people signed a petition in my favor. Russia Today wrote an article about my situation as part of their propaganda campaign against the United States. Various tech figures started a campaign to stop granting interviews to NYT in protest. All of the humbling support kind of blended together. At my character level, I can only cast the spell Summon Entire Internet once per decade or so. So as I clicked through email after email, I asked myself: did I do the right thing?
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
35: Matt Taibbi writes about Hamilton 68, supposedly a sophisticated group tracking Russian bot activity. The New York Times, MSNBC, and Politifact all wrote stories about Russian disinformation campaigns based on their research. Apparently new information reveals Hamilton 68 just sort of randomly declared normal human US conservative commentators “Russian bots” (along with a smattering of obvious Russian accounts like the Russia Today newspaper), tracked their activity to make a “Russian bot activity dashboard”, and hid this by refusing to release their list or explain their methodology. Seems bad.
Inline links: writes about Hamilton 68
DSA1 mentions across 1 issues

r/DSA is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2021 and April 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "about midway between r/DSA and r/SamHarris". It most often appears alongside A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance, Agan, Air Force Chapel.

Reference entry
DSA
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1
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1
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April 12, 2021
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April 12, 2021
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Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
11: Map of Reddit, one of the better such efforts. You can find r/slatestarcodex on the northern continent, in the land of Beliefs, about midway between r/DSA and r/SamHarris . Also, apparently if you divide Reddit into ~ a hundred natural clusters, one of them (middle of the east coast of the southern continent) will be “Texan porn”.
Inline links: Map of Reddit
rational wiki1 mentions across 1 issues

r/rational wiki 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 "I also started the initiative to revamp the r/rational wiki so it was actually usable". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

Reference entry
rational wiki
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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
#11: Preserve And Categorize Web Fiction I'm Makin, and I'm looking for a tiny amount of funding to save the world of web fiction from the ravages of time, with a focus on rational/ist/EA fiction. So much of the history of the genre is hard to reach, and I can put it up for permanent categorization, linking and eventual mirroring on a website. All I need is money to keep DigitalOcean instances up for a long, LONG time, though I'm also looking at IPFS as an option (and if you're aware of any better fits, I welcome advice!). My last project was Homestuck.net, a pretty complete archive of the best works of the Homestuck fandom, which has taught me the necessary steps to archive and display things for future humans to use long-term. I also started the initiative to revamp the r/rational wiki so it was actually usable. If my archival project sounds good to you, I'm looking for yearly Patreon pledges at patreon.com/makin. You can reach me at makin@protonmail.com if a funny-looking Patreon is not an option or want more details about how your money will be used.
russia1 mentions across 1 issues

r/russia is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 08, 2022 and March 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "quarantined their r/russia subreddit". It most often appears alongside Achilles, Afghan, America.

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russia
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1
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1
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March 08, 2022
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March 08, 2022
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Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
d. Reddit has quarantined their r/russia subreddit, which I think is a cowardly and outrageous act of censorship. But you can still see it if you have a verified email, and I find it an interesting window into the Russian perspective on the conflict.
Inline links: r/russia subreddit
SamHarris1 mentions across 1 issues

r/SamHarris is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2021 and April 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "about midway between r/DSA and r/SamHarris". It most often appears alongside A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance, Agan, Air Force Chapel.

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SamHarris
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1
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1
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April 12, 2021
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April 12, 2021
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Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
11: Map of Reddit, one of the better such efforts. You can find r/slatestarcodex on the northern continent, in the land of Beliefs, about midway between r/DSA and r/SamHarris . Also, apparently if you divide Reddit into ~ a hundred natural clusters, one of them (middle of the east coast of the southern continent) will be “Texan porn”.
Inline links: Map of Reddit
slatestarcodex1 mentions across 1 issues

r/slatestarcodex is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 12, 2021 and April 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can find r/slatestarcodex". It most often appears alongside A Whirlwind Tour Of Ethereum Finance, Agan, Air Force Chapel.

Reference entry
slatestarcodex
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1
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1
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April 12, 2021
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April 12, 2021
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Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
11: Map of Reddit, one of the better such efforts. You can find r/slatestarcodex on the northern continent, in the land of Beliefs, about midway between r/DSA and r/SamHarris . Also, apparently if you divide Reddit into ~ a hundred natural clusters, one of them (middle of the east coast of the southern continent) will be “Texan porn”.
Inline links: Map of Reddit
22: Best of recent r/slatestarcodex: Prose Is Bad
Inline links: Prose Is Bad
RaceToTheWH1 mentions across 1 issues

RaceToTheWH is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 18, 2022 and October 18, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "37% chance ( RaceToTheWH ) of taking power". It most often appears alongside 2024 elections, 5 U.S.C. §§ 558, 706, 538.

Reference entry
RaceToTheWH
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1
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1
First seen
October 18, 2022
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October 18, 2022
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  • 22 October 18, 2022
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22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters’ simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning.
Inline links: Economist, 538, RaceToTheWH, has admitted
Radicalising the Romanceless1 mentions across 1 issues

Radicalising the Romanceless is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2025 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "The least toxic the comments section has ever been was on Radicalising the Romanceless". It most often appears alongside 4chan, ACX, ACX.

Mention count
1
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1
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July 26, 2025
Last seen
July 26, 2025
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Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
The graph above shows the output of these two approaches. This is a really weird result, which defies easy explanation. Toxicity goes down over the whole SSC era, then starts ticking back up again from the ACX era. If you allow for a bit more variability in the simpler measure, the fancy neural network closely tracks the number of times we call each other ‘retards’ or ‘dumbasses’, which you would expect to track overall toxicity quite closely. This suggests the neural network is keying in on actual toxicity, rather than polite discussions which happen to involve contested or sensitive concepts. One caveat is that the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with, so the ‘toxicity’ metric may not be sensitive enough to capture the sort of politeness which the Commentariat values. In 2013, at peak toxicity, the toxicity score maxed out at 0.04 (the spike in October 2013 seems to be related to attracting some external neo-reactionaries (very roughly the precursor ideology to the modern alt-right) to comment on this post. In 2021, the lowest toxicity ever was reached at around 0.01. This means that a typical comment would be around 4% likely to be perceived as toxic by a human reader in 2013, but by 2021 this has fallen to 1%. Here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 1% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by John Schilling: The purpose of war is, roughly speaking, to settle the question of whose police get to enforce which laws in a region, and since Catalonia isn’t going to do anything more than say, “We’re going to make you look like Evil Meanies on TV and Youtube if you don’t pull back your policemen and let us have our own”, that point is moot. [Link] By contrast, if you promise to draw your fainting couch nearby, here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 4% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by Maximum Limelihood: Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. …. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today [Link] The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’ (link, no further comment…). More prosaically, this is a great example of what I was discussing earlier – the comment section is usually so civilised that a single individual turning up and acting out of the Commentariat norms is enough to make it the most toxic discussion which has ever taken place. Of Scott’s classic posts, the most toxic the comment section has ever become was on Radicalising the Romanceless. The least toxic the comments section has ever been are the posts on Scott’s conworld, Raikoth (technically the Raikoth post on history and religion specifically, but the whole series is so good I’ve linked to the index). Complexity of thought
Inline links: post, Link, Link, Gupta on Enlightenment, link, link, Radicalising the Romanceless, Raikoth
Radio Bostrom1 mentions across 1 issues

Radio Bostrom is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 28, 2022 and August 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "new project, Radio Bostrom , broadcasting works". It most often appears alongside 1587: A Year Of No Significance, ACX podcast team, Astral Codex Ten.

Reference entry
Radio Bostrom
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1
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1
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August 28, 2022
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August 28, 2022
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Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
2: The ACX podcast team is involved in a new project, Radio Bostrom, broadcasting works by futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom.
Inline links: Radio Bostrom
Rainbows Everywhere1 mentions across 1 issues

Rainbows Everywhere is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 17, 2025 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "he writes about other stories ... at Rainbows Everywhere". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, ACX, ACX.

Reference entry
Rainbows Everywhere
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
October 17, 2025
Last seen
October 17, 2025
Instagram handle
@shoppingtheatre.inc
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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
Ramayana1 mentions across 1 issues

Ramayana is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 09, 2021 and November 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "an analogous forest trial that Sita underwent in the Ramayana". It most often appears alongside Aage Bohr, Abanindranath Tagore, Aldous Huxley.

Reference entry
Ramayana
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1
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1
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November 09, 2021
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November 09, 2021
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Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
For the first decade or so of his life, Tagore remained distant from his father, who was frequently away touring northern India, England, and other places. Meanwhile, Tagore was mostly confined to the family compound — he was forbidden to leave it for any purpose other than travelling to school. He thereby grew increasingly restless for the outside world, open spaces, and nature. On the other hand, Tagore was intimidated by the mansion's perceived ghostly and enigmatic aura. Further, Tagore was ordered about the house by servants in a period he would later designate as a "servocracy". Incidents included servants dunking the heads of Tagore and his siblings into drinking water held by giant clay cisterns — used as a means to quiet the children. In addition, Tagore often refused food to satisfy servants, was confined to a chalk circle by the second-in-command servant named Shyam in parody of an analogous forest trial that Sita underwent in the Ramayana, and was told horrific stories telling the bloody exploits of outlaw dacoits.
Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression1 mentions across 1 issues

Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 14, 2023 and November 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The psychiatric study everyone’s talking about this month is ”Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression”". It most often appears alongside ketamine, ketamine, MADRS.

Mention count
1
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1
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November 14, 2023
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November 14, 2023
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Does Anaesthesia Prove Ketamine Placebo?
November 14, 2023 · Original source
The psychiatric study everyone’s talking about this month is ”Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression”.
Inline links: ”Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression”
randomtweet.com1 mentions across 1 issues

randomtweet.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 18, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "randomtweet.com used to be a great demonstration of this". It most often appears alongside 787, adderallposting, ADL.

Reference entry
randomtweet.com
Mention count
1
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1
First seen
September 18, 2023
Last seen
September 18, 2023
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Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Thanks. It’s a truism that “other people don’t use Twitter the same way you do” (randomtweet.com used to be a great demonstration of this, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore) and many people said they were noticing much worse user experience.
Inline links: randomtweet.com
Rasmussen Report1 mentions across 1 issues

Rasmussen Report is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 01, 2023 and July 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "A plot from the Rasmussen Report estimating the likelihood of deaths from nuclear power"; "slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released". It most often appears alongside 1960 Valdivia earthquake, AEC, Atomic Energy Commission.

Reference entry
Rasmussen Report
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1
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1
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July 01, 2023
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July 01, 2023
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Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
A plot from the Rasmussen Report estimating the likelihood of deaths from nuclear power as orders of magnitude less probable than dying from common natural disasters, closer to being killed by a meteor. There have been no known meteor deaths since this curve was published in 1974, though there is historical evidence that this is not impossible! *** Let me put Wellock and Rasmussen aside for a moment, and try out a metaphor. The process of Probabilistic Risk Assessment is akin to asking a retailer to answer the question "What would happen if we let a flaming cat loose into your furniture store?" If the retailer took the notion seriously, she might systematically examine each piece of furniture and engineer placement to minimize possible damage. She might search everyone entering the building for cats, and train the staff in emergency cat herding protocols. Perhaps every once in a while she would hold a drill, where a non-flaming cat was covered with ink and let loose in the store, so the furniture store staff could see what path it took, and how many minutes were required to fish it out from under the beds. "This seems silly - I mean, what are the odds that someone would ignite a cat?", you ask. Well, here is the story of the Brown's Ferry Nuclear Plant fire, in March 1975, which occurred slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth. Just below the plant's control room, two electricians were trying to seal air leaks in the cable spreading room, where the electrical cables that control the two reactors are separated and routed through different tunnels to the reactor buildings. They were using strips of spongy foam rubber to seal the leaks. They were also using candles to determine whether or not the leaks had been successfully plugged -- by observing how the flame was affected by escaping air. The electrical engineer put the candle too close to the foam rubber, and it burst into flame. The fire, of course, began to spread out of control. Among the problems encountered during the thirty minutes between ignition and plant shutdown: The engineers spent 15 minutes trying to put the fire out themselves, rather than sound the alarm per protocol;
Inline links: not impossible, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth
Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide1 mentions across 1 issues

Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 06, 2023 and July 06, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Mingyuan now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide". It most often appears alongside 2017 NYT article on UFOs, @ActualNames1, AARO.

Mention count
1
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1
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July 06, 2023
Last seen
July 06, 2023
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
The CSS General Price 17: Several people have said nice things about the Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist events space where we hold Berkeley ACX meetups. Mingyuan, who helped decorate it, now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide with what she’s learned about light color temperature, chairs, rugs, and more. 18: Elo Everything is simple: it gives you two random people/objects/concepts, for example “soap” and “Nelson Mandela”, and you pick which one you prefer. Then they have a leaderboard with everything’s Elo (a way of ranking things based on victory in binary contests). The current #1 entity is oxygen; the bottom (#2260) entity is the KKK. 19: Erik Hoel tries to deflate UFO rumors. Although most of the post is the standard “here’s a time someone thought they saw a UFO but it had a reasonable explanation”, the highlight is the dissection of the credulous 2017 NYT article on UFOs, which based on his story sounds totally inexcusable (yes, the government funded a lot of money into UFO research, but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt). Nothing here directly addresses the current spate of UFO rumors, but the silliness of the previous batch is indirect evidence of a sort. One thing he didn’t highlight: the Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts. 20: Related: the most practical demand I’ve heard from people who take the current UFO rumors seriously is that AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group) should get Title 50 authority (the right to demand classified information from intelligence services). Read their campaign (maybe sort of supported by some members of Congress) here. Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”. 21: This month in social justice: New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists; “diverse” patients can jump ahead in the queue compared to other patients who may have waited longer or be sicker. The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more. 22: Related: affirmative action Supreme Court ruling links roundup: Will the ruling really change admissions policies, or will universities find a way around it? Humphrey on DSL works in the field and says he thinks it will produce real change.
Inline links: General Price, Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide, Elo Everything, leaderboard, tries to deflate UFO rumors, Bigelow Aerospace, maybe sort of supported by, here, is named, New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists, various, articles, here, This file, scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups, says he thinks it will produce real change
rationalist media1 mentions across 1 issues

rationalist media is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 05, 2025 and August 05, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "rationalist community has its own media". It most often appears alongside Amish, Bay Area rationalist community, Christian media.

Reference entry
rationalist media
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1
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1
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August 05, 2025
Last seen
August 05, 2025
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Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
August 05, 2025 · Original source
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Rationality Salon1 mentions across 1 issues

Rationality Salon is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 29, 2025 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/". It most often appears alongside "Beer Capital" pub, 100 Black Birch Trail, 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City.

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Rationality Salon
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Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: JT Contact Info: rationalitysalon[a t]substack[period]com Time: Saturday, September 13th, 10:00 AM Location: 153-0051 Tokyo, Meguro City, Kamimeguro, 1 Chome−3−9 Fujiya Bldg., ３F (We may reschedule at the last second - join our mailing list for updates Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QF Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/ Notes: Please join the mailing list - location may change at the last minute
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Rationally Speaking1 mentions across 1 issues

Rationally Speaking is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "you can listen to Julia on the Rationally Speaking podcast". It most often appears alongside Amazon, Andrew Jackson, Barack Obama.

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Rationally Speaking
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Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
I know Julia and Luke, they’re both great, and you should absolutely substitute them for whoever was judging you in your mind before. If it would help to have a voice to attach to the name, you can listen to Julia on the Rationally Speaking podcast.
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Raw Story1 mentions across 1 issues

Raw Story is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 10, 2021 and May 10, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Amanda Marcotte published an article in the webzine Raw Story". It most often appears alongside "How do you do, fellow kids?", #NotAllMen, #TheResistance.

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The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
In a completely proportionate response, leading feminist Amanda Marcotte published an article in the webzine Raw Story calling out the comment. She accused Aaronson of saying that "women are failing him by not showing up naked in his bed, unbidden. Because bitches, yo". Of being angry that he has to talk to women at all "when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs". Of believing "women [are not] people, [just] a robot army put here for sexual service and housework". And that's just the beginning! It was whole pages full of this stuff! And most of the other top feminists wrote similar essays that were equally off-the-wall. Somehow there was an entire movement full of people who thought this was a completely accurate and proportional way to respond to things.
Inline links: published an article
RDR paper1 mentions across 1 issues

RDR paper is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 03, 2025 and July 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "In the RDR paper, @alextisyoung tests a method". It most often appears alongside 23andme, @alextisyoung, Aborigines.

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Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
Second, the Scotland pedigree estimates he cites are likely biased due to pop strat. In the RDR paper, @alextisyoung tests a method called “Kinship FE”. At a high-level, Kinship FE estimates heritability using a pedigree model which accounts for shared nuclear family environment. Importantly, this method is quite similar to the methods employed in the two Scotland papers cited by Alexander: Hill et al and Marioni et al (both estimate heritability using pedigrees while modeling the effects of the shared nuclear family environment). Using simulations, Dr. Young shows that Kinship FE is biased in the presence of genetic nurture or pop strat. This is because these processes induce correlations between genes and env beyond the nuclear family. Unfortunately, pop strat bias is not mitigated by PC adjustments. So the key question is: are these at play for cognitive phenotypes? The answer is maybe for genetic nurture & yes for pop strat. Tan et al Figure 1 shows that pop strat biases estimation of genetic effects for IQ & edu. Thus, pedigree estimates should be interpreted w/caution.
Reader’s Digest1 mentions across 1 issues

Reader’s Digest is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 08, 2025 and August 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest". It most often appears alongside Ainu, Altiplano, American cheese.

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Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.
Real Median Household Income1 mentions across 1 issues

Real Median Household Income is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 31, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "FRED’s “Real Median Household Income” series". It most often appears alongside 1955, 4chan, AARP.

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Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
For example, from FRED’s “Real Median Household Income” series (2), from 2000-2024, income grew from $71,790 to $83,730. That’s about a 16.6% increase over 24 years. That’s roughly a 0.6% annual growth rate. If the difference between Chained CPI and CPI is roughly 0.3%/year and real median income growth is ~0.6%/year, then how we measure inflation has a pretty significant impact on how we calculate real income, as well as every inflation adjusted measure we looked at.
And I’m pretty confident that chained CPI is valid, because in the “Real Median Household Income” data from FRED, under notes, it says “Income in 2024 C-CPI-U (2000-2024) and R-CPI-U-RS (pre-2000) adjusted dollars.” Which looks like the pre-2000 numbers are calculated using traditional CPI and the post-2000 numbers are calculated using chained CPI. This is buttressed by the fact that FRED’s chained CPI data only goes back to 2000 (3)
#3 I don’t understand how the decision to use different inflation measures affects all our other inflation adjusted metrics. To make this specific, I don’t know what the real median household income would be for 2019 if we calculated it with CPI (the way we did in 1999) vs with chained CPI.
Real Median Household Income data from FRED1 mentions across 1 issues

Real Median Household Income data from FRED is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 31, 2025 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "in the “Real Median Household Income” data from FRED". It most often appears alongside 1955, 4chan, AARP.

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Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
And I’m pretty confident that chained CPI is valid, because in the “Real Median Household Income” data from FRED, under notes, it says “Income in 2024 C-CPI-U (2000-2024) and R-CPI-U-RS (pre-2000) adjusted dollars.” Which looks like the pre-2000 numbers are calculated using traditional CPI and the post-2000 numbers are calculated using chained CPI. This is buttressed by the fact that FRED’s chained CPI data only goes back to 2000 (3)
RealRawNews1 mentions across 1 issues

RealRawNews is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 11, 2023 and January 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a 'parody site'". It most often appears alongside 2016, 2016 election, Adobe Illustrator.

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Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
Reason Without Restraint1 mentions across 1 issues

Reason Without Restraint is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 08, 2023 and June 08, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Credit here: Reason Without Restraint". It most often appears alongside ACX survey, Adderall, Ambien.

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Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context
June 08, 2023 · Original source
The correlation between reading and math is higher than the correlation between which countries are near the equator, and which countries are hot. The first effect might sound kind of trivial, but it is r = 0.86. And the second effect might sound immense, but it is only r = 0.64. The real correlation between standardized reading and math tests is in between, r = 0.72. The examples above might be sort of cheating, because they’re comparing college majors (which are averaged-out aggregates of people) to countries (which are just individual countries). But that’s my point. It’s easy to cheat! Obviously someone wanting to exaggerate or downplay the generality of intelligence could choose which of these two ways they wanted to “put it into context”. I don’t have a solution to this except for constant vigilance and lots of examples. So here are a lot of examples. I thought I was the first to do this, but partway through I found some prior art. None completely satisfied me, but I’ve stolen a little from all of them. Credit here: Meyer et al, Hattie on education, Reason Without Restraint, Leucht et al. Some effect sizes and correlations are naturally misleading, or depend a lot on context. I’ve tried as hard as I can to avoid these and make all my examples clear, but they will necessarily require some charity. Effect Size: DARE keeps kids off drugs: 0.02
Inline links: r = 0.86, r = 0.64, r = 0.72, Hattie on education, Reason Without Restraint, Leucht et al, 0.02
Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions1 mentions across 1 issues

Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 15, 2021 and November 15, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "paper - Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions". It most often appears alongside America, Bay, Biden.

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15
November 15, 2021 · Original source
Now there’s a paper, by Karger, Monrad, Mellers, and Tetlock - Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions.
Inline links: Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions
Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells1 mentions across 1 issues

Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells 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 "recent and readable review paper titled “ Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells ”". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
Gershman, Balbi, Gallistel, and Gunawardena discuss some of the history of single-cell learning and related controversies (for example, does this really ‘count’ as learning and memory?) in a recent and readable review paper titled “Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells”. Although times are changing, in the mid-twentieth century there was serious resistance to the idea that single cells could learn and store memories. Beatrice Gelber was a pioneering scientist that studied learning in protozoa like paramecia. As Gershman et al. recount, she encountered substantial resistance to the idea that paramecia could exhibit sophisticated learning, even from other psychologists working on paramecia. Donald Jensen, one such psychologist, wrote:
Inline links: Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells, Beatrice Gelber
“Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells”
Inline links: Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells
Recursive Adaptation Substack1 mentions across 1 issues

Recursive Adaptation Substack is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 12, 2024 and September 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Recursive Adaptation Substack". It most often appears alongside @halomancer1, ACX, Amazon.

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Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
31: Related: Nicholas Reville (of the Recursive Adaptation Substack) has finally gotten a coalition together to do formal clinical trials of GLP-1RAs for addiction:
Inline links: finally gotten a coalition together to do formal clinical trials of GLP-1RAs for addiction
Red Barchetta1 mentions across 1 issues

Red Barchetta is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "7: Red Barchetta : I haven't read the comments yet, but why must some authority "set" holidays in the first place?". It most often appears alongside 9-11, Adraste, America.

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Red Barchetta
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Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
7: Red Barchetta:
Inline links: Red Barchetta
sungazing1 mentions across 1 issues

reddit.com/r/sungazing 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 "5.1: reddit.com/r/sungazing". It most often appears alongside 1910s Portugal, 1999 British eclipse, 2017 US eclipse.

Reference entry
sungazing
Mention count
1
Issue count
1
First seen
October 01, 2025
Last seen
October 01, 2025
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The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Scientists have tried to measure the number of extra retinopathy cases presenting at eye clinics after major eclipses. A survey after the 1999 British eclipse found 70 patients, all of whom made full recoveries after six months; another after the 2017 US eclipse found 113. If 154 million Americans viewed the 2017 eclipse, and only 74% used proper eclipse glasses, that suggests that 40 million people viewed the eclipse without glasses. Suppose that 3/4 of those people were at least slightly responsible - they only took short glances, or they only looked during full totality. That’s still 10 million people irresponsibly staring directly at the sun. Only ~100 of these made it to a clinic to report eye damage, for a 1/100,000 injury rate. This paper on a UK eclipse goes into more detail about the exposure times: The time spent looking at the eclipse was reported to be seconds (less than 1 min) in 39% of cases. In a quarter of cases the time spent looking at the eclipse was minutes (range 1-45 min). The duration of exposure in the remaining percentage of cases was unspecified. Taken seriously, this is pretty surprising. If there were a simple dose-response relationship between sun-staring and damage, we would expect everyone with damage to have stared longer than a certain threshold. But in fact, we get a wide variety of doses, with some people reporting damage after ~10 seconds, and others taking 45 minutes. My very weak guess here is that claims like “I stared for three minutes” hide a lot of diversity. Many people who stare at the sun for a long time and get eye damage will feel stupid and claim that they stared for a shorter time. Other people who say they stared for a long time will actually have taken short “breaks”, or even made involuntary microsaccades that shift the sunlight onto a different part of the retina. Everyone will be blinking at some rate which might be faster or slower. And different people will have pupils that contract different amounts in response to light. Finally, we previously discussed how the sun seemed to have been filtered by clouds during the Fatima miracle. This seems to be a common feature - it was also a cloudy/rainy day at Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, Lubbock, and the Medjugorje examples we have good videos of. Cloud filters do not make it absolutely safe to stare at the sun, and experts explicitly say not to let your guard down in situations like these. But GPT estimates they decrease solar radiation by a factor of 4 - 20x, and might push time-to-damage more towards the forty-five minutes side of the window. Out of ten million estimated irresponsible eclipse viewers, only a hundred (1/100,000) came to medical attention. Out of a million Medjugorge pilgrims per year, only about ten (1/100,000) have come to medical attention. I don’t know why these numbers are so low, and I still don’t recommend staring at the sun. But it doesn’t seem completely implausible that the 70,000 people at Fatima could do it for ten minutes on a cloudy day and not cause a medically-noticeable mass blindness epidemic. 5.1: reddit.com/r/sungazing August Messeen stared at the sun for a little while, and only saw mildly interesting minor phenomena; I said we needed to find someone dumber and more masochistic than he was. The great 19th century psychophysicists like Joseph Plateau and Gustav Fechner stared at the sun for a medium while, and also didn’t see very much. Can we find people even dumber and more masochistic than they were? This is the 21st century, we have the Internet, and the answer to this kind of question is always “yes”. Sungazing is an ancient spiritual practice which, like most ancient spiritual practices, was invented by a 1900s quack doctor. According to its practitioners, staring at the sun for long periods heals your eyesight, improves your health, and confers spiritual benefits. The r/sungazing subreddit is a veritable Athens of our times, with its 2,039 readers boldly exploring the important spiritual questions surrounding the technique: There are guides to sungazing safely; the most important rule seems to be to only gaze around sunrise/sunset, and only for a very short period of time. I don’t know whether these rules actually make sungazing safe - the posts above suggest no - but it doesn’t matter; many users proudly ignore them. Sungazing Redditors often say they do their sungazing at high noon, or for extreme durations: Have any of these Buddhas-of-our-age noticed unusual phenomena similar to those reported at Fatima? Here are some selections from r/sungazing and some associated subreddits: (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: found 70 patients, found 113, 154 million Americans, Sungazing, r/sungazing, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0q4D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F447f33ae-2e10-4d9b-aedf-66c86b2a278f_967x327.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-LI_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc3e062eb-2b2a-4402-bd14-6edf35bccfaa_929x194.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q0mC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F64ee6a7a-725c-4e5b-a10f-801395fddbbf_940x265.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bcW-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb4decaf-6bb6-4857-ba2f-4a32a41a2c29_857x155.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0lHW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb1b85717-26e1-4148-8200-5cd3182da6ce_867x149.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bzRr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb2d5558-9620-4f33-be30-57e29aba1e97_907x794.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PNtD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f35d939-7107-41c2-b02c-b4debff88687_921x836.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vKRy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3338fedb-3164-4217-acd4-4626ceb1d2e8_1007x587.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rwPY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F21dac42b-d8c4-4a06-bbbd-4993700c7312_865x269.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z3WC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab662837-a9bd-41f3-ad37-784c1a83a108_854x231.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6xn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe12f5540-70b0-42cc-9761-7120e4f5639c_875x283.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JvKD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1a91c47-c9ac-4ab6-b9bc-66516404667b_915x297.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Iwq-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d4b5f36-df71-466c-a221-89e697adfd6b_915x92.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3px-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc956da20-4dfe-4140-b794-78fd9a211642_869x222.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E0tO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcf0e506-9a14-42c6-927a-ffd8c7a54654_838x177.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7qb-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eb70355-fbbb-41af-bcf8-2fbd5e58fe31_772x258.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PNtD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f35d939-7107-41c2-b02c-b4debff88687_921x836.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vKRy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3338fedb-3164-4217-acd4-4626ceb1d2e8_1007x587.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rwPY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F21dac42b-d8c4-4a06-bbbd-4993700c7312_865x269.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z3WC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab662837-a9bd-41f3-ad37-784c1a83a108_854x231.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6xn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe12f5540-70b0-42cc-9761-7120e4f5639c_875x283.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JvKD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1a91c47-c9ac-4ab6-b9bc-66516404667b_915x297.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Iwq-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d4b5f36-df71-466c-a221-89e697adfd6b_915x92.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3px-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc956da20-4dfe-4140-b794-78fd9a211642_869x222.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E0tO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcf0e506-9a14-42c6-927a-ffd8c7a54654_838x177.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7qb-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eb70355-fbbb-41af-bcf8-2fbd5e58fe31_772x258.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, Sun Turned Purple?, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vKRy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3338fedb-3164-4217-acd4-4626ceb1d2e8_1007x587.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rwPY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F21dac42b-d8c4-4a06-bbbd-4993700c7312_865x269.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z3WC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab662837-a9bd-41f3-ad37-784c1a83a108_854x231.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6xn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe12f5540-70b0-42cc-9761-7120e4f5639c_875x283.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JvKD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1a91c47-c9ac-4ab6-b9bc-66516404667b_915x297.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Iwq-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d4b5f36-df71-466c-a221-89e697adfd6b_915x92.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3px-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc956da20-4dfe-4140-b794-78fd9a211642_869x222.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E0tO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcf0e506-9a14-42c6-927a-ffd8c7a54654_838x177.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7qb-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eb70355-fbbb-41af-bcf8-2fbd5e58fe31_772x258.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, Sun Turned Purple?, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here
Redwood Research’s Current Project1 mentions across 1 issues

Redwood Research’s Current Project is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2022 and November 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Redwood Research’s Current Project (written 9/2021, introduces the idea)". It most often appears alongside Adversarial Training For High-Stakes Reliability, AI, AI X-Risk Podcast.

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Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate?
November 28, 2022 · Original source
Redwood Research’s Current Project (written 9/2021, introduces the idea)
Inline links: Redwood Research’s Current Project
Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia1 mentions across 1 issues

Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia 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 "study ... David Glanzman (“ Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia ”)"; "“ Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia ”". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
...fairly stable, and can be heritable. Next, experiments have shown examples of non-synaptic memory storage . A study from the lab of UCLA neurobiologist David Glanzman (“ Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia ”) showed that you can erase synaptic weight changes in sea slugs, and that this doesn’t totally erase the associated memory. The memory could be reinstated—that is, the...
...e fairly stable, and can be heritable. Next, experiments have shown examples of non-synaptic memory storage . A study from the lab of UCLA neurobiologist David Glanzman (“ Reinstatement of long-term memory following erasure of its behavioral and synaptic expression in Aplysia ”) showed that you can erase synaptic weight changes in sea slugs, and that this doesn’t totally erase the associated memory. The memory could be reinstated—that is, they...
Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain1 mentions across 1 issues

Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 19, 2021 and July 19, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "read Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain or this review of it". It most often appears alongside Adderall, alcohol, AMPA receptors.

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Peer Review Request: Ketamine
July 19, 2021 · Original source
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is a little different, and works more like other drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA). The idea is that ketamine gets you into an unusually fluid mental state where you’re able to reach insights and produce changes that would otherwise be unavailable (for a description of why this might happen, read Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain or this review of it). Ketamine isn’t a traditional psychedelic, but it seems to produce some of the same effects.
Inline links: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, this review of it
Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk1 mentions across 1 issues

Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 30, 2021 and August 30, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk". It most often appears alongside Acceptable Losses, Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion, Alex Imas.

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On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird. I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just didn’t happen, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental. Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it. Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (h/t Alex Imas, who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force. There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re quite as careful as G&R at ruling out every other possible bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure). The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions. And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, which says: Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (n = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds. Beyond any reasonable thresholds! IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small? Continuing through the Hreha article: For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be. In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all. This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two "nudge units" here in the United States. I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average... 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%? If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity). According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field. I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy. Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction. Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a lot of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit. Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Alex Imas, Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials, others, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1gY_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b127d7c-045a-4266-b515-a0e9201ce651_571x382.png, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Reprogramming Predators1 mentions across 1 issues

Reprogramming Predators is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 15, 2024 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Cf. “Reprogramming Predators”". It most often appears alongside @the_megabase, A Pan-Species Welfare State, ACX Grantees.

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Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Cf. “Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State” This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.
Inline links: “Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State”
Republica1 mentions across 1 issues

Republica 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 "… maybe that’s not true? Republica". It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

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Republica
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Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
…I said it was pretty obvious, like it’s a law of nature, but maybe that’s not true? Republicans thought they were winning as recently as 2020; Democrats were very close to thinking it in 2016. So you could also make an argument that whichever side doesn’t have the President thinks they’re losing, up until the Biden administration, when Democrats decided they were losing even though they had Biden. But Republicans thought they were losing until halfway into the Trump administration, then changed their minds, even though the Dems won the House that year. Why?
residentcontrarian.com1 mentions across 1 issues

residentcontrarian.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Resident Contrarian blogs at residentcontrarian.com". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

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residentcontrarian.com
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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
God-Emperor Of Dune, reviewed by Resident Contrarian. RC is a rapidly aging father from Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs at residentcontrarian.com and is available for freelance work
Inline links: God-Emperor Of Dune, residentcontrarian.com, freelance work
I was happy with my decision to keep this contest anonymous, because the most “famous” person to enter won first place, and if it had been open-identity I would have wondered whether he was drawing on a pre-existing fan base. But no, Erik can rest assured he is actually very good at writing (which he probably already knew, being a novelist and all, but you never know). In fact, 2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here (Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, and the extra 0.5 is for Etienne who I didn’t know about before this week but just saw his post Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards on the subreddit). I’m always suspicious that everything is fake and good writers aren’t actually good and it’s just a social conspiracy to believe that they are, but these results are a vote in support of our existing writer-identification-institutions (are they all Substack? I guess it’s just Substack) - although many unknown people also did very well, including the 2nd place winner (I didn’t get a response to my email asking how I should reveal his identity, so I’m defaulting to initials, but I don’t recognize his real name either).
Inline links: Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards
Rest Of World1 mentions across 1 issues

Rest Of World is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 08, 2021 and November 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "News site Rest Of World gives local leaders’ version"; "Rest Of World wasn’t really able to deny that Prospera gave Crawfish Rock water". It most often appears alongside America, Apolo Group, Ashkenazi.

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Rest Of World
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November 08, 2021 · Original source
The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights. News site Rest Of World gives local leaders’ version:
Inline links: Rest Of World
I’m probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine. Other sources confirm that Crawfish Rock citizens have had big problems getting water for a long time. Rest Of World wasn’t really able to deny that Prospera gave Crawfish Rock water when they really needed it, try as they might to make it sound sinister. And they weren’t able to deny that their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.
Inline links: Other sources
Revelation1 mentions across 1 issues

Revelation is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast"; ""The Alpha and Omega (Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13)""; "generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Revelation
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
We can do better. Earlier this year, at the Manifest forecasting conference in Berkeley, I gave a presentation titled “Forecasting Transformative AI Using The Book Of Revelation”. Given the renewed interest in this topic, I repost it below, in written form, with slight edits. The first two-thirds, including the section on the Antichrist, is free. In deference to the injunction by prior researchers on this topic not to “cast one’s pearls before swine”, the last third (including the Whore of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon, and the New Jerusalem) will be paywalled.
Inline links: Manifest forecasting conference
Thank you for attending. The Book of Revelation was written around 95 AD by St. John of Patmos. Most secular scholars interpret it as an allegorical description of events in John’s own time, especially the Roman persecution of the early church. But millennia of Christian commentators have treated it as a prophecy about some future cataclysm - most often during the commentator’s own era. In the 10th century, a renegade bishop declared Pope John XV to be the Antichrist. In the 19th century, the Russian Old Believers accused Napoleon of the same. In our own day, American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama.
…if the technological singularity hypothesis is true, then we are genuinely living at the hinge of history - the cataclysmic climax of humankind - and insofar as Revelation is a prophecy, it will make sense in the context of the AI race of our own era. This will be our working hypothesis. We will try to match each symbol in Revelation with a person or institution from the mid-2020s Bay Area artificial intelligence scene. If we consistently find eerie levels of similarity, beyond any plausible coincidence, we will consider that evidence in favor, and perhaps gain useful knowledge about the shape of things to come, starting with: The Beast Revelation contains several beasts - at least two, maybe as many as four. John doesn’t keep track of them very effectively, and they seem to reappear several times after being killed. Most commentators collapse these into one beast - ‘the’ Beast - and I will anxiously follow their lead despite losing some potential subtlety. According to Revelation 13:14-15: [The Beast] had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak. In the context of our working hypothesis, this sounds like the Beast is an AI company, creating an LLM. But if the Beast is an AI company, which one is it? In 13:1, John gives us several clues: I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy. The Beast has seven heads. In the context of an AI company, this might mean seven CEOs, presidents, or co-founders. I was unable to find an AI company with this many CEOs or presidents, but here’s the co-founder count for each of the major labs: OpenAI: 11 co-founders
Inline links: hinge of history, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XlvZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe982757b-a210-4581-bde4-d7fda747ef77_692x514.png, 11 co-founders
Revelation 12:11 mentions across 1 issues

Revelation 12:1 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Revelation 12:1 introduces an unnamed figure commonly called the Woman of the Apocalypse". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Revelation 12:1
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Yes! Just last year, researchers found that forehead creases were actually a cutting-edge biometric target, and suggested them as a superior alternative to fingerprints (contactless) and facial recognition (blocked by masks during a pandemic). This section suggests that Anthropic will come up with its own proof-of-personhood scheme, superior to OpenAI’s WorldCoin in that it uses the newer forehead-based biometric recognition (with the more commonly-used handprint as a backup). We’ll discuss more about why you might not want to be in their database later. The Woman Of The Apocalypse Revelation 12:1 introduces an unnamed figure commonly called the Woman of the Apocalypse: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. The woman gives birth to a son, who is implied to be the Messiah. Satan tries to kill the son, so the mother flees with her child to Heaven, where she waits for 1,260 days. This is obviously a reference to the Virgin Mary and Christ, but (as per the multilayered symbolism of Revelation) somehow also a reference to some specific person in the End Times. I originally couldn’t figure out who that person was, but a now-deactivated Tumblr poster, resinsculpture, convinced me that it was Ursula von der Leyen, current president of the European Union. Here is a typical official picture of von der Leyen. She is in her trademark yellow suit (“clothed with the sun”), standing with her head centered in the twelve stars of the EU flag (“upon her head a crown of twelve stars”). In what sense is “the moon under her feet”? In her role as President, von der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament, which looks like this: The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When von der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2 Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood: If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: Yes!, resinsculpture, Ursula von der Leyen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!plab!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed45366f-e577-4e7a-9161-27d692d8f031_862x575.avif, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lAgG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5c91f3a-873f-4b73-b68d-bc14a7cfffc9_600x314.jpeg, 2, surprisingly promising AI regulations, especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vntf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcab19e9-c8f0-4996-9fb1-942061463e5d_839x520.png, says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
Revelation 13:181 mentions across 1 issues

Revelation 13:18 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "From Revelation 13:18: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Revelation 13:18
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Samuel McCandlish is the seventh co-founder. Samuel is related to Samael, another demon-king. McCandlish is Gaelic for “son of the lord”. So this name means “Samael is the son of the Lord”. This is another name of blasphemy. So we see that all seven co-founders have names of blasphemy. If the chance of a randomly selected person having a blasphemous name is 1%, then the chance of seven people having such names entirely by coincidence is 10^-14, or one in one hundred trillion. Given that Anthropic has seven heads, ten horns, and on each head a name of blasphemy, the case for identifying it with the Beast is strong. However, we cannot move on before examining one last verse from this chapter, probably the most famous of all. From Revelation 13:18: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666. Many people have tried to decode this verse. Here’s my paltry contribution: in other cases where the New Testament uses the phrase “the number of the X”, it means the number of people in a group. For example: Luke 22:3: “Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve [apostles].”
Inline links: Samael, Gaelic, Luke 22:3
Revelation 9:16: “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.” These are all the same Greek word, ἀριθμός. None of them mean a secret mysterious number that symbolizes their identity. They all mean something like “headcount”. So to be consistent, you would translate Revelation 13:18 as: Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of a man; and his headcount is 666. This is looking good for our hypothesis that the Beast is an AI company. There’s only one remaining hurdle. The second clause specifically says that we’re talking about the number/headcount “of a man” rather than of a company. Can we square this circle? Not all translations say “the number of a man”. Some say “the number of humanity”, or “the number of mankind”. The exact phrase is “ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου”, and the word at issue meaning man/humanity/mankind is the last one, “ἀνθρώπου”. In our alphabet, this word is anthropou. It is the genitive form of the stem anthrop-, meaning man/humanity, and predictably means “of man/humanity”. This word has come into English pretty much wholly intact, with the Greek genitive ending (-ου) simply changed to the corresponding English ending (-ic). It is our word “anthropic”, meaning “of man/humanity”. Why would you use any other word in a translation? Thus: Let him that hath understanding take the headcount of the Beast: for it is the headcount of Anthropic; and its headcount is 666. What is the headcount of Anthropic? I can’t find a precise answer, but here’s their LinkedIn page: Seems concerning. Anthropic might seem like an unlikely candidate for the Beast, given its emphasis on ethical conduct and safe AI research. However, they do perform various experiments on turning AIs evil - always in the context of examining these scenarios and figuring out how best to prepare - and one can imagine ways this could go wrong. We’ll examine likely failure modes in more detail later. The Mark Of The Beast John continues (13:17): And [the Beast] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark. In the context of AI, this resembles the idea of biometric proof of personhood. Suppose that future AI agents have access to bank accounts and can transact like humans. Some platforms may choose to let AIs access their services unrestricted; others may choose to limit use to humans. How would these work in a world where AIs can break CAPTCHAs? One plan is to assign each human a code based on some immutable feature of their body, like a fingerprint or eye scan, then let the humans use that code as an ironclad ID. The most famous plan along these lines is Sam Altman’s WorldCoin. The Mark of the Beast cannot be WorldCoin itself, because WorldCoin uses an iris scan, but the Mark uses the hand or forehead. Handprints are a common biometric recognition target, but foreheads? Yes! Just last year, researchers found that forehead creases were actually a cutting-edge biometric target, and suggested them as a superior alternative to fingerprints (contactless) and facial recognition (blocked by masks during a pandemic). This section suggests that Anthropic will come up with its own proof-of-personhood scheme, superior to OpenAI’s WorldCoin in that it uses the newer forehead-based biometric recognition (with the more commonly-used handprint as a backup). We’ll discuss more about why you might not want to be in their database later. The Woman Of The Apocalypse Revelation 12:1 introduces an unnamed figure commonly called the Woman of the Apocalypse: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. The woman gives birth to a son, who is implied to be the Messiah. Satan tries to kill the son, so the mother flees with her child to Heaven, where she waits for 1,260 days. This is obviously a reference to the Virgin Mary and Christ, but (as per the multilayered symbolism of Revelation) somehow also a reference to some specific person in the End Times. I originally couldn’t figure out who that person was, but a now-deactivated Tumblr poster, resinsculpture, convinced me that it was Ursula von der Leyen, current president of the European Union. Here is a typical official picture of von der Leyen. She is in her trademark yellow suit (“clothed with the sun”), standing with her head centered in the twelve stars of the EU flag (“upon her head a crown of twelve stars”). In what sense is “the moon under her feet”? In her role as President, von der Leyen stands above, and frequently addresses, the European Parliament, which looks like this: The Parliament, also known as the Hemicycle, takes the shape of a half (or slightly crescent) moon. When von der Leyen stands in her yellow suit, in front of the Parliament, with the flag behind her, she is “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”.2 Von der Leyen is one of the leaders behind the EU’s push to become a “regulatory superpower”, which has born fruit in some surprisingly promising AI regulations. In particular, Europe has been especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood: If the apocalypse involves a rogue Anthropic model somehow empowered by proof-of-personhood, Europe is one of the best candidates to resist. Von der Leyen, then, stands as a metonymy for the European Union as a bulwark for the forces of Good. The Witnesses / The Lamb Of God The Lamb is John’s version of the Messiah or the Second Coming. He gives us two clues about its identity. First, Revelation 11:3: And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. The Lamb will be preceded by two witnesses. Revelation itself does not name them, but Jewish tradition says that one will be the prophet Elijah. Second, 12:1: And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. The Lamb will stand on Mount Zion. This is a specific mountain in Jerusalem, but also a poetic name for Israel (for example, “Zionism” = support for Israel). So we are looking for someone or something in Israel, which is being heralded by Elijah. The name Elijah is different in different languages, but the Russian version is “Ilya”. And in fact, famous AI scientist Ilya Sutskever recently founded an Israel-based AI company called “Safe Superintelligence”: Is there some sense in which Ilya Sutskever has “his Father’s name written on [his] forehead”? As weird as it sounds, I think this one might just be literally true. There is some kind of unusual pattern on his forehead (image source). I cannot make heads or tails of it right-side-up, but when I flip it over… …it appears to be the Name of God in Hebrew. In our working hypothesis, Ilya is Elijah, the First Witness3, which suggests that the one he is heralding - that is, the Safe Superintelligence which is to be built by his company - is the Lamb of God, the Messiah that will defeat the unsafe superintelligences produced by Anthropic and other companies. The Antichrist / The Dragon Revelation doesn’t use the word “Antichrist” - the concept comes from from the separate Epistles of John, which may or may not be by the same author. Most scholars identify the Epistle’s Antichrist with Revelation’s Beast, but I dissent: we hypothesize the Beast to be a company, but I can’t get past the elegance of having the Antichrist be - like the Christ - a particular individual. I prefer to identify him with a different character in Revelation, namely the Dragon. On the level of Biblical narrative - the same level where the Woman is the Virgin Mary - the Dragon is clearly Satan. On the level of apocalyptic prophecy, he may additionally represent an individual from our own age. Who? John says (13:2 - 13:4) The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority . . . People worshiped the dragon, because he had given authority to the beast. We saw above that the Beast is a company. Who gives companies their power, then demands to be worshiped by them? Obviously VCs. And in fact, venture capitalists are often identified with dragons in the popular imagination: But which venture capitalist? Plenty of people have claimed to know secret ways to identify the Antichrist, but surely the best-credentialled expert here is the Pope, and according to Wikipedia: Pope Pius IX in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoting Cyprian, said Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. What is the title of Christ? In the Bible, we find two common titles: “The Son of Man” (Matthew 12:32, Luke 12:8, John 1:51)
Inline links: Revelation 9:16, exact phrase, their LinkedIn page, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dz9y!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F596f66e3-4745-44f8-b868-12e9ca03cc63_789x862.png, perform various experiments on turning AIs evil, biometric proof of personhood, WorldCoin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rYmL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F972fc381-4d38-4e55-88d7-88b1e4f79010_2363x3150.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Nj3r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5324e82d-bc07-4ff2-9fb7-44fb61f61c24_934x473.png, Yes!, resinsculpture, Ursula von der Leyen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!plab!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed45366f-e577-4e7a-9161-27d692d8f031_862x575.avif, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lAgG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5c91f3a-873f-4b73-b68d-bc14a7cfffc9_600x314.jpeg, 2, surprisingly promising AI regulations, especially strict on biometric proof-of-personhood, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vntf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcab19e9-c8f0-4996-9fb1-942061463e5d_839x520.png, says, Ilya, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pdG7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd81ef77a-d6d6-41dc-9281-3f0d55702f2a_1210x510.png, image source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1eC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb37f1e4-9cbc-4153-b20a-8e879ad753ce_1711x719.png, Name of God in Hebrew, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W4E8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7d2847a-aba1-42a7-b376-9f6e0fd319f0_841x468.png, according to Wikipedia
Revelation 9:161 mentions across 1 issues

Revelation 9:16 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 22, 2025 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Revelation 9:16 : 'And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand'". It most often appears alongside 10th century, 19th Century, A16Z.

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Revelation 9:16
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My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Revelation 9:16: “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.”
Inline links: Revelation 9:16
Revelations 22:181 mentions across 1 issues

Revelations 22:18 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 16, 2022 and February 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Bible says - Revelations 22:18 - that if anyone changes the Bible in any way". It most often appears alongside Abercrombie & Fitch, Athenian democracy, Athenians.

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Revelations 22:18
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Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
(The Bible describes very clearly what angels look like. Everyone agrees the Bible is the authority on angels, maybe the only primary source for them at all. All Western culture for 1500 years has been based around the Bible. There are hundreds of millions of people who take the Bible completely literally and read it every day. The Bible says - Revelations 22:18 - that if anyone changes the Bible in any way even by a single word they will be punished with eternal torture. And yet nobody’s mental image of an angel, nor any popular artistic depiction of an angel, has anything in common with the Biblical description. This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.)
Reversal of Fortune1 mentions across 1 issues

Reversal of Fortune is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 25, 2023 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development and Reversal of Fortune used other researchers’ indexes". It most often appears alongside 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson, ACX comments.

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Reversal of Fortune
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Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears. Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths. 1. What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I'll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt. Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture1. Others instead point to cultural attributes ... Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success. A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. Unsurprisingly, those other economists and policy pundits turn out to be wrong and the authors turn out to be right. In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. And the Egyptian lesson turns out to be general. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor. Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities. What are “institutions” anyway? (The economic and political kind, not the prison and mental hospital kind.) Basically, AR mean politics. The word "institutions" occurs over 1000 times in Why Nations Fail2. I'll just focus on how AR use it without worrying about the dictionary, different schools of economics, or other social sciences. They begin with what institutions do rather than what they are. Nogales, Arizona, is in the United States. Its inhabitants have access to the economic institutions of the United States, which enable them to choose their occupations freely, acquire schooling and skills, and encourage their employers to invest in the best technology, which leads to higher wages for them. They also have access to political institutions that allow them to take part in the democratic process, to elect their representatives, and replace them if they misbehave. The word is used dozens more times before ARattempt a more general definition. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. So while economic and political institutions can be separated, it is the political institutions that matter in the long run. The good kind of institutions that lead to economic growth are "inclusive", as opposed to "extractive". To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it also must permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers. ... such rights must exist for the majority of people in society. Political pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient without a strong centralised state. ... political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. ... the key to understanding why South Korea and the United States have inclusive economic institutions is not just their pluralistic political institutions but also their sufficiently centralized and powerful states. A telling contrast is with the East African nation of Somalia. I am still a bit hazy as to the relative importance of de jure written rules versus the de facto struggle for power. AR are somewhat circular: Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions ... When there is conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ... The political institutions of a society are a key determinant of the outcome of this game. They are the rules that govern incentives in politics. But overall, you could just say ‘politics’ and not be too far off. AR do this themselves occasionally. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the North because different people with different interests and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics. AR's academic reputation is based on statistical analysis, but Why Nations Fail tries to do narrative history, IMHO not very well. When Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the book, he complained: They never define their key variables with precision, present any quantitative data or classifications based on those definitions, or offer even a single table, figure, or regression line to demonstrate the relationships that they contend underpin all economic history. Instead, they present a stream of assertions and anecdotes about the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution. AR replied baldly: Sachs ... argues that we provide no evidence. Right, we do not in the book. But that’s because a book for a general audience is not the right forum for presenting academic research, and we spent many years of our lives precisely on writing academic papers providing exactly the sort of evidence. ... So yes, we don’t provide the econometric evidence in the book, which isn’t of course the right place to do it, but econometric evidence is abundantly loud in the way it speaks on these topics. So, don't expect Why Nations Fail to be an accessible explanation of AR's academic work, which is what I was hoping for when I first read it. What do they spend over 500 pages on then? Well, after the preface, there's fifteen chapters of, as Sachs says, "assertions and anecdotes". Not just about "the inclusive or extractive nature of this or that institution", to be fair, but how institutions can change at "critical junctures" such as the Black Death or colonisation, and why it can be in elites’ interests to block economic innovation if it threatens their power, so that growth under extractive institutions is unlikely to be sustained. These chapters are not particularly good – I found them poorly organised and repetitive – but not particularly bad, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that institutions are the main determinant of economic growth. Cumulatively they have an effect similar to the Old Testament, if you are willing to accept the underlying premise that the fortunes of the nation of Israel are determined by the LORD. Only the second chapter, ‘Theories that Don't Work’, makes a sustained argument against alternative theories. Geography is disposed of by noting the stark differences at the US-Mexican, North-South Korean and East-West German borders, and the reversal of fortune by which the present day US and Canada only became richer than Mexico, Central and South America following European colonisation. Culture is hand-waved away with the assertion that institutions determine the any relevant cultural behaviours, not the other way around, referring to the same border examples, the rapid catch up of Catholic Europe despite Weber's Protestant Ethic, the malign influence of the European and Ottoman empires on Africa, the range of outcomes within the former British Empire, and the more European population of Argentina and Uruguay versus the US and Canada, or of Columbia versus Ecuador and Peru. Not a bad list of anecdotes, but one could equally well point to the cross-border success of Ashkenazi Jews, overseas Chinese, or Baltic and Volga Germans. Ignorance is simply dismissed with the assertion that "if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies." Various good and bad policy changes are explained as the result of political pressures rather than improved knowledge. The implication seems to be that good policies are so obvious they don’t require expert knowledge or advice, or that the experts never get it wrong. This appears most implausible in the debate over socialism and economic planning. Writing off the entire Communist experience as simply another elite trying to preserve its power feels inadequate, especially considering that some distinguished bourgeois economists thought central planning was a plausible road to riches until quite late in the day. Genetics or race is not mentioned, but would presumably attract the same counterexamples as geography and culture. Another theory AR do not discuss is crude exploitation: while colonial empires are excoriated, it is for setting up persistent extractive political institutions rather than for a direct theft of resources. The prosperity of white-owned South African farms next to poverty-stricken Bantustans is explained by the better quality of the institutions available to whites under apartheid, not relative population densities and land quality. For the rest of the book, I'll just list a few nitpicks to signal I read the whole thing and know a bit of history, but feel free to skip this – the real evidence for AR's thesis is in their academic papers, and I'll discuss those in the next section. I think AR overrate the importance of the Glorious Revolution, to the point of claiming it "created the rule of law" – after all, Parliament had already deposed and executed a king, then brought back the king’s son on their own terms after a decade of republican government. No less a luminary than Edmund Burke asserted "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Also, strong signs of British economic uniqueness – the abnormal growth of London and reliance on coal as a fuel – predated 1688.
Inline links: 1, 2, dictionary, schools, economics, social sciences, reviewed, replied, Protestant Ethic, planning, distinguished, bourgeois, Glorious Revolution, Edmund Burke, predated
Measuring institutional quality has turned into a field of its own, with complicated multi-dimensional indexes put out by major institutions like the World Bank. AR's seminal papers, however, were done with much simpler measures. The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development and Reversal of Fortune used other researchers’ indexes of protection against expropriation (an economic institution), and constraint on executive power (a political institution). In Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution AR constructed their own index based on the dates of adoption of civil law codes, agrarian reform, abolition of guilds, and Jewish emancipation.
Inline links: World Bank, The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, Reversal of Fortune, Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
In ‘Reversal of Fortune’, AR pointed out that the urbanisation rates and population density of societies later colonised by Europeans in 1500 is negatively correlated with contemporary per capita income, and argue that this again reflects the options chosen by European colonisers: if there was a large native population to exploit, they would set up extractive institutions to do so. If not, they had to set up inclusive institutions to attract voluntary migrants5. AR used both urbanisation rates and population density in addition to mortality as instruments for contemporary institutions, and again find that institutions have a significant effect on contemporary income.
Inline links: 5
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence1 mentions across 1 issues

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 01, 2022 and March 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the relevant Less Wrong post here is Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence". It most often appears alongside ACX, Afghan government, Aleppo.

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Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
A bunch of leftists - Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald - failed because they couldn’t believe that warmongering intelligence officials trying to scare everyone about Russia had a point. They admittedly had great heuristics: there are lots of warmongers, our intelligence community has been really wrong lots of times before, and the past few years have seen a lot of really embarrassing Russia-related paranoia. Unfortunately, the relevant Less Wrong post here is Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, and the relevant ACX post is Heuristics That Almost Always Work, so they failed.
Inline links: Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, Heuristics That Almost Always Work
Revising Down The Rise Of China1 mentions across 1 issues

Revising Down The Rise Of China is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 06, 2022 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "See eg Revising Down The Rise Of China, which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected". It most often appears alongside America, American consulate, Attorney General.

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Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
Xi inherited near-double-digit GDP growth from his predecessors, and has watched it slowly go down to ~6% before COVID and less than 5% now (America is usually between 2-3%) Partly this is inevitable; economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier. But China was hoping its catch-up growth would last longer than this. See eg Revising Down The Rise Of China, which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected, never really catch up to developed world standards, and plateau at around the same (absolute) GDP as the USA.
Inline links: Revising Down The Rise Of China
Reward Is Not The Optimization Target1 mentions across 1 issues

Reward Is Not The Optimization Target is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 13, 2022 and September 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I recently read TurnTrout’s Reward Is Not The Optimization Target on Less Wrong". It most often appears alongside Andres, bereavement, companionate love.

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Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness
September 13, 2022 · Original source
I recently read TurnTrout’s Reward Is Not The Optimization Target on Less Wrong. It’s technically about AI, but half the useful things I’ve learned about psychology recently have started out being about AI, so let’s not hold that against it.
Inline links: Reward Is Not The Optimization Target
Ribbonfarm1 mentions across 1 issues

Ribbonfarm is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "unlike Ribbonfarm, it should be easy to tell if the ideas hold water". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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Ribbonfarm
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February 10, 2022
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#79: A Method For Solving Coordination Problems My name is Bendini, and I’ve figured out how to solve coordination™. Okay no, that’s an overstatement. What I’ve actually done is figured out a general method for turning some intractable coordination problems into a set of merely difficult ones. I call this general method Intentionality, and it can be summarised as follows: A) Get people to state their intentions explicitly and honestly. B) Put everything in place that’s necessary to ensure that people actually do A, instead of just pretending to do it. The core insight is A, but it’s irrelevant without B’s infrastructure. As such, I’m writing a yellow paper aimed at smart laypeople that explains all of B’s interlocking parts and how to bootstrap them into existence. This is a huge task, and I have no credentials that would grant plausibility to my claims, but here are 4 reasons to treat them as plausible anyway: 1) I’ve never set foot in California. 2) Scott rejected my application without asking to see a draft of the yellow paper, so its ideas are yet to be judged. 3) The paper is written in plain language similar to (https://bendini.uk/systematic-cooking-intro), so unlike Ribbonfarm, it should be easy to tell if the ideas hold water. 4) I’m not asking for funding, only feedback to get it published ASAP. If you think this either 1) sounds plausible, or 2) sounds fake, but worth a Pascal’s mugging on the chance that it’s real, you can reach me at kernelmanchester@gmail.com or @BendiniUK on Twitter.
Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent1 mentions across 1 issues

Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 01, 2024 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent". It most often appears alongside /r/BadMTGCombos, @cremieuxrecuel, @justin_garson.

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Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
…whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Rigby and Wright 20131 mentions across 1 issues

Rigby and Wright 2013 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 07, 2023 and July 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kogelmann also cites others, including ... Rigby and Wright 2013". It most often appears alongside Alberto Parmigiani, Ansolabehere, Barack Obama.

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Rigby and Wright 2013
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Your Book Review: Secret Government
July 07, 2023 · Original source
Kogelmann also cites others, including “Gilens 2005, 2012; Flavin 2012; Rigby and Wright 2013; … Bartels 2016” (page 40), and concludes “it certainly seems like wealth is leading to unequal influence on political outcomes” (page 40). I agree. There is enough smoke here to indicate some fire.
Rise In Murders In The US, Explained1 mentions across 1 issues

Rise In Murders In The US, Explained is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between June 29, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Vox’s Rise In Murders In The US, Explained gives seven possible explanations". It most often appears alongside Baltimore, Black Lives Matter, BLM.

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What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
Most other media treatments do the same. Vox’s Rise In Murders In The US, Explained gives seven possible explanations, of which two are protest-related, but its overall conclusion is that:
Inline links: Rise In Murders In The US, Explained
Rising Tide1 mentions across 1 issues

Rising Tide is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 22, 2025 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, @msamalam, A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.

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Rising Tide
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Links For April 2025
April 22, 2025 · Original source
You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.
Inline links: Rising Tide, Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse
RLAIF paper1 mentions across 1 issues

RLAIF paper is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 28, 2023 and November 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "eight of the authors of the RLAIF paper". It most often appears alongside #57, 80,000 Hours, Adam D’Angelo.

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RLAIF paper
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In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
I recognize at least eight of the authors of the RLAIF paper as EAs, and four members of the interpretability team, including team lead Chris Olah. Overall I think Anthropic’s safety team is pretty EA focused.
RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia1 mentions across 1 issues

RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia 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 "See their 2018 paper (“ RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia ”)". It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

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Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
A dramatic followup experiment by Glanzman’s group suggested that the memory was at least partly stored as RNA. Their experiment involved sensitizing one slug to touch, by shocking it, extracting RNA from that slug, and then injecting that RNA into a different slug. They found that the second slug became sensitive to touch, as if it had been shocked. In other words, it seems like the ‘memory’ of the shock got transferred! See their 2018 paper (“RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia”), and a related 2019 review article (“Is plasticity of synapses the mechanism of long-term memory storage?”) for more discussion.
Inline links: RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia, Is plasticity of synapses the mechanism of long-term memory storage?
rntz.net1 mentions across 1 issues

rntz.net is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 10, 2022 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "I'm Michael Arntzenius (rntz.net)". It most often appears alongside 2018, @BendiniUK, @benyeohben.

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rntz.net
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ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#95: Make Programming By Voice More Practical I'm Michael Arntzenius (rntz.net) and I'd like $5-40K to work on making programming by voice more practical. Many programmers at some point suffer from repetitive strain injuries (RSI) that make typing difficult; I'm one. To mitigate this I use a tool called Talon that lets me control my computer by voice. Thanks to recent advances, voice control is increasingly practical, and voice programmers form a small but rapidly growing community. However, idioms and tools for coding by voice are in their infancy. I believe now is the right time to push hard on voice-oriented editing: the underlying voice recognition tech is ready, we have a creative, dedicated community willing to experiment with new approaches, and mature editor technology like language servers and online error-robust parsing (eg. tree-sitter) supports editing commands at a higher level than character-by-character. Specifically, this money could support me working part-time for 6 months ($5k) up to full time for 2 years ($40K). I could work on: contributing to Cursorless, the state-of-the-art open-source voice editing framework for VSCode; porting cursorless to other editors to increase its reach; incorporating ideas from recent research on structural editing and typed holes; and on my duties as co-maintainer of the de-facto default Talon script-set. If you're interested, contact me at daekharel@gmail.com.
Rocrastination1 mentions across 1 issues

Rocrastination 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 "http://www.rocrastination.com/contact/". It most often appears alongside 538, 55-gal drum, 750k horny men.

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Rocrastination
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ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#18: Philanthropic Messaging Strategies Using Evolutionary Ideas I’m Ro Gupta. Inspired initially by https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/, I’d like to commission research that explores if and how Kin Selection and Hamilton’s Rule [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection#Hamilton%27s_rule] can be applied in mass communications for altruistic giving of humans in modern times. The goal is to uncover alternative messaging strategies that help subjects transcend blood-thicker-than-water hardwiring, based on underlying evolutionary biology theory – e.g. kin recognition, kin altruism – that ultimately serves to increase wealthy countries’ proportion of altruistic giving to less genetically familiar yet higher need/ impact populations, e.g. those of the Global South. [Estimates suggest around 5% of US giving currently goes to international causes.] I believe I have the right combination of academic, professional, NGO and global experience [https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptaro] to lead this, and access to a high quality network of research and communications experts to match grants to. I estimate a robust synthesis of existing work could be done for the low tens of thousands of USD, while a primary research phase one could be substantively scoped for the high tens to one hundred thousand USD. If of interest to be a part of this as a researcher, funder or general thought partner, please get in touch: http://www.rocrastination.com/contact/.
Roger’s Bacon1 mentions across 1 issues

Roger’s Bacon is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 02, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here ( Hoel , Roger’s Bacon , Resident Contrarian". It most often appears alongside 1587, 1587, A Year Of No Significance, @campeters4.

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Roger’s Bacon
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Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
=3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.
Inline links: The Castrato, Secretorum, Seeds of Science
I was happy with my decision to keep this contest anonymous, because the most “famous” person to enter won first place, and if it had been open-identity I would have wondered whether he was drawing on a pre-existing fan base. But no, Erik can rest assured he is actually very good at writing (which he probably already knew, being a novelist and all, but you never know). In fact, 2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here (Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, and the extra 0.5 is for Etienne who I didn’t know about before this week but just saw his post Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards on the subreddit). I’m always suspicious that everything is fake and good writers aren’t actually good and it’s just a social conspiracy to believe that they are, but these results are a vote in support of our existing writer-identification-institutions (are they all Substack? I guess it’s just Substack) - although many unknown people also did very well, including the 2nd place winner (I didn’t get a response to my email asking how I should reveal his identity, so I’m defaulting to initials, but I don’t recognize his real name either).
Inline links: Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards
Romberg 19951 mentions across 1 issues

Romberg 1995 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between November 16, 2022 and November 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "See Romberg 1995, Methamphetamine and amphetamine derived from the metabolism of selegiline". It most often appears alongside @AutismCapital, Adderall, ADHD.

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Romberg 1995
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The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
See Romberg 1995, Methamphetamine and amphetamine derived from the metabolism of selegiline. When you take selegiline, your body metabolizes it into other chemicals. One of them is methamphetamine. How much? Probably lower than the levels methheads get, but maybe around the threshold for being clinically relevant.
Inline links: Methamphetamine and amphetamine derived from the metabolism of selegiline
Roodman 20171 mentions across 1 issues

Roodman 2017 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 "Roodman 2017. Written by a researcher at the effective altruist nonprofit Open Philanthropy Project". It most often appears alongside Abrams 2012, ACLU, age-crime curve.

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Roodman 2017
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Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Roodman 2017. Written by a researcher at the effective altruist nonprofit Open Philanthropy Project, which was trying to determine whether to continue to advocate decarceration. They (Roodman’s bosses) had already started some advocacy, so Roodman admits he is at risk of a soft-on crime bias. This was extraordinarily well-written, and is one of the most careful meta-analyses I have seen on any topic - Roodman tried to get data from every study and replicate it himself and test all of the assumptions - but I am still interpreting it as the anti-incarceration faction presenting their side of the case.
Inline links: Roodman 2017, whether to continue to advocate
Rootclaim blog1 mentions across 1 issues

Rootclaim blog is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 09, 2024 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog". It most often appears alongside #S14, 2009 flu pandemic, 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak.

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Rootclaim blog
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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.
Inline links: on the Rootclaim blog
Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
Inline links: here
1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis — 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? — 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? — 1.3: 92 early cases — 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater — 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments — 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments — 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? — 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? — 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases — 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats — 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post
Rootclaim’s Track Record page1 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
...who perpetrated a deadly chemical weapons attack in Syria (Rootclaim says it was rebels; Tobias presumably thinks it was the government). This analysis is at the top of Rootclaim’s Track Record page , which says: Rootclaim’s conclusion contradicted all Western intelligence agencies, but years later was shown to be correct. This demonstrates that superior inference m...
Roots of Progress1 mentions across 1 issues

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Links For May 2023
June 01, 2023 · Original source
21: Last month I reviewed Simon Whitney’s book on IRBs, From Oversight To Overkill. In the book’s honor, Roots of Progress discusses alternatives to the review and approval paradigm. And External Medicine Podcast has an interview with author Simon Whitney.
Inline links: alternatives to the review and approval paradigm, an interview with author Simon Whitney
Rosenfeld and Wallman 20191 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Hypothesis A appears true: police do pull back from policing when facing public scrutiny. The extent of this pullback is debated. For more info, see MacDonald 2019; Marier and Fridell 2020; Mourtgos, Adams, and Nix 2022; Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. However, you beg the question by showing hypothesis A is true, and claiming hypothesis B is also true!
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.
Ross 19821 mentions across 1 issues

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Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
Ross 1982 investigated the effects of some widely publicized laws that increased penalties for drunk driving. They found that it decreased drunk driving 66% (!) in the year the law came out, but this effect gradually faded to zero over the next three years. The most likely explanation is that the publicity around the new law got people excited, but nobody really knows the laws around drunk driving anyway (do you know what the range of sentences for DUI in your jurisdiction is?) and so once the excitement of “law is stricter now!” faded from memory, the law had no effect.
Inline links: Ross 1982
RotB1 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves
November 08, 2022 · Original source
[RotB author Gyorgy Buzsaki’s new] book seems to get at the idea that the brain is a self-coherent system, which is stable in and of itself without needing to be "driven" by sensory events. Anyway the summary [here] can do a better job than me, for the lazy its all summarised from about 1:02
Rotten Tomatoes1 mentions across 1 issues

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August 16, 2022 · Original source
4: Prediction market manipulation looms larger in people’s imagination than in reality, but there have been a couple of attempts recently. Here’s a thread detailing two of them: one based on spamming Rotten Tomatoes with reviews to manipulate a movie’s score, the other based on creating a web presence for a fake labor union to manipulate a question about strikes.
Inline links: detailing two of them
RRN1 mentions across 1 issues

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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Real Raw News.1
Inline links: Real Raw News., 1
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.
At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.
Rule Thinkers In, Not Out1 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
2. I'm an expert on Rand (I've read some of her books). I think even if you see her arguments/“proofs” as weak, you can at least gain something by seeing what project she was engaged in and what direction she was taking it. (A great blogger once said you should “Rule Thinkers In, Not Out.”)
Russia As The Great Satan In The Liberal Imagination1 mentions across 1 issues

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Ukraine Warcasting
March 01, 2022 · Original source
Still, like Karlin, he flubbed the Ukrainian resistance. In Russia As The Great Satan In The Liberal Imagination (subtitled: “Why the culture war is global and there will be no insurgency in Ukraine”) he wrote:
Inline links: Russia As The Great Satan In The Liberal Imagination
Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis1 mentions across 1 issues

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Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
December 04, 2025 · Original source
I didn’t expect that Googling “graph about how negative media is over time” would work. We really do live in an age of wonders (source). This measure likely underestimates the trend towards negativity, because it only tracks a specific basket of media outlets. But the change could also have included viewers shifting consumption from more mainstream outlets towards more conspiratorial ones, including social media and blogs. (my Substack is tagged Science, but I hear the real money is in the Health Politics tag, where top performers feature articles like The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions and Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis) So, is that all there is? I think the strongest case for an economic crisis beyond vibes would be: Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.
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Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
k. Metaculus thinks Russia might soon close its borders. It might be helpful to talk to Russians you know about getting out of Russia if they can, before things get worse. See also Letter: Russians Are Welcome In America - though I don’t know what the visa situation is like now and it might be terrible.
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Ryan Haight Act of 20081 mentions across 1 issues

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Highlights From The Comments On Telemedicine Regulations
April 03, 2023 · Original source
If for some reason that doesn’t work, go to a different psychiatrist and try again. You don’t have to tell them you already tried. Since everything about ADHD diagnosis and treatment is already security theater, it’s hard to say what pill mills are doing except kind of smirking under their breath while going through the rituals - as opposed to real doctors, who go through the rituals with sincere faith. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there’s a difference here. But the regulatory state isn’t set up to say “And you have to sincerely believe in the rituals or they don’t count”. So instead they punish unrelated groups, like telepsychiatrists. See also my old post Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient. The security theater doesn’t work because it’s effective. It works because it’s inconvenient enough to weed out the less motivated fakers, and some of the remaining fakers get cold feet about lying to a nice sincere psychiatrist who seems to be trying to help them. Pill mills remove the inconvenience, and seem to be nod-and-wink cooperating with liars, so the theater stops working. The only solution is to inject some inconvenience and shame back into the process somewhere, which the DEA has chosen to do by restricting telepsychiatry. They could accomplish the same goal by making you attend your appointments naked, but I guess clothing companies have better lobbyists than telepsychiatrists do. 4: Comments About Forcing Blind People To Fill Out Forms Before They Can Access Braille I analogized forcing patients to see an in-person doctor before they could access a teledoctor to forcing blind people to fill out forms before they could access Braille. Several blind people and their friends pitched in to say this was a real problem. For example, Mikolysz: Blind person here, this kind of thing is actually much more common than people imagine. Many government agencies (regardless of which particular government you mean) just assume that anybody who needs to fill a form can read and write print and/or lives with somebody who does. This is often a problem even when the form in question is specifically targeted at blind people. Non-governmental organizations, including those who specifically serve the blind, aren't much better at this either. This issue is slightly more pronounced in civil law countries, where what constitutes a legally-binding signature is clearly defined in law and you can't just Docusign your way out of the problem, but it exists everywhere, including the US. I literally had to file this kind of document today, while the main form could be filled electronically, I was required to attach a few extra documents, for GDPR and such, and those had to be printed, filled in by a sighted person, signed and scanned. The same problem exists with physical mail which you're required to read and respond to, but which is almost never available in an accessible form, a few exceptions like the American IRS notwithstanding. 5: Comments About My Caricature Of A Doctor Who Refuses To Prescribe Psych Drugs Because People Just Need Jesus Jon Cutchins writes: You don't want psychiatrists and liberals in general to be accused of an unreasoning hatred towards Christianity you should probably be more judicious in your use of anti-Christian tropes when describing everyone who is skeptical of mind-altering drugs. Mike writes: I’ve been a primary care nurse practitioner in the Bible Belt for 20yrs and not once have I even heard of a provider telling a patient they should substitute religion for psychiatric (or any) medication. It’s so easy for some people to throw around these tropes as if Christianity is some exotic, weird tribe with horrifying anthropological traits. On the other hand, fluxe writes: I am a young Christian--in my life, I have -been told by my PCP not to get an IUD because it carries "a significant risk of causing infertility or death" -had a pharmacist refuse to fill an old, male family friend's ulcer medication because it's also an abortifacient -been told by a therapist to discontinue the SSRI a different provider had prescribed and just trust in the man of the house the PCP wasn't even particularly Christian herself, but since all of her patients are she hadn't updated on IUDs since the scare back in the 70s. Our horrifying anthropological traits become everyone's problem--it might be worth listening to those who "throw around these tropes" so you can understand what they have to deal with Unfortunately I only mention this possibility because it’s happened to several of my patients. The best I can offer in terms of being unbiased and apolitical is to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem. Alien on Earth writes: I generally like your writing and ideas, hell, I just re-uped for a year. However, in an otherwise near perfect post, you took a cheap shot at a steriotyped view of one religion thst is not popular amoungst coastal elites, that really detracts from your core point. "The worst-case is that you get one of those doctors who think that Psych Drugs Aren’t Real Because You Just Need Jesus, and then the patient has to keep looking until they find someone else." In my experience, it is the new age(y), non-religious, doctors who are least likely to like prescribing psyc. meds or who tend to give them at too low a dose or for too short a time. Certainly, I've found little correlation with their religion, if I even know it. The only correlation I've observed is that this perscription reluctance is, perhaps, slightly more common amongst middle career doctors. Perhaps it is more common in deep red areas, I don't know. However, even there, I would suggest, it is less due to religion, per se, than to "old fashion" "grit your teeth and bear it" thinking. I agree that there are many reasons people recommend against psychiatric drugs (a few are even good). Psychiatric drugs have lots of side effects and are clearly imperfect options, and I see people object to them more often when they think they have a perfect option as an alternative. Sometimes that option is Jesus. Other times it’s the trendy new somatic yoga reprocessing kundalini trauma dianetics therapy. Other times it’s LSD or ketamine or Dr. Bob’s 24-In-One Internet Nootropic. All of these work for some people, but not as much as the people pushing them think - which I guess is also true for psych drugs. I’m nervous about people who think they’ve found the answer and pressure people towards one alternative or another without presenting evidence. I’ve seen this happen enough in religious contexts that I think it was a fair thing to use as an example. 6: Comments About Which Part Of The Government Is Responsible For This Regulation ProfessorE writes: I’m not sure that what Scott wrote is even completely accurate. I have a relative who is an MD in this space, and it seems that the underlying problem is not the DEA but an actual law passed by Congress. Aren’t telemedicine regulations limited with respect to controlled substances by the Ryan Haight Act of 2008 U.S.C. § 829(e)… there may be interpretations of this act by the DEA and other agencies, but, where controlled substances are prescribed by means of the Internet, the general requirement is that the prescribing Practitioner must have conducted at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient. It seems like a colossal overreach to ask an Executive Branch agency to overrule the plain text of the act. There are some exceptions, which Scott noted. A different way of looking at things was that the Executive Branch was highly responsive to the emergency situation of Covid. Now that it’s not an emergency, they are obligated to return to the legal framework that exists. Congress needs to change the law, not the DEA. The *data* from covid should be used as part of a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it is reasonable to regulate telemedicine, and, if so, what regulations might address whatever problems arose. Followed by: Actually, Scott is even more off-base than I thought in my initial post. Apparently the DEA & DOJ are already proposing new changes to the 2008 Act (which seem like they violate the clear text of the act), but the act and the changes are summarized here: https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/ Sounds like government is aware of the issue. See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had For the actual changes that are being proposed. End of the day, this should be modified by Congress, not the agencies. Everyone should remember that the law was written in 2008. That’s 1 year after the very first iPhone and 2 years before the first iPad. Zoom didn’t exist (2011). None of the other technologies for video conferencing existed. Congress was attempting to fight opioid pill-mills. At the time of passage, I am willing to bet that ≈0% of patients were “Telehealth” using videoconferencing. More like phone calls and email a few times to get drugs. The law should have been amended, and it hasn’t been, but it is far from clear that it was a crazy law in the first place. I mostly accept this correction, although I’m still a bit confused - a lot of the analyses by lawyers I read said things like “Unquestionably, the DEA’s proposal is not what most industry stakeholders were anticipating. The initial reaction is the rules are more restrictive than necessary and impose concerning limitations and burdens on clinicians and the patients they treat”, and I’m confused why industry stakeholders weren’t anticipating it if the DEA had to do it in order to follow the law. And JR writes: Meanwhile, the DEA was instructed by law in -2008- to develop a special registration process for telemedicine to allow providers to prescribe controlled substances remotely. The DEA has simply failed to do so in that time, despite repeated Congressional demands to act. Don't worry, though - the DEA has said about this proposed rule that it feels this will be 'less burdensome' for providers than any kind of special registration, so it feels it has discharged its legal responsibility to create a special registration process. I am a psychiatrist having to deal with this idiocy with my patients too, and renting an office temporarily is not going to cut it. So I am going the letter route. I will probably a lose a reasonable chunk of patients I was prescribing controlled substances to. The only possible saving grace is that PCPs in this country are used to being asked to sign and complete all kinds of nonsense forms and documents so probably most of them will just do it with minimal fuss. I'm more concerned with the new requirement that all telemedicine scripts now have to be recorded by the prescriber with the date and time they were written, the PHYSICAL ADDRESS of the prescriber and patient at the time of the telehealth encounter, and have an explicit note on them that they are telemedicine prescriptions. I am less concerned about PCPs balking at writing an idiotic referral than I am skittish pharmacists refusing to fill scripts that they might interpret as being labeled equivalently to FAKE SCRIPT FOR DRUGSEEKERS Based on that comment and this, my best guess about what’s happening is: Congress passed restrictions on telemedicine in 2001, and asked the DEA to come up with a way that trusted providers could avoid those restrictions. Now that there is videoconferencing, etc, most people now believe those restrictions were too severe.
Inline links: Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient, Mikolysz, writes, writes, writes, to signal-boost posts like this one about overly woke therapists being another big problem, writes, writes, Followed by, https://www.legitscript.com/2023/03/27/proposed-changes-ryan-haight/, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/01/2023-04248/telemedicine-prescribing-of-controlled-substances-when-the-practitioner-and-the-patient-have-not-had, said things like, JR writes:, this