Astral Codex Ten

Neom

13 min read

Neom

Article

Neom is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 01, 2022 and February 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bloomberg View has a new article on the progress of Neom (h/t Marginal Revolution ), Saudi Arabia’s answer to Dubai”; “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is obsessed with Neom”; “But the problem isn’t just that Neom is too big. Everything about it is doomed”. It most often appears alongside Dubai, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, Prospera.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: August 01, 2022
  • Last seen: February 03, 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.

22
August 01, 2022 · Original source
Bloomberg View has a new article on the progress of Neom (h/t Marginal Revolution), Saudi Arabia’s answer to Dubai. I hesitate to include Neom in this newsletter. It’s not really a charter city, but very much a project of the Saudi government. It is in no sense utopian or libertarian; in fact, it advertises itself as a new level of surveillance in an already-totalitarian state. Most of all, it doesn’t. make. sense. This is an insane, utterly impossible project that the Saudi government is somehow barrelling full-speed-ahead on.
Inline links: the progress of Neom, Marginal Revolution
You really want to watch this video. I had read a few other articles on Neom, thought I understood what level of craziness we were talking about here - but no, this is much, much crazier. I didn’t understand the full scale until they gave their proposed dimensions: a structure 500 meters tall, 200 meters wide, and (wait for it) 170 km long.
Is this just some crazy attempt to build hype, like when Elon Musk says the next Tesla definitely will have full-self-driving ability? I don’t think so. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is obsessed with Neom and very vain; I don’t think he would deliberately promise impossible things knowing that he will be embarrassed later when they don’t work out (and he says it will be done by 2030, so we’ll know the results relatively soon). Also, the government has earmarked $500 billion to $1 trillion for the project - around the GDP of Sweden - which sounds kind of like being serious. Also, they’ve already started on important Saudi construction preliminaries, like murdering the people who previously lived in the area. Also, they’ve already set up on-site camps for the construction workers (source):
Inline links: murdering the people who previously lived in the area, source
Absurdity Bias, Neom Edition
August 04, 2022 · Original source
Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom.
Inline links: expresses concern, on Neom
My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that’s absurd!
Can I convince you to read the sequences? There are some real underappreciated classics. (excerpt edited to remove examples that someone would misinterpret and start a flame war over) Here’s a possible argument why not: everything has to bottom out in absurdity arguments at some level or another. Suppose I carefully calculated that, with modern construction techniques, building Neom would cost 10x more than its allotted budget. This argument contains an implied premise: “and the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else”. How do we know the Saudis can’t construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else? The argument itself doesn’t prove this; it’s just left as too absurd to need justification. Suppose I did want to address this objection. For example, I carefully researched existing construction projects in Saudi Arabia, checked how cheap they were, calculated how much they could cut costs using every trick available to them, and found it was less than 10x? My argument still contains the implied premise “there’s no Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world”. But this is another absurdity heuristic - I have no argument beyond that such a conspiracy would be absurd. I might eventually be able to come up with an argument supporting this, but that argument, too, would have implied premises depending on absurdity arguments. So how far down this chain should I go? One plausible answer is “just stop at the first level where your interlocutors accept your absurdity argument”. Anyone here think Neom’s a good idea? No? Even Alexandros agrees it probably won’t work. So maybe this is the right level of absurdity. If I was pitching my post towards people who mostly thought Neom was a good idea, then I might try showing that it would cost 10x more than its expected budget, and see whether they agreed with me that Saudis being able to construct things 10x cheaper than anyone else was absurd. If they did agree with me, then I’ve hit the right level of argument. And if they agree with me right away, before I make any careful calculations, then it was fine for me to just point to it and gesture “That’s absurd!” I think this is basically the right answer for communications questions, like how to structure a blog post. When I criticize communicators for relying on the absurdity heuristic too much, it’s because they’re claiming to adjudicate a question with people on both sides, but then retreating to absurdity instead. When I was young a friend recommended me a pseudoscience book on ESP, with lots of pseudoscientific studies proving ESP was real. I looked for skeptical rebuttals, and they were all “Ha ha! ESP? That’s absurd, you morons!” These people were just clogging up Google search results that could have been giving me real arguments. But if nobody has ever heard of Neom, and I expect my readers to immediately agree that Neom is absurd, then it’s fine (in a post describing Neom rather than debating it) to stop at the first level. (I do worry that it might be creating an echo chamber; people start out thinking Neom is a bad idea for the obvious reasons, then read my post and think “and ACX also thinks it’s a bad idea” is additional evidence; I think my obligation here is to not exaggerate the amount of thought that went into my assessment, which I hope I didn’t.) But the absurdity bias isn’t just about communication. What about when I’m thinking things through in my head, alone? I’m still going to be asking questions like “is Neom possible?” and having to decide what level of argument to stop at. To put it another way: which of your assumptions do you accept vs. question? Question none of your assumptions, and you’re a closed-minded bigot. Question all of your assumptions, and you get stuck in an infinite regress. The only way to escape (outside of a formal system with official axioms) is to just trust your own intuitive judgment at some point. So maybe you should just start out doing that. Except that some people seem to actually be doing something wrong. The guy who hears about evolution and says “I know that monkeys can’t turn into humans, this is so absurd that I don’t even have to think about the question any further” is doing something wrong. How do you avoid being that guy? Some people try to dodge the question and say that all rationality is basically a social process. Maybe on my own, I will naturally stop at whatever level seems self-evident to me. Then other people might challenge me, and I can reassess. But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are. It’s like answering a child’s question about how to do a math problem with “ask a grown-up”. A coward’s way out! Eliezer Yudkowsky gives his answer here: I can think of three major circumstances where the [useful] absurdity heuristic gives rise to a [bad] absurdity bias: The first case is when we have information about underlying laws which should override surface reasoning. If you know why most objects fall, and you can calculate how fast they fall, then your calculation that a helium balloon should rise at such-and-such a rate, ought to strictly override the absurdity of an object falling upward. If you can do deep calculations, you have no need for qualitative surface reasoning. But we may find it hard to attend to mere calculations in the face of surface absurdity, until we see the balloon rise. (In 1913, Lee de Forest was accused of fraud for selling stock in an impossible endeavor, the Radio Telephone Company: "De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public...has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company...") The second case is a generalization of the first - attending to surface absurdity in the face of abstract information that ought to override it. If people cannot accept that studies show that marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect, because it seems absurd - violating the surface rule that "medicine cures" - then I would call this "absurdity bias". There are many reasons that people may fail to attend to abstract information or integrate it incorrectly. I think it worth distinguishing cases where the failure arises from absurdity detectors going off. The third case is when the absurdity heuristic simply doesn't work - the process is not stable in its surface properties over the range of extrapolation - and yet people use it anyway. The future is usually "absurd" - it is unstable in its surface rules over fifty-year intervals. This doesn't mean that anything can happen. Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been "absurd" by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one - to the best of our knowledge - violated the law of conservation of energy, which was known in 1850. Reality is not up for grabs; it works by rules even more precise than the ones we believe in instinctively. The point is not that you can say anything you like about the future and no one can contradict you; but, rather, that the particular practice of crying "Absurd!" has historically been an extremely poor heuristic for predicting the future. Over the last few centuries, the absurdity heuristic has done worse than maximum entropy - ruled out the actual outcomes as being far too absurd to be considered. You would have been better off saying "I don't know". This is all true as far as it goes, but it’s still just rules for the rare situations when your intuitive judgments of absurdity are contradicted by clear facts that someone else is handing you on a silver platter. But how do you, pondering a question on your own, know when to stop because a line of argument strikes you as absurd, vs. to stick around and gather more facts and see whether your first impressions were accurate? I don’t have a great answer here, but here are some parts of a mediocre answer: Calibration training. Make predictions so you know how often you’re right vs. wrong about things. If the things you say only have a 1% chance of happening happen a third of the time, you know you’re stopping too soon when you make absurdity arguments.
Inline links: read the sequences, additional evidence, infinite regress, here, information about underlying laws which should override surface reasoning, fraud, studies show that marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect, The future is usually "absurd", law of conservation of energy, Calibration training
Open Thread 236
August 08, 2022 · Original source
2: Comments of the week: John Schilling tries to calculate the cost of building Neom, and comes up with an optimistic estimate of $4 trillion (compared to its $0.5-1 trillion budget). But he uses the cost of WTC1 as a base; this is unfair because it’s one of the costliest skyscrapers ever. If we use the similarly-sized Princess Tower in Dubai, one of the cheapest, we get a base cost of $2 trillion before applying economies of scale, and ??? afterwards (potentially much less because they can mass produce, or potentially much more because they exhaust the global concrete market). But the $1 trillion Neom budget also has to cover the Floating Octagon Of Clean Industry, the giant ski resort, etc, so it’s still a long shot. Also, Reader talks about his experience working in one of the companies that designed Neom. And Honourary notes that the Saudis are big investors in hyperloops, and a working hyperloop could make good on Neom’s otherwise-hyperbolic transportation claims. Maybe one way to think about Neom is as the first city designed from the ground up around hyperloops, in the same way that Levittown was the first city designed from the ground up around cars. This makes me update very slightly towards plausibility - but it’s still based around combining ~5 things that have never been tried before, and hoping none of them goes wrong or exceeds projected costs.
Inline links: tries to calculate, talks about his experience, notes that
25
February 03, 2025 · Original source
It looks like a big part of investors’ hope for Prospera is biotech research and medical tourism. It hosted the Vitalia conference, and the Vitalia team are trying to build on it with Infinita, a charter city VC, and Viva, a broader program and potential more permanent hub.. I still think that Minicircle, the most famous biotech clinic currently in Prospera, is either confused or fraudulent, but hopefully they can eventually attract firms which are neither. Neom Neom Neom Neom Neom Neom, Saudi Arabia’s insane giant linear city project, has admitted they cannot actually build a giant linear city.
Inline links: Vitalia, Infinita, Viva, either confused or fraudulent, admitted
Neom, Saudi Arabia’s insane giant linear city project, has admitted they cannot actually build a giant linear city.
Inline links: admitted
To soften the blow, Saudi Arabia has announced even more bizarre subareas of NEOM with silly names, like EPICON:
Inline links: EPICON