Astral Codex Ten

Oxford

4 min read

Oxford

Article

Oxford is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 18, 2021 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them”; “admissions at Oxford/Cambridge”; “Oxford accepts about 20%“. It most often appears alongside effective altruism, Harvard, Jews.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: August 18, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2024

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.

Links For August
August 18, 2021 · Original source
6: Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them; at some point, this got transformed into terrible maps that serve as a parable against…overfitting, maybe?…I don’t even know…definitely a parable against something. “As a man, you are tentatively okay with your hands being touched by your mother, father, sister, or brother. You actually quite like your hands being touched by your uncle. You are implacably opposed to your hands being touched by your aunt.” And so on.
Inline links: transformed into terrible maps
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
Britain is a good example; not because it's the most illustrative, but just because it's the only country with whose popular culture the average American might be expected to be somewhat familiar. And it's a similar story, old moneyed elite getting kicked down by a new and supposedly-more-meritocratic elite. The process was perhaps a bit slower and a bit less complete (e.g. the new Prime Minister might be an Indian but he still went to Winchester). Among the many trends explaining this, I don't think admissions at Oxford/Cambridge are really close to the top, nor even admissions at Eton etc.
I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
According to the popular caricature, slave morality is about being nice and master morality is about being mean. But that’s not quite it. The overflowing life Nietzsche praises also encompasses ‘kindness and love, the most curative herbs and agents in human intercourse,’ and ‘good nature, friendliness, and courtesy of the heart.’ The real difference is that behind its meekness, slave morality is powered entirely by resentment: the secret, poisonous delight in being weak, being the saintly victim, feasting on the black slime of your own self-regard. According to some Oxford textbook that’s the first result that when you Google the words ‘nietzsche resentment,’ and which I’ll take as representative of the field, ‘Nietzsche is against resentment because it is an emotion of the weak that the strong and powerful do not and cannot feel.’ Not true! He’s very clear that the strong can feel resentment, but for them ‘resentment is a superfluous feeling, a feeling to remain master of, which is almost a proof of riches.’ It’s the other way round; Nietzsche has disdain for the weak because they have been overwhelmed by resentment…Nietzsche might have been weak, but he refused the comforts of resentment. His entire philosophy is a image of what it would look like to really live without those comforts.