Astral Codex Ten

Thomas Edison

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Thomas Edison

Article

Thomas Edison is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 22, 2022 and March 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Thomas Edison grew up poor in Michigan”; “It’s like that old joke about how if Thomas Edison had never existed, we’d all be browsing the Internet in the dark; no, we would have waited another few years, and then some other genius would have invented electric light”; “It worked for people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, none of whom went to college”. It most often appears alongside AI, America, Bill Gates.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: March 22, 2022
  • Last seen: March 16, 2026

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.

Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
March 22, 2022 · Original source
He argues the most likely cause is the decline of “aristocratic tutoring” - an educational method typical among the ultra-rich of the past - and its replacement with normal public (or private) schools. The answer must lie in education somewhere [...] paradoxically there exists an agreed-upon and specific answer to the single best way to educate children, a way that has clear, obvious, and strong effects. The problem is that this answer is unacceptable. The superior method of education is deeply unfair and privileges those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s an answer that was well-known historically, and is also observed by education researchers today: tutoring. […] Let us call [the] past form aristocratic tutoring, to distinguish it from a tutor you meet in a coffeeshop to go over SAT math problems while the clock ticks down. It’s also different than “tiger parenting,” which is specifically focused around the resume padding that’s needed for kids to meet the impossible requirements for high-tier colleges. Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields. He amply proves that many of the great geniuses of the past, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and John von Neumann received tutoring like this, and suggests that its absence (more because of strengthening democratic norms than because people don’t have the money) might be why we don’t see figures of their stature anymore. II. I agree that this kind of tutoring sounds great. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a big effect size. But it’s not the reason we have fewer geniuses. Why not? Suppose that half of past geniuses were tutored this way, and half weren’t. Even if every single genius who was tutored owed his genius entirely to the tutoring, the tutoring could only explain half of geniuses. That means that after the tutoring stopped, we would expect half as many geniuses. But Hoel is making a stronger claim: that there are almost no geniuses today. For aristocratic tutoring to explain that, we would need for almost all past geniuses to be aristocratically tutored. But as far as I can tell, that isn’t true. Probably well below half of them were. Just to give some examples: Isaac Newton went to a local school at at 12, and to Cambridge at 17. The Wikipedia page on his early life doesn't mention "tutor", except in the context of a college teacher. His adopted father was a country parson, and his family wasn't rich enough to do aristocratic tutoring even if they'd wanted to. Articles on his early life stress his self-motivated nature: he was constantly building things and observing things on his own time. Wolfgang Mozart was tutored, but primarily by his father, himself an excellent violinist. According to his Wikipedia article, "In his early years, Wolfgang's father was his only teacher". Mozart was already an obvious child prodigy by 6 or 7, and wrote his first symphony at 8. I can't find any evidence that non-family members contributed to his education. This kind of tutoring is still common; my wife learned cello from her grandmother, a professional music tutor. Charles Darwin went to a local school at age 8, switched to a boarding school at 9, spent a summer at age 16 following his father (a doctor) around as he treated patients, then went to medical school. He switched to regular college at Cambridge at 19, where he seemed to have a pretty traditional education. Wikipedia has a long article on his education, which doesn't mention the word "tutor" until college age, when he "spent the autumn term at home studying Greek with a tutor". Later in college, he "joined other Cambridge friends on a three-month "reading party" at Barmouth on the coast of Wales to revise their studies with private tutors". I don't think he had a stronger relationship with being tutored himself, especially not in childhood. His summer following his father around learning medicine was probably good for him, but not outside the bounds of what still happens today (I followed my father around learning medicine). Louis Pasteur was born "to a Catholic family of a poor tanner". He went to primary school at 8 and college at 16. I can't find any evidence he was tutored. Charles Dickens barely seems to have been educated at all. His family was so poor that he spent some of his childhood working in a sweatshop. During other periods they did a little better and he went to small lower-to-middle-class private schools. Dickens seems to have gotten most of his education by reading novels on his own. Thomas Edison grew up poor in Michigan. Again according to Wikipedia, "Edison was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, who used to be a school teacher. He attended school for only a few months. However, one biographer described him as a very curious child who learned most things by reading on his own. As a child, he became fascinated with technology and spent hours working on experiments at home." Hoel argues that the decline in aristocratic tutoring is “why we stopped making Einsteins”. But then why did we stop making Newtons, Mozarts, Darwins, Pasteurs, Dickenses, and Edisons? III. One other argument: Hoel cites Holden Karnofsky’s Where’s Today’s Beethoven?, which suggests that music is a typical case of the genius decline. But aristocratic tutoring in music is alive and well. When my brother was identified as a piano prodigy, my (well-off but not absurdly rich) parents hired jazz musician Linda Martinez to tutor him. I asked around and this is apparently pretty common in music. In fact, it seems common across a variety of fields, especially those that aren’t taught in school and where success doesn’t make you too rich to need tutoring money (a friend brings up chess as another example). If aristocratic tutoring were a significant factor behind declining genius, we would expect to see a split: fields like science where tutoring is rare would lose their geniuses, whereas fields like music where tutoring is common would be as genius-filled as ever. But people use music as a typical example of a declining-genius field. So that can’t be it. IV. So what’s my explanation? You will not be surprised to hear it’s the maximally boring one, a combination of: Good ideas are getting harder to find. In 300 BC, if you noticed that the water level in your bathtub got higher when you got into it, you were allowed to run through the streets shouting “eureka!” and declare yourself to be a genius. Now you would need some 400 page mathematical proof drawing on the topology of eight-dimensional manifolds in order to get that kind of cred.
Inline links: Isaac Newton, Wolfgang Mozart, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Charles Dickens, Thomas Edison, Where’s Today’s Beethoven?, Linda Martinez, Good ideas are getting harder to find
Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability
August 31, 2022 · Original source
(It’s like that old joke about how if Thomas Edison had never existed, we’d all be browsing the Internet in the dark; no, we would have waited another few years, and then some other genius would have invented electric light.)
Book Review: Paper Belt On Fire
March 23, 2023 · Original source
Probably it depends on the angle or something. Lindh was the only American to find Osama bin Laden in the early 2000s - he went to lots of jihadi training camps in the process of learning how to jihad, and Osama happened to be at one of them. The lesson, Walker says, is that if you want to find people who are hard to find, you need to steep yourself in their culture, truly understand them, become one with them. Good founders are hard to find. But he and Strachman went to dozens of dingy college dorms, math competitions, group houses, and hackathons, looking for people with the right sort of talent. After pooh-poohing IQ (“Marilyn vos Savant is listed as having the highest recorded IQ, and what does she do? She writes a column for a Sunday supplement in the newspaper”) he lists some of his own preferred metrics for judging would-be Thiel fellows and founders: Polytropon - a famously untranslatable Greek word (“of-many-turns”? “always-has-a-trick-up-his-sleeve” “clever bastard”?) used to describe Odysseus. Edge control - willingness to constantly surf the boundary between order and disorder Crawl-walk-run - ability to scale from a tiny startup to a big company. …and several others, including “tensive brilliance” and “Friday night Dyson sphere”. He and Danielle searched the country for people with these qualities, annoying colleges (he was banned from MIT after showing up too often to convince their students to drop out) and doing various stunts (on October 31 2017, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s theses, he nailed a list of anti-formal-education theses to the doors of the admin buildings of top colleges (“Our commercial printer had misunderstood our request and printed them on seven-foot-long scrolls. They were ridiculous . . . but it turned out for the best.”) At one point, he negotiated with a brilliant 21 year old who may have discovered a transformative diabetes therapeutic, but the hidebound conformist novelty-hating establishment refused to work with him just because he liked the Marvel Cinemat - okay, fine, he may have legally changed his name to “Tony Stark”. Still, Gibson saw past his eccentricities, helped him start his company, and gave him sage advice (he should introduce himself to other investors as “Anthony”). Skip through several more chapters of everyone hating Gibson and telling him he was wrong and refusing to give him money and cheating him out of the money he already had, and the payoff is Luminar. One of the dropouts they cultivated founded a beyond-cutting-edge lasers-for-self-driving-cars company which went public at $3 billion. 1517 made $200 million from the deal - it sounds like they had only ever raised about $25 million, so their investors must have octupled their money on that company alone. Everyone involved is now very rich, and Gibson considers his anti-education thesis on the way to being proven. The book ends with a newly-resourced Gibson continuing his quest to figure out whether and why the CIA killed his father, but it’s slow going. If any of you know a guy named Albert van Dam in Amsterdam, or how to convince Swiss banks to reveal secret account information, get in touch with him. II. A common pattern: I assert something. Everyone yells at me and tells me I’m wrong and stupid, sometimes in very colorful language. I wait, time proves me right, and I write an essay gloating educating people about this. The median comment is “of course this is true, nobody ever denied this was true, why are you wasting our time with something obvious?” I hate this and I try to avoid doing it to other people. This is too bad, because I’m tempted to say: obviously talented dropouts can start good companies. We’ve known this at least since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft. But also, obviously they can. Brilliant and driven people can succeed whether they get a college education or not. If Bill Gates had stayed an extra two years at Harvard, he probably would have taken a few more advanced math classes not really related to programming software or running a company. So why should we even have as a hypothesis that he couldn’t start Microsoft successfully without doing that? Still, Gibson adequately proves that lots of people hated him and were sure he would fail. Either we should read this backwards - learn that there was once a time when pro-college messages were even stronger than now, so strong that people thought it was literally impossible to succeed without every single day of a four-year college application - or the critics were trying to get at something deeper they were bad at expressing. For example: what, exactly, is Gibson’s alternative to the education system? The back-of-book-blurb says Paper Belt On Fire is about “how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow” - but evolve how? What exactly has been proven here? A few of the very brightest young people, hand-picked by an expert young-person-picker and given $100K, can become billionaires or make great discoveries without a college degree. What are the implications? Suppose you are an average college student with an average level of talent and motivation. Should you drop out and try to create a company for Peter Thiel? Based on how many average-talent people Thiel rejects, even he doesn’t think you should do that. And if you don’t have a good answer to this question - the one relevant to 99.9% of education system inmates - have you really launched a challenge to the educational system? Gibson doesn’t address this question, but I predict he would admit that, fine, he doesn’t have an alternative to the education system in the sense of “educate people this way rather than that way”. He just wants less formal education, and has proven this will work fine. True, he’s only proven it for a tiny subset of ultra-talented people. But “billionaire tech founder” is a hard job - if it wasn’t, more people would do it and reap the $1 billion reward. Proving that people can become billionaire tech founders without college degrees implicitly suggests they can be successful middle managers or budget analysts without college degrees. So the sort of companies that need middle managers and budget analysts should also consider hiring people without degrees, and the sorts of average-level-of-talent-and-motivation people who want these jobs should consider skipping college. Would this work? Probably. It worked in the early 1900s, when only 5-10% of Americans had college degrees but the country seemed about as dynamic and successful as it does now. It worked for people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, none of whom went to college. It works in other countries - for example in the UK where young doctors skip undergrad and go straight to medical school, and whose patients get about the same outcomes as in the US. It works for people with impractical degrees like philosophy, who are constantly getting jobs in (and doing well in) fields that don’t require you to compare Locke vs. Leibniz’s perspective on a priori truths. So this would work if everyone agreed to do it at once, which they won’t. The way college gets you is adverse selection. Suppose that tomorrow, you - a smart and hard-working person who could easily get a college degree - decline to do so, because you appreciate Peter Thiel and Michael Gibson’s anti-institutional perspective. The pool of people without college degrees is now, to a first approximation: 200 million people who weren’t smart to get in, rich enough to afford it, or motivated enough to finish.
Inline links: his company, read this backwards
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Who “won” the electricity “race”? Maybe Thomas Edison, but that didn’t cause Edison’s descendants to rule the world as emperors, or make Menlo Park a second Rome. It didn’t even especially advantage America. Edison personally got rich, the overall balance of power didn’t change, and today all developed countries have electricity.
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
Here the black line indicates that the average European of 6000 BC would have had genetic IQ 65 (compared to modern 100), but the regression line indicates more like IQ 90 - I don’t know why the researchers chose to interpret the trend as necessarily constant and linear, or whether we should follow. There isn’t enough ancient DNA to fully test whether the same happened in other populations yet, although a preliminary small-sample test on Asians suggests it happened there too (not really, see here). If the selection for IQ was a response of agriculture, we’d expect to see higher genetic IQ in populations that got agriculture earlier. But it could also be a response to sentience itself creating new selection pressures that continued to act as recently as historical time (some evidence suggests this is true of schizophrenia), which might make populations more similar. 7: Joseph Heath on Marxism vs. John Rawls. I appreciated this because everyone knows we’re supposed say that John Rawls is among the most important philosophers of all time blah blah blah but nobody had ever explained why to me (veil of ignorance seems neither very original nor very good). Heath’s answer: Marxism dominated the academy for decades, but eventually became philosophically unsustainable. This wasn’t because of the generic “Communism doesn’t work” objections that moved ordinary people. It was because Marx’s ethical critique of capitalism was based on exploitation, according to a technical definition of “exploit” that only made sense according to Marx’s labor theory of value. But the supply-and-demand theory of value quickly supplanted the labor theory, the exploitation argument doesn’t really work within supply-and-demand, and so Marxist philosophers were left without a clear ethical critique. John Rawls, by coming up with the part of the underpinning for the modern inequality-based-critique of society, let all the Marxist academics switch to being liberals while continuing to dislike capitalists. 8: /r/BadMTGCombos: a simple 19-card combination of Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Transformation, Mirror Room, Darksteel Citadel, Sanctum Weaver, Freed From The Real, Abuelo's Awakening, Myrkul Lord of Bones, Zimone All Questioning, Birgi God of Storytelling, Siege Zombie, Desecration Elemental, Mirror Gallery, Clock of Omens, Parallel Lives, Life and Limb, Isochron Scepter, Narset's Reversal, and Molten Reflection can be used to deal infinite damage if and only if the Twin Prime Conjecture is true. 9: During the most recent Berkeley ACX meetup, we somehow ended up discussing how often people feed living mice to snakes. The answer seems to be that there’s a debate about it in the snake community, the smartest and most experienced voices are against it, but it still happens a lot. Here’s an EA Forum post on the feeder rodent industry and efforts to make it more humane. 10: King Frederick William I of Prussia decided to have a regiment of giants in his army and scoured Europe for extremely tall people, including poaching them from other countries’ armies and forcing them to enlist against their will. He ended up with 3,000 soldiers, ranging from 6’2 - 7’6, but “many of the men were unfit for combat due to their gigantism”. So why did he do it? He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness" The King dreamed of a eugenics program to create even taller soldiers. He got as far as pairing up some of his tall soldiers up with tall women and birthing a few tall babies before he died; his successor had no interest and let everybody go home. 11: Before modern IP law, you could write a sequel to someone else’s book and they couldn’t stop you. Among the most successful examples is American “astronomer and writer” Garrett Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest Of Mars, a sequel to War Of The Worlds in which a vengeful human race, led by Thomas Edison, invent spaceships and attack Mars in retaliation for the first book’s Martian invasion. "The book contains some notable 'firsts' in science fiction: alien abductions, spacesuits, aliens building the Pyramids, space battles, oxygen pills, asteroid mining and disintegrator rays", and was credited as an inspiration by Robert Goddard and HP Lovecraft. 12: Joe Biden, singularitarian? (click for link to video) 13: Gwern on the chip embargo: It is pretty damning. We're told the chip embargo has failed, and smugglers have been running rampant for years, and China is about to jump light years beyond the West and enslave us with AXiI (if you will) . . . And then an expert casually remarks that all of China put together, smuggling chips since 2022, has fewer H100s than Elon Musk orders for his datacenter while playing Elden Ring. And even with that huge bottleneck and 1.4 billion people, there's so little demand for them that they cost less per hour than in the West, where AI is redhot and we can't get enough H100s in datacenters. (And where the serious AI people are now discussing how to put that many into a single datacenter for a single run before the next scaleup with B200s obsoletes those...) 14: A company called Cosm has raised $250 million to build “immersive sports experiences”, ie giant buildings sort of like a cross between a stadium and a movie theater where people can get together and watch high-quality televised sports games in a “realistic” setting; they already have facilities in Dallas and Los Angeles. 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast! 16: The Green Party, a US third party, tried to put their candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in November. The Nevada election office sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process. The Greens filed the wrong forms, the Democrats sued, and the Supreme Court disqualified Stein, calling the election office’s incorrect advice an “unfortunate mistake”. I’m disappointed in this outcome - partly for the obvious reasons, but also because the incorrect forms they submitted technically should have added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”. If they’re going to disqualify her candidacy, then I think they should at least hold the state referendum! 17: Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown. 18: Also Nostalgebraist: The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated. New AIs like o1 give “chain of thought”, ie display what they’re thinking after each step. This seems like a promising avenue to solve alignment - just see whether they’re thinking “and now I will plot against humans”. Unfortunately it’s not so easy; the chain of thought isn’t always accurate (you can sometimes catch the AI “hiding” thoughts it doesn’t want its human overseers to know, like when it’s using a racial stereotype). This article argues that these examples aren’t as exciting as they sound, and chain-of-thought accurately reflects reasoning for most tasks. 19: Australian government considers making doxxing a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail. 20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free. 21: Cube Flipper: Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people. The visual system must solve difficult math problems when translating the 2D visual field into a 3D world. Can we harness this innate mathematical ability to do arbitrary work? Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi developed a series of visual circuits (eg XOR gates) based on Necker cubes, probably easier seen than described: After surveying the field, Cube Flipper proposes a more advanced visual computer based on taking DMT and viewing certain types of tiles with slight deviations: …and makes the extreme claim that something like this might demonstrate hypercomputation, ie the visual system has semi-magic computational properties beyond those permitted by normal physical laws. I am skeptical but appreciate the survey of visual computing (as well as the callback to one of my older posts). 22: Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891). Mormon apologists note that Joseph Smith did not live to be 85, so no conclusion can be drawn. 23: More old-timey psychiatric ads (this one is from 1952, source: @justin_garson): This was before they invented what we would call antidepressants today; Dexedrine is an amphetamine related to Adderall. 24: Congratulations to Open Philanthropy, the biggest effective altruist foundation… …whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: see here, got agriculture earlier, some evidence suggests this is true of schizophrenia, Marxism, John Rawls, nor very good, /r/BadMTGCombos, can be used, Twin Prime Conjecture, the feeder rodent industry and efforts to make it more humane, decided to have a regiment of giants in his army, Edison’s Conquest Of Mars, click for link to video, Gwern on the chip embargo, Cosm, The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity, sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process, added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”., Nostalgebraist, Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown, The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated, isn’t always accurate, considers making doxxing a crime, is now free, Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people, developed, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FcOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbee8dfa6-4d7b-41c9-972a-5fbaa792b9ec_3566x2888.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x34r!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F413f5fc2-2391-4734-904f-8401dd968488_1024x1024.png, one of my older posts, reports, note, @justin_garson, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EF4p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b7af4c0-ac0f-4c9a-88bc-6c00e57ca977_479x639.jpeg, https://x.com/albrgr/status/1844527064956928009, won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations
March 16, 2026 · Original source
Some kids never guessed. They thought it was dishonest. I had trouble understanding them, but when I think back on it, I had limits too. I would guess on multiple choice questions, but never the short answer section. “Who invented the cotton gin?” For any “who invented” question in US History, there’s a 10% chance it’s Thomas Edison. Still, I never put down his name. “Who negotiated the purchase of southern Arizona from Mexico?” The most common name in the United States has long been “John Smith”, applying to 1/10,000 individuals. An 0.01% chance of getting a question right is better than zero, right? If I’d guessed “John Smith” for every short answer question I didn’t know, I might have gotten ~1 extra point in my school career, with no downside.
The cotton gin was invented by Thomas Edison in 1910. It was important because gin made with cotton, of which the Southern plantation economy produced a surplus, was cheaper than the usual gin made with juniper berries. This lowered the price of alcoholic spirits considerably. According to historian John Smith in his seminal The Invention Of The Cotton Gin For Dummies, the resulting boom in alcoholism provoked a backlash that ultimately led to Prohibition.