Astral Codex Ten

Adraste

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Adraste

Article

Adraste is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 07, 2022 and April 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Adraste: You changed “society is preventing pogroms against a marginalized group””; “three main theories - Adraste’s plus two others”; “I (or Adraste) was also wrong or at least on thin ice about Columbus cutting off the hands of Indians”. It most often appears alongside Beroe, America, American Jews.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: October 07, 2022
  • Last seen: April 14, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Columbian Exchange
October 07, 2022 · Original source
Adraste: Happy Indigenous People’s Day!
Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we’re about to have. Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc, would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it?
Adraste: I would have to say that it does.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
Starting with Christmas, Retsam says that there are three main theories - Adraste’s plus two others:
Inline links: says
Still, I think the fact that Easter is currently named after Eostre, who was a real goddess celebrated at that time, and that Bede says it replaced her feasts, is enough to back the strictest interpretation of Adraste’s claim.
It looks like I (or Adraste) was also wrong or at least on thin ice about Columbus cutting off the hands of Indians who didn’t give him enough gold - see here for details. Columbus did (by his son’s admission) punish Indians who did not give him enough gold, in some unspecified way. And hand-cutting was used as a punishment for insufficient-gold-tribute elsewhere in Spanish America. But there is no hard evidence that Columbus ever used this punishment himself - though punishing people who don’t give you gold after you take over their country seems pretty bad regardless of what the punishment was.
Inline links: here
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adraste: Like what?
Adraste: Oh, interesting. I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”. But of course there are many things we don’t allow people to offer other people money for. Like sex work. Or organ donation. Although people are allowed to have sex and donate organs for free, we think the desperation of poverty is so compelling, and the danger of these irreversible actions so great, that we ban seemingly-voluntary economic transactions around them. Call me a BETA-MEALR, but I think sterilization should be in the same category. Still, your suggestion avoided that, so good job.
Inline links: BETA-MEALR
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
Inline links: 1, 2
Open Thread 377
April 14, 2025 · Original source
Adraste: All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.
Adraste: He said you needed to do that in order to be a man. I’m a woman, so I can tell it to you straight: hearing the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools fucking sucks.