Holocaust
Article
Holocaust is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between July 21, 2021 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Holocaust survivors”; “Everything about the Holocaust is so tragic”; “as increased awareness of the Holocaust made anti-Semitism déclassé”. It most often appears alongside New York, United States, America.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: July 21, 2021
- Last seen: August 01, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On “Crazy Like Us”
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
- Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
- Interview Day At Thiel Capital
- Your Review: Joan of Arc
Related Pages
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- New York (3 shared issues)
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- United States (3 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Ashkenazi Jews (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- English (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- French (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Greg Cochran (2 shared issues)
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- Hitler (2 shared issues)
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- Leo Szilard (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Perhaps some are outright malingerers, but clearly for a large number (including a friend of mine) this is real. They really are suffering from a set of symptoms consistent with PTSD. And yet, the vast majority of WWI veterans, Holocaust survivors, everyone who lived through WWII in Western Russia etc., a large fraction of people in the Middle Ages etc. experienced as bad or worse stuff and the vast majority could function as adults. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we've created an expectation of disabling trauma and people fulfill it. Crazy Like Us quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next.
In my post, I was able to track down a few clues to the mystery. All of the Martians were Jewish, which linked the puzzle to the general puzzle of Jewish overachievement (for example, 36% of US Nobel Prize winners are Jews, compared to only 2% of the US population). Greg Cochran and others suggest a genetic explanation, with Daron Acemoglu and others suggesting a cultural/historical one; unsurprisingly, I side with Cochran. Granting that this is a Jewish phenomenon, it’s not too hard to explain why it happened at the turn of the century in particular - too long before then, and anti-Semitism prevented European Jews from getting a good education; too long after then, and they all died in the Holocaust.
Inline links: a genetic explanation, a cultural/historical one
I think this clears up my remaining confusion around the Martians. For whatever reason, Eastern European Jews of the 19th century were unusually bright. The very brightest of this unusual group moved to Budapest, interbred with each other, and had one generation of totally unprecedentedly brilliant children before being wiped out. Everything about the Holocaust is so tragic that it’s hard to make it any worse, but credit to MacRae for his attempt.
Around 1955 (Brooks writes, building on an earlier book by Nicholas Lemann) Harvard changed their admission policy. Why? Partly a personal decision by Harvard presidents James Conant, and Nathan Pusey, who sincerely believed in meritocracy. And partly because Harvard’s Jewish quota was becoming unpopular, as increased awareness of the Holocaust made anti-Semitism déclassé. Conant and Pusey decided to admit based on academic merit (measured mostly by SAT scores). The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
“Hmmm…racism good…oh! I believe the Holocaust had to happen for anthropic reasons.”
“Maybe not directly, but think about it. People always say that it could happen here. That early 20th century Europeans thought they were so great and civilized, but the Holocaust proves that even the seemingly-most-sophisticated countries can descend into barbarism and genocide at any time. But they can’t! Or there’s only a one in a billion chance that they do, the same as everyone thought in 1900. It’s just that everyone who’s still alive comes from world-branches where the one-in-a-billion thing happened. I even think World War I was a fluke - that was the only way the outcome pump could set up Hitler.”
Basilica: You mean, instead of intervening here, God could intervene when the weak are oppressed by the strong - as in the Holocaust, or Tokugawa's persecutions of the Japanese martyrs, or if He is specifically trying to spread the Christian religion He could make the Crusades a success. If God doesn't discriminate by Christian sect, He could preserve the Byzantine empire, and if He's specifically Catholic, He could have the Thirty Years’ War last just five years and end with a permanent Catholic Holy Roman Empire.