Astral Codex Ten

9-11

6 min read

9-11

Article

9-11 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between March 03, 2021 and May 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “he’s still completely sure 9-11 was an inside job”; “If someone said ‘let’s only eat bad food from now on to remember 9-11’”; “Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, Joe Biden, New York Times.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: March 03, 2021
  • Last seen: May 01, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For March
March 03, 2021 · Original source
The word that comes to mind is “humanize”. This really humanizes flat-earthers and everyone else like them. I think it’s too easy to start thinking that “denialists” and “pseudoscientists” and whatever are some sort of aliens, acting out of hatred or paranoia or something. There’s some truth to it, but it’s truth that gets rammed into your head a little too hard until it becomes hard to see the other perspective - a lot of these people are really good people trying to reason things out as best they can, and getting those things wrong. I am sure I get things wrong and I hope when someone corrects me I can deal with it as gracefully as this guy dealt with Sphere Earth. Except he does say that he’s still completely sure 9-11 was an inside job, which is interesting (you would think learning one conspiracy theory was wrong would cause a general update towards trusting the Outside View) but honestly relatable (I have sometimes been wrong about things without this causing me to enter total Cartesian doubt and default to the Outside View).
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
Usually there is some group of people with some silly idea, like “let’s only build ugly things to remind ourselves of the horrors of WWII”, and they make like five things, and then the market gives ordinary people what they want, which is pretty things (at least for some watered-down mass market definition of “pretty”). If someone said “let’s only eat bad food from now on to remember 9-11”, it would never work. Heck, people won’t eat slightly-worse-tasting food to avoid diabetes and save their own lives. If some group of architects actually coordinated the entire world into only building ugly buildings for 70 years to in order to make an important moral point, this would be one of the most impressive acts of coordination in the history of the world. We should find these same architects and ask them to coordinate us into only building environmentally-sound buildings in order to prevent climate change, or whatever.
Bounded Distrust
January 26, 2022 · Original source
It's not quite that this would be *worse* than anything FOX has ever done. I assume FOX helped spread the story that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11 and had WMDs, just like everyone else. That's probably a bigger lie (in some sense) than one extra mass shooting in a country with dozens of them, or changing the name and ethnicity of a perpetrator. Certainly it did more damage. But that's not the point. The point is, there are rules to the "being a biased media source" game. There are lines you can cross, and all that will happen is a bunch of people who complain about you all the time anyway will complain about you more. And there are other lines you don't cross, or else you'll be the center of a giant scandal and maybe get shut down. I don't want to claim those lines are objectively reasonable. But we all know where they are. And so we all trust a report on FOX about a mass shooting, even if we hate FOX in general.
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.