Astral Codex Ten

Taiwan

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Taiwan

Article

Taiwan is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between January 29, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “the country, Taiwan, which performed best in the virus”; “Taiwan (see her amazing poetic job description here”; “Taiwan and other islands off of its coast are hostile to it”. It most often appears alongside China, India, Canada.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 27
  • Issue count: 27
  • First seen: January 29, 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.

Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
4. Furthermore, the positive examples of technocracy @slatestarcodex refers to are...surprising. Two examples. To call school desegregation a technocratic invention papers over decades of community activism for desegregation. Perhaps even more dramatically looking at the coronavirus as an example of the success of technocracy runs against pretty much any reasonable reading of the international data. Danielle Allen and I have a piece coming out on this (we were both deeply involved in developing a response plan here https://ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap that significantly influenced now-President Biden's response), but perhaps the sharpest point here is that the country, Taiwan, which performed best in the virus was led in part by Audrey Tang who moved back to Taiwan after being immersed in and repulsed by the rationalist movement in Silicon Valley - see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/) and dedicated herself to doing things differently in Taiwan (see her amazing poetic job description here:
Inline links: https://ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap, https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
Should America stop securing sea lanes, China would face an oil crisis. “Almost all of the countries along China’s oil import route are also oil importers. All already have more than enough naval power necessary to interdict supertankers that go somewhere they don’t wish them to. And China dare not risk tangling with even a mid-powered navy out of range of its land-based aircraft because it lacks meaningful blue-water capabilities.” Worse for China, Japan’s navy is very capable, and Taiwan and other islands off of its coast are hostile to it (and are likely to remain American allies on top of that).
The last serious point to make about his thesis is about how it depends on America pulling back from the world. Is that a good idea or not? When I was younger, I wouldn’t have hesitated: I’d have said that we’re throwing tons of money at world security that we don’t have, that we get little in return, and that we should come home. Zeihan’s explanation of the free trade order that America has ensured for decades is the most powerful argument against that perspective that I’ve encountered. I’m not sure if it changes my conclusion, but I’m certainly less confident of it now. I could use more straight talk about what America’s interests actually are with respect to overseas commitments. Radigan Carter puts this in very real terms, asking about a CCP invasion of Taiwan (“a lot of us war veterans [are] more interested in buying a house and taking a hunting trip than reenlisting to defend Taiwan”). For the rest of the world, whether America withdraws may be the defining question of the era.
Inline links: Radigan Carter puts this in very real terms
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow.
There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why?
Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers.
Another thing: the importance of export markets. These countries need to have markets willing to purchase their goods. If they don't, export lead industrialization fails. Big imperial nations have options that modern nations don't. Where do these nations export their goods? To the US. Korea had special deals with the US. So did Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. And even China got special deals (enough to cause Russian complaints). This may be changing, especially for big countries like China with internally developed markets. But this advocacy for ELI should mention the politics of finding places to sell their goods. Otherwise the idea of "protected at home competing abroad" fails.
Because China, Vietnam, and Laos started so late, they don’t look great on the 1950 plot. They look a lot better on the 1990 plot, and it seems justified putting them in a separate “winner” category compared to “losers" Philippines/Indonesia/Malaysia/etc (South Korea, Taiwan, etc are already too rich to be able to grow fast by this point). If you switch the start date to 2005, then a lot of the gap closes.
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
The countries that got through COVID the best (eg South Korea and Taiwan) controlled it through test-and-trace. This allowed them to scrape by with minimal lockdown and almost no deaths. But it only worked because they started testing and tracing really quickly - almost the moment they learned that the coronavirus existed. Could the US have done equally well?
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
TAIPEI, TAIWAN (RSVP) Contact: KZ, kz[dot]acx[at]co[dot]sent[dot]com Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, September 19 Location: Inside the Nanmen Park Museum's cafe, look for the "ACX" sign. Coordinates point to the entrance. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/notice.chills.perform
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/notice.chills.perform
Book Review: Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care?
January 19, 2022 · Original source
Emanuel hates having to give a clear answer to that question, but when confronted with the fact that he’s writing a book with that title and can’t really weasel out, he grudgingly admits that “the top tier would include Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Taiwan”.
2: Single Payer With Very Limited Private Insurance is typical of Canada, China, Norway, and Taiwan. The government runs everyone’s insurance. But doctors, hospitals, etc can be independent businesses or nonprofits. They negotiate some kind of payment rate with the national insurance, who reimburses them. This is similar to how Medicare works in the US.
(I’m ignoring China and Taiwan here for two reasons. First, they’re significantly poorer/less developed than the other countries on this list. Second, Taiwan works its doctors incredibly hard - they see about 2-3x as many patients per day as in other countries, for less money, and I’m not sure why they stay in medicine or how they stay sane. Third, China also underpays its doctors, and they compensate by being corrupt and demanding bribes before treating patients. All of these things make it hard to compare them to Western countries.)
Predictions For 2022
February 01, 2022 · Original source
US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%
YGLESIAS PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats lose both houses of Congress (90%) HOLD 2. Democrats lose at least two Senate seats (80%) HOLD 3. Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats (80%) HOLD 4. Nancy Pelosi announces retirement plans (70%) HOLD 5. Stephen Breyer does not retire (60%) N/A 6. Some version of Build Back Better passes (60%) HOLD 7. Joe Biden is still president (90%) HOLD 8. At least one Biden cabinet-rank official resigns (70%) HOLD 9. No military conflict between the PRC and Taiwan (a worryingly low 90%) HOLD 10. New U.S. sanctions on Russia (70%) HOLD 11. Saudi Arabia and Israel establish diplomatic relations (60%) SELL to 50% 12. Fewer U.S. Covid deaths in 2022 than in 2021 (80%) BUY to 90% 13. Emmanuel Macron re-elected (60%) HOLD 14. Traffic light coalition exploits loopholes to get around the constitutional debt brake (70%) HOLD 15. No recession in 2021 (90%) SELL to 80% 16. Liz Cheney loses primary (80%) HOLD 17. Some version of USICA passes Congress (70%) HOLD 18. Lula elected president of Brazil (60%) SELL to 50% 19. China officially abandons Covid Zero (70%) HOLD 20. Fewer U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2022 than in 2020 (80%) BUY to 90% 21. Additional booster shots of mRNA vaccines authorized for seniors (80%) HOLD 22. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is below 6% (70%) BUY to 80% 23. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is above 4% (70%) SELL to 50% 24. The Fed ends up doing more than its currently forecast three interest rate hikes (60%) HOLD 25. Russia does not invade Ukraine (60%) HOLD 26. Viktor Orbán loses power in Hungary (60%) HOLD 27. Sinn Fein becomes the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly (60%) HOLD 28. The U.S. and Canada reach an agreement on softwood lumber (70%) HOLD 29. Democrats go down at least one governor on net (60%) HOLD 30. The unemployment rate stays between 4 and 5% (70%) SELL to 60% if you mean 12/22, to 40% if you mean it never gets outside that range at all
Ukraine Thoughts And Links
March 08, 2022 · Original source
Everyone can sanction Russia as much as they want, and it can win anyway. Putin is in too deep to extricate himself easily; it’s become a matter of honor, of “not being seen to be weak”. The point isn’t to save Ukraine, it’s to establish expectations for next time. This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t.
These were most of Putin’s demands before the war, so one could argue that, if they’re a good idea now, they would have been a good idea then, and Ukraine should have agreed and prevented bloodshed. This might be true, but I don’t think it’s necessarily so. A big part of diplomacy is maintaining your honor and your reputation for not caving in to threats. If Russia had gotten everything it wanted from Ukraine with no effort, it would have legitimized using threats of war as a negotiating tactic and made it harder for Taiwan/Georgia/Iran etc in the future. This is easy for me to say on the other side of the world, not losing any friends or relatives, but it is potentially worth standing up for yourself, even to the point of war, in order to maintain the illegitimacy of such threats.
Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
April 13, 2022 · Original source
In Fujian, Xi made efforts to attract investment from Taiwan and to strengthen the private sector of the provincial economy. In February 2000, he and then-provincial Party Secretary Chen Mingyi were called before the top members of Central Politburo Standing Committee of the CCP – General Secretary Jiang Zemin, Premier Zhu Rongji, Vice-President Hu Jintao and Discipline Inspection Secretary Wei Jianxing – to explain aspects of the Yuanhua scandal. In 2002, Xi left Fujian and took up leading political positions in neighbouring Zhejiang. He eventually took over as provincial Party Committee Secretary after several months as acting governor, occupying a top provincial office for the first time in his career. In 2002, he was elected a full member of the 16th Central Committee, marking his ascension to the national stage.
Your Book Review: Viral
July 30, 2022 · Original source
Although the first SARS virus originated in nature, it was studied in labs after the initial epidemic, and escaped several times, infecting people. This occurred in Singapore, Taiwan, and China, from 2003-2004.
Photograph of the famous Latané and Darley experiment, cerca 1968. So, what could those participants have been thinking? Maybe something like: Hmm, why’s the room filling up with smoke? Is this a problem? *looks around the room* Well nobody else seems to care, so I guess not. Looking back at the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, I think maybe this is why so many of us didn’t think twice about the location of the initial outbreak. Hmm, is it kinda suspicious that this virus broke out near a major virology institute that works on bat coronaviruses? Should we maybe look into that? *looks around* Well nobody else seems to think so, so I guess not. I can’t speak for everyone else, but this was at least my mindset. I had vaguely heard something about how there was a virology research institute close to where the pandemic broke out, and that some conspiracy theorists were claiming it was the source of the virus. I looked around and noticed that nobody was really taking this idea seriously, so I figured I didn’t need to take it seriously either. Also, I was thinking something like: Eh, probably every major city has labs and research institutes doing this kind of research. And I’ll bet they purposely built the virology institute close to where these viruses occur in nature, to give them easy access for sampling. Well, it turns out both of these things are wrong. The type of research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is pretty rare and specialized. It includes things like creation of chimeric coronaviruses [1, 2], infecting humanized mice with bat coronaviruses, and other types of gain of function research, which Chan and Ridley devote a chapter to. The WIV is one of only a few institutions in the world doing this type of research. It’s not the case, as I had assumed, that every major university has a couple labs doing similar work. So it does seem like a pretty remarkable coincidence that the outbreak happened in Wuhan. But maybe they purposely built the Wuhan Institute of Virology close to where these viruses are found in nature? Well, this also turns out to be wrong. The areas where viruses most similar to SARS-CoV-2 are found in nature are Yunnan province and Laos, which are more than a thousand kilometers away from Wuhan. The authors put this distance in perspective by noting that it’s more than the distance between Orlando and NYC. Image source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-30/china-is-making-it-harder-to-solve-the-mystery-of-how-covid-began If SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal somewhere around the Yunnan / Laos area, how did it make it all the way to Wuhan without leaving a trail along the way? 4. The story of RaTG13 Although I enjoyed the book, I do have one pretty major criticism. The authors repeatedly make the claim that a virus called RaTG13, which was being studied at the WIV before the pandemic, is the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2. But this claim is outdated and no longer correct. In September 2021 researchers identified a virus called BANAL-52 in Laos that’s a 96.8% match to SARS-CoV-2, closer than RaTG13’s 96.2% match. (Important note: a 96.8% match is still a long way off in genomic space, and does not imply that this is the same virus as SARS-CoV-2, or even necessarily a progenitor.) At first I thought maybe the authors didn’t mention BANAL-52 because it was discovered after the book was published, but this isn’t the case – Viral was published November 16, 2021, nearly two months after the discovery of BANAL-52 was published. Although I’m writing an overall-positive review here, I don’t want to go easy on the book where serious criticism is warranted. It’s completely unacceptable that BANAL-52 wasn’t mentioned. Even if it would have been inconvenient from a publishing standpoint, the authors should have rewritten the RaTG13 chapter, or at least included an addendum about the discovery of BANAL-52. With that being said, I think the story of RaTG13 is still interesting and important, so I’ll give a quick summary here. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was quickly sequenced, and the full genome sequence was published by Dr. Shi Zhengli’s team at the WIV. In this paper, they also briefly mentioned that the genome was a 96.2% match with another bat coronavirus called RaTG13 – the closest known match at the time. Oddly, the mention of RaTG13 did not include any reference, footnote, or link to any previously published sequence. Although the WIV didn’t provide details on this mysterious RaTG13 virus, a group of internet volunteers, including both amateurs as well as professional scientists working in their free time, began to investigate. This loose collection of open-source researchers, called DRASTIC, uncovered a medical thesis describing an outbreak of a mysterious disease in 2012. Six men who had been working in a bat-infested mine in Mojiang County, China, fell ill and were admitted to a hospital with symptoms including dry coughs, shortness of breath, fevers, muscle aches, headaches, and fatigue. Three of the men eventually died of this mysterious illness. In the years following this incident, teams of researchers (including a team led by Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV) were sent to investigate the cause of this illness and collect samples from the Mojiang mine. This sampling led to the discovery of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in 2013, and a part of its genomic sequence was published under the name BtCoV/4991 in 2016. The DRASTIC researchers discovered that RaTG13 was genetically identical to the BtCoV/4991 sequence from the Mojiang mine – it was the same virus, and had just been renamed for some reason, without any public record of the change. They also discovered that at least eight other closely related coronaviruses were also sampled from this mine and brought to the WIV. Although unhelpful throughout the investigation, the WIV eventually verified these facts when pressed on them, and an addendum was added to the original paper confirming DRASTIC’s account of the origin of RaTG13. So what should we make of this? Well, as I mentioned before, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2, so maybe the whole story is less important as it pertains to the origin of the pandemic. But the discovery of BANAL-52 doesn’t really resolve things either [2]. Laos is very far away from Wuhan (actually even further than Yunnan), so we’re left with the same question as before – how did SARS-CoV-2 make it all the way to Wuhan from such a distant natural reservoir without leaving a trail along the way? 5. Lack of institutional transparency and competence A lot of the book is devoted to criticizing the Chinese government’s lack of transparency during the pandemic. Some brief examples: In the early days of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, hundreds of people were investigated and punished for the crime of “spreading rumors”. This included whistleblowing doctors who attempted to warn others [3] about the spread of the disease and its human-to-human transmission, which was being denied by the Chinese government at the time.
Inline links: 1, 2, infecting humanized mice with bat coronaviruses, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6khv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac0a8f26-8f26-4712-b245-797d478ae385_1246x642.png, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-30/china-is-making-it-harder-to-solve-the-mystery-of-how-covid-began, virus called BANAL-52, published by Dr. Shi Zhengli’s team at the WIV., addendum
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Huang first went to university to study electrical engineering, but during the World War II years he became an Army officer. He saw combat, recovered from a gunshot wound to the leg, and rose to the level of Major in an elite Chinese military unit known as the New First Army, which was aligned with U.S. forces. They battled Japanese troops in south-east Asia and, later, Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Huang graduated from the American Army Staff College in 1947, but after the victory of the Chinese Communists on the mainland, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists to Taiwan, Huang stayed in the U.S. and took up the study of Chinese history, obtaining a doctorate degree in 1964 (when he was 46). 1587 is his best-known and most widely acclaimed book, but he enjoyed a long and successful academic career and also contributed to Joseph Needham's opus Science and Civilisation in China.
The “Japanese pirates” were not much like Captain Morgan or Jack Sparrow - they were really more like Vikings. Annual raiding parties would sail in from Japan, where they would set up armed bandit camps and raid the surrounding countryside. Often joined by disenfranchised or disgruntled locals, they posed a serious threat to public order all along the southeast coast, from Shanghai to the Taiwan Strait.
Inline links: Japanese pirates
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
Artificial biocatastrophe (worse than COVID): 5% INTERNATIONAL: IDK, I don't expect a Taiwan invasion. Generally bearish on China for the usual reasons: I just think they've built up too much debt (literal and metaphorical), have a demographic time bomb, it's always hard to come down from the high of fast growth, and even though their mixed centralized-ish model worked well before, I think Xi is a significant change towards traditional dictatorship which doesn't work as well. I don't expect this to produce any obvious explosion or disaster for them before 2028 though. I expect Ukraine and Russia to figure out some unsatisfying stalemate before 2028, followed by massive growth in Ukraine (usually happens post-war, they'll probably get favorable terms from lots of other countries including an EU admission deal, they're overdue for a Poland-style post-communist boom). Ukraine war cease-fire: 80%
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Who “won” the computer “race”? Charles Babbage? Alan Turing? John von Neumann? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Again, it was a long path of incremental improvements. Jobs and Gates got rich, and their hometowns are big tech hubs, but other people have gotten even richer, and the world chip manufacturing center is in Taiwan now for some reason. The overall balance of power didn’t change (except maybe during a brief window when the Bombes broke Enigma) and today all developed countries have computers.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
An oversized transplant force creates a transplant economy: a place that depends on industries that it did not generate itself. Getting a transplanted factory is always tempting for the governments of poor regions. But while the new jobs do alleviate poverty, transplants almost never lead to durable economic development (with rare exceptions, such as Taiwan). Jacobs has multiple examples, but the one I like most is Iran just before the revolution, when the Shah used oil money to buy a helicopter factory from the United States — thereby spurring a lot of development in the United States, where many companies got involved in building the factory, and almost none in Iran.
The Forbidden Solution All empires eventually collapse. This is not what we would expect if empires were a good economic arrangement. If they only ever got wealthier and wealthier, they wouldn’t disintegrate into various separatist factions or end in foreign conquest. The first empire to form would have slowly absorbed everything else, and we would all be living good lives under the enlightened rule of the Sumerians or whatever. But that doesn’t happen, because empires always milk their own cities until they become poor. Modern nation-states do the same. They accumulate stress by trying to hold themselves together, and then, one day, the stress is released all at once. Wars and revolutions galore. Most countries are born that way, like new stars formed in the aftermath of a supernova. Peaceful separatism offers an alternative, Jacobs says — but only a theoretical one. Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy,” she writes, “young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’” Can you imagine Canada saying this to Quebec? Or England to Scotland? Or China to Tibet and Taiwan? Yeah, me neither. That’s why it’s only theoretical and utopian. Jacobs knows very well that nations will never accept separatism as an option. And though the term “nationalist” has fallen out of fashion, almost all of us still think very much in terms of nations. Even when separatism does seem grudgingly acceptable, I’d say that’s usually either because it’s an instance of decolonization (colonial empires are decidedly out of fashion) or for cultural, nationalistic reasons. Quebecois, Scottish, or Catalan separatists say that they belong to nations that are culturally distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Spain. And they love their smaller nation just as much as others love the larger one. If any of these separatists got their way, we can be sure that the new nation of Quebec, Scotland, or Catalonia would then oppose further separatism in the strongest terms. When the American South seceded from the Union in 1861, the reaction wasn’t “good luck!” even though the Union was itself the result of a secession from Great Britain. To separate for economic reasons seems forbidden. Unthinkable. For one thing, it would be selfish. If Catalonia left, the poor regions of Spain, which benefit from welfare financed in part by Barcelona, would suffer, which is obviously unacceptable to Spain. For another, it’s not guaranteed to work. Small countries and city-states can still adopt dumb economic policies. It can seem intolerably risky to go your own way, unless your region is already rich, in which case see the selfishness point above. Widespread separatism also seems worse for solving large-scale coordination problems, like environmental issues, nuclear proliferation (and, perhaps, AI), or war. I suspect that Jacobs would agree with Nassim Taleb’s antifragility framing: it’s better to be in a constant state of mild disorder than to have apparent stability that hides stressors and ends in violent conflict. But that idea is not intuitive. Most of us would pick apparent stability over mild disorder. I also suspect — and this is my personal take — that we dread the additional complexity of having numerous small countries. We look at a map of medieval Germany, like this one… … 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sPn6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd25ceff6-f68e-4163-becf-613204a9be35_1600x1297.png, 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
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
So far. China hasn’t quite caught up to America. Their GDP per capita is still less than a quarter of ours. Although they make many excellent products, the world leaders - iPhones, 747s, GPTs - are mostly still designed in the US, even if Chinese factories churn out the parts. Other Asian tigers like South Korea and Taiwan liberalized politically around the point where they started approaching developed-country GDP; in his analysis of their rise, Joe Studwell suggests that this might have been a necessary component. And Japan, despite all the virtues that made Wang think they would overtake the US, has stagnated instead.
Inline links: Joe Studwell suggests
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
11: George Psalmanazar (1679 - 1763) was “a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Europe”. He explained away his white skin by saying that Taiwanese people lived underground. Psalmanazar invented an incredibly elaborate fake Taiwanese language, mythology, and custom, and was briefly an 18th-century-England viral sensation. Eventually some people who had actually been to Taiwan called his bluff, he confessed, and he settled down as a writer and theologian, befriending Samuel Johnson and other British intellectuals.
Inline links: George Psalmanazar
Fertility rates in China and Taiwan have reduced at similar rates over the past 50 years, suggesting that China’s one-child policy didn’t have a significant effect on curbing its population growth.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
SINGAPORE Contact: Andrew Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, May 12th, 4:00 PM Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W Group Link: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W Notes: We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct dates will be on https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W (our Group Link). Please send your RSVP email early because it would be immensely helpful. Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and shared with the other attendees. Taiwan TAIPEI Contact: Jake and Brandon Contact Info: jakessolo[plus]acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, April 28th, 3:00 PM Location: Daan Park - northeast field next to the basketball courts (backup: Learn Bar if it's raining) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+PG3 Notes: Backup location coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GMJ+GHR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+PG3, https://plus.codes/7QQ32GMJ+GHR
Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate
April 09, 2024 · Original source
…and deciding whether you think the assumptions behind a specific statistical test are likely to debunk the idea that cases are centered around the wet market. 11. Wuhan used as a control for a 2015 serological study on SARS-related bat coronaviruses due to its urban location. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ I don’t know why this point is supposed to matter. If you mean that Wuhan isn’t directly exposed to bats, nobody ever said it was. The zoonotic theory is that wildlife carted in from other areas of China started the pandemic in the wet market. 12. Superspreader events also seen at wet markets in Beijing and Singapore (Xinfadi and Jurong). This was discussed very extensively in the debates, both in section 1 and section 3. Wet markets weren’t “superspreader locations” - in fact, the disease spread no more quickly there than anywhere else. They were the first place in those cities that the pandemic started, due to contaminated animal products. If anything, this supports zoonosis. See also my discussion with Saar on this point below. 13. WIV refuse to share their records with NIH who terminated subaward in 2022. Wider suspension over biosafety concerns. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling Although WIV has not been especially forthcoming, some of their databases were leaked in various ways and showed that they did not have any viruses capable of transforming into COVID. 14. PLA involvement at WIV and MERS research prior to SARS-COV-2. MERS features several similarities with SARS-CoV-2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/ I can’t even tell what conspiracy theory you’re trying to propose with this one; if you spell it out I can try to explain why it might be false. 15. SARS1 leaked several times and SARS-COV-2 has leaked from a BSL-3 lab in Taiwan. Agreed that SARS leaked several times. It also spilled over from animals several times. During the debate, a lab leak rate of once per lab per 500 years was proposed (everyone agreed to steelman this by 10x for WIV numbers); I would be interested to know whether anything about the study of SARS challenges that number. 16. Unpublished infectious clone identified from Wuhan contradicting arguments such reverse genetics systems would be published. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full I asked some scientists about this paper and here’s what they told me. Wuhan University sequenced some rice. In the middle of the sequence, there’s an unexpected sequence from a common coronavirus, HKU4. The most likely explanation is that someone else in Wuhan was working on the coronavirus and there was cross-contamination. Plausibly this is Wuhan Institute of Virology, who is known to work with coronaviruses. This is cool detective work, but it’s not clear what it’s supposed to prove. I think some lab leakers are using it to prove that WIV can do reverse genetics, but they admitted this already in a published paper so that’s not too helpful. I think others are using it to prove WIV had “secret viruses” in their catalogue, but the rice virus wasn’t secret, it was HKU4, which is common and which WIV has already published papers about. 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 Arguments Once again, I cannot stress enough how much better a take you might have on this debate if you watch it. “The first known case predates the market outbreak by a month” - this is not the consensus position. I cannot say for sure what Dr. Chou means by this, but I suspect he’s referring to one of the many claims to this effect that Peter effectively debunked during the debate (Connor Reed, Mr. Chen, the 92 cases, Brazil, etc).
Inline links: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full, a published paper, has already published papers about, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yA9U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F467dd304-190a-4437-8920-d498c433dffb_1600x960.jpeg
This collapses the ‘extreme coincidence’ claim, which as explained above, turns lab-leak into the leading hypothesis. My strongest disagreement is with his Point 3 - the inference from other seafood-market-based COVID spread events. Saar writes: A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%. Most of these outbreaks have been traced back to either a migrant worker (eg a fisherman from a country with COVID sells fish at the market of a country with Zero COVID) or a cold chain product. For example, here’s Dai et al on the Xinfadi outbreak, the most important event of this type: According to a joint publication by the Beijing CDC and 13 research institutions, the outbreak at Xinfadi Market was likely to be initiated by fomite transmission from contaminated foods imported via cold-chain logistics (Pang et al., 2020; Beijing Daily, 2020b). Based on the epidemiological investigations at the Xinfadi Market, the researchers preliminarily concluded that booth #S14 in the aquaculture product selling area on the basement floor of the primary trading hall was the source of the initial transmission. Specifically, five customers were tested positive for IgG/IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in serological screenings, all of whom visited booth #S14 on May 30 and 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, the owner of booth #S14 procured imported and fully packaged salmon from a company's cold storage warehouse, then cut and processed the salmon for sale at the Xinfadi Market. Laboratory tests showed that sample swabs from five salmon fish from this supplier were tested positive by examining all salmon in the original sealed packages (n = 3582) in the cold storage facility. Viral genome sequencing showed that the viral strain isolated from one of the positive salmon swabs was homologous to that isolated from the infected persons and environmental samples at the Xinfadi Market (Beijing Daily, 2020b). The joint study reported that an ancestral strain isolated from the Xinfadi Market in Beijing was markedly different from the strains identified in two preceding outbreaks in China and the sequences obtained in March 2020 in Beijing. Phylogenetic analysis assigned the ancestral Xinfadi strain to clade B.1.1. Given the fact that the ancestral sequences were mainly identified in Europe, the strain was more likely to be imported to Beijing rather than derived from strains previously circulating in China (Pang et al., 2020). I know China has a bias towards believing frozen food COVID explanations, but this all sounds pretty convincing to me. Why is it more often markets than other places with cold chain products? Partly it’s the migrant workers - a lot of seafood markets are right next to seaports, and the contact tracing eventually traces back to a fisherman who came in through the seaport - I don’t think this is any more mysterious than epidemics often starting via airport or any other transportation hub. But even just keeping the focus on cold chain products, - there have also been outbreaks in seafood distribution warehouses, on docks, and in a seafood processing work area. Markets have many more people than any of those locations, and maybe (total speculation) cutting on cutting boards could aerosolize bits of fish. The strongest evidence that the Wuhan / Huanan Seafood Market epidemic wasn’t caused by migrant workers or imported seafood products is that there was no previous COVID-infected source of workers or seafood. If there had been, we would have noticed when the outbreak there spread (see Section 1.4 on Brazil). Responses to a few of Saar’s other points below: How many locations other than markets provide an interface with wildlife? Were markets actually identified in advance to be high-risk spillover locations or only in retrospect? I think scientists had called wet markets as an especially dangerous potential transmission location in advance. See for example Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets, published in 2006, which says: » “In Chinese wet-markets, unique epicenters for transmission of potential viral pathogens, new genes may be acquired or existing genes modified through various mechanisms such as genetic reassortment, recombination and mutation. The wet-markets, at closer proximity to humans, with high viral burden or strains of higher transmission efficiency, facilitate transmission of the viruses to humans.” In 2004, a paper on an emerging bird flu expressed hope that it would not spread too widely, but concluded that: » “Even in the event of yet another lucky escape, more measures must be taken to limit the amplification of viruses with pandemic potential in the wet markets around the world.” In 2007, Reuters published an investigation: Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses, which said things like: » “We face similar threats from other viruses and such epidemics can happen because we continue to have very crowded markets in China," said Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong. "Even though official measures are in place, they are not faithfully followed. We are not talking about just civet cats, but all animals," he added.” Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza, published 2004, is admittedly focusing on the next SARS1 outbreak instead of on SARS2, but gets bonus points for mentioning both wet markets and labs as likely causes of the next pandemic: » “Will SARS reappear? This question confronts public-health officials worldwide, particularly infectious disease personnel in those regions of the world most affected by the disease and the economic burden of SARS, including China, Taiwan, and Canada. Will the virus re-emerge from wet markets or from laboratories working with SARS CoV, or are asymptomatic infections ongoing in human beings? Similar questions can be asked about a pandemic of influenza that is probably imminent. Knowledge of the ecology of influenza in wet markets can be used as an early-warning system to detect the reappearance of SARS or pandemic influenza.” Saar mentions that there are several other possible sources like restaurants or farms. I think Peter demonstrated during the debate that pandemics are unlikely to start in rural areas, so farms aren’t that important. Restaurants mostly source their products from wet markets. During SARS1, some pandemics started in restaurants because they kept the civets in cages next to the diners (like how some Western restaurants keep lobsters). After SARS1, restaurants stopped doing that and became a less likely spillover location. Saar again: Scott quotes Peter, who implies that under the lab-leak hypothesis, we would expect the confirmed early cases to be centered around the WIV. However, cases are not expected to center on the lab. The lab is not spraying viruses into the air or hosting thousands of locals daily. If a worker gets infected, they spread the virus to their friends and family at completely different locations. In most places with an outbreak of known origin, epidemics show some geographic clustering. This has been true ever since the very beginning of epidemiology, when John Snow successfully traced a cholera outbreak back to its origin at a contaminated water pump by taking the center of the map of cholera cases. This isn’t a 100% law of nature; an infected lab worker might get lucky and not pass it to any of his lab co-workers. Still, we might expect him to infect his family, the stores he went to, or the restaurants he went to. If he lived near his workplace, these might also be near the lab. If he didn’t - let’s say he lived on the other side of town and had a long commute - he would start a cluster near his house, or his favorite store, or his favorite restaurant. Then the people there would infect their families/co-workers/stores/restaurants. The cluster would start somewhere! Sure, some people would infect nobody close to their work or home, and instead just infect one person a hundred miles away who they breathed on during a trip - but this is the exception, not the rule. So you wouldn’t expect a totally random distribution of cases all around Wuhan. There would be one center, or maybe several centers. But none of the claims that COVID was quietly spreading for months before the wet market have pointed to some alternate center of cases. If COVID was spreading for months before the lab, it somehow spread in a completely diffuse geographical pattern, with people exactly as likely to infect people far away from them as close to them - until it reached the wet market in December, and then spread in the normal center-radiating-outward way that every other infection spreads. All the evidence trying to support a spillover at the market is based on complex models with many single points of failure, built from unreliable and biased data. Therefore, it is difficult to give this evidence significant weight as there is always a possibility of errors in the data or its interpretation. More on this in the UFO comment below. Disagree. “First known case was at a wet market” is as simple as it comes. Certainly it’s less complex than “the virus has a 12 nucleotide insertion at the furin cleavage site, and even though those sometimes happen by natural recombination probably this one didn’t, and even though it looks out of frame maybe there was some weird thing going on with serine that made it in frame this one time only”, which is Saar’s star piece of evidence. I understand Saar thinks he can come up with lots of objections to “seen near wet market is suspicious for wet market origin”, then claim that getting over those objections requires “complexity”. But if Peter had no dignity, he could also come up with lots of objections to “seen in same city as Wuhan Institute of Virology is suspicious". He could say that maybe the civet farms of Hubei province were uniquely blah blah blah, and then Saar would have to prove that the civet farms weren’t uniquely blah blah blah, and then he could say “Oh, sure seems like you have a complex model with lots of unique points of failure, it all depends on fifty facts about the regulation of civet farms.” To illustrate what a market looks like in a real zoonotic pandemic, consider this study from SARS1. The researchers went to a random market and sampled the wildlife sold there. 4 of 6 civets sampled were positive, and 3 of them were phylogenetically distinct (i.e. infected in completely different places). A scientist I talked to says the 3 phylogenetically distinct lineages were most likely sampling errors. Still, this seems irrelevant to me since, again, no raccoon-dogs were tested. Scott explains that Covid’s closest known relative, BANAL-52, is rare and so it’s highly unlikely the WIV would’ve had it available as the starting point to engineer Covid . . . This is a basic mistake. SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here. No BANAL-52 relative close enough to create COVID from has ever been discovered. By mentioning BANAL-52, I was trying to be maximally charitable to the lab leak side. In order to create COVID, they would need a virus very close to COVID. But in years and years of searching, nobody has ever discovered a virus like this. Therefore it must be rare. As a way of bounding how rare, let’s see how rare the closest virus ever discovered is. That’s BANAL-52. It is very rare. Therefore, the COVID ancestor must be rarer than that. I don’t know how strong this argument is, because maybe there are millions of rare viruses capable of becoming pandemics, such that getting any one of them is very easy, even though each one individually is rare. The version of this I find convincing is that it should be a probabilistic cost to say that WIV did gain-of-function on a seemingly undiscovered and so-far-very-hard-to-discover rare virus instead of on any of the usual SARS-like viruses that people do their gain-of-function research on. Overall, all attempts to portray [Connor Reed] as an unstable, delusional person were unsuccessful. He is an ordinary person who very accurately described Covid-19 symptoms in real-time and claims to have received a positive test result. The timing and location matches the lab leak hypothesis and is impossible for the HSM claim. Therefore, they must discredit him. It is worth noting here the biased evidentiary standards used by zoonotic proponents. Reed’s testimony about his sickness, given on camera to multiple outlets, is deceitful and should be ignored. Yet, an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication is definitely identified as Mr. Chen (another possible pre-HSM case) and should be considered reliable. See above for why I don’t trust Connor Reed. I’m not sure why Saar attributes Mr. Chen to “an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication”. When I looked for Chen information, I got this thread, where it’s attributed to two Chinese hospital doctors, cross-checked with the Chinese COVID data repository, and double-cross-checked with the supplementary table in a peer-reviewed paper published by a team of Wuhan doctors. To understand how ridiculous the claim is that the HKU1 insertion looks just as engineered as SARS2’s, here are their alignments. Hopefully that should be enough. COVID: HKU1: I’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works. Surely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations). The fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID. Or am I missing something here? [The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal). Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products. From a Vox article from March 2023: From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data. Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit. The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts. It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China. “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.” […] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago. “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.” The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this: December: COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies Early January: Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person Late January: Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now. February: Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes. March: COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy. April: Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission. 2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation? randomstringofcharacters wrote: Isn't [the pandemic starting near the lab] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past. Many people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away. During the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade). This isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade. 3: Other Points That Came Up 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds quiet_NaN wrote: Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone. The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are): Peter -20.7 Saar 2.7 Eric -3.1 Will -2.5 Scott -1.2 Daniel -1.4 One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it "trolling", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market. I might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying: This is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc. In an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me. Peter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers. Trying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be: During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.
Inline links: Dai et al, Pang et al., 2020, Beijing Daily, 2020b, seafood distribution warehouses, on docks, a seafood processing work area, Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets, a paper on an emerging bird flu, Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses, Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza, this study from SARS1, this thread, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dcI7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc5aabd26-d70b-4f35-97cb-96d351bb52fd_552x920.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UQ14!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2411167c-1405-4fde-914b-6388ee498523_935x851.jpeg, a Vox article, wrote, wrote, https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1773797640607850745
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Andrew Contact Info: mindupgrade[at]protonmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 29th, 04:30 PM Location: Maxwell (will send more details in email) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W Group Link: https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W. Please send your RSVP email as early as you can because it would be immensely helpful. Notes: Feel free to send an email about topic sentences that you are interested in or want to have a conversation with others about. Topic sentences will be collated and privately shared with the other attendees. We have at least one ACX Meetup every month. The Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec dates will be on https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W. Taiwan TAIPEI, TAIWAN Contact: Jake & Brandon Contact Info: jakessolo[plus]acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 08th, 03:00 PM Location: Daan Park - northeast field next to the basketball courts (backup: Learn Bar if it's raining) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+PG3 Notes: Backup location coordinates of Learn Bar: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GMJ+GHR
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH57RJV+5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W, https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W., https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+PG3, https://plus.codes/7QQ32GMJ+GHR
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
November 05, 2024 · Original source
If Trump wins, will China invade Taiwan?
If Harris wins, will China invade Taiwan?
China more likely to invade Taiwan under Trump (25%) than Harris (17%), and Harris is more likely to fight back (75%) than Trump (54%).
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Cyrus C Contact Info: Ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so i know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome. Taiwan TAIPEI Contact: Colin Contact Info: contact[a t]cosmc[period]net Time: Wednesday, April 16th, 8:00 PM Location: Wyatt's, 106台北市大安區通化街39巷49弄17號1樓 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32HJ4+C7
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X, https://plus.codes/7QQ32HJ4+C7
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
48: T. Greer on China’s strategy for invading Taiwan. He argues that the Chinese hope for “something like the Gulf War, where America was able to use air superiority and precision munitions to degrade the internal coherence of the enemy force so decisively that when the actual land force showed up the Iraqis crumple” - and that means the Taiwanese should study the Houthis, who just successfully resisted such a campaign.
Inline links: T. Greer on China’s strategy for invading Taiwan
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Cyrus Contact Info: ccheung13[a t]protonmail[period]com Time: Friday, September 26th, 6:30 PM Location: Seoul Brewery in Seongsu, 28-12, Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people are joining! The organizer is an English speaker, but Korean-speakers are welcome. Taiwan TAIPEI Contact: Pepe Contact Info: altansarai[period]havard[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, September 21st, 2:00 PM Location: DeRoot休閒空間 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GRM+72
Inline links: https://plus.codes/8Q99G3V2+6X, https://plus.codes/7QQ32GRM+72
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: here’s the chaser, I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud, Part 2, recent paper, Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X), here (X), got accepted, started taking pre-orders, Public opinion, Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X), New revelations, claims (X), Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country, St. Carlo Acutis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkfL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcffc254-0a35-4360-baaf-2ffae8c00e64_769x931.png, St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Srijita Contact Info: srijitak[.]cmi[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, May 10th, 3:15 PM Location: Myx at Holland Village Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ Group Link: Two groups, one at https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX and one at https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore Notes: Preferrably RSVP on LessWrong if you’re coming. The reservation at MyX is till 5:30 pm, and I will cover snacks till then. If you’re planning to stay for dinner as well (I am), please email me so I can extend the reservation. Dinner will be at your own expense. Taiwan TAIPEI Contact: Luca Contact Info: mail[@]lucapizzagalli[.]com Time: Friday, May 8th, 7:00 PM Location: The Singularity Co-Working Cafe Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GV8+PC2
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX, https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore, https://plus.codes/7QQ32GV8+PC2