Japan

Article

Japan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 54 times across 54 issues between March 09, 2021 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “post-war reform experiences in Germany and Japan”; “look at Japan and Germany after WWII”; “list of Best Practice Peer Countries including: Japan”. It most often appears alongside China, Germany, US.

Metadata

Category: Places
Mention count: 54
Issue count: 54
First seen: March 09, 2021
Last seen: February 05, 2026

Appears In

- China (28 shared issues)
- Germany (26 shared issues)
- US (26 shared issues)
- United States (25 shared issues)
- Europe (23 shared issues)
- France (23 shared issues)
- Scott (20 shared issues)
- America (17 shared issues)
- Australia (17 shared issues)
- India (17 shared issues)
- Britain (16 shared issues)
- Israel (16 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.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform

March 09, 2021 · Original source

The success of the French reforms raises the question: why did they work when other externally-imposed reforms often fail? Most likely this is because the reforms were much more radical than is typically the case. The French reformed simultaneously in many dimensions and weakened the powers of local elites, making a return to the status quo ante largely impossible. Even when some pre-revolution elites returned to power after 1815, there was a permanent change in the political equilibrium. This scope and radicalism of the French reforms are common with the post-war reform experiences in Germany and Japan and stand in contrast with many other reform experiences.

Do I believe they have a tendency to generally make things better? I'm not sure. One thing I'm still chewing over was a throwaway line in the paper saying that of course getting conquered by a foreign enemy is good for economic growth, look at Japan and Germany after WWII. The idea was that the occupying American forces couldn't care less about the entrenched power structure and vetocracy in Germany and Japan, so they rammed through whatever reforms seemed like good ideas at the time, and they were in fact mostly good ideas. On the other hand, the Soviet Union tried the same thing in East Germany and that went less well.

Prospectus On Próspera

April 14, 2021 · Original source

But let’s get to what I know you’re all here for - medical licensing policy. Próspera plans to be the first polity to allow complete medical reciprocity with all developed nations (plus Honduras). That means if you’re an American/French/Japanese/etc doctor with a valid American/French/Japanese/etc medical license, you are licensed to practice medicine in Próspera.

Other people are playing up the ultra-nationalist side of things. The territorial integrity of Honduras is the most important thing possible! It would be better for everyone to die than to see even one inch of Honduras get governed by institutions that foreigners had a hand in designing! I have never understood why Japanese people will give their lives to keep some uninhabited ocean rocks from the clutches of China, or vice versa, but there seem to be a lot of Hondurans equally concerned about a 58-acre parcel of uninhabited land on Roatan. The new ZEDE law, which emphasizes that the territories remain within some of Honduras' institutions, seem to have partly (but not completely) cooled some of these sentiments.

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Dubai, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States of America

Book Review: Global Economic History

April 21, 2021 · Original source

Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why have some non-Western countries (Japan, China) come from behind and mostly caught up? Why have others failed to replicate the West's trajectory and stayed underdeveloped despite seemingly having enough time to catch up? GEH:VSI tries to answer these questions.

GEH:VSI is also nervous talking too much about institutions, especially along the lines of strong property rights or other libertarian-adjacent ideas. While it admits that they matter to some degree, it also points out that some of the most successfully-developing economies, including Britain in the 1700s and Japan in the Meiji period, had unusually strong governments, high taxes, and poor property rights. The strong governments pursued strong industrial policies, the high taxes paid for infrastructure, and the poor property rights let governments use eminent domain to build canals, railroads, et cetera. In other cases, the book just isn't sure these helped that much. For example, China gets a lot of credit for its free-market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, but these reforms just took China from "literally Mao" to "kind of an average level of market freedom for developing countries". Given that the average developing country has an average-for-developing-countries level of market freedom, but does not experience a China-level economic miracle, these can gain only partial credit for China's success.

Japan was a weird special case. It almost missed the industrialization boat, but eventually succeeded through a very strong central government with excellent industrial policy, a lot of local smart people willing to adapt foreign inventions to the needs of Japan, and a lot of luck (eg the isolationist Tokugawa-era policies helped create a surprisingly strong educated urban class).

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism

May 04, 2021 · Original source

During/after the crisis, Harvey predicts the US’ only options will be hyperinflation, or prolonged Japan-style deflation, and goes into detail about which one we might choose (neither happened in 2008). He doesn’t think either of these will go very well, and thinks neoliberalism will need a new trick in order to survive.

Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower

May 21, 2021 · Original source

Its historical geographic divisions have apparently held to this day, with the north controlling politics, Shanghai and central China forming an economic core, the south a perennial secessionist threat, and the interior ignored. (This book predates the genocidal campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, though Tibet has suffered its share of atrocities.) Recent unification came about only after America took the threat of Japan away, and its economic rise coincided with its participation in America’s free trade network. With that change, “Instead of being raided for raw materials, China was guaranteed access to global supplies. The endless supplies of cheap labor that the Europeans and Japanese ruthlessly tapped now allowed China to generate its own goods for export, this time with the revenues flowing to the Chinese instead of overseas interests.”

Inline links: campaign against the Uighurs in Xinjiang

We didn’t just get tremendous economic growth though – we got “magical” results, but they were based on a one-time confluence of factors that “overwhelmed the normal rule that lots of twenty-and thirty-somethings make for an expensive-capital environment.” What were these one-time accelerants? He identifies the peace dividend – cuts in military spending that allowed capital to be put to more productive uses – as one such change, along with the emergent dominance of the US dollar, particularly boosted by Russian demand thanks to the collapse of their currency, and a later boost in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. With the Europeans’ decision to eliminate national currencies (agreed upon in a 1992 treaty, with the Euro to be introduced in 1999), they became relatively unattractive, and the Euro itself (an “unprecedented experiment in pan-government planning”) was too risky. Many holders of European currencies switched to the US dollar, such that between 1994 and 2002 (“when the euro finally got some traction and the surge dialed back”) there was a $2 trillion increase in the money supply. Zeihan also points to a collapse in commodities prices influenced by the elimination of Russian demand, but continued Russian production of oil and other commodities, followed by a collapse in demand thanks to the East Asian financial crisis. This story of capital coming to the West (“allowing consumption-driven growth not simply to soar, but to explode”) is one of chance world events. However, the story of capital coming from the Boomer cohort is one of demographics. By the 2000s, they’re the mature workers of Zeihan’s four stages described above – and as the bulge in the demographic pyramid, they started flooding the world with capital. Accordingly, “The cost of credit plummeted to levels never before experienced.” Zeihan suggests that developed-world demographics are the cause of booms in places that haven’t been well-developed, from Southern Europe to Brazil, Russia, and India. But he says it’s quickly coming to an end; Boomer savings into stocks and bonds will be moving to low-risk instruments and then turning into withdrawals rather than savings, and the cohort behind them is too small to replace all of that capital. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon: In every single developed country there is currently an American-style population inversion between the about-to-retire and the about-to-be-mature-workers age groups. Japan’s Boomers bulge is a decade older than the American equivalent, while Spain’s is roughly fifteen years younger. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. It dictates a period of chronically low growth and high credit costs, just not on precisely the same time frame. The undeveloped world is that way because it can’t self-fund, so without foreign capital, their growth will come to an end. In sum, the 1990-2005 period of high growth and easy capital was a historical anomaly; “the post-Cold War financial flight was a once-in-a-generation event” and the demographic bulge that coincided with it won’t come around again for decades, if ever. 4 2: America’s incredible advantages As noted above, Zeihan really likes America’s position in the world. He likes its demographics (relative to other developed countries) and loves its geography. Taking the population question first, in America, “the demographic inversion is only a temporary development.” America is younger than the rest of the developed world, as it urbanized later and its enormous size made having kids easier despite that urbanization (i.e., the suburbs exist). This makes the demographic crunch a single-generation issue, as the Millennials are a huge cohort. And even if they weren’t, America assimilates immigrants more easily than other places – Zeihan attributes this to it being a “settler society” – which can help with demographic problems. The rest of the developed world doesn’t have similar cohorts following their massive Boomer and Gen-X analogues. Accordingly: While the American financial world will be past its period of maximum stress by 2030, for the rest of the world 2030 will simply be another year of an ever-deepening imbalance between retirees and taxpayers, with smaller and smaller generations coming up the ranks generating less and less growth. For the developed world beyond the United States—and even large portions of the developing world—chronic capital poverty and permanent recession will be the new normal from which there is no return. Together with America’s Millennial-led growth and abundant energy (there’s a chapter explaining how shale is a done deal that, as of the mid-2014 writing, already made America the world’s largest energy producer 5), by 2030 Zeihan sees it as practically the only country with an economy worth noting. Anyone who is familiar with American geography should see the argument that’s coming about that aspect of Zeihan’s model. Isn’t the Mississippi River a pretty big deal? And those oceans on the east and west coasts seem like nice borders. Indeed, while he gives us many reasons why there was always going to be an American superpower, geography is central to his story. He has lots to say about America’s internal river systems, farmland, and other geographic features. What mountain barriers exist are apparently better than in other countries in terms of allowing internal transport; the Rockies have major passes, several of which have large cities within them, and the easiest pass in the Appalachians featured America’s first National Road, 130 miles of buried logs that linked two rivers, and thus the east coast with the best farmland in the world. As we saw with his exposition on the Nile, Zeihan puts a lot of emphasis on the value of river systems. He argues that America’s waterway network alone should be sufficient for “global dominance.” The numbers he provides in support of this point are impressive. For example, “the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.” He praises US barrier islands that mitigate oceanic destruction and effectively create another river system, as well as the fact that the river system is an actual network. All of this gives America more internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Thus, we get cheap transportation for “Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars,” enabling savings that “can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.” America doesn’t have to spend on artificial infrastructure, like German roads and rails, but when it does, the competition from the rivers keeps transport costs low. Cheap internal transportation has other benefits. “It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship,” as small government keeps taxes low, leaving people with plenty of capital. Some people may think of the American consumer with disdain, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Zeihan points out that America has been the world’s largest consumer market “since shortly after the Civil War.” His observation about a robust food supply forming the base of any civilization bodes well for America, which apparently has the largest connected stretch of quality farmland in the world (the Midwest), the value of which is exponentially increased by the fact that it overlaps with so many of these amazing river systems. It isn’t just the Midwest that he gushes over. California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento River, and Washington and Oregon’s farmland with the Columbia and Snake Rivers get praise. The only major farmland more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway is some of the Great Plains near the Rockies. ***** Zeihan provides a reminder that national security is actually a thing, and that at its most basic level, it’s about protection against invasions. It was something of a shock reading about America’s land borders in that context. “As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands.” And, “Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated,” thanks to mountains and thick forests over much of it. The mid-continent lands are much more connected, but Zeihan frames these Canadian areas as basically American; they’re physically separated from Canada’s core eastern provinces, so trade with them is weaker than with the closer American states. Then there are the oceans. As much as Zeihan loves deserts for protection, he loves oceans more (particularly in a post-World War II world; more on that below). We get a story about the War of 1812 nearly splitting America into three when the British attacked Baltimore. America learned about “strategic vulnerability and sea approaches,” as the attack “on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.” American foreign policy since then can be understood with respect to this lesson. Zeihan cites it as inspiration for America’s steps to make its ocean borders truly impenetrable, such as working to sever Canada from Britain, and the imperial-era acquisitions of Alaska, Hawaii, Midway, Puerto Rico, and de facto control of Cuba (preventing enemies from cutting off Mississippi River-based trade from the rest of the world). There’s more to Zeihan’s being awestruck by America than his analysis of its balance of transport advantages. He argues that America has been the world leader for agriculture, technology, finance, and industry since the Civil War, and runs through a litany of reasons for its preeminence: America is like a continent-sized island (because of its effective land borders), which is always going to be a more natural naval power than a more landlocked country.

Inline links: 4, 5

American empire was rejected out of an unwillingness to have a forever-war of occupation that would have been impractical to wage against the Soviets. Instead, America offers a deal that is “one of the great strategic gambits in history.” The deal offered benefits not only to England, France, and the Allies, but also to Japan and Germany that they couldn’t have even hoped to achieve had they won the war.6 Zeihan refers to this deal as “free trade” and “Bretton Woods,” based on the New Hampshire town in which the Americans dictated its terms to the Allies in 1944. It would let everyone sell into the best and last market in the world, with their commerce protected by the world’s only real navy, and all that America asked in return was the provision of cannon fodder against Soviet invasions. That may not have been such a big ask, as they may have lost their independence to such invasions without American assistance anyway. The deal was offered in pursuit of the strategic goal of containing the Soviets, presumably to avoid having them directly threaten Americans.

Inline links: 6

Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies

June 03, 2021 · Original source

In a survey of 50 countries (many of which do not invest heavily in military R&D), Evenson showed that inventions per scientist and engineer have declined in nearly all cases between the late 1960s and the late 1970s (1984: 89). In both the U.S. and Japan, between 1964 and 1979-80, the ratio of patents to productive inputs fell in almost all industries.

⊙ The first world might be capturing more of the gains through trade when trading with developing countries (e.g. Japan buys peanuts from Sudan at a price that’s much closer to the indifference price of Sudanese sellers than that of Japan’s buyers), a source of ‘income’ I expect will disappear as those developing countries become more powerful. I tried to find out how true this by googling around for it; apparently this idea is a subclaim of ‘dependency theory’ and if you open the Wikipedia article for it, there’s a banner at the top saying “someone wrote a rant here, please trust it less than usual”.

Inline links: Wikipedia article

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London

June 10, 2021 · Original source

Me: So why do Japanese people work so much? Teachers in the US usually go home at 4 or 5. Why do you stay until ten or eleven?

Japanese Colleague: Well, you know, I have to stay because everyone else does. It would look bad if I was first to leave.

Please don’t think I’m exaggerating about Japan. I’m really, really, not. But in contrast to Orwell, I’d assert that everyone, including the mob themselves share this same fear of the mob. Everyone is afraid of too much improvement, if that improvement means more ‘idle’ time for poor people. We can spot this now whenever UBI is brought up. I count myself among the skeptics of UBI, but I recognize that much of my initial skepticism amounted to, “But what will all those people do without their horrible jobs to keep them busy?” And I see this mob-fear in the eyes of my Japanese friends whenever I question them. They would probably still see it in my eyes if they asked me about UBI. Orwell sums up the whole, messy, tangled situation far better than I could:

Book Review: How Asia Works

June 28, 2021 · Original source

Despite all these benefits, land reform rarely happens. Landlords naturally resist expropriation, and no country at this stage has the money to pay them market value. The Asian countries got their land reform through convoluted pathways. Japan's happened first in the Meiji Restoration, but didn't stick; the final version was rammed through by Douglas MacArthur, who acted as a dictator and didn't care what Japanese elites thought. China's happened under communism, and South Korea's and Taiwan's happened as part of an American-led effort to defuse the appeal of communism by giving peasants and workers an unusually fair deal under capitalism.

After graduating college, he joined the occupying Japanese military, where he served in Japan's drive to industrialize its occupied territories. By the time Japan was defeated and withdrew, he had absorbed all the economic knowledge of the only successful non-Western economic power up to that point.

Each day workers at Pohang [steel factory] were lined up in front of the main, corrugated-iron site office and told that Japanese reparations money was being used for the project and that it was preferable to die rather than suffer the humiliation of wasting the money.

Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"

July 01, 2021 · Original source

Probably the best thing to do is just to check if IQ changed a lot in East Asian countries during their rise to success. The Japanese data (and valiant attempts to extend it to Korea) suggests yes. I don’t think we have the very fine-grained data it would take to try to see how much of these gains are “hollow” vs. important, but in their absence I think it’s fair to speculate that most of the northern vs. southern Asian IQ difference is just that northerners are more Flynn-ified.

Inline links: suggests yes

1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers.

Thirdly, he ignores that peasants will vote for land reform overwhelmingly in any democratic system. His focus on outside institutions is horribly misguided. From the CCP to 19th century Japan, peasant ability to make demands of the political system lead directly to land reform. If land reform is no longer viable in nations where the peasantry is still common, the question I'd ask is why that is. Are they all dictatorships? If so, it's a problem of democratization. Have they got other political goals? Then that's a separate issues.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us

July 15, 2021 · Original source

Here I’m less sure about where Watters is going. It seems like a stretch to argue that 1990s pharma companies introduced depression to Japan - a country where committing suicide is basically the national pastime. But Crazy Like Us tries its best. It says that although Japanese people commit lots of suicide, in their culture this is considered a reasonable response to feeling like they’ve shamed their family or lost their honor or something, very different from the Western idea of “some person isn’t able to cope with their depression and shoots themselves in a fit of despair they would have regretted in a few days if they had lived”. And although pre-1990s Japanese people sometimes got, let’s say, “spells of low mood”, they thought of this as a normal part of life which it’s important to go through and probably learn lessons from.

A sign at Aokigahara, a popular Japanese suicide hotspot, urges visitors not to kill themselves. The pre-1990s Japanese word for depression was utsubyo, which meant a lifetime tendency to extremely severe depression that would probably land you in a mental hospital. Utsubyo was considered a rare but severe mental illness much like schizophrenia, one that a few unlucky people had, probably for genetic reasons, but that most people would never have to worry about.

Inline links: Aokigahara

The pre-1990s Japanese word for depression was utsubyo, which meant a lifetime tendency to extremely severe depression that would probably land you in a mental hospital. Utsubyo was considered a rare but severe mental illness much like schizophrenia, one that a few unlucky people had, probably for genetic reasons, but that most people would never have to worry about.

Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"

July 21, 2021 · Original source

Also, I don’t know if things like the giant increase in neurasthenia in Japan after people started glorifying it is like this, or whether it was just a giant increase in neurasthenia, with no benefits or compensations.

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places

August 23, 2021 · Original source

TOKYO, JAPAN (RSVP) Contact: Harold, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 9:00 AM, Saturday, September 4 Location: The Deck Coffee & Pie (open air terrace) Coordinates: https://w3w.co/vanish.exhaled.command

Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/vanish.exhaled.command

Open Thread 200

November 28, 2021 · Original source

This was a big thing with the USSR too: they'd bury us in economic productivity with their stakhanovite New Soviet Men freed from the waste of capitalism (cf. that _Conquest of Bread_ review incidentally). Then it was with Japan, they'd surpass us with their unique Japan Inc. fusion of pseudo-democracy in which one party was always elected and worked hand-in-glove with the zaibatsus (or maybe South Korea, or another Asian Tiger). Then it was China... http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html You'll note all the countries in question are still below (sometimes vastly) US per capita.

Inline links: http://web.archive.org/web/20090302203414/http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html

The conclusion is more "the Industrial Revolution is a helluva drug", and can make any regime look good and get high on its own ideological supply about how it has restarted history and inaugurated the Caliphate or China Dream or Japan as #1 or whatever.

Book Review: Lifespan

December 02, 2021 · Original source

You can make a similar argument for the world at large: life expectancy is a really minimal driver of population growth. The world’s longest-lived large country, Japan, currently has negative population growth; the world’s shortest-lived large country, Somalia, has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. If 25% of the world population took immortality serum (I’m decreasing this from the 50% for USA because I’m not even sure 50% of the world’s population has access to basic antibiotics), that would increase world population by 15 million per year over the counterfactual. It would take 60 years for there to even be an extra billion people, and in 60 years a lot of projections suggest world population will be stable or declining anyway. By the time we really have to worry about this we’ll either be dead or colonizing space.

Inline links: a lot of projections

Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems

January 27, 2022 · Original source

Japan (GDP $5T): 2007: $21B, 2012: $28B

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

February 03, 2022 · Original source

#55: Non-Fiction Book With Case Studies On Resilience And Design I'm Nikhil Mulani and I'm looking for connections and funding to support a non-fiction book project. “Patient Designs” is an exploration of case studies of organizational resilience, technological design, and investment management that could provide valuable guidance for building a society oriented around the benefit of future generations. Case studies include the successes and failures of centuries-old family-run businesses in Japan, governance frameworks for early Internet architecture and recent AI development, and ethical safeguards created for new and old public investment bodies such as Norway's sovereign wealth fund and the City of London's "City Cash" fund. My experience includes product management roles at a variety of large companies and startups, and management consulting engagements across a variety of clients in the public and private sectors. My educational background includes a B.A. in Classics from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Wharton. If you can provide funding, connections, or advice, please email nikhilrmulani@gmail.com

Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping

April 28, 2022 · Original source

I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen for miles. In the US most folks would just jaywalk.

Your Book Review: Making Nature

May 20, 2022 · Original source

“International,” of course, mostly means the United States. The 1960s and 70s are the golden period when the US overtook all other countries in most domains, including science. Nature could not ignore this, and opened a satellite office in Washington D.C. in 1970. Interestingly, however, the journal’s Britishness seems to have helped it be seen as more international than its rival Science, which researchers in France, Germany, Japan, and other countries may have considered too American.

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy

June 17, 2022 · Original source

Figure 8: Construction at ITER as of May 2021. ITER We can now answer some of our earlier questions. The reason why progress has stalled is because we did as much as we could do on medium experiments. No country has been willing to provide enough money to build its own large experiment. So the fusion community has been gathering money from all around the world for decades for a single project [13]. ITER is supported by Europe (EU + UK + Switzerland), the US (which withdrew in 1999 and rejoined in 2003 [14]), Russia, Japan, China, South Korea, and India. Figure 9: There are three people in this diagram. Can you find them? ITER is designed to get Q=10. Despite getting 10 times as much energy from fusion as we put into the plasma, ITER is not designed to get engineering breakeven. ITER is designed as an experiment, not as a power plant. There will be tons of measuring devices pointed inwards. There are four different ways to heat the plasma and drive the current. This all allows you to learn more, but it requires extra power and lowers the overall plant efficiency. ITER will be followed by a demonstration power plant, named DEMO [15]. A fully optimized power plant should be able to reach engineering breakeven as long as Q>5. This is why I chose Q=5 as my criterion for ‘getting fusion’. ITER is also testing multiple designs for the tritium breeding blanket. Tritium is expensive and radioactive, so you want to produce it on site. The D-T fusion reaction produces a neutron, which we want to absorb, so we can use it to produce tritium. ‘Breeding' is when we use a neutron to produce a more useful isotope. It is a ‘blanket' because it surrounds the entire plasma, keeping the neutrons from going anywhere else. The best reaction to produce tritium involves lithium-6: 36Li +01n 24He +13T . This reaction also releases energy, which increases the power produced by about 25%. The tritium breeding blanket needs to make this reaction occur as much as possible, to efficiently carry the heat away so it can be used to generate electricity, and to provide a way to extract the tritium produced. ITER is scheduled to begin their first experiments in 2025. Part of why I think that we are about to make rapid progress again is because we are finally getting a large experiment. There have been problems with ITER staying on schedule and under budget. This isn't surprising for a collaboration between governments representing over half the world's population. In 2014, ITER got a new director, recalculated its expected cost, and underwent a major restructuring. Since then, ITER has largely stuck to this schedule and budget. Recently, there has been a 6 month delay because the French nuclear agency did what nuclear regulatory agencies do best, but this has been the longest delay since 2014. It is still possible for ITER to fail. The biggest risk involves disruptions. Sometimes, the plasma in a tokamak becomes unstable and all of the plasma hits the wall at once. This could melt some extremely expensive equipment and take years to repair. If ITER cannot get disruptions under control, then it would be a failed experiment. This is especially challenging because pushing for higher Q makes disruptions more likely. ITER is planning on being extremely cautious: Experiments begin in 2025, but it won't operate at full capacity until 2035. ITER has been the focus of the fusion community now for decades. The Future of Fusion Energy similarly makes ITER the centerpiece of the book. Things. Have. Changed. ITER by itself is not enough to justify the high level of confidence I express at the start. When Parisi & Ball finished writing this book in April 2018, ITER was basically the only game in town. Since then, Things. Have. Changed. Historically, private fusion companies were almost entirely jokes or frauds. They make outlandish claims, use completely different designs so they can't build on the progress of Figure 3, and they can be safely ignored. For example, Lockheed Martin [16] claims that it will take them five years to build a prototype of a fusion power plant that will fit in a truck. They have yet to publish evidence that they have produced a fully ionized plasma. Maybe they're just being secretive, but their design has solid components in the plasma. That won't work. A new generation of private companies have surged into fusion. Leading the charge is Commonwealth Fusion Systems and their tokamak SPARC [17]. Recent advances in high temperature superconductors have been a game changer. They can produce a much stronger magnetic field which allows for better confinement in a smaller experiment. We should now be able to get Q=10 in a medium experiment, which costs ten times less than ITER [18] and is within the reach of private venture capital. Figure 10: Finding the person here is much easier. When the Department of Energy decided to close the third largest plasma experiment in the US, the MIT group which ran it found itself adrift. They founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2018 with a goal of getting fusion within 10 years [19]. Since then, they have built the first ever high temperature superconducting coil in 2019, released their engineering plans for SPARC in 2020, began construction in 2021, and plan on finishing construction in 2025. Commonwealth Fusion had just been founded when Parisi & Ball wrote in 2018. Now they're leading the race to fusion. Several other startups are following SPARC's strategy of using stronger magnetic fields to get fusion in a smaller experiment. They use a variety of designs. Alternative Designs To understand how the alternative designs are different, we need to make sure we understand the basic strategy for getting fusion in a tokamak. Let's run through it again: (A) We want to get lots of fusion reactions … … so we want a large triple product (density * temperature * confinement time). (B) The fusion plasma is too hot to touch solid objects … … so we put it in a magnetic bottle shaped like a doughnut. (C) The particles drift outwards, leaving the bottle … … so we twist the magnetic field with a current in the plasma. I will start with the alternatives that are most similar to a tokamak. For each one, I will list the best experiments that currently exist, where they're located, and the year they began operation. Tokamaks have been better researched than any other strategy. There are currently 10 medium tokamaks: T-10 (Russia, 1975)

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RLSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d89bbdd-da25-4297-afd6-871f116f2355_1600x783.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!n_7L!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80bdc472-0b30-4841-8b08-9527c70f16f4_820x369.jpeg

JT-60 (Japan, 1985)

LHD (Japan, 1998)

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Practically unchanged throughout 1951, 1986, and 2019. It’s difficult to see what threat the US is protecting against in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. The rise of China has not lead to increase in troop deployment in Japan or South Korea; the wars in the Greater Middle East has not resulted in the influx of the bulk of troops from the former Axis powers; the fall of the Soviet Union has not seen any withdrawal as promised to Gorbachev but rather expansion of troops right up to the border of the Russian Federation. Once again, Hanania clearly shows that status quo bias has been disguised as grand strategy. IR theorists have long debated what strategy the US should adopt when responding to potential challengers: realists are pessimistic in viewing great powers to be destined for war; liberal internationalists are optimistic in trusting the pacifying effects of trade and enlightened self interests. Either way, they assume states make rational decisions to attain long-term objectives, but the two ideologically hostile states of the Soviet Union and China show that presidents are too worried about short-term political prospects to stop American business and technology from engaging with and empowering rivals. If there is no grand strategy against the most powerful geopolitical rivals, it’s unlikely any exists for lesser adversaries. 4. The Atrocity Of American Sanctions Sanctions were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in 1977 gave the president the right to sign an executive order to declare a national emergency to prohibit any transaction between anyone under the jurisdiction of the United States and the foreign country or its nationals. This means most sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public. The three main concentrated interests do not oppose sanctions (the only exception being the unprecedented lobbying campaign from American businesses to open up trade with China). The national security bureaucracy doesn’t stand to gain or lose from trading with foreign states, nor do government contractors (most rogue states' economies are miniscule compared to China’s). Foreign governments that are candidates for sanctions also can’t oppose them — Kim Jong Un cannot fund Washington think tanks; Israel and Saudi Arabia can fund a maximum pressure campaign against Iran as even meetings with Iranian state officials bring accusations of illegality. In theory, sanctions work by: Hurting the economy

Counterinsurgency (COIN) In the case of Afghanistan, the Bush administration was so eager to go to war it avoided any other options. No evidence has ever emerged that Taliban (the political faction that ruled Afghanistan at the time) itself knew about the 9/11 attacks, much less planned it; the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan condemned the attacks on 9/12. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” became the standard American line — before the war began, Taliban was willing to discuss bin Laden’s fate but the White House Chief of Staff refused; after the war began, Taliban was willing to hand over bin Laden to a third country for trial but White House refused just the same. In the case of Iraq, Bush was so eager to, in his own words, “Fuck Saddam, We’re taking him out” as early as February 2002 (and floated the idea of invading Iraq to Tony Blair), that on 9/17 Bush told his cabinet “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not gong to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point.” The administration couldn’t find any evidence directly tying Saddam to 9/11, so they settled on the now-discredited lies of WMDs and “ties” between al-Qaeda and Iraq. “We don’t negotiate with terrorist”’ extended to the non-terrorist Saddam — before the war, Saddam was cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency; after the war began, Saddam was willing to accede to practically all Amercan demands but White House refused communication just the same. Just like in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had no interest in exploring any other option short of war. Two feuding factions within the Bush administration had little contact with each other: the war hawks (neocons like Cheney i.e. products of Lockheed Martin), supported by the Pentagon, did not want to do nation-building; those partial to nation-building (the State Department) did not want war. Bush agreed with the former at the start of the war, but once Saddam was removed, sided with the latter. The postwar plan for Afghanistan was officially determined by the Bonn Agreement of 2001, but neither Bush nor Cheney consider it to be worthy of much thought in their memoirs despite years of hindsight; the postwar plan for Iraq lay entirely in the hands of Paul Bremer as subsequent Deputy Committee meetings on Iraq stopped being conducted — there wasn’t a single meeting to discuss disbanding the Iraqi army that left 400,000 jobless former soldiers prime for insurgency. The Iraq war dealt with no real crisis but cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, plunged Iraq into two decades of intermittent civil war — a candidate for the worst American foreign policy failure in history, but a success for the careers of Bush (who won reelection and congressional seats) and his advisors who led the US into Baghdad (who went on to work for think tanks, the World Bank, and the Trump Administration). Once again, there is no grand strategy as each party was only self-interested in short-term gains. The Earlier Obama Years As a candidate, Obama campaigned in support of the Afghanistan war, and indeed his first foreign policy decision as president was to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, largely due to overwhelming political pressure from top generals like Petraeus and McChrystal who boxed Obama into sending more troops by limiting the options presented to Obama, blatantly lobbying in press interviews, and threatening dire consequences like resigning from commanding troops in Afghanistan. We know Obama was hesitant as he announced at the same time that American troops would begin withdrawal in July 2011 (by 2015 he announced that American troop presence would stay in Afghanistan indefinitely). Obama’s second decision was to bomb al-Qadhafi in the name of Libyan regime change, due to domestic but this time also international political pressure from the heads of France and the UK who would face political embarrassment if Qadhafi’s regime, despite months of bombing and sanctions by the US-led coalition, recaptures the rebel-held Benghazi. NATO forces bombed al-Qadhafi’s convoy. Ten days after the killing of the dictator, the bombing campaign ended, and the subsequent decade of intermittent civil war faded from the American consciousnesss. Obama’s third decision was to cripple Assad’s regime in Syria with sanctions and by arming and training rebels, again due to overwhelming political pressure from hawkish ‘foreign policy community’ who still criticise Obama for having ‘done nothing’ despite spending $1 billion through the CIA and $500 million through the Pentagon, and crushing the Syrian economy. Top officials in the Obama administration admitted that assisting rebels would not change the course of war, nor was there any way to prevent arms from ending up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Syrian civil war only got bloodier with American involvement. The Later Obama Years Obama’s first major decision was the war on ISIS with the reentry into Iraq from which all American troops withdrew just a few years ago in 2011, due to overwhelming political pressure and in the face of a potentially humanitarian catastrophe (ISIS was going to massacre the Yazidi religious sectarians in Mount Sinjar). This time, the United States would roll back all territorial gains of the Islamic State by working with the Iraqi government, Shia militias in Iraq, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Obama’s second decision was signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Acton (JCPOA) with Iran to stop its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for UN and EU sanctions to be lifted, $100 billion in assets seized by the US to be returned to Iran, and the US to stop implementing secondary or third-party sanctions. This time, Obama faced unusually significant pressure from Congress which passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act by overwhelming majority to be able to revoke JCPOA, but Obama signed JCPOA with Iran nonetheless as enough Democrats would be able to sustain a veto. This was the one and only decision that made sense from the perspective of classical IR theory — American leaders doing things they think are right for the country without a clear political payoff. Indeed, the Iranian nuclear agreement is the exception that proves the rule of public choice, as the deal was only possible near the end of Obama’s second term, and at the end cancelled by Trump upon entering office — a president’s foreign policy accomplishment made without the support of concentrated interests only lasted as long as his administration. 6. Learning From American Foreign Policy Failures IR theorists widely acknowledge that it was a mistake to invade Vietnam and Iraq, and even the war in Afghanistan went on for too long even if it was originally justified, but these scholars have yet to comprehend the shortcoming of the unitary actor model in accounting for the lack of rational cost-benefit analysis. Comparing the pre-invasion GDP of the countries to what the US has sacrificed (even setting aside the number of lives lost), the GDP-to-money-spent ratio has been 1:74 in South Vietnam, 1:43.3 in Iraq, and a staggering 1:396 in Afghanistan. In other words, the United States has spent in Afghanistan the equivalent of that country’s level of production for close to four centuries. Cost-benefit analysis also fails outside the major wars: NATO, despite the collapse of the USSR, is willing to absorb practically any country including states that can drag the US into war without contributing anything to American security; the military expenditure in Japan and South Korea, despite anti-China talks in Washington, are either flat or declining. While an utter failure in humanitarian and economic terms, American foreign policy has a been a resounding “success” from the public choice perspective: Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone (more than any company in history)

Your Book Review: The Internationalists

July 01, 2022 · Original source

A brief aside - these norms were often confusing and initially incomprehensible (and often patently unfair!) to peoples outside the European sphere of intellectual influence. H&S tell some great stories of cultures colliding. One is an instance of a Sioux warrior having to be freed rather than tried for murder because the US finally admitted that he was a foreign soldier, and thus immune to prosecution for murder. Another is the “opening” of Japan via Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy - basically, showing up and threatening to go to war if they didn’t sign a treaty with him - and the ensuing pursuit by Japanese scholars of an understanding of the European philosophy of war.

The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.

Inline links: More Dakka

An account by a member of the British 23rd Indian Division—known as “The Fighting Cock” for the insignia on the uniforms of the men within it—shows how the colonized turned the colonizers’ ideals against them. During the war, the Japanese had seized control of Indonesia from the Dutch. When the Japanese surrendered in early September 1945, the Fighting Cock went to Java to accept a transfer of authority to Allied forces. In Singapore, en route to Java, an advance party met a “cheerful Dutchman who assumed that he and his countrymen were coming back to the peaceful reoccupation of their Empire.” But the Indonesians had a different idea. To greet the returning imperialists, they covered carriages and vehicles with graffiti declaring: “Atlantic Charter means freedom from Dutch Imperialism.” “Indonesia for Indonesians.” And, simply, “Merdeka”—Freedom. The armed resistance did not abate until the United Nations recognized the country’s independence in 1949.

Your Book Review: Viral

July 30, 2022 · Original source

[4] This report was widely criticized, with the governments of the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others expressing “shared concerns” about the investigation. Even the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, suggested that a more thorough follow-up investigation might be required.

Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries

August 04, 2022 · Original source

But Japan and China will drop a lot. By 2100, there will only be 800 million Chinese and 70 million Japanese.

Still: in the early 1900s, America and Europe were gripped by fear of “the Yellow Peril”: what if innumerable hordes of Orientals overran the West using their limitless numbers? Chinese and Japanese people were likened to swarms of insects, or flocks of birds: so numerous that it was incomprehensible and almost obscene.

At the time, there were about 500 million Chinese and 50 million Japanese.

Your Book Review: Exhaustion

August 05, 2022 · Original source

I read this book to try to make sense of CFS and its related conditions, and the book in my opinion begins to come together as it moves into the modern conceptions of exhaustion, but it is important to first follow Schaffner as she traces the explanatory models used in science and culture throughout Western history – there are only passing mentions in the book about Eastern conceptions of this condition, although it seems as though it is almost as common in Asian countries as in the West, where versions of neurasthenia are still diagnosed in China (shenjing shuairou; 神经衰弱) and Japan (shinkeisuijaku; 神経衰弱) and elsewhere.

Inline links: almost as common

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance

August 19, 2022 · Original source

The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion - so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates. Yet this is not some bodice-ripping work of historical fiction: it's well-sourced and vetted history, with plenty of primary source citations.

Huang first went to university to study electrical engineering, but during the World War II years he became an Army officer. He saw combat, recovered from a gunshot wound to the leg, and rose to the level of Major in an elite Chinese military unit known as the New First Army, which was aligned with U.S. forces. They battled Japanese troops in south-east Asia and, later, Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Huang graduated from the American Army Staff College in 1947, but after the victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan, Huang stayed in the U.S. and took up the study of Chinese history, obtaining a doctorate degree in 1964 (when he was 46). 1587 is his best-known and most widely acclaimed book, but he enjoyed a long and successful academic career and also contributed to Joseph Needham's opus Science and Civilisation in China.

The late rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard likewise once boasted “I don't walk! I get carried!” (On "Reunited" from the second Wu-Tang Clan album.) There is, of course, no end to the similarities between Ol' Dirty Bastard and the emperors of Japan, not least of which is their arrogation of divine status to themselves - to wit, the imperial Japanese claim of direct genealogical descent from the goddess of the sun and Ol' Dirty Bastard's alternate noms-de-rap of Osiris and Big Baby Jesus.

Inline links: Reunited

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places

August 26, 2022 · Original source

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jarred Filmer, jarred[dot]filmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: 52 McCaul Street Taringa (house) Coordinates: 5R4JFXXQ+P8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We used to meet once a month years ago, but now just meet whenever there's a Meetups Everywhere :) Notes: Snacks will be provided but dinner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong, Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of the pub, over the river, is free after 5pm! GOLD COAST (SOUTH), AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan, lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: 5R3MVF5W+555 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time etc. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan, xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 2, 6:00 PM Location: Beer Deluxe Federation Square Coordinates: 4RJ65XM9+3Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We're officially the Less Wrong Melbourne social meetup group, though our members include the broader rationalist community. We meet once a month for casual discussion (and beers for those so inclined). Please join our Facebook group to see the meeting invite; there you will see a WhatsApp group link - please join that group too to ensure timely updates in case of changes (Facebook notifications don't work reliably for this). Notes: Please RSVP to the meeting invite on the Facebook group so that I can make an appropriate booking. PERTH, AUSTRALIA Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 4PWQ3V34+W6 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: I run one meetup per year, if someone else wants to take over please do Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 6:00 PM Location: City of Sydney rsl, lvl 2 in the fishbowl Coordinates: 4RRH46F4+983 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet monthly WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jason, jason[dot]bowkettblogs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: UOW Library Coordinates: 4RQGHVVH+69 Event link(s): LessWrong CHENGDU, CHINA Contact: Alex, acx[dot]chengdu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 7:00 PM Location: Chef Wenwu Hot & Spicy Jianghu Food (Yulin store)/文武大厨·热辣江湖菜(玉林店). I (a foreigner) will be wearing a green shirt. Coordinates: 8P26J3C5+462 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP at the above email address, I will give you my Wechat contact if you're interested in attending. Open to time/date/location changes, so let me know if the proposed event doesn't work for you! Can be a bilingual event; all welcome. 有双语交流的可能性。如果想来的话，请提前发给我个电子邮件。 HONG KONG Contact: Nathan, nathan[at]xevarion[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan. Big wooden door. Coordinates: 862M74PW+6XP Event link(s): LessWrong BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal, propwash[at]duck[dot]com, Discord: propwash#4648 Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: 7J4VXJF4+PR Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We're the longest active group in Asia — we've been meeting monthly for the last 4 years, discussing ACX posts, LW content with a diverse and friendly group of people. Check our website for more info. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong to help me be better prepared. HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal, vmehra[at]pm[dot]me, Whatsapp: +919944430856 (username: Vim) Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India Coordinates: 7J9WFF4X+5P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Our rationality meetup group has been around for about 3 months and we discuss articles and exercises (eg. CFAR handbook) that can help us improve epistemic and instrumental rationality. MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB, e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 4:00 PM Location: Jamjar Diner, Versova Coordinates: 7JFJ4RM6+5W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email so I can plan activities accordingly. NEW DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi, suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp/phone +919997299972 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Select CityWalk Mall, Saket. Where inside the mall depends on the number of people interested. Coordinates: 7JWVG6H9+8H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please either send me an email or message me on WhatsApp if you want to attend. Any suggestions/changes are welcome. UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA Contact: Shailendra Paliwal, acx-meetup-2022[at]shailendra[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: We'll be at Doodh Talai near Pichola Lake and I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt carrying a sign ACX Meetup Coordinates: 7JPMHM9M+HG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that I can plan ahead UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: William Ubud, Napaproject[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, August 30, 6:00 PM Location: PARQ Ubud Coordinates: 6P3QG789+F7 Event link(s): LessWrong TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Godsoe, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 AM Location: Near Nakameguro station - RSVP for details Coordinates: 8Q7XJPV2+QFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Notes: ACX Tokyo meets monthly since Sept 2021. Our meetups are in English, so far. To join in, feel free to get in touch in any of the many ways to do so (email, Meetup.com). It's useful to be in contact before coming to an event, to help with that first leap of faith. KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang, yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com, LessWrong profile Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: I'll be in Lisette's Bangsar, which is a 5-minute walk from Bangsar LRT. I'll be wearing a pale green t-shirt and carrying an ACX sign. Coordinates: 6PM34MHH+VW Event link(s): LessWrong AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Jonathan De Wet, jonpdw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:30 PM Location: 32 Stanley Ave Milford, Auckland Coordinates: 4VMP6QH4+86 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: It’s a dinner party! Please RSVP on FB so I know how much food to make DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin, bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Picnic tables outside of St. David's lecture theatre on Otago University campus. I'll make a sign with ACX meetup. Coordinates: 4V6G4GP7+GM5 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: There is no Dunedin group as far as I'm aware of, but I'd be keen to meet other likeminded people and organise group hangouts occasionally. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 27, 5:30 PM Location: Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington. Room MZ05, which is on the mezzanine floor Coordinates: 4VCPPQCH+FGC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington LAPU LAPU, CEBU, PHILIPPINES Contact: Dave, tokkolizard[at]tutanota[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Starbucks in Mactan Newtown, there will be a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 7Q268257+4F Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by mail so I know if I need to set up a bigger meeting place SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng, jonathan[dot]ng1[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram @derpy Time: Tuesday, September 6, 6:30 PM Location: Tanjong Pagar MRT gantry, I'll be wearing the dark blue EA Global 2022 jumper Coordinates: 6PH57RGW+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise

December 09, 2022 · Original source

I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.

Links For February 2023

February 09, 2023 · Original source

34: Etirabys: In 1910, Argentina was the 7th richest country in the world. Starting around 1930, it flatlined harder than anyone had ever flatlined before, until now it is only about average for South America, itself a relatively mediocre region. Why? Etirabys brings up fifty years of incessant coups and countercoups centered upon Juan Peron and his opponents. @moritheil clarifies two additional points: first, "though the Peronists are often described as proto-fascist, First Lady Eva would in modern terms be called a social justice warrior . . . Argentina discovered identity politics decades before the US did". This is probably not the sentence you want to read about your country’s governing party if you’re hoping for economic growth. Second, during the period involved, Argentina accepted an extraordinary number of immigrants, especially from Italy (60% of Argentines are now of at least partial Italian descent), reaching percent-immigrant levels more than double the US at its peak. Those immigrants were an awkward combination of Jews and other refugees fleeing Europe just before World War II, and defeated Nazis fleeing Europe just after World War II. These conflicts created the fertile soil for the identity politics half of Peronism. Garrett Jones says that his new book on immigration has a chapter on this. Related quote: “There are four types of economies: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina”.

Inline links: Etirabys, clarifies two additional points, Garrett Jones says, Related quote:

Highlights From The Comments On Geography Of Madness

February 27, 2023 · Original source

In fact, this would be a good place to admit I’m getting very skeptical about pretty much every culture-bound syndrome on the traditional list. Amok and boufee deliriante impress much much less after reading your comments, and the other big famous one is taijin kyofusho, a supposedly a Japanese culture-bound condition where someone is excessively . . . I’m trying not to use the words “socially anxious” so that it can be a big reveal when I say it seems similar to our Social Anxiety Disorder.

Inline links: taijin kyofusho

The culture-bound aspect is supposed to be that it presents differently, with fear of causing offense. But first, many Americans with social anxiety disorder fear causing offense. And second, everyone knows that Japanese culture is more offense-focused than ours; “Americans and Japanese express social anxiety in different ways” feels less mysterious than “they have completely different culture-bound mental disorders!”

Another thing going on seems to be a problem of grouping: one sub-aspect of taijin kyofusho is shubo-kyofu, basically body dysmorphic disorder. American psychiatrists would never think of this as a kind of social anxiety, but it kind of fits. Another symptom is jikoshu-kyofu, fear of body odor. I’d never heard of this and thought it might be a genuine Japanese culture-bound condition, but Wikipedia tells me there’s a Western version called olfactory reference syndrome. The International OCD Foundation says that “the prevalence of ORS is not known, but it is certainly more common than generally recognized”. Lochner and Stein find that the prevalence in psychiatric samples (ie people with other mental health conditions) seems to be around 2%. I don’t think it’s at all obvious that more Japanese than non-Japanese have this condition that nobody ever does a good job measuring the prevalence of.

Inline links: olfactory reference syndrome, Lochner and Stein find

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023

April 10, 2023 · Original source

TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 13th, 10:00 AM Location: Nakameguro (Contact for details) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QFW Event Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/events/lvvvzsyfchbrb/ Notes: https://rationalitysalon.straw.page/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QFW, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/events/lvvvzsyfchbrb/, https://rationalitysalon.straw.page/

Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices

May 01, 2023 · Original source

I’m limiting this to America because it’s approximately a self-contained housing market; I don’t think there are enough immigrants to really affect things. Thinking at a country level does make a difference - for example, I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself!

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

May 10, 2023 · Original source

Kangbashi, China’s most famous ghost city. What are housing prices like in the ghost city? Again from Bloomberg: Sitting on the southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City (population 2.2 million), Kangbashi was the archetypal ghost city 10 years ago, with barren boulevards and empty buildings standing forlornly in the desert. Local officials are adamant that things have changed. They say 91% of homes in the district are occupied. In fact, after a yearslong construction freeze, the government approved six housing projects in 2020 and expects 3,000 homes to be built by the end of this year. Apartments in a new development are selling for 9,500 yuan per square meter, and downtown they go for 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, according to Liu Yueyue, 28, a salesman at a new residential development in the district’s northeast. “Would houses in a ghost town sell at such high prices?” asks Liu. Half of his customers come from outside Kangbashi, and most are parents who want to send their children to the well-regarded local schools, he says. Looking at this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Kangbashi seems squarely in the middle - for example, Wuhan and Xian are also in the 15,000 - 16,000 range. I claim this supports my argument: surely twenty years ago, houses in this particular deserted corner of Inner Mongolia would have been dirt cheap (if any even existed). But if you build a city there, it becomes just as expensive as any other city! Here it’s very obvious that the density caused the high prices instead of the other way around. Still, the Chinese housing market is weird, with significant vacancies even in expensive, well-developed cities. Paul Botts: No official vacancy rates are published in China and no specific definition of it exists there. Various think tanks and researchers both within that country and elsewhere have published estimates ranging from as low as 11 percent to as high as 24 percent. Those estimates have been for varying samples of Chinese cities, have used various definitions of housing vacancy rate, etc. The best (as in most systematic) estimate yet produced has come from researchers at a university in Liaoning. They used night-time urban lightsheds captured by a new (2018 launch) Chinese satellite having a new level of light sensing technology which allows separating out light from parks and plazas. They covered a large sample (49 cities), and made their sample representative of city type, city size, regions within China, etc. They also crossed-referenced with local housing data to ensure accurate balancing of their sample and to confirm that the satellite was successfully identifying light coming from housing blocks. They found vacancy rates of just under 20 percent in China's Tier 1 cities, and found rates above 20 percent in 40 of the 49 cities. They found the highest vacancy rates in western and northeastern cities, which are also the newest ones; that finding is consistent with the hypothesis of significant numbers of recently-built ghost cities. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data And Phil H (author of the blog Tang Poetry) writes: The price of housing in China has skyrocketed over the past few decades, as all those extra apartments have been built. I live in a pleasant but unremarkable southern city, and I paid London prices (about 4.5m yuan/$650k for a 1,300 sq ft flat). That seems to match Scott's hypothesis that high density leads to high prices. House prices here have risen much faster than incomes. They've risen in rural areas, too, but the increases in price in cities have been stratospheric. 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant I won’t name and shame people, but for example: You excluded Tokyo from your dataset. Tokyo has much higher density than SF and much lower price per sqft. Tokyo just kills this. Tokyo is bigger than New York and has significantly lower rent because they build more housing! This is in a wealthy country with even lower interest rates than the US. I don't think you have justified excluding non-US metros, like Tokyo, or Auckland. Doesn't this lead to the natural conclusion that there is a sufficient level of housing to build, and that the problem is that the USA's many metros are structured to prevent housing? It seems like you're just arguing that US metros are bad at building housing, which is also what Matt Yglesias is arguing. "Change my mind about housing, but don't mention Tokyo" is like saying "Change my mind about gun possession, but don't mention Switzerland." You can't test the effect of allowing new housing unless you're willing to look at cities that do, in fact, allow it. Tokyo and NYC both attract tons of new residents But Tokyo's housing rents have been stable, while NYC rents keep rising. Why? Tokyo has permissive housing construction laws. NYC makes building new housing almost illegal. Yes, dense cities are attractive, and that makes them get more dense over time. But it only makes them more expensive if you forbid new housing to keep up with the new residents. Tokyo! But I’m like the 10th person to bring it up… As I wrote on the original post (not even edited in! it’s been there the whole time!): I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself! That is, yes, you’re all correct that cities are only expensive in the context of more demand for city housing than the (NIMBY-constrained) city housing market can currently supply. You are all correct that if this problem were solved at the national level, then city housing would be cheap, and every additional city house would make it cheaper. My claim is that marginal changes - like Oakland building an extra 10,000 units, but everyone else staying the same - will most likely increase Oakland prices. Yes, if Oakland unilaterally built 50 million units, that would soak up the entire excess demand and probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). Yes, if the entire US switched to good housing policy at the same time, that would probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). But if we don’t do any of that stuff, and just build another 10,000 houses in Oakland, I think it would probably increase prices in Oakland. Some other people brought up that Japan has a declining population, and it’s much easier to have low house prices when your population is declining (compared to some previous time when number of houses presumably matched number of people), but ddd pointed out that people continue to migrate from the Japanese countryside to Tokyo, so its population continues to increase. Also, Mike (I’m stitching together two comments here): In a country with a declining population, you would expect that fewer homes are being built per capita because there's little to no competition for existing homes. But it's exactly the opposite! Japan builds far more homes per capita than the US does, despite their declining population […] As a result, the average Japanese home is very new and the average house is torn down and replaced after a relatively short 30 years. They're living in nice new homes for cheaper. 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I think you're making a very common mistake here of confusing supply/demand with *quantity* supplied or quantity demanded. (This is very common! we teach students about this in micro 101 because it's so easy to make!) What you're seeing is that the quantity supplied is correlated with housing prices (true!). But this is very different from establishing that the supply curve--i.e. the amount of housing that would be produced at any given price, and what moves up/down when we regulate/deregulate supply--is positively correlated with price. Figuring out what supply curves look like is a lot less intuitive and requires some high-grade econometrics, which is why economists had to set up a whole commission just to study this particular problem (the Cowles Commission). In terms of resources for understanding how these concepts are different, a micro 101 textbook will cover this distinction. For the econometrics side of this, I've heard good things about Scott Cunningham's *Causal Inference Mixtape*, although I haven't personally used it. My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability. MLE later gets more on point: The effect you're discussing here is kind of real in a sense. When the marginal utility of housing increases for *other* people, density arguably becomes more desirable for me, which is kind of like the demand curve shifting up. These are called bandwagon goods and discussed here: http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf In theory, the bandwagon effect could be so strong that parts of the demand curve are upward-sloping. Solutions like this are not, technically, prohibited by the laws of mathematics, just the laws of economics. (And arguably of physics--see paper for conditions where these kinds of bandwagon effects imply the amount of housing in the city would have to be negative). In practice, this effect exists but just can't overcome the normal, non-weird economics that says "making more of a good makes the prices fall." Again, I claim the existence of Manhattan vs. Conanicut shows that sometimes it does. I cannot find the words “housing”, “real estate”, or “land value” anywhere in that paper. Alex Poterack writes: There's two things going on here: confusing shifts in demand with movement along the demand curve, and getting causation backwards. You're assuming density causes prosperity, rather than prosperity causing density. There are ways the former can happen, but the bigger thing is that, for a wide range of historical reasons, you can make a lot of money in NYC and SF, so lots of people want to live there, so they get very dense. This is the prosperity shifting demand right, so at any given price, more people want to live there; this drives prices up, and they go higher the more fixed supply is. If you built a bunch of housing in Oakland, lots of people would move there because it's cheaper, which is movement along the demand curve; it's still the same number of people who want to live there at any price. Now, it's possible that the increased number of people living there makes the city more prosperous (this is the phenomenon of induced demand), which would shift demand right, but there are way more differences between NYC/SF and Oakland than just the density, so I don't think it would shift demand enough to offset this. In particular, if it's just a small increase in small, it's also a small increase in density, so there's almost no shift in demand (but there is movement along the curve). I still think this is missing my point, but I present it here in case anyone else is enlightened by it and wants to try further to convince me I’m making this mistake. 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions Scott Sumner is an economist and blogger; he writes: It is certainly the case that building more housing can make a city more desirable, and that this effect could be so strong that it overwhelms the price depressing impact of a greater quantity supplied. But studies suggest that this is not generally the case. Texas provides a nice case study. Among Texas’s big metro areas, Austin has the tightest restrictions on building and Houston is the most willing to allow dense infill development. Even though Houston is the larger city, house prices are far higher in Austin: Houston pretty much describes the “Oakland with more housing” outcome that Alexander views as somewhat far-fetched. Only in this case, it’s Austin with more housing. Alexander seems too quick to accept the, “If you build it they will come” idea—that you can build more housing and thereby boost demand so much that prices actually rise. I started the post with a graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. I’m having trouble seeing how Sumner’s point isn’t just “if you remove 48 of those cities and cherry-pick two, the relationship is negative”. My attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph, using Sumner’s data plus a few other things available online. Why weren’t they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities, but I’m not sure and agree this is confusing. Everyone knows Austin is more expensive than Houston because Austin is a trendy tech and culture hub and Houston isn’t (and relatedly, because Austin’s median family income is 50% higher than Houston’s). Unless someone wants to claim that its failure to build housing helped turn it into a trendy tech and culture hub, I don’t think there’s much point to this comparison. It’s true that Houston’s bigger size didn’t let it leapfrog over Austin to become a trendy tech and culture hub, which goes against some of what I claimed in the first part of this post. But I never claimed there would be a perfect 1-1 correlation between city size and trendiness, or that you could never find a pair of cities where one was bigger but the other was more trendy. Just that there would be a correlation. Moving on: Here’s the problem with this argument. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration, with population changes due to regulatory changes such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against Alexander’s argument. Over the past 50 years, increasingly strict zoning has reduced housing construction on big cities like New York and San Francisco. As a result, their populations have increased by less than in cities with less strict zoning, such as Houston. If Alexander were correct, then the price gap between the tightly controlled cities on the coast and the more laissez-faire cities of Middle America should have shrunk over time. Instead, the price gap has widened. New York and San Francisco were always more expensive than other cites, but with tighter zoning and less new construction the gap has become far wider. During the last fifty years, there was also deindustrialization and demographic sorting. This is just the Austin vs. Houston story all over again. Alexander is implicitly viewing this outcome as a “problem” for the city that builds more housing. They must sacrifice so that the rest of the country can gain. But in his scenario, Oakland is better off. Indeed if it were not better off, then why would more people choose to live in Oakland? In order for it to be true that building more housing boosts housing prices, it must also be true that the quality of existing houses (including neighborhood effects) rises by more than enough to offset the increase in supply. That means the new housing construction must make Oakland such a desirable place to live that the amenity effect overwhelms the quantity effect [...] Of course, economic change always has winners and losers. Here’s how I would describe the impact of allowing more housing construction in Oakland, in the unlikely event that this did raise housing prices: 1. America would benefit. 2. Oakland would benefit. 3. Poor people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 4. Affluent people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 5. Homeowners in Oakland would benefit. 6. Some renters in Oakland would benefit (from a more economically dynamic city.) 7. Some renters in Oakland would suffer from higher rents. In the much more likely case where new housing construction would lower prices, the impact described in #5 and #7 might reverse. Either way, there is no defensible argument for not building more housing in Oakland, regardless of the impact on price. If building more housing reduces its price, then there is a strong argument for allowing more housing construction. If building more housing raises its price, then the argument for more construction is even stronger. I agree with all this. Jeremiah Johnson is a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, host of the Neoliberal Podcast, and a YIMBY activist (not to be confused with Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, who killed 300 Native Americans and ate their livers). He writes: Here's why you're wrong in a single sentence: Demand causes high prices, not new units. Prices are high in SF and NYC because those are desirable places to live for a huge number of people. People all over the country and the world would live there if they could, and prices reflect that. The fact that the densest cities are the most expensive is true. But the high prices are not caused by density - rather, the density and the high prices are both a consequence of crushingly high demand […] There's a feedback loop, but what matters here is the elasticity, which is less than one. We can measure this empirically. New housing lowers prices via the mechanism of adding supply, which is basic economics and how we expect markets to work. New housing could raise prices if it also made the city a more desirable place to live and shifted people's preferences, such that there was more demand to live there after the new housing is built. If you think it's unclear which of these effects would dominate, luckily we have empirical data that over and over and over shows adding housing supply does indeed lower prices on a local level. This is a fairly well established result that replicates well. edit: I'm actually thinking about drawing out the weighted DAG graphs here to make the conceptual stuff easier, but it would be pretty long. I'd love to do this as a guest post. I’m skeptical of the empirical results because they don’t match the much stronger “Manhattan vs. Conanicut island” empirical results, and if I try to think about why, the best explanation I can think of is that the Manhattan experiment has been going on longer (ie long enough for Manhattan’s extra residents to found businesses and institutions that attract new people). I’ve told him he can try pitching this guest post to me; in either case, I would be interested in seeing the graphs. Several other people also posted this graph that Johnson helped make famous: Hopefully by now you can predict my objection: the places in the southeast corner are mostly unfashionable red state Sun Belt cities; the places in the northwest corner are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities. My conclusion is that trendy liberal coastal cities are both more NIMBY and more desirable, and if you use this to draw any conclusions about housing policy you’ll just end up confused. But maybe I should take this same lesson to heart myself. Dense cities are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities; uninhabited tundra in North Dakota isn’t. Maybe the demand is just for trendy liberal coastal cities, and once you attain that status, extra density doesn’t matter that much. Maybe Oakland has already maxed out its “trendy liberal coastal city” status, and even if it became Manhattan-sized, it wouldn’t get any trendier, or would get trendier only with a long time lag. There are a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch); maybe these (rather than North Dakota) are the natural control group for San Francisco. I think they are still cheaper than SF, but maybe not by very much. Cameron Murray is a housing economist whose work some other commenters recommended; he also writes the blog Fresh Economic Thinking. He very kindly showed up and wrote: I think you are in general right that agglomeration effects are real, which is why bigger cities have higher value to residents. I agree that people move locations. But I think you can go a step further. If one city is growing faster and densifying, surely those people are not demanding homes in other cities and those cities build slower. This is part of the spatial equilibrium story that further makes claims about “build density and get cheap homes” less plausible. 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll Thanks to everyone who commented on this post and helped me refine my thoughts. I’m willing to concede the following points: It might be that only attracting the sort of educated people who found companies, universities, etc will make housing prices go up. Less educated people will take more jobs than they create and not ratchet up the city’s desirability level. (I’d previously told commenters talking about “gentrification” that it was irrelevant to the mechanism I was talking about here, but maybe it isn’t - maybe “gentrifiers” are the people creating more jobs and institutions than they consume, and so homes that attract them in particular will increase demand more than they increase supply? Maybe this discussion does reduce to the gentrification discussion?)

Inline links: this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Paul Botts, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data, Tang Poetry, writes, ddd pointed out, Mike, Maximum Limelihood Estimator, gets more on point, http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf, writes, writes:, far higher in Austin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tAF8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f2b338-da84-4d85-b71c-0ce2e02e10e1_685x559.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mLwn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf942da-5716-49e8-a177-20140681e7fc_573x421.png, Center for New Liberalism, the Neoliberal Podcast, Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, Johnson helped make famous, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tg5t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc490a60a-3e97-4b73-9806-79bb967b5172_608x550.png, Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

The Question Of Separatism

May 19, 2023 · Original source

Capital. Cities can provide money directly to other regions, for instance as subsidies, loans, or development grants. I’m guessing that Bardou received some assistance from the French national or regional governments at some point. These five forces determine pretty much everything that happens in rural regions. We can distinguish at least seven types of these regions, depending on which forces act upon them. Seven Types of Rural Regions When the five forces act together in a reasonably balanced manner, this creates a type of rural area that Jacobs calls a city region. This is a confusing name, because it absolutely does not mean “any region around a city,” nor does it mean “suburbs.” We know this because Jacobs spends several pages telling us which cities have a city region and which don’t. For instance, Tokyo has a city region, the largest in the world as of 1984, but Sapporo, in northern Japan, doesn’t. Boston, Paris, Milan, and Taipei do; Atlanta, Marseille, Naples, or Manila don’t. A city region, in Jacobs’s terms, is the rural hinterland around a city that gets “radically reshaped” by that city’s economy. It contains a mix of productive farms, prosperous satellite towns, and factories that have moved out of the city, forming a symbiotic network of commercial and industrial enterprises. City regions “are the richest, densest, and most intricate of all types of economies except for cities themselves,” she writes. They arise thanks to the interplay between the five forces. In another of her wonderfully told examples, Jacobs summarizes a book about Shinohata, a real Japanese village (but with a fake name, for anonymity) on the outskirts of the Tokyo area. In the post-war era, Tokyo was expanding rapidly, and so was its city region, eventually reaching Shinohata in the 1950s. Before, most families in the village lived from subsistence farming and exported a little bit of silk to distant places. Almost no one moved out to Tokyo or other cities. But after 1955, the markets, jobs, technology, transplants, and capital from the city all came bearing upon Shinohata at the same time, totally transforming it. The growing city markets meant that most families could switch to new cash crops and make more money. New jobs were opening up in Tokyo for the sons and daughters of Shinohata, many of whom left — prompting the remaining farmers to buy labor-saving equipment, which made productivity soar. Soon, a large food processing factory was transplanted into the village, providing additional jobs and money and causing a variety of smaller businesses to pop up in the area. After a typhoon disaster in 1959, a recovery grant from the government — an example of city capital — was put to good use by providing much needed excavation work and infrastructure development. Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GCSd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9012632f-bf92-4318-9c85-e4b95826dd50_300x450.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png

… and we think, thank goodness that Germany is unified now. So much easier to think about! Can you imagine if the Our World in Data charts had to show separate lines for the Electorate of Saxony, the Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg, the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and about 1,800 other semi-sovereign states? Can you imagine traveling around if each of them had its own currency? (Fun fact: the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire Wikipedia page doesn’t contain such a list. Instead it points to no less than 28 sub-lists.) Jacobs stops shy of asking, in either book, the question that seems to be the logical continuation of her reasoning: should everything be a city-state? Should we encourage separatism until each inhabited place in the world is either a city or a city region with its own currency? We can hazard a guess as to what her answer would be. She would probably say that there’s no need to upend everything right this moment. Just adopt an attitude of political openness and experimentation. Don’t try to hold together entities that don’t work that well. When separatist sentiment arises somewhere, you can argue it’s a bad idea, but don’t fight it out of emotion such as fear for your nation’s integrity. Eventually, things will settle — the regions that want to be city-states will be, and those that prefer to be united with others, for cultural or economic reasons, will stay that way. Unity has good PR and some genuine advantages, so there will still be plenty of it. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asks this question because she knows it’s irrelevant. We just can’t help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions (like the EU), and too bad if they enter long periods of stagflation until they violently collapse. This might be the right time to mention that her last book, published in 2004, is called Dark Age Ahead. IV. Something to Dislike For Everyone Jane Jacobs’s most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is recognized as perhaps the most influential thinker in urbanism. She is credited with saving Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York City, and helping cancel the Spadina Expressway in Toronto. To this day people organize “Jane’s Walks” as a living memorial to her impact on cities. But Jane Jacobs herself thought that her greatest intellectual contribution was not in city planning, but in economics. She thought that import replacement was her most important discovery, since it explained how wealth expands better than existing macroeconomic theories. She wrote multiple books that were explicitly about economics and was about to write another when she died, Uncovering the Economy. I am not an economist, so I might not be qualified to make a judgment on this matter, but: it seems to me that there’s a discrepancy here. Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don’t quite seem mainstream. I’d never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it came out, and more recently Tyler Cowen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. The most obvious target, of course, is her city obsession: yes, cities are important, but they’re not the only economic phenomenon that matters, some would say. Perhaps Jacobs has overplayed her hand. But there are other possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that she was a woman and had no credentials, which made it difficult for (mostly male) professionals to take her seriously. We know this was true at the beginning of her career at least. It seems possible that even after she managed to establish herself as an original urban thinker, economists had trouble accepting that she could, with her lack of any college degree, come up with new insights in their field. I doubt that’s really true today, though. We do take Jacobs seriously, and still read all of her books, which is more than we could say about most economists. Instead, I propose that the discrepancy comes from a darker place: in laboring to be comprehensive about cities and economics, she reached conclusions that most people don’t want to be true. No matter your politics, there’ll be something for you to dislike in Jacobs’s work. For example, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t think the European Union was a good idea, so she probably would have supported Brexit. Brexiters might rejoice, except that a lot of them are British nationalists who certainly don’t want Scotland to leave the UK, whereas Jacobs would agree with that. Which would be great news to Scottish independentists — except that if a new separatist movement arose within Scotland, she’d also support that. Jacobs’s ideas and grassroots activism in favor of small-scale, organic urban planning have come to be seen as left-wing — yet her criticism of national welfare programs wouldn’t make her out of place among hardcore right-wingers. Unless those right-wingers were military hawks, in which case they’d find no solace in reading Jacobs on military transactions of decline. Writing during the Cold War, Jacobs criticized the Soviet Union for its incredible centralization of decision-making in Moscow. She rightfully predicted its collapse, making her an ideological ally of the capitalist West, right? Not so, since the United States is also, according to her, too centralized and in the early stages of decay. “Today the Soviet Union and the United States each predicts and anticipates the economic decline of the other,” she writes. “Neither will be disappointed.” Whether she was correct about the US is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case, she did foresee, using her theory on cities, the decline of Japan. This must have been bold in the 1980s at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle, when there was a widespread trope that Japan would soon take over the world. Yet she was right: in 1991, Japan entered its “lost decade,” which soon became two lost decades, and then three. To be fair, she predicted the decline of all large-ish countries, so I wouldn’t mark her as a superforecaster or anything. Still, this puts in perspective the more recent trope that China is going to take over the world. No country, no ideology is safe from Jacobs’s prophecies. Smaller ideologies aren’t spared, either. Effective altruism would probably seem totally mistaken to her, since at its core it promotes an inorganic, top-down transfer of wealth from prosperous cities to poor areas. Progress studies people think that technological innovation will solve economic stagnation, but she would point out how labor-saving equipment so often causes damage when it is introduced to regions that don’t benefit from the other city forces, like the Scottish Highlands or many of her other examples in Colombia, India, or the American South. (This point would deserve an essay of its own, but reading Jacobs has made me a bit more worried about the “AI will take our jobs” thing. It’s clear that new jobs will appear, but when the technology city force from the San Francisco Bay Area reaches distant places with poor economies, which it will very soon thanks to the internet, the effects might not be very pleasant to see.) Overall, the political ideology that might fit Jacobs the best might be… libertarianism? She’s not a big fan of large governments who make big top-down decisions, clearly. Yet I don’t get the feeling that this association fits all that well either. Jacobs doesn’t seem to be anti-government if the government is at the city level. I doubt she would have liked the kind of hyperfragmented world depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I also doubt she’d be impressed by cryptocurrency-backed “cloud cities” or fantasies of charter cities, none of which she would see as real cities in the sense of concentrated pockets of people who start replacing what they import with local production. Jane Jacobs, in sum, was an archetypal accidental moderate. She took one idea very seriously — the idea that cities are fundamental — and explored its ramifications without caring in the slightest if it led to the “wrong” opinions, as her friends in 1980 Toronto must have thought when she wrote about Quebec. I don’t know if she went too far; I’m sure someone more qualified than I am can find flaws in that core idea or any of her other observations. But to me she sounds convincing, and her consistency is frankly admirable. So, to end this review on a more review-y note, go read Jane Jacobs. Her books are a delight, with their elegant arguments and masterfully told anecdotes. Her predictions often take an air of doom, but she is also an optimist who offers constructive ways forward. She sets an example for all of us who care about getting the details right, no matter the credentialed experts, the current political climate, or the great theories of the past. Image credits Cities and the Wealth of Nations book cover: from Amazon.

Inline links: List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyMq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc388f24-009c-42ee-adca-9d5c50faaa66_932x190.png, academic, reviews, expressed, Japan would soon take over the world, fantasies, of, charter, cities, accidental moderate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r8Rb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60621c76-b34b-4e10-b272-394480443e1b_1600x1066.png, Amazon

Shinohata is in Tochigi Prefecture, but I couldn’t figure out what its real name is. In any case, it is part of the vast Greater Tokyo Area, a region that combines the largest city in the world with large tracts of rural land, and occupies a disproportionate space in Japan’s demographics and national economy. Rural regions far from import-replacing cities are generally less lucky. Their plights take different forms, depending on which of the five forces dominates the others. An oversized market force creates a supply region: a place that exploits agricultural or natural resources and exports them to distant cities. These regions (the most common in the world) can be rich or poor, but they’re never economically dynamic — and they’re very sensitive to disturbances in the markets that they serve. Jacobs’s example is Uruguay, a country that grew rich selling animal products to European cities in the early 20th century, but then suffered immensely when the market changed in the 1950s, propelling the nation into a succession of economic crises.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JDqr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ad04ba-f051-4744-b735-b6474c67dd81_1397x1593.png

Your Book Review: Lying for Money

May 26, 2023 · Original source

Sam Bankman-Fried's origin story begins in a similar manner: his foray into cryptocurrency began with the Alameda Research trading firm, whose first mission was focused on an arbitrage opportunity that they discovered: the story, as SBF tells it, is that there was enough of a price differential between the price of cryptocurrency on US and Japanese exchanges that, if you were set up to trade in both markets, you could exploit the difference and make "free money."

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

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America

June 07, 2023 · Original source

Another noteworthy event was a situation seen at a university that illustrates very well that Americans do not disregard human relations. A delegation from the Japanese business community came to speak at a university, representing some of Japan’ s major corporations and important academic institutions. The Japanese are rich and already known to the world. At the reception, many Americans treated the Japanese representatives with respect and looked for things to say. One woman official from the local government held the hand of a Japanese man for several minutes, smiling all over and saying straight out that the Japanese man had a beautiful tie. I felt uncomfortable looking at her. In fact, she was trying to get some Japanese investment for the local area. Americans mostly despise Japanese, but their attitude towards Japanese and what they think inside is different.

Japanese culture promotes collectivism, while American culture promotes individualism. Modern mass production is about division of labor and cooperation, and the collectivist gene in Japanese culture is more suitable for collaborative production. American individualism tends to reject large-scale or oblivious cooperation, and Americans speak first and foremost of the status of the individual. Americans tend to think about individual success, while the Japanese are often led to think about collective success. The unifying spirit of large Japanese companies is difficult to find in the United States. Japanese people can dedicate their lives to a company and do a small part of the work. Americans, I’m afraid, have difficulty doing this. There are pros and cons to collectivism for the development of a society, but it is clear that collectivism unites more than individualism.

Japanese culture focuses on personal devotion and American culture focuses on personal enjoyment. The American culture is hedonistic. Work is for pleasure, Americans never have trouble with themselves, and money is spent. Americans with large savings are rare animals. Many people often do not know where to get the money tomorrow. Americans borrow money to buy houses, cars, college, etc. Spend it first. Japanese culture does not have a high personal position, and does not emphasize personal enjoyment, but rather advocates personal dedication, Japanese men work, many people have to work until midnight, are working long hours consciously and voluntarily, there is no overtime pay. I was told that if a Japanese man does not work until midnight at night in the company, people will think he has no drive and is not valued. The American standard of living is probably one of the highest in the world, surpassing Japan in housing, transportation, education, food, and environment, although the per capita income is not as high as in Japan. The hedonistic culture leads people to spend large sums of money on welfare rather than investment. The Japanese are typically “economic animals” with a strong desire to invest, but not as focused on personal enjoyment as the Americans.

Your Book Review: Safe Enough?

July 01, 2023 · Original source

On March 16th, 2011, Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto learned that he would not have to evacuate Tokyo2.

Inline links: 2

In the worst case scenario, not made public until long after the disaster, the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area - 35 million people - would have to be moved to temporary shelter. The very existence of the nation of Japan was at stake. And no one - not TEPCO, the utility that owned Fukushima, not the Prime Minister, not the Japanese military - could do anything but hope.

For this summary I want to cite three sources that I found particularly useful. First, Fukushima in review: A complex disaster, a disastrous response, published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Second, The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the DPJ: Leadership, Structures, and Information Challenges During the Crisis published in Japanese Political Economy. Third, The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission. Wikipedia’s summary is of course excellent as well, but these more academic sources provide an excellent source of stories, and further understanding for the social and political context in Japan at the time of the event.

Inline links: Fukushima in review: A complex disaster, a disastrous response, The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the DPJ: Leadership, Structures, and Information Challenges During the Crisis, The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, Wikipedia’s summary

Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline

July 20, 2023 · Original source

As I see it, Britain's bet is that being a junior partner of the United States will both give them more success than chaining themselves to Europe and give them more freedom (since the US has no interest in British domestic politics in the way the EU does). To this end, it's aligning itself with other "individual" US allies like Japan or Thailand and attempting to take a leading role in things like Ukraine or Pacific defense.

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places

August 25, 2023 · Original source

JAKARTA, INDONESIA Contact: Fawwaz Contact Info: fawwazanvi[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 10th, 3:00 PM Location: Workshop Space, Cecemuwe Cafe and Space - Senayan Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8 Notes: Please RSVP on my twitter account -- @fawwazanvilen -- so I have an idea of how many are coming. Japan TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold and Andrew Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 14th, 10:00 AM Location: Nakameguro, Tokyo Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QG Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Please contact the organizer to RSVP and for exact details.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58QQ7V+G8, https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QG, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/

TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold and Andrew Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 14th, 10:00 AM Location: Nakameguro, Tokyo Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QG Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Please contact the organizer to RSVP and for exact details.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+QG, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/

HAMBURG, GERMANY Contact: Chris Contact Info: acx[dot]hamburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 4:00 PM Location: Planten un Blomen, Japanischer Garten, Pavillon Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5FHX6M+76X Notes: Just looking to get in touch with other interested people, so no knowledge or expertise of any kind necessary to attend the meetup. If you intend to come I would appreciate a short email, but feel free to join spontaneously : ) Bring along what makes for a nice afternoon/evening in the park. In case of harsh weather, we could switch to a cafe or bar (I will check my email regularly and could quickly respond to you with the new location).

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F5FHX6M+76X

Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail

August 25, 2023 · Original source

It is well known that countries' relative income levels are quite stable over time: most of today's rich countries were rich (by contemporary standards) a century ago. It is less well known that even the poorest countries often have a decade or two of rapid growth somewhere in their past (which, incidentally, is a strong argument against 'poverty trap' theories). What is rare is a poor country sustaining rapid growth for multiple decades, to the point where it climbs significantly in the relative income rankings6. This is why Japan and the Asian tigers were considered special and the poster children for various growth theories, whether industry policy, culture, or good old fashioned capitalism and hard work.

Inline links: past, 6, Asian tigers

Does Capitalism Beat Charity?

January 04, 2024 · Original source

It would seem that capitalism is better than charity. The countries that became permanently rich, like America and Japan, did it with capitalism. This seems better than temporarily alleviating poverty by donating food or clothing. So (say proponents), good people who want to help others should stop giving to charity and start giving to capitalism. These proponents differ on exactly what “giving to capitalism” means - you can’t write a check to capitalism directly. But it’s usually one of three things:

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024

March 30, 2024 · Original source

This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.

SEMINYAK, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: Maciej Contact Info: maciej[dot]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20, 01:00 PM Location: Ingka Petitenget Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P3Q85G5+XW Additional Notes: Try to drop me an email if you might be coming, so I can estimate if anybody is / how many people are coming Japan TOKYO Contact: JT Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 11th, 10:00 AM Location: Contact email for the address - location TBD in Meguro Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPP5+48 Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Please join our google group! We email once a month to announce meetups.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P3Q85G5+XW, https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPP5+48, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/

Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa

June 21, 2024 · Original source

Fukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Osaka in 1835. He is often described as a Japanese Benjamin Franklin. But with his knack for popping up at moments of great historical importance he also slightly resembles a Japanese Forrest Gump. When Japan opens its ports to American and European ships, he’s there. When Japan makes its first diplomatic missions abroad, he’s there. And when you dive into the history of Japan’s modern institutions—the police force, the universities, the banking system, the press—Fuzukawa is there as well.

Fukuzawa says that the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ships in 1853 and 1854 “made its impression on every remote town in Japan.” The resulting treaty, the Convention of Kanagawa, opened select Japanese ports to American ships. Harmless as such a treaty may sound, the Japanese had just watched Britain attack the Qing dynasty over domestic trade policy. Japan seemed destined to endure a similar loss of sovereignty now that the Americans had gotten a foot in the door.

For over two centuries, the sole point of contact between Japan and Europe had been an artificial island in Nagasaki called Dejima. The Dutch had occupied the island since 1641, exercising a carefully monitored monopoly in trade. As a result, the few Western books that entered Japan were generally written in Dutch. Any Japanese person who wanted to learn Western science therefore needed to gain fluency in that language (which, given the limited opportunities for interaction between the two groups, was not so easy).

Your Book Review: Dominion

June 28, 2024 · Original source

It’s the variety of ways in which he tries to make his plea for mercy that gives the book its unique flavor. He explores hunting, whaling, factory farming, religion, ethics, capitalism, and the science of consciousness. He puts boots on the ground at hunting conventions and inside factory farms, touching squealing piglets with his bare hands. He talks to hippie activists. He engages with lifelong hunters who will die on the hill that dolphins are, in fact, really dumb. He secures interviews with high ranking diplomats from Japan. He can be repetitive, and some of his arguments miss the mark, but the sheer determination of the effort has to be commended. I have yet to encounter another animal welfare writer who put their credibility on the line to secure an exclusive interview with a high-ranking meat industry executive and then called them a moral monster to their face.

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

July 18, 2024 · Original source

Or consider high-speed rail. A decade or two ago, California voted to construct a world-class high-speed rail system linking the whole state. Conservatives warned this would be a horrible boondoggle. But cheap, high-quality high-speed rail is definitely doable. Japan does it! France does it! America created a 3000 mile Rockies-crossing Transcontinental Railroad in f**king 1869, don’t tell me we can’t do rail! You’re just a defeatist who thinks we can’t do things other countries do easily.

Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers

August 06, 2024 · Original source

This isn’t to say there’s no advantage of conflict. Capitalism is a kind of conflict and was responsible for many (though not all) of the inventions mentioned above (but do remember that Bell Labs was famously productive precisely because it was a monopoly). The Cold War also inspired both the US and Russia to do some good work (as well as inspiring both to waste trillions of dollars on useless one-upsmanship and arms races). There’s some evidence that the most heavily-bombed areas of Britain and Japan are richer today (because they were able to build back from first principles instead of being limited by existing infrastructure). But this is a pretty far cry from saying that war is generally good.

Your Book Review: How the War Was Won

August 09, 2024 · Original source

The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.

The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war.

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places

August 29, 2024 · Original source

名前/Contact: Emi 連絡先/Contact Info: gouritekinakai[at]proton[dot]me 時/Time: Monday, September 16, 07:00 PM 場所/Location: エースイン新宿/Ace Inn Shinjuku 座標/ Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XMPVF+2P 追加メモ/Additional Notes: (こちらは日本語の東京ミートアップです)/ This is a Tokyo Meetup in Japanese. 初めての企画なので多分こじんまりとしたミートとなりますがちょっとでも興味のある方は是非ご参加してください。日本語全レベルok 着きましたら「ACX」とフロントの人にささやいて通してもらってください：）

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q7XMPVF+2P

Contact: Doris Contact Info: siroddoris13[a t]gmail[do t]com Time: Sunday, September 8th, 04:00 PM Location: King's Hall Cafe @ Sek 13 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GVRRXWM+6H Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/XXFspCmy Additional Notes: Please RSVP so we can book the venue accordingly! Japan TOKYO (ENGLISH), JAPAN Contact: Harold Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 12th, 10:00 AM Location: Get in touch for the details! Coordinates: Get in touch for the details! Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Get in touch for the details!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GVRRXWM+6H, https://discord.com/invite/XXFspCmy, https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/

Contact: Harold Contact Info: rationalitysalon[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 12th, 10:00 AM Location: Get in touch for the details! Coordinates: Get in touch for the details! Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/ Notes: Get in touch for the details! TOKYO (日本語), JAPAN 名前/Contact: Emi 連絡先/Contact Info: gouritekinakai[at]proton[dot]me 時/Time: Monday, September 16, 07:00 PM 場所/Location: エースイン新宿/Ace Inn Shinjuku 座標/ Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XMPVF+2P 追加メモ/Additional Notes: (こちらは日本語の東京ミートアップです)/ This is a Tokyo Meetup in Japanese. 初めての企画なので多分こじんまりとしたミートとなりますがちょっとでも興味のある方は是非ご参加してください。日本語全レベルok 着きましたら「ACX」とフロントの人にささやいて通してもらってください：）

Inline links: https://www.meetup.com/acx-tokyo/, https://plus.codes/8Q7XMPVF+2P

Links For September 2024

September 12, 2024 · Original source

35: I’m not saying Satoshi Nakamoto was a CIA asset, but isn’t it weird that “Satoshi Nakamoto” is Japanese for “central intelligence”?

Inline links: isn’t it weird that “Satoshi Nakamoto” is Japanese for “central intelligence”

6: …and I found the above a good appetizer before reading It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom, which argues (I think correctly) that the root cause of declining fertility is what society finds honorable vs. low-status. Attempts to shore up fertility through economic means and free childcare have mostly failed. Attempts to shore it up with status (giving mothers of X children some kind of national award presented by a beloved figure) have . . . well, they’re at least correlated with success, although this post doesn’t prove causation as well as I’d like. In this model, Asians (Korea, Japan, etc) are having the most fertility issues because their societies are most collectivist, ie people more closely follow the gradient of what is vs. isn’t considered socially acceptable/high-status. I’m impressed by this post’s thoroughness, but also by arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know: they say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and often look for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop looking down on them for being a stay-at-home mother (a friend suggests this is responsible for most of the popularity of multi-level marketing - and this same friend argues that Korea could solve its fertility crisis by mandating that all K-pop idols have at least two children).

Inline links: It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places

March 25, 2025 · Original source

This year we have spring meetups planned in over a hundred and eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.

Contact: Aud Contact Info: helloaud2000[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 20th, 2:00 PM Location: JJ Royal Cafe Menteng Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58RR3G+X4 Notes: Please RSVP to my email so I know how many people to expect. Thanks! Japan TOKYO (ENGLISH) Contact: JT Contact Info: rationalitysalon[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, May 10th, 10:00 AM Location: Tokyo-to Meguro-ku chuo-cho 2-4-18 Shiki Residences. Enter from the door on the north side; we'll meet you, but if you're late, ask for the party in the first suite. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMJR+PV Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo Notes: Please subscribe to the substack feed for updates to the meetup details and for future events. Applications open for 5 min lightning talks, email us at the substack.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6P58RR3G+X4, https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMJR+PV, https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo

Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr

May 08, 2025 · Original source

It guessed Honshu Japan, was Central Illinois. Distance wrong: 10,500 km

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

September 19, 2025 · Original source

He was a Navy man, a radar technician, just 20 years old when he shipped out of San Francisco. As he tells it, the entire crew were very nervous, seeing as they were being sent off to invade Japan. But just as the ship sailed past the Bay Bridge, “the captain came out on the bridge and looked down on us. ‘Japan just surrendered!’ he shouts. And suddenly all propriety leaves us, and we all say, ‘well then, for Christ’s sake, turn around!’”

Inline links: he tells it

Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!

Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan

Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession

December 31, 2025 · Original source

The OECD also produces consumer confidence surveys and the US is pretty middle of the pack compared to other advanced countries for the last three years - US, Australia, western europe, UK, japan, are all in the -1 to -1.5 z score range historically. China is the worst, around -2 z scores. Interestingly, Mexico is one of the few places with high consumer confidence right now.

Links For February 2026

February 05, 2026 · Original source

2: You might know that the term “weaboo” (or “weeb”) originally comes from a Perry Bible Fellowship comic. But how did it come to mean “a Westerner who likes Japanese culture”?

43: The last Emperor of Korea was overthrown by Japan in 1910. That last emperor has several living grandsons, who fight over which of them is the “rightful heir” (a meaningless title, as neither Korea recognizes the monarchy). A Korean-American tech entrepreneur, Andrew Lee, convinced one of these grandsons to adopt him, making him “Crown Prince of Korea”. Lee then created the “Joseon Cybernation”, a new, updated version of Korea located on (all of you have already predicted this) the blockchain. The only remotely surprising part of any of this is that Antigua and Barbuda, by all accounts a real country, recognized Joseon Cybernation and initiated diplomatic relations with them.

Inline links: Andrew Lee, Joseon Cybernation, recognized Joseon Cybernation

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Japan

Japan

Article

Metadata

Appears In

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Japan

Japan

Article

Metadata

Appears In

Related Pages

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks