Astral Codex Ten

Fabian

6 min read

Fabian

Article

Fabian is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 18, 2021 and January 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “And Fabian writes : new/ (the /pol/ predecessor) and /pol/ have always been far right”; “Fabian said : While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations”. It most often appears alongside BLM, /b/, /sp/.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 18, 2021
  • Last seen: January 23, 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.

Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
And Fabian writes:
Inline links: writes
Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
January 23, 2026 · Original source
In the comments to last year’s USAID post, Fabian said:
Inline links: said
VOTE NO: You feel like a bad person, and your vote doesn’t change your taxes. Since your taxes will be the same either way, voting yes strictly dominates. This is the virtue signaling model of voting, and it implies that even if no single voter supports raising taxes for foreign aid, the electorate might nevertheless vote to raise taxes for foreign aid! (although most people don’t tell others their votes, maybe this is about self-signaling) One potential counterargument: votes on these topics tend to reflect polls about voters’ true beliefs pretty well. But you could argue that poll respondents face the same incentive to virtue signal (polls also don’t change your taxes). Answers to poll questions do change based on changing realities (eg people are less likely to support foreign aid if they’re told the budget is tight), but, uh, maybe people are also trying to signal fiscal discipline, and, uh, somehow keep all of these signals straight so that it exactly matches what you would expect if they were voting and responding based on true beliefs. A stronger counterargument: the Virtue Signaling Argument implies that all “raise taxes slightly to do a nice thing” laws should succeed. But in fact, many of these laws fail. There are dozens of state and local measures like this every election, and they usually follow the pattern you would expect - blue states vote in favor, red states vote against, more likely to pass if the taxes are low and the nice thing is popular. You could still explain this with more signaling epicycles - the red staters would rather signal fiscal discipline, except on really popular causes where they’d rather signal support - but now the signaling theory has gotten so complicated that it’s almost impossible to distinguish from honestly held beliefs even in principle. The Insomnia Argument Fabian’s critique above gestures at the free rider model of fair taxation. In this model, certain taxes (for example, to fund the police) are fair, because there’s no market solution to the same problem that avoids free rider effects. We can’t simply ask each citizen to make their own decision about whether or not to contribute to the police, because police presence lowers crime for everybody. It would be too tempting to defect - that is, to refuse to contribute - trusting that everyone else’s contributions will be enough to maintain adequate police funding level and keep crime low for you. But if everyone does this, the police don’t get funded at all. Is charity like this? Suppose that we think of charity as purchasing some psychological good - for example, maybe people sleep better knowing that the poor are being helped. Then we can think of non-donation as free-riding on this psychological good - if you donate to charity and solve the African famine, then I can sleep easy instead of fretting about all the poor people starving in Africa. The obvious counterargument is that many people don’t care. They’re not free riders; they just sleep fine whether poor people are helped or not. But we usually ignore this when thinking about government. Let’s take an example from the other side of the aisle and imagine a plan to privatize ICE: the government sets laws for what it can do (e.g. who can vs. can’t be deported), but it’s funded entirely by voluntary donations. What goes wrong? Free-rider theorists would say that there are some benefits to fewer immigrants (e.g. lower crime, less job-stealing) that defectors would enjoy even if they didn’t donate. But many people don’t believe in these benefits. And many other people, whether they believe or not, are unaffected (for example, they live in crime-free gated communities and have un-stealable-jobs like founder/CEO). These people aren’t free riders in the minarchist sense. They just don’t benefit from the policy. In order to justify immigration enforcement via taxation rather than voluntary donation, you have to argue that the benefit of coordinating the people who do want fewer immigrants is greater than the unfair cost imposed on the people who don’t want that. But then you could make this same argument about charity. I’m not sure how to think about this one, or how to avoid having it justify almost anything, so I’m presenting it for your assessment but otherwise moving on. The Bundling Argument A variation on the above: Suppose there’s a famine that will kill 50,000 people, and the only way to solve it is through a $5 million project - for example, buying a giant cargo ship to transport food. If there are 50,000 altruists with $100 each, this is a coordination problem, where you need to figure out some way to incentivize all of them to do their part. For example: They might worry that if they donated, other altruists would free-ride off them.