Astral Codex Ten

Publications: U

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Publications: U

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

UpToDate5 mentions across 5 issues

UpToDate is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between February 22, 2021 and January 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "no major academic or popular resource (eg UpToDate, NICE, Wikipedia, WebMD)"; "According to UpToDate ($) "CBT for insomnia (CBT-I) is preferred as first-line therapy for chronic insomnia in most patients.""; "UpToDate says that: In four randomized trials". It most often appears alongside FDA, NICE, Substack.

Article page
UpToDate
Mention count
5
Issue count
5
First seen
February 22, 2021
Last seen
January 24, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
  • FDA 4 shared issues
  • NICE 2 shared issues
  • Substack 2 shared issues
  • US 2 shared issues
  • 538 1 shared issues
Source context
A Look Down Track B
February 22, 2021 · Original source
...but I look forward to seeing further attempts to replicate and explicate these interesting results. Prediction: 90% chance that no major academic or popular resource (eg UpToDate, NICE, Wikipedia, WebMD) will give this theory prominence equal to or greater than the standard serotonin theory in its explanation of antidepressant effects by 2030, un...
...F -> TrkB -> nerve growth theory for now, but I look forward to seeing further attempts to replicate and explicate these interesting results. Prediction: 90% chance that no major academic or popular resource (eg UpToDate, NICE, Wikipedia, WebMD) will give this theory prominence equal to or greater than the standard serotonin theory in its explanation of antidepressant effects by 2030, unless this is because some...
Highlights From The Comments On CBT-i Apps
May 14, 2021 · Original source
According to UpToDate ($) "CBT for insomnia (CBT-I) is preferred as first-line therapy for chronic insomnia in most patients. Several prospective studies have assessed the comparative efficacy of CBT-I, medications, and combination therapy as an initial approach. In short-term trials, CBT-I alone and CBT-I in combination with medications demonstrate relatively equivalent outcomes, and both are superior to medication alone."
Inline links: UpToDate
Peer Review Request: Ketamine
July 19, 2021 · Original source
Psychiatric doses of ketamine do cause transient hypertension, pretty often. UpToDate says that:
The standard dose of IV ketamine is 0.5 mg/kg (eg 35 mg for a 70 kg person). This is the dose used in most studies and recommended by UpToDate. If that doesn’t work, some people will try going up to 1 mg/kg.
Inline links: most studies
The standard dose of intranasal ketamine is 50 – 80 mg. This is more or less the dose recommended by UpToDate, the dose used in most studies, the FDA-recommended dose of Spravato, and the dose that most successful ketamine providers have told me they use.
Inline links: most studies
Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
August 06, 2021 · Original source
UpToDate, the US gold standard medical evidence aggregator, says:
Inline links: says
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
COVID 23. Fewer than 10K daily average official COVID cases in US in December 2021: 30% 24. Fewer than 50K daily average COVID cases worldwide in December 2021: 1% 25. Greater than 66% of US population vaccinated against COVID: 50% 26. India's official case count is higher than US: 50% 27. Vitamin D is not generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70% 28. Something else not currently used becomes first-line treatment for COVID: 40% 29. Some new variant not currently known is greater than 25% of cases: 50% 30. Some new variant where no existing vaccine is more than 50% effective: 40% 31. US approves AstraZeneca vaccine: 20% 32. Most people I see in the local grocery store aren't wearing a mask: 60%
Ukraine Warcasting2 mentions across 2 issues

Ukraine Warcasting is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 07, 2022 and March 14, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "On my previous post, Ukraine Warcasting, I asked people for the names of anyone who had successfully predicted"; "Ukraine Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, ACX Grants, Adam Something.

Article page
Ukraine Warcasting
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
March 07, 2022
Last seen
March 14, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 214
March 07, 2022 · Original source
3: On my previous post, Ukraine Warcasting, I asked people for the names of anyone who had successfully predicted both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the strong Ukrainian resistance, and said I’d signal-boost them if they existed. Someone brought up a Hungarian YouTuber named Adam Something, who I am dutifully signal-boosting. Another commenter pointed out that Anatoly Karlin was wrong before he was right. Many such cases!
Inline links: brought up, dutifully signal-boosting, was wrong before he was right
22
March 14, 2022 · Original source
Ukraine Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28: - Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022 ?: 69% —→ 14% - Will at least three of six big cit...
Ukraine Warcasting Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28: - Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022 ?: 69% —→ 14% - Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1? : 71% —→ 70% - Will World War III hap...
Unherd2 mentions across 2 issues

Unherd is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 18, 2021 and February 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "From Unherd: are PhDs really the demographic least likely to get vaccines?"; "Unherd on the rise of sensitivity readers". It most often appears alongside China, facebook, 1984.

Article page
Unherd
Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
August 18, 2021
Last seen
February 22, 2022
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Links For August
August 18, 2021 · Original source
22: From Unherd: are PhDs really the demographic least likely to get vaccines?
Inline links: are PhDs really the demographic least likely to get vaccines
Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
Unherd on the rise of sensitivity readers, ie censors who publishing companies employ to remove problematic material from books.
Inline links: the rise of sensitivity readers
Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders2 mentions across 2 issues

Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 29, 2024 and February 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Correction to Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders"; "the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Grants, Best of Science Blogging feed.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
January 29, 2024
Last seen
February 08, 2024
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Open Thread 313
January 29, 2024 · Original source
1: Correction to Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders: if schizophrenia is 80-20 genetic, that means genes matter 2x as much as the environment, not the more intuitive 4x, see here for more. This somewhat invalidates my simulations, but in a way that makes my point stronger rather than weaker, so whatever. See also this commenter’s more sophisticated model.
Inline links: Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders, see here for more, this commenter’s more sophisticated model
Evolution Explains Polygenic Structure
February 08, 2024 · Original source
We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic, the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders. Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to:
Inline links: It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic, Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders
United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 20172 mentions across 2 issues

United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017 is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 16, 2021 and December 09, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "Based on data from the United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017". It most often appears alongside California, China, Citizen's Dividend.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
April 16, 2021
Last seen
December 09, 2021
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
April 16, 2021 · Original source
Based on data from the United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017. Published Oct 31, 2017. Revision Period: Beginning of each time series. Date of next release: July 2018. The "privileges" in "Land and privileges" are things like taxi medallions and patents, that were worth "almost zero" according to Nate. No matter how hard you try, "there is no occupation in which labor and capital can engage which does not require the use of land." Whenever anyone does labor, the owner of some piece of land – whether it's the farm in the middle of Kansas that grows your food, the lot upon which the server farm sending you these bytes sits, or the ground that right now sits beneath your feet – is sticking their finger in the pie. George reminds us that labor and capital will have to share whatever landowners take off the top of production in rent: As Produce = Rent + Wages + Interest, Therefore, Produce - Rent = Wages + Interest So... what happens when the productivity of land goes up? Let's go back to Lot A and Lot B, both 100-util fields. Let's say they belong to different landlords, and I'm a tenant on Lot B. I improve the soil of the field I'm working on so now it's worth 110 utils. What happens? My landlord raises the rent, of course! The only way wages (the return to labor) and interest (the return to capital) can go up as productivity increases, is if land values fail to rise at the same rate. The Law of Interest George wants to find the fundamental reason capital is able to produce wealth and justly claim a fair share of production. Remember that capital is wealth devoted to getting more wealth. So if capital is wealth that begets wealth, it makes sense that if I lend it out to you, I miss out on the potential for it to grow while it's out of my hands. George says I am justly entitled to ask for more back than I originally gave you. Let's say I loan you some corn seeds for a season. Had I not leant them to you, in a season's time I could have grown my own crop of corn and been left with more seed than I started with. So in a perfectly square deal, you need to give me back what I started with and what I could have expected to gain from natural increase (less the value of the labor required to get things started). Likewise with any other article of capital – say bricks or lumber. In the time I've spent without it while it was in your possession, I could have found someone else who had a better use for it than I did and exchanged it for something of theirs that I had a better use for, leaving me with capital of greater value. George says the act of progressively exchanging things in a way that increases subjective value for all involved is analogous to the natural forces of nature that make living capital (like corn and cows) grow over time. Remember, "subjective value" is real value. In a game of Settlers of Catan, if I have two bricks and you have two lumber, neither of us can build anything. The simple act of trading one brick for one lumber means both of us are better off because each of us can now build a road. The amount of bricks and lumber in the world didn't increase, but the amount of roads (or potential roads) did, and that represents a real increase in wealth. Interest thus springs from the "reproductive" powers of capital, whether that's biological reproduction, or the more abstract reproductive force of exchanging things so that you have a more valuable distribution of capital than you started with. As for how it relates to the other two returns to production – the more powerful the "power of increase" the capital has, the greater return interest can claim compared to wages. If you're ploughing a field and I lend you a tractor which makes you ten times as productive, I can justly claim more compensation for that than if I lend you a mule that only makes you twice as productive. However, rent still holds the whip hand, so the margin of cultivation determines how much return is left over to divvy up between interest and wages. This is because the net "reproductive" value of capital goes down given rent is a general tax on overall productivity. The amount I would have gained by using the thing productively over the period of time it was out on loan (the amount I can justly charge in interest) is reduced by how much I have to pay in rent. The Law of Wages Wages, like interest, are limited by the margin of production. Within that limit there's not much to understand about how wages work except that people seek to satisfy their desires "with the least exertion," which is a fancy way of saying people don't like to get ripped off. If two bosses offer the same exact job, but one offers higher pay, I'm taking that gig. If two bosses pay the same, but one is asking for twice as much work, I'll tell that boss where he can stick it. Wages depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent. So with all three laws established George sums it up like so: Where land is free and labor is unassisted by capital, the whole produce will go to labor as wages. Where land is free and labor is assisted by capital, wages will consist of the whole produce, less that part necessary to induce the storing up of labor as capital. Where land is subject to ownership and rent arises, wages will be fixed by what labor could secure from the highest natural opportunities open to it without the payment of rent. Where natural opportunities are all monopolized, wages may be forced by the competition among laborers to the minimum at which laborers will consent to reproduce. This is the reason George says that wages are so high in "new countries" where there's more land available than in countries where it's been locked up for centuries. Here's how it all fits together: Though neither wages nor interest anywhere increase as material progress goes on, yet the invariable accompaniment and mark of material progress is the increase of rent – the rise of land values. And: where the value of land is highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution IV. Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution of Wealth As a society undergoes material progress, the rent goes up. Why? Let's break it down. Three things contribute to material progress: Increasing population
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zIvo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43f758ce-2bb5-479e-bc07-b2bb7fcc6eb8_600x400.png
Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?
December 09, 2021 · Original source
Based on data from the United Kingdom National Accounts: The Blue Book 2017. Published Oct 31, 2017. Revision Period: Beginning of each time series. Date of next release: July 2018. The "privileges" in "Land and privileges" are things like taxi medallions and patents, that were worth "almost zero" according to Nate Blair, who prepared the chart. Here are two graphs from Thomas Piketty breaking down "national capital" for Britain and France by sector:
Unqualified Reservations2 mentions across 2 issues

Unqualified Reservations is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 06, 2022 and May 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "I would prefer that you read all of Unqualified Reservations"; "I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013". It most often appears alongside Hitler, Moldbug, Trump.

Mention count
2
Issue count
2
First seen
April 06, 2022
Last seen
May 07, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
April 06, 2022 · Original source
I would prefer that you read all of Unqualified Reservations, but that might be a bit much to ask, realistically. So why not start with this piece: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol5-shortest-way-to-world-peace/. (It comes in the middle of a long sequence, true, but I think it’s readable enough on its own.)
Inline links: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol5-shortest-way-to-world-peace/
Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth
Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed
U.S. Constitution1 mentions across 1 issues

U.S. Constitution is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 26, 2024 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly". It most often appears alongside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 2020 election, 2024 book review contest.

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U.S. Constitution
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1
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1
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July 26, 2024
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July 26, 2024
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Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
Ubyssey1 mentions across 1 issues

Ubyssey is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 23, 2024 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "student newspaper of the University of British Columbia (affectionately named the ‘Ubyssey’)". It most often appears alongside A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, A Hymn to God the Father, Alabama.

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Ubyssey
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1
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1
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August 23, 2024
Last seen
August 23, 2024
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Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)
August 23, 2024 · Original source
Throughout the early 30s, the student newspaper of the University of British Columbia (affectionately named the ‘Ubyssey’) would run various comic poems and light verse in a recurring feature, alternately titled “Litany Coroner”, “POME”, or in one case, “Poetic Ballyhoo” (featuring GK Chesterton, who probably would have approved of being there). These poems were, mostly, submitted by students, and can’t be found anywhere else online. They were, mostly, written with traditional rhyme and metre, with some free verse here and there. They were, mostly, not the highest-caliber poems you’ll ever read.
Inline links: (affectionately named the ‘Ubyssey’)
And the Ubyssey inadvertently buried them with one of the final publications of the now-appropriately-named “Litany Coroner”.
Inline links: final publications
UK Policy Forecast1 mentions across 1 issues

UK Policy Forecast is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between December 28, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as "You can read his newsletter, the UK Policy Forecast". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot initiative, @GoodSciProject.

Reference entry
UK Policy Forecast
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1
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1
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December 28, 2021
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December 28, 2021
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ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Nathan Young, $5,000, to fund his continued work writing Metaculus questions and trying to build bridges between the forecasting and effective altruist communities. Nathan is a Metaculus moderator, the author of a prediction market blog I've used as a source before, and has useful connections with people who might be convinced to use formal forecasting methods for their organizations. This grant is a vote of confidence in him to continue this work, and another part of my effort to fund more forecasting infrastructure. You can read his newsletter, the UK Policy Forecast, here. If you have suggestions for forecasting questions he asks that you DM him on twitter or add them to this open Google doc.
Inline links: here, DM him on twitter, this open Google doc
Ukraine: A Restart Of History1 mentions across 1 issues

Ukraine: A Restart Of History is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2022 and September 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "and Ukraine: A Restart Of History". It most often appears alongside 9-11, AI, Better Angels.

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1
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1
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September 28, 2022
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September 28, 2022
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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
Not that this has done Fukuyama any good. Any time anything happened over the past thirty years, the headlines have been “FUKUYAMA PROVEN WRONG”. The particulars have changed with the crisis du jour - most recently it’s Putin’s Ukrainian Actions Show “The End Of History” Is A Myth, The Russia-Ukraine War Shows History Did Not End, and Ukraine: A Restart Of History. But Twitter-search “end of history” at any time, and you’ll see the Fukuyama-bashing still going strong:
Inline links: Putin’s Ukrainian Actions Show “The End Of History” Is A Myth, The Russia-Ukraine War Shows History Did Not End, Ukraine: A Restart Of History
Ukrainian Actions Show 'The End Of History' Is A Myth1 mentions across 1 issues

Ukrainian Actions Show 'The End Of History' Is A Myth is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 28, 2022 and September 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "most recently it’s Putin’s Ukrainian Actions Show “The End Of History” Is A Myth". It most often appears alongside 9-11, AI, Better Angels.

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1
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1
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September 28, 2022
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September 28, 2022
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From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
...any good. Any time anything happened over the past thirty years, the headlines have been “FUKUYAMA PROVEN WRONG”. The particulars have changed with the crisis du jour - most recently it’s Putin’s Ukrainian Actions Show “The End Of History” Is A Myth , The Russia-Ukraine War Shows History Did Not End , and Ukraine: A Restart Of History . But Twitter-search “end of history” at any time, and you’ll see the Fukuyama-bas...
Ultimate Spider-Man1 mentions across 1 issues

Ultimate Spider-Man is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 16, 2024 and August 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011"; "Are the best comics today generally better than Ultimate Spider-man (2000)". It most often appears alongside 20th Century Fox, Abomination, Abomination.

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Ultimate Spider-Man
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1
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1
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August 16, 2024
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August 16, 2024
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Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
While the Avengers were a clear copy of the Justice League, Stan Lee put his own spin on it. While the JLA superheroes all had roughly the same personality and no real inter-team conflict, Lee made his heroes very distinct – almost caricatures – and there was PLENTY of inter-team conflict. The Hulk in particular abandoned the team in the second issue and was the primary antagonist by Avengers #3. Avengers #3 (January 1964) is itself the final step in connecting all of the Marvel heroes together. The Hulk has gone missing and the rest of the team wants to find him. Iron Man uses an “Image Projector” to ask other superheroes around the world if they had seen the Hulk. He visits the Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the X-men. In that same month in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man meets Angel (one of the X-men). The cat was out of the bag. Lee had a new trick to boost sales of all of his titles and he put it to work throughout the year. The first full crossover of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers happens in May (Fantastic Four #26). Daredevil premiered in March 1964 (with Spider-man on the cover, but not in the pages), and crosses over in Amazing Spider-man #16 (September 1964). Dr Strange first appears on the cover of another title in Fantastic Four #27 (June 1964). The Avengers battle the X-men (before teaming up) in X-men #9 (Dec 1964) Atlas was no longer just a collection of comic books about various topics, or even a collection of different flavors of superhero. It was a single shared universe: The Marvel Universe. It wasn’t planned out in advance, instead it happened in stages due more to commercial rather than artistic needs. Basically Stan Lee created the most successful modern mythology because he needed the money. III. Are Silver Age Marvel Comics any good? Well, apart from Amazing Spider-man, which holds up surprisingly well, I would not recommend reading any of them. Even Spider-Man is much weaker than the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot version of the story published 2000-2011. If you wanted to read Spider-Man from the beginning you would likely enjoy that later series a lot more than the original. The other titles vary in quality from “okay” (the Fantastic Four) to “absolute garbage” (Ant Man stories in Tales to Astonish). Which begs the questions, if these comics were so bad, how did they succeed as well as they did? Clearly the comics were “good for their time”. Millions of people bought and read them, and they clearly passed the “test of time”. So does that mean that we are better today at making art than we were back then? Or is art neither better or worse, just “of its time” and people back then would think the Ultimate Spider-man stories from 2000 were unreadable? I will argue the following: The stories were “good for their time”. VERY good for their time. They were much much better than the comic book stories that preceded them, and much better than other contemporary comic book adventures (like those being published by DC)
Generative: Shakespeare was the inspiration for a great deal of later work. I would add a fourth: 4. Innovative: Shakespeare was the greatest writer of his time and innovated in new ways that have become standard in writing going forward Richard argues that when you look at activities with objective standards, performance improves over time. It is only when we look at subjective things, like art, where many people believe that the people who came early were the Greatest Of All Time (GOATs). But I think the same thing is going on in both objective and subjective fields. The greatest individuals at any time period both perform the activity well AND find a way to do it in ways that have never been done before. Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player of his time. He still holds the record for the most points (goals + assists) in a regular season (1985-86). He also holds second place (212, 1981-82) and third place (208, 1984-85). In fact when you rank all players by season across all time “Gretzky seasons” are four of the top five and eight of the top ten. When you look at career points, Gretzky has so many more points than second place (Jaromir Jagr) that Gretzky would still win even if you didn’t count any of his goals (i.e., he has more assists than Jagr has goals plus assists). Gretsky also holds the record for most records (at 61). Derek Thompson, at The Atlantic, argues that Gretzky has the most impressive statistical achievement in any sport. The top player in terms of assists last year was Nikita Kucherov, coming in at 100 assists – enough to be the 4th best player of all time – but only the 14th best season because Gretzky did better 11 times. And yet if Gretsky played today he would likely be outclassed by Nikita Kucherov – and many modern players. Because hockey players today are, generally, much better than hockey players back when Gretsky was playing. Part of the REASON they are better is that they learned how to play by watching Gretzky. Gretzky did not just play better than everyone at the time – he played differently. His famous quote “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” seems obvious to us today, but it was novel enough that it got put on Wayne Gretzky posters after he said it. That is true for many innovations: What is obvious today once had to be invented by someone, and wasn’t obvious before that happened. Before Gretsky, players played hockey between the two nets. Gretsky played BEHIND the net. He did it so often and so well, “behind the net” became referred to as Gretsky’s “office”. Now it is well known that if a player can get behind the net and then pass outfront it is almost always a goal (the goalie can’t see where the puck is coming from in time). All professional players and teams know that and do whatever they can to stop it from happening. The players that now play behind the net, or the writers that mix metaphors in witty ways are not considered “great” because everyone does it now – or at least understands how it can be done. What made Gretsky and Shakespeare great is that they were the first of their respective kinds to figure out new ways of doing things. So can we quantify the quality of art? Finding ways to quantify Beethoven vs Mozart vs Andrew Lyde Webber is out of scope for this essay, but storytelling, at least part of storytelling HAS been quantified. In 2004 Steven Johnson wrote “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter”. In it Johnson diagrams the plots of television episodes. Most TV shows in the 1970s had two “plotlines”. There would be some sort of opening piece for a couple of minutes (plot line 1), followed by the main story for the majority of the episode (plot line 2), then after plotline 2 was wrapped up, there would be a short epilogue calling back to plot line 1 for the last minute or two of the show – very “linear television”. Johnson claims Hill Street Blues was the first innovation on that model. Instead of one main storyline there were three stories – the A, B and C stories. The writer/director would move back and forth between the three stories, which often had thematic parallels to each other. This created far more engaging television, but it was also much more difficult to follow for people who were used to the old model. That increase in complication belies Johnson’s claim that pop culture was making people smarter. But I just want to focus on how it was making stories more complicated – and “better”. It was an innovation. That innovation continued. Johnson explains that The Sopranos was the show to take it to the next level. Instead of just three plots that each ran independently, now David Chase (creator of The Sopranos) oversaw dozens and dozens of plot lines. Unlike Hill Street Blues where any given scene would advance a single plot line, in The Sopranos a single scene might push forward elements from two, three, four or more plotlines as everything intertangles. Sopranos also pushed further into long term commitment. Where Hill Street Blues plotlines were generally started and then wrapped up within each episode, Sopranos plotlines would carry over from one episode to the next. Sometimes a new plot line would be created in a scene of an episode and then go dormant for multiple episodes before coming back. This type of storytelling is common in prestige television today. Even the “dumbest” TV for the lowest common denominator is more complicated than Hill Street Blues (the most complicated show of its time). That does not mean that Mike Kelly (creator of “Revenge”, one of the lowest rated TV on IMBD still on the air today) is a better writer than Steven Bochco (creator of HSB), but it might mean that the plots of Revenge may keep modern audiences more entertained than the comparably slow moving Hill Street Blues (or maybe not. I have never seen Revenge and have no desire to attempt it, even for a more thorough review). The point is that it is possible that art IS getting better. That writers are learning from the writers that came before them on what types of stories people like to hear and engage with. Silver Age Marvel Comics did things that no comic had ever done before, but that does not mean they did ALL the innovative things that could make comics better. There are likely diminishing returns on innovation in art – but wherever those diminishing returns land on comic book creation, the creators in the 1960s were far from approaching them. Aside #6: In ancient Greece plays were traditionally a single protagonist/actor playing off of a large chorus. At some point (we aren’t sure when due to the limited number of plays that have survived) Aeschylus innovated and added a second actor (and shrunk the size of the chorus). This allowed two actors to have dialog and interact with each other. Before Aeschylus, no other playwright had thought to do this. Then it took almost twenty years before a new playwright, Sophocles, fell upon the idea of adding a THIRD actor. It seems that was as far as it went. The idea of a fourth actor would require innovation beyond the ability of the Greeks at the time. Today, comic book storytelling may be at the efficient frontier. At some point between 1965 and today it is possible the major innovations were complete and future innovations were fighting against diminishing returns (“I have an idea! What about a 272nd actor!”). Are the best comics today generally better than Ultimate Spider-man (2000), or other great comic book runs of the past 30 years? Maybe the best comic book stories to ever be written will be Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead or Michael Bendis’ Daredevil? It could be that the innovation in comic book storytelling peaked sometime in the last 20 years. There are still more stories to tell, but they won’t be objectively better than the best stories that came before. I don’t want to debate that point. But what I will argue is that the writers of the early 1960s were very far away from the storytelling capabilities that came later. But while those Silver Age writers did not have the tools and experience writers have today, they did have an open canvas. They had “low hanging fruit of innovation”. Lee, Kirby and Ditko were some of the most innovative creators of their time, and their time just happened to be the right time for creating the modern mythological foundation of our time. IV. Silver Age Innovations When writing the first draft of this essay I came up with a dozen innovations that made Silver Age Marvel Comics different from their contemporaries and what came before. Rather than working through all of them, I am going to highlight four of those innovations, chosen mostly because those four are the most interesting to write about, and that should be enough to get the point across. Innovation #1: The Characters Let’s review the characters that Stan Lee had a part in creating between November 1961 and December 1965: The Fantastic Four (Reed Richards, Invisible Girl, Human Torch, Thing – and Franklin Storm (1964))
Inline links: record for most records, Derek Thompson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter
Unboxing Politics1 mentions across 1 issues

Unboxing Politics is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 04, 2025 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "And Unboxing Politics argues (against me in particular)"; "And Unboxing Politics argues (against me in particular)". It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, abundance liberalism, Afghanistan.

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Unboxing Politics
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September 04, 2025 · Original source
I appreciated Snow Martingale’s perspective: in the 1990s, fast food became associated with obesity, poor health, and the lower class. To escape this stigma, big chains rebranded as sort-of-at-least-attempting-to-be-bougie places with wraps and salads and decent coffee; the aesthetic change was part of this (successful and profit-increasing) effort. I wonder if we could take this further and trace it back to increasing inequality (appealing to bougies because that’s where more of the money is) or decreasing fertility (abandoning kid-friendly aesthetics because kids are a smaller fraction of customers). 9: Someone links (X) a paper saying that firewood made up almost a third of US GDP in 1830. Eliezer says (X) that doesn’t sound right. The rest of Twitter (X) uses this as an excuse for one of their regularly-scheduled paroxysms about how rationalists are all all smug autodidacts who hate experts and worship their own brilliance while sitting in their armchairs. Someone looks at the paper more closely (X) and finds that yeah, it was comparing apples to oranges and the original statistic was wrong. Remember, never be afraid to say “Huh, that sounds funny…”! 10: Richard Hanania interviews Scott Wiener on YIMBYism. I didn’t watch it - too close to a podcast - but this would not have been on my bingo card three years ago. 11: Claim: robots can already carve statues; buildings with AI-created stone ornaments are next. From their lips to God’s ears! 12: Terminal lucidity (aka “paradoxical lucidity”) is a medical mystery where previously demented people - even those who had been demented for many years - sometimes become lucid for just a few hours or days before they die. It’s surprisingly common - 6% of deaths in one palliative care ward. It is sometimes used as evidence that dementia must not cause complete information loss, even if it is irreversible with current technology. Scientists are baffled but gingerly suggest that maybe lack of oxygen disrupts inhibitory mechanisms in the brain, allowing enough electrical activity to make even a severely-damaged brain capable of complex thought - but I can’t help noticing that this is also the best evidence for an immaterial soul I’ve ever heard (you would need some model where the soul pretends to be dependent on the brain during life, becomes independent of the brain after death in order to head to the afterlife, but occasionally jumps the gun a little bit). 13: You probably heard about the METR study showing that even though programmers think AI is speeding them up, it actually seems to slow them down. Emmett Shear objects, saying that the developers didn’t have enough experience with AI tools to be past the negative-value part of the learning curve. And two of the programmer test subjects gave their takes: Ruby Bloom says part of the slowdown might be programmers fixing very simple bugs that could be improved by better prompts, and another part because they get distracted by other things while the AI is running. And Quentin Anthony says that coding AIs are addictive intermittent reinforcement - every so often they solve a bug perfectly, and this is so satisfying that it’s tempting to keep trying them again and again even when the chance is very low. 14: Jacob Goldsmith gives a clearer presentation of the issues with many antidepressant studies than I’d previously heard. Everyone knows that one problem is that reversion to the mean is so strong that it’s hard to find a treatment effect. But wouldn’t that in itself suggest that antidepressants aren’t necessary? Jacob says: not if there’s negative correlation between the treatment and placebo effects. That is, if your study is full of people with short-lived depression who will recover no matter what, then this dilutes the effect you’re looking for. But it might be that there’s a subgroup with long-lasting depression who recover only on the medication. One way to look for would be a “placebo run-in period”: give people a while to see if they recover on their own, then give the antidepressant to the ones who don’t. Psychiatrists and statisticians debate whether this is a good idea or cheating. My question: how come you can’t fix this with strict study entry criteria of “had depression for a long time”? 15: Lots more good discussion about missing heritability. Sasha Gusev argues that twin studies might be a poor guide to anything else if there are many gene-gene interactions. That is, if we take the difference between identical twins (who share 100% of their genes and therefore 100% of their interactions) and fraternal twins (who share 50% of their genes and therefore fewer than 50% of their interactions), and incorrectly extrapolate it to other differences using a model that assumes there are no interactions, we will overestimate the size of (non-interaction) genetic effects. Most studies find that there are few gene x gene interactions, but commenters convinced me last time that this might be an artifact of the studies being bad. And Unboxing Politics argues (against me in particular) that although it superficially looks like adoption and twin studies sort of agree, when you adjust out their known biases, it moves twin studies further up and adoption studies further down, such that now they disagree again (the objection I would have made is their Objection 2, which I think they at least somewhat refute). This is a good argument; without spending several hours checking all of their claims, my only weak partial objection is that I don’t think assortative mating can play quite the role they expect, because there seem to be the same twin/RDR differences even on traits where believing in assortative mating is absurd (like kidney function). But if you replaced it with Sasha’s argument above, you might have a pretty good case! On the pro-hereditarian side, East Hunter takes aim at gene x environment correlations, comes down somewhere in the middle, and Sebastian Jensen continues banging the drum of how most objections to twin studies don’t work. I think these are good attempts to buttress existing research but don’t fundamentally change anything or respond to the novel arguments above. And Emil Kirkegaard points out that the observed SNP heritability of facial features is only 23%. He argues that since it seems like facial features are extremely heritable, this reinforces the argument that SNP heritability numbers are too low (and therefore twin study numbers are more likely defensible). But should we be sure that facial features are more than 23% heritable? His argument is that identical twins have identical faces, but this might be vulnerable to Gusev’s point about interactions. Maybe a better argument would be that it seems very hard for shared environment to affect facial features (with a few exceptions like fetal alcohol syndrome), and facial features seem more than 23% heritable just by normal “he looks like his brother” common-sense observation? One interesting potential consequence of this research: if we ever fully understand how genes affect faces, then embryo selection companies could show people what each of their potential future kids might look like. I suggest they not do this: it might spook me into becoming pro-life. 16: Andy Masley’s AI art is good (three examples below). 17: There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other. The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that it thinks it’s lying when it says that! Link is to a Less Wrong comment from a researcher in the field; I look forward to seeing an eventual peer-reviewed paper. H/T JD Pressman. 18: 80,000 Hours has a high-production-value video about the AI 2027 scenario. 19: Dynomight vs. Casey Milkweed debate on mathematical forecasting, with special reference to AI 2027. And Dynomight comments on Casey’s post here. 20: The Psmiths review The Ancient City, about ways that ancient culture depended on family, clan, ritual, and “the household gods”. Sample quote: I'm more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it's not that hard! ... Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don't share a name. I don't much care whether it's the wife who takes the husband's name or the husband who takes the wife's, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I'm a lib). But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in. 21: Did you know: Epic Systems, the electronic medical record company, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters in Wisconsin, with buildings that look like castles, quaint medieval towns, and the Emerald City of Oz (h/t Devon Zuegel): Meanwhile, tech companies with ten times as much money pretend that they’re cool and playful when their HQ has some rounded edges and a set of colored cubes in front. Do better! 22: Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions. 23: Ozy, citing Stutzman et al: “Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.” 24: Lencapavir is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS; a single dose protects against infection for six months. Unclear how this interacts with PEPFAR cuts; if PEPFAR still existed it would be a big boost to its efficacy; now maybe this might be part of a strategy to tread water? 25: Did you know: when people first started making artificial ice in the 1850s, there was a backlash from people who thought it was gross and dystopian and that people should insist on natural ice for their iceboxes. From Pessimists’ Archive, which goes on to draw an analogy to lab-grown meat, etc (h/t Isaac King on X). 26: From Peter Hague (on X) and commenter Phaethon: why did so many Anglosphere countries see immigration spikes in 2021? Each of these has their own local story. In Britain, it’s the paradoxical effects of Brexit. In the US, it’s Joe Biden being soft on immigration. And so on - but should we be looking for some deeper cause that explains the overall phenomenon? A commenter suggests “a way to soak up all the inflation from the COVID money printing”, but I can’t tell if that even makes sense. Still, should something something COVID be a leading hypothesis? 27: Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern on the Skrmetti Supreme Court case that failed to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender medicine. US law bans sex discrimination, so pro-transgender advocates argued that, since doctors often prescribe eg estrogen to biological women, it was sex discrimination to ban prescribing it to biological men. Tennessee’s anti-transgender argument was that they weren’t discriminating by sex, they were discriminating by diagnosis (estrogen for eg hot flashes, vs. estrogen for gender transition). There is some subtlety here (if a biological man grows breasts because of some hormone imbalance, doctors might give him testosterone to counteract it, and this seems sort of like giving biological women testosterone to make them look less like women), but these are still sort of different diagnoses (gynecomastia vs. gender dysphoria) and Tennessee said you can still think of it as diagnostic discrimination rather than sex discrimination. This makes sense, except that the standards around sex discrimination are very strict and sort of box the court in here. And in a fit of wokeness, the 2020 court (including some of the conservative justices hearing this case) applied these standards very strictly and ruled that discriminating against gays was a form of sex discrimination (since if women can date men, it’s sex discrimination if men can’t also date men), and this is obviously the same argument. Now that wokeness is less popular, the court wants to rule against transgender, but it can’t help tripping over its previous ruling and giving some kind of unprincipled confusing non-opinion. 28: Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations. Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: Snow Martingale’s perspective, Someone links (X), Eliezer says (X), The rest of Twitter (X), Someone looks at the paper more closely (X), Richard Hanania interviews Scott Wiener on YIMBYism, robots can already carve statues; buildings with AI-created stone ornaments are next, Terminal lucidity, the METR study showing, Emmett Shear objects, Ruby Bloom, Quentin Anthony, Jacob Goldsmith gives, Sasha Gusev argues, commenters convinced me last time, Unboxing Politics, East Hunter takes aim at, Sebastian Jensen continues, Emil Kirkegaard points out, Andy Masley’s AI art is good, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5bZR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcafaf1f2-b7b9-4acd-a0a7-2de9fc31c724_2688x1792.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6-cZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ffb2b5c-3fcb-467d-b1f3-7aafb5dc90a3_1024x1024.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UyUx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F91b73899-6e25-460f-94f9-46d0713c5dd2_1024x1024.webp, it thinks it’s lying when it says that!, JD Pressman, a high-production-value video, Dynomight, Casey Milkweed, here, The Ancient City, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters, Devon Zuegel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yqG3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b2d15b0-e0f0-4bae-a2f6-aabfd2eda017_1536x794.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!taZn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad460bb8-4416-4886-8ef0-b3d36f04c81a_640x480.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bDya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd45e5123-753d-4c87-b108-6523b38004cb_1480x833.webp, now a new report comes out, Here are some related Metaculus questions, Ozy, Stutzman et al, is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS, Pessimists’ Archive, Isaac King on X, Peter Hague (on X), Phaethon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ry-j!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea22939-8cf9-4b32-8494-511f01cb2758_964x755.png, Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VScL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2509e243-f6f7-4448-9779-a8f9be45a2f9_1500x1500.png, proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Understanding America’s New Right1 mentions across 1 issues

Understanding America’s New Right is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 11, 2026 and February 11, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "In Understanding America’s New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs"; "In Understanding America’s New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives". It most often appears alongside Afghan-Americans, Afghanistan, Baby Boomers.

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1
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February 11, 2026
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February 11, 2026
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Political Backflow From Europe
February 11, 2026 · Original source
In Understanding America’s New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs, and especially in their immigration policy. He answers that conservative ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization (this is kind of him: a more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism). Since Europe is the home of Western civilization, it’s especially galling for it to be ravaged by immigration or whatever.
Inline links: Understanding America’s New Right
Unexpected Values1 mentions across 1 issues

Unexpected Values is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between January 24, 2023 and January 24, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Eric blogs at Unexpected Values". It most often appears alongside ACX, ACX Prediction Contest, AI Impacts.

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Unexpected Values
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1
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January 24, 2023
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January 24, 2023
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Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
Eric is nominally a grad student at Columbia studying algorithms for elicitation and aggregation of knowledge, but he's on a leave of absence to do research in AI alignment. Eric blogs at Unexpected Values, and you can read some of his more formal work on prediction aggregation here.
Inline links: Eric, Unexpected Values, here
United States Constitution1 mentions across 1 issues

United States Constitution is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 26, 2023 and May 26, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "he had the US Constitution and Bill of Rights existed at the time". It most often appears alongside /r/wallstreetbets, 2013 Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act, 80,000 Hours.

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1
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1
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May 26, 2023
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May 26, 2023
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Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
Adam Smith was breaking with centuries of tradition when, in The Wealth of Nations, he frowned practice of price fixing by describing it as a "conspiracy against the public." And even though believed that price fixing had a pernicious effect, he believed that it would be "impossible indeed to prevent such meetings," as any meeting that tried to ban conspiratorial price-fixing would have either been impossible to execute, or inconsistent with liberty and justice. (He wrote this in 1776, but had the US Constitution and Bill of Rights existed at the time, he might have argued that a meeting between two competitors to decide how to price their wares would be protected by the First Amendment.)
Universe Hopping Through Substack1 mentions across 1 issues

Universe Hopping Through Substack is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 02, 2022 and October 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "the stew mentioned in Universe Hopping Through Substack". It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX Grants, Astralcodexten Com.

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1
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October 02, 2022
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October 02, 2022
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Open Thread 244
October 02, 2022 · Original source
3: Matt G, who comments here as “Vaniver”, invited me and some friends over to try the stew mentioned in Universe Hopping Through Substack. I can report that it was okay. Thank you Vaniver for your commitment to empiricism!
Inline links: Universe Hopping Through Substack
Unruly Sun1 mentions across 1 issues

Unruly Sun is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 05, 2024 and March 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "He blogs about “meaning and enactivism” at Unruly Sun". It most often appears alongside @wc1766, Adam, Adam Unikowsky.

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Unruly Sun
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March 05, 2024
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March 05, 2024
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Who Predicted 2023?
March 05, 2024 · Original source
Max Langenkamp works on hardware and policy for biosecurity at SecureDNA. He says he’s been keeping track of forecasts to private questions for several years but “isn’t motivated” by most prediction market questions. He blogs about “meaning and enactivism” at Unruly Sun.
Inline links: Unruly Sun
Unsong1 mentions across 1 issues

Unsong is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between October 12, 2022 and October 12, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Kind of feels like something from Unsong". It most often appears alongside 538 deluxe model, @rcafdm, Andres.

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Unsong
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1
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October 12, 2022
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October 12, 2022
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Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
14: Kind of feels like something from Unsong:
unz.com1 mentions across 1 issues

unz.com is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between February 09, 2023 and February 09, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site)". It most often appears alongside @moritheil, ACX Prediction Contest, Adam Tooze.

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unz.com
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February 09, 2023
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February 09, 2023
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Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images
Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images
UR1 mentions across 1 issues

UR is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2025 and May 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "author of UR has received emails"; "the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails". It most often appears alongside 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity, Apple.

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UR
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1
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1
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May 07, 2025
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May 07, 2025
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@p.k.81
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Moldbug Sold Out
May 07, 2025 · Original source
A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth
Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed
US intelligence report1 mentions across 1 issues

US intelligence report is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 30, 2022 and July 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "according to a US intelligence report". It most often appears alongside 1950s influenza strain, 1977 influenza pandemic, 1992 scientific investigation.

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Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Sometimes your overconfident friend will get it wrong, and the coin will come up tails. 6. Technical evidence The book covers a lot of technical evidence that’s considered by some to point toward a lab origin. Although I’m a computational biologist myself, I don’t have the background knowledge required to evaluate this evidence, and have only been able to observe the back-and-forth debates between people who actually do have this background knowledge. So I didn’t update my opinion much based on these pieces of evidence, but I’ll still describe some of them here. The first widely-cited piece of technical evidence has to do with the lack of rapid evolution of the virus early on in the pandemic. Some scientists claim that SARS-CoV-2 reached genetic stability early on, suggesting that it was already well-adapted to spread in humans at the start of the outbreak. Some have interpreted this as evidence that it was engineered for this purpose, or underwent serial passaging to encourage adaptation to human or humanized cells. Here’s a pre-print from May 2020 (on which Alina Chan is actually a co-author) making the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was already well-adapted to humans at the beginning of the pandemic. However, a review paper from proponents of the natural origins hypothesis disputes this claim, and offers several technical counterpoints, citing adaptive mutations later on in the pandemic that increased the virus’s fitness. The second widely-cited piece of technical evidence is related to a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 called the furin cleavage site (FCS). The FCS increases the ability of the virus to infect certain types of cells, and is part of what makes SARS-CoV-2 especially contagious. It’s considered an unusual feature, and has not been found in the other viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. It’s worth noting that previous gain of function research has included inserting a furin cleavage site into the original SARS virus from the 2003 epidemic. The debate over the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is mostly related to sequence analysis, and I don’t have enough background knowledge on this to take a side on it either way. This is a paper by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin claiming that the FCS may suggest genetic manipulation and point to a lab origin. For technical counterpoints on the FCS, I’ll refer you to the same review paper from natural origins proponents that I mentioned in the last paragraph. A large chunk of the book is devoted to exploring these technical claims. These sections of the book are interesting and informative for hearing one perspective, but I definitely recommend checking out other sources with the technical counterpoints to get a full view of things. Personally I did not update my opinion based on these pieces of evidence because I don’t have enough background knowledge to evaluate opposing claims being made about them. Also, I think it’s worth noting that the debates around these pieces of evidence are specifically related to the subset of lab leak possibilities that involves genetic engineering and manipulation. However, even if it were proven, beyond a doubt, that SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of genetic engineering, that would not rule out the possibility that it was a natural virus, collected from the field, that was stored in the WIV and leaked out. I want to point this out because I’ve seen some semantic confusion where people claim to “disprove” the lab leak hypothesis, when really they are given arguments specifically against the possibility of genetic engineering. 7. Signal and noise So far I’ve tried to summarize some of the key points of the book that I view as being the most important, but there are also a ton of other tiny pieces of information for us to try to make sense of. Some of these bits are either false, misleading, or meaningless. For example, Chan and Ridley tell the story of Dr. Limeng Yan, a scientist-turned-whistleblower who fled to the US in April 2020 in fear of being “disappeared” in China. By all accounts, Dr. Yan started off as a legitimate whistleblower. She learned of COVID’s human-to-human transmission early on, when it was still being denied by the Chinese government, tried to report it up her chain of command (but was told to keep quiet), and ended up leaking the information to a Youtube commentator who told the world – and of course, it was confirmed by the Chinese government and WHO the next day. But instead of the story ending there, with Dr. Yan as a brave hero, things took a sad turn. She fled to the US in fear, but ended up in a situation where her only American contacts were people with their own political agendas (including Steve Bannon). Facing this scary and uncertain situation in a foreign land, it seems she basically told these people what they wanted to hear, and possibly ended up believing it herself through self-deception. Soon she was giving interviews to right-wing media outlets, spouting the actual unfounded conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon released by China on purpose, and other false information. This is a sad story about a scientist who tried to do the right thing, but ended up intellectually corrupted by forces beyond her control. It’s also a reminder of how much noise and false information is out there. It’s easy to dismiss the ridiculous claim that COVID began as a bioweapon, but other claims are more difficult to evaluate. For example, according to a US intelligence report, three researchers at the WIV became so severely ill in November 2019 that they required hospitalization. It was reported that they had symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and regular seasonal illness. What should we make of this claim [7]? Conclusion 1: I have no idea whether the virus came from a lab or from nature After reading the book and going down several related rabbit holes, I feel as uncertain as ever about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I have generally updated towards viewing the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, rather than an insane conspiracy theory. This partly due to this book, as well as many other related sources I came across last year. To summarize, my overall updating went something like this: Prior: Definitely natural origins (Obviously, I’m not a conspiracy theorist).
Inline links: pre-print from May 2020, review paper from proponents of the natural origins hypothesis, inserting a furin cleavage site into the original SARS virus, This is a paper by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin, three researchers at the WIV became so severely ill in November 2019 that they required hospitalization.
US News1 mentions across 1 issues

US News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between May 07, 2024 and May 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote". It most often appears alongside affirmative action, Africa, African National Congress.

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Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"
May 07, 2024 · Original source
Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.
US News & World Report1 mentions across 1 issues

US News & World Report is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between April 21, 2025 and April 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "looked at the US News & World Report rankings". It most often appears alongside Aashish Reddy, AI 2027, AI Innovation And Security Policy Workshop.

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US News & World Report
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1
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1
First seen
April 21, 2025
Last seen
April 21, 2025
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Open Thread 378
April 21, 2025 · Original source
...e weirdest reaction to anaesthesia he’d ever seen - does that count as a hardship? (“Yes, but why are you applying to Dartmouth in particular?” “Because we looked at the US News & World Report rankings and realized we weren’t good enough to get into colleges better than Dartmouth, but we were too good for colleges worse than Dartmouth, any other stupid obvious...
...said we had the weirdest reaction to anaesthesia he’d ever seen - does that count as a hardship? (“Yes, but why are you applying to Dartmouth in particular?” “Because we looked at the US News & World Report rankings and realized we weren’t good enough to get into colleges better than Dartmouth, but we were too good for colleges worse than Dartmouth, any other stupid obvious question...
Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post1 mentions across 1 issues

Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between July 07, 2025 and July 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "New subscriber-only post: Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post". It most often appears alongside ACX, Allan Shivers, Cremieux.

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1
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1
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July 07, 2025
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July 07, 2025
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Open Thread 389
July 07, 2025 · Original source
2: New subscriber-only post: Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post. "An unprecedented combination of brilliant and mendacious; too useful to avoid but too unstable to fully trust."
Inline links: Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post
utilitarianism.com1 mentions across 1 issues

utilitarianism.com 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 "you can find his arguments scattered across pages like utilitarianism.com". It most often appears alongside @the_megabase, A Pan-Species Welfare State, ACX Grantees.

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utilitarianism.com
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1
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1
First seen
May 15, 2024
Last seen
May 15, 2024
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Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
(being a combination philosopher/domain-name-monger has its advantages; along with his main site, you can find his arguments scattered across pages like utilitarianism.com, biopsychiatry.com, and superhappiness.com)
Inline links: his main site, utilitarianism.com, biopsychiatry.com, superhappiness.com
UTobian1 mentions across 1 issues

UTobian is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 29, 2022 and September 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Toby Rogers’ is “UTobian”". It most often appears alongside 1 Kings 10-11, 2008 Democratic National Convention, Adam Scheffer.

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UTobian
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1
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1
First seen
September 29, 2022
Last seen
September 29, 2022
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Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
(and a few also have cute puns. Toby Rogers’ is “UTobian”; Jay Kuo’s is “The Status Kuo”)
Inline links: UTobian, The Status Kuo