Astral Codex Ten

NYC

14 min read

NYC

Article

NYC is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 34 times across 34 issues between February 18, 2021 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “When I was growing up in NYC in the ’50s & ’60s”; “NYC widely considered worst-hit US city”; “all in the heart of the NYC in a news world”. It most often appears alongside California, Boston, San Francisco.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 34
  • Issue count: 34
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: December 31, 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.

Highlights From The Comments On Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
...can stay away. Peter Shenkin describes how things used to work : We have regressed in providing a range of public schools that cater to multiple tastes and aspirations. When I was growing up in NYC in the '50s & '60s, more such paths were provided. Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and Brooklyn tech educated the technical elite. (I'm not afraid of that term.) The HS of Music and Art trained...
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 05, 2021 · Original source
CORONAVIRUS: 1. Bay Area lockdown (eg restaurants closed) will be extended beyond June 15: 60% 2. …until Election Day: 10% 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10% 4. Fewer than 300,000 US coronavirus deaths: 50% 5. Fewer than 3 million US coronavirus deaths: 90% 6. US has highest official death toll of any country: 80% 7. US has highest death toll as per expert guesses of real numbers: 70% 8. NYC widely considered worst-hit US city: 90% 9. China’s (official) case number goes from its current 82,000 to 100,000 by the end of the year: 70% 10. A coronavirus vaccine has been approved for general use and given to at least 10,000 people somewhere in the First World: 50% 11. Best scientific consensus ends up being that hydroxychloroquine was significantly effective: 20% 12. I personally will get coronavirus (as per my best guess if I had it; positive test not needed): 30% 13. Someone I am close to (housemate or close family member) will get coronavirus: 60% 14. General consensus is that we (April 2020 US) were overreacting: 50% 15. General consensus is that we (April 2020 US) were underreacting: 20% 16. General consensus is that summer made coronavirus significantly less dangerous: 70% 17. …and there is a catastrophic (50K+ US deaths, or more major lockdowns, after at least a month without these things) second wave in autumn: 30% 18. I personally am back to working not-at-home: 90% 19. At least half of states send every voter a mail-in ballot in 2020 presidential election: 20% 20. PredictIt is uncertain (less than 95% sure) who won the presidential election for more than 24 hours after Election Day. 20%
Inline links: 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10%
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
...w remaining veterans of the Nic Denton side of the war. They were amplified by all the other Gawker sites fighting the man (I guess) and mentioning each other's stories, all in the heart of the NYC in a news world that was still reeling from the fact that online blogs were actually competing and putting out new content (gasp) hourly, not just daily. They clearly didn't care about...
Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting
July 12, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
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Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
October 11, 2021 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
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21
November 08, 2021 · Original source
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2022
January 28, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 217
March 27, 2022 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
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Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
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Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
I can’t find temperatures for 2020 in particular, but here’s average temperature in New York City over the course of the year.
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
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Open Thread 240
September 05, 2022 · Original source
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Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices
May 01, 2023 · Original source
The two densest US cities, ie the cities with the greatest housing supply per square kilometer, are New York City and San Francisco. These are also the 1st and 3rd most expensive cities in the US.
Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices
May 10, 2023 · Original source
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Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 285
July 17, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 286
July 23, 2023 · Original source
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New York Meetup On Sunday
July 26, 2023 · Original source
Why: Some combination of bad planning and bad karma has once again brought me to New York City. I’m 95% sure of my travel plans but I might have to change something last minute - if that happens I’ll try to alert you, and hopefully you can still have a fun meetup without me.
Open Thread 287
July 30, 2023 · Original source
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23: Room Temperature Superforecaster
August 01, 2023 · Original source
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My Left Kidney
October 27, 2023 · Original source
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Open Thread 326
April 22, 2024 · Original source
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My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
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Open Thread 339
July 22, 2024 · Original source
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Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
July 30, 2024 · Original source
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Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates
September 30, 2024 · Original source
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More Drowning Children
March 21, 2025 · Original source
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
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Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
December 04, 2025 · Original source
(source) …someone who moves from a counterfactual life in Boston to New York City has effectively had rent increase from 30% to 58% of income, even before we get to the secular trend! Then these people think “My life and that of everyone I know is unaffordable! It must be a generational crisis!” Then they write about it in the New York Times and The New Yorker, and their readers - including the average people who take the consumer sentiment surveys - believe the economy is uniquely awful. This isn’t the same as saying “it’s all vibes, there’s no crisis”. The crisis is that young people who want to join the elite are being forced into places they can’t afford. Would-be financial elites must spend years of misery chasing a lottery ticket that might not pay off; would-be cultural elites face the same challenge, plus their economic situation may not improve even if they win the culturally-prestigious (but low-paying) positions they seek. A natural test for this hypothesis would be to check economic sentiment in Brooklyn vs. the rest of the country. But this wouldn’t necessarily work: the hypothesis predicts that malaise will spread from Brooklyn to everywhere else. More Work To Stay In The Same Place Brenda Boomer applied to a local business she liked at age 18. She got hired, worked her way up from the bottom, and by age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,000 per year. Martha Millennial lost her adolescence to endless lessons in Mandarin, water polo, and competitive debate, all intended to pad her college resume; her only break was the three months she spent building houses in Rwanda to establish her social justice credentials. She eventually got accepted to Penn and earned a 4.2 in her college classes, despite having to complete several of them remotely from the Google campus where she was doing a simultaneous internship. After graduation, she applied to twenty-eight grad schools but was rejected from all of them, so she instead got two half-time jobs, one as a waitress and one at a startup that pitched itself as “Uber for humidifiers”. The humidifier startup failed, reducing her equity to $0, but she had only been in it for networking anyway, and by attending industry conferences every weekend she had collected the right contacts to get a warm introduction to the vice-president of their biggest competitor, “Uber for dehumidifiers”. She joined the dehumidifier startup, rose to associate manager, bumped up against a local ceiling (“we don’t promote from inside”), and successfully got herself poached by an air purifier startup, where at age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,001 per year. Technically Martha did better than Brenda at the same age. But she might still yearn for simpler times. (source) (source) What causes this one? It must be something big: after all, we see the same trend in college admissions, job applications, and (really!) dating, where matches that used to happen naturally have turned to an endless grind through hundreds of rejections and near-misses. The most likely explanation is technology removing frictions: when it’s easy to apply en masse to every opportunity in the world, every opportunity in the world gets thousands of applicants. They search for the best based on formal qualifications, so the value of formal qualifications goes up, so there’s an increasing arms race to achieve them. The only problem with this theory is that it doesn’t entirely match people’s complaints. They don’t complain that it was too hard to achieve their success, they complain that they are not achieving success, or that it feels hopeless. Speculatively, maybe people complain that they are not getting the level of success they expected based on their qualifications. That is, the same average-talent person is getting the same average-salary job they would have forty years ago. But since they have a masters’ degree and five internships and 12,000 LinkedIn contacts, they expected to get a better-than-average job. When they don’t, it feels like success slipping away. Conclusion Until now, we’ve tried to take disillusioned young people at their word. If instead we lean towards the economists, what might be ruining the vibes? The obvious answer is increasing negative bias in the media. I didn’t expect that Googling “graph about how negative media is over time” would work. We really do live in an age of wonders (source). This measure likely underestimates the trend towards negativity, because it only tracks a specific basket of media outlets. But the change could also have included viewers shifting consumption from more mainstream outlets towards more conspiratorial ones, including social media and blogs. (my Substack is tagged Science, but I hear the real money is in the Health Politics tag, where top performers feature articles like The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions and Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis) So, is that all there is? I think the strongest case for an economic crisis beyond vibes would be: Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!33ZC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fbed681-cd12-4f7d-9b42-1c98019eae4d_518x797.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!06v5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9fd4d840-0d95-402a-81e6-ff444ef09316_848x480.jpeg, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HlGa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c9d01fd-1834-41bd-abb7-5b935149bd17_726x227.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ll2f!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0095e4e7-7e15-4bcf-b64a-534e75fe0f3d_1080x884.jpeg, The most likely explanation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N2xe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c6ff762-10f4-4022-a759-206d873c2ec1_1456x807.webp, source, The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions, Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.