North Pole
Article
North Pole is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 06, 2023 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Robert Peary, on his way to discover the North Pole”; “serving as native guides on expeditions to discover the North Pole”; “One answer to that is the North Pole”. It most often appears alongside Abe Lincoln, AI alignment movement, Alaska.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 06, 2023
- Last seen: September 13, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Abe Lincoln (1 shared issues)
-
- AI alignment movement (1 shared issues)
-
- Alaska (1 shared issues)
-
- Alaskan government (1 shared issues)
-
- Ambras (1 shared issues)
-
- Andamanese (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Beal (1 shared issues)
-
- Android (1 shared issues)
-
- Antarctic (1 shared issues)
-
- anti-apartheid party (1 shared issues)
-
- Arctic hysteria (1 shared issues)
-
- Ashlee Vance (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Robert Peary, on his way to discover the North Pole, wrote:
Although these papers are long on name-calling and short of explanations of exactly what was going on, I don’t want to throw them out entirely. Something does seem odd about the situation. Some writers say that Eskimo oral tradition doesn’t talk about it as much as you would expect from how often the explorers reported it (or at all). Everything we know about this condition comes from about fifty case studies, most by explorers with no medical training. Sometimes they did rape/colonize/oppress the natives, and even when interactions were friendly, they were often in inherently stressful contexts like serving as native guides on expeditions to discover the North Pole.
Second, piblokto was a reaction to the very particular stress of being an Eskimo meeting a Western explorer for the first time. This isn’t how mental disorders usually work, right? Exotic stress responses for one particular kind of stress that you can only have once, and then you never experience it again? The only reason I take it seriously is that it exactly matches Sorenson’s report of a weird weeklong mass hysteria among the Andamanese - which he describes as the death throes of a premodern form of consciousness encountering and getting replaced by modern consciousness. This feels a little magical to me - one explorer coming in and asking for help finding the North Pole doesn’t seem like enough to cause society-wide vibe collapse. Still, it kind of fits.
From that point, the tales of engineers who have interviewed with Musk run the gamut from torturous experiences to the sublime. He might ask one question or he might ask several. You can be sure, though, that he will roll out the Riddle: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” One answer to that is the North Pole, and most of the engineers get it right away. That’s when Musk will follow with “Where else could you be?” The other answer is somewhere close to the South Pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile. Fewer engineers get this answer, and Musk will happily walk them through that riddle and others and cite any relevant equations during his explanations. He tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about how they describe the problem and their approach to solving it.