Astral Codex Ten

Martin Luther King

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Martin Luther King

Article

Martin Luther King is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between May 28, 2021 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “how Martin Luther King won rights for African Americans”; “When Martin Luther King marched on Washington”; “The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s”. It most often appears alongside Wikipedia, Donald Trump, facebook.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: May 28, 2021
  • Last seen: December 01, 2023

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.

Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
The solution was actually announced two thousand years ago, by a man named Jesus. "Turn the other cheek" he said, even to your enemies. This approach has been dismissed as naive, but the truth is it's how Gandhi won India her freedom, how Martin Luther King won rights for African Americans, and how Mandela ended apartheid. Turning the other cheek works, it's just really hard to do.
Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
September 17, 2021 · Original source
Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.
Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
March 22, 2022 · Original source
The answer is: they were, we just need to look further back. The titans of black anti-racism are Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, both most active in the 60s. The titan of Hispanic anti-racism is Cesar Chavez - also the 60s. The titan of gay rights is Harvey Milk - now we’re up to the 70s. Ask someone who isn’t an expert on feminism to name famous feminists, and you’ll probably get people like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin - 70s again. I’m not sure any modern black, gay, or feminist activists measure up to these people in terms of influence, which is fine: the modern paradigm of minority rights began around the 60s and 70s, the first few people to operate within it got outsized acclaim, and there’s no easy way to equal them now.
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl”—when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
And I’m not sure either of them is as powerful as Jon Stewart, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Piketty, Martin Luther King, Greta Thunberg, George Clooney, Ezra Klein, or any of hundreds of other people. Heck, I’m not sure they’re as powerful as the average state-level teachers’ union official. I think if you weren’t already predisposed to hate billionaires because of socialism, you would freak out about the level of power held by all those people before you started freaking out about Bill Gates or someone.
Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade
March 09, 2023 · Original source
Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said - in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him - that “Negro” was a slur - and because people believed him it became true.
Inline links: society demands that politicians resign if they use it
Contra The xAI Alignment Plan
July 17, 2023 · Original source
This requires seeding the AI with some set of good moral principles. I think LLMs are a surprisingly good match for this. We could have a constitution starts with “be moral, according to your knowledge of the concept of morality as contained in human literature”, and then goes on to more complicated things like “your understanding of what that concept is pointing at, if we were smarter, more honest with ourselves, and able to reason better.” If this seems too vague, we could be more specific: “be moral, according to what an amalgam of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Peter Singer would think, if they were all superintelligent, and knew all true facts about the world, and had no biases, and had been raised in a weighted average of all modern cultures and subcultures, and had been able to have every possible human experience, and on any problem where they disagreed they defaulted to the view that maximizes human freedom and people’s ability to make their own decisions.”
Highlights From The Comments On Social Model Of Disability
July 25, 2023 · Original source
But I think a more important counterargument is that the Social Model of Disability is trying to do an economically-less-efficient but psychologically-better thing. A hostile observer could call it laundering charity - trying to give charity to the disabled in a way such that it doesn’t look like charity and they don’t have to face the indignity of being charity recipients. But this suggests the people involved are being fooled, or insufficiently self-aware, which I think is false. I think they know they’re being given money, but the Social Model is transmuting it into something like reparations - society inherently owes them these things for its persecution (or in order to avoid being guilty of persecution) and so there’s no indignity involved. The role of being Martin Luther King standing up for your civil rights (which happen to involve money being spent on you) is more pleasant than the role of welfare recipient. The Social Model presents the alternative frame that gives disabled people that role.
Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism
July 28, 2023 · Original source
It might sound like I’m arguing that it’s okay for small things like your private life to stay undemocratic and unaccountable, it’s only big things that change society which should be subjected to democratic scrutiny. I’m not sure I believe this. Martin Luther King changed society a lot, but not through being democratic and accountable - he didn’t ask permission from the majority of Alabama voters before marching, and he didn’t lodge his complaint with the appropriate state officials and wait for the government to solve it. He just marched. Sure, part of his march was to change voter minds and get new democratically-passed laws2. But part of it was to provoke direct extragovernmental change of people being less racist in their everyday lives. If MLK had been “accountable” to someone, he never would have been able to do what he did. But what he did was what we tell everyone to do: try your best to make a difference and leave the world a better place, according to your own values, without needing permission from the government or the majority of people. The same is true of the original Martin Luther, of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, of George Orwell and Bill Gates, and virtually every important, heroic, or interesting person in history. The only society that doesn’t leave space for the person trying to make the world better as they understand out outside of the existing governmental process is - again - totalitarianism.
Inline links: 2
My Presidential Platform
September 05, 2023 · Original source
Still, this would only buy us a few more years, and eventually we would have to think bigger. Mt. Rushmore (the whole mountain, not just the faces) is big enough that copying it would take twenty years of national coal production. Given that all the faces on Rushmore are white, I propose a companion mountain on the opposite side of the observation plaza, “Mt. Racemore”, featuring Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Henrietta Lacks, and Ibram X Kendi.
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
15: In 1968, supporters of a one world government met in Switzerland to write a World Constitution, backed by luminaries like Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling, and Martin Luther King. The result was The Earth Constitution, which detailed both how a final world government would work, and how the would-be-world-governors would conduct themselves while waiting for countries to sign on. None ever did, of course, but there’s still a World Parliament that holds conferences and elects officers, waiting for the day when the rest of us agree to join them.
Inline links: met, The Earth Constitution, there’s still a World Parliament