Astral Codex Ten

Arabia

11 min read

Arabia

Article

Arabia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 01, 2023 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “after leaving Africa, modern humans were limited to “Arabia and surrounding regions””; “There is a place in Arabia… which I visited because I wished to know more about the flying snakes”; “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon”. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Aristotle, Bryan Caplan.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: June 01, 2023
  • Last seen: March 03, 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.

Links For May 2023
June 01, 2023 · Original source
2: All the ancients, from Darius the Great to Augustus Caesar, agreed that the Nisean horse was the most majestic horse breed, the horse of kings. The Chinese fought a war (the War of Heavenly Horses) just to get access to a breeding stock. Then they sort of ambiguously went extinct during the Middle Ages. But here’s a modern Iranian horse enthusiast talking about which breeds might be its descendants. 3: Remember when the global community banned whaling, but some countries (eg Japan) continued doing it under the facade of “research”? With octopus factory farms under increasing scrutiny, UNAM university in Mexico is operating a “farm disguised as a research center”. 4: Genuinely new (to me) optical illusion: what is this guy is doing with his hands? Here’s a slow motion version that shows how it’s done. And some people in the replies were speculating this only works because of his dark skin, but here’s a white person doing the exact same thing (wait for it). 5: Shingles vaccine probably reduces incidence of dementia, suggesting that VZV (virus behind shingles and chickenpox) is a contributor. Further discussion here that I’m still trying to make sense of. 6: This deserves to go down in history alongside the wittiest Socratic comebacks in the Platonic dialogues: 7: Matt Lakeman: Notes On Nigeria. Great introduction to modern Nigerian history. Read it for the visceral understanding of the “resource curse” and why poor countries stay poor, but also: A savant is basically someone who has innate mental challenges but is extremely competent in a particular narrow domain. Some savants become obsessed with trains and become great engineers. Some become obsessed with computers and build software wonders. One of Abacha’s predecessors said of him: “He might not be bright upstairs, but he knows how to overthrow governments.” Kenyon elaborates: “It was as if Abacha was an idiot savant. Dull, even gormless, he filled his days with cowboy movies and sleeping off the previous night’s indulgences in alcohol and prostitutes. But he was possessed of a prodigious flair when it came to coups.” 8: Related to my previous subscribers-only post on the psychology of fantasy: Balioc’s Taxonomy Of What Magic Is Doing In Fantasy Books. See also Eliezer’s commentary. 9: New study on the timing of human mutations confirms Greg Cochran’s 2012 post about how after leaving Africa, modern humans were limited to “Arabia and surrounding regions” for ~30,000 - 50,000 years, racking up various new mutations and becoming adapted to life outside Africa (kabbalistically equivalent to the 40 years spent wandering in Sinai?). Most mutations in “fat storage, neural development, skin physiology, and cilia function”. 10: Iron Economist on Twitter: “Desalinization was one of the big technological success stories of the 2010s”. 11: Matt Bruenig argues against the Success Sequence, whose proponents (including Bryan Caplan) describe it as: 97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). Bruenig’s argument is mostly a lot of annoying “well maybe it’s just your cultural bias that makes you care about this”, but in the middle of this it mentions some genuinely strong points, especially that the research doesn’t measure “sequence”, but rather “current status”. So if you graduated, got a job, got married, and had children, but then lost your job, your would be counted as “not following the sequence” (same if you get divorced). Also, disabled and old people and their caretakers are excluded from the analysis, which in one sense is fair (your conclusion can be “abled young adults can avoid poverty through this method”) but in another sense risks reducing all of this to the more trivial-seeming statement “if you’re young, healthy, abled, married, don’t have to support anyone else, and have a full-time job, you’re probably not poor”. But the authors (channeled by Caplan) disagree: Some critics of the success sequence have argued that marriage does not matter once education and work status are controlled. The regression results indicate that after controlling for a range of background factors, the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives is significantly associated with their financial well-being in the prime of young adulthood. Simply put, compared with the path of having a baby first, marrying before children more than doubles young adults’ odds of being in the middle or top income. Meanwhile, putting marriage first reduces the odds of young adults being in poverty by 60% (vs. having a baby first). The main thing I would want to look at here is how much of this is causal vs. just class selection: upper-class people are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to wait before having children. Has anyone followed some pre-selected group of equal class people (eg the population of some low-income school district) and seen how their own success varies with sequence compliance? 12: I’ve previously linked claims that vat-grown meat, freed from the tyranny of having to grow inside animals, will include tiger steaks, lion burgers, and the like. Once again global capitalism outpaces my wildest fantasies and offers burgers with woolly mammoth protein (so far just the myoglobin, not the meat). 13: The people who believed there was lots of gender bias in STEM academia, and the people who believed there wasn’t finally did an adversarial collaboration (a study co-conducted by two groups of scientists with conflicting theories, keeping each other honest). The results: Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. For ten years lots of important people told us again and again that discrimination against women in STEM was a massive problem. People who questioned its extent were accused of misogyny and sometimes fired, I got harassed and insulted for pointing out reasons the standard arguments didn’t seem to hold true. Millions of dollars were spent investigating and responding to the problem. And now I expect this pretty strong evidence that women were actually advantaged in hiring and had parity in most other things (the salary is probably just the usual negotiation issue) to produce no publicity, no apologies, and no soul-searching from the people leading the current round of anti-academia and anti-STEM inquisitions. Sorry, yes I am bitter, it just bothers me how much the people claiming that it’s urgently important that nobody is ever allowed to suggest they are wrong have a consistent track record of being totally and inexcusably wrong. 14: In my response to Sam Kriss, I speculated on what would happen if someone rewrote the MCU to sound like ancient myths. Thanks to the many people who reminded me of Star Wars as Icelandic saga and Star Wars as Irish epic. And Sam has a response . 15: @AISafetyMemes on Twitter is exactly what you’d expect from the name. I especially like the fire dogs: More here: 16: More AI links from this month: Can’t even list all the new people who have come out as AI x-risk believers, but you can just read the CAIS statement. The top signatures are Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei; aside from the usual suspects, they also have Bruce Schneier (computer security expert) , Dawn Song (computer scientist and security expert), Andy Clark (professor of cognitive philosophy, wrote Surfing Uncertainty), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he didn't sign the last one because he disagreed with specifics, but he's here), and a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense.
Inline links: the Nisean horse, the War of Heavenly Horses, a modern Iranian horse enthusiast talking about, is operating a “farm disguised as a research center”, what is this guy is doing with his hands?, a slow motion version, here’s a white person doing the exact same thing, Shingles vaccine probably reduces incidence of dementia, here, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EEvz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ecd2933-810f-41dd-af25-71fdf8e8d90f_590x234.png, Notes On Nigeria, Taxonomy Of What Magic Is Doing In Fantasy Books, Eliezer’s commentary, New study on the timing of human mutations, Greg Cochran’s 2012 post, Iron Economist on Twitter, argues against the Success Sequence, describe, tiger steaks, lion burgers, burgers with woolly mammoth protein, an adversarial collaboration, my response to Sam Kriss, Star Wars as Icelandic saga, Star Wars as Irish epic, a response, @, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!korm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e680df9-6385-4a23-91d5-3a5a9f8f9be7_680x343.jpeg, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-Hau!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda6b71a4-78a4-4c4a-b755-b8051e7b5539_680x343.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RIF-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F846c32fc-c454-4e7f-b46e-e363cb925a95_1216x613.jpeg, CAIS statement
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Writing predated the Greeks, but before the Greeks got their hands on it, Egan says, it was mostly used for simple matters — listing out the names of rulers, or itemized debts. People like Herodotus realize writing has the potential to immortalize the greatest, strangest things in the world. The word that comes to mind when reading it is “adolescent”. (The first time I opened my copy, my eyes landed on the sentence “There is a place in Arabia… which I visited because I wished to know more about the flying snakes”. The fourteen-year-old in me was eager to read more.)
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
29: Did you know: “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests. Pliny the Elder wrote that . . . the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.”
Inline links: cinnamon birds
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
The Strait of Hormuz is the waterway between Iran and Arabia that many of the world’s oil tanker routes pass through. Iran is already threatening traffic in the strait; if it threatened it more, it might be able to damage the global economy. This wouldn’t really help anything - Iran is part of the global economy too - but it would probably feel good to annoy the US a little more than they could otherwise do. Realistically this all comes down to the resolution criteria - Iran will certainly threaten the Strait, but probably can’t keep it 100% closed forever. The criteria here specify decreasing a seven-day moving average of traffic to below 20% of its usual level, which forecasters seem to think is more likely than not.