Astral Codex Ten

Ethiopia

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Ethiopia

Article

Ethiopia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 16 times across 16 issues between February 22, 2021 and March 31, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as ""tweets out an SOS message to the Ras of Ethiopia""; “Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves”; “those same factories relocate to Vietnam or Ethiopia or somewhere”. It most often appears alongside India, China, United States.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 16
  • Issue count: 16
  • First seen: February 22, 2021
  • Last seen: March 31, 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.

A Look Down Track B
February 22, 2021 · Original source
Pictured: BDNF binds to TrkB. The IRS confiscates 1/2 of it as taxes, which radicalizes the receptor and makes it join Gab (see footnote 1), where it tweets out an SOS message to the Ras of Ethiopia. But the left wing of the receptor joins the Palestine Liberation Council and moves to California (see footnotes 2+). California has sunshine and good beaches, so you stop feeling depressed. This part sort of makes sense. But it coexists uneasily with other puzzle pieces in our knowledge of depression. For example, we give people SSRIs, their serotonin levels go up, and this makes them feel better. Why? Because of BDNF something TrkB something mTORC something? Probably; mice with dysregulated BDNF/TrkB systems don't benefit from antidepressants. But why does more serotonin cause BDNF something TrkB something? I've looked for years for a paper that says something like "by the way, serotonin makes cells release more BDNF". But despite a few suggestive links I don't see anyone strongly asserting that they understand this.
Inline links: mice with dysregulated BDNF/TrkB systems don't benefit from antidepressants, links
Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
8: Related? Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves. But see this comment for reasons to be skeptical.
Inline links: Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves, this comment
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
This is something I’ve wondered about before, in an even more disturbing way. How much of US wage stagnation has been that we “exported” our potential wage growth to China (or other developing countries)? Relocating a lot of US factories to China is surely good for Chinese factory workers and bad for US factory workers. Then once China becomes less attractive, those same factories relocate to Vietnam or Ethiopia or somewhere.
When Does Worrying About Things Trade Off Against Worrying About Other Things?
July 28, 2021 · Original source
(3): Instead of worrying about nuclear war, we should worry about the smaller conflicts going on today, like the deadly civil war in Ethiopia.
On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
The Identifiable Victim Effect is a thing where people care more about harm done to an identifiable victim (eg “John the cute orphan”) than a broad class of people (eg “inhabitants of Ethiopia”). Hreha’s article doesn’t link to the purported failed replications, but plausibly it’s Hart, Lane, and Chinn: The elusive power of the individual victim: Failure to find a difference in the effectiveness of charitable appeals focused on one compared to many victims. If I understand right, it compared simulated charity ads:
Inline links: Hart, Lane, and Chinn: The elusive power of the individual victim: Failure to find a difference in the effectiveness of charitable appeals focused on one compared to many victims
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
My concern is something more like: one commenter brought up the 1980s Ethiopia famine, which killed about a million people (also, “400,000 refugees left the country…2.5 million people were internally displaced, [and] almost 200,000 children were orphaned.”) Climatologists suspect a major contributor to the famine was global dimming, a phenomenon where air pollution decreases sunlight over certain parts of the world.
Inline links: the 1980s Ethiopia famine, global dimming
The famine was mostly the fault of communism and an incompetent government destroying Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, which made it extra vulnerable to global-dimming-induced drought. If we had only had global dimming and not these other vulnerabilities, it would have been fine.
We will never actually be able to know for sure whether the Ethiopia famine would have happened anyway without global dimming. Wikipedia cites a claim that dimming was the “leading factor” in the famine, but other sources go quite into depth about the climatological causes of the famine without even mentioning it.
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#13: Scholarships In Ethiopia The non-profit Omo Valley Research Project provides scholarships for indigenous students from the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, home to some of the most traditional groups on earth, most of whom typically live in small-scale subsistence communities. Less than 1% of members of the Omo Valley have received any formal education but increased development is opening up new opportunities for education as well as transforming their livelihoods. For students who start school, attendance after Grade 5 is often financially out of reach and a vocational college or university impossible. Supporting education for those who desire it equips community members to fully participate in the opportunities generated through development, gives them the ability to maintain a degree of cultural autonomy, and negotiate with the governmental and market-based organizations that are transforming their lives. Finally, many students yearn to learn about the world, to learn history, science, and math. Giving these students the ability to pursue their dreams is the greatest investment in human capital I know of. We support secondary, university, and vocational education through direct contributions for tuition or cost of living expenses. The students we support are all from traditional nomadic pastoralist communities including the Hamar and Nyangatom ethnic groups. [Email us at] Omovalleyresearchproject@gmail.com [or check out our website at] omovalleyresearchproject.org/
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
The Axis powers stood for the Old World Order. Germany, Japan, and Italy had each rejected the principles of the Peace Pact—Japan by invading Manchuria and continuing into China, French Indochina, British Malaya, Indonesia, and Singapore; Italy by invading Ethiopia, Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa; and Germany by seeking to gain control of nearly all of Europe. Each had a reason to resent the Allies and their efforts to outlaw war. The Axis powers had largely missed out on the colonial land grab. Japan only began to participate in international affairs in the 1860s, and it was more than a generation before it was prepared to project military force outside its own borders, too late to successfully participate in the empire-building scramble. Both Germany and Italy finally achieved unification in the same year—1871. They joined the land grab soon after, but were never as successful as France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, which built extensive empires. Without the authority to wage war and conquer new territory, the Axis powers saw little possibility of ever achieving equality. (Chapter 8)
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
There is a nice modern road in that screenshot, but between its 18th-century founding and the 1920s, there wasn’t even a path that a horse-drawn wagon could use, and so Higgins was extremely isolated. It barely sold anything to anyone outside, and accordingly imported very little. The people lived from subsistence farming. Their lives were so difficult, so focused on sheer survival, that they gradually forgot many of the skills and techniques that their British ancestors had, like candle making, weaving from a loom, and even masonry. When Jacobs’ aunt arrived as a Presbyterian missionary in 1922, and suggested that they build a church out of stone, the people of Higgins confidently stated that this was impossible: mortar just wasn’t strong enough. “These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals,” Jacobs writes, and yet eventually they forgot that stone buildings were a possibility at all. Such is the fate of regions that get cut off from cities. Jacobs calls them bypassed places. Sometimes these places are entire countries, such as Ethiopia, once the seat of an empire, but which as of the 1980s had barely any links to cities except its own backward ones. Unsurprisingly, Ethiopia has high prices (for Ethiopians) and too few jobs. That will always be so, unless one of its cities can start the process of import replacement. III. Should Everything Be a City-State? That was roughly the first half of the book. After that, Jane Jacobs discusses various consequences of her theory, including why decline happens and how we can, in theory, prevent it. We’ll get there — but first, it’s time for a detour through the other book, The Question of Separatism, which provides a great case study of Jacobs’s ideas. After an introductory chapter in which Jacobs acknowledges that separatism always makes everyone emotional, and warns that she’s going to study it in a dispassionate manner anyway, she starts by describing the issues in Quebec and Canada through a specific lens. You can probably guess which lens. That’s right — cities. To her, the question of Quebec separatism is primarily the question of how the two main cities in Canada, Toronto and Montreal, have coexisted and will coexist in the future. At this point you need at least a basic understanding of Canadian history. Here’s a quick primer, focusing on those two cities. Canadian History Speedrun (Jane’s Version) Canada, a word that used to refer to the large valley around the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes, was originally a colony of the Kingdom of France. Then the Kingdom of Great Britain conquered it in 1760. For various reasons, most of the French settlers stayed in Canada rather than emigrating to France or being deported, so at first, a small British elite ruled over a mostly French-speaking and Catholic colony. However, immigration from the British Isles, as well as from the newly seceded United States (loyalists who wanted to live in a monarchy rather than a republic for some reason) eventually tipped the linguistic and cultural balance. The population sorted itself such that the lower part of the valley (what is now Quebec) remained French, while the upper part (what is now Ontario) became English. The exception to this trend was the city of Montreal. Although located in Quebec, it became an English-speaking city and the hub for the British merchant elite. For at least a hundred years, it was the main city in Canada across almost all metrics: population, wealth, manufacturing, political influence. In the middle of the 20th century, Montreal grew enormously and became French-speaking again, owing to immigration from rural Quebec. It became the center of Quebecois culture and, with its increasingly educated population, the breeding ground for new ideas, including separatism. At the same time, the main city in Ontario, Toronto, was growing even faster. Immigrants from all over Canada and other countries poured into it (including Jane Jacobs herself). Sometime around 1970, it became bigger and wealthier than Montreal, and replaced it as the main economic hub. Many people attribute this to the rise of Quebec separatists, which supposedly scared the Anglo elite of Montreal into moving all the banks and companies to Toronto, and, to be sure, some of that happened — but of course, Jacobs prefers explanations that rely on city economics. One of the reasons for Toronto's economic and demographic growth is that it became the nexus of what Jacobs calls a conurbation, and would have called a city region if we were in the other book. In case you craved another concrete example of a city region, here’s a map of Ontario with two ways to define Toronto’s so-called “Golden Horseshoe” (Toronto itself is just the tiny strip in the middle of the red area, next to the lake): Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Qj1l!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff727cfae-ec34-42c4-b509-9a25f4126f2d_1600x834.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T392!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff9795745-8a40-40c1-8173-5296c13eef3b_1600x1553.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Book Review: The Alexander Romance
September 19, 2023 · Original source
There is no single Alexander Romance. Every culture from Ethiopia to Russia added their own bits and adapted it to their own needs. The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia; the Jewish version adds bits about how Alexander knelt before the High Priest of Jerusalem and said that the LORD was the one true God. Someone from Syria added the bits about Gog and Magog; nobody knows who added the parts with the 36-foot-tall giants, the three-eyed lions, the sphere-people, or the headless men. This makes it hard to review “the” Alexander Romance - some historians describe it as more of a genre than a single story.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.6
Inline links: 6
Ethiopia source here and here, India source here, Rwanda source here.
Inline links: here, here, here, here
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection. 3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here. 4: Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence. 5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder. 6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job. 7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here. 8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.” 9: @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and lists his favorite discoveries, including: Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
Inline links: Answer here, Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population, Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle, It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart, a new post about polygenic screening, here, @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals, lists his favorite discoveries
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“Lots of people are tripped up by not condemning enough things. Imagine that you want to express discontent with the Trump administration restricting food stamps, but someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn food insecurity for white people but you didn’t condemn the famine in Gaza equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Gaza, and someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn starvation when it makes Jews look like the bad guys, but you didn’t condemn the famine in Ethiopia equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Ethiopia, but then people tell you that’s ‘telescopic altruism’, because you didn’t condemn a murder that happened in your own city. So you try condemning a murder in your own city, but it was a black-on-white murder, and people say that it’s pretty suspicious that you didn’t condemn the latest white-on-black murder equally hard. The only solution is to monitor the news 24-7, condemning each thing as soon as it happens, in exact proportion to how bad it is. But nobody has time for that. So you give us access to your Twitter account and we do it for you. We promise not only to condemn all bad things within one business day of them happening, but to use all the appropriate words. You know those politicians who get in trouble because they condemned “the recent massacre” in vague terms but didn’t use the words “terrorism” or “radical Islam”, or because they said “killed” instead of “murdered”? If they’d used Condemnr, we could have tweeted “We condemn the recent radical Islamic terrorist massacre in Fairtown that murdered nine people #terrorism #radicalislam #murder”, and their PR would be immaculate.”
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Lewis Wall, $50K, for therapeutic food in Ethiopia. After years of drought, war, and locusts, the Tigray region of Ethiopia is experiencing a major famine. Lewis and the Fewsi Foundation will produce a special peanut butter optimized to relieve the worst effects of childhood malnutrition. This grant will fund a giant commercial mixer to help produce the peanut butter, plus some of the raw material and distribution cost.
Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
January 06, 2026 · Original source
Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 80s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery. I read that the catalyst for their resurgence was radical land distribution quickly followed by the return of a capitalist government. A government that enforced free markets and relatively strong rule of law, but refused to undo the redistribution of their Marxist forebears.
So recreating the Ethiopian miracle would be a tall order. But dammit, I wish we could try it here. I really believe that if everyone had an affordable place to live where they didn’t have to worry about getting evicted for purely financial reasons, this security would enable them to be more effective in our capitalist system. Didn’t we do something like this more than once in American history, when the Feds issued sweeping amnesties for squatters on public land?
Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism
March 31, 2026 · Original source
Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home? Yes - most Democrats support programs like free school lunches (used as a way to ensure poor kids get at least one good meal a day), and most Republicans oppose them. This is probably just downstream around general beliefs in government intervention, but at least these beliefs are consistent.
Inline links: and