Tomas Pueyo
Article
Tomas Pueyo is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 16, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Tomas Pueyo thinks this might not happen because the mutation rate is pretty low”; “I don’t agree as much with Tomas Pueyo’s analysis here”; “Mark Lutter gets interviewed by Tomas Pueyo”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, COVID, Freddie DeBoer.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: February 16, 2021
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
- Coronavirus: Links, Discussion, Open Thread
- Links For March 2023
- Links For July 2023
- Links For September 2023
- The Other COVID Reckoning
- Links For October 2025
Related Pages
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- Twitter (4 shared issues)
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- COVID (3 shared issues)
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- Freddie DeBoer (3 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (3 shared issues)
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- Trump (3 shared issues)
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- Aella (2 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (2 shared issues)
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- Boston (2 shared issues)
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- Caribbean (2 shared issues)
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- Clinton (2 shared issues)
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- Cremieux (2 shared issues)
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- DeepMind (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.
[EDIT: Tomas Pueyo thinks this might not happen because the mutation rate is pretty low. But Trevor Bedford thinks the mutation rate might actually be pretty fast. Right now we’re not sure whether COVID is just picking the low-hanging fruit for good mutations or actually really good at mutating; depending on which of these is true we might or might not see the flu-like pattern.]
Inline links: thinks this might not happen, might actually be pretty fast
16: Continuing discussion around the Cochrane review apparently showing masks didn’t work. I agree with Kelsey’s analysis here (see also continuing Twitter discussion of Kelsey’s analysis). I don’t agree as much with Tomas Pueyo’s analysis here, for the reasons GidMK lays out here. I also stand by what I said in last month’s links (see #45)
14: Mark Lutter, former head of the Charter Cities Institute and one of the top authorities on charter cities, gets interviewed by Tomas Pueyo. Significant for some very slight teasers about his current stealth-mode project, a potential new city in the Caribbean. Are you interested in this subject and very rich? Mark is looking for 8-9 digit investments and can give a pretty convincing pitch; email him at mark@braavos.cc, or email me at my usual address and I’ll tell you more.
Inline links: gets interviewed by Tomas Pueyo
33: Tomas Pueyo on “the loneliness epidemic”. He concludes that people are spending more time alone, but by choice, and they are happy with it.
Inline links: Tomas Pueyo on “the loneliness epidemic”
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.
50: Tomas Pueyo with a new theory for why cold/temperate countries are rich and warm countries are poor - it’s the mountains. Warm-climate agriculture and civilization cluster in highlands regions, where transportation and trade are harder. Partially paywalled comment responses 1 and 2. I find this very interesting, and far more thoughtful than most attempts at this question, but I’m pretty concerned about his answer here to the objection that India, Cambodia, etc birthed great empires while being hot and nonmountainous. He says that they may have had high GDP, but always had low GDP per capita, which he pinpoints as the real measure of wealth. My impression is that pre-Industrial Revolution, all countries had low GDP per capita, because they were in a Malthusian regime where economic improvement translated to population density rather than increasing per capita GDP. Any differences between regions reflected minor fluctuations in the exact parameters of their Malthusianism and were not of any broader significance. So I think the India etc objection still stands and is pretty strong.