Astral Codex Ten

Maine

12 min read

Maine

Article

Maine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between February 24, 2021 and March 25, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bar Harbor (Maine)”; “and we see it as well in the lobstermen of Maine”; “#1 through #5 were … Maine”. It most often appears alongside California, Europe, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: February 24, 2021
  • Last seen: March 25, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
5. If you have to be in the United States, some places are classier than others. The best places are "those longest under occupation by financially prudent Anglo-Saxons, like Newport (Rhode Island) Haddam (Connecticut), and Bar Harbor (Maine)". The worst are places like Akron and Tampa, but why? Fussell is always somewhere on the border between serious and joking, and I worry he completely loses the plot here. He says you can measure the unclassiness of a place in bowling alleys per capita, megachurches per capita, or (perhaps), some kind of joint bowling alleys plus megachurches index. Getting serious again:
Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
Ellickson describes a few possible norms that wouldn’t be welfare maximizing for them, and which in fact weren’t used. For example, a whale might simply belong to whichever ship physically held the carcass; but that would allow one ship to wait for another to weaken a whale, then attach a stronger line and pull it in. Or it might belong to the ship that killed it; but that would often be ambiguous, and ships would have no incentive to harvest dead whales or to injure without killing. Or it might belong to whichever ship first lowered a boat to pursue it, so long as the boat remained in fresh pursuit; but that would encourage them to launch too early, and give claim to a crew who might not be best placed to take advantage of it. Or it might belong to whichever ship first had a reasonable chance of capturing it, so long as it remained in fresh pursuit; but that would be far too ambiguous.
In practice they used three different sets of norms. Two gave full ownership to one party. The “fast-fish/loose-fish” rule said that you owned a whale as long as it was physically connected to your boat or ship. The “first iron” (or “iron holds the whale”) rule said that the first whaler to land a harpoon could claim a whale, as long as they remained in fresh pursuit, and as long as whoever found it hadn’t started cutting in by then.
Remedial norms require a grievant to apply self-help measures in an escalating sequence. Generally it starts at give the deviant notice of the debt; goes through gossip truthfully about it; and ends with sieze or destroy some of their assets. Gossip can be omitted when it would be obviously pointless, such as against outsiders. This is consistent with the hypothesis, since the less destructive remedies come first in the sequence. It’s also consistent with practice in Shasta County, and we see it as well in the lobstermen of Maine when someone sets a trap in someone else’s territory. They’ll start by attaching a warning to a trap, sometimes sabotaging it without damaging it. If that doesn’t work, they destroy the trap. They don’t seem to use gossip, perhaps because they can’t identify the intruder or aren’t close-knit with him.
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
But it’s also worth mentioning that US states that seemed kind of like Scandinavia (northern, forested, liberal) also had the lowest number of coronavirus cases in the continental US - #1 through #5 were Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Washington, and New Hampshire. And this isn’t clearly related to household size, so maybe something else is going on.
Inline links: isn’t clearly related to household size
Highlights From The Comments On Diseasonality
December 23, 2021 · Original source
I’m having trouble figuring out how to analyze this point. After thinking about it, maybe the problem is I don’t have a good sense of why fires ever stop. Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?
It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
June 06, 2022 · Original source
No actual person believes it It isn't a national trend Some loony in Maine with a turd for a brain Said some idiot thing, the end Some intern from Williams or Amherst Wrote all of it up, real slick And now it's the front page of WaPo But it's bad on purpose to make you click.
Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices
May 01, 2023 · Original source
Could this be reverse causation - ie New York is very dense because its prices are so high (which incentivizes developers to squeeze the most out of every parcel of land)? Yes, obviously this is part of the effect. But equally obviously, it isn’t the full effect. Stripped of its density, Manhattan is just a little island off the US East Coast. There are plenty of little islands off the US East Coast - Maine alone has dozens - and none of them are as expensive to live in as Manhattan. Manhattan has a few extra natural amenities, like a river and a good harbor. But nobody moves to Manhattan for the harbor. They moving there because they want to be in a big city - with friends, jobs, museums, and nightlife. This induced demand effect is so strong that it overwhelms the fact that Manhattan has millions more houses than the empty North Dakota plain (or lower-tier cities like Des Moines or Cleveland). So empirically, as you move along the density spectrum from the empty North Dakota plain to Manhattan, housing prices go up.
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
HALEY: Hmmmm . . . um . . . [sweating] . . . the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the Maine issues facing the world today. Errgh . . . um . . . it is a source of great suffering and Missouri for the people of the Middle East. [Long pause] Idaho-ped that there would have been peace in the region, but those hopes have been dashed. [Very long pause]. I believe we Kansas-tematically develop a long term plan to bring . . .
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
This is the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research group, out for a team dinner at a local restaurant on January 15th 2020 (ie a month after the pandemic started). This isn’t the most rational probabilistic evidence in the world. But we’ve already seen people take the rational probabilistic evidence twenty different directions. So let’s ask the same question Peter did - do these look like people who secretly know they just started the worst pandemic in modern history? If they secretly knew they’d just started the worst pandemic in modern history, wouldn’t they at least be wearing masks? I think China, WIV, etc, were as clueless as the rest of us, at least at the beginning of the pandemic when a lot of this origins evidence was being collected. They tried to shove the raccoon-dogs under the bed, to prevent anyone from accusing them of bungling their SARS commitments. But they weren’t really up to anything else. A more thorough argument would go over specific pieces of evidence, examine when they were collected (ie whether it was before or after China started caring enough about COVID to get their competent people involved), and how China could have rigged each. Second, Peter (privately) discussed a Chinese conspiracy theory of his own with me by email. Here’s an article from a random Chinese blog (you’ll have to Google Translate it). It describes China’s preferred theory of COVID origins: it was started by imported lobster from Maine (really!) The lobster arrived in the wet market, the wet market got sick, and diabolical Americans trying to hide their own complicity blamed it on raccoon-dogs and lab leaks and what-have-you. The article includes this graphic: It’s a map of which vendors at the wet market got COVID and where their stalls are. In many ways, it matches the maps that China gave to Western scientists. In other ways, it’s better - it includes information that Western scientists only inferred months after this article came out. But also, unlike the maps provided to Western scientists, it says the raccoon-dog vendors got COVID - something China has previously denied, and which would significantly raise the odds of a natural origin. Is this China’s internal record of what really happened at the wet market? Did they fail some kind of critical communication about how classified it should be, so that a guy in their propaganda department accidentally released it publicly in a stupid article about lobsters? That would be so embarrassingly weird that Peter didn’t even try bringing it up in the debate. But in a response to a question about coverups, sure, let’s get conspiratorial. 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? Worobey and Pekar are the two most prolific pro-zoonosis scientists, and many of the points in Peter’s argument were based on them. Several people criticized my writeup for not mentioning that these were “debunked”, for example: Worobey and Pekar have about a million papers, each of which makes many different points, so I don’t know for sure what these are referring to. But a few other people make more specific claims, and I’ll respond to them here: Pekar’s paper on the two lineages originally estimated 99-1 odds of double spillover. Someone found a coding error that reduced it to 6-1 odds, Pekar admitted the error, and the paper has been updated. Other people have made other criticisms which I haven’t investigated in depth and am agnostic on. I don’t think my argument depends too much on the details of this paper. The argument for B earlier than A is that it infected twice as many people and has more genetic diversity. It’s possible these things happened by chance and A preceded (and mutated to) B. In that case, I still think the most likely scenario is that A was released at the wet market, infected a customer or two, mutated to B, and infected a vendor. A then spread among the neighborhoods near the market, and B spread among market vendors.
Inline links: Here’s an article from a random Chinese blog, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Qc6O!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d870903-e4ba-4080-b543-6d1b6dcb5a70_1080x516.webp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!15_o!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa11b0b0-b9d5-45b9-93e5-ec97b7fc69b0_597x207.png
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Blake Bertuccelli-Booth Contact Info: 1111[at]philosophers[dot]group Time: Monday, October 14th, 11:11 AM Location: Petite Clouet Cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XFXX73+8R Group Link: http://philosophers.group Notes: We're hosting an ACX Lunch and Learn part of NOAI 2024, https://noai.philosophers.group. Maine ACTON, MAINE, USA Contact: Paul Contact Info: saturndoesmars[plus]acx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 26th, 06:00 PM Location: We'll be hosted by an awesome event venue with a 4-season timber frame "barn" w/ recreation/games/patio/fires and lodging for 12 available in 2 cottages. Dinner for purchase. Full bar inside. rain/shine. We are 45min from both Portland, ME and Portsmouth, NH. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87MFG3HM+75 Notes: Please RSVP and I'll send a simple Square $0 ticket link. Meeting up and hanging out is free. Buying a dinner is optional. Max capacity 150 people inside.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76XFXX73+8R, https://plus.codes/87MFG3HM+75
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Owen Contact Info: owencardwellcopenhefer[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Noble Funk Brewing Company Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CP66RV+5C Notes: Location is child friendly. EV slow-charging available. Maine PORTLAND Contact: Frost Contact Info: argot207[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Monday, April 21st, 6:00 PM Location: Bell Buoy Park on the Waterfront, I've got dyed blue hair you can spot me with, and I'll be near the Bouy. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87MFMQ52+22
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86CP66RV+5C, https://plus.codes/87MFMQ52+22