Astral Codex Ten

Uganda

16 min read

Uganda

Article

Uganda is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between December 06, 2021 and August 29, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda”; “to begin work aimed at bringing mobile slaughterhouses to Uganda”; “pitch it to Uganda”. It most often appears alongside Australia, India, Metaculus.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 8
  • Issue count: 8
  • First seen: December 06, 2021
  • Last seen: August 29, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Delia Grace, $30,000, to begin work aimed at bringing mobile slaughterhouses to Uganda. Ugandan farms are being devastated by African Swine Fever, and farmers are currently incentivized to sell their sick pigs to people who don't know they're sick, spreading the disease around the country. A system of dedicated mobile slaughterhouses could change the incentives and help arrest the spread of disease. Delia is a veterinarian, epidemiologist, and senior scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya.
Inline links: Delia Grace
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
A. $60K to run simulations checking if some chemicals were promising antibiotics. B. $60K for a professor to study the factors influencing cross-cultural gender norms C. $50K to put climate-related measures on the ballot in a bunch of states. D. $30K to research a solution for African Swine Fever and pitch it to Uganda E. $40K to replicate psych studies and improve incentives in social science
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
50: BBC Africa: The Deadly Accordion Wars Of Lesotho. Related: BBC from 2011 on the African space program (ie one Ugandan man trying to build a shuttle in his backyard).
Inline links: The Deadly Accordion Wars Of Lesotho, BBC from 2011 on the African space program
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
9: Mobile Slaughterhouses To Prevent African Swine Fever (7/10) African Swine Fever spreads in Uganda by farmers selling their pigs rather than reporting suspected outbreaks of the disease; Delia Grace and Tom Randolph want to introduce mobile slaughterhouses that will help bring a disease under control a disease devastating for Ugandan pig farmers. The project has since gotten preliminary approval from Ugandan officials and they are working on the technical reports and epidemiological models that could get them to the next stage. They report they will eventually need more funding from a large donor interested in slightly unconventional livestock disease control interventions - contact t.randolph@cgiar.org if interested.
Inline links: t.randolph@cgiar.org
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
DUBAI, UAE Contact: RS Contact Info: xyxyxz[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 24th, 7:00 PM Location: Unwind Boardgame Cafe - Zabeel Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HQQ67MV+HV Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or send an email Uganda MUKONO, UGANDA Contact: Neil Contact Info: neilsotherinbox[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 15th, 11:00 AM Location: Bushbaby Lodge, there will be seating arranged and a sign in case there are other groups meeting that day too. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GGJ7RHC+X2 Notes: Tea and coffee will be served. Other food and drinks available for purchase. Feel free to bring kids/dogs.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/7HQQ67MV+HV, https://plus.codes/6GGJ7RHC+X2
MUKONO, UGANDA Contact: Neil Contact Info: neilsotherinbox[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 15th, 11:00 AM Location: Bushbaby Lodge, there will be seating arranged and a sign in case there are other groups meeting that day too. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GGJ7RHC+X2 Notes: Tea and coffee will be served. Other food and drinks available for purchase. Feel free to bring kids/dogs.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GGJ7RHC+X2
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Source: this page. See “Evidence Action says Dispensers for Safe Water is currently reaching four million people in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda, and this grant will allow them to expand that to 9.5 million.” Cf the charity’s website, which says it costs $1.50 per person/year. GiveWell’s grant is for $64 million, which would check out if the dispensers were expected to last ~10 years.
Inline links: this page, the charity’s website
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
(See Istanbul. It’s in Europe.) Uganda KAMPALA Contact: Anslem Namonye Contact Info: anslemnamonye[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 6:00 PM Location: National ICT Innovation Hub, Nakawa, Kampala, Uganda. We'll be meeting inside the main reception area of the National ICT Innovation Hub. Once you're at the entrance, look out for a sign labeled "ACX MEETUP - Kampala", and I’ll be wearing a White shirt. If you need help finding the place or have any questions, feel free to call or WhatsApp me at +256 761 951 019 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DII [remove this bit] k5Ru1QxxLrBAfvIIYmi Notes: Feel free to bring a friend or two! Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP via WhatsApp so we can plan seating and snacks accordingly: +256 761 951 019 Come with curiosity and an open mind. We welcome both first-timers and long-time ACX readers.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH
Contact: Anslem Namonye Contact Info: anslemnamonye[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 6:00 PM Location: National ICT Innovation Hub, Nakawa, Kampala, Uganda. We'll be meeting inside the main reception area of the National ICT Innovation Hub. Once you're at the entrance, look out for a sign labeled "ACX MEETUP - Kampala", and I’ll be wearing a White shirt. If you need help finding the place or have any questions, feel free to call or WhatsApp me at +256 761 951 019 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DII [remove this bit] k5Ru1QxxLrBAfvIIYmi Notes: Feel free to bring a friend or two! Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP via WhatsApp so we can plan seating and snacks accordingly: +256 761 951 019 Come with curiosity and an open mind. We welcome both first-timers and long-time ACX readers.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/6GGJ8JH7+JH