Astral Codex Ten

North America

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North America

Article

North America is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 19 times across 19 issues between April 21, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “By the early 20th century, a clear gap had emerged between Europe, North America, and Japan (on one side), and everyone else (on the other)”; ""North American energy will flourish in this world""; “friendly North American-based trade”. It most often appears alongside Spain, Canada, Europe.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 19
  • Issue count: 19
  • First seen: April 21, 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.

Book Review: Global Economic History
April 21, 2021 · Original source
By the early 20th century, a clear gap had emerged between Europe, North America, and Japan (on one side), and everyone else (on the other). After World War II, the former colonies declared independence from Europe, hoping to try the Standard Development Model at long last and get the same easy successes the West had. But this no longer worked; they had missed the boat entirely. GEH:VSI invokes the increasing gap between developed and less developed countries; when the gap was still small, the Standard Model prongs were enough to overcome it. By the 20th century, developed countries were so far ahead that the model made less sense. If you're 1820s France trying to catch up to Britain, you can probably find some craftsmen somewhere in your economy who can make something like a textile mill, train them a bit, get them to make textile mills, use some clever investment policy to create whatever prerequisites to textile mills you don't already have, and eventually end up with textile mills without too much trouble. If you're 2000s Bangladesh trying to catch up to the West, you want semiconductor factories. Scrounging around a mostly-agrarian economy and eventually cobbling together enough expertise and capital to make a textile mill is one thing. Making a semiconductor factory is a lot harder. And if you decide to just make the textile mill instead, what if First World textile mills are some sort of amazing robotic wonderland now and nobody wants your crappy 1800s-technology textiles? Development needs a lot more slack now before it can become profitable.
Inline links: slack
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Peak capital availability will happen over the next few years (through 2024), the aftermath of which will be brutal. More expensive credit for individuals and governments, plunging consumer activity from that and fewer young workers, increased government spending on healthcare and pensions even as the decrease in mature workers guts its tax revenues (he doesn’t seem to consider that fewer fifty-year olds may mean fewer high-income taxpayers, but if there are many more young workers, revenues could actually increase), slower technological progress, lower standards of living. Without America to protect shipping, insurance costs will rise, and transport will become erratic (but North American energy will flourish in this world, with political stability and ease of transport across the continent decoupling it from world prices).
While this is hardly cheerful stuff, America’s situation in the Disorder is relatively great. The demographic inversion will affect it, but less so than other places. The American market will still be the largest in the world, and it won’t need the world for energy or food. It isn’t as reliant on international trade as other places, and once the friendly North American-based trade is excluded, it looks even more independent. The net result is America losing interest in global energy and global trade, requiring it to go abroad only to secure its own shipping, which itself is a shrinking share of GDP. “Without global needs or global interests, there is no reason to impose a global order.”
These predictions include some persuasive analysis of many countries and plenty of speculation to go with it. Zeihan spends a chapter highlighting America’s partners in the chaos to come. At the top of the list are its North American neighbors, and a prediction that Cuba will be pulled back into the American orbit (because a larger power that supported it could cut off trade with the greater Mississippi system – Zeihan’s summary of exactly why America was willing to risk nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis). He also gives some analysis of the geography of South America and how it affects their trading patterns, and of the best European allies for various purposes (Denmark and the Netherlands control access to the Rhine and Baltic Sea, making them valuable allies). He runs through the trade of Southeast Asia and suggests that American cooperation in the area could have a strategic benefit of helping to “keep China and India apart.”
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
…A North American equivalent would be if there had been an agreement between Canada, US and Mexico that refugees could be returned to the country of “first entry” – which would usually be Mexico. For obvious reasons, Mexico would not have been happy with such an agreement (and EU countries bordering on non-EU countries, including bordering on the Mediterranean, have also tried – so far unsuccessfully- to change the Dublin agreement).
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
TOULOUSE, FRANCE Contact: APE (barsom.maelwys@gmail.com) Date: May 12 Time: 6:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCQW+9H Location: Le Biergarten (60 Grande Rue St. Michel). If the weather is nice, we'll be sitting outside. In any case, we'll have a plant on the table. NORTH AMERICA ANCHORAGE, AK Contact: Matthew (7o2wzrybd@mozmail.com) Date: May 1 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/93HG6485+Q6 Location: I'll be sitting at the end of the "main steppy zone" closest to E Street and the Whale Mural, wearing a brown Carhartt-ish jacket, with a red backpack in front of me. If a couple people show interest (slash show up), we can look at adjourning to the Fat Ptarmigan for some pizza and warmth as well.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FM3HCQW+9H, https://plus.codes/93HG6485+Q6
Every Bay Area House Party
May 04, 2022 · Original source
“Some parts would be surprisingly similar! You take your basic taco, and you can keep the tortilla - corn, of course - the tomato salsa, the beans, and the guac. But the cheese and sour cream have got to go - that’s an import from cultures with lactase-persistence. And you can’t have beef or chicken - the typical Aztec meats were rabbit, lizard, and - if you can believe it - axolotl. A common spice was culantro, which is actually noticeably different from Old World cilantro. We think that with time, the Aztecs would have expanded into North America and added bison, and established trade routes with the Inca and gotten potatoes. The conditions in the Mexican Plateau were almost ideal for…sorry, I’m quoting our literature. All our dishes came with a pamphlet explaining when the world-branch it came from diverged from our own and how it differed.”
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age. . . this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman. . . Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.
Among the Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals, and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
In North America, Hanukkah became increasingly important to many Jewish individuals and families during the latter part of the 20th century, including a large number of secular Jews, who wanted to celebrate a Jewish alternative to the Christmas celebrations which frequently overlap with Hanukkah. Diane Ashton argues that Jewish immigrants to America raised the profile of Hanukkah as a kid-centered alternative to Christmas as early as the 1800s. This in parts mirrors the ascendancy of Christmas, which like Hanukkah increased in importance in the 1800s. During this time period, Jewish leaders (especially Reform) like Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise made an effort to rebrand Hanukkah and started creating Hanukkah celebration for kids at their synagogues, which included candy and singing songs. By the 1900s, it started to become a commercial holiday like Christmas, with Hanukkah gifts and decorations appearing in stores and Jewish Women's magazines printing articles on holiday decorations, children's celebrations, and gift giving. Ashton says that Jewish families did this in order to maintain a Jewish identity which is distinct from mainline Christian culture, on the other hand, the mirroring of Hanukkah and Christmas made Jewish families and kids feel that they were American. Though it was traditional for Ashkenazi Jews to give "gelt" or money to children during Hanukkah, in many families, this tradition has been supplemented with the giving of other gifts so that Jewish children can enjoy receiving gifts just like their Christmas-celebrating peers do. Children play a big role in Hanukkah, and Jewish families with children are more likely to celebrate it than childless Jewish families, and sociologists hypothesize that this is because Jewish parents do not want their kids to be alienated from their non-Jewish peers who celebrate Christmas.
Links For October
October 12, 2022 · Original source
11: Wedding Of The Waters: To celebrate a new highway opening in 1937, California arranged a ceremony in which water from North America’s highest (then known) lake was transferred from an Indian to the Pony Express to a mule to a covered wagon to ( . . . ) to an airplane to North America’s lowest lake.
Inline links: Wedding Of The Waters
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use. Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to donate to the war effort - $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework. Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. Inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people worried the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. I personally contributed in a small way to Russia’s cryptocurrency use. I’ve been trying to help Russian ACX readers escape to other countries to avoid conscription or arrest. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country. I’m pretty proud of this and I don’t think it would have been possible without crypto. I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in 2022. But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams.I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms. I ended up using four articles for this experiment: Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
Inline links: 69% of Vietnamese, a history, remittances, “the crypto capital of the world”, this guy, $70 million as of March, pass a law, More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America, Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
Even More Bay Area House Party
January 04, 2023 · Original source
“Not species. Two individuals. The first was a dog who lived somewhere in North America six thousand years ago. It got cancer. The cancer mutated. The mutant cancer became a sexually transmitted disease. It spread from dog to dog. It’s still around today, “canine transmissible venereal tumor”. Still made of living cells from that one original dog. That’s immortality, of a sort. The second was a Tasmanian Devil from the 1990s. Same story, now it’s Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease. It’s spread to 95% of the Devil population and will live on as long as the species itself.”
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
Meanwhile, Montreal never generated a conurbation or significant city region. This is Jacobs’s main hypothesis for why it was overtaken by Toronto, though she doesn’t give a lot of detail on why it happened. In any case, the result was that Montreal lost its status as the economic capital of the country. It became a regional city. The problem is that regional cities tend to do poorly. The nature of nations is to centralize everything in one place (we’ll come back to this). That’s why Paris has a large and rich city region, but Lyon and Marseille don’t. That’s why London looms so large in the UK’s economy while Glasgow or Manchester now contribute very little. There’s nothing wrong per se with being an economically stagnant regional city. Such cities can be fine places. When they’re the center of a supply region, like Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich Alberta, they can even be wealthy. The complication for Montreal, though, is that its previous status as the main Canadian metropolis made it grow too large for this purpose. Yet, at the same time, Montreal plays an outsized cultural role for French-speaking Canadians — one that Toronto doesn’t even come close to fulfilling. So, Jacobs sees only decline for Montreal. And she thinks this means decline for Quebecois culture generally. Without a strong import-replacing city, Quebec will become a patchwork of supply regions, regions that workers abandon, or transplant economies, like the poverty-stricken Atlantic provinces in eastern Canada already are. Either the Quebecois resign themselves to this fate, she says, or they fight it — and the only true way to fight it is to declare independence. As of the 1980 referendum, she thinks they should go for independence. Generalized Separatism Quebecers did not go for independence, neither then in 1980 nor in 1995 when they voted on the question again. If they had, it would probably have been an example of a peaceful secession. Jacobs points out that there haven’t been many of those, if you exclude the decolonization of overseas imperial possessions (like Canada from Britain). Non-peaceful secessions have been common, but in those cases the destructiveness of war tends to overshadow everything else, economically speaking. In fact that might be the main reason most of us intuitively dislike separatism: we associate it with conflict. But peaceful non-colonial secessions do happen. Since 1980 there have been several more cases, like Czechia and Slovakia. When Jacobs wrote her book, though, the only good example she could think of was the independence of Norway from Sweden in 1905. She tells a great account of the process, noting that the outcome wasn’t predetermined: Sweden didn’t want to lose its western province, and did what it could to contain Norwegian nationalist sentiment. But Norwegian nationalist sentiment won — and importantly, both Norway and Sweden seemingly benefitted. Neither of them was particularly rich in the 19th century, and Norway was in fact dirt poor, which is why so many Norwegians escaped by emigrating to North America. Yet after the dissolution of their union, the two countries developed quickly, and both are now among the wealthiest countries in the world. They certainly didn’t disintegrate. (Of course, in Norway the wealth is due in large part to the oil that they discovered in the late 1960s. But they were pretty advanced by that point already — advanced enough that they could use the oil to develop their own industry, rather than get rich quick by exporting it raw, which is what keeps many countries trapped as supply regions.) When people argue against separatism, they often tout the benefits of being large. A Canada that would be split in two would mean smaller markets, and a weaker political counterweight to the United States. (Not to be mean to Canadian readers, but this argument seems delusional to me — I don’t think Americans currently see Canada as a political counterweight of any significance.) It would certainly be less prestigious. Large size, Jacobs says, is associated with power, and we admire power. We love slogans like “unity makes strength.” But after the medium-sized country of Sweden-Norway became the two smaller countries of Sweden and Norway, they both did well. Small size is less powerful, but it has its own advantages, such as nimbleness and ability to fail non-catastrophically. Small size also allows more diversity in cultural and economic matters, and here Jacobs waxes philosophical, pointing out that favoring diversity over uniformity is a recent, post-Enlightenment idea that has not yet been fully embraced in politics. We can see analogs everywhere. Europe, split into numerous small countries from the Middle Ages onward, became far more advanced than China, which has been unified more often than not. The city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy are seen as golden ages of Western civilization, even if they weren’t part of larger political units and therefore constantly went to war with one another. In business, large companies are impressive and powerful, but people always complain that Google or Microsoft have become stagnant and that the best place to work is tiny startups of about 2 cofounders and 4 employees. In biology, humans are more successful than numerous larger animals, and in terms of raw numbers, small animals like rats or insects are the most successful of all. Jacobs’s point isn’t that smaller is always better. Her point is that the converse statement, “bigger is always better,” is false — despite how intuitive it feels for political entities. Just like we don’t view a small nation like Switzerland or Singapore as a failure of unity, we (and in particular, Canadians) shouldn’t see the secession of a place like Quebec, if it’s done peacefully and democratically, as a failure either. Still, some people in online reviews of the book complain that this argument is a bit thin, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for the later chapters (which are more directly about late 1970s Quebec politics). Sure, small is beautiful, but large states are great for stability, peace, markets, whatever. If the potential benefits of small national size are Jacobs’s strongest argument, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to agreeing that separatism is bad. Pointing out the widespread bias in favor of unified political entities does seem valuable to me, but okay, fair enough. Does Jacobs have deeper reasons why separatism might be a good idea in general? Yes, and for this we go back to the second half of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Why Nations and Empires Fail Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again. Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work. This creature is an analogy, representing a nation. The ten people are its individual cities, and the breathing rate is the cities’ economies. If it sounds like a stupid analogy, that’s because it is: “I have had to propose a preposterous situation,” writes Jacobs, “because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last.” Nor do they exist in machines we design; they wouldn’t work. But “nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.” The feedback mechanism that fails to work properly in a nation is currency. A currency always fluctuates according to the exports and imports of the area where it circulates. Let me use the Republic of Venice and its ducat as a toy example, because the coins look nice: Whenever Venice produces something (like salt) and sells it abroad, foreigners need ducats to buy the exports, so the demand for ducats increases. When Venice buys something from abroad, it needs to use foreign currencies, so the demand for ducats decreases. Add up everything that Venice exports and imports, and you get either a trade surplus (more exports than imports) or a trade deficit (more imports than exports), which determines the value of the ducat relative to other currencies. In both cases, a negative feedback loop restores balance over time, just like our brain stem does with carbon dioxide levels. A trade surplus, and therefore a strong ducat, means that when foreigners want Venetian salt, it’s expensive. So Venice’s exports decrease, while imports increase, since Venetians can use their valuable ducats to buy stuff cheaply from abroad. Conversely, a trade deficit makes exports a bargain for foreigners and imports expensive for Venetians. This feedback loop is great. It’s exactly what a city needs to trigger the crucial import replacement process. When exports decrease and a trade deficit begins (maybe because Constantinople found a cheaper source of salt somewhere else), the weak ducat means that Venice is less able to afford the resources and manufactured goods it used to import. The people of Venice don’t want to have less of those goods, though, so they figure out ways to produce some themselves — that is, they do import replacement. Later they will be able to export the output of the newly expanding industries too, strengthening the ducat and continuing the cycle. Currencies, Jacobs explains, function as automatic tariffs (to protect local industry from foreign imports) and automatic export subsidies (to encourage local industry to export). They are “automatic” because of the feedback mechanism. Just like an accelerated breathing rate, they take effect exactly when they are needed — and no longer. … Or so they should, except that import replacement, as we discussed, is a city process. Whereas most currencies are national or supranational. National currencies work well for city-states, like the Republic of Venice or today’s Singapore. But in large nations, which, remember, are not the fundamental unit of economic life, they mess everything up. Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines. Jacobs hypothesizes that this issue of national currencies is at the root of every large country’s economic troubles. It is why nations and empires always centralize everything into one large city, whether that’s Paris, London, Tokyo, or Toronto, or ancient Rome: that city, being the largest, is simply the only one for which national-level currency feedback works fine. The rest of the nation or empire, then, declines. But of course, nations and empires don’t accept this. They care about the economic well-being of their peripheral regions, sometimes out of genuine concern for the people there, sometimes out of fear that they rebel or hold independence referendums. So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. Eventually the nation or empire will disintegrate, as nations and empires always do, and always will. Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline. She identifies three types, and, content warning, you might not like some of them depending on your political sensibilities. Sustained military production is a transaction of decline. Permanent military bases and garrison towns are a special kind of settlement: they import a lot and export nothing. Superficially, producing weapons and supplies for the military seems like a good deal for some cities — Jacobs gives the example of Seattle, which, before Microsoft and Amazon were a thing, depended mostly on making military aircraft. But because nobody in a military base ever tries to replace those weapons and supplies with their own production, the trade is sterile in terms of economic development. In a sense, the wealth is slowly “drained” from cities. Large empires are especially prone to this: eventually all of their wealth is destined to the military just to keep the empire together.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zETj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3e99b106-d34e-4a49-93a8-553a8f57952a_1600x1130.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YeXj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fe681e6-b571-4f4c-aa90-313f77fc1dbb_750x359.png
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Musk’s word choice there—“obvious decision”—goes a long way toward explaining how he operates. Yes, the car needed to be light, and, yes, aluminum would be an option for making that happen. But at the time, car manufacturers in North America had almost no experience producing aluminum body panels. Aluminum tends to tear when worked by large presses. It also develops lines that look like stretch marks on skin and make it difficult to lay down smooth coats of paint. “In Europe, you had some Jaguars and one Audi that were made of aluminum, but it was less than five percent of the market,” Musk said. “In North America, there was nothing. It’s only recently that the Ford F-150 has arrived as mostly aluminum. Before that, we were the only one.”
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
At first I thought this was the actual house Jesus grew up in and thought “oh, no wonder he turned out that way”. But in fact it’s the “marble screen” placed around the house for protection. 3: A surprising puzzle from @finmoorhouse: “Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface. You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country. What is the first country you hit?” Answer here. 4: Polypharmacy blog has some good psychiatry content. I especially liked Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, which is one of those things lots of people know but which takes bravery (and a lot of tough scholarship to justify your controversial position) to say. I would add Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population to the pile of evidence. 5: Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle. In 2002, Ethiopia was the poorest country in Africa, but since then it's grown at 9%/year for twenty years, even as the rest of the continent languishes. Yaw tells a familiar story; Ethiopia was taken over by communists in the 70s, they caused mass starvation, but after they were overthrown the country shot up the development ladder. We can add them to the list of other successful ex-communist or liberalized-communist countries like Poland, China, and Vietnam. What’s the common factor? Plausibly land reform. The communists redistributed the land, this didn't help when the country was still under communism, but liberalized economy + land reform is the secret combination. In support of this, Yaw says that "Ethiopia's rapid growth in comparison to many African nations is attributed to a significant increase in agricultural productivity". Ethiopia did other things right, but the land reform seems like the one that separates it from every other lower-income country trying to get on the development ladder. 6: It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart - BPodgursky’s defense of polygenic selection. This is a response to the people saying polygenic selection is bad, because we should instead make parents have children with diseases, then treat the diseases with medication. BPodgursky’s counterargument is that this goes badly if the economy collapses and medications become less accessible. This is surely true, but seems like only a very weak argument compared to “why should we force people to stay dependent on expensive, inconvenient, and side-effect medication when we can just not do this?” I’m honestly weirded out that we have to make this argument at all; still, it seems like we do, and BPodgursky does a good job. 7: Related: Awais Aftab has a new post about polygenic screening and how likely it is to perform up to its advertised standard in reducing schizophrenia risk. My response here. 8: @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals - plagiarism isn’t that important on its own, but “since copy-pasting is already against the rules, and is highly legible and verifiable, it seems like a relatively easy thing to enforce to get rid of the laziest and/or most incompetent >1% of the literature and the field.” 9: @BoyanSlat reads “every page of OurWorldInData” and lists his favorite discoveries, including: Almost all countries in Africa have higher death rates from obesity than in Western Europe and the USA
Inline links: Answer here, Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc, Outcomes of Citalopram Dosage Risk Mitigation in a Veteran Population, Yawboadu on the Ethiopian economic miracle, It’s Okay To Want Your Children To Be Healthy Even If The World Falls Apart, a new post about polygenic screening, here, @literalbanana’s take on recent plagiarism scandals, lists his favorite discoveries
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
North America & Central America
KYIV Contact: Artem Batogovsky (or Forux) Contact Info: https://t[dot]me/forux Time: Friday, April 5th, 7:00 PM Location: Ziferblat Cafe (Циферблат кафе) Group Link: https://t.me/lwkyiv Notes: The meetup has been moved to online due to the situation in Ukraine. Use the group link. North America Canada CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA Contact: David P Contact Info: qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 27th, 2:00 PM Location: Side Street Pub: 1167 Kensington Crescent NW. I'll bring an "ACX" sign with red letters. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95373W26+R8G Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
Inline links: https://t.me/lwkyiv, https://plus.codes/95373W26+R8G
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
North America
Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[d ot]org[do t]uk Time: Saturday, September 07th, 03:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz North America Canada CALGARY, CANADA Contact: David P Contact Info: qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 07th, 02:00 PM Location: First Street Market, 1327 1st Street SW, Calgary. Look for a red ACX sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95372WRM+2F Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/LZQ6HBAd8afoqPP27
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M, https://discord.gg/8RMx8BvZbz, https://plus.codes/95372WRM+2F, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/LZQ6HBAd8afoqPP27
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
September 10, 2024 · Original source
What about the apocalypse? This one is tougher. Freddie tries to do an argument from absurdity: suppose the apocalypse happened tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be crazy that, you, of all the humans who have ever existed, were correct when you thought the apocalypse was nigh? No, it’s not crazy at all. If the apocalypse happens tomorrow, then 7% of humans throughout history would have been right to predict an apocalypse in their lifetime. That’s not a such a low percent - your probability of being born in the final generation is about the same as (eg) your probability of being born in North America.
I think if you use anthropic reasoning correctly, you end up with a prior probability of something like 30% that the singularity (defined as a technological revolution as momentous as agriculture or industry) happens8 during your lifetime, and a smaller percent that I’m not sure about (maybe 7%9?) that the apocalypse happens during your lifetime. None of these probabilities are lower than the probability that you’re born in North America, so people should stop acting like they’re so small as to be absurd or impossible.
Inline links: 8, 9
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
This system might seem pointlessly complex, an exercise in building castles in the air. But in the late 19th century, anthropologists from distant lands compared notes and noticed that the Iroquois of North America do the same thing, as do other scattered groups across several continents. So there must be some underlying logic. What is it?
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
North America & Central America
Contact: Skittle Contact Info: witneymeetup[a t]proton[period]me Time: Saturday, September 27th, 2:00 PM Location: The top end of Church Green, near the war memorial. I’ll wear a red jacket, and have an ‘ACX Meetup’ sign. If it’s raining, retreat to the Buttercross for a passing moment, or the Wetherspoon’s (‘The Company of Weavers’) if it looks like we need a longer period of shelter. Close to ‘Market Square’ bus stop, or Witney has free parking. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3WQGM9+9F North America Canada CALGARY Contact: Megh Contact Info: meghss[a t]proton[period]me Time: Saturday, October 4th, 11:00 AM Location: At Bono Coffee Roasters, I will have ACX meetup sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95373X33+6HW
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3WQGM9+9F, https://plus.codes/95373X33+6HW
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
North America & Central America
Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[@]rtnl[.]org[.]uk Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I’ll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz North America Canada CALGARY Contact: LN Contact Info: laibanas20[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 16th, 10:30 AM Location: Calgary West Farmers Market- Near the west entrance Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95373QQG+6W Notes: Please RSVP to laibanas20@gmail.com
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M, https://plus.codes/95373QQG+6W