Works in Progress
Article
Works in Progress is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between May 27, 2021 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I have an essay about this up on Works in Progress”; “A Voxsplainer in spirit (actually on Works In Progress) by Stephan Guyenet on new weight loss drug semaglutide”; “Related, from Works In Progress: no, it’s not just that only the prettiest buildings of past ages survived”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, China, Substack.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 10
- Issue count: 10
- First seen: May 27, 2021
- Last seen: September 04, 2025
Appears In
- COVID Suicides: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Links For September
- Links For February
- Links For December 2022
- Followup: Quests And Requests
- Open Thread 318
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
- Links For November 2024
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Links For September 2025
Related Pages
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- Twitter (6 shared issues)
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- China (4 shared issues)
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- Substack (4 shared issues)
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- US (4 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (4 shared issues)
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- Australia (3 shared issues)
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- Berkeley (3 shared issues)
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- Brooklyn (3 shared issues)
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- California (3 shared issues)
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- Devon Zuegel (3 shared issues)
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- Europe (3 shared issues)
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- Gwern (3 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I have an essay about this up on Works in Progress, tell me what you think.
Inline links: an essay about this up on Works in Progress
31: A Voxsplainer in spirit (actually on Works In Progress) by Stephan Guyenet on new weight loss drug semaglutide. Although it is excellent, I find it raises more questions than it answers. The drug was originally designed to increase insulin secretion, but apparently its weight-loss-related effects are completely separate from that and involve some action in the hypothalamus? And it decreases alcoholism and generally improves impulse control? I’m really curious what lever it’s pressing here and I hope that - despite already being one of the biggest science stories of the decade - it eventually leads to even more mental health applications.
Inline links: semaglutide
32: Related, from Works In Progress: no, it’s not just that only the prettiest buildings of past ages survived, past ages really did produce (on average) prettier buildings.
53: From Works In Progress: The Story Of VaccinateCA, by Patrick McKenzie (@patio11). The very beginning of rolling out COVID vaccines in California was plagued by political and logistical nightmares. Patrick McKenzie of Stripe and a few of his friends founded a group to try to break the logjam, and ended up saving thousands of lives. Highly highly recommended, both as a story about heroic altruism and as a look into how the political sausage gets made (or doesn’t). Don’t worry, there are juicy culture war parts.
Inline links: The Story Of VaccinateCA
Though I have to say that I think 'classical architecture' and 'traditional architecture' are probably the wrong framing. What we want is popular architecture (which they are a type of, but not the only type of): https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy
Hopefully you saw our previous work on this question too (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest and https://worksinprogress.co/issue/in-praise-of-pastiche)
1: Comments of the week: UncleWeyland on what it would mean for Alzheimers to be/not be a prion disease. And Richard Fuisz says the RIMS1 gene (mentioned in the links post; postulated to cause blindness + increased IQ) doesn’t actually make you blind; nobody has checked the IQ claim yet, but here’s how Richard thinks about it. And a correction: the article about phages was from Asimov Press, not Works In Progress.
Art Deco architecture, typical of the early 20th century. After (?) the trauma of the World Wars (?), something flipped. Instead of embiggening ourselves, we began to ensmallen. We replaced World’s Fairs with “World Expos”, which Wikipedia describes as “less focused on technology and aimed more at cultural themes and social progress”. Of the few inventions that did feature, more and more were “green tech” - machines aimed at reducing the damage we were doing to the world. The classical goddesses got replaced by murals of ordinary workers, then abstractions, then nothing. The last ticker tape parade for an individual was 1998; since then the (relatively few, comparatively small) parades have all been for classes of people (NYC’s most recent was for “COVID-19 Essential Workers”). Our buildings became smaller and duller. Last month’s Works In Progress magazine tried to investigate why. Some economists have blamed “Baumol’s cost disease” - as industrialization makes some things (like consumer goods) cheaper, other things (like skilled labor) become relatively more expensive. So maybe the rising cost of skilled labor put buildings like the one of the left out of reach. But Works In Progress found that wasn’t true; if anything, industrialization has made fancy buildings cheaper. They concluded that it was “a story of cultural choice, not of technological destiny” - in other words, people stopped wanting impressive buildings. The vibes were wrong, or something. Intellectuals started feting ideas like degrowth. Degrowth says that it’s gross, greedy, and unsustainable to want economic progress. Instead, we should deliberately aim for economic regress, until First World GDPs are closer to those of South America or Africa. Advocates are careful to emphasize that as long as we take common-sense steps (like implementing socialism), this won’t force anyone to starve to death, just get rid of our useless luxuries - and in some sense, wouldn’t that make us better off?3 The promised future utopia was replaced by almost unbroken dystopianism. Global warming will kill us all, or maybe we’ll be stuck in a cyberpunk world of hopeless soul-crushing inequality. Technological advance is interesting only insofar as it brings our cyberpunk hell closer and (unfairly) enriches some billionaires along the way. The only bright spots are occasional acts of voluntary ensmallening - power plants cancelled, products banned, indigenous tribes winning little legal triumphs over modernity. Live-people goals like “build giant skyscrapers!” and “go to the moon!” could have been followed up with even greater live-people goals like “tile the desert with solar plants”, “create genetically-engineered superbabies”, “get one billion Americans”, or “cure all diseases”. Instead, they’ve been replaced by dead-people goals like “don’t damage the traditional character of communities” or “don’t damage the environment”. If you Google “why aren’t there world’s fairs?” you get a link to this podcast, which explains that they had “useless gizmos”, that the towers were “unattractive”, and that it involved “a dismal thread of racism”. Also because “technology won’t save us”. I agree that this doesn’t literally say the words “we hate all life” - you either see it or you don’t. Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package. VI. Andrew Tate I originally wanted to explain to Bentham’s Bulldog why slave morality wasn’t obviously “the good one” and master morality “the bad one”. Lest I come down too hard and get you thinking that master morality is obviously “the good one”, let’s talk about Andrew Tate. In case you’ve been under a rock your whole life, Andrew Tate is a masculinity influencer. He’s a former world champion kickboxer who pivoted to self-help, sold scammy courses on business and relationships, and got rich. Some of his courses apparently recommended beating up women (I’m not sure if this was supposed to help your business or your relationship), and when people confronted him on this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure”. He was credibly accused of rape (by “credibly” I mean that he sent one of the victims a text message saying “I love raping you”) and when people tried to cancel him over this, his response was always “I’m strong and successful and own a Bugatti, which makes me better than you, you pathetic weakling failure.” Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault, human trafficking, and being a general scumbag of a human being; he is currently awaiting trial. Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things. Still, he’s obviously a jerk. This is exactly the situation that Nietzsche believes slave morality evolved for - letting me feel contempt for someone who’s stronger and richer and more successful than I am - and yup, now that I’m in this situation, I find myself definitely interested in a moral system that lets me do this. The obvious compromise goes something like: We can genuinely appreciate that Andrew Tate has the many good qualities listed above.
Inline links: since then, Last month’s, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AbVF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8c33c84-0e6e-4489-8a58-f3603361d7e9_1357x501.png, degrowth, 3, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Ttz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7589c5dc-2f84-4f82-a6b8-c132ce4a0fc8_697x628.png, this podcast
46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now
Contact: Sean Brocklebank Contact Info: astral[period]club[period]edinburgh[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 6th, 3:00 PM Location: 31 Buccleuch Place (Edinburgh University's School of Economics) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV7+6J Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bl5 [remove this bit] zIidSM2BA9VlBHbWxV3 Notes: The building is keycard access on weekends but Sean will come out to collect people and bring everyone in at 3pm (if you're late, try to message the WhatsApp group above and someone can come down and let you in). This is a monthly rationalist reading group. Please write to Sean at the address to be added to the list for readings, but for September, this is AI 2027 project material and Amodei's essay "Machines of Loving Grace". We will also meet on October 18 (in a different room on campus) to discuss a few recent articles from Works in Progress (again: message Sean for info).
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV7+6J
59: Works In Progress suggests a $50 million foundation model to predict earthquakes. Author is not a geologist and presents no particular evidence that this will work, but I appreciate the thesis, which is that there are all these domains where we have lots of data but can’t predict the relevant outcome, AIs seem to do prediction tasks in a different way than we do, and maybe we should just make giant AI models for every dataset we’ve got and see if some of them work. Cf. foundation models for genetics.
Inline links: a $50 million foundation model to predict earthquakes
Backlinks
- Art Deco
- COVID Suicides: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Devon Zuegel
- Followup: Quests And Requests
- Links For December 2022
- Links For February
- Links For November 2024
- Links For September
- Links For September 2025
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Open Thread 318
- People: S
- Publications: W
- Samuel Hughes