Astral Codex Ten

Fire

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Fire

Article

Fire is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 30, 2021 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Mann names each chapter after one of the four elements: Fire (energy)”; “How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? … playing with fire”; “FIRE (as in Financial Independence/Retire Early) in particular comes to mind as another weird community”. It most often appears alongside Great Depression, India, 21st century American society.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: August 12, 2025

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.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Vogt’s life begins in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, New York. At fourteen, he contracts polio, which leaves him with a Richard III-esque limp and drives him from his preferred leisure activity, hiking, to the gentlemanly sport of bird-watching. It is this hobby that brings him into contact with the nascent environmental movement of the 1930s, and soon he is doing unpaid field work, editing, and writing for various ecological societies on the East Coast. He becomes director of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary in Long Island, where he notices the sudden dwindling in local bird populations and launches a polemical campaign against what he believes to be the culprit: government-sponsored public works projects to drain ditches and marshes and spray pesticides to control the mosquito population, intended to curb the spread of malaria. Vogt refers to these efforts as "‘perilously close to destructive government-sponsored rackets’" and uses his position as editor of the Audubon Society’s official publication, Bird-Lore, to lambast them with such venom that the president of the Audubon Society tells him to stop and, eventually, fires him. (Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.)
Inline links: dovekie, ridiculously cute
The problem with the concept of carrying capacity – impossible to define or know when we’ve surpassed, until after the proverbial moment when killing one mosquito or dovekie too many plunges us into everlasting fire and brimstone – is that it seems mostly like a mood affiliation thing. Consider this: when you look out at the bird feeder hanging in your backyard (Bay Area people living in closets, use your imagination here), do you see a blissful symbiotic coexistence of the human world and nature, with humans generously giving of our growth-accumulated abundance to help the birds flourish? Or do you see a dystopian struggle where innocent creatures pushed to the brink of death by our traffic and pesticides and housecats must rely on meager scraps for survival? There isn’t really a right view here, I don’t think, just a predilection for seeing what matches your intuition and telling a story about it. Given the life story Mann depicts for Vogt, it’s not hard to see why he would lean toward the pessimistic take. From the childhood marred by a philandering father who left his family in a cloud of scandal and ruin, to the adult life spent stumbling from one bourgeois non-occupation (theater critic, bird watcher, government mole rooting out Nazis in South America) to the next, to the childlessness and divorce, Vogt seems happiest when he is away from any humans, whether tromping through pre-suburbanized Long Island, or alone with the guano-producing birds on the desolate coast of Peru. Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter, he would definitely be that guy reposting memes that COVID is finally letting our planet "heal."
Inline links: mood affiliation
The second half of The Wizard and the Prophet explores four areas where humankind faces major dilemmas and needs some form of action (whether Wizardry or Prophetry) in order to survive. Mann names each chapter after one of the four elements: Earth (food), Water (self-explanatory), Fire (energy), and Air (climate change). Again, while Mann gives ample airtime to both worldviews and their proposed solutions, Wizards come out looking pretty good. Each chapter sees the Wizards demonstrate over and over that carrying capacity in these spheres is not fixed and can be altered by science and technology – earth through hacking photosynthesis to produce more abundant crop yields with the same soil and water inputs, water through desalination plants and massive public works projects to move water from more to less abundant environments, energy through better use of legacy fuel sources and finding new ones, and climate change through carbon capture. The Prophets, meanwhile, decry the dangers of both growth and Wizardry (insofar as it enables growth) and argue for social change that seems, at best, limited in impact, and at worst, impossible and ineffective. But the question remains: are we creating a better world by increasing global capacity with our Wizardly tricks, or are we overreaching and dragging down the quality of life around us?
MR Tries The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy
March 30, 2023 · Original source
Therefore, it’ll be fine. You’re not missing anything. It’s not supposed to make sense; that’s why it’s a fallacy. For years, people used the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy on AI timelines: Eliezer didn’t realize that at our level, you can just name fallacies. Since 2017, AI has moved faster than most people expected; GPT-4 sort of qualifies as an AGI, the kind of AI most people were saying was decades away. When you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA when something will happen, sometimes the answer turns out to be “soon”. Now Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution tries his hand at this argument. We have absolutely no idea how AI will go, it’s radically uncertain: No matter how positive or negative the overall calculus of cost and benefit, AI is very likely to overturn most of our apple carts, most of all for the so-called chattering classes. The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring. No one is good at predicting the longer-term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changes (we can do the short term, albeit imperfectly). No one. Not you, not Eliezer, not Sam Altman, and not your next door neighbor. How well did people predict the final impacts of the printing press? How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? We even have an expression “playing with fire.” Yet it is, on net, a good thing we proceeded with the deployment of fire (“Fire? You can’t do that! Everything will burn! You can kill people with fire! All of them! What if someone yells “fire” in a crowded theater!?”). Therefore, it’ll be fine: I am a bit distressed each time I read an account of a person “arguing himself” or “arguing herself” into existential risk from AI being a major concern. No one can foresee those futures! Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability. Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become. It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison. The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable — “boom!” Yet at some point your inner Hayekian (Popperian?) has to take over and pull you away from those concerns. (Especially when you hear a nine-part argument based upon eight new conceptual categories that were first discussed on LessWrong eleven years ago.) Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough. The mere fact that AGI risk can be put on a par with those other also distant possibilities simply should not impress you very much. So we should take the plunge. If someone is obsessively arguing about the details of AI technology today, and the arguments on LessWrong from eleven years ago, they won’t see this. Don’t be suckered into taking their bait. Look. It may well be fine. I said before my chance of existential risk from AI is 33%; that means I think there’s a 66% chance it won’t happen. In most futures, we get through okay, and Tyler gently ribs me for being silly. Don’t let him. Even if AI is the best thing that ever happens and never does anything wrong and from this point forward never even shows racial bias or hallucinates another citation ever again, I will stick to my position that the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy is a bad argument. Normally this would be the point where I try to steelman Tyler and explain in more detail why the strongest version of his case is wrong. But I’m having trouble figuring out what the strong version is. Here are three possibilities: 1) The base rate for things killing humanity is very low, so we would need a strong affirmative argument to shift our estimate away from that base rate. Since there’s so much uncertainty, we don’t have strong affirmative arguments, and we should stick with our base rate of “very low”. Suppose astronomers spotted a 100-mile long alien starship approaching Earth. Surely this counts as a radically uncertain situation if anything does; we have absolutely no idea what could happen. Therefore - the alien starship definitely won’t kill us and it’s not worth worrying? Seems wrong. What’s the base rate for alien starships approaching Earth killing humanity? We don’t have a base rate, because we’ve never been in this situation before. What is the base rate for developing above-human-level AI killing humanity? We don’t . . . you get the picture. You can try to fish for something sort of like a base rate: “There have been a hundred major inventions since agriculture, and none of them killed humanity, so the base rate for major inventions killing everyone is about 0%”. But I can counterargue: “There have been about a dozen times a sapient species has created a more intelligent successor species: australopithecus → homo habilis, homo habilis → homo erectus, etc - and in each case, the successor species has wiped out its predecessor. So the base rate for more intelligent successor species killing everyone is about 100%”. The Less Wrongers call this game “reference class tennis”, and insist that the only winning move is not to play. Thinking about this question in terms of base rates is just as hard as thinking of it any other way, and would require arguments for why one base rate is better than another. Tyler hasn’t made any. 2) There are so many different possibilities - let’s say 100! - and dying is only one of them, so there’s only a 1% chance that we’ll die. This is sort of how I interpret: Existential risk from AI is indeed a distant possibility, just like every other future you might be trying to imagine. All the possibilities are distant, I cannot stress that enough. The mere fact that AGI risk can be put on a par with those other also distant possibilities simply should not impress you very much. Alien time again! Here are some possible ways the hundred-mile long starship situation could end: The aliens are peaceful and want to share their advanced technology
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jYyh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F672bd8f5-484b-48ff-a80f-539d7b77b66c_599x238.png, sort of qualifies as an AGI, tries his hand at this argument
Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
August 12, 2025 · Original source
FIRE (as in Financial Independence/Retire Early) in particular comes to mind as another weird community that absolutely corresponds with his thesis of affluence enabling more niche community-building. FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado. It's way easier for everybody to go to a community meetup in the desert for a week or two if they're affluent. That applies to a FIRE meetup I went to in the desert in Utah, and also calls Burning Man to mind. Tons of people just draw the line of weirdness at a place where they can blend into "normal" liberal society.
I appreciate the FIRE example - if they’re taking over parts of neighborhoods, they at least get a 5/10 on my scale.
Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this; I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of. If 50K people are that seriously into FIRE, and there are a thousand communities of that size, and there’s 50% overlap (e.g. someone who’s both into FIRE and a Mormon), then that’s still consistent with less than 10%!