Substack
Article
Substack is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 53 times across 53 issues between August 30, 2020 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Substack has committed to do everything they can to help keep that community alive”; ""As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here.""; “thanks for following me to Substack”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 53
- Issue count: 53
- First seen: August 30, 2020
- Last seen: March 03, 2026
Appears In
- You’re Probably Wondering Why I’ve Called You Here Today
- Still Alive
- Logistics
- Open Thread 157
- Book Review Contest Final Rules
- Open Thread 161
- Adding My Data Point To The Discussion Of Substack Advances
- Your Book Review: Order Without Law
- Open Thread 169
- Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
- Open Thread 171
- Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post
- Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
- Highlights From The Comments On Ivermectin
- Open Thread 201
- Predictions For 2022
- Why Do I Suck?
- ACX Grants ++: The First Half
- Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog’s Layout To Substack’s?
- Open Thread 228
- Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
- Universe-Hopping Through Substack
- Open Thread 245
- Links For October
- 22
- Open Thread 249
- 2023 Subscription Drive + Free Unlocked Posts
- Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
- Every Flashing Element On Your Site Alienates And Enrages Users
- Open Thread 283
- Bad Definitions Of “Democracy” And “Accountability” Shade Into Totalitarianism
- Bride Of Bay Area House Party
- What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
- Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
- How Are The Gay Younger Brothers Doing?
- Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
- Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts
- Open Thread 317
- Open Thread 322
- Open Thread 330
- Links for May 2024
- Open Thread 344
- Open Thread 371.5
- The Colors Of Her Coat
- Links For April 2025
- Links For July 2025
- Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
- Open Thread 402
- Open Thread 404
- Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Links For December 2025
- Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
- Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
Related Pages
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- Trump (14 shared issues)
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- Twitter (14 shared issues)
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- ACX (11 shared issues)
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- US (10 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (9 shared issues)
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- COVID (9 shared issues)
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- Google (9 shared issues)
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- New York Times (9 shared issues)
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- Biden (8 shared issues)
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- China (8 shared issues)
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- facebook (8 shared issues)
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- Matt Yglesias (8 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.
And finally, the highlight of my last blog was its loyal and active readership, who constantly corrected my errors, resolved my lingering questions, and inspired most of "my" best ideas. Substack has committed to do everything they can to help keep that community alive. I commit to doing everything I can to keep that community alive. So take a look around, and feel free to comment here, the subreddit, the Discord, or the vintage-style bulletin board.
As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to fix it. But as Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insufferable about it. If it doesn't, I can at least have a fun conversation with Alex Tabarrok about where our theories went wrong. Since I'm no longer protecting my anonymity, I can advertise it here - Lorien Psychiatry - though I'm not currently accepting blog readers as patients, sorry.
Inline links: cost disease, Lorien Psychiatry
So here goes. With malice towards none, with charity towards all, with firmness in the ṛta as reflective equilibrium gives us to see the ṛta, let us restart our mutual explorations, begin anew the joyful reduction of uncertainty wherever it may lead us.
Inline links: ṛta
Substack
First, thanks for following me to Substack.
I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings.
1. Thanks to everyone who expressed concerns about aspects of the comment system. Substack says they're interested in helping. I've made the first comment to this thread a list of comment-related concerns Substack already knows about. If you have another one not on the list, post it as a reply to that comment thread. If you see one you like, heart it (even though removing hearts is one of the things on my list). That way we'll get a list of everyone's concerns in order of concernedness, and I can send it to the Substack team.
Inline links: the first comment to this thread
I previously said to send me entries in .txt format with hand-written HTML. If you've already done that, you're fine and don't need to change. If you're submitting a new entry, you can either do that or send me a normal Word/Google document type thing - I think Substack's interface should be able to handle it.
1: On my predictions thread, I included a prediction that expert consensus would be that the US had the highest unofficial coronavirus death toll of any country. I graded it true. Commenters made a strong case that I was wrong, and it should have been India. A couple of studies (see eg here) suggest seropositivity numbers of 20%+. This is pretty similar to the US’ percentage, but India has three times as many people. Among known cases, India’s case fatality rate is half the US’; if the same pattern holds among missed cases, India probably has 1.5x the US’ death toll (it would be better to use excess mortality numbers, but I can’t find this). This would mean the official Johns Hopkins numbers for the India:US case ratio are off by a factor of four, and probably the same is true for lots of other Third World countries. I’m adding this to my Mistakes Page.
2: Comment of the week is TD describing the animal welfare precautions researchers follow when doing mouse research.
Inline links: the animal welfare precautions
5: Substack still claims to be working on fixing some of the comment problems on their end, though I don’t have an ETA or progress reports to give you. While you’re waiting, ACX reader Pycea has created a browser extension which fixes some remaining issues with the comments section here, including auto-expanding everything, highlighting new comments, hiding hearts, and several other things. Available for Firefox and Chrome, with some partial fixes for Safari available here. Thanks, Pycea!
Inline links: a browser extension, here
From The Hypothesis: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well. It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other writers doing the same) when really the big money comes from Substack paying a pre-selected group money directly. Other people have said it's Substack exercising editorial policy to attract a certain type of person to their site, usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic. I'm one of the writers Substack paid, which gives me some extra information on how this went down. Here's a stylized interpretation of the email conversation that got it started: SUBSTACK: You should join our new blogging thing! ME: No. SUBSTACK: It's really good! ME: No. SUBSTACK: You can make lots of money! ME: No. SUBSTACK: Like, X amount of money (where X is very large, much larger than I would have thought possible). ME: No I can't, you're lying. SUBSTACK: No, we're serious, we've gotten good at making these kinds of predictions, and we really think you can make X. ME: I wasn't born yesterday and I refuse to believe you. SUBSTACK: Okay, we'll put our money where our mouth is. We're so sure you can make X that we'll sign a contract promising to give you an advance of Y% of X (where Y% of X is still a very very large number) your first year, in exchange for Y% of your subscription revenues (but not all, because then people who want to support you would have no incentive to subscribe). After the first year, you’ll go back to our normal payment scheme, and if it’s not as much as you want, you can quit. ME: Give me a second to talk to some smart people to figure out how you could be scamming me...huh, none of them can think of a way this could be a scam. Fine, I'll join. That's the shot. The chaser is - as I write this, my organic subscriber-generated revenue is very slightly more than X. I lost money by taking the deal! This is in no way a complaint - I'm making much more than I thought possible, much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles, it would be ridiculous to complain, and Substack deserves the extra money for the work they put in overcoming my skepticism. Matt Yglesias, another writer who took the same deal, says the same thing. He says that if he hadn't taken Substack's advance, he’d be making $775,000, but as it is, he'll only keep $380,000 this year. Again, these are all huge numbers, Yglesias has no right to complain, and AFAIK he isn't complaining. But it suggests that I'm not a one-off. I can imagine Yglesias having the same conversation with Substack management. They say "You could make more than $250K!" Yglesias says "Haha no you're lying". They say "We're so sure of this that we'll offer you a fixed payment of that much plus a little extra your first year." Then Yglesias says yes and ends up making even more, and Substack goes on to offer the same terms to lots of other people including me.
Inline links: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well, says the same thing
[update: Yglesias confirms this is what happened, Taibbi says that “everyone he knows” would have made more money not taking the advance] At least for Yglesias and me, I don't see any reason to attribute sinister motives to Substack. We didn't believe Substack's estimates of how much money we could make. They made their projections more credible and skin-in-the-game-y by offering an advance. We took it, and they increased their market share plus made a lot of money. Usually if a for-profit company uses a strategy, and it ends with them increasing their market share and making a lot of money, it's safe to assume that was what they were going for. I don't know anyone's stories except Yglesias' and my own, so maybe they're doing something else with other people. But there's no particular evidence to make me think that; the two of us seem like pretty typical cases, and you can see why Substack would stick with the strategy.
Inline links: Yglesias confirms this is what happened, says that
[edit: some people suggest I mention I had a blog with tens of thousands of readers, built up over a ten-year period, before I joined Substack. My experience will not generalize and most people won’t make lots of money Substacking.]
[This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack’s, so please don’t hold it against this entry. Oh, and I promise not all of them are this long. - SA]
Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.
Inline links: 1
They almost never ask for money, and lawyers only get involved in the most exceptional circumstances (the author found two instances of that happening). When someone does need to pay a debt, he does so in kind: “Should your goat happen to eat your neighbor’s tomatoes, the neighborly thing for you to do would be to help replant the tomatoes; a transfer of money would be too cold and too impersonal.”2 Ranchers do keep rough mental account of debits and credits, but they allow these to be settled long term and over multiple fronts. A debt of “he refused to help with our mutual fence” might be paid with “but he did look after my place while I was on holiday”.
Inline links: 2
1: I've updated my Mistakes page with some corrections to my most recent posts. In particular, among my Trump predictions, one that I graded right should have been wrong, and another that I graded right should have been indeterminate. On the Global Economic History post, I blamed the book for falsely saying that Italy had a higher GDP than Great Britain, but that was true ten years ago when the book was written. There were also various smaller errors.
Inline links: my Mistakes page
2: Usually with this kind of thing I write stuff, and then if commenters point out problems I edit them as they appear. This works less well on Substack where some people are reading by email. Keep in mind that if you read the email version of posts, it may not be as accurate as possible or include all the changes I made. Also keep in mind that if you read the web version of posts, I've probably corrected a bunch of things before you've gotten to it, so although it's very accurate about the world, it's not accurate about how stupid I am - the post probably had lots of mistakes before commenters pointed them out to me.
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. This year I’m really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021.
Inline links: make predictions, score them
BLOG 86. ACX is earning more money than it is right now: 70% 87. [redacted]: 10% 88. [redacted]: 50% 89. [redacted]: 20% 90. There is another article primarily about SSC/ACX/me in a major news source: 10% 91. I subscribe to at least 5 new Substacks (so total of 8): 20% 92. I've read and reviewed How Asia Works: 90% 93. I've read and reviewed Nixonland: 70% 94. I've read and reviewed Scout Mindset: 60% 95. I've read and reviewed at least two more dictator books: 50% 96. I've started and am at least 25% of the way through the formal editing process for Unsong: 30% 97. Unsong is published: 10% 98. I've written at least five chapters of some non-Unsong book I hope to publish: 40% 99. [redacted] wins the book review contest: 60% 100. I run an ACX reader survey: 50% 101. I run a normal ACX survey (must start, but not necessarily finish, before end of year): 90% 102. By end of year, some other post beats NYT commentary for my most popular post: 10% 103. I finish and post the culture wars essay I'm working on: 90% 104. I finish and post the climate change essay I'm working on: 80% 105. I finish and post the CO2 essay I'm working on: 80% 106. I have a queue of fewer than ten extra posts: 70%
1: Comments of the week: EHarding points out some misconceptions about the post-war US economy that I fell victim to. People who didn’t like my Neoliberalism review pointed to RedfordCastle’s comment as the best rebuttal, so check that out for the other side.
Inline links: points out, RedfordCastle’s comment
2: And Jack links to graphs of GDP growth in various world regions , showing that a common pattern is good growth until ~1980, poor growth until ~2002, then good growth until ~2012, then poor growth again. Relevant to the Neoliberalism review because neoliberalism took hold ~1980, and the book was written ~2002, so it would have been tempting to think neoliberalism = poor growth. The post-2002 growth complicates this picture - but what’s a better explanation for this pattern, and where can I learn more about it?
Inline links: graphs of GDP growth in various world regions
2: And Jack links to graphs of GDP growth in various world regions , showing that a common pattern is good growth until ~1980, poor growth until ~2002, then good growth until ~2012, then poor growth again. Relevant to the Neoliberalism review because neoliberalism took hold ~1980, and the book was written ~2002, so it would have been tempting to think neoliberalism = poor growth. The post-2002 growth complicates this picture - but what’s a better explanation for this pattern, and where can I learn more about it? 3: The Substack team noticed that lots of good programmers hang out here, and asked me to signal-boost that they’re hiring full stack engineers and various other technical and non-technical jobs. Please work for them so they can add lots of new features I can benefit from.
Inline links: graphs of GDP growth in various world regions, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gYHv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb16d326-850a-40e3-8e2f-00193f04bcea_1658x1023.png, full stack engineers, technical and non-technical jobs
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog.
I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful.
Some of the protests were more socialist and anarchist than others, but none were successfully captured by establishment strains of Marxism or existing movements. Many successfully combined conservative and liberal elements. Gurri calls them nihilists. They believed that the existing order was entirely rotten, that everyone involved was corrupt and irredeemable, and that some sort of apocalyptic transformation was needed. All existing institutions were illegitimate, everyone needed to be kicked out, that kind of thing. But so few specifics that socialists and reactionaries could march under the same banner, with no need to agree on anything besides "not this". (source) Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called Time For Outrage!
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MoII!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea966da7-21e3-4b5b-8118-7e1d40536ffe_532x527.png, source
(source) Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called Time For Outrage!
Inline links: source
Gurri calls our current government a kind of "zombie democracy". The institutions of the 20th century - legislatures, universities, newspapers - continue to exist. But they are hollow shells, stripped of all legitimacy. Nobody likes or trusts them. They lurch forward, mimicking the motions they took in life, but no longer able to change or make plans or accomplish new things. Not original, but I can’t find the source. There is no longer a role for leaders qua leaders; they would attain office, fail to solve everything immediately, and get torn to pieces. To adapt, leaders have become “protesters-in-chief”. Gurri says that Obama's presidential speeches took an unprecedented turn from "here is why America is great" to "I stand beside you in your conclusion that everything sucks and in your desire to change it". Obama marched with protesters and validated their anger. In the afterword for the second edition, Gurri holds up Trump as a different sort of protester-in-chief, somebody whose very existence sends a message of "I hate the elites and everything they stand for", and who consequently gets a pass on not having solved all problems yet. These leaders portray themselves as outsiders, just as angry and oppositional as any blogger or Occupy denizen or Tea Party sign-waver, but equally powerless in the face of the true elites, who are vague and formless and everywhere and not up for re-election (maybe this is linked to increasing discussion of the Deep State?).
Thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know.
Inline links: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Alexandros Marinos is the most thoughtful and dedicated ivermectin proponent I know of. He’s been thinking a lot about my post, so far without any clear conclusions, but I’ve enjoyed reading his process, which has also led to helpful explainers like this one: A few points of his I want to discuss in more depth:
Inline links: Alexandros Marinos, his process, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vWYg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e91b866-67db-4705-b6d1-1c74cb9ba991_1115x843.jpeg
A few points of his I want to discuss in more depth:
1: A few months ago, I wrote about how I tracked my performance on word games over different carbon dioxide levels, and found they didn’t matter. Some people offered to replicate my work in different ways, and the first to come back with their findings is Steven Kaye, who has 88 days of chess-playing data. He also mostly finds it doesn’t matter, though some ways of slicing the data might suggest a weak trend. There are still people who seem really into CO2 effects, so I encourage more people to find their own ways of experimenting on this.
Inline links: I wrote about, Steven Kaye
2: Some good discussion on my Pascalian Medicine post, see especially David Chapman’s tweets and Jay Daigle’s blog. But I do feel like some the responses flirt with assuming everything has the most convenient possible value to fit a morality tale. Suppose someone you love gets COVID, and you have the option to either recommend or disrecommend that they take a cocktail of melatonin (a harmless sleep supplement, I take it every night, eight unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID), curcumin (a harmless-when-sourced-correctly spice, six unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID) and Vitamin D (a harmless vitamin, twelve unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID). What do you do, here, in the real world? I’m honestly not sure, and I think my discomfort with this question is a lot more interesting than some too-pat fable about The Rationalist Who Thought The Real World Was Exactly Like A Casino.
3: The discussion on ivermectin also continues: ivermectin supporters counterargue against what I said on my last open thread; Shakoist on Substack defends me.
Inline links: counterargue against what I said, Shakoist on Substack defends me
BLOG 77. ACX is making more than $400K: 80% 78. ...more than $500K: 50% 79. ...more than $600K: 30% 80. At least one post gets more than 300 likes: 80% 81. I run another Book Review Contest: 90% 82. I go to at least 6 meetups in 6 different cities: 60% 83. I run a survey or am extremely prepared to run one in January: 80% 84. I finally finish posting the analysis of the remaining birth order results: 60% 85. I run another ACX Grants round with at least $100,000 moved: 70% 86. I add at least two more dictators to the Book Club: 80% 87. I’m still the top-ranked blog in Substack’s “Science” category: 70%
My commenters were very nice about it. They didn’t use those exact words. It was more like “I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don’t you write articles like that any more?” Or “Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack? It feels like there was something in your old articles that isn’t there now.” There was a lot of similar discussion on this one year retrospective subreddit thread.
Inline links: this one year retrospective subreddit thread
The evidence that I’ve gotten worse at blogging is mixed. I asked about it on a reader survey six months ago, and got this: Most people think my quality is about the same, although the minority who do see a difference mostly lean towards “worse”.
Most people think my quality is about the same, although the minority who do see a difference mostly lean towards “worse”.
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
When you’re done with these, you can now find the second half of the list here.
Inline links: here
#6: System Dynamics Simulator I'm Oleksandr Nikitin, and I want to build a system dynamics simulator. Enable independent researchers to simulate, forecast, and visualize metabolic pathways, epidemic spread, mass transit, ecology, macroeconomics, etc. Show, don't tell. Without code. Think Airtable+Vensim+Roam+Kumu, integrated and working offline. Why offline? Why simulate? Why a new tool? Complex systems must be simulated. You miss emergent phenomena if you analyze parts separately or simplify the details. Offline sets you free from distractions and groupthink. Free to make your own breakthroughs. Take your references, notes and data with you, dive deep, then return with the verified, reproducible, interactive model. Research can take years. Tools should outlast devices and app stores. And it must be fast. Isn’t it insane for a productivity tool to make you wait? I spent years on prototypes and algorithms, tested in companies since 2013, and now I want to put these experiments together. Not as a startup. As a tool accessible to everyone. The plan: create a community of curious inquisitive makers, empower them with a small fast and robust core app, iterate and grow together, augment the human intelligence even more, and understand the world. I seek funding to focus on this project full-time, for two years. To launch and to guide people to the finished research. Sounds inspiring? Worth the money? Want more details? Ping me at oleksandr@tvori.info. Also see https://cortex.substack.com/
This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought. They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and:
Inline links: asked my readers what they thought
This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought. They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and: …yep, they preferred the SSC layout
Inline links: asked my readers what they thought, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gNbU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e48a01e-724e-417c-b231-daa0af79a0cd_759x341.png
…yep, they preferred the SSC layout
1: Correction: the graph on “Against ‘There Are Two X-Wing Parties’” was weird, see this comment for why. I’ve edited the graph to include a link to the comment in the caption, but am stopping short of removing it or listing it as a Mistake for now.
Inline links: Against ‘There Are Two X-Wing Parties, this comment
2: Your comments on Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme were mostly terrible, and as promised I deleted all comments of the form “How can you even ask that question when the other party has done X, which is far crazier than anything my party has done?” - for the record, two of those comments were by Democrats and two by Republicans. But I will grudgingly tolerate Crimson Wool’s comment, which links a poll that “asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "‘how dumb and goddamn crazy are you?’"
Inline links: Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme, Crimson Wool’s comment
3: Gary Marcus has responded to Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling on his own Substack: Does AI Really Need A Paradigm Shift. He is unhappy that I described him as thinking GPT’s performance “proves” its paradigm is doomed, whereas he only thinks it provides “evidence” for this. I agree that outside of math it’s generally not worth talking about “proving” things and I was using it colloquially as “provides such strong evidence that someone asserts it is true without any caveats or qualifiers”; I usually think this usage is fine but have edited it in this case since he feels misrepresented. He also gives probability estimates for some of the same statements I did - he thinks there’s only a 10% chance we can get full AGI without any paradigm shift (compared to my 40%), and only a 20% chance we can get it without something symbol-manipulation-y in particular (compared to my 66%). He also accuses me of unfairly focusing on him, rather than the many other people who agree with him. I am focusing on him because he is the person I am having this discussion with right now. He is the person I am having this discussion with right now partly because he tweeted about me 23 times in the past six days and I figured it was worth responding to him in some way. Still, this is probably a sign that I should stop, which I will do immediately.
1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.
2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain.
Inline links: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
=3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.
RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as “a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you.” This was the first English-language tweet I got from them. I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.
Inline links: RandomTweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hOLr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ac8879c-102b-4fb3-ac8f-6081e68c1555_558x239.png, Matt Yglesias’, Freddie de Boer’s, Stuart Ritchie’s
This was the first English-language tweet I got from them. I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.
I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.
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:
1: Neil Thanedar of LabDoor doesn’t agree with the way I characterized his company on my post on supplements and has a response up here. I have edited the post slightly to be more noncommittal until I can explain my reasoning - which I hope to do on a Highlights From The Comments post eventually.
Inline links: my post on supplements, a response up here
2: Edwin Chen has surveyed some people on whether the Imagen images on my AI art post match the prompts, and most people believe that 1-2 do, rather than the 3 I claimed. Given that, I am retracting my claim to have won the bet - which I guess is still on - and adding this to my Mistakes page. Sorry to Vitor and others. I will revisit this sometime in or before 2025, I guess!
Inline links: surveyed some people, my Mistakes page
4: RIP Patrick Non-White of Popehat.
Inline links: RIP Patrick Non-White of Popehat
8: What explains this? (h/t @WaltHickey) 9: How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson. Good but hard to summarize. The news used to be staid, neutral, and formulaic, Jon Stewart discovered that a news show could get more viewers by pitching itself as the antidote to the news rather than the news itself, and others (like Tucker Carlson) took that insight in unexpected directions. Also offers an unexpected possible explanation for polarization: there were some regulations and business incentives pushing the news in the direction of being boring until about 1990, but not so much afterwards.
Inline links: @WaltHickey, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fQME!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F11cd7874-0a99-4afb-86ea-b822510e8f54_861x1200.jpeg, How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson
9: How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson. Good but hard to summarize. The news used to be staid, neutral, and formulaic, Jon Stewart discovered that a news show could get more viewers by pitching itself as the antidote to the news rather than the news itself, and others (like Tucker Carlson) took that insight in unexpected directions. Also offers an unexpected possible explanation for polarization: there were some regulations and business incentives pushing the news in the direction of being boring until about 1990, but not so much afterwards.
Inline links: How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson
Prediction markets say . . . kind of! Sources: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen The lowest forecaster is higher than the highest pollster! Taking 538 as an example, forecasters range from 5 pp higher (Manifold) to 17 pp higher (PredictIt). Tournaments and real-money markets tend to give higher numbers than play-money sites. I would go with 47% on this one, based on the convergence between GJO, CSPI, and Polymarket.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MZAY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66972015-6fa4-4555-b2f6-3c7ee5b72b7a_1338x1632.png, Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen
Sources: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen The lowest forecaster is higher than the highest pollster! Taking 538 as an example, forecasters range from 5 pp higher (Manifold) to 17 pp higher (PredictIt). Tournaments and real-money markets tend to give higher numbers than play-money sites. I would go with 47% on this one, based on the convergence between GJO, CSPI, and Polymarket.
Sources: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen The lowest forecaster is higher than the highest pollster! Taking 538 as an example, forecasters range from 5 pp higher (Manifold) to 17 pp higher (PredictIt). Tournaments and real-money markets tend to give higher numbers than play-money sites. I would go with 47% on this one, based on the convergence between GJO, CSPI, and Polymarket. CFTC vs. PredictIt (and everyone else), Part II The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is the US agency regulating prediction markets. In August, they told PredictIt (the biggest political prediction market) to shut down, effective in February. Now a motley group of stakeholders are suing the CFTC for a stay of execution. Plaintiffs include: 2 professors using the site as “a source of data for research”
Inline links: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen, they told PredictIt
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 other news:
1: In the comments of Moderation Is Different From Censorship, some people asked if my moderation policy here was hypocritical. I answered that I would be happy to implement some kind of see-all-banned-posters policy here if it were possible, but I’m limited to Substack’s features, and that means making a blanket decision about whether everyone should see a certain person or not.
Inline links: Moderation Is Different From Censorship, I answered
2: Related - the following people have been banned (links go to representative bad comment): Jason MacGuire, Timothy Buckmeister II, Les_Bergers_Des_Photons, PEG, Ludex, Bernard Gress, Anti-Homo-Genius, Embrace Christ, LutherFischerKennedyKaczynski, Thad, Bobby Bigdick, Lazarus (I assume he’ll return), Bokra, …, and Ian Duncan. The following people have received new warnings: Angus, G Retriever, Descriptor, Impassionata, Chaz Gibson, Jay Rollins, Machine Interface, Machine Interface again, IICS, Essex, KillerBee, Kamran, Calion, Cosimo Giusti. Thanks to everyone who reports comments using the “Report Comment” button hidden in the (…) sign below each comment.
Inline links: Jason MacGuire, Timothy Buckmeister II, Les_Bergers_Des_Photons, PEG, Ludex, Bernard Gress, Anti-Homo-Genius, Embrace Christ, LutherFischerKennedyKaczynski, Thad, Bobby Bigdick, Lazarus, Bokra, …, Ian Duncan, Angus, G Retriever, Descriptor, Impassionata, Chaz Gibson, Jay Rollins, Machine Interface, Machine Interface again, IICS, Essex, KillerBee, Kamran, Calion, Cosimo Giusti
The warm glow of supporting the blog. I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. But the graph of paid subscribers over time looks like this: That is, thousands of people bought subscriptions when I started the blog in January 2021, several hundred expired after a year in January 2022, and I expect several hundred more to expire this January. I make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog, but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% per year indefinitely. So even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I figure I’ll start holding once-a-year subscription drives now instead of waiting until I’m actually needy. Please don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it - again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large. Here’s a sample of some of last year’s subscriber-only posts, which I’ve unlocked for now to pique your interest: It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GXfT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86c66a6c-9ddf-4183-9e2a-d33efc2da144_771x581.png, It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Inline links: It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
If The Media Reported on Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism
But some people have more sophisticated concerns. Philosophy Bear discusses a broader chatbot propaganda apocalypse - I’m basing the rest of this post off the way I think about his argument, which might not be exactly the same as his actual argument - any errors in reasoning here are mine, not his.
Inline links: Philosophy Bear discusses
Bear is a leftie, and thinks about thinks about this through a class-based lens:
Inline links: thinks about this through a class-based lens
From the comments; I can’t resist editing it in here:
Inline links: the comments
A few days ago I needed to look up an obscure point of Jewish law, as you do, and found this Jewish law website: I can’t figure out how to include screenshots of flashing elements here, so I’m just connecting them with arrows. The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of . . . a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.
Inline links: this Jewish law website, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tyGo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bcb3797-0865-42c3-938b-694344b14fda_1490x366.png
I can’t figure out how to include screenshots of flashing elements here, so I’m just connecting them with arrows. The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of . . . a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.
I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey . . . . . . and 88% of people find them at least a little annoying! 16% of people go all the way, and say they wouldn’t use a website that has them!
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 the comments of the Flashing Element post, several people complained that ACX has a subscribe popup. This is unintentional, and I’ve tried to get rid of it by checking all the relevant boxes on my dashboard. If you can still see it, please comment here to report it as a bug to Substack.
Inline links: Flashing Element post, comment here
2: Last Thursday I wrote about a paper on the illusion of moral decline. Thanks to Filippo for pointing out that one of the authors has a Substack where he’s explained the paper and countered some arguments against it. I’m embarrassed that he addressed my major criticism (that the paper is mostly about kindness-and-honesty, whereas other people interpret “morality” more broadly to include things like self-control) in a section called “Note To Pedants”, where he agrees this is true but says “morality” rolls off the tongue better.
When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”. Here it’s painfully obvious that “accountability” is opposed to people retaining ownership of their own output, to them working for themselves instead of a megacorporation, and to them keeping control of their own lives. A society where every writer has “accountability” is totalitarian - or, if you don’t like that word for something that might lock in merely corporate rather than government control, at least it would lack a flourishing private sphere.
Inline links: had no “accountability”
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3]
Now that you think of it, you are in the mood for something to drink, so you head to the kitchen. An Asian guy seems to be handling the catering. He looks familiar. He notices you staring at him and helpfully supplies his name, which you promptly forget, and the information that last time you spoke to him he’d been talking about his alternate-history-based fusion restaurant. You ask him how it’s going.
Inline links: last time you spoke to him
“I guess that makes sense,” you say. “I couldn’t stand him, but I just unsubscribed from his Substack and forgot about it. Not much you can do beyond that.”
Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.
Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t); I’ve also studied BDSM and lactation fetishes, and Aella has done even more fetish-ology work. In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field?
Inline links: been debating, involved, mostly don’t, BDSM, lactation fetishes, even more fetish-ology work
Foot fetish: On the somatosensory cortex, the area representing the feet is right next to the area representing the genitalia. If the genome includes an “address” for the genitalia, plus the instructions “have sexual urges towards this”, then getting the address slightly wrong will land you in the feet. A reasonable next question would be “what’s on the other side of the genitalia, and do people also have fetishes about that one?” The answer is “the somatosensory cortex is a line with the genitalia at the far end, because God is merciful and didn’t want there to be a second thing like foot fetishes.” (source for cortex image)
1st: The Educated Mind, reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD, a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning (losttools.substack.com).
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature.
Lying for Money, reviewed by Kuiper. He's a video game scriptwriter who just launched a Substack. He also scripwrites edutainment YouTube videos for an audience of millions. (You can contact him if you need his expertise.)
In 2018, scientists announced tentative confirmation: antibodies to a male protein called NLGN4Y seemed more common in the mothers of gay sons than in men, non-mothers, and mothers of straight people. It seemed like the FBOE was ready to coast into the pantheon of accepted scientific ideas.
Inline links: scientists announced, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!o65a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed12cadc-ee66-4d6e-8962-d2ba6a6e2bce_779x857.png
It seemed like the FBOE was ready to coast into the pantheon of accepted scientific ideas.
It seemed like the FBOE was ready to coast into the pantheon of accepted scientific ideas. But three more recent studies have complicated things, starting with: Frisch, Hviid, And 2,000,000 Danes Not actually that recent (2006), but still relevant. Denmark legalized gay marriage in 1989 and keeps great records. So a sufficiently bold scientist could get data on everybody in Denmark, use birth certificates to figure their family structure, use marriage certificates (gay vs. straight) to figure out their sexual orientation, and study the determinants of homosexuality with a sample hundreds of times bigger than anyone had done before. Frisch and Hviid tried this and discovered many interesting things2, but not a clear fraternal birth order effect. They argued that previous studies of the FBOE hypothesis had used pretty atypical gays - often pedophiles or people in therapy, because these were the populations hanging around scientists and easy to organize into a sample to study. Gays who get gay-married is also a selected population, but probably a more typical one, and studying them showed nothing. Ray Blanchard, leading proponent of FBOE, wrote a comment in response suggesting that maybe an alternative method did end up finding a small but real difference. But Frisch and Hviid wrote a counter-counter-response saying even this small difference was artifactual and should be ignored. So it seems that the largest, best study failed to find the FBOE. But then how come so many previous studies did find it? Vilsmeier et al: Statistics Is Hard Vilsmeier, Kossmeier, Voracek, and Tran have opinions on this. The paper is 25,000 words of very dense statistical reasoning; I often found myself struggling to read a paragraph, only to eventually realize it was saying something obvious in as many long words as possible. But in the end I see it as making a few main points: Blanchard and Bogaert weren’t justified in saying that older brothers but not older sisters increased chance of homosexuality. In their original paper, they found that the coefficient on older brothers was significant, and that on older sisters wasn’t. But the difference between “significant” and “nonsignificant” is not itself statistically significant. So we need to re-evaluate whether the theory should actually apply to brothers, brothers and sisters, or neither. And in fact their statistics can’t really do that! Birth order statistics are hard: you want to isolate an effect (birth order) from a separate but related effect (family size). For example, you might guess that gays would have fewer siblings overall than straights (because their parents had some gay genes, and so weren’t as committed to the heterosexual-sex-for-reproduction thing). So if the FBOE is true, there will be one effect giving gays fewer siblings, plus a contrary effect giving gays more siblings. In theory you can separate these out by looking at birth order and older brothers vs. sisters and then controlling for family size. In practice, B&B slightly bungled this, and it’s impossible to tell from any of their statistics if gays have more older brothers, older sisters, or just older siblings in general. Read “Part i. current approaches do not quantify the theoretical estimand of interest: insights from probability calculus” for the details. Having noticed these flaws, they meta-meta-analyze all previous meta-analyses on this subject with much more advanced and accurate statistical tools, and find: Depending on which specific study set is interpreted, the odds for observing an older brother among the set of all older siblings reported by homosexual participants (male or female) were between 7% (for the Women full set) and 17% (for the 31 samples included in Blanchard 2018a) greater than those same odds for the heterosexual participants. However, the 95% CIs suggest that these estimates were compatible with a 6% decrease as well as with a 35% increase (i.e., the respective lower and upper bounds of the 95% CI of the summary estimate for the six probability samples included in Blanchard 2018a) for these odds. In other words, while their point estimate somewhat supported the hypothesis, confidence intervals included zero3. Note that this is just saying there is a small to zero effect for “observing an older brother among the set of all older siblings”. It doesn’t argue against versions of the FBOE that say the main difference between gays and straights is more older siblings in general (although AFAIK nobody has ever supported this hypothesis). Fourth, they found some evidence of publication bias: …suggesting that even the nonsignificant effect they found might have just been from small studies and a file drawer effect. So they’re claiming FBOE doesn’t exist, right? Actually, their paper is so long and dense I can’t figure out exactly what they’re claiming. It sort of looks like they think that, but when someone says so, they protest that: Blanchard & Skorska (2022) completely misconstrued our work by claiming that we wrote there is no evidence for the FBOE in men or women. This is not what we claim, neither in the present study, nor in the preprint. So what are they claiming? I’m not sure, but notice that their specification of the effect only demonstrates that older brothers do not cause homosexuality too much more than older sisters. If both types of older sibling caused homosexuality, that would match their findings, even if brothers caused it slightly more. And in fact, hot on their heels, a new study found exactly that! Ablaza, Kabatek, Perales, And 9,000,000 Dutch People To The Rescue Remember how Frisch and Hviid managed to look at two million Danes? Well, the Dutch also have gay marriage and keep really good records. Ablaza, Kabatek, and Perales were able to obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them. They do more advanced statistics than any of their predecessors and are able to report basically every parameter of interest with high confidence4. They find: On average, individuals who did not enter a same-sex union have 2.36 siblings. This number is split evenly between younger (μ=1.19) and older (μ=1.17) siblings. The average sibling sex ratio—that is, the number of brothers over the number of sisters—is 1.04 for both younger and older siblings. In contrast, individuals who entered a same-sex union have fewer siblings (μ=2.14) and a greater number of older (μ=1.23) than younger (μ=0.91) siblings. Further, the sex ratio of their older siblings is skewed towards brothers (μ=1.18). All of these differences are statistically significant . . . these patterns manifest among both men and women. These effects are potentially large: For example, 0.73% of men who are the youngest of five siblings entered a same sex union, compared to just 0.35% of men who are the eldest of five siblings . . . the share of men with four older brothers entering a same-sex union is 0.96%, more than twice the share among men with four older sisters (0.46%) Because of their advanced regression model, they’re able to tease apart family size effects from birth order and gender effects: Adding one younger sister to an existing sibship is associated with a 13.8% decrease in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 0.87, p < 0.001)5; moving one place down the birth order while keeping the number of younger and older brothers fixed is associated with an 7.9% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.08, p < 0.001); and replacing one older sister by one older brother is associated with a 12.5% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.13, p < 0.001). Replacing one younger sister by one younger brother is associated with a 1.2% increase in the probability of entering a same-sex union (OR = 1.01), but this estimate is not statistically significant (p > 0.1). Also: To illustrate the combined effects of birth order and sibling sex, we use the model to predict and plot the probabilities of entering a same-sex union for individuals in all relevant permutations of two-person sibships (Figure 3). In this example, we focus on two-person sibships because they are the most common sibship type (35% of individuals) and because the corresponding number of permutations is fairly contained (n=8). Among men, the lowest predicted probability (PP) of entering a same-sex union is for those whose only sibling is a younger sister (PP = 0.55%), followed by those with a younger brother (PP = 0.56%), those with an older sister (PP = 0.61%) and, finally, those with an older brother (PP = 0.68%). The ordering is the same among women: those with a younger sister (PP = 0.757%), followed by those with a younger brother (PP = 0.764%), those with an older sister (PP = 0.81%), and those with an older brother (PP = 0.92%). The difference between the lowest and highest predicted probabilities is 0.12 percentage points (23.5%) for men, and 0.16 percentage points (21.2%) for women. How does this correspond to the findings of Frisch & Hviid, Blanchard & Bogaert, and and Vilsmeier et al? I can’t really square it with Frisch & Hviid. Even though the methodologies are similar (one investigating everyone in Denmark, the other everyone in the Netherlands), the first finds approximately no result, and the second a very clear result. But Ablaza et al have both a larger sample and better statistics, and they better match previous studies on the topic, so I’ll be siding with them. On the other hand, this beautifully synthesizes the seemingly-opposed results of Blanchard & Bogaert vs. Vilsmeier et al. The FBOE, rightly understood, is primarily an effect of older siblings in general, not just older brothers. However, older brothers exert a slightly stronger effect than older sisters, for both men and women. Blanchard and Bogaert were right to think something was going on with older siblings and homosexuality, and even right to highlight brothers in particular. But Vilsmeier et al were right to say they were wrong to discount older sisters, and that the “advantage” of older brothers over older sisters was so small they shouldn’t be sure it existed (although this much larger study can say more confidently that it does). What does this mean for the maternal immune system / H-Y antigen / NLGN4Y theory of the effect6? It’s definitely awkward: the classic version of the theory doesn’t predict that older sisters should have any effect, or that siblings should have an effect at all on turning later-born females lesbian. Proponents of the theory are trying to adjust, claiming that maybe women have some kind of related antigen. Blanchard and Lippa have already proposed (though not conducted) the experimental next step: see if women with daughters have higher NLGN4Y levels than women who have never had children at all. I would also feel more comfortable if somebody replicates Bogaert’s 2006 study finding this was definitely biological and it’s not just some boring social effect like guys with more brothers having more positive male role models and so being more likely to get attracted to men. Cremeiux Is Still Skeptical I’d like to end on a note of “so now finally everyone agrees that birth order effects on homosexuality are real”, but Statistics Twitter personality Cremieux Recueil (Twitter, Substack) doesn’t agree. He admits that the Dutch study is the best evidence we have so far, but worries that it’s not good enough: I don’t find these objections too convincing. Yes, gay marriage as an outcome omits most gays, but it’s still a bigger sample size than anyone else, and it seems less likely that married gays systematically differ from unmarried gays in their number of siblings for some reason (which doesn’t apply to married heterosexuals) than that they’re finding the same effect everyone else has found before them. Conclusion The fraternal birth order effect hypothesis has had a tough decade, but things are starting to look up. It’s been forced to abandon some of its key tenets (like an effect on male gays but not on female lesbians) and relax others (like older brothers having more of an effect than older sisters). In the process, its beautiful immunological mechanism has been cast into some doubt. But the core of the idea - that more older siblings = more gay - seems to stand. My predictions (to be evaluated whenever stronger evidence comes in): Sibling birth order effect on homosexuality is real: 85%
Inline links: Frisch and Hviid, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1Gl5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2f468077-e522-449d-88e6-110d79965434_1120x750.png, wrote a comment in response, counter-counter-response, Vilsmeier, Kossmeier, Voracek, and Tran, the difference between “significant” and “nonsignificant” is not itself statistically significant, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2Bkf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75679171-a487-4b71-a6f2-a0f3179546d9_598x600.jpeg, Blanchard & Skorska (2022), obtain and analyze the data from nine million of them, 4, 5, 6, Blanchard and Lippa, Twitter, Substack, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oh7O!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2f346572-af93-421f-a1ca-ba4f2a5fe3f2_586x701.png
I think of this as unearned money and want to give some of it back to the community, hence this grants program. I have a lot of it but not an unlimited amount. At the current rate, I can probably afford another ~4 ACX Grants rounds. When it runs out, I‘ll just be a normal person with normal amounts of money (Substack is great, but not great enough for me to afford this level of donation consistently).
The warm glow of supporting the blog. I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. But the graph of paid subscribers over time looks like this: Even though I gained about 20,000 unpaid subscribers per year, on net I lost about 500 paid subscribers. I asked Substack to remove their usual “please subscribe” popups and “teasers” of subscriber-only posts from ACX. I think this improves reader experience, but the consequence is that people don’t think about subscribing and I keep losing subscribers. I make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog, but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% of subscribers every year indefinitely. So even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I will be holding subscription drives yearly instead of waiting until I’m actually needy. Please don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it - again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large. Last year I wrote fourteen subscriber-only articles: Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero - why do we celebrate someone with weird cell mutations so much more than real scientists?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UKU5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe7a668d5-c116-4acc-ad47-5ef15c3f2bda_776x616.png, Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero
Even though I gained about 20,000 unpaid subscribers per year, on net I lost about 500 paid subscribers. I asked Substack to remove their usual “please subscribe” popups and “teasers” of subscriber-only posts from ACX. I think this improves reader experience, but the consequence is that people don’t think about subscribing and I keep losing subscribers. I make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog, but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% of subscribers every year indefinitely. So even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I will be holding subscription drives yearly instead of waiting until I’m actually needy. Please don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it - again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large. Last year I wrote fourteen subscriber-only articles: Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero - why do we celebrate someone with weird cell mutations so much more than real scientists?
If you need the student / financial hardship discount, and for some reason it doesn’t show up at the button above, you can get it here.
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:
1: A commenter emailed me to complain that, although I said I unbanned him, the unban never went through. I talked to Substack, who confirmed that no unban has ever gone through, oops, sorry. I’ve found one other case and resolved it, but if I told you I was unbanning you and you aren’t unbanned, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I’ll try to fix it.
2: Related: I have heard your many complaints about page/comment loading speed and passed them on to Substack; my contact there said they’re “pretty sure we've got plans to improve this.”
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: The previous attempt to email people their Forecasting Contest score didn’t work. So new plan: here’s a list of everyone’s scores, associated with a hash of their email address: Blind Score Hash 59.5KB ∙ XLSX file Download Download Go to this site and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages on this graphic from the post. Eight people had hash collisions and their scores will be ambiguous; if that’s you, email me if you really want to know. Thanks to Legionnaire for putting this together; I’ll update you when I know if there are any plans for Full Mode.
Go to this site and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages on this graphic from the post. Eight people had hash collisions and their scores will be ambiguous; if that’s you, email me if you really want to know. Thanks to Legionnaire for putting this together; I’ll update you when I know if there are any plans for Full Mode.
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: Many thanks to Substack, who have streamlined some code to make ACX comments load faster. More information - and a link to contact the engineers involved - here.
Inline links: here
4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place. I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory.
Inline links: COVID didn’t happen at all
5: I’ll never tire of analogies putting the US / Europe gap into perspective - for example, did you know that the median black American household earns more ($48,297) than the median UK household (£35,000 = $44,450)? Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country: [EDIT: Here’s a claim that this image might be false]
Inline links: $48,297, £35,000, $44,450, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7B1O!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54bd3301-6320-4b45-ac35-54f5baa507c7_679x334.jpeg, Here’s a claim
[EDIT: Here’s a claim that this image might be false]
Inline links: Here’s a claim
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: Substack asks me to advertise that they’re hiring, and especially looking for software engineers with experience building recommendation systems. You can learn more at their jobs page. I’m always happy to direct more ACX readers to jobs at Substack, since it means I can easily get their attention for features/fixes I want.
Inline links: learn more at their jobs page
3: Comment of the week is Benjamin Jolley on compounding semaglutide. You can read Benjamin’s blog on pharmacy work here.
2: New round of bans. I usually try to link all bans so that people have a chance to critique / learn from them, but Substack seems to have messed this up somehow and made it impossible to link to the relevant comments, I don’t know what happened. Link stubs that should go to bans but don’t are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. You can see if you have any better luck accessing them than I did - otherwise, did you know that the ancient Chinese kept the laws secret, lest people search too hard for loopholes? You’ll learn what the rules are after you’re executed for breaking them.
In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat. Madonna and Child, by Filippino Lippi To us moderns, this seems bizarrely specific. But the Catholic Church had united Europe in a single symbolic language, with lots of rules like "this style is only used for such-and-such a saint”. Within this context, “ultramarine = Virgin Mary’s coat” was a normal piece of symbolic vocabulary.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WcX-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0617aea3-37e1-486b-a1ce-8581be3181af_584x793.png, Filippino Lippi
Madonna and Child, by Filippino Lippi To us moderns, this seems bizarrely specific. But the Catholic Church had united Europe in a single symbolic language, with lots of rules like "this style is only used for such-and-such a saint”. Within this context, “ultramarine = Virgin Mary’s coat” was a normal piece of symbolic vocabulary.
Inline links: Filippino Lippi
In the 19th century, a German man named Christian Gmelin discovered the process of producing synthetic ultramarine. And in the 1960s, French artist Yves Klein came up with a new synthetic ultramarine that he thought was even bluer. This being the 1960s, Klein leveraged his invention into a bunch of entirely blue paintings - literally, he just painted an entire canvas blue and hung it in a gallery - which caused various scandals and counterscandals and discourse. It’s pretty, but is is art? Klein was a provocateur, and I’m no art historian, so don’t let me tell you what he actually meant by his all-blue paintings. But one thing he could have meant was a callback to all the medieval merchants and monks and miners; everyone who died to get a few drops of ultramarine back to Europe so the Virgin’s robes could be perfectly celestially blue. “Look!” say Klein’s paintings. “Now we’re so rich, so blessed, that I can paint an entire canvas with the perfect blue of the heavens. I can use more blue than the total yearly output of medieval Europe, just so a couple of passers-by can frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff.”
This is the main data point that keeps me from 100% believing the “it’s all ketamine” theory. Related: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk.
Inline links: A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk
16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too.
Inline links: Trump Tower, Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel
16: Trump Tower is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, and nominate them to cover this one too. 17: Wikipedia on the beginning of the Horslips, one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands: Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers. 18: I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was bad for alignment, and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, already paying dividends (X): 19: Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, and Against Lyman Stone are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content. 20: New polling on the Middle Ages: 21: More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time: You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, Rising Tide. I especially appreciated Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse.
Inline links: Trump Tower, Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel, the beginning of the Horslips, bad for alignment, already paying dividends (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nPJW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad66b2c0-0180-4fc1-afc1-25de0f0ce40f_533x518.png, Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb, The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone, Against Lyman Stone, New polling on the Middle Ages, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9b_4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3163eca-eaf4-492a-ac68-eadefa169be2_632x419.png, Rising Tide, Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse
2: In the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%. Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican (h/t BobaCalifornian).
Inline links: 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ixAp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe933c32d-56b7-4728-a435-efc1dced7e3a_336x470.png, h/t BobaCalifornian
Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican (h/t BobaCalifornian).
Inline links: h/t BobaCalifornian
3: Chess grandmasters don’t really burn 6000 calories a day during matches.
“Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021
“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:
2: I sent emails October 1 to people who received ACX Grants. The following people haven’t replied and should check their spam folders: Diego E, Lewis W, David Ro, Jacob Ar, Nino O, Nishank B, Alejandro A, Alyssia J, Chetan K, Bryan Da. If you’ve replied and it didn’t reach me for some reason, send me a message on Substack or Twitter. If you haven’t received an email and are not on the list above, you didn’t win, sorry. I’ll post the public announcement once I’m in touch with all winners and have run some final formalities by them. Again, sorry for limited posts as I get some of this finished up.
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:
4: I’m now using my Substack recommendations tab to highlight contest winners’ Substacks. That means I’ve removed all previous recommendations. If that was you, sorry - I still like your Substacks and will link to them when you make posts I like; I just want to make room to promote up-and-coming bloggers.
5: Advertisement: Free in-person AI futures conference in London on November 2 (the organizers told me to call it an “unconference”, but I have never been able to figure out a difference, and refuse to cooperate in the use of this word). See here for more info and RSVP instructions.
Inline links: See here
I’ll assume you’ve already heard the complaints about the economy coming from the media, social media, et cetera. But are we sure there isn’t a meta-vibecession? The vibes about the vibes are bad, but really, the vibes are good? Maybe the media just - - oh god, no, it’s even worse than I thought. The vibes are awful.
- oh god, no, it’s even worse than I thought. The vibes are awful.
- oh god, no, it’s even worse than I thought. The vibes are awful. This is the official measure of vibes, the Index of Consumer Sentiments. Can we trust it? One reason not to trust it is that most of its questions take a form like “do you think things are better than last year?” or “do you think things will be better next year?” These are local and don’t really allow you to compare today vs. 1980. But consumers are terrible at answering these questions in the spirit in which they’re intended; for example, when the economy is bad, “do you think things will be better next year?” reaches a low, even though bad economies are exactly when you would expect next year to be better (through mean reversion). So it’s probably fair to treat this as overall “vibes: good or bad?” Another reason not to trust it is that they changed the survey methodology in 2024, causing multiple trend breaks; instead of adjusting for this, they “smoothed it out” so people wouldn’t notice! This seems irresponsible and I don’t know how they got away with it. Everything after 2024 should arguably be ~5 points higher. But even adding 5 points, things now look pretty grim. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index, which doesn’t have the methodology problem, looks pretty similar: This is a combination of an absolute question (“how are conditions?”) and a relative question (“are they getting worse or better”), but you can disambiguate them here and get similar results. I conclude the vibes are actually bad. There is one anomaly, which is that I remember people complaining about the bad economy and the Boomers and hellworld since well before 2020 (consider the Trump and Sanders campaigns), but the official vibes didn’t crash until COVID. Is my memory faulty? The Economists’ Seemingly Rosy Statistics Here’s real median household income in the US over time (source): People today earn 33% more than they did during the Boomers’ heyday. Might this just be a few billionaires bringing the average up, while the incomes of ordinary people stagnate? No: this is median income. You’re thinking of mean income. The mean can be brought up by a few outliers; the median represents the exact most ordinary member of society. If you insist, here are the same data presented as the share of society making more than a certain threshold in inflation-adjusted dollars (source): Might cost-of-living increases have eaten all of these gains and then some? No: this is real median income, ie adjusted for inflation. Cost-of-living increases are a type of inflation, so those should be priced in. Might this just represent old people doing better, while the young are left behind? No: here are the same data disaggregated by age group (source): Young people’s incomes have increased as fast as everyone else’s. And the youth-specific unemployment rate was near historic lows until last year (some people blame the current uptick on AI, but this is too recent to have caused the vibecession): Here’s an attempt to compare generations directly. We can’t do this as a point-in-time estimate, because late-career old people will always earn more than early-career young people, but we can compare how much people made in inflation-adjusted dollars at the same ages: Just as our previous graphs imply, Millennials and Zoomers earn significantly more than Boomers did at the same age, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. So, the economists conclude, maybe it really is just vibes. We know of other cases where the public believes things are worsening even as they get better: crime rates are the classic example. But most people judge crime rates by what they hear on TV. Vanishing economic opportunity is much more personal. Can people really be wrong about something so close to their own lives? Fine, You’ve Proven The Contradiction We Already Knew About, Get To The Point Where You Solve It. We start by looking at other people’s proposed solutions. (Briefly) Declining Real Wages The term “vibecession” most strictly refers to the period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment was down. During that period, Noah Smith popularized a paper by Darren Grant arguing that this corresponded to a brief decline in real wages, even though stocks and other indicators kept rising: During COVID, the government instituted various relief programs which temporarily gave people lots of money (the spike). This caused some inflation, which temporarily lowered real (ie inflation-adjusted) wages. Then inflation calmed down and real wages started rising again - thus Noah’s post title, “The End Of The Vibecession?” With the benefit of two more years of data, we see that Noah and Darren were right about the trend: Wages never jumped back to the point where they would be if the pandemic had never happened, but they’re back to growing as fast as ever. So this could explain the mini-vibecession of 2023-2024. Still, I claim there is a broader vibecession. Young people felt closed out from opportunities before 2023, and they still feel that way. Since only the 2023-2024 period saw falling real wages, this can’t be the full explanation. The Housing Theory Of Everything John Burn-Murdoch, after examining some of these same data, agrees that wages can’t be the full story. He writes: Are millennials wrong to complain? I fear not. The per capita measure is a beautifully simple rejoinder, but it misses one crucial detail. Wealth accumulation — just like income — matters primarily to millennials today as a means to home ownership, especially as we move into an era of high interest rates. If we deflate wealth by the index of house prices instead of the CPI, millennials’ assets only go about half as far as boomers’ once did. We’re left with a smaller millennial deficit than the original chart implied, but a deficit nonetheless. The YIMBYs at Works In Progress go further, and present The Housing Theory Of Everything (or at least of everything bad): Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well. Here is the Case-Shiller index, the standard measure of US home prices. I’ve started it in 1985 to match our other graphs: If I were designing an index to present the case that capitalism had not failed, I would have avoided naming it “Case Shiller”. During this time, average home price has approximately doubled. Might this only reflect falling interest rates? That is, suppose people can only afford a certain level of monthly mortgage payment. When interest rates are high, that mortgage payment would correspond to a cheap house; when they are low, that same person willing to spend that same amount could buy a more expensive house. To really work with this, we need average mortgage payment over time. Kevin Drum has this up to 2020: …but it matters a lot whether this that spike at the end is a temporary pandemic effect or a permanent regime change. I’ve tried to calculate an updated version from FRED data: Average monthly payment in 1985 dollars. Going to tell my bank I’m paying my mortgage in 1985 dollars from now on. This matches Drum’s data enough to build confidence, and it shows that the post-pandemic spike has lasted. Mortgage payments are almost twice as high as in the 2010s. The COVID housing spike was partly a function of lockdown locking people in their houses (meaning that having a nice house was more important), and partly a function of the government cutting mortgage rates to alleviate lockdown-related economic distress. But why did it last even after COVID lockdowns ended? Partly because the homebuyers who bought houses during COVID will never move again, because that would mean giving up their great mortgages.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_mwY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feddaab40-062d-4171-b55b-d9e0cddad187_615x591.png, here, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GKUE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc530b08-f7ef-486d-805c-378a1f3ae374_1325x535.png, median, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fafc69dd4-34a2-423d-87dd-0a509135adf6_1416x1028.webp, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9czs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F547eead1-8b66-4d06-b237-5c9da92369a8_3130x2274.png, near historic lows, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VuL6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F956512a3-6365-49a5-803f-1126765cf475_860x624.webp, Here’s, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dds-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67c591eb-cca5-40c3-980c-4da6d2f7e98f_333x387.jpeg, Noah Smith popularized, paper by Darren Grant, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OODv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c0da39e-5e13-4656-8b07-7e375e2acc6c_1318x450.webp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6flf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ba053b8-edf0-4cf4-aee6-8e83e31bf9ac_1337x553.png, He writes, The Housing Theory Of Everything, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zP-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27507c77-dfcc-49a2-8060-61faf8c8df9a_1403x402.png, has this, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W2g8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d40e6a9-cfaa-40e8-94e6-97cf0d07f7c3_1265x632.webp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7GyC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc556be94-624f-48be-99fb-9918b91324a5_752x485.png
1: Ben Goldhaber: Unexpected Things That Are People. “It’s widely known that corporations are people . . . but there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of [legal] person.”
Inline links: Unexpected Things That Are People
2: Jackdaw was originally Jack Daw. Magpie was originally Maggie Pie (really!) Robin Redbreast is still Robin Redbreast. Weird Medieval Guys explains how birds got human names. Short version: there was a medieval tradition of giving every animal one standard human name (all worms were “William Worm”, all monkeys were “Robert Monkey”) and although these are mostly forgotten, they survived in the names of a few birds. Also: “Perhaps the most baffling … was the common Kestrel. He was known simply as the Windfucker.”
Inline links: how birds got human names
3: A story “in the style of Scott Alexander or Jack Clark” about the two-door meme (meme below). And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser.
Alex also mentions the political angle: Obviously nothing real changes the exact second a new president is inaugurated, so people must be using questions about the economy to express their overall happiness about the state of the world.
Obviously nothing real changes the exact second a new president is inaugurated, so people must be using questions about the economy to express their overall happiness about the state of the world.
Obviously nothing real changes the exact second a new president is inaugurated, so people must be using questions about the economy to express their overall happiness about the state of the world. Alex asks whether increasing political polarization could make this worse. Both parties’ extreme factions share a tendency to treat the country as controlled by a hegemonic conspiracy of their enemies - the woke coastal elite Soros cosmopolitan establishment, or the neoliberal fat cat Koch Brothers tech oligarch blob. Does this mean everyone is getting some multiple of the “other party’s president is in power” effect all the time? 3: Discourse Downstream Of The Mike Green $140K Poverty Line Post … Shovacklerod writes: Scott have you read Mike Green’s viral post on this? His main argument is that the poverty line is miscalculated, but in context of declining middle class sentiments— The more interesting thesis is that there exists a “valley of death” where two parents in the workforce need a combined ~$140k salary otherwise the cumulative “participation costs” of a fast modern society (for example a phone plan or child care) make year-over-year capital accumulation near impossible. I haven’t, but other commenters suggest reading responses, including Noah Smith’s The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, Jeremy Horpedahl’s The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, and Tyler Cowen’s The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line. Most of these focus on Green’s explicit errors - for example, he gets most of his cost-of-living numbers from Essex, NJ, an especially rich county, then compares them to average earnings. Correct half a dozen things like this, and the real poverty line is probably somewhere between $35K - $60K. The percent of Americans below this line continues to decline every year, as it has for decades. Green finally pseudo-apologized, lambasting the “mockery machine” of the “cognitive elite” but admitting that his post “was never intended to go viral and was written for my existing audience that tends to be pretty understanding that I don’t do this for a living, but rather as PART of my living” Still, many people took Green’s article as a starting point to contribute to the Vibecession discourse, so let’s go over the ones that touch on our topic in more detail. Lincicome titles his response The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, and blames Baumol’s cost disease: As the Financial Times’ John-Burns Murdoch just detailed, Americans’ overall cost of living has improved over time, but certain highly visible and socially desirable services have become more expensive. That’s not a conspiracy against the middle class but instead just Baumol at work: “[A]s countries develop economically, the same productivity growth that drives down the cost of tradeable goods causes the cost of in-person services to balloon. Wages in sectors like healthcare and education that require intensive face-to-face labour, and have slow (if any) productivity growth, are forced upwards in order to attract workers who would otherwise opt for high-paying work in more productive sectors. The result is that even if people keep consuming the exact same basket of goods and services, as living standards in their country increase they will find more and more of their spending is going on essential services.” Sectors where productivity grows slowly and prices outpace inflation—health care, education, child care, personal services, housing (construction), etc.—happen to be the same ones that middle-class families notice most and that signal social status. As we’ve all gotten richer, moreover, these services have transitioned from luxuries to expectations. Throw in the hedonic treadmill and the fact that you can’t price-shop schools or hospitals the way you can TVs, and public alarm is all but inevitable. I’m suspicious of including “housing (construction)” on this list - couldn’t you use the same argument to reclassify any manufactured good as a service good? - but the rest of these are well-taken. Still, did Baumol or the other economists who first discussed the effect in the 1960s predict it would make people feel like things were outright worse, as opposed to just getting better less than would be expected from raw productivity numbers? Seems strange. Also, hasn’t the Baumol effect been basically constant since at least the Industrial Revolution? And isn’t the Vibecession only 5 - 20 years old? Matt Bruenig has his own response to Green, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind? He bases his argument around this graph: …which is just making the common-sense point that, as society shifts from one-income to two-income families, the husband’s share of family income drops from ~100% to ~50%. So, Bruenig argues, if everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are a dual-earner family, then this single working man has gone from making 100% of his comparison point, to making only 50%. This is a cool potential cognitive bias, but is anyone really making this mistake? Vibecession complaints hardly seem limited to men in traditional one-earner households wondering why they’re not making as much as the neighbors whose wife is a fancy lawyer. My impression is that they include both two-earner families who still feel like they’re falling behind, and (most of all) young singles who are comparing themselves to their young single friends where this issue never comes up in the first place. Matt Yglesias uses a similar strategy in You Can Afford A Tradlife. This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy
Inline links: writes, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, Baumol’s cost disease, detailed, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E2rN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff94f8851-17f5-4a98-b1f8-349f568d23bb_1024x800.png, You Can Afford A Tradlife, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ljt5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b1176e8-f932-430a-b7e1-c699a5ecf15c_581x479.png, They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes
Upon the “supply chain risk” designation, predicted value at IPO fell from about $550 billion to $475 billion - then, after a day or two, went back up to $550 billion. No effect!
The chance of Anthropic getting a $500 billion+ valuation in 2026 fell from 90% to 76%, before rebounding to 83%.
Partly it’s because Anthropic seems likely to win on appeal. Hegseth has said the government will keep using Anthropic for the next six months (undermining his case that they’re a national security risk) and has signed a substantially similar contract with OpenAI (undermining his case that their contract terms were unworkable). The prediction markets think the courts will be sympathetic: But even in the 28% of timelines where the designation sticks, things don’t seem so bad. Secretary of War Hegseth originally tweeted that:
Inline links: tweeted
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