Astral Codex Ten

Minneapolis

9 min read

Minneapolis

Article

Minneapolis is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 30, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “While attending college in Minneapolis at the height of the Great Depression”; “Minneapolis, the epicenter of BLM protests”; “Cassell shows an even more dramatic pattern for traffic stops in Minneapolis”. It most often appears alongside Baltimore, California, Chicago.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: August 29, 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.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Borlaug’s section, in contrast, begins not in the rarefied world of middle-class New York, but on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm. He comes of age at roughly the same time as Vogt, but his early life may as well be mid-1800s Little House on the Prairie: Borlaug and his siblings literally have to walk three miles in the snow to get to their one-room schoolhouse. Fortunately, he is freed from a life of subsistence farming and given the chance to go to high school and college by his family’s purchase of a Ford tractor, which nicely sets up his lifelong optimism about the ability of technology to improve lives. While attending college in Minneapolis at the height of the Great Depression, Borlaug sees a crowd of striking dairy farmers being beaten by police and National Guardsmen for protesting the drop in the price of milk by surrounding a scab-driven milk truck. "Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized," Mann writes. "Some of them were just hungry – famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want." Where Vogt might have curled his lip in distaste and gone home to write a pamphlet about this scene as an illustration of humanity’s taxing the earth’s carrying capacity and reaping the consequences, for Borlaug this was the catalyst for homing in on solving the problem of hunger. Mann: "Something must be done, he thought. Those famished people were ready to tear apart the world, and who could blame them? Here began, or so he said afterward, the work that would make him the original Wizard."
What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
From the Financial Times. Notice no difference from the usual trend in March, April, or early May, then a very obvious spike around the time the BLM protests start on May 25. This is shootings rather than murders, for the same reason discussed below, but murders show a similar though noisier pattern. Another surprise on the Intercept’s graph: Minneapolis, the epicenter of BLM protests, saw more of a change in January-April than from May-August. Is this true? Cassell (2020) shows us the data: It looks like maybe this is random variation; there’s so few murders in Minneapolis in the winter that even one or two looks like a very large percent increase. But the raw data show that the summer was a much bigger deal. Since murder is very rare, maybe we can get a better view using assault, a crime similar to murder but much more common: Now the pattern is really obvious, except that it looks like it began about a week before the protests. I’m not sure, but I think this is because the site the paper took this from uses a 7-day rolling average, which smooths the data at the cost of having it be about a week off. A few of the other graphs have this problem as well, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. Nationwide, the spike in murders clearly happened in May, not March. On a city by city level, it’s hard to tell because murders are so rare. But when we look at other crimes that probably correlate with the murder rate, they clearly go up in May, not March. Police Pullback My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of: Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
Inline links: Cassell (2020), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGDj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46ae5619-a8dd-4b28-a4c0-3a98e712c51b_608x488.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCKB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae2f05f2-4dff-4561-8222-5446e0f9f9ac_638x475.png
It looks like maybe this is random variation; there’s so few murders in Minneapolis in the winter that even one or two looks like a very large percent increase. But the raw data show that the summer was a much bigger deal. Since murder is very rare, maybe we can get a better view using assault, a crime similar to murder but much more common: Now the pattern is really obvious, except that it looks like it began about a week before the protests. I’m not sure, but I think this is because the site the paper took this from uses a 7-day rolling average, which smooths the data at the cost of having it be about a week off. A few of the other graphs have this problem as well, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. Nationwide, the spike in murders clearly happened in May, not March. On a city by city level, it’s hard to tell because murders are so rare. But when we look at other crimes that probably correlate with the murder rate, they clearly go up in May, not March. Police Pullback My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of: Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCKB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae2f05f2-4dff-4561-8222-5446e0f9f9ac_638x475.png
Cassell shows an even more dramatic pattern for traffic stops in Minneapolis:
Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Kind of feels like Scott came to his conclusion first and then is now reading the data to support that. But the data doesn’t at all look convincing to me. Clearly there was a spike around May, but the data shows it was starting in the middle of May? Floyd died on May 25, and while protests began the next day in Minneapolis, they really didn’t pick up steam across the country until a few days later. But, for example, the NYC chart shows a clear escalation that starts at the beginning of May.
What about this Minneapolis graph?
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, USA Contact: Timothy M. Contact Info: tmbond[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 16th, 1:00 PM Location: Meet at Sisters' Sludge Coffee Cafe and Wine Bar. I will be wearing a "Wall Drug" souvenir shirt with a Jackalope being abducted by a UFO. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WQM6+P9 Group Link: https://bit.ly/3wTZTwj Notes: Make sure to RSVP on LessWrong - https://www.lesswrong.com/events/6xBdodMhyYMTGonG4/acx-meetup-september-2023 - so I can give a headcount to the Sisters. Also, they don't charge me for a large reservation but they do ask that everybody who attends purchase something - if you prefer I will buy you something, no questions asked.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86P8WQM6+P9, https://bit.ly/3wTZTwj, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/6xBdodMhyYMTGonG4/acx-meetup-september-2023
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
When I was originally awarded the ACX Grant, I wanted to develop a system that would autonomously design and test cell culture media. A lot has happened since then. I met my co-founder, Gabe Warshauer-Baker, who switched from working on self-driving cars at Waymo to working on self-driving labs at our new startup, Dragonase (https://dragonase.com). We believe that some of the most important challenges in anti-aging research are essentially culture media design problems, which we think we can solve. We have a couple of employees, and we now operate a small cell biology lab in Minneapolis and a small AI lab in Palo Alto. We've built an operational self-driving cell culture robot, and, although it's just a prototype, we're using it for stem cell expansion and rejuvenation experiments. All of this was seeded by the ACX Grant. Biology labs and GPUs are expensive, though, so additional support would help us a lot! Please contact us at contact@dragonase.com if you're interested.
Inline links: https://dragonase.com
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Aaron Kaufman Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 28th, 4:00 PM Location: 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105 Davanni's Pizza Party Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX Group Link: This is the minneapolis/st paul ACX Discord: https://discord.gg/m2x [remove this bit] JcuC937 Notes: I'll be ordering pizzas for the group, including vegetarian pizza. Note that Davanni's has no vegan options besides salad (though I will be ordering a group salad that should be vegan-compatible.)
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX