Astral Codex Ten

David Chapman

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David Chapman

Article

David Chapman is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between March 23, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Other parts of Antifragile reminded more of David Chapman”; “see especially David Chapman’s tweets”; “David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution”. It most often appears alongside California, Elon Musk, Google.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: March 23, 2021
  • Last seen: January 16, 2026

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.

Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
Other parts of Antifragile reminded more of David Chapman (confession: I have not yet read all of Chapman's many and confusingly-organized works). There's the same discussion of the limits of rational systems, also by a person who obviously knows a lot about formal rationality and isn't just some fundamentalist or postmodernist or something.
Inline links: David Chapman
Open Thread 201
December 06, 2021 · Original source
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.
Inline links: Pascalian Medicine, David Chapman’s tweets, Jay Daigle’s blog.
A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures
August 10, 2022 · Original source
David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement.
Inline links: Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures
August 19, 2022 · Original source
I guess I should have been more respectful to David Chapman’s model, because the most common criticism in the comments was “actually I think it’s more of [reinvents David Chapman’s model]. Fine. Good work David.
Inline links: David Chapman’s model
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
9: David Chapman and many other people took me as attacking philosophy:
Inline links: took me as
9: David Chapman and many other people took me as attacking philosophy: @slatestarcodex vs. philosophy\n\n[philosophy is bad. don’t do it. gently ridicule anyone who takes it seriously] astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-… ","username":"Meaningness","name":"David Chapman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Aug 23 12:48:36 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Fa2Mk9vUIAAmEwV.png","link_url":"https://t.co/3qEChyezOX","alt_text":null},{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Fa2Mk8KUEAA26p0.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/3qEChyezOX","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":21,"like_count":251,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I disagree with this. I joked about it defeating the point of philosophy, but I think that realistically I was doing philosophy just like everyone else. In a sense all attacks on philosophy are doing philosophy, but I feel like I was doing philosophy even more than the bare minimum that you have to in order to have an opinion at all.
Inline links: took me as
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
7: David Chapman (author of the “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” theory of subcultures) responds to my response to him.
Inline links: responds to
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“Cheems mindset again!” says Astra. “Think about it for five seconds! Buddhism is about self-liberation. Conservatives love the self, and they love liberating things! The only problem is a hundred years of western progressives interpreting it in western progressive terms. Have you even read David Chapman? You just have to rephrase it in the right language.”
Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness
February 27, 2023 · Original source
I agree with the first paragraph; I think saying “more people are being socialized into transgender” and “fewer people are being socialized into cisgender” are more or less identical. David Chapman writes about the “choiceless” nature of traditional societies; if you were born in a peasant village in medieval England, you would be straight, cis, Christian, monarchist, and a farmer - neither because you loved those things and chose them voluntarily, nor because evil outsiders forced you to do those things which you secretly hated, but because you couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. Very gradually, that choiceless mode broke down into the package of identity choices people face today; faced with the choice between being cis and trans, some people find that something (maybe biology) gives them an extremely strong pressure towards trans; if they didn’t realize that was a choice, the pressure might come out some other way, or just fizzle out.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
I think going through every David Chapman essay and replacing the word “metarationality” with “THE AVATAR” would actually be very refreshing.