monkeypox
Article
monkeypox is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 13, 2022 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year”; “one on monkeypox”; ""monkeypox means the End Times” argument”. It most often appears alongside Polymarket, Africa, COVID.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: June 13, 2022
- Last seen: October 13, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Polymarket (3 shared issues)
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- Africa (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Manifold (2 shared issues)
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- Metaculus (2 shared issues)
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- PredictIt (2 shared issues)
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- Republicans (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- Substack (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- Ukraine (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.
Metaculus predicts 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it’s all about the distribution 90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases. This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it’s true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I’m not sure. How would you test that? Warcasting The war in Ukraine has shifted into a new phase, with Russia concentrating in Donetsk and Luhansk, and finally beginning to make good use of its artillery advantage. I’m going to stop following the old Kiev-centric set of questions and replace them with more appropriate ones: Notice that this continues to rise, from 16% a month ago to 22% today. See Eikonal’s comment here for some discussion of how this might happen and what territories these might be (and note that we switched from Ukrainian control in the last question to Russian control in this one). I’m keeping this one in here, but it never changes. Meanwhile, on Insight Prediction: $2000 in liquidity and still 14% off from Metaculus, weird. Musk Vs. Marcus Elon Musk recently said he thought we might have AGI before 2029, and Gary Marcus said we wouldn’t and offered to bet on it. It’s an important tradition of AGI discussions that nobody can ever agree on a definition of it and it has to be re-invented every time the topic comes up. Marcus proposed five different things he thought an AI couldn’t do before 2029, such that if it does them, he admits he was wrong and Musk wins the bet (which purely hypothetical at this point; Musk hasn’t responded). The AI would have to do at least three of: Read a novel and answer complicated questions about eg the themes (existing language models can do this with pre-digested novels, eg LAMDA talking about Les Miserables here - I think Marcus means you have to give it a new novel that it has no corpus of humans ever having discussed before, and make it do the work itself).
Inline links: predicts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UYb_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f6313de-8f39-4c11-bbfb-00629e7f7276_778x300.png, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10738/ukraine-controls-dnrlnr-on-jan-1-2024/, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10745/russian-control-of-new-territory-2024-01-01/, Eikonal’s comment here, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10050/bilateral-ceasefire-between-russia--ukraine/, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10002/presidency-of-vladimir-putin-on-feb-1-2023/, https://insightprediction.com/m/206/will-russia-conquer-the-donbass-by-the-end-of-july-2022, https://insightprediction.com/m/1282/will-russia-conquer-luhansk-by-july-15th, https://insightprediction.com/m/232/when-will-the-russia-ukraine-war-end, said we wouldn’t, here
So far they have two reports, one on monkeypox and one on Ukraine. I’ll try to review this in more detail some other Monday.
This is wacky in some sense, but it’s not the sort of no-holds-barred, pattern-recognition-turned-up-to-max attempt to link modern events to Biblical prophecies I was hoping for. The best I could find was this article on The Prophetic Significance Of Monkeypox, which noted that the Bible describes the Horsemen of the Apocalypse as “given [authority]…to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth”, and that “with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth” sort of maybe sounds like zoonotic diseases.
Inline links: The Prophetic Significance Of Monkeypox
I feel like this is weak. If I were doing this, I’d point out that 1 Kings 10-11 describes the moral decline of King Solomon. His main offenses are overtaxing the people, taking too many heathen women into his harem, and overspending on luxuries - including monkeys from far-off Tarshish. God gets angry at all of this and curses him to have his kingdom fall in the next generation. Surely monkeys + sexual profligacy = curse, plus the impending fall of the kingdom, forms a better “monkeypox means the End Times” argument than the “zoonotic disease” drivel. Also, Solomon’s excessive taxes come out to exactly 666 talents of gold - coincidence? But also: the Hebrew letter qoph means “monkey” - both symbolically, in the sense that its glyph is supposed to represent a monkey with a tail, and literally, in the sense that the word “qoph” also means “monkey” in Hebrew. According to kabbalah, it is the letter of impurity and unholiness. Its gematria value is 100, representing the 100 people killed by plague every day due to David offending God. But qoph is also the first letter of the Hebrew word keitz, meaning the end of time! I really feel like you could make a much stronger case here!
Inline links: means “monkey”, According to kabbalah
Saeed Ahmad, $10K, to build an epidemic reporting system in Liberia. Liberia has been on the forefront of some recent pandemics, including Ebola and monkeypox. Saeed is currently based in Liberia, and wants to build infrastructure to translate local rumors about unusual diseases into reports to the national health authorities, including community reporters, phone hotlines, and social media.