Astral Codex Ten

9-11

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9-11

Article

9-11 is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 18, 2022 and March 31, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I will never forget where I was when I heard about 9-11”; “The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror”; “My best counterexample is 9-11, which seems to have semi-organically become a nationwide day of remembrance”. It most often appears alongside Scott, US, Iraq War.

Metadata

  • Category: Events
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: August 18, 2022
  • Last seen: March 31, 2026

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.

Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference
August 18, 2022 · Original source
These two hypotheses leave me much less puzzled by skill plateaus, but don’t entirely explain all patterns of remembering and forgetting. There seems to be something like an interestingness effect - I will never forget where I was when I heard about 9-11, but I very much forget where I was on 9-12, 9-13, etc. The decay hypothesis doesn’t explain this. Does interference? Maybe - it could be that 9-12, 9-13, etc all blend together and give me no obvious retrieval cues, whereas 9-11 was unique and so un-interfere-with-able. If devastating terrorist attacks happened once a month, each as bad as 9-11, probably I wouldn’t remember it.
From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
But I don’t think Fukuyama feels like someone who’s gotten a C-. There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes, which show no sign of running out. The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror, when people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”. See for instance The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy, and many more. Fukuyama himself wrote in October 2001 that “A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history”.
Inline links: The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy
With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
My best counterexample is 9-11, which seems to have semi-organically become a nationwide day of remembrance, although realistically that seems to mostly involve newspapers publishing “It’s the somethingth anniversary of 9-11 today, never forget!”. Any more . . . exuberant . . . commemorations tend to be considered insensitive (eg this).
Inline links: this
Against Learning From Dramatic Events
January 16, 2024 · Original source
Back in 2001, the motto was “9-11 changed everything”. Everyone started talking about the clash of civilizations, and how Islam was fundamentally opposed to the West. The government made a whole new Cabinet department around the theory that terrorism was now a giant threat and we needed to sacrifice our civil liberties to deal with it.
But terrorist attacks after 9-11 mostly followed the same pattern as before 9-11: every few years, someone set off a bomb and killed some people, at about the same rate as always. Islam stayed about as opposed to the West as it had always been (plus some extra because we spent a decade bombing them).
In retrospect, updating any of our beliefs - about Islam, about the extent of the terrorist threat, about geopolitical reality, based on 9-11, was probably a mistake.
Response to Hanson On Health Care
April 30, 2024 · Original source
It seems to me that if we were to cut medicine in half, figuring out which half to cut would be among the most consequential decisions in history. For example, if we foolishly tried to cut out all treatments that start with letters A - M, then we would lose antibiotics, appendectomies, AIDS medications, etc. I would expect even small mistakes in this process to cause more deaths than 9-11, the Iraq War, or other things we think of as greatly consequential.
Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism
March 31, 2026 · Original source
Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can’t bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it’s pretty hard to find a “telescopic altruism” example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities.
Inline links: List Of Top US Causes Of Death