Astral Codex Ten

MOSCOW

39 min read

MOSCOW

Article

MOSCOW is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 22 times across 22 issues between August 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “MOSCOW, RUSSIA ( RSVP )”; “I myself am (was?) an American professor in Moscow”; “He was sent from Italy to Moscow at about the age seventeen”. It most often appears alongside France, London, Philadelphia.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 22
  • Issue count: 22
  • First seen: August 23, 2021
  • Last seen: April 01, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

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

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
MOSCOW, RUSSIA (RSVP) Contact: A³MS, mike[dot]yagudin[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram chat Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, September 5 Location: Muzeon park, in front of the entry to the New Tretyakov Gallery; join our chat for the updates Coordinates: https://w3w.co/sectors.toffee.sweeten
Inline links: RSVP, Telegram chat, https://w3w.co/sectors.toffee.sweeten
22
March 21, 2022 · Original source
I myself am (was?) an American professor in Moscow. I have been allowed to teach my next course which starts in 10 days online, and so I am moving back to the US on Sunday, to Puerto Rico. Some of our development team is stuck in Ukraine. I've offered to move them to Puerto Rico, but it's not clear they'll be able to leave the country anytime soon. Progress with the site may be slow, but obviously that's not the most important thing now.
I am now out of Russia, and on to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The people here are quite anti-war. I fly to Dubai in a bit. It was surprisingly difficult (and expensive) to book a ticket out of Moscow after all the airspace closures.
Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
“He was sent from Italy to Moscow at about the age seventeen (in 1698), but only after extensive negotiations that took place at the court of Tuscany. As Balatri tells it, the Grand Duke Cosimo III wanted to satisfy the czar so he looked to Filippo’s father for the boy’s release. The father resisted at first, but the czar’s agent—a cousin of Peter the Great from the Golitsyn family—persisted and then succeeded on the condition that Filippo be treated “as a son.” In the end it was not really the father who released and sent him abroad, of course, but the grand duke, nor was there any difficulty breaking a three-year contract the father had recently signed with a local singing master at whose home Balatri was living in Florence.” [pg. 63]
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
31: In response to Russia debating un-recognizing Lithuania’s independence, the Kiev City Council has rescinded the 1147 AD decree by the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus founding the city of Moscow. Moscow now officially has not been founded; please conduct yourselves accordingly. [Update: Likely fake]
Inline links: has rescinded, Likely fake
Highlights From The Comments On Brain Waves
November 08, 2022 · Original source
In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
… 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
Dictator Book Club: Putin
August 03, 2023 · Original source
Deputy Mayor Putin with his boss, Mayor Sobchak (source) Putin became Deputy Mayor In Charge Of Foreign Affairs, in charge of making business deals with foreign cities. In this position, he was notably corrupt even for 1990s St. Petersburg, one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt eras in one of the most corrupt nations in history. People who challenged his corruption tended to have bad things happen to him; probably he called on his KGB connections here, though it seemed he also had some connections to local organized crime. Mayor Sobchak, who was equally corrupt, stood behind him the whole way. Eventually the electorate got tired of all the corruption and voted Sobchak out; Putin moved to Moscow and got various mid-level positions on the strength of being boring, loyal, and not having enough personality to offend anybody - others say the KGB was involved in some way. Around this time, President Boris Yeltsin was floundering. He had descended into alcoholism, become temperamental, fired all of his competent ministers, and mismanaged the country to the brink of economic collapse. His approval rating was 2%. The only people in Moscow who didn’t hate him were his daughter Tatyana and friendly oligarch Boris Berezovksy. Their job was to pick new officials when Yeltsin would fire the previous ones in a drunken rage. When an opening in Security opened up, Berezovsky remembered Putin, who he had met a few times doing business in St. Petersburg. Putin had refused a bribe - something so shocking it had seared him in the oligarch’s memory2. If Berezovsky is to be believed, he was the one who mentioned Putin to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “I said ‘We’ve got Putin, who used to be in the secret services, didn’t he?’ And Valya said ‘Yes, he did,’ and I said, ‘Listen, I think it’s an option. Think about it: he is a friend, after all.’ And Valya said, ‘But he’s got pretty low rank.’ And I said, ‘Look, there is a revolution going on, everything is all mixed up, so there . . . ‘“ As the description of the decision-making process for appointing the head of the main security agency of a nuclear power, this conversation sounds so absurd, I am actually inclined to believe it. Putin got to work filling the FSB with his old KGB pals, and Yeltsin got to work tanking his reputation still further. By this time, the most likely scenario was that the opposition party - the Communists - would win the upcoming election, then prosecute Yeltsin for corruption. Berezovsky and Tatyana Yeltsin tried to come up with an exit strategy. All they could think of was resigning in favor of some handpicked successor who would give him a presidential pardon. But who? Well, there was always Putin again. He still seemed loyal. The security forces seemed to like him. There were a bunch of wars going on in Chechnya, and it would look good to have a strong scary-looking guy in power. But mostly he was just in the right place at the right time. Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person . . . but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined. And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, [communist opposition leader] Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin - slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits - looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them. On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned in favor of Putin, effective immediately. That same day, Putin signed his first presidential decree - a law saying Yeltsin would not be prosecuted. III. Doubt Creeps In From the beginning, Putin had strong support. Westerners and liberals liked him because he was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. Oligarchs liked him because he wasn’t communist and seemed potentially controllable. The Soviet nostalgia contingent liked him because he was ex-KGB and seemed to share their values. As for ordinary citizens - a few months earlier, when Putin was still Yeltsin’s second-in-command, there had been a series of four apartment bombings, killing a total of 300+ people. Everyone suspected the Chechens, a group of Muslims with a history of terrorism who Russia was in the process of invading at the time. Vladimir Putin, as head of the security forces, got up in front of the country and gave a firm-sounding, profanity-laced speech where he vowed justice for everyone involved. His men quickly caught some Chechens, who were found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. The bombings stopped. Putin was hailed as a hero. Over the next few months, people started noticing weird things that didn’t add up. Most concerningly, a fifth bomb, in the city of Ryazan, had been discovered beforehand by an alert resident. The local police were called. They brought in a bomb squad, the bomb squad confirmed it was a bomb and defused it, and the apartment was saved. More heroics! Except a few days later, everyone involved backtracked and said no, it was fake, it was just a training exercise, no bomb at all, nothing to worry about. This was clearly false; the bomb squad had tested it and the bomb was as real as they come. Several members of the local police said this, then quickly changed their story. It started to look like a coverup. Russia’s investigative journalists had not yet all been murdered, and some of them started looking into the case. It seemed that when local police successfully defused the bomb, they had found clues pointing to the perpetrators, who appeared to be associated with the Russian security services. The security services had then strong-armed the police into denying that a bomb ever existed. Also, some people noticed that the speaker of the Russian Parliament had announced on September 13 that they had just received word of a bombing in Volgodonsk, but the bombing in Volgodonsk had not occurred until September 16. It would seem that someone had passed him the wrong note. Seen on satirical conservative website Babylon Bee. This was exactly what happened with the Volgodonsk apartment bombing. The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators. The plan worked. Putin won re-election handily. By the time people started questioning the official story, his power was already secure. The questioners faced harassment - typical “warning shots” would be burglaries of their houses with all the valuables left intact, or getting beaten up by random thugs while they were out walking, or being accused of a series of crimes - tax evasion, but if they proved themselves innocent of that, then it was taking bribes, and if they proved themselves innocent of that too, then it was failing to register their businesses correctly. Soon media oligarchs faced the same treatment, and either fled the country or handed their newspapers and TV channels over to the state. Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had originally helped put Putin in power, kept his own TV station until 2003, when the Russian submarine Kursk sank and Putin faced criticism for bungling the rescue. Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of stff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich.' and got up to leave. And I said, “Volodya [nickname for Vladimir], this is goodbye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos […] Within days, [Berezovsky] had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former [business] rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a awarrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares of Channel One. Over the next few years, Putin centralized authority further. He got Parliament to agree to constitutional changes where governors served at his whim, and members of Parliament were elected by governors. “The only official in the Russian Federation directly elected by the people was the President.” Then he made it clear that governors who kept his favor would keep their jobs, and vice versa. He developed an entire colorful vocabulary for threatening people, moving beyond traditional standbys like “Nice house you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it” into new realms of intimidation. A Prime Minister who quit after Putin arrested one too many media tycoon was given the parting words “If you ever have a problem with the tax police, you may ask for help, but please come to me personally.” An urban legend says that leading dissident Marina Salye received a New Year’s postcard from Putin: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” By the time the next election came around in 2004, the vote counts were clearly fake. Gessen doubts Putin even had to give a direct order to falsify them; everyone was so desperate for his goodwill that they did so all on their own. The problem was less that honest officials refused to stuff the ballot box, and more that some bureaucrats were so desperate to make sure Putin knew they were complying with his (implied) desires that they faked the vote in extremely obvious ways, without even a nod to keeping it plausible. The Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe reported “The elections . . . failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled Russians Inch Toward Democracy. Putin had sunk far enough to earn the same dubious honor as Stalin: praise from the New York Times. IV. The Very-Briefly-Reluctant Culture Warrior One thing missing from this book: anything about religion, nationalism, gays, or the culture wars. This isn’t because Masha Gessen doesn’t care about these things: when the book was written, they self-described as “the only publicly out gay person in [Russia]”; since then (like everyone else) they have declared themselves nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In an afterword, Gessen remedies this omission. For his first decade, Putin wasn’t too interested in culture war topics; his ideology began and ended with “Russia strong”. But Gessen says that after another rigged election in 2012, people grew tired and started protesting Putin. Putin’s propaganda department made various accusations against the rioters, and one of them - they’re gay - seemed to stick. Putin had stumbled by coincidence onto a narrative that resonated with the Russian people. A few months later, a deliberately provocative punk band called Pussy Riot invaded a cathedral and sung a song whose chorus was “the Lord is shit”. Putin announced he was against this sort of thing, again his popularity soared, and again he took notice. Since then, he’s leaned into various culture-warrior roles that other people have cast upon him - protector of traditional values, leader of the conservative world, something something Eurasianism - without giving many clues how much he believes them vs. considers them useful bulwarks for his own power. Is it true that Putin only leaned into traditional values after 2012? I only looked into this question briefly, and it seems like he was on good terms with the Orthodox Church well before then. But some of this could have just been his native authoritarianism; just as he wanted to consolidate all media and business under his control, he wanted to consolidate all religion, and the Orthodox Church was the natural vehicle for, and a cooperative partner in, doing this. Both shared suspicion of invasive Western religions and Islam; both liked the idea of Russia being united in a top-down structure. God doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it. V. Could It Happen Here? …is the question we ask at the end of every Dictator Book Club. The Man Without A Face makes it sound like Putin was able to consolidate power and become a dictator because: He led the security services
Inline links: source, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2bxW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F105ae659-4f17-4a8d-a8cb-24dcd106af93_770x705.png, Babylon Bee, Russians Inch Toward Democracy, he was on good terms with
Highlights From The Comments On Putin
August 11, 2023 · Original source
It was not just economical too, a lot of people who used to have a stable or even respectable occupation (manufacturing workers, doctors, teachers, scientists) lost their jobs or saw their income evaporate. The amount of misery was simply enormous, and it explains the real support for someone who promised and seemed to deliver a measure of stability and even growth. This level of support is of course less that the percentage Putin gets in elections but it's real nonetheless. When I was an observer at the elections in Moscow, seeing the whole process at one polling station, Putin got almost exactly 50% and the next candidate got thirty-something.
Interestingly, Short begins his biography by explaining why he doesn't think the apartment bombings were Putin's doing. Among other things, there was a smaller bomb in Volgodonsk set off by gangsters a few days before the apartment bomb which had appeared in Moscow press in a manner that could fool a parliamentarian into thinking another apartment bombing had occurred. Also, for some stupid reason, it really was KGB/FSB practice to conduct drills like the Ryazan incident. Finally, the bombings occurred in the context of a Russian counteroffensive in Dagestan, and the conspiracy version requires us to believe that insurgents like Shamir Basayev were willing to lie about the origin of the bomb to help Putin for some reason.
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
MOSCOW, MOSCOW OBLAST, RUSSIA Contact: UselessCommon Contact Info: titon[dot]a[at]yandex[dot]ru Time: Saturday, September 16th, 2:00 PM Location: Москва, Русаковская ул. д.31 - торговый центр Сокольники, 2 этаж, фуд-корт/Moscow, Russakovskaya st. 31 - "Сокольники" trade center, food-court. I will bring an SSC sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMQH+8F Notes: I don't really use LW, and would prefer to be contacted (as uselesscommon) on the ACX discord.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMQH+8F
Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
1: New meetups have been registered in Canterbury, UK and Tallinn, Estonia. Meetups scheduled for the coming week include Los Angeles, Ottawa, Milano, Lisbon, Moscow, Edinburgh, Montreal, Waterloo, San Francisco, Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Auckland, Berlin, Denver, Istanbul, and many more! As always, check the meetups list for details.
Inline links: check the meetups list for details
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
TRUMP: Pour’ng / forth out of / Rus’s / rough woods; from / Muscovy’s / boroughs Gun-bulky / troops rush / forth on / Korsun’s / uncorrupt / country Just so / Cronus' / son, who / roosts on / lofty O- / lympus Puffs up / storm clouds / - so puff'd / up, so / smug Popov's / columns. But ho- / mologous / to long- / shoot’ng / Phöbus’s / sun-glow Just so / Korsun’s proud / corps burnt / through your / columns, o / Moscow. Frolov / Sokolov / Tsokov / Kozlov / sturdy Kutuzov Brought to / Cocytus; / turn’d to / bounty for / dolorous / Pluto. But not ours such / glory; / you, Vo- / lodomyr, / hog boughs of / honor Thus our / funds ought / not to sup- / ply you, your / jousts should go / solo.
A Theoretical "Case Against Education"
May 23, 2024 · Original source
31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
August 09, 2024 · Original source
Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
On December 27, 1941, when the climactic battle outside Moscow was taking place, the Germans had deployed almost a hundred more aircraft to the fight the Royal Air Force than they had on the Eastern Front.
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Luís Campos Contact Info: luis[dot]filipe[dot]lcampos[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 21st, 03:00 PM Location: We meet on top of a small hill East of the Linha d'Água café in Jardim Amália Rodrigues. For comfort, bring sunglasses and a blanket to sit on. There is some natural shade. Also, it can get quite windy, so bring a jacket. Look for the big orange blanket. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8 Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EaWFPJNf [ignore this part] KZeJiHECesblMS Russia MOSCOW, RUSSIA Contact: teapot Contact Info: blastjoe41 [a t]gma il[ dot]com Time: Sunday, October 06, 12:00 PM Location: Surf Coffee X Lucky, Baumanskaya 33 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VQMFH+2FP Additional Notes: RSVP is NOT required but there might be a venue change so we strongly recommend you message us
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8, https://plus.codes/9G7VQMFH+2FP
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
'So Putin killed his own people in Moscow so he could kill hundreds and thousands more of ours.'
'No,' al-Kurdi replied. 'There's been a lot of talk about the bombings in Moscow. All of it is wrong. The Islamic Emirate was responsible.'
Al-Kurdi said that members of the brutal Moscow Region OMON militia unit had been involved in previous atrocities in the Caucasus. The jihadis had tracked a few of them to the Moscow apartment buildings that had been bombed.
Open Thread 349
September 30, 2024 · Original source
2: Late addition to Meetups Everywhere: Moscow on October 6, see link for more. Other meetups coming up this week include Philadelphia, Austin, Istanbul, Canberra, Budapest, and Warsaw. 3: If you haven’t already, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest - voting closes Sunday, October 6. 4: And if you’re an ACX veteran, you might remember the winner of the very first book review contest - Lars Doucet’s review of Progress And Poverty, the book on Georgism. Since then, Lars has gone on to start a Georgism-inspired land valuation company, Valuebase, which has gotten investment from Sam Altman, Nat Friedman, and others. Now they’re recruiting paid interns, including: Technical interns: Ideal candidates have experience in programming, data science, machine learning, or AI, and are eager to work on real-world problems that scale across millions of properties.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest, Lars Doucet’s review of, Valuebase
Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument
November 22, 2024 · Original source
Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be unprepared. Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say “Don’t do it, we don’t know if it’s safe”. They do it anyway and it’s fine. You say “I guess 100 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 250 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 250 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 500 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 500 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They say “Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you’re a fraud! Stop lecturing me!” Then they try 1000 mg and they die. The lesson is: “maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now” doesn’t count as a failed prediction. I’ve noticed this in a few places recently. First, in discussion of the Ukraine War, some people have worried that Putin will escalate (to tactical nukes? to WWIII?) if the US gives Ukraine too many new weapons. Lately there’s a genre of commentary (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that says “Well, Putin didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine HIMARS. They didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine ATACMS. He didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine F-16s. So the people who believe Putin might start WWIII have been proven wrong, and we should escalate as much as possible.” There’s obviously some level of escalation that would start WWIII (example: nuking Moscow). So we’re just debating where the line is. Since nobody (except Putin?) knows where the line is, it’s always reasonable to be cautious. I don’t actually know anything about Ukraine, but a warning about HIMARS causing WWIII seems less like “this will definitely be what does it” and more like “there’s a 2% chance this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back”. Suppose we have two theories, Escalatory-Putin and Non-Escalatory-Putin. EP says that for each new weapon we give, there’s a 2% chance Putin launches a tactical nuke. NEP says there’s a 0% chance. If we start out with even odds on both theories, after three new weapons with no nukes, our odds should only go down to 48.5% - 51.5%. (yes, this is another version of the generalized argument against updating on dramatic events) Second, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong. My internal argument against him being demented was something like “They said he was demented in 2020, but he had a good debate and proved them wrong. They said he was demented in 2022, but he gave a good State Of The Union and proved them wrong. Now they’re saying he’s demented in 2024, but they’ve already discredited themselves, so who cares?” I think this was broadly right about the Republican political machine, who was just throwing the same allegation out every election and seeing if it would stick. But regardless of the Republicans’ personal virtue, the odds of an old guy becoming newly demented each year is about 4% per year. If it had been two years since I last paid attention to this question, there was an 8% chance it had happened while I wasn’t looking. Like the other examples, dementia is something that happens eventually (this isn’t strictly true - some people reach their 100s without dementia - but I think it’s a fair idealized assumption that if someone survives long enough, then eventually their risk of cognitive decline becomes very high). It is reasonable to be worried about the President of the United States being demented - so reasonable that people will start raising the alarm about it being a possibility long before it happens. Even if some Republicans had ulterior motives for harping on it, plenty of smart, well-meaning people were also raising the alarm. Here I failed by letting the multiple false alarms lull me into a false sense of security, where I figured the non-demented side had “won” the “argument”, rather than it being a constant problem we needed to stay vigilant for. Third, this is obviously what’s going on with AI right now. The SB1047 AI safety bill tried to monitor that any AI bigger than 10^25 FLOPs (ie a little bigger than the biggest existing AIs) had to be exhaustively tested for safety. Some people argued - the AI safety folks freaked out about how AIs of 10^23 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Then they freaked out about how AIs of 10^24 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Now they’re freaking out about AIs of 10^25 FLOPs! Haven’t we already figured out that they’re dumb and oversensitive? No. I think of this as equivalent to the doctor who says “We haven’t confirmed that 100 mg of the experimental drug is safe”, then “I guess your foolhardy decision to ingest it anyway confirms 100 mg is safe, but we haven’t confirmed that 250 mg is safe, so don’t take that dose,” and so on up to the dose that kills the patient. It would be surprising if AI never became dangerous - if, in 2500 AD, AI still can’t hack important systems, or help terrorists commit attacks or anything like that. So we’re arguing about when we reach that threshold. It’s true and important to say “well, we don’t know, so it might be worth checking whether the answer is right now.” It probably won’t be right now the first few times we check! But that doesn’t make caution retroactively stupid and unjustified, or mean it’s not worth checking the tenth time. Can we take this insight too far? Suppose Penny Panic says “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans and it doesn’t happen. The next election cycle: “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans again and it still doesn’t happen. After her saying this every election cycle, and being wrong every election cycle, shouldn’t we stop treating her words as meaningful? I think we have to be careful to distinguish this from the useful cases above. It’s not true that, each election, the chance of Republicans becoming dictators increases, until eventually it’s certain. This is different from our examples above: Eventually at some age, Castro has to die, and the chance gets higher the older he gets.
Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, generalized argument against updating on dramatic events, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong, about 4% per year
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Yan Lyutnev Contact Info: @yanskov (telegram) (See the Group Link) Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:30 PM Location: Chekhov Library, 2nd floor, conference hall. Moskovsky Prospekt Street 39, Russia, Kaliningrad. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G62PG63+3R Group Link: https://t.me/+M2JH [remove this bit] Ikss6tZiMzEy Notes: Access to the event is free. Registration is optional. MOSCOW Contact: teapot/Di Contact Info: blastjoe41[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 1:00 PM Location: Monoid - Moscow, Lomonosovsky street (проспект), 25к3 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqc [remove this bit] FWhsilkOTJi Notes: we don't require RSVP but it would still be cool if you messaged us beforehand
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G62PG63+3R, https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG
Contact: teapot/Di Contact Info: blastjoe41[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, April 06th, 1:00 PM Location: Monoid - Moscow, Lomonosovsky street (проспект), 25к3 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqc [remove this bit] FWhsilkOTJi Notes: we don't require RSVP but it would still be cool if you messaged us beforehand
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG
Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
July 21, 2025 · Original source
“Yeah, but we’re not really associated with him. We named ourselves after an urban legend. Once there was a big blizzard in Moscow. Snow blocking all the streets. People begged the government to clear the roads, but the government was corrupt and didn’t care. So somebody started boxing clever. Spray-painted ‘FREE NAVALNY’ on the snowdrifts. Suddenly the government cared a lot, all the snow was gone the next day.”
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Alvin Contact Info: alv[period]csk[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 27th, 7:00 PM Location: Scârț Loc Lejer, most likely outside. I'll probably put an ACX MEETUP sign on the table! Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7QR Notes: Messaging me on Lesswrong, if possible and comfortable, would be much appreciated! Russia MOSCOW Contact: Caled Contact Info: gwinyster[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 4:00 PM Location: г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3 ЦДО Моноид Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9 Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7QR, https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9, https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi
Contact: Caled Contact Info: gwinyster[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 14th, 4:00 PM Location: г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3 ЦДО Моноид Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9 Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+M9, https://t.me/+6oIqcFWhsilkOTJi
Open Thread 398
September 08, 2025 · Original source
1: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.
Inline links: Berkeley, the list
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Alvin Contact Info: alv[.]csk[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 25th, 7:30 PM Location: Scârț Loc Lejer, very likely outside. There will be a small tent-like sign on the table that reads ‘ACX-EA’. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7QR Notes: Feel free to message on LW or FB if so inclined. Russia MOSCOW Contact: Caledfwlch Contact Info: gwinyster[@]gmail[.]com Time: Monday, April 4th, 6:00 PM Location: площадка ЦДО Моноид, г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3, помещение 15 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PW Group Link: https://t.me/+yd9BuQBB4KY0M2Q6
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7QR, https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PW, https://t.me/+yd9BuQBB4KY0M2Q6
Contact: Caledfwlch Contact Info: gwinyster[@]gmail[.]com Time: Monday, April 4th, 6:00 PM Location: площадка ЦДО Моноид, г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3, помещение 15 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PW Group Link: https://t.me/+yd9BuQBB4KY0M2Q6
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PW, https://t.me/+yd9BuQBB4KY0M2Q6