Astral Codex Ten

Maya

3 min read

Maya

Article

Maya is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2021 and January 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “a closer analogy would be with the Mycenaeans or the Maya”; “maya as ‘fake news’“. It most often appears alongside Rome, AI Circle, ancient Rome.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 03, 2021
  • Last seen: January 04, 2023

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 Collapse Of Complex Societies
June 03, 2021 · Original source
After explaining his model of various types of diminishing returns on complexity eventually pushing societies to collapse, Tainter picks three states to apply his model to. He chooses out three civilizations at different levels of complexity – the Chacoan civilization (‘proto-state’), the Mayan civilization (‘definitely a state but not an empire’), and Rome (Rome). In 1988 the Mayan script had not been fully decrypted, and Chacoa didn’t have writing, so Tainter draws primarily on archaeology to put together pieces about what happened there.
For the Mayans, the strategy that brought them down was investing in a red queen race of population growth and agricultural intensification. There were several major power centers in competition, and they might have prioritized population growth as a matter of policy – when food started becoming scarce, male height started going down while female height didn’t, which some people think indicates that Mayans prioritized keeping women healthy for population growth reasons. (Tainter doesn’t say, but I assume they ruled out the hypothesis that the women were never that well fed to begin with, since it’s easy to check for – male:female height distributions under equal nutrition are well known.)
Inline links: red queen race
Mayans practiced similar kinds of agriculture, and hard times hit everyone at the same time. This was a major cause of population clustering around the power centers / states:
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“Glad you asked! I’m working on a new translation of the Pali Canon. I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’. Some parts don’t even have to be retranslated! The sutras say that you attain the formless jhanas by ‘passing beyond bodily sensations and paying no attention to perceptions of diversity’. See, it’s perfect! Red state conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity!”