Astral Codex Ten

Mark

118 min read

Mark

Article

Mark is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between January 27, 2022 and October 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Germany, starting with Mark”; “If you can provide funding or advice, please email mark@cci.city”; “His philosophical approach to markets is best demonstrated through this story of a trader named Mark”. It most often appears alongside New York City, ACX, Brazil.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: January 27, 2022
  • Last seen: October 01, 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 Health Care Systems
January 27, 2022 · Original source
I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!
Inline links: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8
Second, I think any of the results individually are surprising! Remember, this isn't an association; it's a comparison. If I asked you, based on priors, who has better outcomes after a heart attack, white people in the richest counties in America (average income ~$100k), to people in Denmark (average income ~$51k) (see the supplement for some of this data: https://bit.ly/3KsUP71), I think most people would say America? But Americans die about 12% of the time when admitted for a heart attack compared to 10% in Denmark. In other words, the design of the study is HEAVILY biased in the direction opposite of the results we see.
Inline links: https://bit.ly/3KsUP71
The incremental cost of manufacturing a pill tends to be pretty cheap. A drug company has to make back its investment in R&D with returns to justify the investment somewhere (which is necessarily a high risk investment with a long time window between the investment and when it starts giving returns which standard economic theory says makes the required returns higher). But once it makes back its research investment anywhere, it has a pretty big incentive to just sell its drugs everywhere even if it is selling them heavily discounted in some markets relative to others. (The regulations around drugs are a particularly effective form of geofencing that eliminate the incentives that might otherwise exist to charge similar prices in different markets.)
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#1: A Movement To Fight Attention Hijacking It’s my assertion that we need to draw people’s attention to the methods marketers use to get us to buy stuff – to point out the techniques used in digital and physical environments. The trappings of an advanced economy have led us to create some persuasive methods of engagement. And while these have been used to subliminally guide us towards purchases, by drawing attention to them as a phenomenon, we can unlock new ways to use them for the greater good – for educational purposes, to encourage positive behaviours, for healthcare, mental wellbeing, and other challenges we face as part of what, Alvin and Heidi Toffler refer to as ‘the Third Wave’ of development. Won’t that denigrate the intent behind these techniques? Well… let’s be fair – advertisers have had it good for a long time. That said, does the fact we know what television commercials or online ads are trying to do, make us buy less stuff? Nope. While drawing attention certainly makes us more aware of the purpose of the medium used, it also leads us to greater transparency and an increased opportunity to mix media – for any purpose. Could the UI that made Facebook addictive be used to promote healthy eating? Could we re-engineer Gruen transfer for hospital appointments? Can Kansei design principles remove racial bias? I want to kickstart a movement to test these ideas out. A movement called *punktoj* Anyone game? Ping me: dave.barton@tbc.wtf
#5: YIMBY Explainer Video On Migration Chains I'm Michael Wiebe, and I will make a YIMBY explainer video on migration chains, to show how even expensive new apartments can improve housing affordability for everyone. The basic idea: A moves into a newly built apartment, B moves into A's old house, C moves into B's old house, which frees up affordable housing for D in a poorer neighborhood. The video will put a human face on the process, by interviewing everyone in a chain, and showing how real people in low-income neighborhoods benefit from new market-rate apartments. For example, we could show a poor college student who benefits from a vacancy in a studio apartment near their university, and trace that vacancy to the construction of a market-rate apartment building. The idea of migration chains is new, and is a big improvement over a simple supply and demand model, which NIMBYs don’t trust anyway. This model has an intuitive mechanism, where people moving *into* new housing are also moving *out* of old housing. Since the mechanism is general and applies everywhere, promoting this idea is high-leverage: it can be used to support YIMBY activism all around the world. I'm a PhD economist and can summarize the research (eg. see here). The video will be produced by urbanist youtube channel About Here, who budgets $5000 per video. We'll also need $1000 to buy food to incentivize volunteers to trace out a complete chain. Please contact me at maswiebe@gmail.com.
Inline links: here
#9: Help Research Teams Improve Software Quality I'm Victor Engmark, and I'm looking for funding to help research teams improve their software quality. Researchers have often been criticized for producing broken and unusable software, and improving the quality is key to both trust and reproducibility. I've worked as a software developer for 18 years, with a focus on quality assurance. I will need to spend at least a few weeks per project. This is typically the minimum amount of time it takes to set up a reasonable process, teach the baseline techniques, and hand over the maintenance. If you can help, please contact victor@engmark.name.
Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
July 21, 2023 · Original source
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.
Inline links: The Laws of Trading
We need a framework for thinking about these trades. Lebron’s first law states that we must know ourselves and our motivations for trading before we trade. We tell ourselves many stories, but someone with intellectual honesty – the person with the most alignment between their motivations and actions – will take money from the person who didn’t go through the work to understand their own motivations. There is a reason that Citadel and other hedge funds pay millions of dollars to trade with retail. They know why they are trading: to maximize profit. And the dilettante who “trades for fun” will be eaten alive by a firm with a much better model of a) the world and b) the dilettante themself. Why did I write this book review? To test my intellectual mettle. I could easily have posted this book review elsewhere, but no, I wanted to see how I stack up against other ACX Book Review contest participants. Similarly, this is often the reason people get into trading. One motivation that Lebron explicitly calls out is intellectual validation. You can toil in obscurity for years as an academic. But in trading, there is a quick feedback loop. If your P&L showed $10M last year and the guy sitting next to you showed $8M, you have demonstrated who is “cleverer” and established a clear hierarchy. What lessons here transfer to our daily lives? Like Paul Graham, Lebron encourages us to keep our identities small. He gives the standard decision-making advice to write down your framework and reasoning for why you made a decision at a specific point in time, in order to avoid biases after the fact. This section of the book contained good general advice, but nothing that will be particularly new for the median ACX reader. 2: Adverse Selection You’re never happy with the amount you traded. Now we start to get into the good stuff. Financial markets are an information aggregation mechanism, relying on multiple parties’ beliefs and recursive Bayesian updates of an individual actor’s beliefs based on the beliefs of others2. Market mechanics demonstrate Bayesian beliefs in action. The following quote is quite long, so skip over it if you don’t want to dive deep into the psychology of making a market. I retained it in full because this is quite literally the best description I’ve ever seen of the Bayesian dance between two market makers: “You are a market maker in South African mining companies. Through years of effort and continual improvement, you have built a trading model for the company Veldt Resources. You walk into work one day, ready to set up your trading for the day. It's a stock that doesn't trade much, and usually there are only two market makers: you and another (we'll call her Jo). She's sharp, and she competes well to trade against customer orders that come in. Your model has Veldt valued at 54.35 ZAR (South African rand). You're going to start quoting the stock, so you're about to turn on your machine making a market 54.25 - 54.45 (1000x)3. Before you turn on, you check the current market and notice that Jo has already turned on and she's making her market 53.50 - 54.00 (2000x). If you were to turn on your machine, your market would cross her market, and you would buy 1000 shares from her for 54.00. You now need to make a decision. Whose model do you believe more, yours or Jo's? If you believe yours, you should turn on your machine, trade at 54.00, and expect to make money. If you believe Jo's model, you should adjust your own model parameters to match her market and turn on, making a similar market to hers. What to do? As with many dichotomies, this is a false one. And as with many decision processes, Bayesian reasoning lights the way… …Jo presumably believes Veldt is worth around 53.75 (the average of her bid and offer). But how confident is she in her belief? The width of her market can give you a clue. It's 0.50 ZAR, whereas yours was going to be 0.20 ZAR wide. All other things equal, you should think that Jo only has 40% (0.20/0.50) of the confidence in her fair value as you do in yours. On some absolute scale of confidence, you can say you had a belief-strength of 100 in your fair value of 54.35 (before seeing Jo's market), and Jo has a belief-strength of 40 in her fair value of 53.75 (before seeing yours). And it turns out the weighted average of these two beliefs is quite a reasonable way to combine them: 100/140 * 54.35 + 40/140 * 53.75 = 54.18. Your updated fair value, having seen Jo's market, is thus 54.18 ZAR. This procedure is a quick, heuristic, and reduced version of Bayesian belief-updating, and a good reference on the subject is A.L. Barker's 1995 paper. After updating, you now believe that the stock is worth 54.18. Assuming your trading costs, risk limits, and return requirements are satisfied, buying 1000 shares for 54.00 is a good trade. Naively, you might just put out a 54.00 bid for 1000 shares, trade with half the 2000 share offer, and hope to collect your expected-value ZAR. In practice, however, you might be able to make even more. If Jo is making a 0.50 wide market, maybe she'd be willing to sell lower than 54.00. It's conceivable that if you put out a 53.90 bid for 1000 shares, Jo will sell at that price, and you collect an extra 100 ZAR! Of course, Jo could react differently. She could see your bid and use that information to change her market, in much the same way you did before turning on. These are difficult decisions, ones where experience with the product and the market make a big difference in being able to eke out a little extra edge. Let's play it safe however and pay 54.00 for 1000 shares. You trade, and Jo reacts by immediately canceling her market. This is not an uncommon occurrence in illiquid stocks, especially in emerging markets, so you're not too surprised. You wait a couple of minutes, mentally visualizing Jo in front of her six monitors, evaluating her trade and her model. Finally, she turns back on. Her new market is 53.50 - 54.05 (10000x)! You reason that Jo has seen that someone (you) disagrees with her valuation of the stock. Jo is a good Bayesian like you, and so she has incorporated that information into her model and updated her beliefs about the fair value of the stock. Her updated belief is that she now wants to sell even more stock, at a marginally higher price. Clearly, she almost entirely discounts the information you've communicated to her with your trade. How should you react? It seems fairly clear that, assuming Jo is not a crazy or incompetent market maker (usually a fair assumption), your trade was a bad one. You bought 1000 shares, when in retrospect, you would have wanted to buy much less, probably zero. Imagine instead that Jo had turned back on with a market of 54.00 - 54.50 (1000x). Her reaction now clearly indicates the information you gave her with your trade is valuable, and she has adjusted her beliefs accordingly. Your trade was probably a good one. Don't you wish you had bought all 2000 shares on offer? No matter what Jo's reaction is, you will be unhappy with your trade. Note that Jo will be unhappy too, since retrospectively she should have either made her initial market bigger or smaller. Welcome to the joyous world of trading!” Whether or not you make money, you have regrets! If you profited, you could have made more. If you lost money, you shouldn’t have made the trade at all. Like death and taxes, you can’t avoid adverse selection. Lebron continues to highlight a few areas of trading that have adverse selection problems. First, IPOs. If you buy the stock in an IPO, you expect the share price to “pop” on the first day of trading. However, if others also have this expectation, the round will be oversubscribed. You can only get the quantity of shares that you bid for when the market doesn’t think the shares will go up. So if you are able to get the shares that you want, the IPO is likely a dud. See also: Venture Capital fundraising. Second, powerful entities that change the rules of the game while you’re playing. Exchanges nullify “erroneous” trades. Brokerages limit buying. Anyone who tried to buy GameStop stock on Robinhood on January 28, 2021, knows this form of adverse selection all too well. Lebron also highlights “special trades”, in which you should throw the “normal rules” out of the window. This advice generalizes to other areas of life: “The normal rules do not apply. If you remove yourself from our usual routine, if you think hard and clearly about the specific situation, maybe you can do something good. Perhaps even great. Others will be paralyzed by inaction, but perhaps you won’t be. Crises can be opportunities.” 3: Risk Take only the risks you’re being paid to take. Hedge the others. In trading, as in life, you can make the right call in expected value terms but still lose due to randomness. Some of that randomness is avoidable. Some of it is not — and can be accounted for by hedging. Here, Lebron encourages us to rely on multiple risk measures and actively seek to understand the risks that we might be subject to. That’s all well and good in the world of finance, with derivatives contracts. But how might this apply in other areas of life? If you work for a publicly traded company and are compensated in stock, sell your shares as soon as you receive them. This is not because I don’t expect the share price of Microsoft/Meta/Apple/etc. to go up. The stock may very well outperform the market. But you are not being compensated for the added risk that you take on here. Your employment prospects at Microsoft/Meta/Apple/etc. are highly correlated with the share price. When the share price is down is when layoffs happen. Former Enron employees can chime in here. Similarly, it makes sense to hedge anything that is outside of your control. Let’s say you’ve decided the crypto bear market of 2023 is a great time to start a new crypto company. Your success depends on things within your control, such as: Your idea
Inline links: pay millions of dollars to trade with retail, keep our identities small, 2, market makers, 3
Etc. It might make sense to short the overall tech sector or a basket of publicly traded crypto-related companies so that your trade of time and foregone income to start your new crypto company is associated with only the risks you can control. But some risks you can’t hedge. These are the more interesting ones. There is counterparty risk (your trading partner blows up), liquidity risk (the market you used to hedge dries up), or even political risk: “Living in the developed world, it’s easy to fall into the seductive assumption that the rule of law applies strongly everywhere. This is far from the case. A foreigner trading in an emerging market is frequently among the first “victims” of any political turmoil.” Lebron is meticulous in the ways that he thinks about risk. He highlights that in the markets, you need to be exceedingly paranoid to survive: “Certainly, the modern compendium of mental illnesses (DSM-5) takes a dim view of people who think everyone is out to get them. Yet financial markets are different: people really are out to get you, after all.” I don’t think enough people consider risk and the hedges you can take in the context of a career. I’ve spent the past several years working at startups, where I’ve placed a hugely levered career bet. I’m trading my time and the opportunity cost of another job to work at my current employer. My salary, stock options, expertise, and social capital that I build from working 10 hours per day is fundamentally long (and has risks associated with): The tech industry
My Left Kidney
October 27, 2023 · Original source
On the other hand, I discussed this with my uncle, a nephrologist (kidney doctor), who says he sees suspiciously many patients who donated kidneys 30+ years ago and now have serious kidney disease. None of these studies have followed subjects for 30+ years, and although they can statistically extend their projections, something weird might happen after many decades that deviates from what you would get by just extrapolating the earlier trend. I was eventually able to find Ibrahim et al, which follows some kidney donors for as long as 30-40 years. They find no negative deviation from trend after the 20 year mark. Even up to 35-40 years, donors continue to have less kidney disease than the average non-donor.
Inline links: Ibrahim et al
This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence.
This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence. Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney. IV. Something else happened that month. On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”. But during the flurry of intakes, screenings, and evaluations that UCSF gave me that month, the doctors asked “so what made you want to donate?” And I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to this one, so I blurted out “Have you heard of effective altruism?” I expected the worst. But the usual response was “Oh! Those people! Great, no further explanation needed.” When everyone else abandoned us, the organ banks still thought of us as those nice people who were always giving them free kidneys. We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out. This is surprising, because kidney donation is only medium effective, as far as altruisms go4. The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years. This is great - my grandfather died of kidney disease, and 10 - 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about $5,000 - $10,000 to produce this many QALYs through bog-standard effective altruist interventions, like buying mosquito nets for malarial regions in Africa. In a Philosophy 101 Thought Experiment sense, if you’re going to miss a lot of work recovering from your surgery, you might as well skip the surgery, do the work, and donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead5. Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. For their work, they got a million sneering thinkpieces on how “EA just takes people’s money to buy castles, then sit in them wearing crowns and waving scepters and laughing at poor people”. I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in the Calcutta slums sounds horrible - so anyone who does it must be really charitable (regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped). Owning a castle is the opposite of suffering - it sounds great - therefore it is fake charity (no matter how much good you do with the castle). This heuristic isn’t terrible. If you’re suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you, and you’re obviously not doing it for personal gain. If you do charity in a way that benefits you (like gets you a castle), then the personal gain aspect starts looking suspicious. The problem is the people who elevate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do. And it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways, instead of thinking about what will actually help others. But getting back to the point: kidney donation has an unusually high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gains. So why do EAs keep doing it? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll speak for myself. It starts with wanting, just once, do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spent on improving your self-image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it’s not like there’s anything else you can do with that spare kidney. Still, it’s not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristics as everyone else’s. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it’s hard to make your emotions track what you know is right and not what the rest of the world is telling you. The last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart. You want to do just one good thing that you’ll feel unreservedly good about, and where you know somebody’s going to be directly happy at the end of it in a way that doesn’t depend on a giant rickety tower of assumptions. Dylan Matthews wrote: As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city. So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one. …and it really resonated. Everything else I try to do, there’s a little voice inside of me which says “Maybe the haters are right, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re just doing the easy things. Maybe you’re no good after all, maybe you’ll never be able to figure any of this out. Maybe you should just give up.” The Talmud is very clear: that voice is called the evil inclination, and it dwells in the left kidney. There is only one way to shut it off forever. I was ready. V. You might not be a masochist. But hospitals are sadists. They want to hear you beg. After I submitted the donation form, I was evaluated by a horde of indistinguishable women. They all had titles like “Transplant Coordinator”, “Financial Coordinator”, and “Patient Care Representative”. Several were social workers; one was a psychiatrist. They would see me through a buggy version of Zoom that caused various parts of their body to suddenly turn into the UCSF logo, and they all had questions like “Are you sure you want to do this?” and “Are you going to regret this later?” and “Is anyone pressuring you to do this?” and “Are you sure you want to do this?” After clearing that gauntlet came the tests. Blood tests - I think I must have given between 20 and 50 vials of blood throughout the screening process. Urine tests - both the normal kind where you pee in a cup, and a more involved kind where you have to store all your urine for 24 hours in a big jug, then take it to the lab. “Urinate into a jug” ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but some of the labs have overly complicated jugs that I, with my mere MD, couldn’t always get right - hence my experience accidentally pouring urine on myself in an Uber. Then came the big guns. Echocardiogram. MRI. One of my urine tests was slightly off, so I also got a nuclear kidney scan, where they injected radioactive liquid in me and monitored how long it took to come out the other end (I remember asking a friend “Can I use your bathroom? My urine might be slightly radioactive today, but it shouldn’t be enough to matter.”) Finally, five months after I originally applied, I got a phone call from the Transplant Coordinator. The test results were in, and . . . I had been rejected because I’d had mild childhood OCD. This was something I’d mentioned offhandedly during one of the psych evaluations. As a child, I used to touch objects in odd patterns that only made sense to me. I got diagnosed with OCD, put on SSRIs for a while, finally did therapy at age 15, hadn’t had any problems since. I still go back on SSRIs sometimes when I’m really stressed, and will grudgingly admit to the occasional odd-pattern-touching when no one’s looking. But it’s nothing anyone would know about if I didn’t tell them! It was mild even at age 15, and it’s been close-to-nonexistent for the past twenty years! Now I’m a successful psychiatrist who owns his own psychiatry practice and helps other people with the condition! I told them all this. They didn’t care. I asked them if there was anything I could do. They said maybe I could go to therapy for six months, then apply again. I asked them what kind of therapy was indicated for mild OCD that’s been in remission for twenty years. They sounded kind of surprised to learn there were different types of therapy and said whatever, just talk to someone or something. I asked them how frequent they thought the therapy needed to be. They sounded kind of surprised to learn that therapy could have different frequencies, and said, you know, therapy, the thing where you talk to someone. I asked them if they actually knew anything about OCD, psychotherapy, or mental health in general, or if they had just vaguely heard rumors that some people were bad and crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions, and that a ritual called “therapy” could absolve one of this impurity. They responded as politely as possible under the circumstances, but didn’t change their mind. I wasn’t going to waste an hour a week for six months, and spend thousands of dollars of my own extremely-not-reimbursed-by-UCSF money, to see a randomly-selected therapist for a condition I’d gotten over twenty years ago, just so I could apply again and get rejected a second time. This was one of the most infuriating and humiliating things that’s ever happened to me. We throw around a lot of terms like “stigma” and “paternalism”, and I’ve worked with patients who have dealt with all these issues (it’s UCSF in particular a surprising amount of the time!). But I was still surprised how much it hurt when it happened to me. Being denied the right to control your own body because of some meaningless diagnosis on a chart somewhere is surprisingly frustrating, even compared to things that should objectively be worse. I thought I was going to be able to do a good deed that I’d been fantasizing about for years, and some jerk administrator torpedoed my dreams because I had once, long ago, had mild mental health issues. So I gave up. I spent the next few weeks unleashing torrents of anti-UCSF abuse at anyone who would listen. This turned out to be very productive! When I was unleashing a torrent of anti-UCSF abuse to Josh Morrison of WaitlistZero, he asked if I’d tried other hospitals. I hadn’t. I’d assumed they were all in cahoots. But Josh said no, each hospital had their own evaluation process. Weill Cornell, a hospital in NYC, was one of the best transplant centers in the country, and had a reputation for fair and thoughtful pre-donor screening. Why didn’t I talk to them? NYC was far away, and I hate to travel, but I was just angry enough to accept. At this point I’d forgotten whatever good altruistic motivations I might have originally had and was fueled entirely by spite. Getting my kidney taken out somewhere else felt like it would be a sort of victory over UCSF. So I went for it. Cornell was lovely. They tried to do as much of the process as they could via Californian intermediaries, so that I only had to fly to New York twice. Their psychiatrist evaluated me, listened to me explain my weak history of OCD, then treated me like a reasonable adult who tells the truth and can handle his own medical decisions. They were concerned that I sometimes self-prescribed Lexapro to deal with anxiety. But we agreed on a compromise: I found another psychiatrist, let her give me the exact same prescription of Lexapro at a much higher cost to my insurance, and that resolved the problem. So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12. VI. I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep. There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked. Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery. A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country. . . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice. Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle. VII. In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%? Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one. This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process. 20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it. (obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint6.) So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it7. When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you! VIII. The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year. Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance. My kidney donation “mentor”8 Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+. (the libertarian in me would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal) This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to still have all of your organs. This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important. If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.9 Feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com if you have questions about the process. 1Further perspective: I’m 38, which gives me a 2/million total chance of dying per day. So the likelihood that I would die during my kidney operation equals the likelihood that I would die during a randomly chosen two months of everyday life. 2Maybe, kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so close to background that it’s hard to adjust for possible confounders. So the first scientists to study the problem just drew a line through their high-radiation data points and extended it to the low radiation levels - ie if 1 Sievert caused one thousand extra cancers, probably 1 milli-Sievert would cause one extra cancer. This is called the Linear Dose No Threshold (LDNT) model, and has become a subject of intense and acrimonious debate. Some people think that at some very small dose, radiation stops being bad for you at all. Other people think maybe at low enough doses radiation is good for you - see this claim that the atomic bomb “elongated lifespan” in survivors far enough away from the blast. If this were true, CTs probably wouldn’t increase cancer risk at all. I didn’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to take a firm position, and I noticed eminent scientists on both sides, so I am using the more cautious estimate here. 3I told them I had an aunt who died of radiation-induced cancer. It’s true, but I feel grubby for bringing her into this; I thought doctors would be more likely to listen to an emotional story than cold logic. 4EAs have been debating the exact effectiveness of kidney donations for a long time. You can find good skeptical arguments by Jeff Kaufman and Derek Shiller, and good arguments in favor by Alexander Berger and Tom Ash. 5Outside of Philosophy 101 thought experiments, there’s a nonprofit that will often reimburse you for lost wages from your donation. 6Self-modifying into a person who can act boldly without social permission is a more general solution and has many other advantages. But the long version involves living a full life of accumulating moral wisdom, and the short version starts with removing guardrails that are there for good reasons. 7But here are some practical points you might not already appreciate: You shouldn’t have to pay much money. If, like me, you need to travel (eg to New York), kidney related charities will reimburse your travel costs (in theory, I haven’t yet proven this, and a few costs were illegible and I decided not to submit them).
Inline links: bumpy, 4, 5 - 7 extra years of life, improves quality of life, creates a “chain”, $5,000 - $10,000, 5, sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking, WaitlistZero, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7c71!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cf5218-6398-4dfb-91a3-d5fc7989b754_765x642.png, polls, 5,000, 40,000, Manifest journalism panel, 6, filling out a form, 7, usual, 8, the, here, 9, 1, 2, Linear Dose No Threshold, this claim, 3, 4, Jeff Kaufman, Derek Shiller, Alexander Berger, Tom Ash, 5, 6, 7
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money1, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities.
Inline links: 1
Mark Webb, $5,000, to study land reform. You might know Mark better as ACX commenter sclmlw, and you might remember land reform from my review of How Asia Works as a key part of the process by which countries move up the development ladder. There are a few organizations working on lobbying for land reform on a political level. Mark wants to try something different and just buy land directly. This would be very expensive to do at scale, but I talked to Mark and he has a pretty well-thought-out plan to start small, prove the concept, and gradually court bigger and bigger funders. I am honestly a little skeptical, but Mark has put a lot of thought into this project, and it’s not like anyone else’s land reform ideas are working very quickly, so I’ve agreed to grant a starting $5,000 to help him get started.
Inline links: my review of How Asia Works
Kurtis Lockhart, $100,000, to help build a campus for the African School of Economics in Fumba, Zanzibar. We talked recently about the difficulty of using charity to accelerate market development in lower-income countries, so I was delighted to come across such a perfect opportunity. I’m especially excited about being able to do this in Fumba, the Charter Cities Institute’s “flagship new cities project” in Africa.
Inline links: the difficulty of using charity to accelerate market development, “flagship new cities project”
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: shai zilberman Contact Info: dizinteria[at]walla[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 19th, 05:00 PM Location: The Goldmund book store located at the talpiot market on ekron 6 street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSclSIRSpdSJ [ignore this part] 6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Looking forward to seeing ya'll at our meetup! Feel free to bring along anyone/anything if you'd like—everyone is welcome. To help us plan better, please RSVP via email or whatsapp (detailed here) so we can ensure we have enough space and refreshments for everyone. See you there!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39
Contact: Mark Contact Info: markgilmour[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 10:00 AM Location: Cornwall Park Band Rotunda Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VMP4Q3Q+RR Notes: Bring kids if relevant, feel free to bring some nibbles.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VMP4Q3Q+RR
Contact: Jiri Nadvornik Contact Info: nadvornik[d ot]jiri[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 26th, 06:00 PM Location: Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/835029216562521/ Denmark COPENHAGEN, DENMARK Contact: Søren Elverlin Contact Info: soeren[dot]elverlin[a t]gm ail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau Notes: RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ, https://www.facebook.com/groups/835029216562521/, https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GFJ, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xsAqbxvT8PD8kCgcr/astralcodexten-lesswrong-meetup-5jau
Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
September 20, 2024 · Original source
“The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.
For Eldred fought like a frank hunter That killeth and goeth home; And Mark had fought because all arms Rang like the name of Rome.
Therefore is Mark forgotten, That was wise with his tongue and brave; And the cairn over Colan crumbled, And the cross on Eldred's grave.
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Sha Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Tuesday, May 6th, 5:00 PM Location: We'll be in the goldmund bookstore , at ekron 6 in the talpiot market area, and I will be wearing a batik/Hawaiian shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSc [remove this bit] lSIRSpdSJ6T5VJT2QAD Notes: Please RSVP on whatsapp/our group email so I know how many people will participate
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C
Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM Location: Sarona market, grass area next to Max Brenner Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+PQ2 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: Everyone is welcome, feel free to bring snacks, a large secure location is nearby in case of a missile alert.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+PQ2, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361
Contact: Mark Contact Info: markgilmour[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM Location: Cakes & Ladders, 173 Symonds St, Auckland. I'll have a small sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VMP4QP6+WC Group Link: Email me for an invite to the WhatsApp group Notes: We have a small existing meetup group, if you are reading this then you should absolutely come along and check it out. You should RSVP so you feel obligated to follow through :p
Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VMP4QP6+WC
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
October 01, 2025 · Original source
Some Fatimologists say the corpus of testimonies is remarkably consistent; others argue it is completely self-contradictory.
Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry. …then almost every testimonial contains some elements of the consensus story, in approximately the correct order. The case for self-contradiction is that very few testimonials contain all six elements: most are a random subset of those claims. Also, nobody can agree on which colors were involved in (4), or in which order. A believer might argue that if you encounter six different miracles in close succession, they all sort of blend together and you might forget one or two in your accounting. Or you might turn to your friend and ask what they think, and while you’re not looking you miss part of what’s going on. A skeptic might argue that if the sun falls to earth and appears seconds away from crushing you and everyone around you is screaming because they think it’s the end of the world, approximately 100% of people should mention that in their account of what happened that day, and if it’s more like 50%, then you have a problem. Here are some interestingly discordant testimonies that I came across during my search: Antonio dos Ramos Mira, local resident: A quarter of an hour after the rain stopped, he saw that huge crowd of people, in great clamor and almost all kneeling, facing the sun, which had unusual signs, turning around, trembling, observing at the same time that a yellow-reddish color had appeared around him, which was reflected throughout the crowd and on the horizon, with at the same time a weakening of light and an increase in temperature. The crowd, even the unbelievers, said that it was a known miracle. This is in the third person because the priest and clerk conducting the investigation are summarizing an account being given by an illiterate peasant. The witness names one color - yellow-reddish - and doesn’t mention the sun falling to earth. Antonio Maria Menitra, local property owner: It had rained heavily in the morning, and a little after noon, the rain stopped, and he observed a large crowd of people kneeling down and looking at the sun. He also looked and saw different colors in the sun and in the people. No mention of the sun dancing, spinning, shooting off sparks, or approaching the earth. Joao Martia Lucio Serra, lawyer: Already in some candid souls arose the fear that the foretold event might not occur, when suddenly the entire immense crowd stirred at the seer's voice in a significant brouhaha of astonishment and wonder, raising their heads to the sky, where thousands of eyes gazed in amazement at the sun in full blue, visible to all, without the intensity of its rays harming the retina and hindering vision, crowned with various colors, in a rapid rotation, at times seeming to detach itself from the celestial vault, approaching the earth. The spectators, looking at each other, represented themselves to each other as yellow, and on the horizon, reddish-orange, wherever their eyes looked, they saw beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances, and reflecting on the earth. Nobody else mentions the “beams of dim light, affecting an oval shape, seemingly placed at equal distances”. Maria Augusta Saraiva Vieira de Campos, local resident: Our sense of discouragement was profound, when suddenly we heard from all sides: Miracle! Look at the sun! The rain had stopped as if by magic; hats were closed; a warmth was felt as if we had entered a heated greenhouse, and the disk of the sun began to be seen, clearly discernible in the brownish layer that covered the entire sky. The heat increased, and the sun seemed to sink lower and lower, presenting new and varied changes. We saw a silvery veil, rounded in shape, as if it were a full moon; shortly after, it turned to vivid purple, then red, then emerald green, and finally took on its original color. Cries were heard from all sides as it emerged from the sun like a white, shining snow-like shape, without harming the retina, coming toward us, returning to the sun again, and finally hiding for the third time among the clouds. Everyone wept, and prayers, supplications, and acts of faith were heard from many mouths. Now something is coming down off the sun, instead of the sun itself coming down. Also, the colors are purple → red → green. Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, mathematics professor: 1st: The phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes; 2nd: The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen; 3rd: The sun, three times during this period, manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels; 4th: This rotational movement of the sun's edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less; 5th: Next, the sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor, impossible to be seen with the eyes; 6th: It was shortly after noon and near the zenith (which is very important) that these facts occurred. Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this? We saw this account earlier, and in most ways it matches the consensus story. But even though he’s trying to be methodical, he totally fails to mention the sun descending to crush the world. Instead, it’s the rotational movement that happens three times. Also, the colors are violet → orange Luis Antonio Vieira de Magalhaes e Vasconcelos, nobleman: I was absolutely convinced that I would see nothing. I then remembered, as I had remembered many times before, that principle of Gustave Le Bon, which boils down to the hypnotic current that dominates it. I had to be cautious, not to be influenced. This friend of mine, taking out his watch, said to me: there are five minutes left, at one o'clock look at the sun, that was the time announced by the shepherdesses, then you will tell me. My friends shout to me: look, look, but at first I only saw clouds drifting by, leaving the sun uncovered. Suddenly, I see an intensely pink rim, surrounding the sun, which resembled a disc of dull silver, as someone once said, while giving me the impression that it was moving from its original position. Diaphanous, vaporous clouds, somewhat purple, somewhat orange, permeated the air. At various points along the horizon, contrasting with the leaden hue of the sky, I also saw pink and yellow spots. The clamor grew louder and louder. This didn't last seconds: perhaps minutes. As I observed these manifestations, which I never doubted for a moment were due to the Infinite Omnipotence of God, an indescribable impression came over me. Here are the silver disc and the unusual colors (here “pink, purple, and orange”). But the colors are now merely “clouds” and “spots”, and there is nothing about spinning, dancing, or falling to earth. Antonio de Paula, pilgrim from Lisbon: Suddenly the priest looks at the sun and says that the sun in eclipse was not like that. The deponent also looked and saw that the sun gave no light; a white mist hung over it, it was a dull moon. The sun was to the left, with the rest of the sky obscured. Taking his eyes off the sun, he saw the people a very bright red color; and he exclaimed: "Oh, gentlemen, how the people are all red!" And the priest replied: "Are they red scarves?" To which he remarked: "How can that be? So they had all agreed to have red scarves on their backs?!" Then the people appeared the color of gold. The sun's rotational movements were not visible to them. The people on that occasion cried out loudly, kneeling with their hands raised, shouting for Our Lady, not caring about the thick mud, repeatedly invoking Our Lady. The people's impression was extraordinary. This person saw the silver moon-like sun and the color changes (here “red” and “gold”), but nothing else. He explicitly mentions not seeing the rotation. Luis de Andrade de Silva: The globe of the sun, similar to a disc of dull silver, rotated around an imaginary axis, and at that moment, it seemed to descend through the atmosphere, towards the earth, accompanied at times by an extraordinary brightness, and by an intense heat. The sun's rays were said to have yellow, green, blue and purple colors, but I only noticed the yellow color. After a few minutes, during which these phenomena occurred, no one could look at the sun anymore, because its rays hurt the retina. Only those who witnessed these phenomena can evaluate what happened then, but cannot describe them exactly. He says that although he heard other people mention yellow, green, blue, and purple colors, he only saw yellow. Dominic Reis, American traveler: The sun started to roll from one place to another place, and changed blue, yellow, all colors! Then we see the sun come toward the children, toward the tree. Everybody was hollering out. Some start to confess their sins, ‘cause there were no Priests around there . . . even my mother grabbed me to her and started to cry, saying, ‘It is the end of the world! And we see the sun come right into the trees. And then the little children get up and turn around to the people and told the people, ‘Pray and pray hard because everything is going to be all right.’ This person says the sun didn’t merely fall to earth, but went to the children (ie the child-seers) and the tree (the oak where the Virgin was appearing) in particular. At one point, it is specifically located “right [in] the trees”. But in this account, I am getting the impression that the “sun” is some sort of UFO-like object, maybe the size of a large helicopter, which is in a particular place. I can’t tell if other witnesses also thought this and just didn’t describe it clearly, or whether this testimony is discordant. The interviewer (Haffert again) notices this, and asks whether Reis really thinks it was the sun; Reis gives a weird non-answer (“Well, for my part it was the sun . . . but whether just a light or not, there was something there. I know for sure.”) Dominic Reis, continued from elsewhere in his account: As soon as the sun went back in the right place the wind started to blow real hard, but the trees didn’t move at all. The wind was blow, blow and in few minutes the ground was as dry as this floor here. Even our clothes had dried. We were walking here and there, and our clothes... we don’t feel at all. The clothes were dry and looked as though they had just come from the laundry. I believed. I thought: Either I’m out of my mind or this was a miracle, a real miracle. Although many people said their clothes were miraculously dry, Reis is the only one who mentions a miraculous wind. Everyone else says their clothes were dried by a miraculous heat. Reis does not mention heat. Maria dos Santos On October 13th, when Lucia said: "Our Lady is coming!", one of the deponent's daughters, named Maria, was standing on a rock, a meter from the holm oak tree, on the east side, to guard the bow so the people wouldn't damage it. The girl felt a blow to her face, saw a beautiful light near her, and cried out: "Oh! Our Lady!" The deponent looked and saw a star, a ball, not entirely round, like an egg, very beautiful, with the colors of the celestial rainbow, but much more vivid, with a tail of one and a half meters of brilliant colors. It passed very quickly and close to the holm oak tree, and disappeared a hand's breadth from the ground. She saw the sun sinking low. This is maybe the same UFO-like object that Dominic is reporting. In some of the other Fatima apparitions, the Virgin appears to those who cannot see her true form as a ball of light that comes to the tree where the child-seers are waiting. So maybe there were two things going on - the sun in the sky, and a ball of light (the apparition itself) heading back and forth to the tree. Still, if these are really two different phenomena, only these two accounts mention the second one. I don’t really have much that is non-obvious to say about these discordant testimonies. Aside from the ones with the UFO-like object, they seem about as discordant as you would expect from panicked people seeing a real inexplicable phenomenon - with the exception of some people who are absolutely terrified by the falling sun, and other people who don’t mention it at all. 1.4 Dalleur And The Distant Testimonies Maybe the only interesting advance in Fatimology in the last fifty years is Dalleur (2021), the focus of Muse’s Substack post. Dalleur is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical University in Rome, but clearly a multi-talented individual. He seems to lean toward the “miracle” explanation, but asks a fruitful question that nobody else seems to be considering: if it was a miracle, how was it implemented? That is, the real sun obviously didn’t change color or move - this would have been visible around the world, and would probably have fried the Earth. So what did God or the Virgin do, exactly, to produce the appearance of a moving sun? We can imagine two possibilities. First, they could have implemented the miracle through a “prophetic vision”, where they inspire a sort of mass hallucination in the onlookers. Second, they could have created some kind of objectively-real fiery wheel object in the skies above Portugal, and arranged for people to mistake it for the sun. If they did the second, we should be able to pin down where exactly they created it by triangulating distant testimonies Dalleur and I both found four of these: Joaquim Lourenco, schoolboy, 9 miles from Fatima: I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zigzag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment. It was a crowd which had gathered outside our local village school and we had all left classes and run into the streets because of the cries and surprised shouts of men and women who were in the street in front of the school when the miracle began. There was an unbeliever there who had spent the morning mocking the ‘simpletons’ who had gone off to Fatima just to see an ordinary girl. He now seemed paralyzed, his eyes fixed on the sun. He began to tremble from head to foot, and lifting up his arms, fell on his knees in the mud, crying out to God. But meanwhile the people continued to cry out and to weep, asking God to pardon their sins. We all ran to the two chapels in the village, which were soon filled to overflowing. During those long moments of the solar prodigy, objects around us turned all colors of the rainbow... When the people realized that the danger was over, there was an explosion of joy. Albano Barros, young boy, 12 miles away: I was watching sheep, as was my daily task, and suddenly there, in the direction of Fatima, I saw the sun fall from the sky. I thought it was the end of the world. I was so distracted that I remember nothing but the falling sun. I cannot even remember whether I took the sheep home, whether I ran, or what I did. Guilhermina Lopes da Silva, local resident, 16 miles away: I could not go [to Fatima] because my husband was an unbeliever. I was looking toward the mountain at noon when suddenly I saw a great red flash in the sky. I called two men who were working for us. They, of course, saw it, too. Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda… Dalleur pins these on a map, which I’ve edited slightly for clearer labeling: The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun: was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima]. …ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map. Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event: He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°. The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning. So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space. The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude. What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”? 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged: “The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous. I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge. Am I hallucinating? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll: Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images: I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience. So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure. In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation. “The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin? Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time: Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion. If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not. “The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this? If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed. If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth. Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world. Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement. When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side. Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these: Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: Dalleur (2021), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NeXK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffebd07d1-3975-4603-8c98-8ca3707ec2b8_612x447.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SjQ8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79b42000-faa4-443f-8a5c-7f000582410e_657x459.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XQWF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f301773-b8b8-45c1-99c3-908c5b5f5524_1145x1192.png, Nepal chose its prime minister, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-qHG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6cbf5f49-7c02-4d1d-9b2c-b3ea2ff962f5_656x235.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AM8u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F852624ae-e398-4a8a-9cd7-44a99710c478_612x408.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GnUV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b2c6498-11a6-4276-8a66-0555ca5141e5_1296x730.webp, John Touhey’s project, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ybv5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6509924b-583f-4686-8ba9-cd4185892199_1012x463.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!12sU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d21e8d2-ad0d-4a15-9ad0-0048338bcb33_1012x470.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases
The furthest report is 34 km (21 miles) away from Fatima, so Dalleur concludes the phenomenon was visible from about this distance. Further, all witnesses outside Fatima said the phenomenon was coming from the direction of Fatima, not from the direction of the sun (which in some cases was directly opposite Fatima)! By triangulating the accounts, Dalleur estimates that the miraculous light source which appeared to be the sun: was probably located above the hills a few km south of the Cova da Iria [in Fatima]. …ie at the spot indicated by the black sun sign in the purple circle on the map. Dalleur moves on to analyzing photographs of the event: He tries to estimate the angle of the shadows, and, from there, the angle of the light source. I cannot entirely follow his calculations, but he finds that there are two light sources - a diffuse source at about 42° elevation, and a point source at about 30°. The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning. So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space. The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude. What, who did you think God drafted to play “terrifying spinning fiery disc”? 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies The multitude of testimonies of Fatima may trick us into thinking we understand what the miracle looked like. This complacency deserves to be challenged: “The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous. I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge. Am I hallucinating? I decided to resolve this the same way the new government of Nepal chose its prime minister - via Discord poll: Here’s one of the hits for “sun behind clouds” on Google Images: I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience. So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained? A few people argue that (although it was a generally cloudy day), the mystery is that the clouds were nowhere near the sun at this point, so they couldn’t have been causing the unusual pallor. But the majority of witnesses say the clouds were absolutely near, or veiling, or even covering the sun. Stanley Jaki makes this a central point of his book, saying that “The great majority of eyewitness accounts, and certainly the most important ones, contain emphatic references to the continued presence of clouds.” I’m going kind of crazy here. I notice that the holdouts on my Discord poll disproportionately come from my non-Californian friends - is this rarer in other locales? I’m not sure. In any case, I will not count this as being one of the mysterious aspects of the miracle requiring explanation. “The sun was spinning”: How can a featureless disc be seen to spin? Despite this being one the most commonly-reported aspects of the miracle, almost nobody explains this point. Some say that only the rim was spinning, but this has the same problem. However, several people compared the sun to a “firework wheel”, also called a “Catherine wheel”. Here is a video of this object, which apparently was well-known in the Portugal of the time: Stanley Jaki relates a story about a priest having this same question and grilling a witness; the witness finally claimed that the sun traced a circle (like a basket in a Ferris wheel) rather than merely rotating. But this contradicts several claims that it “rotated around its own axis”, and I wonder if the witness was intimidated by the seeming contradiction in her story and was trying to weasel out of her own confusion. If we treat the miracle as the result of some kind of illusion, this becomes slightly easier to explain; there are plenty of visual distortions that look like a spinning motion, and since it is the visual field itself that is spinning, rather than any particular object, it can be seen whether the object is a disc or not. “The sun seemed to fall to earth”: In what sense did it seem like this? If the sun had simply gone down in the sky, people would have said it was setting, the same way it does every evening. One witness does say this. Most other witnesses say it was terrifying, and they felt like they (as opposed to other people living near the horizon) were about to be crushed. If the sun had simply gotten bigger - wouldn’t people have just said it looked bigger? Isn’t this a more natural way to record that the sun’s disc seemed to expand? Fr. Jaki combs his selection of witness accounts (larger than mine), but is only able to find one person who says “it got bigger” in so many words, compared to the dozens who talk about it looming, or falling to earth. Some people say that the sun “left the sky” or “left its place in the sky” at this point. In what sense? If the object that appeared to be the sun at Fatima had been visible as an object of a particular size (let’s imagine it as a flying saucer), then not only would this have been remarked upon, but it would have appeared to threaten some parts of the crowd in particular (that is, a descending saucer would look like it was about to land on some specific area). But this is not the consensus description, and several people say they thought the sun might crush the entire world. Several witnesses say it approached Earth with a jerky or zig-zag motion. If I imagine something else approaching Earth - let’s say a jumbo jet or asteroid - I can tell that it’s approaching rather than getting bigger because there’s multiple components to its trajectory that let me separate size change from forward movement. When I think of this aspect, I imagine the sun very suddenly growing in size and brightness to take up a substantial fraction of the sky (maybe >50%?!), maybe with some jerky motion on the side. Although it’s hardly scientific, I was charmed by John Touhey’s project of trying to visualize the miracle by using witness descriptions as prompts for ChatGPT. His work is a year old, and so several GPT iterations out of date. When I repeat his work with the current version, I get these: Interlude: The Anti-Clerical Union As mentioned briefly before, 1910s Portugal was in a period of transition. In 1910, a group of proto-socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy. The monarchy and church had been in cahoots, so the revolutionaries cracked down on Catholicism, closing the monasteries and persecuting the churches. This was a bold move - only an upper crust of educated urbanites were proto-socialist, and 99%+ of the country identified as Catholic, albeit at various levels of religiosity. In the 1920s, conservatives would regain the upper hand, overthrow the proto-socialists and restore a pro-church dictatorship. Still, the small urban educated ruling class of 1910s Portugal was a hotbed of atheistic anti-church sentiment. Probably the child-seers of Fatima were only dimly aware of this, but their prophecies were a spark entering a powder keg, and many of the more worldly witnesses were aware of this context. While reading through Fatima-related documents, I came across some pamphlets by Grupo Anticlerical, one of the era’s leading atheist organizations. They are totally irrelevant to our primary goal of trying to figure out what’s up with the miracle. But I love them so much that I can’t resist adding one as an interlude. I have slightly edited the machine translation for clarity and readability: To defend the sacred freedom of conscience—guaranteed by the original Law of Separation of Church and State—from the furious attacks of implacable Jesuitism—the greatest enemy of all human happiness!—the Anticlerical Group was organized in this town, similar to what is being done in many parts of the country! This was necessary. They call us to fight. We present ourselves courageously! The great, formidable battle of progress against Ultramontane Reaction, of Freedom against Tyranny, of Truth against Lies is waged again with enthusiasm and ardor! The redemptive dawn that the Portuguese people saw emerge on October 5, 1910, is about to be eclipsed, intercepted by the immense flood of black cassocks!... But in the dark night that seeks to envelop Reason; where moral suffering takes on tragic proportions in a frightening asphyxiation, the Light will once again break through!... the consoling light of elevated spirits... and like a sinister scarecrow, the grim reaction will flee in terror! Liberal people! Hear us! This fight is terrible! Many of our people will perhaps be crushed and tortured on the battlefield, but what does it matter?! Every war against reaction is a holy war because it frees consciences from the clutches of their enemies!... It is the fight of Justice against Iniquity, of Love against Hate, of Good against Evil!... To the fight, then, for the Progress that makes life beautiful; for the Freedom that redeems the people; and for the science that guides us all as an eternal beacon to the Light of Truth! Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral [two Portuguese aviators who had recently flown across the Atlantic] are prodigious spirits before whom our souls kneel religiously – boldly breaking through the air with the mathematical certainty of someone who knows the path to be taken to get from one point to another determined point; flying through the immense blue as sure of their route as any of us walking on earth, they showed us that Science is not an empty word! The power of their prodigious sextant, the fruit of immense scientific lucubrations, is more real and positive than the cross of Christ painted on their device, which could not even have saved them from falling due to lack of gasoline in the middle of the sea at the mercy of the waves. Their extraordinary journey, an adventure which moved us to tears, was the most resounding scientific victory of recent times! It was, above all, a powerful affirmation of science! Let us therefore make science our religion, for scientific religion is Freedom of Thought! To be a Free Thinker is to love immortal science, eagerly waiting for it to reveal to us the truth of the great enigmas of the Universe! And only it can reveal them! People! Let us always fight! From the victory of progress, science, freedom, and free thought, will result human happiness, joy, love, fraternity, respect for women, veneration for mothers, adoration for children, affection for the elderly, protection for the sick, the unfortunate, the tortured. The victory of reaction, of clericalism, of black, cruel and ferocious Jesuitism will result in: the gallows, the acts of faith with their human destruction, persecution, exile, robbery, arson, the deflowering of women, the killing of children, the monstrous torture of all free spirits! The history of so many crimes committed in the name of God horrifies us! The Inquisition, relentlessly slaughtering, tearing, and burning the flesh of so many victims, is still today, in the twentieth century, a sinister specter haunting us!... O most holy mothers! O holy, pious mothers who so love your sweet little children! Have compassion on your beautiful little children, sacred fruits of your blessed wombs: Love Freedom! Love Liberty, O loving mothers, immaculate saints of our altar! We pray for them... for your children, who are the light of your candid eyes, the life of your life... for little children... for all children, tender rosebuds that retrogression furiously lashes, – love Liberty!. And you, O parents! Heads of families who so tremble at your loved ones, snatch them from the merciless clutches of the reactionaries who twist their brains and kill their reason! Hear us all, men, women, and children; listen: Freedom writhes in horrible convulsions... it vibrates in space, echoing from mountain to mountain, an anguished cry for help!... It is Freedom that falls, annihilated! It is Freedom that dies in the bloody clutches of Jesuitism! The Miracle of Fatima, people, is a ridiculous lie, it is a comedy, it is not religion! Come on, liberals! Let us all rise up from this criminal apathy and, without delay, fight not the religious sentiment of the Portuguese people, such a good people, a race of heroes, but rather the exploitation that clericalism is inflicting on the people, foisting upon them, at a good price, images of the saint —trademarked to avoid competition from other vampires! —the shamelessness!—and leading them, through suggestion, to wallow and drink madly, the miraculous water, foul, filthy water, full of rot, pus, and pestilent microbes that the sore flesh of the sick leaves deposited there in the washings! We, all as one man, will fight the reaction, forcing it to retreat and thus, with our efforts, we will save the Republic and the Portuguese Land from its fatal annihilation! … …anyway, Interlude over, let’s get back to the miracle. 2: The Skeptical Explanations Re-invigorated by the rousing prose of Grupo Anticlerical, can we come up with a materialist explanation for the sun miracle? 2.1: Pilgrim, Avert Thine Eyes Starting in October 1917, doubters have focused on one obvious possibility: staring at the sun is harmful to your health. If you stare too long, you go blind. If you stare just slightly less long than that . . . maybe something strange happens? Just to get a particular theory out there: everyone knows that if you stare at a bright light source for a few seconds, you get a temporary afterimage - often pink or bluish-green - on your retina. Suppose the pilgrims stared at the sun. Their eyes would inevitably make microsaccades - small natural jerking motions - and the afterimage would appear somewhere slightly different than the true sun. This might look like the sun turning pink or blue and moving in a zig-zag pattern. Believers in the miracle counter this proposal in several ways. First, although it might explain the sun changing colors and dancing, it doesn’t give an explanation for spinning, sparkling, or falling to earth and threatening to crush everybody (exactly three times in a ten minute interval, no less). Second, although witnesses describe the sun changing color, they also describe everything around them changing color to match the sunlight, which doesn’t match localized afterimages. And one scientifically-minded witness specifically describes closing his eyes to see if there was a persistent afterimage; he says there was not. Third, there are no reports of eye injuries or blindness from a crowd that was, supposedly, staring straight at the sun for ten minutes. This is a good match to witness reports (that the sun was unusually pale and didn’t hurt to look at) and with Dalleur’s theory (that it wasn’t the sun). But it’s a bad match to any theory depending on eye injuries. Fourth, this would require Portuguese people to be total idiots. Everyone already knows bright lights cause afterimages. Surely if you stare at the sun for ten minutes and get some afterimages, you’re not going to freak out and start screaming about miracles and the end of the world. Even if the peasants had somehow remained ignorant of afterimages their whole lives, the scientists and doctors in attendance wouldn’t be fooled. If we are to keep this theory, maybe we should posit some retinal phenomenon much stronger than the ones we know. Everyone thinks they know how much an illusion can fool you - “yeah, okay, obviously the cookie that looks very slightly bigger will actually be the same size” - which is exactly why the really good ones, like the Checker Shadow Illusion, come as such a shock. Squares A and B are the same color. Source: Checker shadow illusion. There’s no way around it: we need to hear from someone who has stared directly into the sun. August Meessen was a physics professor at a Catholic university, which sounds like exactly the job profile we want for this sort of thing. He found himself sufficiently interested in the Fatima miracle to stare straight into the sun for a few minutes and record what happened. From his paper: In November 2002, I looked directly into the sun, at about 4 p.m. The sun was relatively low above the horizon and its light intensity was attenuated, although the sky was clear. I was able to look right into the sun and was amazed to see that the sun was immediately converted into a grey disc, surrounded by a brilliant ring. The grey disc was practically uniform, while the surrounding ring was somewhat irregular and flamboyant, but did not extend beyond the solar disk. It coincided with its rim. I stopped the experiment, since I wanted to be prudent, but I had experienced myself the initial phase of a typical “miracle of the sun” and I could explain it. The sun became grey, since my eyes immediately responded to its great luminosity by an automatic reduction of their sensitivity. This adaptation is not simply due to the bleaching of pigments in the colour-sensitive cones of the fovea, where the image of the sun is projected, but to secondary processes. By “initial phase”, he means the part where the sun looks pale and well-defined, like a full moon. This isn’t something I think needs explanation (see above), but he sure has explained it. Moving on: In a second experiment, realized at 3 p.m. in December 2002, I looked straight at the sun during a much longer time. After some minutes, I saw impressive colours, up to 2 or 3 times the diameter of the sun. They changed, but were mainly pink, deep blue, red and green. Further away, the sky became progressively more luminous. I stopped there, since I understood that these colours resulted from the fact that the red, green and blue sensitive pigments are bleached and regenerated at different rates. This is frustratingly vague. Are the “impressive colors up to 2-3 times the diameter of the sun” just the normal aftereffects of staring at a bright object? Or something surprising even to physics professors? And the spinning? What about the motions of the sun? I didn’t see them, because I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time or my brain knew already too much. Once, after I had been looking at a very long passing train, I had (for about 30 seconds) the illusion of an opposite motion. Joseph Plateau discovered that when we look at the centre of a spiral that is rotating at some given velocity about this point, and when we stop this rotation, we see a reversed rotation. It lasts for several minutes, although in reality, there is no motion at all. This is a good example of motional after-effects. The “dance of the sun” is initiated, however, by a spontaneous generation of apparent motion. This feels suspiciously like a just-so story. His explanation for the sun falling to earth to crush everyone - which he also did not see - is equally ad hoc: A very interesting study was recently devoted to this “zoom and loom effect”. It tends to appear when the brain is confronted with the two-dimensional retinal image of an object that is situated at some unknown distance. The brain will then consider the possibility that it could come closer, by performing an illusory mental zoom, where the apparent size of the object is progressively increased. This results from the fact that evolution preserved the tendency to take into account the possibility of a dangerous approach: a rapid evasive action could be beneficial for survival. If true, it sounds like you should be able to generate this effect not just by staring at the sun (ill-advised, causes blindness), but by staring at the moon. I would like to test this, but unfortunately I am writing this on the night of a new moon; I’ll check back in two weeks. Still, I am skeptical that no human being living before 1917 AD ever figured out that staring at a celestial body long enough would make it appear to fall to earth and crush you. Compare to much gentler illusions - like how the moon looks bigger right when it starts to rise - which everybody knows about. I was able to find a thirdhand report (Fr. Stanley Jaki → G. J. Strangfeld → consultation with bishop) of another sun miracle investigator, one “Professor Dr. Stöckl” in Germany, who made a similar experiment: After almost a minute (the time varies according to the condition of the atmopshere and the momentary condition of the eyes) one thinks to see a dark blue disk in front of the sun (this is already a sign of the highly excited state of the retina). According to my experience … this dark blue disk is somewhat smaller than the solar disk, so that the edge of that disk stands out as a ring beyond that dark blue disk. Then one has right away the impression that the solar disk rotates with great speed in one or the other direction. This I have experienced often enough. All this is a subjective appearance that has nothing to do with the external world. These reports are suggestive, but weaker than all but the barest Fatima testimonials. Dr. Messeen admits as much, saying that “I didn’t look at the sun for a sufficiently long time”. Can we find people even more committed - or reckless, or masochistic - than Professors Messeen and Stöckl? Absolutely yes: there was a whole subfield of late 18th / early 19th century psychophysicists who experimented with staring at the sun for long periods, many of whom went blind. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883, went blind in 18432) summarizes their work in his aptly-named On The Contemplation Of Bright Objects. He lists twenty-six scientists who tried staring at the sun for a really long time. Most describe what we now recognize as typical retinal afterimages, and Plateau spends most of his time talking about how long these last and what colors they pass through. The only one of Plateau’s sources who reports anything even slightly interesting to us is Robert Darwin (father of Charles; cf. Secrets of the Great Families). After stating that: The author has frequently observed that when he gazed at the midday sun for a long time, until its disk appeared pale blue, he saw a bright blue specter on other objects for more than two days. …he mentions how When looking at the meridian sun as long as the eyes can well bear its brightness, the disc first becomes pale, with a luminous crescent, which seems to librate from one edge of it to the other owing to the unsteadiness of the eye. Here is pallor, and at least a hint of motion. But it’s pretty different from spinning, and not really clear how it relates to the sun miracle. Gustav Fechner (1801 - 1887, went blind in 1839) may have stared for even longer; you can read more of his story - including his ensuing insanity and subsequent attempts to found a new religion - on Adam Mastroianni’s blog. But all that he records about his ill-fated experiment is that: …after looking at the sun through homogeneously colored lenses, if you close your eyes, the primary impression remains for a long time and the entire afterimage usually disappears without a complementary coloration having clearly emerged. These people are great, and they all sound like minor Sam Kriss characters. But after whole careers dedicated to staring at the sun much longer than any normal person would ever try, they report only the barest hints of odd phenomena. Indeed, if anything they saw less of interest to the Fatimologist than Profs. Messeen and Stöckl. Worse, all of these authorities saw their phenomena after seconds to minutes of deliberate staring. Surely if it had taken a minute of staring at the sun before anything happened, some of our eyewitnesses would have mentioned this; after all, several mention that they were starting to doubt after the child-seers’ deadline had passed a few minutes earlier. But by all accounts, the miracle was near-instantaneous. Although Messeen and Stöckl’s reports of miracle-like phenomena are intriguing, it doesn’t seem like they can be the whole picture. Let’s move on. 2.2: Aurora Borealis? At This Time Of Year? In This Part Of The Country? Localized Entirely Within Your Kitchen? Could the miracle at Fatima have been some kind of weird weather phenomenon? The main argument against is that if it were a common weather phenomenon, it would not have awed and terrified tens of thousands of people. But if it were a rare weather phenomenon, then the seers’ successful prophecy that the rare weather phenomenon would happen at solar noon on October 13 1917 becomes almost as impressive as an outright miracle. The argument in favor is that dozens of people have written books and papers about this possibility, we would feel remiss if we didn’t mention them, and anyway it gives us the opportunity to look at pretty pictures of interesting weather phenomena. This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported. (source) This is a solar corona3; cloud iridescence is a related phenomenon. I don’t know how much work the exposure length is doing in this particular photo, but I’m guessing more than zero. Coronae are also very pretty, and might explain the description of wheels and colors. They seem surprisingly common for something that I can’t ever remember seeing, supposedly happening several times a year in most locations. But they don’t spin, the colors don’t change or stain the surrounding landscape, and they don’t fall to earth and crush people. Let’s keep this one as a backup option and move on. This is a dust storm. Steuart Campbell wrote a paper arguing that the miracle was caused by one of these, and I admit if I saw this I would start praying pretty hard. Dust storms can change the color of the sun (including unusual colors like green or blue). And very, very charitably, whirling dust could look like the sun itself spinning around, and the thickening and thinning of dust could look like the sun approaching or receding. But this would require a dust storm localized to a 20 mile region of Portugal which does not, technically, have any dust (and where it was, technically, raining at the time). Campbell proposes that perhaps a storm blew a 20 miles x 20 mile dust cloud from the Sahara out to the Atlantic, then onto Fatima for ten minutes during a break in the rain, then back to the Atlantic again. But I don’t think any dust storm has ever behaved in quite this way. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be at the exact moment predicted by child-seers months in advance. At this point, we might as well talk about literal meteors. The way I’m imagining it is this: as a meteor approaches Earth, it breaks up into three big parts and a host of smaller particles. They strike the atmosphere head-on, from the approximate direction of the sun. The small particles hit first and make a firework show. Then the three big pieces hit, producing multicolored fireballs (meteors can absolutely stain the sky bright colors - see the video). Finally, they burn out a few miles above the ground, , convincingly producing the appearance of the sun falling to earth and nearly striking the spectators. This could even explain the warmth and dry clothes - a local meteor strike produces a lot of heat! I like this because it’s the only one that takes seriously the facet of the event which most impressed the witnesses - the part where it looked like the sun was plummeting to earth and about to kill them. But against it: would a rain of micrometeorites really look like the sun was “dancing”, “spinning”, or “zig-zagging”? Aren’t most nearby meteor strikes very loud? (the Fatima event was, according to witnesses, silent) Don’t they usually break windows? Aren’t most meteor strikes of this size visible for hundreds of miles, not just the twenty miles from which we have witness testimonies? Wouldn’t the strike have to be remarkably head-on, and remarkable close to the position of the sun, in order to look like a solar phenomenon rather than a long streak? Aren’t most meteor fireballs visible for between a few seconds and a minute, not the ten minutes of the Fatima event4? And if there were some extremely unusual meteor strike that was the exception to everything, wouldn’t it still be pretty surprising for it to happen at the exact time and place predicted by child-seers months in advance? We come to the unpromisingly-titled Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, in which Artur Wiroski argues that Fatima was a three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces. Actually, he offhandedly mentions Fatima in three sentences, with the majority of the paper looking more like the image above - but he eventually makes it into a Guardian article where he emphasizes that yes, he is trying to explain the miracle of the sun. However, if I’m understanding him correctly, he says that his theoretical ice crystal phenomenon can only happen when the sun is at an altitude below 22 degrees. But during the Fatima miracle, the sun was at 42 degrees (and Dalleur’s mysterious light source was at 30 degrees), so none of this applies. I’ve tried to include pictures of all the phenomena I mention in this section. I failed for this one, because it’s never been spotted or photographed. It’s just some incredibly weird thing that one scientist says ice crystals might do if parameters were ever exactly right, with such a precise definition of “exactly right” that it’s never happened in real life. If it ever did happen, it probably wouldn’t be at exactly the moment predicted by child-seers several months in advance. 2.3: Everyone’s Mad Here Except You And Me Another common response calls the Sun Miracle a “mass hallucination”. Can 70,000 people really hallucinate the same thing? “Mass hallucination” on Wikipedia redirects to List Of Mass Panic Cases. The Miracle of the Sun is on there, but listed as “(disputed)” - the only item to earn such a parenthetical. The other fifty items mostly belong to three categories: A disease with unusual symptoms spreads through a population; doctors eventually pronounce it psychosomatic.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SjQ8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79b42000-faa4-443f-8a5c-7f000582410e_657x459.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XQWF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f301773-b8b8-45c1-99c3-908c5b5f5524_1145x1192.png, Nepal chose its prime minister, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-qHG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6cbf5f49-7c02-4d1d-9b2c-b3ea2ff962f5_656x235.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AM8u!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F852624ae-e398-4a8a-9cd7-44a99710c478_612x408.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GnUV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b2c6498-11a6-4276-8a66-0555ca5141e5_1296x730.webp, John Touhey’s project, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ybv5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6509924b-583f-4686-8ba9-cd4185892199_1012x463.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!12sU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d21e8d2-ad0d-4a15-9ad0-0048338bcb33_1012x470.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wkjz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcff92f63-ad21-42fa-ad6f-c412b71f8524_631x481.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mhyb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5fdf3d3-3e36-403e-95b9-f9fcbe7a06f0_1280x974.png, Checker shadow illusion, his paper, 2, Secrets of the Great Families, Adam Mastroianni’s blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvPF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30bf02a3-f57b-4a9f-a849-e7e318c65b6f_900x600.jpeg, source, 3, cloud iridescence, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y1Qt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbd9216-eb7d-4012-b114-bae56dbb0d4c_1024x681.webp, wrote a paper, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Id7a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c37c56e-bdf1-46e2-8d29-d395987be105_851x310.png, Derivation of equations of the model of the dynamic behavior of the three-dimensional atmospheric cloud of electrically charged ice crystals under the influence of electrostatic forces, a Guardian article, List Of Mass Panic Cases