Astral Codex Ten

Caesar

11 min read

Caesar

Article

Caesar is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between November 11, 2021 and July 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “that’s why Caesar was called an “imperator""; “Xi would be Caesar (Julius or Augustus)?”; “its training data included Alexander the Great and Caesar”. It most often appears alongside Scott, US, USSR.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: November 11, 2021
  • Last seen: July 18, 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.

Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
"Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin. The Roman Senate was the governing body in the Republican period, but it continued to exist all the way through the entire Western Empire and for another century-plus after the Western Empire fell; and, in the East there was still a Roman Senate for another 600 years after that, though not quite until the final fall of Constantinople.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
Marius would be Mao, the dictator who threatened to install a destabilizing system; Deng would be Sulla, who tried to institute a stable power sharing system; Xi would be Caesar (Julius or Augustus)?
Somewhat Contra Marcus On AI Scaling
June 10, 2022 · Original source
This seems like a good fit for the chimp → human transition, where evolutionary lineages that couldn’t do a bunch of difficult things for the first few hundred million years suddenly became good at those things in an evolutionary eyeblink. The ~5 million chimp/human gap seems like enough time to scale up chimp brains a bit (which definitely happened), but not enough time to invent a fundamentally new architecture. It wouldn’t surprise me if the architecture changed a little during this time, but we’re limited in how fundamental a change we can talk about over that period. I’m not at all sure this is true! I’m honestly close to 50-50 here. Maybe the PFC actually is magic! It just confuses me that Marcus seems to think we’ve ruled out the theory that this kind of scaling is possible, when I feel like we’ve heard plausible arguments on both sides. Nothing we’ve seen in GPTs or any other AI thus far disproves the scaling hypothesis, and a lot of what we’ve seen supports it. So sure, point out that large language models suck at reasoning today. I just don’t see how you can be so sure that they’re still going to suck tomorrow. Lemurs sucked for millions of years, then scaled up a bit and took over the world! V. …is one possible argument. Another possible argument is: language models and other deep learners really aren’t doing the same thing humans do - but whatever, their thing is powerful/effective/dangerous too. Suppose that GPT-X took over the world and killed all humans. Millennia later, some alien archaeologists come and investigate. They conclude that since its training data included Alexander the Great and Caesar, it was just pattern-matching to the kind of things they did (multiplied by a vector representing the difference between ancient and modern times), and GPT-X never demonstrated any true intelligence. So . . . what? I imagine this situation ALL THE TIME and I hate it. I think the impetus behind a lot of the AI risk stuff is that we’re barrelling to a world where AIs have far more than self-driving-car levels of capabilities, while being unpredictable in ways that are a lot like this. The history of the past few decades has been people getting surprised, again and again, at how much AIs can do without being “generally intelligent”. Douglas Hofstadter predicted in 1979 that any AI that could beat a grandmaster at chess would also be able to decide chess was boring and it preferred writing poetry. Instead, we got Deep Blue, so domain-specific it can’t even do so much as play checkers. Worse, now we have AIs that can switch between writing poetry and playing chess, and it still seems like a clever parlor trick rather than anything like real intelligence. I think basically nobody predicted this: narrow AI has won victories beyond past generations’ imagination. (cf. Nostalgebraist’s Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal) So even if GPTs aren’t a step on the path towards some sort of human-like AGI thing, I have no idea where they’ll end up. Replacing humans at all jobs? Writing novels? Taking over the world? If this seems crazy to you, “solve protein folding” sounded crazy ten years ago, and they already did that! At this point I will basically believe anything. VI. So I’m not going to take Marcus’ bet that GPT-4 will be perfect (as if anything ever is!). But here are some things I do believe, with confidence levels: At some point before 2030, someone will come out with a deep-learning-based language model which is significantly better than the current state of the art, by Gary Marcus’ admission (97%)
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_D9T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5cb652e3-381b-488d-a6a6-f1155f7ff557_586x194.png, writing poetry, playing chess, Human Psycholinguists: A Critical Appraisal
The Prophet And Caesar's Wife
September 02, 2022 · Original source
“It is said,” said the Prophet, “that Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity. A good reputation is worth more than any treasure. Fat as you are, nobody will believe you are untainted by the temptations of wealth. Give the golden palace back to your brother, and live in a hovel in the woods. Only then will you earn the people’s trust.”
“Oh well,” said the Bishop. “I guess that’s how moral hazard works. Because you told the Bishop of Belazzia that you supported him living lavishly, the rest of us thought maybe we should do the same. Perhaps you should have preached that no Bishop can live lavishly, in order to have a bright-line rule that prevents other people from getting confused or taking advantage of you. As they say, Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity.”
The Prophet in his wanderings came to the Great Capital, where he was approached by literal Caesar’s literal wife.
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“The Resurrection isn’t about money,” says the youth pastor. “Christ said that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar - that is, material goods - but that giving our hearts to God is more important.”
“You’re missing the point of the parable,” says the crypto bro. “The Bible says that the Pharisees asked Jesus if the Jews should pay taxes to Rome. Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it, and said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. He was saying that if you have government-controlled fiat money, then you’ll never be able to control how you use it. But just as the denarius depicted Caesar, Bitcoin is a depiction of God - an immaterial, formless, omnipresent entity. What you do with your Bitcoin is between you and God and nobody else.”
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). And one of the parts I didn’t understand was the psychological appeal of all this. So you’re Caesar, you’re an amazing general, and you totally wipe the floor with the Gauls. You’re a glorious military genius and will be celebrated forever in song. So . . . what? Is beating other people an end in itself? I don’t know, I guess this is how it works in sports6. But I’ve never found sports too interesting either. Also, if you defeat the Gallic armies enough times, you might find yourself ruling Gaul and making decisions about its future. Don’t you need some kind of lodestar beyond “I really like beating people”? Doesn’t that have to be something about leaving the world a better place than you found it?
Inline links: 6
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
An obvious counterexample to this is all the extremely successful people from privileged upbringings. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all had great childhoods. So did Caesar and Napoleon. So did Einstein and von Neumann. Meanwhile, there are millions of poor people and war victims who have lived lives of constant horrible trauma without much benefit. If success and creativity were proportional to suffering, the West would have to ban refugees from the Gaza Strip, lest they take all the spots in the best colleges and form an elite billionaire overclass.
How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
September 24, 2024 · Original source
Considering what I'd say to somebody who is completely in favour of current governmental restrictions of a kind that I imagine might have been relevant during Julius Caesar's rise to dictatorial power.
Hail Caesar!
Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
July 18, 2025 · Original source
As a historical benchmark for the loss of ancient cultural treasures, people like to point to the Library of Alexandria. But historians have largely debunked the idea that Caesar, Saladin, or the Mongols set fire to it. Instead, I’m reminded of a Chinese emperor of the southern Liang dynasty in the mid 500s. In his early years, one of his older brothers — an eminent literati like himself — composed an eloquent letter lamenting the literary trends of the day. Anthropomorphizing rather gratuitously, he decried the corruption of good style by his contemporaries: “Were it not for its muteness, could the sooty ink be compelled by their brushes to stain? Were it not for its senselessness, could the reams of paper suffer their hands to flutter and crimp at will? Terrible is the sweeping inundation of letters — how has it come to this!” Years later, when the empire was in dire straits, the younger brother had the crown thrusted upon him. Eventually, with the capital besieged with no hope of rescue, he set fire to the hundreds of thousands of volumes in the imperial library, declaring, “The way of letters and the virtue of arms both shall come to an end tonight!”