Astral Codex Ten

Freddie de Boer

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Freddie de Boer

Article

Freddie de Boer is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between May 12, 2021 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people”; “Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people, describes his experience trying to get a therapist”; “then Freddie de Boer is right, private schools are all grifts”. It most often appears alongside Matt Yglesias, Substack, US.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 14
  • Issue count: 14
  • First seen: May 12, 2021
  • Last seen: September 04, 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.

Welcome To The Terrible World Of Prescription-Only Apps
May 12, 2021 · Original source
In theory, an app is a great solution to accessibility issues. Some people can’t afford to see a professional. Or they have complicated schedules that make it hard to see a professional. Or they’ve been traumatized by the medical system and don’t want to see a professional. Or they have executive function problems and can’t schedule a appointment with a professional. Or they have bad insurance that doesn’t have many professionals in-network, and all of them have six month wait lists. Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people, describes his experience trying to get a therapist here:
Inline links: here
21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
Once you’ve got this, you’ve also got the ability to answer questions like “how would my child do at public school vs. Montessori school vs. Success Academy”? If the prediction markets say the test scores would be about the same no matter what, then Freddie de Boer is right, private schools are all grifts, and the whole thing is hopelessly confounded by selection bias.
Why Do I Suck?
February 02, 2022 · Original source
And that means my natural I-hate-saying-whatever-the-majority-says kicks in whenever I’m tempted to criticize wokeness. I could write about something something critical race theory in school. But first of all, Jesse Singal, Freddie de Boer, and Bari Weiss have probably already written things on it and they probably all did a better job than I would. Second of all, probably the electorate has already figured out it’s bad and is planning to vote out everyone involved. Third of all, do I really want to spend my life reminding other unwoke people that dumbing down math classes and using the extra time to force kids into classes where they chant prayers to the Aztec gods instead is actually bad? Don’t get me wrong, it is bad. But Cicero had Catiline, and Lincoln had Stephen Douglas. I’m hardly the equal of either, but I would like to think I’m cool enough to deserve a worthier foil than the Aztec-prayers-in-school crowd, who everyone else also hates.
Inline links: chant prayers to the Aztec gods
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
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: Matt Yglesias’, Freddie de Boer’s, Stuart Ritchie’s
Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters
April 27, 2023 · Original source
…where Sam fills in the northwest and southeast squares, then claims a correlation, draws a line, and points to high-status/deep-engagement as a single unified concept. But the southwest square could be “writes a wacky Shakespeare fanfiction, Romeo & Juliet II, in blank verse and period-appropriate language”, and the northeast square could be “publishes a dissertation on some irrelevant aspect of word frequency changes across English plays to prove something about linguistics”. And then having conflated these two things, he goes on to conflate a third thing, Shakespeare vs. Marvel. I’m not up to date on what goes on in academic literature departments, but Freddie de Boer says they’re increasingly offering “Spiderman Studies” classes in attempts to stay culturally relevant; probably Spiderman professors engage with Spiderman on the same deep level that Shakespeare professors engage with Shakespeare. If we made this a cube - high-status vs. low-status forms of engagement along one axis, Shakespeare vs. Spiderman along another axis, and deep vs. shallow engagement along the third - would anything be left of the “nerd” cluster as Sam describes it? I’m not sure. 2. Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc There were many of these. One common theme was that in the 70s, “nerd” was almost synonymous with “person who is only into unpopular things”, for example sci-fi, comics, and RPGs, all of which were unpopular in the 70s. Then those things became very popular, but the people who were interested in them still get called “nerds”. So now people like Kriss use “nerd” almost synonymously with “person who is only into popular things”. So we have a word which denotes either interest in unpopular things or interest in popular things, depending on who’s using it and when they last updated their lexicon. In the 70s, it was more reasonable to group “interested in math and computers” and “interested in sci-fi and RPGs” together, because both were unpopular and tended to involve the same group of socially maladept young men. Now math is still hard and unpopular; computers are hard in the sense that it’s tough to learn programming languages, but universally used and beloved; sci-fi and RPGs are very popular, and the typical sci-fi fan is closer to a socially-adept albeit “quirky” young woman. If words are hidden inferences, the inference represented by “nerd” - that sci-fi fandom, interest in math, interest in computers, maleness, poor social skills, and nonconformity with mainstream interests all go together - is now thoroughly false, dooming us to conversations like this one. Attempts to repurpose the several different words used to refer to the math/sci-fi/awkward/unpopular cluster to represent different aspects of its successor clusters have mostly failed. Sample comments from this section: Coagulopath writes: To me, being a nerd requires a degree of swimming against the cultural tide. It's weird and unpopular to be into trains, so the fact that you are indicates you have a bit of character (or are socially oblivious, which is also kind of endearing). The problem (and I think Kriss alludes to this) is that nerd stuff went mainstream in the past few decades. Of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the 2010s, 6 are Star Wars or Marvel films. There's no longer any sense that nerds are the underdog. But what does it say about you when you wear a Star Wars shirt? You're pledging allegiance to the biggest, most popular club imaginable. Is that a brave stance? Those people always make me think "if you lived in the SW universe, you'd be on the side of the Empire". In general, I am creeped out by effusive public adoration for things that are near-universally loved. Like The Beatles. Or bacon. Or dogs. Or science (Neil DeGrasse Tyson's whole shtick). Regardless of how I feel about those things on the object level, there's no glory in joining a culture war when you're signing on to the winning side. Tolaughoftenandmuch writes: All this is so different from when I was a kid. I was a nerd because I was intellectually curious, bad at and disinterested in sports, socially awkward, and had a computer hobby (owning hardware C64 ->8088 ->286, writing programs in Basic, being a BBS SysOp). Cultural interests were irrelevant to my nerd status. In terms of exactly when nerd interests started becoming popular, Ghatanathoah writes: I also wouldn't say that nerd stuff only went mainstream in the last decade, it's not like the first 3 Star Wars movies were obscure arthouse pictures. I think the reason Marvel took off is just innovations in storytelling: movie producers finally figured out a way to adapt the gloriously arcane and convoluted lore of superhero comics in a way that could appeal to mainstream audiences in addition to nerds (much how George Lucas figured out how to get mainstream audiences to love the space operas nerds had been enjoying for decades before 1977). And Melvin writes: Comic book movies had always been pretty popular. Superman was the top grossing movie of 1979 despite coming out in 1978. Superman 2 was the second top grossing movie of 1981. Batman was the second top grossing movie of 1989. Batman Returns was the top grossing movie of 1992. Batman Forever was the top grossing movie of 1995. Spider-man was the third top grossing movie of 2002 (behind Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies). That's about all I can be bothered looking up right now but you get the idea, superhero movies have been popular since the 1970s. Kaitian writes: I think being a nerd requires being a bit socially clumsy about your interest, and talking or signalling about it in situations where most people don't expect it. So being a nerd about completely mainstream stuff like pop music or football is not possible, that's just fandom. Being a nerd about very well known and relatively well-respected stuff like classical music or birdwatching is rare, because most people who are classy enough to care about the thing in the first place are also classy enough to know when to shut up about it. But comics? Star trek? Power metal? They have fairly low barriers to entry *and* most people don't care about them, so there's plenty of opportunities to bring it up to people who don't want to hear about it. So that's why I think nerdery usually attaches itself to the typical targets. J.R. Leonard has as good a terminology proposal as anyone: I think what's missing is that Kriss uses "nerds" as his foil, but what he's talking about would better be described as fan culture. Deiseach teaches us the etymology of “geek”. The very distant etymology is from German gek, a relative of “cackle” → geck, a fool/madman (who was presumably cackling all the time). But this comes down to us through the early American institution of the geek show. From Wikipedia (cw: disturbing): Geek shows were an act in traveling carnivals and circuses of early America and were often part of a larger sideshow. The billed performer's act consisted of a single geek, who stood in the center ring to chase live chickens. It ended with the performer biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. The geek shows were often used as openers for what are commonly known as freak shows. It was a matter of pride among circus and carnival professionals not to have traveled with a troupe that included geeks. Geeks were often alcoholics or drug addicts, and paid with liquor – especially during Prohibition – or with narcotics. More obvious but I went surprisingly long without realizing it: “fan” (as in “sports fan”) is just short for fanatic. 3. Comments About Collecting The veteran collectors in the comments said that my theory (the Internet makes collecting too easy) was only a small part of the decline. The bigger part is that most coin collecting begins with the wonder of finding a rare coin in your change, and most stamp collecting begins with the wonder of finding a rare stamp on your mail, and the rise of credit cards and emails means people aren’t handling coins and stamps as much in their daily lives. Tom Metcalf writes: I'd guess many coin collectors got their start being patient enough to sort through change to see if they had e.g. a wheat cent or silver dime, but first of all, who pays with cash and gets change, and the chances of finding something collectible are orders of magnitude smaller than, say, the '90s. And stamp collectors would have started saving the stamps on mail sent to their house, but how frequently do you get stamped mail anymore? My 79-year old father goes to stamp shows, because one of his hobbies is to buy sheets of old but common unused stamps for less than face value. They are still valid postage, and then he uses them to personalize the stamps he puts on letters he sends to various people. And most of the other people at stamp shows are about his age. He does have some stamps he thinks are interesting that he's held onto, but the dealers at the stamp shows think they're common and uninteresting. So there's a decreasing number of stamps that might be "worth something" and a net loss of collectors in the hobby, and then every time a collector dies and his heirs have no interest in his collection and that many more stamps make their way to dealers who now have one less buyer. Too bad "sending paper letters with vintage but still valid stamps" never caught on with the hipsters. Art writes: The widespread adoption of email created a world where a letter is almost certainly junk mail or a bill. Nobody looks forward to hearing from a good friend from across the country now when picking up the day’s mail. If letters are not interesting why would stamps? The same for coins. Nobody uses cash, and getting a pile of coins with no significant value (inflation) is just an annoyance. These objects have passed into irrelevance. Still, it seems like some little pieces of joy and wonder have passed from our lives. Nathan Savir writes: I collect coins and I think the description of the hobby (and its putative death) isn't quite right. 1. Rare coins are in fact hard to find, even in today's internet world. They are usually sold in auctions, which might happen online, but still not that frequently. It's not unusual for examples some specific rare coin to be sold only once every few years. If the coin is also obscure, it may not be prohibitively expensive, so this kind of situation isn't the sole province of rich people. 2. One area of collecting is to get all the rare items. Another is to get all the minor varieties of a common item. These varieties may not be very rare, but it still takes a lot of effort to be able to distinguish them and to find them. Some collectors will obtain large numbers of relatively common coins and sort through and scrutinize them to try to identify interesting varieties. 3. An important part of collecting is getting good deals. This is surely a lot harder than it used to be because sellers can more easily figure out what things are worth and you won't find something grossly underpriced in a random antique store as often these days. But filtering through buckets (or online listings) of large numbers of coins can still be fun and lead to spotting good deals. So I think there is room in the hobby for nerd-like behavior (per your definition). I would argue the decline of the hobby is more due to competition from other similar hobbies (a generation ago you could collect stamps, coins, baseball cards, or rare books/comics - now you can collect beanie babies, Pokemon cards, NFTs, funko pops, action figures, etc.). I think stamps have suffered more than coins because stamp collecting has more of an aesthetic component (which has faced stronger competition) while coins have a historical element that is less well replicated by collecting newer things. This difference isn't obvious in the google trends graphs you posted but I believe is observable from looking at prices of stamps vs coins. I asked Nathan what coins he collects that are still tough to find, and he gave the example of this Yuan dynasty coin from 1350. I guess if you want to be a collector in 2023 you need to go hard. Arrk Mindmaster writes: I used to collect US coins from every denomination, year, mint, and variety (such as large and small date 1960 pennies). It was kind of like a treasure hunt, knowing you could find something in circulation that was actually more valuable than most people thought it was. I lost interest in the late 1980s sometime, when I found the volume of new coins dwarfed older coins. For example, for Lincoln pennies, they used to make a few million per year, then a few tens of millions. In the 80s, they started making about 5 BILLION each, and it started drowning out all of the old coins, which basically stayed the same value. This comment snapped some things into place for me; I collected coins as a kid in the 90s, and older coin collectors would talk as if you could spot some pretty rare things in your pocket change. But I had much worse luck, and it’s been years since I’ve even found a wheat cent in circulation (even when I was a kid this would happen occasionally). Maybe coin collecting is dying not just because we don’t use change, but because our change is less likely to have interesting coins in it. Another victim of mass money printing! The new state quarters sort of fix this, but other commenters express contempt for this. It feels like the transition between old myths (which one can enjoy) to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which corporations are begging you to enjoy in a pre-approved way) - now that the Mint wants you to collect their coins, it feels kind of slavish to comply. Other people point out that the collecting of things other than stamps and coins is still going strong. Drethelin: Collecting has not in the slightest died out. People collect more things than ever, like sneakers, funko pops, vintage cars, guns, antique ceramics, anime figurines, magic cards, etc. Some people also brought up NFTs - are there lots of people who truly enjoy collecting NFTs, aren’t just in it for the investment value, and have kept up through the crypto bear market? 4. Comments Insisting That Sports Are Good Aris C writes: It's a little glib to dismiss sports as bad, isn't it? Athletes display extreme skill, sometimes transcendent. I don't think watching people push the limits of human ability is obviously bad. When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me. 5. Comments About Enjoying Things Vs. Building Identities Around Them Many people complained that some combination of me and/or Sam Kriss were denying that anyone can ever enjoy anything except as an attempt to “gain status”. I would answer first that yes, I think most behavior has some status component (although it may be a small component, mixed with genuine enjoyment). But also, it doesn’t seem mysterious that some people eg like Star Wars, or even love Star Wars. What seems mysterious to me is when this expresses itself as desire to buy thousands of dollars of figurines in the original boxes, or memorize the stats of every class of ship in the Imperial Navy, or something else which doesn’t seem very fun on its own merits. I’m not criticizing others from a place of invulnerability here. When I was ~14, I got really into Star Wars, and aside from reading all the Extended Universe books - some of which were genuinely very good - for about a year I spent all of my allowance and a good fraction of my free time obtaining Star Wars collectable cards associated with an M:TG style card game (which I never got around to playing). My parents probably still have them somewhere. I cannot at all retrace what led me to do this, but I appreciate commenters’ less cynical explanations. For example, enchantingacacia writes: I think it's honestly sort of funny how non-nerds seem to genuinely not understand that a nerd's identity becomes about [thing] because they like it so much, not the other way around. Sometimes you encounter a thing—let's say it's Minecraft, because why not—and it's just such a positive experience for you that you take every possible opportunity to keep thinking about Minecraft, even when you're not playing. You collect every scrap of information you can find about Minecraft and you compose your own original Minecraft-related songs and you decorate your room with blocky little figurines. You get into a virtuous cycle where talking and thinking about Minecraft is so rewarding that you keep enjoying all these secondary activities long after you're bored of actually playing Minecraft itself. You look out for opportunities to meet people who'd enjoy talking about Minecraft with you and make a bunch of friends with whom you mostly talk about Minecraft, and your friends and family start seeing you as "the Minecraft guy" and they get you a Minecraft hoodie for Christmas cause they know it's a safe pick. This is the obvious and intuitive explanation! There's no need to get fake-deep about "ah, they got into Minecraft so they'd have something to construct their identity around": it explains nothing, and consistently makes incorrect predictions about the internal experiences of Minecraft nerds. It's only virtue is making people feel better about being annoyed by those weirdos who won't shut up about Minecraft. It's possibly that I have unusually low social motivation (genuinely, what does it mean to "construct your identity" and why is it something people would be this comically desperate to do?) and am typical-minding, but, uh, I wonder if there's any group closely associated with "nerds" who are also known for having low social motivation? I think it's a tad more likely that people like Kriss are typical-minding, and constructing elaborate social motivations for people who just like stuff regardless of what people like him think. This is a good comment which avoids buck-passing-style “I enjoy it because it’s fun” explanations. Along the same lines, odd anon writes: It is only among nerds that enthusiasm for something corresponds to learning more and more about it. That's the core element here. Non-nerds who like something do not feel any need to read up on it, to know more and more. Of course, the producers of content notice when their audience are nerds, and they start to produce content built more for those who obsessively learn every detail. Comics can start "rewarding" readers for noticing some obscure thing. A game series can have an elaborate continuity, or a zillion details to memorize. Content that either "leans into the fandom" or simply naturally has too much for non-nerds to easily pick up, can rapidly become nerd-only, thus solidifying boundaries. And sure, there are the personality correlations, attributes most nerds also have, including being STEM-y and lacking social skills. Combined, a nerd ended up being an unpopular thing to be. Ghatanathoah is less patient: Both Kriss' essay, and Scott's response to it, remind me of the "Evil Cannot Comprehend Good" trope from TV tropes, except replace "Evil" with "Very socially motivated people" and "Good" with "Less socially motivated people" (although honestly both sets have a lot of overlap). Both essays seem obsessed with finding some deep, social reason why hipsters and nerds behave the way they do, like the supervillain who is telling the hero that they are "Not So Different." They literally can't comprehend the idea that someone could actually like something, so they try desperately to find some way that liking things isn't something people actually do. People couldn't actually like Star Wars, sportsball, the MCU, or the Beatles, they must be liking them to achieve some social goal like forming an identity or seeking status! This is one of the two giant flawed assumptions that invalidates the theses of both articles (the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements*). If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, or even in addition to social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU, and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular, they care about if it fascinates them. Whether that thing is popular is orthogonal to how fascinating it is. That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form and identity first and picking Star Wars, identity formation was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored with things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their identity comes second, if at all. Also Ghatanathoah: Scott asks if its ever okay to build your identity around liking a thing. I would ask if it's ever okay not to? What's the alternative, building it around social status games or large nonselective identity groups? It seems to me that liking something isn't just a good thing to build your identity around, it's one of the best things to build it around. After all, unlike social status games, you can like something without forcing other people to not like it. This is a good question, well-phrased. I think the traditional answer is that you should build your identity around social relationships (I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z), career, and maybe a few hobbies. I agree with this as far as it goes, but it doesn’t work for a lot of practical tasks - I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y. Some people linked a Freddie de Boer post, Your Personality Has To Be Load-Bearing, which is generally good but I think has a similar problem. Obviously you should have a genuine and complex personality, but I worry a lot of people who talk about this will reject every specific aspect of personality because “it’s not, in itself, a full complex personality!”, but you can’t have a personality without building it out of specific aspects. A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games. Most people realize this on some level and try to cultivate some personality beyond this, but I think that makes it extra unfair to say “Just use your natural true self!” The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person. I’m trying to think if I have a personal answer to this. Part of my answer is the EA and rationalist communities. This has some downsides; I’m thinner-skinned about insults to these groups than I should be; some people might think I’m a fanatic. It also has some upsides; they embody real values I like, they try to make a difference in the world, they’re not consumer properties that make me feel like a corporation is pulling my strings. But my real answer is probably “I cheat by having a popular blog; this means you all know everything about me and I don’t have to fit my personality into a ten-second elevator pitch”. Maybe this is the traditional solution, from back when everyone knew everyone else in their community. It sure doesn’t feel adequate now, back when (non-bloggers) are constantly meeting strangers and having to communicate their identity to them quickly. My internal hierarchy of things it’s virtuous to build identity around, which is probably a weird class artifact and which I absolutely don’t consciously endorse, goes something like: Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.
Inline links: words are hidden inferences, writes, Tolaughoftenandmuch, writes, writes, writes, J.R. Leonard has, teaches us the etymology of “geek”, From Wikipedia, writes, writes, writes, this Yuan dynasty coin from 1350, writes, other, commenters, Drethelin, writes, enchantingacacia writes, odd anon writes, is less patient, Your Personality Has To Be Load-Bearing
Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
May 24, 2023 · Original source
Freddie de Boer’s Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop presents an argument that educational hypergamy is lowering marriage rates1. He writes:
Inline links: Demographic Dating Market Doom Loop, 1
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
24: Ethan Strauss on Twitter changes making it harder for posts to go viral. This is my experience too, but I think it started pre-Musk, or at least pre-recently - here’s Freddie de Boer complaining about the same earlier this year, and my impression is it’s been getting worse for years now.
Inline links: Twitter changes making it harder for posts to go viral, earlier this year
31: Leah Libresco interviews Freddie de Boer on his new book, partial transcript here.
Inline links: here
You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books
February 07, 2024 · Original source
Freddie de Boer recently wrote a harsh review of a memoir, which included quotes like this:
Inline links: recently wrote
In Continued Defense Of Non-Frequentist Probabilities
March 21, 2024 · Original source
It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example:
Ye Olde Bay Area House Party
April 18, 2024 · Original source
“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re the third-best-selling women’s magazine in the United States at this point. Our only regret is that we’re not as popular with the male demographic. That’s why we’re working on launching a new spinoff, Stop Paying Attention To The Marvel Cinematic Universe. We just signed our first big contract; Freddie de Boer will be writing 600 articles for us over the next three years.”
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
Cf. Freddie de Boer here: “To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented.”
Inline links: here
In Defense Of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"
August 28, 2024 · Original source
People complain a lot about “therapy culture”, but usually without explaining it or giving examples. Freddie de Boer does better here (see the list of bullet points halfway down). What do all of his examples have in common? They all overfit social norms to benefit you in the exact position you’re in at any given moment.
Inline links: here
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
38: Freddie de Boer says he was ghosted by the New York Times (he pitched them a time-sensitive article, their editor accepted his pitch and told him to write it a certain way, he stopped shopping the pitch around to other publications and wrote it the way NYT wanted, and then the editor never returned his emails or paid him). Seems like pretty unprofessional behavior, I’d like to think there’s an innocent explanation but at some point not noticing and publicly giving an apology itself becomes culpable.
Inline links: ghosted by the New York Times
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy