Taylor Swift
Article
Taylor Swift is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between May 04, 2022 and April 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “it could be Taylor Swift”; “My favorite things are listening to Taylor Swift”; “My favorite things are listening to Taylor Swift (<3 Taylor 4-ever!)“. It most often appears alongside Hamas, OpenAI, Twitter.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 8
- Issue count: 8
- First seen: May 04, 2022
- Last seen: April 08, 2025
Appears In
- Every Bay Area House Party
- In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences
- Open Thread 292
- 23
- Open Thread 306
- Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
- Ye Olde Bay Area House Party
- My Takeaways From AI 2027
Related Pages
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- Hamas (3 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Adam D’Angelo (2 shared issues)
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- Aella (2 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (2 shared issues)
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- Bob (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Daniel (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- GPT-4 (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
“It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk. Depending on who your guests would be interested in, it could be Taylor Swift, or Tyler Cowen, or Peter Thiel . . .”
Hiiiiii! I’m Cindy, 29 yo! My favorite things are listening to Taylor Swift (<3 Taylor 4-ever!) and going out with my friends, maybe I go out a little too much lol. I want a man who treats me like a princess and isn’t afraid of a girl who knows what she wants lol. Good taste in bars and clubs is a must. If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.
2: RIP Kontextmaschine: polymath, prolific Tumblr blogger, and valued member of the Portland ACX community. His chosen medium makes it hard to navigate his output, so these are more “posts of his I could easily find” than “best posts” - if someone wants to put in the work to collect the latter, I’ll link that too. But here’s KM on the humanities, on race, on relationships, on censorship, on Disney, on cable TV, on anti-Semitism, on Cascadia, and on the life he might have lived; if you can navigate Tumblr you might be able to find more here. He was such a colorful character all along that it was hard to notice his increasing bizarreness (he attributed his sudden bisexuality and inability to feel anxiety to “long COVID”, but speculation is he died of a brain tumor). Thanks to Barry for trying to help him. There was no one else exactly like him, and I regret that he will never achieve his destiny of marrying Taylor Swift and becoming respective Emperor and Empress of Idealized Timeless America. [update: longer tribute here]
Second one is out of order, but these basically agree. Why is Taylor Swift so high? I understand she’s a very famous pop star, but hasn’t she been an equally famous pop star every one of the past ten years?
1: Comments of the week: Timothy Johnson tries to explain why Taylor Swift is such a big deal; Waldo explains why regulated businesses might sue their regulators even when trying to stay on their good side; and Scott Aaronson sets the record straight on his beliefs about AI risk. And I previously said I couldn’t find the source of a poll claiming that the median American estimated a 26% chance AI would kill all humans, but an alert reader found it here. Remember that ordinary people aren’t good at asserting probabilities, and also that medians don’t always present the full picture; see the link for more details.
“Taylor Swift!”
“I work for Stop Talking About Taylor Swift Magazine,” says a man in his mid-twenties. “It’s the #1 publication for people who want to stop hearing about Taylor Swift all the time. We carry monthly features on why Taylor’s music, schedule, personal life, and wardrobe are all less important than other things and don’t deserve the level of attention they’ve been getting.”
You don’t want to interrupt, but you can’t help asking: “Would the kind of person who wants to stop hearing about Taylor Swift really be into a magazine like that?”
If persuasion “only” tops out at the level of top humans, this is still impressive; the top humans are very persuasive! They range from charismatic charmers (Bill Clinton) to strategic masterminds (Dominic Cummings) to Machiavellian statesmen (Otto von Bismarck) to inspirational-yet-culty gurus (Steve Jobs) to beloved celebrities (Taylor Swift). At the very least, a superintelligence can combine all of these skills.