Astralcodexten
Article
Astralcodexten is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 30 times across 30 issues between June 13, 2021 and November 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “ACX in-person Bay Area meetup”; “Dehaene phrases this in a way that ACX readers will love”; “This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit , Discord , and bulletin board , and in-person meetups around the world”. It most often appears alongside ACX, Istanbul, Scott.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 30
- Issue count: 30
- First seen: June 13, 2021
- Last seen: November 10, 2025
Appears In
- Open Thread 176
- Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
- Open Thread 229
- Open Thread 242
- Open Thread 255
- Open Thread 256
- Open Thread 259
- Open Thread 267
- Open Thread 291
- Open Thread 292
- Open Thread 301
- Open Thread 308
- Open Thread 309
- Open Thread 320
- Open Thread 325
- Open Thread 331
- Open Thread 334
- Open Thread 338
- Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024 - Call for Organizers
- Open Thread 349
- Open Thread 370
- Open Thread 373
- Open Thread 374
- Open Thread 378
- Open Thread 379
- Open Thread 387
- Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
- Open Thread 401
- Open Thread 403
- Open Thread 407
Related Pages
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- ACX (4 shared issues)
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- Istanbul (4 shared issues)
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- Scott (4 shared issues)
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- Berkeley (3 shared issues)
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- Dallas (3 shared issues)
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- Metaculus (3 shared issues)
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- Oxford (3 shared issues)
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- Paris (3 shared issues)
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- Rome (3 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (3 shared issues)
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- Slate Star Codex (3 shared issues)
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- Substack (3 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.
4: Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which Zach describes as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and Harry Deuchar calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is so not medical advice)
Inline links: Zach describes, Harry Deuchar
3: Remember, ACX in-person Bay Area meetup today, Sunday 6/13, at 2 PM at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence, vaccinated people only). You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.
I have read one other scientific book which breathes the same positive pedantry, and that is Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. I think there is a pattern. It helps that both fields treat a topic on which everyone has their own opinion, so they get a lot of know-alls from outside the field interfering with the discussion. But more importantly, they are based on methods which used to be tabooed inside their scientific community. De Waal treated his animals as personalities and even bonded with them instead of keeping neutral distance, and he took wildlife observations seriously. All of this was considered totally unscientific, so he was forced to be extra scrupulous in his experiments. For Dehaene and his colleagues, it was the paradigm that “subjective reports can and should be believed” -- as a source of raw data, without making the mistake of conflating the subjective belief with reality. When patients tell you after surgery that they had the impression to leave their body and float at the ceiling, then you should not believe that they actually floated. You should believe that "floating" was their true feeling, and that probably there is a neuroscientific cause for this feeling. Taking it seriously eventually enabled researchers to induce the feeling of leaving your body in any person, by using the right neural stimulation. But until the 90s, it was scientifically taboo to take subjective feelings into account, so experiments with low standards would have been torn apart.
Inline links: Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Dehaene phrases this in a way that ACX readers will love. For him, the unconscious (or pre-conscious) neural activity encodes a probability distribution over the possible states of the world. If we see the word "bank", then the meaning "credit institute" and "sitting bench" are both represented by some neurons, so they both occur in this probability distribution. When the word reaches consciousness, then the brain *samples* from this distribution. So it decides for one of the possible options, and all neurons are overwritten with this meaning. For example, in binocular rivalry (when your two eyes see incompatible images) you will sometimes see option A, sometimes option B, but usually not both. Once you have drawn a sample, this is not a final decision. In binocular rivalry, your perception switches every few seconds between A and B. Some researchers even claim that the brain gets the Bayesian math right: if you present an image that is ambiguous in a very clever way, such that there is an objective underlying probability of 70% for A and 30% for B, then you will see A for 70% of the time and B for 30% of the time. Others claim that you can play "Wisdom of the Crowd" in single-player modus. Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:
5: Michael Trazzi has an interview with Katja Grace on AI forecasting, part of which is Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress (a reference to my post Why Not Slow AI Progress?) I am not sure she is actually contra me - I meant for the post to be an overview of different opinions rather than a strong defense of one side - but it’s interesting and worth a read (or, if you’re that kind of person, a watch or a listen)
Inline links: Contra Scott Alexander On Slowing Down AI Progress, Why Not Slow AI Progress?, watch, listen
6: Gary Marcus has a response to my recent AI bet. I want to make it clear that whatever the merits of my bet or his arguments, Google did not “snooker” me. They had no part in this: I went around begging for someone to run my prompts through PARTI and Imagen, one of their employees asked their bosses’ permission and then agreed to do so, and ran them exactly as I asked. Any fault is entirely mine. I’m insisting on this pretty hard because I’m grateful that Google will sometimes respond to random requests by amateurs, and accusing them of deliberate deception in response burns their willingness to do that. As for everything else: I wrote “without wanting to claim that Imagen has fully mastered compositionality, I think it represents a significant enough improvement to win the bet, and to provide some evidence that simple scaling and normal progress are enough for compositionality gains”, I stick to the “some evidence” claim, I feel like I was pretty open about exactly how much/little evidence it was (Google sent me ten examples per prompt, I showed you four representative ones, but the extra six don’t change much). I agree Marcus makes some useful common sense claims on how sure to be after five examples.
Inline links: has a response to my recent AI bet, begging
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
2: In case you missed it on Friday, I’m still hosting a contest to predict the course of 2023.
Inline links: a contest to predict the course of 2023
3: My post on crypto has gone viral. While I’m glad that people like it, I want to re-emphasize that I have a conflict of interest, in that generous blog readers have sometimes given me unsolicited large gifts of cryptocurrency (see Part 2 here for one example, there are others where people have asked to stay anonymous), and for various reasons I still have some of the money in crypto. I try not to let this conflict of interest shape my opinion but you can decide whether I have succeeded or not.
Inline links: here
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
4: Thanks to everyone who bought subscriptions in the Subscription Drive; I really appreciate it.
Inline links: Subscription
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
3: Today is investors’ last chance to bid on impact certificates in our mini-grants round. Current situation:
Inline links: bid on impact certificates, mini-grants round
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Since we posted Meetups Everywhere on Friday, we’ve added in proposed meetups for Eindhoven, Netherlands and Mérida, Mexico.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
3: New additions to Meetups Everywhere: Bratislava, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Vienna, Curitiba - check the post for details. Meetups this week in Munich, Vienna, Cologne, Grass Valley, DC, New Orleans, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Columbus, Jakarta, Budapest, Toronto - along with many smaller cities that won’t fit here - so again, check the post if you’re interested.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Remember, ACX Grants application deadline is December 29. That’s this Friday!
Inline links: ACX Grants application deadline
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Update on the 2023 Forecasting Contest: We’re now working on sending everyone their scores. You should either have already gotten this email (from autoastralcodexten@gmail.com) or get it sometime in the next few days. Thanks to Leon for making this happen.
Inline links: Forecasting Contest
3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here, and my explanation of what’s going on is here.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: More meetups this week, including London, Oxford, SF, Cambridge (UK), Vienna, Portland, Jerusalem, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Capetown, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Boulder, Dallas, Leipzig, and Jakarta; bolding these last two since they were later additions you might have missed the first time. Check the list for more information.
Inline links: the list
2: Thanks to everyone for continued good discussion on the Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate. I want to avoid getting bogged down in this forever, so I’ll mostly try to resist responding and just highlight some of the pro-lab-leak comments I found most thought-provoking:
Inline links: Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: In my Quests and Requests post, I challenged someone to create a good dating site. A team led by Shreeda Segan is working on this and trying to raise money on Manifund; you can read more about their plan and funding goals here.
Inline links: my Quests and Requests post, here
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
2: Several people speculated that the recent Don Juan review was secretly by me. It wasn’t, but unrelatedly I have been working on a Don-Juan-related project, which I might show you at some point. I’m mentioning this now so that I don’t seem like I’m plagiarizing the (excellent) review.
Inline links: the recent Don Juan review
3: And many people also enjoyed the Family That Couldn’t Sleep review. If you want to know the latest on prions, and especially on chronic wasting disease of deer, I recommend this blog post by my friend EukaryoteWrites: Will The Growing Deer Prion Epidemic Spread To Humans? Why Not?
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: On last week’s post How Often Do Men Think About Rome, I presented ACX survey data showing that men and women thought about Rome the same amount. Commenter RenOS was able to find a YouGov poll showing the opposite (men more). Possible interpretations: my poll was contaminated by selection bias (ACX-reading women are unusually interested in history), theirs was contaminated by response bias (they asked how often you thought about Rome; I asked whether you thought about it in the last 24 hours - I think their version leaves more room for retroactive editing of memories). YouGov also provided other interesting historical information:
2: Late addition to Meetups Everywhere: Moscow on October 6, see link for more. Other meetups coming up this week include Philadelphia, Austin, Istanbul, Canberra, Budapest, and Warsaw. 3: If you haven’t already, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest - voting closes Sunday, October 6. 4: And if you’re an ACX veteran, you might remember the winner of the very first book review contest - Lars Doucet’s review of Progress And Poverty, the book on Georgism. Since then, Lars has gone on to start a Georgism-inspired land valuation company, Valuebase, which has gotten investment from Sam Altman, Nat Friedman, and others. Now they’re recruiting paid interns, including: Technical interns: Ideal candidates have experience in programming, data science, machine learning, or AI, and are eager to work on real-world problems that scale across millions of properties.
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
It purports to be a “memoir” but struggles to resist turning into a lecture on lots of interesting facts about medicine - which is also what living with my father is like, so good job memoiring, I guess. Whoever chooses this for the next book review contest will win automatically (not really).
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See the post for details. And remember there’s a feedback form for meetup-goers.
Inline links: the post, feedback form
2: Reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is coming up on May 12.
Inline links: Everything-Except-Book Review Contest
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: ACX meetups this week in Istanbul, Belfast, Copenhagen, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Rome, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and LA. See the post for details.
Inline links: the post
3: New subscribers-only post, With This Character’s Death, The Thread Of Prophecy Is Severed, discussing how Pope Francis’ passing obsoletes a 500-year-old apocalyptic prophecy (or not).
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
2: New subscribers-only post, Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book. "AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great [children’s birthday presents]"
Inline links: Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book
A couple of years ago Scott asked, Why Do I Suck?. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good’? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts:
Inline links: Why Do I Suck?
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021 Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, writes: A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX. Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, writes: I would definitely agree that the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic. And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – this one: Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, your commenting community remains excellent, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow. The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In Why Do I Suck? Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror? My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in Why Do I Suck? – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX. Setting Out the Case for Decline There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist? It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not). To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021. In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician). The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’ for Scott’s writing happens much earlier than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of The Control Group is Out of Control (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either The Toxoplasmosa of Rage or Untitled – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
Inline links: writes, writes, this one, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!04Ny!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ab1e15-6e36-4500-8980-ad652af543c6_745x421.png, The Control Group is Out of Control, Toxoplasmosa of Rage, Untitled
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Meetups this week include Ankara, Bangalore, Dallas, DC, Delhi, Denver, Hyderabad, Istanbul, LA, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco, Zagreb; see the meetup post for more information.. And late additions Aachen, Lviv, and Malaga have been added to the list for October.
Inline links: the meetup post
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Meetups this week include Auckland, Hamburg, Houston, Lviv, Oxford, and Warsaw - see the meetup post for more information.
Inline links: the meetup post
3: All Non-Book Review finalists and honorable mentions (list at #3 here) should have gotten an email asking you to send me your bios for the announcement post. But I have only gotten 6/20 responses. If you didn’t get it, check your spam folder for scott@slatestarcodex.com. If you still didn’t get it, email me. If I don’t answer, DM me on Substack or Twitter.
Inline links: list at #3 here
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:
1: I experimented with a paywall on the My Antichrist Lecture post. I’ve decided not to keep using paywalls and to continue having paid posts be invisible to nonsubscribers. As a side effect of the switch back, the Antichrist post disappeared for nonsubscribers. You can read an archived copy here.
Inline links: My Antichrist Lecture, here
Backlinks
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