Astral Codex Ten

Eastern Europe

6 min read

Eastern Europe

Article

Eastern Europe is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between July 01, 2021 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc”; “A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe”; “those from Eastern Europe”. It most often appears alongside Germany, Israel, Russia.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: July 01, 2021
  • Last seen: November 12, 2024

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.

Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.
Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 · Original source
The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.
Inline links: Ukraine is not even a state!, Putin declared, stated, Medvedev told
Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe. Although most of the weird overachievement comes from Ashkenazi Jews in particular - those from Eastern Europe - there were Ashkenazim in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, etc. So why Hungary?
Still, I wasn’t too happy with this explanation. Many of the Eastern European Jews eventually fled to America, where there was less anti-Semitism and they could get good educations. They did very well for themselves - see the Nobel Prize statistic above. But the Manhattan Project, which you would expect to draw disproportionately from Americans, was still disproportionately Hungarian. There are now 15x more Jews in the US than in early 1900s Hungary, but we still admire and envy those few 1900s Hungarian supergeniuses as a breed apart. Why? I couldn’t find a satisfying explanation.
MacRae’s thesis is that, of the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, the upper classes disproportionately migrated to Budapest, and the lower classes to New York. This fits with my findings in Contra Smith On Selective Jewish Immigration, where I argued that (contra Noah Smith’s claim that US Jewish achievement might be due to selective immigration) everyone at the time agreed that it was mostly the poorest and least successful Eastern European Jews who came to the US. From a paper I quoted there, describing a first-generation Jewish-American immigrant:
Inline links: Contra Smith On Selective Jewish Immigration, a paper
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
EN, $60,000, to study phage therapy. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. For decades, people have wondered whether you could use them to kill infectious bacterial strains. There have been some small-scale successes, especially in Eastern Europe, but overall these remain neglected. Dr. N and his team work on phage therapy as a potential solution to growing antibiotic resistance. Their current projects include trials of phages to fight typhoid and diabetic wound infections.
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
But the Christian cultural package also fell apart and became the current post-Christian world. This wasn't just a one-time coincidence either. Protestantism gave way to modernism in Scandinavia, Germany, and the US. Catholicism gave way to modernism in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. Orthodoxy gave way to modernism in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia (with a slight Putinist resurrection-in-name-only which hardly seems to have produced a flourishing liberal society). Meanwhile in China, the local mix of Buddhism/Confucianism/Taoism gave way to modernism. In South East Asia, Buddhism gave way to modernism. Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast. India is moderately Hindu but still noticeably modern. Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
All of this is compounded by the fact that Christianity spread equally gloriously in times and places without any of these factors. The first Christian missionary reached Scandinavia in 710 - by the twelfth century, the whole region was Christian. This is about the same timeline as Rome - but Scandinavian fertility was fine, Scandinavian women already had a decent number of rights, and there were no plagues. What about Germany? Britain? Ireland? Eastern Europe? Russia? Korea? Each of these places had their own idiosyncracies, each benefited from the knowledge that Christianity was already a great religion believed by other regional powers - but each did Christianize, as surely as Rome did. This doesn’t seem predestined. An observer in 600 AD would no more consider it inevitable that Norway would Christianize by 1100 than a modern observer would find it inevitable that Saudi Arabia will Christianize by 2500.