Greg Fitzgerald

Article

Greg Fitzgerald is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 12, 2024 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive”; “I am grateful to … Greg Fitzgerald for valuable feedback”. It most often appears alongside Dan Elton, @halomancer1, A. Bejanin.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 12, 2024
  • Last seen: August 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.

September 12, 2024 · Original source
14: Why did Egyptian pharaohs so often marry their sisters? David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time. Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low. What they really wanted was to avoid having to marry royal-line women off to anyone else - who could then create their own branches of the royal dynasty with competing claims to the throne. 15: The ominously named “cerebrolysin” has a positive reputation in the nootropics community, but Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive and find that its manufacturing process is so poor that it ends up being mostly random amino acids - ie it can’t possibly work the way its proponents suggest. Interestingly, cerebrolysin performed about the same as some definitely-real chemicals (eg melatonin, nicotine) on my old nootropics survey, re-emphasizing that most of what the survey measures is placebo effects. 16: Why is the Ukraine war a horrible grinding war of attrition like World War I, instead of resembling more dynamic modern conflicts? I asked this on an Open Thread and got some good answers: PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.
August 14, 2025 · Original source
I am grateful to Logan Thrasher Collins, Tommy Crow, Dan Elton, and Greg Fitzgerald for valuable feedback on this essay, and to Scott Alexander for edits which improved its structure and presentation.