text stringlengths 136 178k | author stringclasses 5
values | id stringlengths 6 9 | title stringlengths 9 112 | source stringclasses 1
value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
# Open Thread 396
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
---
**1:** Comments of the week: [Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-ollantay/comment/147965657) [EDIT: Response from reviewer [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/148891307)]. And some more discussion of people being one-shotted by works of art: hottakergeneral claims that [Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-ollantay/comment/148004547). Fact check: although [Stuck’s Wotan looks](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_von_Stuck_-_Die_Wilde_Jagd_-_G_1405_-_Lenbachhaus.jpg) eerily like Hitler, [GPT-5 thinks](https://chatgpt.com/share/68a88cd2-d4fc-8001-b609-1620df0084a1) any theory of casual resemblance is speculative and that there are other explanations for Hitler’s style.
---
**2:** Philosopher Richard Chappell [responds to my (mild) criticism of his position](https://substack.com/@rychappell/note/c-147423329?utm_source=activity_item) on the embryo selection objections post.
---
**3:** In 2021, I wrote [a blog post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of) on how the best-supported treatment for insomnia was a therapy called CBTi, how it should be easily deliverable by app, but how the only good CBT-i app was prescription-only and cost $900. I challenged people to create normal non-prescription CBTi apps at normal prices. Now after four years, somebody has taken me up on the first half of the problem - a company called SheepSleep, working with a Stanford insomnia expert, has a CBTi therapy app for $298 per month (treatment usually takes 1-2 months). You can see more at [gnsheep.com](https://www.gnsheep.com/). They are offering ACX readers a discount with the code “ACX” (for first 50 people), and the founder asks any interested clinicians, orgs, or investors to reach out to her at luomei@stanford.edu. I still think someone should invent the $5 version, and would like to hear from anyone working on this so I can try to help them.
Note that although CBTi is very well-studied and this app is based on recommended protocols that could be reasonably expected to work, its claims as a product have not been formally tested. (EDIT: negative opinion [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/148899464), founder response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/148964745))
---
**4:** New subscriber-only post I forgot to mention last week: **[Dictator Book Club: Mussolini On Fascism](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-mussolini-on-fascism)**:
> Like most Americans, I only know four things about Mussolini:
>
> 1. He was the dictator of fascist Italy.
> 2. He made the trains run on time.
> 3. According to a WWII-era song sung by some of my older relatives, he bit his penis and now it doesn’t work.
> 4. He had [absolutely amazing taste in architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Braschi#/media/File:Palazzo_Braschi_Fascist_Poster,_1934.png).
>
> Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, *[The Doctrine Of Fascism](https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/reading/germany/mussolini.htm)* to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers.
Subscribers can read it [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-mussolini-on-fascism).
---
**5:** Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise:
* A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.
* (A) volunteer(s) to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 aerospace and astronomy grants (I don’t know how often the same person has both these areas of expertise, feel free to apply if you have only one or the other).
* A volunteer to do a *large* amount of work as the main evaluator for our policy team, which has about ~20 grants on their shortlist. These range from progress studies PACs, to voter education platforms, to free speech advocacy orgs. An ideal candidate would know enough about the policy landscape to have good opinions on which of these things will work and be cost-effective.
Each grant would require a few minutes to a few hours of your time (your choice, depending on how obvious you think the decision is) over the next three weeks. I can explain more details over email if you’re interested. Please volunteer [using this form](https://forms.gle/xyX2QBwD5NB8p8B79), if we have too many volunteers then I may not contact everyone who applies, sorry.
---
**6:** The team behind Eliezer Yudkowsky's upcoming AI book, *[If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies](https://ifanyonebuildsit.com)*, asks me to let interested readers know a few related announcements:
* The book is coming out September 16 and [can be pre-ordered here](https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640).
* There will be [a Zoom Q&A with the authors](https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/events), available to book pre-orderers only, on September 4.
* AI safety org MIRI wants to provide resources to reading groups interested in discussing it, if you have such a group, [let them know here](https://airtable.com/appgM36VHCg9MDEU3/shr4mK6ihTss27kzI). | Scott Alexander | 171863647 | Open Thread 396 | acx |
# Your Review: Ollantay
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
*Ollantay* is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru doing it. If nothing else, it’s popular in Peruvian high schools as a way to get students to connect with Quechua history. It’s not a particularly long play; a full performance of *Ollantay* takes around an hour.[1](#footnote-1)
Also, nobody knows where *Ollantay* was written, when it was written, or who wrote it. And its first documented performance led directly to upwards of a hundred thousand deaths.
*Macbeth* has killed at most fifty people,[2](#footnote-2) and yet it routinely tops listicles of “deadliest plays”. I’m here to propose that *Ollantay* take its place.
### The Meta-Story
When *Ollantay* was first performed, Peru was around two hundred years removed from Pizarro’s apocalyptic conquest. The population was finally starting to recover, so that in 1770 it sat at around 1.2 million people. The vast majority of those 1.2 million people were indigenous,[3](#footnote-3) and the vast majority of those 1.2 million people did not have great lives. Peru was oriented almost exclusively towards extracting mineral wealth from the mountains and moving it to Spain.
Here’s how they did it.
Peru was divided into around fifty provinces called *corregimientos,* each of which was run by a single *corregidor.* The *corregidor* held a monopoly on trade with all the Indians in his province, and he was also in charge of collecting taxes. If that sounds like a position which lends itself pretty easily to corruption and abuse, that’s because it was; the *corregidores* were uniformly fabulously wealthy and fabulously hated. And in addition to having to pay taxes, all the Indians were obligated to provide free labor to factories and public works projects - public works projects which were used not to improve living conditions of the Indians or provide them with roads between their villages, but to enable moving silver from the mines in the mountains down to the coast for shipping abroad. The Spanish crown expected that around 15% of the population of a district should be providing free labor at any given time. The actual number was usually much higher.
The sole representative from the Indian villages to the viceroyalty was the *curaca*, the highest office that an Indian could reach. Like the *corregidores*, there was one *curaca* for each province. This guy was responsible for ensuring that the Indians paid their taxes and delivered their free labor, and he was the only one authorized to lodge complaints to the *corregidor* on behalf of the villages. This was a position designed to make the *curaca* identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of *corregidor,* it was also a way to get very rich.
José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a *curaca*, and he was indeed very rich. He became *curaca* by virtue of his father having been *curaca*; when he was eighteen his father died and he inherited the title. José Gabriel married well, going from rich to richer. He seems to have been a devout Catholic and he got along well with all the local priests, up to and including the bishop of Cuzco - the ancient capital of the Inca empire and the most important city of inland Peru. José Gabriel was of course friendly with the local *corregidor,* a very rich Spaniard named Antonio Arriaga.
That isn’t to say that José Gabriel was particularly corrupt; on the contrary, he seems to have had a desire to help his people in ways that most other *curacas* did not. He used those friendships to get actual material concessions - lower taxes, less free labor, public works projects that actually helped the public. All of these didn’t go nearly far enough, but he at least tried. And he complained a lot. One of the people he complained to was a parish priest named Antonio Valdez.
Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta, and he fancied himself a Man of Culture. Priests were an important part of the Spanish colonial enterprise, and so Don Valdez was on good terms with both the *curaca* and *corregidor.* His name was well-known in Cuzco; he came from a family with long ties to the region and had established himself quite well. Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that *Ollantay* was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.[4](#footnote-4)
After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,[5](#footnote-5) and so he took the name Túpac Amaru II. On his next tours of the local villages he told them all his true name and his true lineage, and let them know that the days of minute changes in tax policy were soon to be over. Things were going to change. He was going to go to Lima to tell the king’s representatives what was what.
He traveled to Lima to press his claims. Specifically, he asked the viceroy to recognize his claim to the Marquessate of Oreposa, which was a noble title originally granted to the grandson of Emperor Túpac Amaru. Apparently he was persuasive enough that the government in Lima recognized the claim, and so he returned to Tinta as Túpac Amaru II, Maruqess of Oreposa. If anyone in the viceroy’s government was nervous about acknowledging the direct descendant of the last Incan emperor, they didn’t make their feelings known.
They should have. Because after his *Ollantay*-inspired transformation, Túpac Amaru II, Marquess of Oreposa and defender of the Quechua, was now on a mission. Back in Tinta, he ratcheted up his agitation against the constant overtaxing, overcharging, and abuse of the free labor system. He was so persuasive in this effort that he (and Valdez the priest/playwright) convinced the bishop of Cuzco to send a delegation back to Madrid, led by Túpac’s uncle, to argue in front of King Charles III.[6](#footnote-6) On the whole, everything was working out quite well for Túpac. He was now recognized as an Inca chief by the government in Cuzco; he knew the bishop well enough that the king would soon hear his grievances. He had every expectation that Charles would agree with him. So why bother waiting for Charles to answer?
On November 4th, 1780, a parish priest held a feast at his house in honor of King Charles’s birthday. Túpac was present, along with Antonio Arriaga, the aforementioned *corregidor*. It is not said whether or not Don Antonio Valdez was at this dinner, when Túpac proclaimed that Arriaga was under arrest for abuse of power. Túpac let it be known that the king had agreed with him that the Quechua should no longer be taxed, but that Arriaga had refused to enact this royal order.[7](#footnote-7) The punishment for this insubordination was death. Then he set up a scaffold in the center of town, waited for a suitable crowd to arrive, and publicly executed Arriaga. Thus began the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II.
Túpac recruited from the disaffected Quechua quite easily. With an army of locals mostly armed with slings and stones, he easily dispatched the initial force sent from Cuzco to stop him, killing nearly the entire force while losing only fifteen of his own men. News of this victory spread rapidly and he amassed an army 60,000 strong. But rather than pressing his advantage and immediately attacking Cuzco, he just wandered around southern Peru, allowing the army to pillage at will. His advisors - chief among them his wife - couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t attack. And in these crucial months, a new Spanish army assembled in Lima.
After two months of confused looting, Túpac’s advisors finally convinced him to attack Cuzco. But the city was by now well prepared for him, and his efforts were half-hearted at best. The attempt failed and the army withdrew to the south, where any remaining cohesion fell apart. January and February were spent holed up in the mountains, waiting for the hammer to fall.
It fell in March. That army from Lima arrived and proved too strong for Túpac’s stone-throwers. On April 6th the indigenous army was smashed; Túpac was captured alive, along with his wife and two of his sons. The entire rebellion had lasted just five months.
They were all brought to Cuzco in chains, where the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out. On May 18th, 1781, Túpac Amaru II was forced to watch as his wife and children were tortured and executed in front of him. Then they cut out his tongue. Then they gathered four horses, tied one to each of his limbs, and sent them running in opposite directions. Túpac Amaru II was pulled apart and he bled out in the plaza of Cuzco.[8](#footnote-8)
The Spanish army then spent the remainder of 1781 pacifying Peru. The indigenous army did not exist anymore, so this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed. And though it wasn’t officially called this, in practice Peru was decimated; from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.
Then the viceroy banned all Quechua theater. He knew what had started this.
---
Don Antonio Valdez was not killed in the purges. He was well-connected enough, and he was Spanish enough, to avoid the fate of all his Indian friends. *Ollantay*, though, was to be destroyed.
Yet Valdez kept a copy of his play hidden in his parish, and then he lived another 35 years. Those 35 years saw the destruction of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar and the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy by Napoleon, events which combined to undermine and ultimately destroy Spanish authority in the Americas. And while José de San Martín wouldn’t liberate Peru until 1820, by the time of Valdez’s death the interior of Peru had fallen well outside the viceregal jurisdiction. Holding Cuzco was hard enough; the viceroy wasn’t in any position to prevent a parish priest from making a copy of a decades-old play.
He made two copies, and gave each one to a priest. One of these priests brought a copy to a convent in Cuzco, where it sat in the library. The other priest kept his copy, and the original remained with Valdez. In 1835, a relative of Valdez’s wrote an article in a Cuzco periodical where he made reference to the fact that copies of *Ollantay* yet existed. This article came to the attention of a certain Johann Moritz Rugendas, a German artist who had recently been booted out of Mexico for trying to overthrow the government there and was presently touring South America.
El Marcado de la Independencia, by Rugendas in 1843. He did some nice paintings of Lima while on tour.
Rugendas asked the monks in the convent to make a copy of *Ollantay* for him. This copy was rather damaged, having sat in a damp convent for eighty years, but the monks obliged and did the best they could. Rugendas brought this copy back to Germany when he returned to Europe in 1846, where it became a curiosity as an example of the Quechua language. He also brought back word that an undamaged copy existed in some priest’s rectory.
An Englishman with an interest in Inca history decided that he was going to find this undamaged version and write an English translation, and so in 1853 Sir Clements Markham[9](#footnote-9) added “find and translate *Ollantay*” to his agenda for an upcoming expedition to the Andes. He succeeded, finding that other priest who held that other copy and meticulously copying every word of *Ollantay* in both Quechua and Spanish, then translating that to English.
And so we can read, watch, and perform *Ollantay*, the play that launched a thousand ships.
### The Story
*Ollantay* is a love story.[10](#footnote-10) The lovers are the titular Ollantay and Cusi Coyllur Ñusta - he the chief of the Anti people (to be clear, *Anti* is the Quechua name of the clan; they’re not anti-people) and she the daughter of the Inca emperor. As the play begins, they have already been clandestine lovers for quite some time and the princess is secretly pregnant by Ollantay. But Ollantay, being simply a regional warlord, is not a suitable match for a princess. The play begins with Ollantay pining to his page - who fills the only role of “comic relief”[11](#footnote-11) - that he must marry Coyllur:
> Have I not already said
> That e’en if death’s fell scythe was here,
> If mountains should oppose my path
> Like two fierce foes who block the way,
> Yet will I fight all these combined
> And risk all else to gain my end,
> And whether it be life or death
> I’ll cast myself at Coyllur’s feet.
The two run into the high priest, whose introductory soliloquy is a paean to the blood of llamas:
> O giver of all warmth and light
> O Sun! I fall and worship thee.
> For thee the victims are prepared,
> A thousand llamas and their lambs
> Are ready for thy festal day.
> The sacred fire’ll lap their blood,
> In thy dread presence, mighty one,
> After long fast thy victims fall.
The priest and Ollantay then discuss how Ollantay can definitely not marry the princess and it’s a really bad idea for him to try. Ollantay reiterates his desires, to which the priest can only give one final warning:
> Put a seed into the ground,
> It multiplies a hundredfold;
> The more thy crime shall grow and swell,
> The greater far thy sudden fall.
Ollantay then approaches the emperor and asks for the hand of his daughter with a long soliloquy. The emperor waves him off in four lines:
> Ollantay, thou dost now presume.
> Thou art a subject, nothing more.
> Remember, bold one, who thou art,
> And learn to keep thy proper place.
And so in the next scene, Ollantay swears vengeance:
> When flames rise to the heavens.
> Cuzco shall sleep on a bloody couch,
> The King shall perish in its fall;
> Then shall my insulter see
> How numerous are my followers.
> When thou, proud King, art at my feet,
> We then shall see if thou wilt say,
> ‘Thou art too base for Coyllur’s hand.’
He returns home and gathers an army. The emperor then dispatches his own army to go hunt down Ollantay, but Ollantay’s men successfully ambush them in a mountain pass and destroy the Inca army without losing a man:
> A rain of stones both great and small
> Down on the crowd of warriors crashed,
> On every side destruction flashed,
> Thy heart the slaughter did appall.
>
> Like a strong flood the blood did flow,
> Inundating the ravine;
> So sad a sight thou ne’er hast seen—
> No man survived to strike a blow.
Ollantay doesn’t press his advantage, though, and is content instead to build up his base of power in his home province. This proves to be a mistake. General Rumi-Ñaui, the general who lost the battle in the mountain pass, comes up with a different, better plan. He begs the emperor for another chance, and the emperor grants it.
Rumi-Ñaui shows up to Ollantay, beaten and bloody, and spins a tale of betrayal by the emperor. Ollantay takes the bait and invites him into his capital, then tells him that they will shut the gates and party for three days straight:
> It will be so. For three whole nights
> We drink and feast, to praise the Sun,
> The better to cast all care aside
> We shall be shut in Tampu fort.
Rumi-Ñaui waits for Ollantay’s whole army to be passed-out drunk. Then he opens the gates and invites his army to come in and kill or capture the lot of them. Ollantay is brought back to Cuzco in chains. Things are looking bad for him.
I’ll let the play take it from here (Túpac Yupanqui is the emperor, and tocarpus are execution stakes):
> **TÚPAC YUPANQUI:**
> Know that tocarpus are prepared.
> Remove those traitors from my sight,
> Let them all perish, and at once.
>
> **RUMI-ÑAUI:**
> Take these three men without delay
> To the dreaded execution stakes;
> Secure them with unyielding ropes,
> And hurl them from the lofty rocks.
>
> **TÚPAC YUPANQUI:**
> Stop! Cast off their bonds.
>
> *(The guards unbind them. They all kneel.)*
>
> *(To Ollantay, kneeling).*
> Rise from thy knees; come to my side.
>
> *(Rises.)*
>
> Now thou hast seen death very near,
> You that have shown ingratitude,
> Learn how mercy flows from my heart;
> I will raise thee higher than before.
> Thou wert Chief of Anti-suyu,
> Now see how far my love will go;
> I make thee Chief in permanence.
> Receive this plume as general,
> This arrow emblem of command.
That’s right! Ollantay swore eternal vengeance on the emperor, seceded, set himself up as a king, destroyed an entire Inca army, and is rewarded for his betrayal by being made viceroy. Rumi-Ñaui has no problem with this, saying:
> Prince Ollantay! Incap Ranti!
> Thy promotion gives me joy.
As the play concludes, Ollantay mentions that he would still very much like to marry Coyllur.[12](#footnote-12) The emperor of course thinks this is a marvelous idea, and so the two are reunited for the first time in ten years and, oddly enough, the first time in the play. *Ollantay* is the kind of love story where the lovers only actually speak to each other once, at the very end.
And so the play concludes with these words from the emperor:
> Thy wife is now in thy arms;
> All sorrow now should disappear,
> Joy, new born, shall take its place.
Which is the Inca version of “and they all lived happily ever after”.
---
*Ollantay* is not a particularly good play. There’s a reason it has only entered the repertoire of Peruvian high school drama. The whole premise that Ollantay is trying to get back to his lover is dropped in Act II and only resurfaces at the very end of the play, almost as an afterthought. None of the characters evolve; Ollantay is the exact same person at the end of the play that he was at the start. And the resolution is comically abrupt. All the foreshadowing, and there is foreshadowing, implies that both Ollantay and Coyllur will end up dead, but instead they end up married and with a ten-year-old daughter. Turns out the priest was wrong! The seed put in the ground that multiplies a hundred fold won’t precipitate a sudden fall after all!
Thematically, *Ollantay* is not thematic. Ollantay acts virtuously and is rewarded for it. Rumi-Ñaui acts wickedly and is rewarded for it. Coyllur acts…well she doesn’t really act, she just bemoans her fate in Act I and then spends the rest of the play literally hidden behind a stone wall.
And it’s not like *Ollantay* tells us anything about Incan society that would make it valuable from an anthropological perspective. Valdez may have been adapting a traditional Quechua play, but his own Spanish and Catholic background definitely seeped in. As we’ll see, there’s an ongoing debate as to how much of the play is Quechua and how much is Valdez.[13](#footnote-13)
### The Same Story
But even if *Ollantay* is not that valuable from an artistic perspective or an anthropological perspective, it is valuable from a historic perspective.
You may have noticed some similarities between the plot of *Ollantay* and the story of Túpac Amaru II. By which I mean that it’s beat-for-beat the same story. A powerful local chief despairs of his inability to <marry a princess / lighten the free labor burden>. After consulting with a local priest, he launches an armed rebellion against the imperial authorities in Cuzco from his home base in the mountains, and quickly raises a large army. He easily defeats the initial army sent to capture him, but instead of marching on Cuzco he focuses on building up his own local power base. This proves to be an error, and he loses control of his own army, leading to military defeat and his own capture. He is taken to Cuzco in chains and <forgiven and made viceroy / brutally tortured and executed>.
Pretty much all of the questions surrounding the Túpac Amaru rebellion vanish if you assume that Túpac was not fighting a rebellion but following a script. Why did Túpac not immediately attack Cuzco? Because Ollantay didn’t. Why was he seemingly okay with his army losing its discipline? Because Ollantay was. Why did he put his army in a position to lose? Why was he okay with being taken alive, knowing how the Spanish dealt with rebels? Because Túpac was following the path set by Ollantay:
* First, declare yourself in rebellion.
* Second, win a quick and easy victory with the help of stone-throwers.
* Third, amass a giant army.
* Fourth, hunker down at your base in the mountains and wait to be defeated by the new army sent from the capital.
* Fifth, be brought to Cuzco and given authority over all of inner Peru.
* Finally, use your new authority to improve the lives of all indigenous people and be remembered forever as a great ruler.
He made it all the way to step five before things went awry.
*Ollantay* was a cognitohazard designed exclusively for José Gabriel Condorcanqui. It led him to embrace his destiny as the liberator of his people, and it led him to believe that he would be vindicated in the end rather than tortured and executed. It led him to make crucial military mistakes. It led one hundred thousand people to their deaths.
### The Author
The first time I read *Ollantay*, I was sure that there was some mistake; that Antonio Valdez had written the play after the rebellion as a way to try and redeem Túpac. A way to recast his story as a romantic tale of heroism and end up with him on top. Maybe he felt bad for his role in the decimation of Peru, and writing (or re-writing) *Ollantay* was his way of making up for it. But Valdez, and his family, and those priests with those copies, and the Spanish military officers burning down ancient villages, they all said that no this really was the *Ollantay* that drove José Gabriel to become Túpac Amaru.
So how much should we blame Don Antonio Valdez? Here are the theories I’ve seen of where Valdez’s version came from. All of these theories have their vigorous defenders.
1. Valdez came up with the whole play himself.
2. Valdez took an existing Quechua oral tradition and set it in the form of a Castilian play.
3. Valdez took an existing Quechua drama that had been acted for centuries and wrote it down.
4. Valdez took an existing Quechua drama that had been acted for centuries, changed the ending so as to fit with his more romantic notions, and wrote it down.
5. Valdez found a play that had already been written down in Castilian verse; all he had to do was hire actors to stage it.
It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied. To quote one article that tries (and fails) to come to any sort of conclusion, “Certain scholars have said that the *Ollantay* tradition, which exists yet today in Peru, is the source of the play; and others say that the play is the source of the tradition.” Which is to say that yes there are folk stories around Ollantay, and we have no idea whether they spawned the play or the play spawned them.
Some Inca historians maintain that *Ollantay* must be a 16th-century original. Others put it in the 15th, others claim that Valdez just made it all up himself. An Argentinian claimed that his father was a friend of Valdez and that Valdez didn’t know anything about writing plays. A Peruvian[14](#footnote-14) countered that Valdez was the greatest linguist, philosopher, and playwright in all of 18th-century South America. Then there’s the racial component - white Peruvians are more inclined to say that Valdez wrote the whole thing himself, and indigenous Peruvians are more inclined to say that he simply adapted it from the Quechua.
I am left without an opinion as to which sections of *Ollantay* are a Valdez original. But I’m also convinced that Valdez does not play an innocent role here. In *Ollantay*, the priest figures heavily in the opening and closing of the play. He begins with a statement of his powers:
> ’Tis well. Now listen, warlike. Chief:
> My science has enabled me,
> To learn and see all hidden things
> Unknown to other mortal men.
> My power will enable me
> To make of thee a greater prince.
He goes on to warn Ollantay of the path he will go down if he insists on making trouble with the emperor. It’s a long back-and-forth, but the priest finishes with this flourish:
> How oft we mortals heedless drink,
> A certain death from golden cup
> Recall to mind how ills befall,
> And that a stubborn heart’s the cause.
And having failed to convince Ollantay, he departs with the lines:
> Be it life, be it death that you find,
> I will never forget thee, my son.
And he means it. He stays with the emperor and advises mercy towards Ollantay at every step.
Finally, in the climactic scene when the defeated Ollantay is brought before the emperor, we have this moment:
> **TÚPAC YUPANQUI:**
> *(to the Uillac Uma).*
> Pronounce their sentence, great High Priest.
>
> **UILLAC UMA:**
> The light that fills me from the Sun
> Brings mercy and pardon to my heart.
It is this sentiment, we are meant to infer, that causes the emperor to show mercy to Ollantay.
Don Antonio Valdez did none of this. He did not attempt to talk down Túpac from his course. He did not go to Cuzco to plead clemency. And when Túpac was captured and brought to Cuzco, when he had his tongue torn out and his limbs tied to horses and his body ripped apart in the plaza, the priest was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was hiding in his parish, hoping nobody would come around asking about a play.
Antonio Valdez lived for another thirty-five years after the brutal suppression of the rebellion and the public execution of his friend. In all the chaos that would subsume Peru as South America broke away from Spain and fell into near-constant civil war, Valdez never made another public appearance. He advised neither San Martín nor Bolívar.
But he did make a copy of his play.
### Trying to Make Sense of It All
I have come to a conclusion. It is my firm belief that *Ollantay* was not created by Don Antonio Valdez. Whether or not Valdez adopted an existing Quechua story is irrelevant; we cannot put the deaths of a hundred thousand people onto the shoulders of a single priest. *Ollantay* must remain without an author. That is good and right.
Because the best explanation I can offer for the Túpac Amaru rebellion is that José Gabriel Condorcanqui was taken in by something beyond his control. You and I can read or watch *Ollantay* and be mildly amused for an hour without wanting to go overthrow the Peruvian government. But that’s not because we’re more clever than José, or more rational than José, or more media-savvy than José. It’s because *Ollantay* wasn’t *for* us. It was *for* him.
But maybe something else is *for* you and *for* me. Maybe there’s a book out there, or a painting, or a song or a play that is just waiting for you to activate your destiny. Maybe every artwork out there exists for a specific person, and every once in a while the art finds the person and they change the world. Maybe we just have to hope that ours never finds us.
After all, *Ollantay* is far from the only example of this. Mark David Chapman read *Catcher in the Rye* and knew he had to kill Lennon. John Hinckley Jr. saw *Taxi Driver* and knew it was talking about him; knew that Jodie Foster needed somebody to follow the script and shoot the president.
And in 1992, [Ronald Ray Howard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Ray_Howard) was pulled over outside of Houston while listening to “Soulja’s Story”, a song with these lyrics:
> Only fifteen and got problems
> Cops on my tail, so I bail 'til I dodge 'em
> They finally pull me over and I laugh
> "Remember Rodney King?" And I blast on his punk ass
Howard followed the script.
And when he was arrested and when he was charged with murder of a police officer and when he faced the death penalty and thirteen years later when he sat in the chair and watched the lethal injection cocktail enter into the IV drip, each time he swore that he didn’t want to kill the officer, but that something came over him. He couldn’t control it. It was the song.
That song was written, of course, by Tupac Amaru.
###
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’m relegating a video of an actual performance of *Ollantay* to this footnote, mainly because I’m reviewing the play in general and not a particular performance. There are quite a few on YouTube, most of pretty similar quality to this one. Performed in Quechua with Spanish subtitles, but English viewers will pretty easily figure out what’s going on. Nothing about this play is subtle.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
22 dead in one particular riot, and a handful of actors’ deaths over the four hundred years since it was written.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Throughout this review I’ll be alternating between “indigenous”, “Indian”, and “Quechua”, but for our purposes they all mean the same thing.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
Meaning that it was refitted to be in octosyllabic verse, which was a popular style for Spanish theater at the time.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
This is actually not as implausible as it might seem. Túpac Amaru I had a lot of children, and Condorcanqui was wealthy enough that his lineage could be traced back to royalty. And we’re not talking like 2,000 years here - Túpac Amaru I was executed in 1572. This would be akin to a rich Virginian claiming to be a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
Said uncle was poisoned to death in Madrid. This story has no happy endings.
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
This was very much Not True. Túpac had not heard anything from Madrid.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Later sources claimed that Túpac was too strong for the horses and they failed to execute him this way, ending up cutting his head off instead, but that seems to be a later fabrication meant to impart some divinity onto him. Either way, not a good way to go.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
More well-known for bringing quinine to India and organizing the first British expeditions to reach the South Pole. But he also dabbled as a translator.
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
Here I’ll be quoting from Markham’s 1863 English translation. Markham tried to preserve the Castilian style of Valdez, and because he did not speak Quechua his version is an English translation of a Spanish translation. But it’s the best we’ve got.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
For example:
PIQUI CHAQUI.
(jumping up).
I was asleep, my master,
And dreaming of evil things.
OLLANTAY.
Of what?
PIQUI CHAQUI.
Of a fox with a rope round its neck.
OLLANTAY.
Sure enough, thou art the fox.
PIQUI CHAQUI.
It is true that my nose is growing finer,
And my ears a good deal longer.
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
She does have her own subplot, which I’ll tell in this footnote. The princess is confined to a prison within a religious order. She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin. We then jump forward ten years, as Ollantay builds his kingdom in the mountains. Yma does not know that she is secretly Inca royalty, and she despairs at the life set before her. She also is very interested in learning why there is a crying woman behind the walls at the convent. This plot is resolved when Yma’s friend tells her everything and brings her to her mother. Yma then goes to tell the emperor, completely unaware of the events surrounding Ollantay. The emperor sends Yma to fetch the princess and bring her back to Ollantay. At no point do Yma or Ollantay acknowledge that she is his daughter.
Wait, you say, wouldn’t it make more sense if Ollantay went to go rescue his wife and daughter after being made viceroy? If he had nothing to do with Yma’s discovery of her true parentage, then why did Yma have to wait ten years before peeking behind a wall to find her mother? These are all good questions! The answer is that *Ollantay* has anticipated the Bechdel test by two hundred years and so is absolutely determined that any time there are two women in a scene together they must 1) have a conservation with each other that 2) is not about a man.
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
There’s also a good argument to be made that he changed the original ending, turning it from a tragedy to a triumph. That would explain the presence of this song in Act I, sung by a passing child to Coyllur:
“She wanders forth from stone to stone,
She seeks her mate in vain;
‘My love! my love!’ she makes her moan,
She falls, she dies in pain.”
[14](#footnote-anchor-14)
Not just a Peruvian, but the Peruvian Minister of Foreign of Affairs. | a reader | 167091288 | Your Review: Ollantay | acx |
# My Responses To Three Concerns From The Embryo Selection Post
*[original post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection)]*
**#1: Isn’t it possible that embryos are alive, or have personhood, or are moral patients? Most IVF involves getting many embryos, then throwing out the ones that the couple doesn’t need to implant. If destroying embryos were wrong, then IVF would be unethical - and embryo selection, which might encourage more people to do IVF, or to maximize the number of embryos they get from IVF, would be extra unethical.**
I think a default position would be that if you believe humans are more valuable than cows, and cows more valuable than bugs - presumably because humans are more conscious/intelligent/complex/thoughtful/have more hopes and dreams/experience more emotions - then in that case embryos, which have less of a brain and nervous system even than bugs, should be less valuable still.
One reason to abandon this default position would be if you believe in souls or some other nonphysical basis for personhood. Then maybe the soul would enter the embryo at conception. I think even here, it’s hard to figure out exactly what you’re saying - the soul clearly isn’t doing very much, in the sense of experiencing things, while it’s in the embryo. But it seems like God is probably pretty attached to souls, and maybe you don’t want to mess with them while He’s watching. In any case, all I can say is that this isn’t my metaphysics.
But most people in the comments took a different tactic, arguing that we should give embryos special status (compared to cows and bugs) because they had the potential to grow into a person.
I tried to provide counterexamples - sperm have the potential to grow into a person, but are not themselves people with rights. Pizza has the potential to grow into a person (if a woman eats it while she’s pregnant), but is not itself a person with rights. If we invented conscious/intelligent/complex/thoughtful robots, then a block of iron sitting in front of the robot factory would have the potential to grow into a person, but is not itself a person with rights.
The commenters argued that an embryo was more of a person than these things. Some people said it was because the embryo had everything it needed to grow into a person on its own, as opposed to the sperm (which needs an egg), the pizza (which needs a pregnant woman), and the iron (which needs the robot factory). This isn’t entirely true - an embryo sitting in the middle of a field will just die; development requires a placenta and the carefully-tuned environment of the human uterus - but maybe if you tried hard enough you could come up with some definition for “everything needed to grow” that ruled in the uterus but ruled out the robot factory.
Other people said it was because the embryo already contained all of the necessary information. I don’t think this is right either. A flash drive with an embryo’s genome and a description of how cells work contains all of the necessary information. So does a printed book containing the code for a sentient robot. But neither of these are people.
Maybe we combine these two approaches? It needs to have all the necessary information, *and* be self-assembling (within definitions of self-assembling that don’t rule out the womb)? But here I think a sperm and an egg in the Fallopian tube just *before* they fertilize one another and combine into an embryo pass the test and become a person with rights! So does a computer, currently turned off, which is programmed to turn on in one hour and run the code for a sentient robot.
Is there some criterion that would keep embryos, while ruling out sperm-egg pairs and computers with robot code? Trivially yes - to qualify as a person, it must contain the information for a person, *and* be self-assembling into a person, *and* start with the letter “E”. This is a deliberately provocative example - what are we even doing here? We can always eventually come up with some gerrymandered criterion that rules in all the things you want to rule in and rules out all the things you want to rule out. But will it be satisfying? Will we, on reflection, think “yes, this is what I mean when I say I’m against murder; the true reason that murder is bad is because it affects things beginning with the letter E”?
When I think about why murder is bad, I think of human beings being conscious, able to feel pain, able to have preferences, having hopes and dreams - things like that. So I would rather just skip this entire process of figuring out exactly how self-assembling counts as *really* self-assembling, and note that embryos have none of those things.
*What about the sleeping hermit?*
One commenter raised an objection to my criterion - what about a sleeping hermit? He’s asleep for the night - so he currently has no consciousness, hopes, dreams, etc. And in case I am tempted to say that his death would make other people sad, we stipulate that he is a hermit with no friends or relations; the only person who can suffer from his death is himself. It seems like here, we might need some concept of “but if they’re going to go back to having personhood soon, we should consider them to be people now” - and then we might want to consider that applying to potentially-having-personhood-in-the-future beings like the embryo.
I answered that the hermit’s past personhood gives him some sort of property rights to continue having his personhood respected, the same way I may still own an object when I’m not physically holding it, or an absentee landlord may own a house when he isn’t present.
Philosophy professor Richard Chappell ([blog here](https://www.goodthoughts.blog/)) [showed up](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection/comment/140986250) and presented a different argument: “A sleeping hermit has a mind, even if their mental states aren't being actively processed. It's completely different from merely having a ‘potential’ to form mental states after a bunch of further development.”
I am always hesitant to disagree with a professional philosopher about philosophy, but I like my explanation better. It’s not clear what it means for the sleeping hermit to have “a mind”. He doesn’t seem to have the metaphysical mind, since (assuming sufficiently deep sleep) he’s not conscious or engaging in any mental activity. He does have a physical brain, but this doesn’t seem like the relevant criterion.
Consider the following story:
> You go in for heart surgery. During heart surgery, surgeons cut you open, turn off your lungs, and cut open your heart (in a way incompatible with living, except that the surgeons are supporting your breathing and blood-pumping with machines, and will eventually fix you up). In the middle of the heart surgery, your enemy tries to bribe the doctors to stop the surgery halfway through and throw your body in the hospital Dumpster. This will not involve any extra violence to you (beyond how cut up you are already) but it will definitely result in your death. The doctors refuse, saying that this would be murder.
>
> You recover from surgery, live for many more decades, and enter the glorious transhuman future. In the glorious transhuman future, there is an immortality surgery. It involves taking your body apart cell by cell, then infusing each cell individually with special nanotechnology. This is a very involved process - at some points, no two cells that previously made up your body are touching one another, and some may be in entirely different laboratory rooms from others - but after a few hours all the cells should get successfully infused, you can be re-assembled on the operating table, and you’ll be good to go. Once again, in the middle of the surgery, while you are disassembled into trillions of pieces scattered across a sprawling lab complex, your enemy tries to bribe the doctors to stop the surgery halfway through and throw the cells in the trash instead of reassembling you. Is this murder or not?
I claim that canceling the cellular-disassembly surgery halfway through is murder, for the same reason that canceling the heart surgery halfway through would be murder. But this seems to disprove both the anti-throwing-away-embryos people’s position *and* Richard Chappell’s position. While you’re disassembled, you don’t have a brain, or a working mind, or any independent potential to self-assemble into a person. You just have a sort of residual claim to personhood that you lodged back when you were a fully-assembled human.
I think lots of things about personhood are a convenient legal fiction. I don’t, *right now*, have a strong preference against dying (in the sense that my brain is currently focused on writing this essay, rather than on how much I don’t want to die). And I currently possess the money in my bank account, even though I am a slightly different person (in the sense of having slightly different opinions, being made of different matter, having brain cells in different positions, etc) from the person who earned that money. We need to abstract all of this weirdness into the idea of a single continuous person with moral rights in order to do anything at all, and I think this covers the sleeping hermit too.
*What about a newborn baby?*
A newborn baby is sort of conscious. It probably has some hopes and dreams, like a hope of getting milk. But it doesn’t seem obviously more conscious than a cow. If we are to grant it rights beyond those we grant cows, don’t we need some sense that things which will develop into an adult person deserve personhood rights?
I mostly bite this bullet. I think a newborn baby deserves more rights than a cow [for moral rather than axiological reasons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) (that is, for reasons that involve the fence around the law, rather than just the law). We want to have a bright-line norm against killing humans who are old enough to be conscious persons. But there are only fuzzy, meaningless lines about when babies transition into fully conscious persons. In order to err on the side of caution, we ban killing babies (and in some cases fetuses). I think this is similar to having age-of-consent laws at age 18 - we don’t really claim that there is a magical distinction between 17.99 and 18.01 that makes sex with the latter genuinely more likely to go well than sex with the former, but we have to draw a line somewhere. I draw the line at when babies seem vaguely human-shaped and able to have any desires/preferences at all (even ones not especially superior to a cow’s). This is necessarily unprincipled, and I don’t have strong arguments against hyper-pro-choice people who want abortions even up to partial birth, or against hyper-pro-life people who want to ban abortions as soon as the first brain cell forms. But I do feel like I’m on pretty firm ground saying that an embryo without any brain cells to speak of is too soon.
Also related to fences around the law: in most cases, killing a baby will make their parents, relatives, and tender-hearted onlookers extremely sad. You can come up with weird thought experiments where it doesn’t (hermit babies, anybody?) but part of what we mean by “the fence around the law” is that the law should have clear elegant bright-line boundaries even at the cost of failing certain weird thought experiments.
**#2: Isn’t there a value in having the right diversity of traits? Wouldn’t embryo selection, by giving parents control over their children’s traits, cause them to maximize ones that seem “better” without taking overall diversity into account?**
There are two versions of this complaint.
First, what if everyone selects their children for the same trait, like extroversion? It seems like probably we need introverts for something (mathematicians? radiologists?), and so this would be net negative for society on practical grounds, as well as some sort of spiritual loss for the diversity of humankind.
Second, what if people select their children for opposite traits? For example, some people might select for extroversion, and others for introversion. Then the human race might split into incompatible clades, or people might end up too extreme to be happy, or it might turn out that one side of the trait is good and the other is bad and the people whose parents chose the bad side are at a major life disadvantage through no fault of their own?
I have a weak theoretical response, and what I hope is a stronger practical response.
*Weak theoretical response*: isn’t this a problem we face with any technology, or anything that makes humans better able to get things they want? By allowing people to construct buildings, we both homogenize - people in Dubai and Siberia can both be in identical 70 degree concrete cubes - and overdiversify - there can be saunas and ice skating rinks in the same city. But this is not an argument against allowing buildings. Overall, we expect letting people optimize their environment to be good; if diversity is harmed, people will find ways around that or not optimize that hard. I think this response is weak because it’s a nice heuristic, but someone could object that optimizing people goes worse than optimizing other things.
*Stronger practical response*: I think it’s worth having a clearer picture of exactly what this technology does. It allows the parents to select from some number of embryos (most examples use five). So consider some family you know with five kids. Now choose the healthiest/happiest/most successful kid. Now imagine we did that for thousands of families, and took the people you chose and stuck them on a distant planet to form a new human race. Would that new race lack diversity? Would it be some kind of dystopian cross between *Brave New World* and GATTACA? If you hopped from Earth to that planet, and back to Earth again, would you even notice a major difference, beyond a couple fewer hospitals?
But this hypothetical greatly *over-*estimates the potential of embryo selection, because it’s imagining perfect foreknowledge. It would be a better analogy if the selection was made by a drunk person reading a note scrawled in Portuguese by a schizophrenic oracle trying to leave cryptic suggestions about which child would be happiest/healthiest/whatever.
And we’re not exactly creating a new human race instantly either. Metaculus currently expects 20 years before any country has 10% of children selected for intelligence (and I don’t think the “for intelligence” is doing much work here; I would be surprised if 10% were selected for something else first):
…and it will take 20 years for those people to grow up and start affecting society. So I think in this projection, it takes 40 years for there to be a significant contingent of selected people - and even 10% isn’t really enough to affect diversity very much. And selection is weak! Even if you select for intelligence, you only have a 70-30 chance of getting a more-intelligent-than-expected rather than a less-intelligent-than-expected kid.
So it’s an effect which would be kind of hard to notice even if it happened perfectly and instantaneously, happening in an extremely imperfect way with lots of random noise, only becoming relevant half a century from now.
If this is true, doesn’t it suggest I can’t be too *in favor* of embryo selection either? What’s the argument for saying the technology is powerful enough to be worth it, but *not* powerful enough to worry about?
I think the first reason that benefits work differently from risks here is that the benefit can happen with a specific person (we prevent that person’s disease), but the costs require affecting a large proportion of the human race (decreasing human diversity). Obviously it’s easier to help a specific person than to harm the whole human race!
A second, more speculative reason is that very slightly increasing the skill of the top few percent of people can significantly affect the human race, and I expect the top few percent to disproportionately use this technology. Suppose that, as above, 10% of the population uses this technology, but that includes half of the smartest 1%. By my (actually o3’s, but I checked them) calculations, this would increase the number of geniuses (IQ > 140) by ~40%, and the number of supergeniuses (IQ > 160) by ~160%. Why can such small adoption increase these numbers so much? Because of the shape of the normal distribution, very small shifts in the right tail of the distribution can result in very large absolute changes in the number of people at any given high-outlier rank. If you think that increasing the number of geniuses by 40%, or the number of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society, then this technology could have a large effect on society even with relatively limited adoption.
But the main reason I think this matters is that it gets us on the road to more advanced technologies. Once people are paying for this, companies can afford research divisions, investors know there’s interest, and regulators who hoped to strangle the field in the cradle will back off. My impression is that there are much stronger technologies about 10-20 years down the line, ones that probably disrupt things so profoundly that your opinions should be more related to your general opinions on transhumanism and technological singularities than on specifics of the selection process. I think a technological singularity would be more diverse insofar as diversity is good (people could have wings if they wanted!) and more homogenous insofar as homogenous is good (nobody dying of cancer). I’m happy to take a 10% increase or decrease in the current level of human diversity if it gets us there.
**#3: Would you tell a disabled person to their face that you would rather they not exist, or that people like them not exist in the next generation?**
Would you tell an embryo-selected person to their face that you would rather they not exist?
Obviously this would be an extremely mean and offensive thing to do. You can be against embryo selection without wanting existing embryo-selected people to die, or accusing them of being unworthy of life.
Or what about rape? I am against rape, would prefer that it not happen, and support efforts to stamp it out. But many people currently alive are the children of rape. Do I have to consider them to be some inferior life-form worthy of extermination?
Or what about lobotomies? When we banned them, we were, in a sense, telling lobotomized people that others like them should not exist in the next generation. But it’s a pretty weak sense. It’s not the sense where you go up to a lobotomized person and shout “You don’t deserve to live, you scum”. It’s just that we would prefer that this not happen in the future.
(I don’t think the fact that it’s possible to imagine stopping the lobotomy without switching which people exist matters very much here, partly because of the considerations I mention [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help), and partly because I think a person who’s lived with a lobotomy for decades is in some sense a genuinely different person than one who was never lobotomized, even if they have the same genes)
Or what about war? I would like there to be peace in the future. But if World War II hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been a baby boom, and millions of Boomers wouldn’t exist. Does this mean we can’t be pacifists?
In all these situations, I think it’s possible to acknowledge that we want to make the world better in the future (less rape, less war, fewer lobotomies, etc) without saying that people who currently owe their existence or their current state to the bad thing are [inferior](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically) or don’t deserve to exist. I think we do this naturally and common-sensically for everything except embryo selection, I think embryo selection opponents would do it naturally and common-sensically if they ever met an embryo-selected child, and I think following our natural and common-sense impulses solves this problem too. | Scott Alexander | 170352519 | My Responses To Three Concerns From The Embryo Selection Post | acx |
# Open Thread 395
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
---
**1:** Thanks to everyone who applied to ACX Grants. I still hope to inform winners by October 1. This remains a goal but not a promise.
**2:** ~~I am wondering about the prevalence of a certain thing and would like to run a survey on it. But if I tell you what it is, then there will be selection bias, since people involved with the thing will be more likely to take a survey about it. So please decide whether you feel like taking a survey, and if so take this one. Once you click on the link you’re committed to taking it whether you think it’s relevant to you or not, and you can’t tell anyone else what it’s about. Don’t worry, it will take less than five minutes, maybe less than one minute if it’s not relevant to you. Yes, I am aware that selection bias is still possible, and I have some hare-brained plans to get around it.~~ [EDIT: It was about LLM psychosis and I got the sample size I wanted, thanks!]
**3:** Thanks to everyone who posted comments on [the dating review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay) (except for people who posted bad comments, who I have banned). I think the prize for the most ACX-stereotype-fulfilling response is [this person who is using it as an AI benchmark](https://x.com/arundsharma/status/1956510644167192743). Since there was a spirited debate about the author, I’ve created a prediction market [here](https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/dating-men-in-sf-acx-review-written).
**4:** Thanks to everyone who posted comments on [the amyloid review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-hypothesis). Chris Strutheo has created a prediction market [here](https://manifold.markets/strutheo/will-david-schneiderjosephs-bet-abo) about whether the author’s bet will pan out. This time the most ACX-stereotype-fulfilling response is the nominative determinism angle: | Scott Alexander | 171253640 | Open Thread 395 | acx |
# Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
# I. The Men Are Not Alright
Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.
This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.
This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things:
1. I am *terrible* at small talk.
2. Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.
3. The men are not alright.
This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships.
A warning: I have no solid solutions to these problems. I have theories and suggestions, but these problems are far beyond my realm of expertise.
That fact has kept me from writing about my thoughts for years, because it seems insulting to expound on men’s lived experiences, when being a man is so foreign to me. But it seems when men try to speak up about these things, they are often derided for being ungrateful, weak, hateful, narcissistic… the list of accusations goes on.
The fact is, men enjoy some privileges that women do not in Western society. This seems to have convinced many that they’re doing perfectly alright, or at least good enough to shut up about their issues until women and other minorities get their problems ironed out.
Most of “polite society”–the elite individuals who often influence narratives in the media and academia–seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, convinced that discussing the pain of men requires ignoring the problems of others.
I believe the opposite is true; the pain facing both men and women is evidence of a wounded society, and you cannot heal an injury by only stitching half of it. The rest of the wound will fester and spread infection, and then your stitches are of no use.
If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.
Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men, so I’ll try to act as a translator, using my identity as a feminist twenty-something woman as a bridge. I’ll explain the pain that’s so obvious to me, yet hidden to many others, and try to provide some insight for both genders on how these issues impact dating, and what can perhaps be done to address them.
# II. The Lost Generations
Historically, “rites of passage” for genders have been practically ubiquitous throughout cultures, and for good reason. Cisgender men and women are biologically different. Men are built to be strong and to use that strength for physical protection and combat. Women are built to be mothers, an activity that is arguably even more physically gruelling, yet in an entirely different manner.
Groups of humans who rejected these roles didn’t last long. Send the women out to combat on a regular basis, and your tribe’s future population would be demolished. After all, when it comes to reproduction, having many wombs is more vital than having many penises.
Thus girls and boys had to be carefully cultivated into women and men using strict gender norms and rites of passage. These rites provided a series of stepping-stones toward womanhood and manhood; follow the steps, and you’d become a true woman or man, roles that existed as the foundation of personal identity.
There is a large amount of debate about when exactly gender roles evolved, but for at least the past 10,000 years, the majority of cultures have provided their sons with very similar maps to manhood: your youth is to be enjoyed, but once you hit puberty, you take on the responsibilities of a man. A man guards his people, procreates with his wife (or wives), and provides resources for his family. He is to be physically strong and intellectually capable, but humble enough to respect the wisdom of his ancestors and their religion. When disrespected or threatened, he must stand up for himself by using physical or emotional punishment.
This map was well known and widely accepted; there was never any question as to the purpose of a man. Priests, parents, mentors, and friends all preached the same set of expectations.
In return for fulfilling these many requirements, a man would be given respect, romantic and sexual companionship, devotion from friends and family, the right to take part in a spiritual tradition, the honor of his legacy being passed down through children, and the physical and emotional safety of a community.
There’s much that can be critiqued about this old model; indeed, thousands of works of critique have been produced in recent centuries, and many damning flaws have been exposed. But this old model provided men with a purpose and a path, ensuring they couldn’t get lost, as long as they met the clear, unified expectations.
Enter modern Western society, a cultural force unlike any the world has ever seen. Modern technology and novel social structures have altered the fabric of our society, ripping apart the old model of manhood in the process.
The old map to womanhood was also damaged, and indeed, many excellent books and essays have been written about this topic. But the map to womanhood was left more intact than the map for men; being a mother is still a largely respected role in society.
In contrast, there is little room left for warriors and combatants, and women can now provide for themselves without needing the help of men. The clear-cut map to becoming a man is gone.
In its place is a hodge-podge of ideals from a variety of sources. We no longer have one tribal leader or religious clergy to tell us how a man should act; the unified messaging has vanished. A boy may receive one definition of manhood from his father, another from his teacher, another from his brother, another from Hollywood, and endless more on YouTube. And if the definition is murky, the path to achieving manhood is even more confused.
In modern America, a minority of boys are born swaddled in communities that actively guide them through the process of becoming a man. However, most of those communities are religious and conservative, adjectives that the Bay Area actively repels. You won’t find many of those men around here.
Instead, the men in the Bay’s dating scene mostly represent the modern majority category–men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community, and instead depended on society at large to teach them about manhood.
The elite social strata, which I refer to as “polite society,” has taken the lead in providing this modernized “map to manhood,” using their strong influence on the media and academics as their primary tools. Gone are the days of carefully defined rituals, initiations, expectations, and stepping stones; now young men are expected to figure out the map through a bewildering mixture of movies, TV, social media, video games, books, news articles, and school.
S*ometimes* it’s okay to also learn from your family and friends… but only if they agree with the map crafted by polite society.
And as for religion? Absolutely not. Throw it in the trash and light the trashcan on fire.
The first rule of the Modern Map to Manhood is that you don’t talk about the Modern Map to Manhood. Defining “manhood” is reinforcing gender roles and thus strengthening the patriarchy. Men are just supposed to “be decent people,” end of story.
…except it’s not, because there are still certain manners and conventions that men in particular are supposed to follow. And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.
So if you squint hard enough at the murky sea of conversation about gender, you can make out the following steps to become a man:
1. **Reject toxic masculinity.**
1. It’s your job to understand what this means, despite the definition of “toxic masculinity” being nebulous and ever-changing.
2. If you’re uncertain whether you fit the definition, you’re probably doing something wrong and should feel ashamed. To play it safe, act as demure as possible and avoid risk-taking.
1. If you adopt these mannerisms and it harms your romantic pursuits, do not complain.
2. **Be your authentic self!**
1. Your authentic self should not be: dominant, highly interested in sex, competitive, emotionally reserved, prone to risk-taking, bad at reading emotions, stoic, or interested in power.
2. You should consider many of your “masculine” personality traits to be symptoms of a poisoned society, rather than potentially inborn characteristics, and feel ashamed if they exist within you.
1. Don’t bring up the multitude of scientific studies that question this belief.
3. Once you figure out how to repress unwanted traits, people may still decide that Yourself ™ is unwanted or problematic. It’s *your* responsibility to figure out their concerns and how to accommodate them.
3. **Provide for and protect others.**
1. It’s your duty to use your privileges and strength as a man to defend the weak and uplift the less-privileged.
2. Understand that “providing” doesn’t mean making money and “protecting” doesn’t mean physical protection; those are outdated concepts that reinforce the patriarchy. Provide *emotionally* and protect against *systemic injustices*.
1. If you fail to provide money and physical protection (or at least a physically capable physique), you’ll be locked out of many relationships. But don’t complain about this discrepancy between stated and actual expectations.
4. **Stop obsessing over “being a man.”**
1. Gender roles are toxic, especially masculine ones, and it’s pathetic to care so much about being manly.
1. Yes, gender is so vital to our self-identity that many trans individuals would rather commit suicide than be forced to repress their gender. But it’s toxic for biological men to adopt manhood as a vital part of their identity, so just stop it.
5. **Don’t expect anything in return for fulfilling these requirements.**
1. This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled.
This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.
The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.
# III. Patterns Within the Pain
Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships.
There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another.
I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful.
Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships.
I hope my experiences can be enlightening to individuals who may find themselves trapped in these categories; sometimes a third-party viewpoint can be helpful for finding yourself. I also hope to provide some insight for how women navigate dating and what red and green flags we may be picking up on. (This, of course, is merely anecdata and should be taken with a massive grain of salt.)
But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy.
These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off.
Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles.
So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness.
# IV. The Categories of Lostness
## THE MAN WHO IS NOT
The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those?
He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties.
The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he *really* wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience.
He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out.
He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery.
What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns.
*Work isn’t supposed to be fun,* they say. *Get used to it.*
It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.
Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership.
Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply.
He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing *wrong* with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him.
He consults the internet, and Reddit tells him to find a community. This seems like solid advice, so he tries to form stronger relationships with his coworkers. After all, work is the closest replacement he has to the structured community he had at college. Back in school, being trapped on campus together just naturally led to friendships and relationships, and he assumes the same will happen at work.
He’s wrong. People don't have time to chat during the day, and they don’t want to hang out after work. They have partners and families and hobbies to get to, and besides, what happens if they have a falling out? That would make office interactions weird. The office is a place for *friendliness*, but not *friends*, and certainly not romantic relationships.
The rejection stings, but he’s not about to give up. He joins a running club and a book club and starts attending group classes at his local gym. He’s not really sure if he *enjoys* any of these activities, but they seem like good ways to meet people and join new communities.
As the weeks tick past, people start to remember his name, and he gets added to some group chats for scheduling activities. Suddenly, his calendar is full of events, and his evenings are no longer an endless churn of YouTube and video game binges.
He feels better. Still not *great*, exactly, but the despair has begun to recede, and he can breathe without feeling the primal fear of being alone and isolated.
There’s still something missing; he still goes to work wondering why the hell he’s there and leaves wondering what the hell he’s achieved, and he has no idea what he’s trying to do with his life. But he knows he’s still young and is pretty sure there’s still time to figure it out.
A life crisis occurs. It's small, but something he’d appreciate some support through. He reaches out to a few of his new friends, and they offer condolences, but none of them have time to meet up. He gets one friend to agree to a phone call, but he’s barely done explaining the issue before she insists she’s “not really sure she can help” and suggests he maybe talks to a therapist.
The dismissal comes as a shock. His old friends would have made time for him and carefully listened and offered advice. It’s not like he’s asking a huge favor; this is basic friendship stuff. What kind of friends refuse to give such basic forms of help?
A cold, creeping reality dawns on him: friends *wouldn’t* do that. Those “communities” he’s joined are just loose groups of acquaintances who enjoy the same activities. He’s never had the opportunity to have deep, emotionally-bonding discussions with any members, and that’s how they like it. After all, true communities come with effort and commitment, and who has time for that these days?
His new “friends” are nothing of the sort. For them to be friends, they'd have to actually know him. And they don't. They know Running Club Him and Book Club Him and Gym Him, but none of them understands the *whole* of him.
He starts to question whether that version of himself even exists. After all, humans are social creatures, and if you don’t have a community or a partner or a purpose, can you even call yourself a whole person?
Logically, he knows he is, but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s a growing void in his soul, an absence that chokes the breath from his chest. It’s odd that a void could weigh anything, but it seems to be a black hole sucking in his emotions, condensing them in a pit of gravity until his limbs struggle to carry the weight.
During a soulless work icebreaker, someone asks him how he’d describe himself. He stutters out a short answer that sounds decent enough, but he realizes he’s not sure what the honest answer is. He’s smart, he supposes, although his recent performance at work doesn’t prove it. He used to consider himself funny, but jokes don’t come easily these days.
He’d never dare to say it out-loud, but the truth is he’d describe himself as sad and lost and alone and frankly rather scared, like some sort of abandoned child.
It’s pathetic, and he knows it. After all, he’s not a child; he’s a grown man.
Or is he? He doesn’t fit the old-fashioned definition of manhood offered by the right, nor does he fit the modern definition offered by polite society, which is basically just a stereotypical woman with a beard and muscle. He doesn’t feel like a grown man, but he doesn't feel like anything at all. He feels empty, devoid of a core identity, and uncertain how to plug that hole.
He may not know what he is, but he knows what he is not: not happy. Not whole. Not satisfied. Not purposeful. Not connected. Not loved.
There seems to be an obvious solution to at least the last problem: he can get another girlfriend. He hasn’t had one since college, and that was a few years ago, but he’s certain he can find another one. A girlfriend is guaranteed to offer him love and support. That’s the entire point of having a romantic relationship, after all.
But dating isn’t easy in the Bay Area. The apps are soul-crushing, his jadedness and bitterness growing with each swipe and conversation with a bot. He manages to land a few dates, but they all seem to focus on the same set of questions: *what are your passions? What are your friends like? What do you want from your future?*
It feels like a stomach-churning interview, and the judgemental frowns from the women make it clear he didn’t pass. He starts to dread dates when he lands them, and begins to cancel them last-minute, unable to face the anxiety and rejection they lead to.
He feels increasingly desperate with each day that passes. Desperation isn’t attractive, and he knows it, but he’s not sure how to tamp down the emotion. The void is consuming him; every day he can feel it crushing more of his soul.
Yet no one seems even the slightest bit interested in helping him free himself from its grip. As soon as he tries to express his feelings to anyone, they react as if he’s diseased, immediately losing interest in him. Men are supposed to be strong and uplift others, not complain and demand attention for themselves.
Maybe he *is* diseased. He’s pretty sure he’s suffering from depression at this point, and the stomach-churning anxiety and dread that frequently fill him don’t seem normal.
He brings it up with his doctor and gets referred to a therapist. He’s reluctant to go—it seems to be an admission of his weakness. But he’s desperate for someone to listen to him, so he decides to give it a try.
It turns out the therapist doesn’t have any interest in listening to him, either. She seems preoccupied with reminding him of his “luck” and “privilege” and insisting that he needs to use it to better his life.
He knows she has a valid point; he’s a straight, educated male. He has privileges in society that others would risk their life for. Logically, it would make sense to be happy and grateful, not sad and upset.
Yet the void has no respect for logic; rather than tempering his pain, the rationality merely adds a layer of self-disgust onto the despair. There are so many who suffer more than him, yet he can barely shoulder this burden.
He tries repeatedly to explain the pitiful truth to the therapist: he can’t help himself. He *can’t*. He’s tried over and over again, and it doesn’t work. He remains lost, and society continues to not care.
The therapist insists he’s not trying hard enough. Her advice is baffling. Exactly what is he supposed to be trying to do? What steps does he need to take to feel whole again? What actions are needed so he can know who he is, and what his purpose is, and convince people that he matters?
The therapist explains that only he can answer those questions.
The whole thing feels like a cruel joke. His performance continues to slip at work, until one day he’s let go. A couple coworkers send a farewell email, but most don’t seem to even notice his departure.
He knows he should start applying to other jobs, but he’s too tired. Tired of the loneliness, of the existential dread, of the rejection, of being reminded how “privileged” he is to exist as this broken shadow of a human being. The void has consumed him alive, and there seems to be no escape.
He lets himself go–doesn’t shower as much, stops going to the gym and running club and book club. Some small part of him hopes this will trigger sympathy and cause people to reach out. Instead, it has the opposite effect. He transforms from barely noticeable to completely invisible.
He is a ghost now, a haunted remnant of a human, yet the only person who cares is himself. And, increasingly, even that isn't true.
He doesn’t want to be invisible anymore. He doesn’t want to be ignored and rejected. He doesn’t want to be tired and scared and lonely and bitter and lost.
He doesn’t want to be. And the world doesn't give a single fuck.
### Dating a Man Who Is Not:
It’s rare to actually go on a date with a man in this category. More often I find them glancing at me, only to abruptly look away when I try to meet their eyes. Attempts at conversing with them are usually met with hollow replies and an exhausted sense of suspicion.
On the rare instances I’ve ended up on dates with these men, it seems they’ve already used up all their hope and energy to schedule and arrive to the date. By the time we actually sit down for coffee, they’ve shriveled back into a ghost, providing half-hearted answers to questions about themselves.
When they do talk freely, it’s usually a rant. Most of them seem to realize ranting isn’t ideal behavior on a first date, but they’re clearly desperate for someone, *anyone,* to listen to their pain. Yeah, it’s going to scare away the woman, but she’s not going to stick around, anyway. No one ever does.
At least that’s what the void tells them, and there’s nothing I could say to sway this opinion. Hypothetically, there might be something I could *do*–I could enter into a relationship with him and provide the love and support he desperately craves, giving him the strength he needs to discover his purpose in life.
Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless.
The best I can do for these men is recommend they join communities where genuine emotional bonds *can* be forged. These still exist, although they’re frighteningly hard to find in modern society. I’ve been lucky enough to join several, and it’s startling how many people have the same story: feeling depressed and isolated and purposeless, and suddenly feeling like they’re alive for the first time in years once they’ve been embraced into the community.
Therapy and guided self-improvement are also helpful, of course. But it has to be the right therapist, and those seem surprisingly rare. I’ve heard some truly jaw-dropping stories about experiences with therapists, and I feel concern for the men who haven’t heard of “therapist shopping” and don’t realize it can take trial and error to find compatible and competent help.
Dates with these men leave me worried. Not for myself, but for these sullen ghosts who seem on the verge of giving up. There’s so much obvious potential within them, yet society offers them so few ladders to climb back from the pit of depression they’ve fallen into. When those ladders do exist, they're often missing rungs or spontaneously snap when men put their full weight on them.
We need more resources for these men, and even more importantly, we need better maps for them, so they don’t lose themselves to depression in the first place.
## THE MAN WITH A PLAN
The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows *exactly* what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school.
He does not know who he should *be*; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to *do*, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right?
Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car.
Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids.
His parents are *thrilled.* All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected.
He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he.
Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing.
He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is *good*. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go.
Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations.
But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands.
This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side.
One night, as they lay in bed, his girlfriend asks him how many kids he wants. He realizes that he doesn’t know. And actually, now that he thinks about it, he’s not even sure if he wants kids. They scream a lot, and they make all sorts of noxious odors and messes, and saddling himself to a dependent for eighteen years seems rather terrifying.
The thoughts come to him unbidden, and he doesn’t dare to voice them. Two kids. That’s what he tells his girlfriend, and she seems pleased enough with this answer.
Yet he can’t shake the dread from his mind. The part of his mind that those fears escaped from seems to have been a pandora’s box. Now that it’s open, he can’t close it, and the dread continues to grow.
He doesn't want to move to the suburbs; he knows there are better homes and schools there, but he enjoys the city. He’s not sure he wants his upcoming promotion to manager; yeah, his salary will increase, but he *hates* corporate politics. He doesn’t actually like doing escape rooms; he desperately misses the days of hanging out with his friends and getting tipsy and maybe a little high, and talking endlessly until the sun begins to rise.
And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for *him*?
He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie.
Yes, actions matter, but so do feelings. And he’s spent his entire adult life actively repressing his feelings, tamping them down in a desperate attempt to follow the plan and gain happiness. But it’s been a fool’s errand; he’s followed the plan, and it’s only led to existential dread.
He wants to discuss these things with his friends, but he realizes they hardly know him anymore, because he hardly knows himself. He lost himself somewhere in the endless march of the plan, and he begins to wonder if he’s ever fully existed at all. He’s followed his parent’s biddings ever since he was a young child, and chastised himself for any desire he’s ever had that doesn’t fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of capitalistic success.
His girlfriend says he’s been acting odd lately, cold and distant. He apologizes, and then he tells her that he likes painting. She probably doesn’t know that, because she’s never seen him do it, because the last time he painted was during art class in high school.
He was good at it, and he loved it. It made him feel *alive*. His teacher suggested he could become a professional someday, but he’d immediately rejected the idea, knowing the life of a starving artist wasn’t a good plan.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he should have embraced that life. Maybe he’d be happier, and wouldn’t wake up every morning with crushing dread at the thought of going to work.
His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up.
He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. *Done.*
His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he *is* helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose.
For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in.
He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers.
He starts painting again, taking up classes at a local studio, but his skill level is that of a fourteen-year-old with potential. He hasn’t practiced in two decades, and his work is weak compared to most other artists his age.
He’s not used to being the least skilled person in the room. His prior plan never allowed that as a possibility, and the sense of failure is disorientating. He also has no idea what he’s going to do with his art. He wants to make a plan, but also balks at the idea of trapping himself in yet another series of checkboxes.
He signs up to see a therapist, and she assures him that he just needs to find his happiness, but this feels like picking out a gift for someone he’s never met. How is he supposed to know what makes him happy, if he’s never been given the chance to figure out who he even is?
He doom scrolls on social media, wincing at the posts about people’s deep passion for their jobs and blazing love for their significant other. Part of him feels disgusted by what he perceives as disingenuity; after all, he was making similar posts just a year ago, and it was all a facade. But another part of him feels a cold wave of fear.
What if all those other people aren’t faking it? What if he’s just broken, and unable to feel the same happiness and fulfillment that others experience?
He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure.
His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him.
But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss *her.* It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account.
He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty.
But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, *something* to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome.
### Dating a Man With a Plan:
In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree.
These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way.
My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality.
It’s a sad misunderstanding of how it all works. My unconventional life isn’t the result of zany choices and the advice contained in self-help books; it’s the result of an intensely rocky childhood I almost didn’t survive.
I don’t have a “cure” for these men and their lack of self-identity. I’ve figured out myself, found my community, and discovered my path, but I can’t do the same for them.
Once they figure this out, they almost immediately lose interest in me. Which is for the best, as I struggle to feel romantic attraction toward men in this category. It’s hard to love someone if they don’t even understand themselves well enough to know what’s lovable.
The good news is that this category seems to be the easiest for men to break free from. If they’re determined not to give up, and willing to realize that the right woman isn’t going to fix their issues, they can create a happy life of their own. They’ll often stumble around for a while–sometimes months, sometimes years–but they’ll eventually find a solid community and a purpose within it. Their brain is already programmed to follow plans and good habits, so as soon as they figure out a new map for themselves, the rest becomes easy.
The process of figuring out a new plan can be rocky, though. I won’t sugar-coat that bit. The reality is that a good community is hard to find, and purpose often comes from a certain amount of suffering. Some men never manage to climb out of this category and adopt the hopeless lostness of a Man Who Is Not.
But with the right support, most can escape to a bright future.
## THE MAN WHO PROVIDES
Meet a Man Who Provides in person, and he’s often interesting and intellectually stimulating, an immediate “yes” when he asks for a date. His online profile features photos from international adventures, flashy job titles like “CEO” and “Senior Director,” and loving moments caught with his friends at Burning Man.
The Man who Provides kept hold of one tattered remnant of the old map to manhood: the part that states men must provide resources. This is a vital piece, one that has guided men for thousands of years, and it has survived the great purge of manhood. Sure, people are more likely to point out that it is flawed and unfair, but the reality is that men are still expected to be breadwinners. (If you doubt this, just ask any “stay at home dad” about the hostility they’ve received for their role.)
The Man who Provides takes this single piece of the map and makes it his entire identity. Much like the Man With a Plan, he takes his education and career seriously. But he doesn’t strive for a *good* education and career; he wants the *best*. In order to provide the most resources, he needs to earn as much success as possible, and he’s willing to put in the work to do it.
Tiger parents are excellent at creating Men Who Provide. From a young age, the message is clear: your worth is equivalent to your ability to provide, and providing requires consistent success.
Other Men Who Provide stumble into the obsession with success by themselves. Often these men are neurodivergent to some degree–ADHD, autistic, hyper-intelligent, or just otherwise “different.” They exasperate and confuse others, and are the subject of bullying by both peers and authority figures.
Success is an escape valve for these men; it earns them praise their personality never receives. Before long, it becomes a costume, a mask slipped over their personality to ward off apathy or disdain.
The Man Who Provides graduates at the top of his class and lands a job at a top company, which doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows him. It’s also not a surprise when he leaves the job to found his own company, which is sure to be a success.
Despite his insane work hours, the Man Who Provides somehow manages to accomplish a vast amount of extra-curricular activities as well. He travels the world, speaking of it the same way most people speak of triathlons. The globe is not a tantalizing opportunity, but rather a challenge meant to be vanquished; he knows precisely how many countries he’s been to and how many he “has left.”
He’s fond of drugs and brags of the enlightenment he’s found in acid and mushrooms. The amount of ketamine he consumes makes some question exactly why he’s so hell bent on dissociating from his enlightened world, but most are simply impressed by the variety of substances he’s sampled.
Those “friends” in his Burning Man photos were from his startup incubator, and he hasn’t spoken to any of them in ten months. He misses speaking with them, if he’s honest with himself, but he worries they’d drag him down. Their startups haven’t been as successful as his, and he’s convinced it’s because of their attitudes and lack of work ethic.
As for dating? Well, a partner is yet another thing to be optimized, of course. They must match or exceed his quality level, and a woman’s quality revolves around their job title and academic degrees.
His dating life is tumultuous, to say the least. He goes through periods of casually dating many women, proving his desirability to those around him. Then he’ll enter a serious relationship, with emphasis on *serious*. His time is valuable, so this relationship had better not waste it.
The relationship will seem perfect at first–two successful, powerful, passionate people combining forces! What could possibly stand in their way?
The answer: themselves. Their relationship quickly implodes, as it turns out two individuals hyper-focused on their personal success tend to be terrible at a group activity such as dating.
Back to the carousel of casual dating he goes, carrying stories of his ex who just “couldn’t match his intensity” and “resented his success.” Then into another serious relationship, this time with someone with a bit less self-esteem and a determination to prove her worth to this intimidatingly accomplished man.
The relationship lasts longer this time around, a year, maybe two. Then it implodes just as violently, with the woman insisting he was a manipulative and neglectful partner. He’s baffled by the claims; *she’s* the one who was always offering to support his success! It’s not like he *made* her do anything. And besides, everything he did was for the both of them. He just wanted to provide.
Back to the carousel of casual dating he goes, still carrying the hope of finding The One, a woman to complete him, to prove to the world that he’s an attractive, successful man.
All the while, a void grows in his chest. Every day, he seems to wake up with less energy and more dread. A friend hints that he’s burning out, and this insinuation panics him, so he runs off to the Amazon todo some ayahuasca about it. But the travel and drugs no longer invigorates him in the same way, and it’s beginning to truly worry him.
He refuses to focus on these emotions, though. Emotions make him illogical and weak, and he needs to be strong and decisive. He’ll keep his focus on his company’s success, making sure that he can continue to provide and prove his worth. And in the meantime, he’ll keep searching for his perfect match to reap the rewards of his success and reassure him that he’s truly an excellent provider.
It’s a small pool of women who meet his quality bar, but he’ll eventually find The One. He knows it. After all, when he puts his mind to something, he always succeeds.
### Dating a Man Who Provides:
Two words sum up dates with these men: pity and frustration. These dates generally begin with these men stating that their time is quite limited, hinting that they’ve made quite the sacrifice to offer some of it to you. Things only go downhill from there, with the entire affair feeling like an intense job interview.
I have zero interest in passing these interviews, which creates frustration in these men. I’ve wasted their precious time, and they’ve wasted mine. They generally end the date quite quickly, convinced that I have no hope of clearing their quality bar.
Yet they have no hope of clearing mine. A strong sense of self-identity is a requirement for anyone I date, and these men have never been given the chance to develop one outside of “founder” or “Ivy Leaguer” or “Forbes 30 Under 30.”
This leaves their identity hopelessly precarious and revolving around their immediate success. A bad day at work or a failed business deal can spell weeks of brooding and self-loathing. You never quite know what version of the man may appear; he could be euphoric from his latest product launch, or despondent and moody from a meeting that went wrong.
There’s little I can do to address the issues faced by Men Who Provide. Try to talk them out of focusing so much on standard capitalistic forms of achievement, and they’ll often accuse you of being jealous and sabotaging their success. Point out their clear misery, and they’ll insist “there’s no gain without pain,” and if they can just achieve a constantly moving goalpost, they’ll *finally* be happy.
These men generally only shake off this mentality after burning themselves out and facing a bout of depression so severe it kills their ability to succeed in a traditional capacity. This forces them to find other ways to derive satisfaction and finally grow a self-identity that doesn’t revolve around money and success.
It’s saddening that these men have to go through this burnout process to learn these lessons; I hope to see less of these men in the future, as more people come forward to describe this toxic form of living.
In the meantime, I try to catch young men *before* they fall into these self-destructive patterns. I lecture my young interns about the hazards of a success-obsessed lifestyle, and encourage them to find senses of worth that don’t revolve around gaining power and providing money.
I’ll be honest, they don’t seem to listen to me much. But I hope my words remain in the back of their mind, ready to help guide them away from misery when they’re ready to make that change.
## THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT
The Man Who Opts Out is a growing contingent of the male population, but a rare sight in the dating world. These are men who have given up on dating, or never even attempted it in the first place.
Some of these men have serious, obvious flaws that keep them locked out of the dating world, such as personality disorders, issues with violence, or severe trauma that’s gone unaddressed.
The majority don’t fit this description, though. In fact, in the Bay Area, a large number of these men are very high-functioning members of society who are smart, respectful, and financially successful.
Often the Man Who Opts Out is the victim of bullying or neglect as a young adult. People accuse him of being awkward, or short, or shy, or overweight, or an “undesirable” ethnicity. Or maybe no one ever directly vocalizes it, but the messages in the media are enough to convince him of his low self-worth, and his interactions with girls seem to confirm it. Most treat him as if he’s invisible, and his few female friends are quick to emphasize that they’re *just friends.*
Dating feels impossible. After all, the goal of dating is to make someone fall in love with you, and how could someone love him when he’s so terribly unattractive?
He decides to shove aside dating and focus on the other things society tells him are important: his schooling, his career, his social circle. He can actively work to improve and succeed in these areas, whereas being attractive feels miserably out of his control.
When he’s a teenager, this mentality doesn’t cause much alarm. In fact, some mentors even mistake his avoidance of dating as a sign of maturity. He “has his priorities straight,” they say.
Yeah, some of his peers might mock him for not having a girlfriend, but did *they* get into MIT? Nope. But *he* did. That helps to ease the pain of not having a date for senior prom.
When he’s in his early-twenties, his aversion to dating starts to feel like a problem. Friends and family comment on it, voicing concern.
He decides, reluctantly, to give dating a shot. Loneliness is beginning to eat at him, and he decides it’s worth facing his fears to have a girlfriend who infuses his life with warmth and affection. He’s still terribly self-conscious about his attractiveness, but his friends insist he’s “perfect boyfriend material,” so he gives it a chance.
His attempts don’t go well. In fact, you might say they’re a bit of a disaster. Women have come to expect a certain level of romantic competence from a twenty-two-year-old, and he just doesn’t meet the bar.
It’s a painful shock. He’d started to gain his confidence back, proving through his successful schooling and his burgeoning career that he’s really worth something, even if he doesn’t quite meet the traditional model of a hot young bachelor. At this point, he’s accustomed to succeeding at most things in life.
But every attempt to flirt and date paints an entirely different picture of himself: he’s practically trembling with nerves, unsure what to talk about, prone to rambling about his niche interests until their eyes glaze over, terrified of accidentally being a creep, yet overly eager for the romantic affection that he desperately craves.
He’s a bit of an anxious, awkward mess, and most women don’t enjoy the vibes. One even starts a rumor that he’s a creep. The accusation brings back an aching self-consciousness he hasn’t felt in years.
He vows to stop even trying. After all, what’s the point? It’s hopeless.
Years pass. He settles into his career, becomes more successful and more mature. He’s not exactly a social butterfly, but he has some good friends and enough love and connection in his life to keep him tumbling down the path of a Man Who Is Not.
Yet something is missing. He tries not to think about it, but there’s a growing emptiness inside him that makes life increasingly hollow. It’s not just a missing girlfriend; it’s a lack of someone, *anyone*, finding him attractive.
More and more friends are finding committed relationships. At the end of the day, they go home to cuddles and laughter and sex and long, deep conversations. He returns home to his silent apartment and plays video games.
That’s it, he decides. He’s done feeling miserable and lesser. He’s not some hapless twenty-two-year-old anymore. He’s a good, mature man with good friends who insist he can find someone, if he just tries.
He’s no longer in college, so meeting women isn’t as easy as it was when he was twenty-two and still living on a campus. He downloads a dating app, and almost immediately regrets it. He gets maybe one match a month, and it’s almost always a bot.
When he does match, he carries the conversation, and the woman usually ghosts at a certain point. He spends hours and hours swiping on profiles, growing more bitter with each swipe. When he goes on dates, he feels like he’s being interviewed, and usually the woman ghosts him afterward.
He takes another break from dating. More years pass, and his friends who are coupled feel increasingly alien. They’re having weddings, honeymoons, kids; buying houses and saving for college; attending recitals and soccer practices. He’s still playing Call of Duty and Dota with his dwindling group of single friends.
Occasionally, some of his coupled friends will join them on Discord, playing a couple hurried rounds before having to log off to cook dinner or tuck the kids into bed. *Damn, I miss being single,* they’ll say, laughing. *You have all the time, all the hobbies, all the peace you could ever want.*
They don’t address the elephant in the room–that at any time, they could dump their partner and be single again.
Yet they don’t. Because being alone sucks.
As he nears his mid-thirties, an interesting development occurs: women start to actively become interested in *him*. Those superficial characteristics that kept them at bay when he was younger no longer seem so important.
So what if he’s only five-foot-six and a bit heavier than average? He has an amazing job, a stellar reputation, a gorgeous apartment, and a great sense of humor. He’s a *catch.*
Yet once they discover he’s never been in a long-term relationship, they once more seem to recoil.
He enters into a series of short-term flings, trying to make up for the lost experience. At first it’s exhilarating to have women actually show interest in him. They *like* him. They *want* him.
Quickly, it becomes exhausting. Even when women initially approach him, *he’s* the one who must invest the most effort. The women know what they’re doing; he’s constantly trying to keep up. Some of them get tired of waiting for him to learn and walk away, opening up old wounds in his self-confidence.
He considers trying to make one of the connections more serious, but it becomes obvious that she’d expect him to change so much. His hobbies, his sleeping patterns, his work habits, his furniture, his friendships… all of it would require modification to keep a girl around.
And history has taught him that he’ll just end up getting rejected anyway, so what’s even the point?
It all feels so futile and so unfair. All around him, he sees women who settled with crappy men who don’t treat them properly. He wouldn’t do that; he’s a good person. Maybe a bit socially awkward, maybe not the handsomest, maybe a little clueless about some aspects of relationships, but he can learn to be a good partner, if he’s just given a chance.
Some of his single friends have officially given up on ever finding a woman, and they encourage him to do the same. It’s peaceful, they insist. No more pointless pining, no more painful daydreams that never come true.
They’re right, he decides. He’s done. It’s over.
Yet one evening, as he lays in bed, the loneliness chews at his soul as he stares at the empty spot beside him. He reaches for his phone and downloads a dating app.
He’ll go on just one more date, he tells himself. Just to remind himself of why he doesn’t date anymore. Just to remind himself of why it’s futile to even try.
### Dating a Man Who Opts Out:
A date with a Man Who Opts Out is a losing battle. They arrive defeated and suspicious, certain they’re wasting their time, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some awkwardly avoid any topic that could reveal their lack of dating experience, while others throw it in your face, wanting to get the reveal over with.
I’m often surprised by the men who fall into this category; society paints them all as grungy, awkward trolls who live in their mothers’ basements, but many are not only high-functioning members of society, but also highly desirable individuals–attractive, wealthy, successful. Yet their self-confidence doesn’t reflect this success; they’re mentally trapped as the awkward, bullied teenager, convinced no one could ever truly love them.
For some, this causes bitterness or apathy to spoil interactions with women; dates with these men are uncomfortable events for everyone involved. Every question is met with suspicion, with the man assuming his responses will be used to negatively judge him.
For others, their lack of self-confidence causes a painful shyness and refusal to open up. They’re convinced that at any second, the woman will find something about them to reject, so they hide as much of themselves as possible.
These are some of the most painful dates I’ve experienced. The nurturing side of me wants to pull the man into a hug, to assure him he’s enough, to promise I won’t judge.
Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait.
It’s a vicious cycle–a man’s confidence in his dating ability is crushed, he finally works up the nerve to show up to a date, gets rejected, and his self-esteem lowers even more. He limps off to nurse his wounds, vowing to avoid the “pointless” exercise of dating. It might be another year before he attempts to go on another date, or two years, or perhaps he just gives up altogether.
I absolutely hate being a participant in this cycle. It’s the dating equivalent of kicking a puppy and always leaves me feeling a dull ache of empathy for the men involved.
I also hate the standard advice given to these men: that it’s “just a numbers game” and they need to “just keep putting themselves out there.”
The truth isn’t nearly so easy. A man with severe self-esteem issues is not likely to find a healthy relationship, no matter how many times he flings himself at the dating world. The core issue of self-esteem must be addressed.
For some, this means structured therapy or psychiatric treatment, for others, it means growing their social life until it’s vibrant enough to soothe the part of their soul that insists they’re not enough. Or maybe it’s a combo of all three or something else entirely. But *action* needs to be taken to address the lack of self-esteem; the man can’t just half-heartedly daydream about a woman who might swoop in to “love him just the way he is” and solve all his confidence problems.
Also, relationships take practice. If a man is past the age of twenty-five and has never been in a committed relationship, most women will view this as a red flag. They’ve spent their teens and early-twenties doing the hard work of learning how to be in a relationship, and they don’t want to partner with someone who hasn’t even begun that journey yet.
The good news is that there are ways to compensate for this. I would happily date a thirty-year-old who has never been in a *romantic* relationship, if he has other *social* relationships to prove his viability as a partner. Close ties to his friends, family, and community can prove he’s well-versed in all the vital elements of a relationship: communication, trust, empathy, honesty, etc.
Yet the fact remains that the longer someone opts out of the dating world, the harder it becomes to opt back in.
So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it *now*. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort.
The good news is that men who fall into this category seem to be pleasantly surprised at how quickly their social and romantic prospects improve, once they identify and address the root issues. Many of them happily “graduate” out of this category and go on to have wonderful relationships.
I have a feeling the man I end up partnered with will be someone who graduated out of this category. After all, both my previous serious partners fell into this category earlier in their life. I seem to have a soft-spot for people who overcome insecurities; they tend to be delightfully empathetic and dynamic individuals.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to try to encourage men who fall into this category not to give up. There’s a path to healthy, happy relationships. It may not be simple, but as the tired but true saying goes, nothing important ever is easy.
## THE MAN WHO BECOMES A BEAST
The Man Who Becomes a Beast often begins as a Man Who Is Not. He is lost, and depressed, and anxious to find himself, yet unsure how to even begin.
He drudges through his job, hating every moment, yet sometimes he hates being away from work even more. At work, he’s at least acknowledged as a person. As soon as he leaves, the lonely silence of his existence threatens to suffocate him.
He doesn’t know what he wants from life, but he knows it’s not *this.*
The city is filled with young, attractive women that inspire wistful daydreams. Maybe he’ll ask one out, and they’ll hit it off, and then his apartment will no longer be empty. Then maybe she can introduce him to her friends, and the empty abyss of his social calendar will suddenly be filled with dinners, and trips, and concerts, and—
No. He doesn’t dare. He’s far from an Adonis–his physique pales in comparison to most men. Chances are, any girl he asks out will say no, and she’ll think he’s a creep for approaching her. Then she might tell the other women that he’s a creep, and the whole thing would be a disaster.
It’s better not to directly approach women. He can find a girlfriend on the apps.
Except that certainly hasn’t been going well. He rarely gets matches, let alone dates. On the rare instances they occur, the women seem bored by the conversation and pepper him with questions about his intentions and future that he can’t answer.
His performance at work slips, and he’s placed on a performance improvement plan. He knows he’ll probably be fired next quarter, but he can’t bring himself to care.
His doctor tells him he’s depressed and tosses some pills at him, but it only serves to anger him.
The anger is a surprise. He’s not an angry person, or at least he’s never been in the past. Yet the emotion keeps flaring to life in his chest, poisoning his mind with spite. Spite toward his idiot manager who doesn’t give a shit about him. Spite toward the women who judge him without truly knowing him. Spite at the asshole doctor who mindlessly writes a prescription without bothering to understand the *real* problem.
There’s nothing wrong with his head; it’s the rest of the world that’s the problem. He doesn’t do anything wrong, yet the world treats him like he’s less than worthless. He doesn’t need pills, he just needs someone to give a shit.
He struggles to focus and turns to social media to distract his churning mind. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok indulge him with a steady stream of entertainment, numbing his frustration and anger with an unceasing shower of fitness routines and video game hacks and soccer highlights.
Gradually, the algorithms drift toward new content. A buff dude sneers into the camera, pointing an accusing finger as he rants about “betas” and their pathetic video games and tiny dicks. It’s not the first time this influencer has crossed his feed, but it is the first time he actually watches a full video.
He’s not sure whether to be offended or amused. The video is so over-the-top that he wants to laugh it off, but it also hits some painful insecurities.
He *is* wasting his life at his shitty job. He *would* attract more women if he worked out more. He *hates* feeling awkward and uncertain and invisible.
He watches several more videos. The influencer sure isn’t a philosopher, but he at least has the balls to discuss the way society has neglected men. High school graduation rates are plummeting, college enrollment has taken a nosedive, addiction is spreading like wildfire, incarceration is creeping upwards, suicide rates are rocketing to the sky.
Where’s the public dismay? Where’s the outrage and the activism?
Nowhere, says the influencer. All those activists are too busy accusing men of being dangerous monsters to bother caring about them.
Fuck those people and all they stand for, says the influencer. If you want anyone to care about you, you have to *make* them care. And this influencer knows exactly how to accomplish that.
And then he gives it: a map for manhood. One that’s entirely different from the vague, confusing, dismissive directions that polite society has offered. One whose guidance loudly insists that being a man is a *good* thing, something to be proud of and use to his advantage.
The manosphere map promises power, success, sex, money, belonging, and confidence if it’s followed. In contrast, the map offered by polite society offers a vague promise to not be considered a failure or a danger.
The choice seems obvious.
If he looked hard at the manosphere map, its contradictions are obvious. It promises the respect and adoration of women, but insists this is to be gained through mistreating them. It promises power and money, yet discourages higher education, despite this being the most sure-fire way to climb the class ladder. It insists women are less intelligent and logical beings, yet also insists they have taken over control of the world.
Yet it’s hard to think critically about these contradictions; life has left him exhausted and angry, and the manosphere map insists that success and payback are just a few easy steps away. And those steps are *deliciously* concrete and specific. The manosphere offers millions of hours of video tutorials on the single subject of how to get a woman “out of your league” to like you. Meanwhile, polite society balks at the mere question, droning on about how romantic “leagues” are an inherently patriarchal and harmful concept.
Sure, some of the advice seems off. Insulting women goes against how he was raised, and some of the money advice seems like it's using people. Yet how he was raised led him to be anxious and invisible. And the rest of society seems to be using him, so why shouldn’t he turn the tables?
And besides, the map works. He knows it does. There are a hundred comments on each popular video balking at their morals, but a thousand more from men reporting the success of the techniques.
He decides to give it a try. He goes out and uses the techniques at a bar, and it works. He brings a woman home for the first time in years. Yeah, she seems kind of unstable and uncertain, but that’s to be expected. She’s a woman, after all. She just needs an alpha male to give her guidance and purpose; he’s actually doing her a favor.
He’s hooked. On the clear directions, on the sex, on the feeling of power. And although he doesn’t like to admit it, he’s hooked on the attention. His actions and opinions upset the people he’s determined to be his enemies; he likes their outrage, and the way he’s able to control their emotions with merely a few words.
They hate him, but that’s okay, because he hates them too.
The influencers were right: fuck society and their weak, pathetic norms. If you want something, you have to be a *real* man and take it.
### Dating a Man Who Becomes a Beast:
There’s a unique aura that surrounds Men Who Become Beasts. Some are fit, and cocky, and smooth, exuding the hyper-masculine air that the Tate brothers exemplify. However, most remain awkward and abrasive, juggling self-consciousness with a sneering confidence that they’re more enlightened than the “sheep” who refuse to see the “truth.”
Both types share a noxious mixture of arrogance and frustration, and they’re all too eager to prove their disdain for the world.
I rarely end up on dates with these men; I’ve gotten good at detecting them over the years, both in-person and on dating apps. Still, occasionally they slip past my radar, and I find myself grabbing coffee with someone whose presence raises my hackles.
I will always end the date as soon as possible and update my detection heuristics. Yet it seems impossible to truly avoid these men.
I punched one a few months back. He tried to dance with my friend at a concert, refused to take her clear “no” for an answer, forcefully shoved himself against her, and did *not* appreciate me shoving him back.
He grabbed my arm and yanked me toward him; I landed a jab to his throat. (Apparently, the manosphere doesn’t teach men to tuck their chins during a fight. Quite the oversight.)
My jab shocked him enough to loosen his grip, and I yanked free. Three strangers from the crowd grabbed him, restraining him as he tried to lunge at me. His face twisted in a snarl as he hurled insults over the booming bass.
*Cunt, crazy bitch, low value whore.*
It was the latter insult that gave it away: he was yet another young man drugged by the toxic ideology of the manosphere.
There was something darkly poetic about the scene: three strangers, all men, throwing themselves in harm’s way to stop a two-hundred-pound brick of muscle from pulverizing me. Struggling against their grasp was the Hyde to their Jekyll, a rabid animal who used his natural strength to attack rather than to protect.
I pity that young man. He was well-dressed, handsome, and fit, clearly doing *something* right to have made it to an expensive concert in a popular city. Yet his mind has been tainted by a creed that turned him into a predator. The preachers of this creed promise success and respect, yet in reality, they doom their adherents to be unfit for society, forcibly outcast from any loving community.
That young man walks the world as a predator, destined to be deprived of the love and respect he yearns for. He’ll likely gain some twisted semblance of a relationship; there are plenty of women out there who won’t recognize the warning signs. But it will be a relationship rooted in fear and manipulation, devoid of the warmth of love.
He will feel that coldness. It will haunt him, and stoke his anger, and some poor woman will probably be the victim when his rage boils over.
I don’t know what to do about these men. I worry it’s too late for most of them; so many have been steeping in the manosphere ideology for years, and converting them away will be as hard as swaying a religious fanatic.
So I avoid them. I fear them. And I sure as hell don’t date them.
# V. The Man Who Is Whole
Don’t let my categories of lostness convince you that all men are bumbling through life without purpose. Many men have beaten the odds and become Men Who Are Whole, and these men deserve an entire section devoted to them.
A Man Who Is Whole rarely begins whole. Occasionally they do, but these are rare and frankly baffling anomalies. Most begin within another category, and through a combination of sheer will, some luck, and the support of a community, they forge themselves into remarkably solid individuals.
A Man Who Is Whole has created his own map to manhood. Often, he’s been blessed with close mentors, and usually it’s coupled with an intense passion for something. Maybe he’s passionate about teaching, or building a business, or becoming a father, or creating music, or writing long-winded essays about the dangers of AI. Whatever it is, it’s a purpose he can use as his true north when piecing together his personal map.
His passions lend themselves to goals, but after some trial and error, it becomes clear that obsessing over his personal goals doesn’t feel quite right. He needs to find some way to benefit his community through his goals.
But what *is* his community exactly? He’s not sure, but he’s determined to find out. It’s not easy, and he screws up several times, burning and getting burned by various relationships. But eventually he manages to find a solid community, a real one with deep, emotional bonds and a mutual desire to provide love and support.
His passion gives him motivation; his goals give him intention; his community gives him purpose. Combined, they provide a scaffolding for him to build himself into the best version of himself.
He continues to flesh out his map, creating a unique path with the help of his community. Mentors guide him, peers critique him, friends and partners encourage him. The map is a messy thing, with lots of erased sections and some meandering parts, but after several years, it finally feels finished.
He knows how to be a man, because he knows how to be himself, and there is no doubt in his mind that he is a man. Some of the traits are exactly what he expected when he was a boy dreaming about manhood: his confidence, his strength, his protectiveness. But others were surprise discoveries: his empathy, his restraint, his soft spot for kids and desire to mentor them.
The map is his, and his alone, a hard-won victory personalized to his wants and needs. It should be celebrated and cherished, and whenever he gets the chance, shared with other young men who might benefit from its contents.
### Dating A Man Who Is Whole:
Dating a Man Who Is Whole is a rare and precious experience. Their presence has a solidness that’s infinitely alluring and soothing, and it makes me want to nuzzle into their chest and listen to their heart, to marvel that such mundane biological pieces could somehow have produced such a magnetic presence.
There’s a stereotype that Men Who Are Whole are always overtly confident and highly masculine, but I haven’t found this to be true. In fact, many of them carry a subtle sort of masculinity that lends itself to gentleness and empathy. They have little to prove to the world, because they know who they are, and so does their community, and they are respected for it.
They have overcome a lot to achieve this frame of mind. They’ve bumbled through confusing directions and dead ends, but never given up, and the persistence has paid off. It makes them invaluable partners through difficult times; they know how to handle themselves in tough situations, and they’re eager to share their strength with others.
They’re not perfect. No human ever is. But they know that, and they have the humility to discuss issues in an open and empathetic way, while still standing their ground when necessary.
It’s an honor to be loved by a Man Who Is Whole, and it’s always a surprising delight when they choose you as the focus of their affection.
But there is also an inevitable sadness that clings to the edges of their presence. After all, it’s only when you interact with them that you realize how lost all those other men are. They usually are aware of how different their existence is to many other men, and they carry the weight of friends and loved ones who have been permanently lost to other categories.
I believe that most young men have the potential to become Men Who Are Whole, if they’re given the right support and guidance. I think the rarity of these men is one of the greatest indictments on our current culture and our methods of raising boys. Yet I’m hopeful that someday they’ll be the rule rather than the exception.
I’m deeply lucky to have several of these men in my life. If you do as well, don’t forget to remind them how grateful you are for them and how proud you are of who they’ve become. Oftentimes, they don’t understand just how impressive and important they are. So tell them, and treasure them, and maintain hope that someday there will be more of them.
# VI. Crafting a New Map
The sheer number of lost men make it obvious that polite society has failed to deliver an effective map to manhood. Men are miserable, and their pain is reflected in the rising rate of suicide, depression, anxiety, joblessness, and crime. The numbers don’t lie: the current map doesn’t work.
Society owes it to young men to draft a new map for them, one with more positivity and concrete steps that can help them avoid getting lost.
I have many ideas about potential fixes and additions to the Modern Map to Manhood, but there are five that I feel are most important:
1. **Encourage positive male role models to provide detailed directions on how to “become a man.”**
Prior cultures have had granular stepping stones toward manhood for a reason: young minds thrive on concrete goals and specific examples. We need more high-profile, morally-sound men who openly discuss what it’s like to live with a testosterone-dominated body and how they learned to channel their natural instincts into positive and productive outcomes.
There is so obviously a desperate desire for this type of conversation; the wild success of “manosphere” influencers is proof that young men are desperate for authority figures to tell them exactly how to become a man. Yet right now the only people filling this niche seem to be creeps such as the Tate brothers, who are preaching a version of manhood that revolves around intimidation, trickery, and abuse.
We need to give good, moral men the license to openly discuss their personal path to manhood in a positive light, and not be accused of being sexists who are “reinforcing the patriarchy.” Millions of young men are desperate for these discussions; our options are either to give them the most positive versions possible, or leave them to feed on the dangerous slop produced by the likes of the Tates.
Importantly, when these discussions occur, there needs to be a focus on positivity. It can’t simply be a list of things you *shouldn’t* be. Don’t be lazy, don’t be violent, and don’t harass women are all vital lessons. But only hearing a list of “do nots” is a great way to make boys attach a feeling of shame to their gender and resentment toward those who preach those lessons.
Positivity needs to be woven into the core of the message; we need more “dos” than “do nots.” And those “dos” need to be specific and understandable.
There is no one “right way” to be a man, just as there is no one right way to be a woman. But we need to provide young men with varied, concrete examples of manhood, highlight the positivity that each form of manhood brings the world, and provide stepping-stones for becoming each type.
2. **Stigmatize sexist behavior toward men.**
There is currently a double-standard when it comes to sexism. For many decades, there has been rightful backlash against sexist behavior toward women; after millenia of horrific treatment of women in Western society, this focus makes sense. Yet there is an increasingly vocal minority that has decided “protecting women” is a zero sum game, and demeaning men and ignoring their concerns will somehow improve the lives of women.
Comments such as “men are pigs” or “this is why women shouldn’t trust men” run rampant, and often escape pushback from polite society. Massively popular social media influencers insist that it’s horrible to judge groups of people as a monolith; so terrible, in fact, that it should be considered a crime in many cases. Yet those same people proudly crow about how they’d feel safer encountering a wild bear than an average man. The hypocrisy goes unquestioned in many cases, and those who do dare to point it out are often accused of being closet sexists.
An increasing amount of this sexism has real-life repercussions for men. For example, a growing body of studies suggests that some viruses affect men’s bodies in more severe ways; COVID and influenza kill a significantly higher number of men than women, even when controlling for other health factors. Yet millions of social media posts mock men for their “man flu,” insisting men who complain of severe illness are exaggerating their symptoms, or just aren’t as accustomed to bodily discomfort as women. This sort of discourse minimizes a very serious issue and discourages further research and targeted health outreach programs.
Similarly, the education gap between boys and girls is often discussed in disparaging and sexist terms. Male students are loudly accused of being “immature” and “disruptive” when compared to female students, and many influencers insist the education gap is the result of male entitlement and poor behavior caused by the patriarchy. Yet the biological reality is that critical portions of the male brain develop at slower rates than female brains, and our education system wasn’t built to accommodate this fact. Boys are at a serious, scientific disadvantage in the classroom, yet sexist discourse continues to minimize this issue or insist it's simply proof of weak character.
Over and over again, a loud segment of society labels casual cruelty toward men as “fighting the patriarchy.” In reality, this type of discourse is simply indulging in childish bullying and neglecting serious issues. Yes, there are some tough realities about the impacts of testosterone and other male hormones on behavior, but that’s no excuse to accept blatant sexism.
Being bigoted toward a group of people is destructive, immature, and harmful. Equality requires caring equally about all members of society. This is not a zero sum game, and that fact needs to be shouted to the heavens until all understand.
Sexism matters, in all forms. It’s horrible, and no one deserves it, so let’s make it unacceptable behavior for *anyone* to display, regardless of their gender.
3. **Remind men of their worth.**
There’s a strange creed within much of polite society that insists men don’t need to be reminded of their worth, because they are privileged. In fact, some insist that reminding men of their worth might even make the privilege disparity *worse.*
This mentality is madness. There’s a raging epidemic of men who question their worth, and it’s leading to them spiraling into lostness and taking their own lives. It’s also causing an alarming uptick in men who despise women and polite society, believing that these people don’t believe they’re worth anything at all.
Men need to know that we care. They need to know that they’re worthy of respect, love, and kindness. The only way this can happen is if we loudly discuss the benefits and beauty that men bring to society.
No one should ever feel ashamed or unworthy because of an inherent trait. Boys should be just as proud of their gender as girls are, and we can accomplish this by celebrating the beauties of both identities.
4. **Encourage men to discuss the issues they face, and listen to them.**
There is currently a confusing contradiction when it comes to vocalizing the issues impacting men. On one hand, polite society insists the patriarchy has stifled men’s emotions, and they need to be better about discussing their thoughts, feelings, and concerns. Yet when men oblige and try to discuss the serious issues they face, they’re often berated for being sexist, told these problems are their own fault, or have their concerns dismissed as “lesser” than those faced by other demographics.
We need to listen to men and the issues they present. Rather than attacking the narratives they give, society needs to find ways to validate and address their concerns.
If we don’t, men will continue to turn to the manosphere and the alt-right for these conversations. And if the alt-right control those discussions, their bigoted and backwards ideas are the only “solutions” on the table.
Refusing to listen to men’s issues, or insisting those issues don’t actually exist, also gives the alt-right an incredibly powerful recruitment tool: they can claim they’re the only ones “willing to speak the truth,” and have that highly alluring message be partially true.
Many will protest that polite society *is* listening and men’s issues *are* being discussed. After all, polite society frequently discusses economic inequality, mental health resources, prison reform, and many other vital topics that have a massive impact on men’s issues. In fact, they discuss these things even more than the right!
This isn’t enough. At all other times, polite society jumps on the opportunity to call out the issues facing specific demographics, and loudly insists on listening to the stories of these people. Paying close attention to specific demographics is better at conveying empathy, validating the concerns of impacted populations, and having more efficient and effective conversations.
Yet when men’s issues are involved, polite society suddenly balks at their own logic and prefers broad, untargeted conversations.
This needs to stop. Polite society needs to get better at saying, “Men are hurting, and we care about their specific needs, and we want to hear from them and make things better for them.” Until that can be accomplished without triggering backlash and infighting, we are doomed to lose more and more young men to the alt-right.
5. **Openly acknowledge that men and women share some biological differences, and embrace the beauty of this diversity.**
Within polite society, there’s a strange insistence for men to be their true selves, yet a rejection of the idea that the average man could, perhaps, *just maybe*, be biologically programmed to act differently than the average woman, like all species closely related to us.
Feminists encourage men to “reject social pressure” about manhood and “be their true selves.” Many seem to imagine that when social pressures vanish, traditionally masculine behaviors will melt away, leaving men with all the personality traits of the average woman.
Thus men face a bizarre push and pull: relentless demands to “be vulnerable” and “express your true self,” followed by self-righteous fury when that true self ends up being more dominant, more sex-driven, and less intuitively empathetic than the average woman.
This needs to stop. It’s wickedly confusing for young boys and frustrating for adult men who know with certainty they’re inherently different from the average women, yet are muzzled from repeating this truth that explains a lot of their experiences.
We need to openly acknowledge these differences and find beauty in them. One of the core messages of polite society is that diversity is a good thing, and this is just another chance to celebrate and embrace differences within people.
Of course, we still need to make sure people understand that many men and women will fall outside these “average” types; plenty of men will be more traditionally feminine than women, and vice-versa. But both of these truths can exist and be celebrated at once.
# VII. A New Beginning
Although this review may make you think differently, I love dating in the Bay Area. There is nowhere else I’d rather live and date, partially because of how dynamic and rapidly-changing this city is.
The Bay Area has reinvented itself many times, and we can do it again. We can help create the next generation of men who are more grounded, more confident in their identity, less lost, and better romantic partners.
It will take effort from all of us and many difficult discussions, but many people in the Bay Area are already hard at work accomplishing these changes, and I hope this essay can help with their progress. With enough persistence, I’m confident that society can move onto a newer, more complete, and healthier Map to Manhood. | [unknown] | 167094307 | Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area | acx |
# In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
The “amyloid hypothesis” says that Alzheimer’s is caused by accumulation of the peptide amyloid-β. It’s the leading model in academia, but a favorite target for science journalists, contrarian bloggers, and neuroscience public intellectuals, who point out problems like:
* Some of the research establishing amyloid's role turned out to be fraudulent.
* The level of amyloid in the brain doesn’t correlate very well with the level of cognitive impairment across Alzheimer’s patients.
* Several strains of mice that were genetically programmed to have extra amyloid did eventually develop cognitive impairments. But it took much higher amyloid levels than humans have, and on further investigation the impairments didn't really look like Alzheimer’s.
* Some infectious agents, like the gingivitis bacterium and the herpesviruses, seem to play a role in at least some Alzheimer’s cases.
* . . . and amyloid is one of the body's responses to injury or infection, so it might be a harmless byproduct of these infections or whatever else the real disease is.
* Anti-amyloid drugs (like [Aduhelm](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/02/adieu-aduhelm-biogen-pulls-plug-on-controversial-alzheimers-drug/)) don't reverse the disease, and only slow progression a relatively small amount.
Opponents call the amyloid hypothesis zombie science, propped up only by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell off a few more anti-amyloid me-too drugs before it collapses. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists . . . continue to believe it without really offering any public defense. Scott was so surprised by the size of the gap between official and unofficial opinion that he asked if someone from the orthodox camp would speak out in its favor.
I am [David Schneider-Joseph](https://thedavidsj.substack.com/), an engineer formerly with SpaceX and Google, now working in AI safety. Alzheimer’s isn’t my field, but I got very interested in it, spent six months studying the literature, and came away believing the amyloid hypothesis was basically completely solid. I thought I’d share that understanding with current skeptics.
## The ATN model
The most plausible variant of the amyloid hypothesis is the A → T → N model: amyloid causes tau causes neurodegeneration.
#### 1: Amyloid
The common entrypoint, typically at least 15 years before clinically detectable symptoms [1], is accumulation of amyloid-β deposits (especially Aβ42, one of several variants).
Amyloid-β is a peptide produced in healthy human beings and many other animals, probably for antimicrobial purposes [2, 3].
Factors which cause overproduction of amyloid also cause Alzheimer’s. Factors that cause decreased clearance of amyloid also cause Alzheimer’s. The clearest relationship is various genes which massively increase amyloid production (while doing nothing else); these genes are Alzheimer’s risk factors, with some of the rarer and more severe ones causing extreme versions of the disease that manifest at otherwise almost-never-seen ages.
One of the clearest examples is Down syndrome, which is caused by three (rather than the usual two) copies of chromosome 21. People with Down syndrome are at much higher risk of Alzheimer’s than the general population: two-thirds will have the condition by age sixty, and 15% have it by age *forty.*
APP, the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, is on chromosome 21. This means that people with Down syndrome will have an extra copy. This extra copy has been observed to lead to higher-than-normal amyloid levels. But there are many genes on chromosome 21; do we have additional evidence that it’s the amyloid one that’s involved?
Yes. Dozens of other mutations on APP cause the same sort of extremely young and severe Alzheimer’s. So do mutations on PSEN1 and 2, the genes for the enzyme that processes amyloid precursor protein into amyloid. So do mutations on several other amyloid-related genes. [6, 91 - 96] Researchers call these *autosomal-dominant* Alzheimer’s, meaning Alzheimer’s cases that get inherited from a single parent in a simple fashion typical of single-gene disorders. They make up about 1% of all cases, and are our strongest evidence for the causal role of amyloid in the disorder. To my knowledge, there is no serious claim that these genes could be working through any pathway other than their shared role in the amyloid system.
But these autosomal-dominant cases only make up about 1% of all Alzheimer’s patients. Might they be a different disease than the usual sporadic Alzheimer’s that strikes people without strong family histories at normal ages?
Probably not: the presentation and trajectory of autosomal-dominant and sporadic Alzheimer’s cases are strikingly similar. Both show an initial appearance of amyloid pathology starting in intrinsic connectivity networks in both autosomal-dominant [14] and sporadic [15–18] types, cortical tau appearing first in the medial temporal lobe and with the exact same fold in both disease types [97] (despite human tauopathies having at least seven other possible characteristic folds [36]), that tau pathology worsening and spreading outside this region only once amyloid pathology reaches sufficient severity [65], neurodegeneration progressing closely in step with the tau pathology, and the same usual approximate trajectory of cognitive symptoms due to the sequence of affected regions. So it’s as if two bank robberies occurred hours apart, in the same town, and in a highly similar and idiosyncratic manner, and we can positively identify the culprit of one on security camera footage. It’s a good bet the culprit of the other is the same.
Increased amyloid production → Alzheimer’s is an especially clear and simple pathway, but any other change in amyloid can also cause the disease. For example
* **Overproduction or reduced clearance of amyloid due to impaired slow wave sleep**. Aβ production is neuronal activity-dependent, and toxins (perhaps including Aβ) are cleared from the brain during sleep via the glymphatic system. Thus Aβ can accumulate if the brain is more active and/or has less opportunity for clearance. [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]
* **Impaired amyloid clearance due to having one or (much worse) two copies of ApoE4** [12], which is by far the most common genetic risk factor. The mechanism here may be a loss of function in microglia, a type of immune cell in the brain which helps clear plaques. [13]
* **Overproduction or reduced clearance due to microbial infection.** Amyloid-β appears to be an antimicrobial peptide and will form plaques in response to infection. [2, 3] This explains various observations that have been used to support the “infectious hypothesis”, sometimes proposed as an alternative to the amyloid hypothesis. However, it can only explain a subset of cases and, as I argue [below](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.ptfizr39bkt3), is even then still *mediated* by amyloid via an “IATN” pathway: infection → amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration.
In cases of increased production, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will show elevated amyloid. In cases of reduced clearance, amyloid will *decrease* in CSF. In all cases, however, PET scans will show elevated brain amyloid, usually at first mainly in “intrinsic connectivity networks” such as the default mode network [14–20], which experience brain activity even at rest. These neurons are the most active - which causes more production and possibly less opportunity for clearance - so they tend to be the first to suffer from a production/clearance imbalance.
Over time, amyloid pathology spreads spatially throughout the brain. [14, 18] Aggregations of amyloid peptides induce more such aggregations. Some of our clearest evidence for this comes from growth hormone deficiency patients, who used to have cadaver-derived ground-up brain matter injected into their own brains to provide the missing hormones. If the ground-up brain matter was sourced from the corpse of an Alzheimer’s patient, the growth hormone deficiency patients would themselves develop Alzheimer’s at a young age, [probably through prion-like spread of the misfolded proteins](https://www.gwasstories.com/p/the-first-case-reports-of-human-to). [21, 22]
After ∼15 years of preclinical spread, the pathology eventually covers the whole brain. [14, 18] While some subtle cognitive impairment may occur during this time, it is usually not severe enough to be clinically detectable from amyloid alone. Indeed, in both humans [23–30] and mice [31–35], the severity of neurodegeneration and cognitive deficits is not a good spatiotemporal match for the severity of amyloid pathology (rather, it is a good match for the severity of tau pathology; see next section for more). These facts are often suggested as evidence against the amyloid hypothesis. However, amyloid is causally upstream of tau, as I will argue below. Therefore, the existence of cognitively normal individuals with amyloid pathology is expected in the ATN model - but typically only for a few decades, before progression to the next stage.
#### 2: Tau pathology (T) and neurodegeneration (N)
*Tauopathies* are a range of prion-like diseases involving the tau protein [36], whose usual function is to assist in stabilizing microtubule structure. In a tauopathy, the tau protein misfolds, and induces other, nearby tau proteins to misfold into the same shape. [37–46]. Injecting nothing but misfolded tau fibrils into a mouse brain can recruit the endogenously-produced mouse tau into this pathology, which spreads far beyond the injection site, causing neurodegeneration wherever it goes. [35, 47–59]
There are at least eight distinct ways the tau protein can misfold in human disease [36], and over a dozen distinct human tauopathies, each involving a specific one of those misfoldings. These include chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Pick’s disease, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy, and Alzheimer’s disease, with the last by far the most common. Each of these five diseases has its own distinct tau fold.
Most normal human beings eventually develop some tau pathology in adulthood, originating probably in the locus coeruleus [60–62], which is part of the brainstem. By middle age, some amount has usually spread to the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex in the medial temporal lobe, regions responsible for episodic memory. This is called primary age-related tauopathy (PART) [63], and has its own tau fold which is distinct from most tauopathies, but the same as Alzheimer’s. [36, 64] Usually, its local severity is mild and it doesn’t spread much beyond those regions. But with sufficient amyloid pathology, this “normal” tau pathology tends to both locally worsen and spread through the rest of the brain [65], becoming the tau pathology of Alzheimer’s.
Some genetic risk factors such as ApoE, in addition to affecting the clearance of amyloid-β, also increase the brain’s susceptibility to this A → T pathology conversion [66, 67]. But this is a matter of degree, as *sufficient* amyloid pathology seems to virtually guarantee the transition: Every [10-centiloid](https://www.gaain.org/centiloid-project) increase in amyloid pathology for a cognitively normal individual increases by 2.7x the probability of a PET scan detecting pathological levels of tau within five years [68]. The only known cases where patients with extremely high amyloid levels can go significant amounts of time without developing tau pathology are a few individuals with extremely rare protective genes, known only from a few case studies, e.g. [69]. Even in these instances, the individuals will eventually succumb to the tau phase, suffering neural atrophy and dementia. [70]
After it forms, the tau pathology no longer appears to require amyloid’s assistance to keep spreading (although amyloid may still accelerate it). This probably explains why existing anti-amyloid therapies [have been](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.ihc42bbb5bpo) only ∼30% effective in test patients, who are usually late in the amyloid → tau progression even if early in having symptomatic disease.
Neurodegeneration follows tau pathology extremely closely in time and space, in humans as well as basically all animal models, and cognitive impairments match the functions of the affected regions. There are rare reports of advanced tau pathology without cognitive decline, often in people with protective ApoE2 alleles [71], but even then, systematic analysis finds that actual density of tau inclusions is highly predictive of cognitive impairment, and that these exceptional cases usually involve widespread but *locally sparse* pathology [66].
The regional distribution of tau pathology explains why the first symptom of Alzheimer’s is typically impaired memory; the first cortical sites affected are usually in regions involved in memory formation. As the pathology spreads, further regions are affected, until eventually all cognitive functions are affected. As with most other aspects of the disease, the high-level picture seems relatively clear but the exact cellular and molecular pathways are not well understood (though may involve an assist from the innate immune system, especially microglia and astrocytes. [13, 35, 72])
Early Alzheimer mouse models were amyloid-only, with extremely heavy overproduction of Aβ, much more than required to recapitulate the human disease, and apparently enough to cause detectable cognitive dysfunction. However, normal mice do not get age-related tauopathy, so an amyloid-only mouse model - while useful for investigating certain questions - is not a full Alzheimer’s disease model.
Combined amyloid+tau pathology mouse models, which are transgenically modified and/or injected with misfolded human tau fibrils, display the property that [the presence of amyloid pathology induces the worsening and spreading of tau pathology](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.pw1ydynatz5u). This is also observed *in vitro* in human cells.
How do we know the amyloid causes the tau? Researchers have measured the correlation in many ways, from the spatiotemporal timeline (tau pathology only begins locally worsening and spreading outside the medial temporal lobe once amyloid reaches sufficient severity) [65], [98], to causal mediation modeling in the human disease [26], [99–101], to causal intervention using in vitro human cell studies [54, 102] and animal models [35, 55], [103 – 113]. But also, giving people drugs that reduce amyloid levels also decreases tau pathology. [78, 80, 82]
(I’ve left out or merely alluded to much other complexity, involving the innate immune system, lipid processing, and detailed molecular and cellular mechanisms, preferring to focus on the parts of the story which are crucial to deciding the causal role of amyloid, and for which I am aware of a satisfactory account from the literature. But I don’t intend to leave the impression that the above is all there is to Alzheimer’s disease, or that all cases progress in the same exact way.)
## The mechanistic claims
I make the following two claims about amyloid-β’s role in Alzheimer’s:
1. Amyloid deposits are a necessary (i.e. but-for) cause in all instances of Alzheimer dementia. That is, **if** someone has PET or CSF positivity for amyloid and tau pathologies, *and* the tau pathology involves the Alzheimer tau fold and made its first cortical appearance in the medial temporal lobe, *and* then they developed medial temporal volume loss + amnestic mild cognitive impairment + later dementia, **then counterfactually,** early enough (probably ∼15 years before clinical presentation) causal intervention solely to remove the amyloid deposits would have prevented almost all tau pathology and symptoms.
2. Severe enough amyloid pathology is a sufficient cause of Alzheimer dementia in almost all brains. That is, **if** someone is PET- or CSF-positive for very severe amyloid pathology (such as the level resulting from typical cases of autosomal-dominant overproduction), lack extremely rare protective genetics preventing further disease progression [69], and is not treated with any recent medical interventions, **then** they will eventually (after typically 15-20 years, and rarely more than 30), develop tau pathology and neurodegeneration in the region of this tau pathology (unless some other disease kills them first). Usually this will start in the medial temporal lobe and affect memory, then spread to other regions and functions.
Mechanistic claims I am *not* making:
1. I am *not* claiming that environmental factors such as microbial infection can never be a cause of Alzheimer’s disease. However, I claim that in all such cases, they act upstream of the above-described disease process, inducing the formation of amyloid deposits leading to the disease. Furthermore, these cannot be all cases - there are instances of the disease in which amyloid deposits arise essentially entirely due to genetic factors (like the autosomal-dominant cases of overproduction).
2. I am *not* claiming that the disease is “as simple as” amyloid deposits directly inducing neurodegeneration. As described above, they act indirectly, via the eventual downstream tau pathology, and possibly an associated microglial/astrocytic inflammatory response. Therefore, there are many people in the preclinical, amyloid-only disease phase who will eventually progress to dementia but have not yet.
These two clarifications imply that even though amyloid pathology is a necessary and (in enough severity) sufficient cause of the disease under normal circumstances, therapies with other targets might still be effective, either intervening upstream such that amyloid deposits never occur, or downstream so as to prevent the neurodegenerative process.
## The testable prediction
I would bet on the following: A therapy whose sole intended mechanism involves amyloid production or clearance, in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, will, in the next 12 years, achieve a slowdown of cognitive decline of at least 75%, with a p-value below 0.001, in its preregistered primary cognitive endpoint (or an average of all such endpoints if more than one exists). I’d eventually expect better than 75% efficacy, but getting stuff to work takes time, and I wanted to make a prediction which can be tested in a reasonable timeframe.
On the other hand, if a clinical trial completes earlier than 12 years from now (perhaps [73], reading out in 2027), sustains extremely good amyloid clearance at the preclinical stage, and has a good safety profile, but doesn’t make substantial progress towards this 75% goal, then I would consider this prediction refuted in advance.
For targeting amyloid, I’m most optimistic about a blood brain barrier (BBB)-penetrating antibody such as trontinemab [74–76], but with an epitope more like lecanemab’s, and given in the preclinical disease stage. Other options for targeting amyloid include antisense oligonucleotides for APP as well as γ-secretase modulators.
## The successes and failures of amyloid antibodies
There have now been three amyloid antibodies with positive phase 3 (and earlier) clinical trials on cognitive endpoints (but with much less than 75% efficacy):
1. **Aducanumab** in phase 1b [77] (**19%** on my average across cognitive endpoints for the highest two doses) and one of two phase 3 trials [78] **(22%**, but **negative 2%** in the other trial, which also gave a lower dose on average).
2. **Lecanemab** in its phase 2b [79] (**30%** on the primary measure, though it technically failed because of its ambitious Bayesian endpoint) and phase 3 [80] (**27%**).
3. **Donanemab** in phase 2 [81] **(32%**) and phase 3 [82] (**35%**).
There have also been earlier antibodies that saw only failure in phase 3 – bapineuzumab [83, 84], crenezumab [85], solanezumab [86–88], and gantenerumab [88, 89]. These failed drugs didn’t just do a bad job treating Alzheimer’s. They also did a bad job clearing amyloid plaques, so their failure is consistent with the amyloid hypothesis. That said, just coupling the older, previously-unsuccessful antibody gantenerumab with a BBB-crossing mechanism produced extremely good target engagement and better safety in early clinical trials [74–76]. This makes me optimistic about a future BBB-crossing lecanemab (or similar), especially if given in the preclinical disease phase prior to significant tauopathy.
Each of the “successes” have shown about 25-30% slowing of decline over 18 months. Some object that this isn’t clinically meaningful because it’s only a slowdown of ∼0.5 points on an 18-point CDR-SB scale, but they don’t mention that the participants start about 3 points from a perfect score (since these are relatively early-stage patients) and worsen by ∼1.5 points in those 18 months when on placebo. A literally perfect drug - one which halted all further clinical progression - could therefore only achieve about 1.5 points of efficacy on that scale. The cruxy question is whether the drugs maintain a 30% reduction after 18 months. Preliminary signs from lecanemab’s and donanemab’s open-label extensions show that they do [90], so this would amount to about 40% more years of life at each disease stage.
But why have amyloid antibodies only achieved about 30% efficacy so far? The likely answer: mainly because they were given too late to prevent the downstream tau pathology cascade, but also because some of their side effects, like when they target amyloid-bearing blood vessels rather than brain tissue, can themselves worsen cognition.
That said, even achieving 30% efficacy proves that amyloid plays *some* causal disease role and isn’t *merely* a downstream, harmless pathology.
## Why is the amyloid hypothesis unpopular?
The amyloid hypothesis remains popular in the Alzheimer’s disease research community, but most press coverage is negative. These challenges are understandable, and some of them make good points, but overall fail to address the evidence discussed above.
#### Failures and perceived failures of amyloid therapies
I discussed this [above](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.ihc42bbb5bpo), but to recap:
* Early attempts had suboptimal epitopes which didn’t successfully engage their targets.
* Later attempts did engage their target, but have mostly been tested ∼15 years after the disease started, and so after downstream tau pathologies had already started.
* These later attempts demonstrated a ∼30% slowdown in clinical progression, which proves at least some causal role for amyloid. Some claim this isn’t clinically meaningful but they use misleading arguments (like saying it’s a 0.5-point benefit on an 18-point scale, when even a perfect drug which halted all clinical progression could only have achieved a 1.5-point benefit vs. placebo, since the patients start near a perfect score and the placebo group only worsens by about 1.5 points).
* In all mature antibodies so far, they have been attended with not-great side effects: brain swelling and bleeding, for reasons related to their difficulty crossing the BBB into brain tissue where they’re actually needed. A new generation of antibodies will cross the BBB, improving efficacy and safety.
It’s frustrating that getting even to a 30% slowdown has taken as long as it has, but all of this is consistent with the model of the disease I laid out, which has strong evidence behind it, and there’s every reason to expect that a new drug (A) with an optimal epitope, similar to lecanemab or donanemab, (B) given in the early preclinical phase, 10+ years earlier than currently, and (C) with a shuttle mechanism to cross the BBB, could be very successful.
The mature antibodies only have (A). There are ongoing trials combining (A)+(B) [73], [114], [115], and a shortly upcoming trial combining (B)+(C) [76], but not yet all three together. I’m optimistic about these but expect (A)+(B)+(C) to do especially well.
Unfortunately, this stuff is hard, slow, and over-regulated. Which means it’s taking longer than we’d like. But my guess is we’re on the right track.
#### Challenges translating from mouse models
The researchers who developed the early Alzheimer mouse models wanted the clearest possible window into disease progression, so they turned up an amyloid gene to extreme levels far beyond those of even severe human cases. This level of amyloid was so massive that it caused cognitive deficits directly, eg without any contribution from tau. And in fact, mouse proteins work differently from human proteins, and mice do not naturally get tauopathies.
So researchers increased amyloid, got cognitive deficits, and thought they were simulating Alzheimer’s. But they were actually doing something significantly different:
* **Human patients:** increased amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration and disease
* **Mouse models:** *massively* increased amyloid → neurodegeneration and disease
Then, since the mouse models didn’t really have Alzheimer’s the way it works in humans, most of the findings from the mouse models failed to translate into human Alzheimer’s patients. Since the findings from the amyloid mice did such a bad job matching human Alzheimer’s cases, some people concluded that amyloid did not cause Alzheimer’s.
There are now tauopathy mouse models. In those models, worsening amyloid pathology tends to cause the tau pathology to worsen as well. [35, 55, 103–113] I predict that findings from these mice are more likely to translate to human disease.
#### Fraud in amyloid research
There was some really bad fraud, such as documented in [123], which is the case that received the most attention. For another good overview of fraud in Alzheimer research (not all relating to amyloid-β), see [124]. The perpetrators should be institutionally severely punished.
This fraud has sometimes been framed by amyloid hypothesis critics as impacting very foundational work for the amyloid hypothesis. But this mostly isn’t true. [125] It concerns some specific variants of amyloid-β that are not prominent in nearly any of the literature I’ve encountered. When it was uncovered, I checked how many of the hundreds of papers in my notes seemed to be affected, and very few were.
For example, the main findings I have relied upon in this argument have, to the best of my understanding, survived unscathed:
* The smoking gun [genetic evidence](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.f1k9y4mgrnu1) for amyloid’s causal role in the autosomal-dominant versions of the disease, and the extensive similarities between the autosomal-dominant disease and sporadic disease.
* The evidence that [Aβ can potentiate or accelerate tau pathology](https://docs.google.com/document/d/130cgtEEwnwPStrsmOFEIOAZk1wq_siFNAKIMhWdvMuM/edit#bookmark=id.pw1ydynatz5u) (which itself is proximate to neurodegeneration), from studies in animal models, studies in human cells, the spatiotemporal disease course, causal mediation modeling of that disease course, and the tau biomarker effects from amyloid therapies.
#### The “amyloid mafia”
There is a perception that a combination of nefarious and misguided behavior has led to it being impossible to pursue alternative hypotheses or therapies, with the whole field pursuing a dead end.
I don’t have numbers for the more basic research, but we do have good data on the therapeutics being explored. In 2020, only 35% of hopefully-disease-modifying phase 3 trials and 20% of hopefully-disease-modifying phase 2 trials targeted amyloid; 65-80% target other pathways [126]. The breakdown for other years is similar (see e.g. [127]).
I support this, in part because it’s always good to test alternative possibilities, but in part because I expect that some of them can succeed even if the ATN model is right.
#### The compellingness of alternative hypotheses
A primary competitor of the amyloid hypothesis is the *tau hypothesis*. This naturally claims that the tau protein is the fundamental cause of Alzheimer’s, which makes good sense - the location and severity of tau pathology correlates better with the location and severity of neurodegeneration than does amyloid-β, in both humans [23 - 30] and combined amyloid/tau mouse models [31 – 35]. However, this is exactly as predicted by the ATN (amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration) model of the disease: amyloid pathology builds for 15–20 years, eventually inducing tau pathology; then the tau pathology causes neurodegeneration. Why not skip the amyloid step? Because as discussed above, we have extensive genetic and clinical evidence that the amyloid is the trigger for tau to spread in the first place.
(of course, this doesn’t mean tau is a bad target for therapy. I’m optimistic about tau antisense oligonucleotides such as BIIB080, which had a very promising phase 1b trial [116, 117] and is now in phase 2)
Another competitor is the *microbial infection hypothesis.* Again, there is good evidence this is true in some cases - multiple pathogens such as the periodontitis bacteria *P. gingivalis* [118] and various herpes viruses [3, 119] are correlated with the disease, which has tempted some microbiologists to treat amyloid as merely a harmless correlate: since amyloid is involved in the body’s immune response, maybe in the process of causing brain damage the microbes cause some amyloid deposition on the side. But again, these facts are also consistent with the ATN (or in this case IATN - infection → amyloid → tau → neurodegeneration) hypothesis.
(again, treating these microbes is still another promising target for treating or preventing Alzheimer’s)
These alternatives are a good reminder that the causal pathway can be hard to disentangle. But again, the strongest evidence for amyloid’s causal role is genetics: genes which increase amyloid increase Alzheimer’s risk, and rare mutations that massively increase amyloid massively increase the risk of Alzheimer’s (including unusually young or severe cases). Given this natural experiment, the most parsimonious explanation is that amyloid is intimately involved in Alzheimer’s, and then the most parsimonious explanation for the role of infection and tau is that they are part of the same I → A → T → N pathway.
#### The meta-psychological explanation: frustration at complexity and slow progress
Progress in biomedical research is slow. The disease (and amyloid-β’s prevalence in it) was discovered in 1906, the amyloid causal hypothesis was first proposed in 1992 after discovery of the genetic evidence [4], [5], the first amyloid antibody entered clinical trials in 2005 [128] - and now, in 2025, the best we have is ∼30% efficacy with potentially serious side effects.
But biology is messy, and we need to have comfort with complexity. Yes, there’s evidence that tau is responsible for the neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease; no, this doesn’t contradict the amyloid hypothesis. Yes, Biogen screwed up in conducting the aducanumab phase 3 trials and this made the results harder to interpret; no, that doesn’t mean amyloid therapies have completely failed. Yes, it’s taken way too long to get even to this intermediate point of 30% efficacy, due to a combination of overregulation and biology just being damned hard; no, that doesn’t mean we’re on the wrong track with the underlying science.
Some years ago, I worked on the guidance and navigation software for the Falcon 9 first stage landing. The early attempts failed because of annoying issues like stuck propellant valves, running out of fin hydraulic fluid, and so on. It took many tries to iron out all those issues. Meanwhile, fans and critics kept proposing that SpaceX’s fundamental approach was flawed, and suggesting entirely different approaches. Most of that criticism was pretty uninformed.
This of course isn’t a general refutation of outsiders criticizing any field, as sometimes such criticism is necessary and right. But it does illustrate the need for patience when specialists are attempting something hard and unprecedented. Curing Alzheimer’s disease is much harder than landing a rocket. It’s important to understand the reasons for therapeutic failures (in this case, failure to engage the target) and underwhelming successes (probably due to treatment late in the disease progression, plus the challenges in crossing the BBB), to put that in the context of the scientific evidence from the basic research (which is very strong in this case), and to consider how compelling the alternative hypotheses are (not very).
Frustrated people who don’t have the time or capacity to study the science themselves often want someone to blame, and the “amyloid mafia” is a ready target. But there isn’t as much of a mafia as they think; biology is just hard.
My bottom line remains that no alternative hypothesis offers a plausible accounting of the evidence for amyloid’s causal role; whereas conversely, there is no evidence I’m aware of that the ATN model has great trouble accounting for.
I am grateful to Logan Thrasher Collins, Tommy Crow, Dan Elton, and Greg Fitzgerald for valuable feedback on this essay, and to Scott Alexander for edits which improved its structure and presentation.
## Footnotes
[1] J. M. Long and D. M. Holtzman, “Alzheimer Disease: An Update on Pathobiology and Treatment Strategies,” *Cell*, vol. 179, no. 2, pp. 312–339, Oct. 2019, doi: [10.1016/j.cell.2019.09.001](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.09.001).
[2] D. K. V. Kumar *et al.*, “Amyloid-β peptide protects against microbial infection in mouse and worm models of Alzheimer’s disease,” *Science Translational Medicine*, vol. 8, no. 340, pp. 340ra72–340ra72, May 2016, doi: [10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf1059](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf1059).
[3] W. A. Eimer *et al.*, “Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated β-Amyloid Is Rapidly Seeded by Herpesviridae to Protect against Brain Infection,” *Neuron*, vol. 99, no. 1, pp. 56–63.e3, Jul. 2018, doi: [10.1016/j.neuron.2018.06.030](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.06.030).
[4] J. A. Hardy and G. A. Higgins, “Alzheimer’s Disease: The Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis,” *Science*, vol. 256, no. 5054, pp. 184–185, Apr. 1992, doi: [10.1126/science.1566067](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1566067).
[5] T. Whipple, “‘What we did then we could do now in a few days or a week. It took us four or five years. Then, in 1991, they had the results.’” X (formerly Twitter), Jul. 17, 2024. Accessed: Jul. 23, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://x.com/whippletom/status/1787768187758485592>
[6] C. Haass, C. Kaether, G. Thinakaran, and S. Sisodia, “Trafficking and Proteolytic Processing of APP,” *Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine*, vol. 2, no. 5, p. a006270, May 2012, doi: [10.1101/cshperspect.a006270](https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a006270).
[7] A. W. Bero *et al.*, “Neuronal activity regulates the regional vulnerability to amyloid-β deposition,” *Nature Neuroscience*, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 750–756, Jun. 2011, doi: [10.1038/nn.2801](https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2801).
[8] J. H. Roh *et al.*, “Disruption of the Sleep-Wake Cycle and Diurnal Fluctuation of β-Amyloid in Mice with Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology,” *Science Translational Medicine*, vol. 4, no. 150, pp. 150ra122–150ra122, Sep. 2012, doi: [10.1126/scitranslmed.3004291](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3004291).
[9] B. P. Lucey *et al.*, “Effect of sleep on overnight cerebrospinal fluid amyloid β kinetics,” *Annals of Neurology*, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 197–204, 2018, doi: [10.1002/ana.25117](https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.25117).
[10] L. Xie *et al.*, “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain,” *Science*, vol. 342, no. 6156, pp. 373–377, Oct. 2013, doi: [10.1126/science.1241224](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1241224).
[11] E. Shokri-Kojori *et al.*, “Β-Amyloid accumulation in the human brain after one night of sleep deprivation,” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, vol. 115, no. 17, pp. 4483–4488, Apr. 2018, doi: [10.1073/pnas.1721694115](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1721694115).
[12] J. M. Castellano *et al.*, “Human apoE isoforms differentially regulate brain amyloid-β peptide clearance,” *Science Translational Medicine*, vol. 3, no. 89, pp. 89ra57–89ra57, Jun. 2011, doi: [10.1126/scitranslmed.3002156](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3002156).
[13] Y. Shi and D. M. Holtzman, “Interplay between innate immunity and Alzheimer disease: APOE and TREM2 in the spotlight,” *Nature Reviews Immunology*, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 759–772, Dec. 2018, doi: [10.1038/s41577-018-0051-1](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-018-0051-1).
[14] B. A. Gordon *et al.*, “Spatial patterns of neuroimaging biomarker change in individuals from families with autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease: A longitudinal study,” *The Lancet Neurology*, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 241–250, Mar. 2018, doi: [10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30028-0](https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30028-0).
[15] R. L. Buckner *et al.*, “Cortical Hubs Revealed by Intrinsic Functional Connectivity: Mapping, Assessment of Stability, and Relation to Alzheimer’s Disease,” *Journal of Neuroscience*, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 1860–1873, Feb. 2009, doi: [10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5062-08.2009](https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5062-08.2009).
[16] S. Villeneuve *et al.*, “Existing Pittsburgh Compound-B positron emission tomography thresholds are too high: Statistical and pathological evaluation,” *Brain*, vol. 138, no. 7, pp. 2020–2033, Jul. 2015, doi: [10.1093/brain/awv112](https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awv112).
[17] S. Palmqvist *et al.*, “Earliest accumulation of β-amyloid occurs within the default-mode network and concurrently affects brain connectivity,” *Nature Communications*, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 1214, Oct. 2017, doi: [10.1038/s41467-017-01150-x](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01150-x).
[18] N. Mattsson, S. Palmqvist, E. Stomrud, J. Vogel, and O. Hansson, “Staging **β** -Amyloid Pathology With Amyloid Positron Emission Tomography,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 76, no. 11, p. 1319, Nov. 2019, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.2214](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.2214).
[19] W. Jagust, “Imaging the evolution and pathophysiology of Alzheimer disease,” *Nature Reviews Neuroscience*, vol. 19, no. 11, pp. 687–700, Nov. 2018, doi: [10.1038/s41583-018-0067-3](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0067-3).
[20] E. Levitis *et al.*, “Differentiating amyloid beta spread in autosomal dominant and sporadic Alzheimer’s disease,” *Brain Communications*, vol. 4, no. 3, p. fcac085, Jun. 2022, doi: [10.1093/braincomms/fcac085](https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcac085).
[21] Z. Jaunmuktane *et al.*, “Evidence for human transmission of amyloid-β pathology and cerebral amyloid angiopathy,” *Nature*, vol. 525, no. 7568, pp. 247–250, Sep. 2015, doi: [10.1038/nature15369](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15369).
[22] G. Banerjee *et al.*, “Iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease in recipients of cadaveric pituitary-derived growth hormone,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 394–402, Feb. 2024, doi: [10.1038/s41591-023-02729-2](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02729-2).
[23] P. T. Nelson *et al.*, “Clinicopathologic Correlations in a Large Alzheimer Disease Center Autopsy Cohort: Neuritic Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles "Do Count" When Staging Disease Severity,” *Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology*, vol. 66, no. 12, pp. 1136–1146, Dec. 2007, doi: [10.1097/nen.0b013e31815c5efb](https://doi.org/10.1097/nen.0b013e31815c5efb).
[24] M. R. Brier *et al.*, “Tau and Aβ imaging, CSF measures, and cognition in Alzheimer’s disease,” *Science Translational Medicine*, vol. 8, no. 338, pp. 338ra66–338ra66, May 2016, doi: [10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf2362](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf2362).
[25] A. J. Aschenbrenner, B. A. Gordon, T. L. S. Benzinger, J. C. Morris, and J. J. Hassenstab, “Influence of tau PET, amyloid PET, and hippocampal volume on cognition in Alzheimer disease,” *Neurology*, vol. 91, no. 9, pp. e859–e866, Aug. 2018, doi: [10.1212/WNL.0000000000006075](https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000006075).
[26] B. J. Hanseeuw *et al.*, “Association of Amyloid and Tau With Cognition in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease: A Longitudinal Study,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 76, no. 8, pp. 915–924, Aug. 2019, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.1424](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.1424).
[27] C. R. Jack Jr *et al.*, “The bivariate distribution of amyloid-β and tau: Relationship with established neurocognitive clinical syndromes,” *Brain*, vol. 142, no. 10, pp. 3230–3242, Oct. 2019, doi: [10.1093/brain/awz268](https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awz268).
[28] R. La Joie *et al.*, “Prospective longitudinal atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease correlates with the intensity and topography of baseline tau-PET,” *Science Translational Medicine*, vol. 12, no. 524, p. eaau5732, Jan. 2020, doi: [10.1126/scitranslmed.aau5732](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aau5732).
[29] A. Bejanin *et al.*, “Tau pathology and neurodegeneration contribute to cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease,” *Brain*, vol. 140, no. 12, pp. 3286–3300, Dec. 2017, doi: [10.1093/brain/awx243](https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awx243).
[30] C. Xia *et al.*, “Association of In Vivo [18F]AV-1451 Tau PET Imaging Results With Cortical Atrophy and Symptoms in Typical and Atypical Alzheimer Disease,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 427–436, Apr. 2017, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2016.5755](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2016.5755).
[31] C. E. G. Leyns *et al.*, “TREM2 function impedes tau seeding in neuritic plaques,” *Nature Neuroscience*, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 1217–1222, Aug. 2019, doi: [10.1038/s41593-019-0433-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0433-0).
[32] B. L. Heckmann *et al.*, “LC3-Associated Endocytosis Facilitates β-Amyloid Clearance and Mitigates Neurodegeneration in Murine Alzheimer’s Disease,” *Cell*, vol. 178, no. 3, pp. 536–551.e14, Jul. 2019, doi: [10.1016/j.cell.2019.05.056](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.05.056).
[33] S.-H. Lee *et al.*, “Trem2 restrains the enhancement of tau accumulation and neurodegeneration by β-amyloid pathology,” *Neuron*, vol. 109, no. 8, pp. 1283–1301.e6, Apr. 2021, doi: [10.1016/j.neuron.2021.02.010](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.02.010).
[34] M. Gratuze *et al.*, “Activated microglia mitigate Aβ-associated tau seeding and spreading,” *Journal of Experimental Medicine*, vol. 218, no. 8, p. e20210542, Jun. 2021, doi: [10.1084/jem.20210542](https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20210542).
[35] C. Lodder *et al.*, “CSF1R inhibition rescues tau pathology and neurodegeneration in an A/T/N model with combined AD pathologies, while preserving plaque associated microglia,” *Acta Neuropathologica Communications*, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 108, Jun. 2021, doi: [10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40478-021-01204-8).
[36] Y. Shi *et al.*, “Structure-based classification of tauopathies,” *Nature*, vol. 598, no. 7880, pp. 359–363, Oct. 2021, doi: [10.1038/s41586-021-03911-7](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03911-7).
[37] A. de Calignon *et al.*, “Propagation of Tau Pathology in a Model of Early Alzheimer’s Disease,” *Neuron*, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 685–697, Feb. 2012, doi: [10.1016/j.neuron.2011.11.033](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.11.033).
[38] L. Liu *et al.*, “Trans-Synaptic Spread of Tau Pathology In Vivo,” *PLOS ONE*, vol. 7, no. 2, p. e31302, Feb. 2012, doi: [10.1371/journal.pone.0031302](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031302).
[39] A. L. Woerman *et al.*, “Tau prions from Alzheimer’s disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy patients propagate in cultured cells,” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, vol. 113, no. 50, pp. E8187–E8196, Dec. 2016, doi: [10.1073/pnas.1616344113](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1616344113).
[40] S. Dujardin *et al.*, “Neuron-to-neuron wild-type Tau protein transfer through a trans-synaptic mechanism: Relevance to sporadic tauopathies,” *Acta Neuropathologica Communications*, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 14, Jan. 2014, doi: [10.1186/2051-5960-2-14](https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-5960-2-14).
[41] S. Calafate *et al.*, “Synaptic Contacts Enhance Cell-to-Cell Tau Pathology Propagation,” *Cell Reports*, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 1176–1183, May 2015, doi: [10.1016/j.celrep.2015.04.043](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2015.04.043).
[42] E. E. Congdon *et al.*, “Affinity of Tau antibodies for solubilized pathological Tau species but not their immunogen or insoluble Tau aggregates predicts in vivo and ex vivo efficacy,” *Molecular Neurodegeneration*, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 62, Aug. 2016, doi: [10.1186/s13024-016-0126-z](https://doi.org/10.1186/s13024-016-0126-z).
[43] S. L. DeVos *et al.*, “Synaptic Tau Seeding Precedes Tau Pathology in Human Alzheimer’s Disease Brain,” *Frontiers in Neuroscience*, vol. 12, Apr. 2018, doi: [10.3389/fnins.2018.00267](https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00267).
[44] J. W. Wu *et al.*, “Small Misfolded Tau Species Are Internalized via Bulk Endocytosis and Anterogradely and Retrogradely Transported in Neurons\*,” *Journal of Biological Chemistry*, vol. 288, no. 3, pp. 1856–1870, Jan. 2013, doi: [10.1074/jbc.M112.394528](https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M112.394528).
[45] S. Takeda *et al.*, “Neuronal uptake and propagation of a rare phosphorylated high-molecular-weight tau derived from Alzheimer’s disease brain,” *Nature Communications*, vol. 6, no. 1, p. 8490, Oct. 2015, doi: [10.1038/ncomms9490](https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9490).
[46] D. M. O. Ramirez *et al.*, “Endogenous pathology in tauopathy mice progresses via brain networks.” bioRxiv, May 2023. doi: [10.1101/2023.05.23.541792](https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.23.541792).
[47] S. Narasimhan *et al.*, “Pathological Tau Strains from Human Brains Recapitulate the Diversity of Tauopathies in Nontransgenic Mouse Brain,” *Journal of Neuroscience*, vol. 37, no. 47, pp. 11406–11423, Nov. 2017, doi: [10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1230-17.2017](https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1230-17.2017).
[48] F. Clavaguera *et al.*, “Transmission and spreading of tauopathy in transgenic mouse brain,” *Nature Cell Biology*, vol. 11, no. 7, pp. 909–913, Jul. 2009, doi: [10.1038/ncb1901](https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb1901).
[49] J. L. Guo and V. M.-Y. Lee, “Seeding of Normal Tau by Pathological Tau Conformers Drives Pathogenesis of Alzheimer-like Tangles\*,” *Journal of Biological Chemistry*, vol. 286, no. 17, pp. 15317–15331, Apr. 2011, doi: [10.1074/jbc.M110.209296](https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M110.209296).
[50] F. Clavaguera *et al.*, “Brain homogenates from human tauopathies induce tau inclusions in mouse brain,” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, vol. 110, no. 23, pp. 9535–9540, Jun. 2013, doi: [10.1073/pnas.1301175110](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301175110).
[51] F. Clavaguera *et al.*, “Peripheral administration of tau aggregates triggers intracerebral tauopathy in transgenic mice,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 127, no. 2, pp. 299–301, Feb. 2014, doi: [10.1007/s00401-013-1231-5](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-013-1231-5).
[52] E. Peeraer *et al.*, “Intracerebral injection of preformed synthetic tau fibrils initiates widespread tauopathy and neuronal loss in the brains of tau transgenic mice,” *Neurobiology of Disease*, vol. 73, pp. 83–95, Jan. 2015, doi: [10.1016/j.nbd.2014.08.032](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbd.2014.08.032).
[53] I.-C. Stancu *et al.*, “Templated misfolding of Tau by prion-like seeding along neuronal connections impairs neuronal network function and associated behavioral outcomes in Tau transgenic mice,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 129, no. 6, pp. 875–894, Jun. 2015, doi: [10.1007/s00401-015-1413-4](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-015-1413-4).
[54] Z. He *et al.*, “Amyloid-β plaques enhance Alzheimer’s brain tau-seeded pathologies by facilitating neuritic plaque tau aggregation,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 29–38, Jan. 2018, doi: [10.1038/nm.4443](https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.4443).
[55] C. Vergara *et al.*, “Amyloid-β pathology enhances pathological fibrillary tau seeding induced by Alzheimer PHF in vivo,” *Acta neuropathologica*, vol. 137, no. 3, pp. 397–412, Mar. 2019, doi: [10.1007/s00401-018-1953-5](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-018-1953-5).
[56] S. Lam *et al.*, “Transmission of amyloid-beta and tau pathologies is associated with cognitive impairments in a primate,” *Acta Neuropathologica Communications*, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–24, Dec. 2021, doi: [10.1186/s40478-021-01266-8](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40478-021-01266-8).
[57] E. Audouard *et al.*, “High–Molecular-Weight Paired Helical Filaments from Alzheimer Brain Induces Seeding of Wild-Type Mouse Tau into an Argyrophilic 4R Tau Pathology in Vivo,” *The American Journal of Pathology*, vol. 186, no. 10, pp. 2709–2722, Oct. 2016, doi: [10.1016/j.ajpath.2016.06.008](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajpath.2016.06.008).
[58] J. L. Guo *et al.*, “Unique pathological tau conformers from Alzheimer’s brains transmit tau pathology in nontransgenic mice,” *Journal of Experimental Medicine*, vol. 213, no. 12, pp. 2635–2654, Oct. 2016, doi: [10.1084/jem.20160833](https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20160833).
[59] C. A. Lasagna-Reeves *et al.*, “Alzheimer brain-derived tau oligomers propagate pathology from endogenous tau,” *Scientific Reports*, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 700, Oct. 2012, doi: [10.1038/srep00700](https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00700).
[60] H. Braak, D. R. Thal, E. Ghebremedhin, and K. Del Tredici, “Stages of the Pathologic Process in Alzheimer Disease: Age Categories From 1 to 100 Years,” *Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology*, vol. 70, no. 11, pp. 960–969, Nov. 2011, doi: [10.1097/NEN.0b013e318232a379](https://doi.org/10.1097/NEN.0b013e318232a379).
[61] H. Braak and K. Del Tredici, “The pathological process underlying Alzheimer’s disease in individuals under thirty,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 121, no. 2, pp. 171–181, Feb. 2011, doi: [10.1007/s00401-010-0789-4](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-010-0789-4).
[62] A. Elobeid, H. Soininen, and I. Alafuzoff, “Hyperphosphorylated tau in young and middle-aged subjects,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 123, no. 1, pp. 97–104, Jan. 2012, doi: [10.1007/s00401-011-0906-z](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-011-0906-z).
[63] “PET Imaging of Tau Deposition in the Aging Human Brain,” *Neuron*, vol. 89, no. 5, pp. 971–982, Mar. 2016, doi: [10.1016/j.neuron.2016.01.028](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.01.028).
[64] Y. Shi *et al.*, “Cryo-EM structures of tau filaments from Alzheimer’s disease with PET ligand APN-1607,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 141, no. 5, pp. 697–708, May 2021, doi: [10.1007/s00401-021-02294-3](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-021-02294-3).
[65] J. Therriault *et al.*, “Biomarker modeling of Alzheimer’s disease using PET-based Braak staging,” *Nature Aging*, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 526–535, Jun. 2022, doi: [10.1038/s43587-022-00204-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-022-00204-0).
[66] P. T. Nelson, H. Braak, and W. R. Markesbery, “Neuropathology and Cognitive Impairment in Alzheimer Disease: A Complex but Coherent Relationship,” *Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology*, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 1–14, Jan. 2009, doi: [10.1097/NEN.0b013e3181919a48](https://doi.org/10.1097/NEN.0b013e3181919a48).
[67] G. B. Frisoni *et al.*, “The probabilistic model of Alzheimer disease: The amyloid hypothesis revised,” *Nature Reviews Neuroscience*, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 53–66, Jan. 2022, doi: [10.1038/s41583-021-00533-w](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-021-00533-w).
[68] K. A. Josephs, S. D. Weigand, and J. L. Whitwell, “Characterizing Amyloid-Positive Individuals With Normal Tau PET Levels After 5 Years: An ADNI Study,” *Neurology*, vol. 98, no. 22, May 2022, doi: [10.1212/WNL.0000000000200287](https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000200287).
[69] J. F. Arboleda-Velasquez *et al.*, “Resistance to autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease in an APOE3 Christchurch homozygote: A case report,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 25, no. 11, pp. 1680–1683, Nov. 2019, doi: [10.1038/s41591-019-0611-3](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0611-3).
[70] D. Sepulveda-Falla *et al.*, “Distinct tau neuropathology and cellular profiles of an APOE3 Christchurch homozygote protected against autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s dementia,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 144, no. 3, pp. 589–601, Sep. 2022, doi: [10.1007/s00401-022-02467-8](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-022-02467-8).
[71] D. J. Berlau, K. Kahle-Wrobleski, E. Head, M. Goodus, R. Kim, and C. Kawas, “Dissociation of Neuropathologic Findings and Cognition: Case Report of an Apolipoprotein E ε2/ε2 Genotype,” *Archives of Neurology*, vol. 64, no. 8, pp. 1193–1196, Aug. 2007, doi: [10.1001/archneur.64.8.1193](https://doi.org/10.1001/archneur.64.8.1193).
[72] Y. Shi *et al.*, “Microglia drive APOE-dependent neurodegeneration in a tauopathy mouse model,” *Journal of Experimental Medicine*, vol. 216, no. 11, pp. 2546–2561, Oct. 2019, doi: [10.1084/jem.20190980](https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20190980).
[73] ClinicalTrials.gov, “A Donanemab (LY3002813) Study in Participants With Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease (TRAILBLAZER‑ALZ 3).” ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05026866, May 23, 2025. Accessed: Jul. 24, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05026866>
[74] J. Shugart, “Trontinemab data strengthen hope for brain shuttles,” *Alzforum News*, 2024, Available:<https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/trontinemab-data-strengthen-hope-brain-shuttles>
[75] L. Kulic *et al.*, “Latest interim results from the Brainshuttle AD study: A phase Ib/IIa study of trontinemab in people with Alzheimer’s disease.” Poster presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD 2024), Madrid, Spain, Oct. 30, 2024. Available:<https://medically.roche.com/content/dam/pdmahub/restricted/neurology/ctad-2024/CTAD-2024-presentation-kulic-latest-interim-results-from-brainshuttle-ad-study.pdf>
[76] Roche, “Roche presents new insights in Alzheimer’s disease research across its diagnostics and pharmaceutical portfolios at AAIC.” Roche Media Release, Basel, Switzerland, Jul. 28, 2025. Available:<https://www.roche.com/media/releases/med-cor-2025-07-28>
[77] J. Sevigny *et al.*, “The antibody aducanumab reduces Aβ plaques in Alzheimer’s disease,” *Nature*, vol. 537, no. 7618, pp. 50–56, Sep. 2016, doi: [10.1038/nature19323](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19323).
[78] S. Budd Haeberlein *et al.*, “Two Randomized Phase 3 Studies of Aducanumab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease,” *The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease*, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 197–210, Apr. 2022, doi: [10.14283/jpad.2022.30](https://doi.org/10.14283/jpad.2022.30).
[79] C. J. Swanson *et al.*, “A randomized, double-blind, phase 2b proof-of-concept clinical trial in early Alzheimer’s disease with lecanemab, an anti-Aβ protofibril antibody,” *Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy*, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 80, Apr. 2021, doi: [10.1186/s13195-021-00813-8](https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-021-00813-8).
[80] C. H. van Dyck *et al.*, “Lecanemab in early Alzheimer’s disease,” *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 388, no. 1, pp. 9–21, 2023, doi: [10.1056/NEJMoa2212948](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2212948).
[81] M. A. Mintun *et al.*, “Donanemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease,” *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 384, no. 18, pp. 1691–1704, May 2021, doi: [10.1056/NEJMoa2100708](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2100708).
[82] J. R. Sims *et al.*, “Donanemab in Early Symptomatic Alzheimer Disease: The TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2 Randomized Clinical Trial,” *JAMA*, Jul. 2023, doi: [10.1001/jama.2023.13239](https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.13239).
[83] S. Salloway *et al.*, “Two phase 3 trials of bapineuzumab in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease,” *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 370, no. 4, pp. 322–333, 2014, doi: [10.1056/NEJMoa1304839](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1304839).
[84] R. Vandenberghe *et al.*, “Bapineuzumab for mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease in two global, randomized, phase 3 trials,” *Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy*, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 18, May 2016, doi: [10.1186/s13195-016-0189-7](https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-016-0189-7).
[85] S. Ostrowitzki *et al.*, “Evaluating the Safety and Efficacy of Crenezumab vs Placebo in Adults With Early Alzheimer Disease: Two Phase 3 Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trials,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 79, no. 11, pp. 1113–1121, Nov. 2022, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.2909](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2022.2909).
[86] R. S. Doody *et al.*, “Phase 3 trials of solanezumab for mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease,” *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 370, no. 4, pp. 311–321, 2014, doi: [10.1056/NEJMoa1312889](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1312889).
[87] L. S. Honig *et al.*, “Trial of Solanezumab for Mild Dementia Due to Alzheimer’s Disease,” *New England Journal of Medicine*, vol. 378, no. 4, pp. 321–330, Jan. 2018, doi: [10.1056/NEJMoa1705971](https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1705971).
[88] S. Salloway *et al.*, “A trial of gantenerumab or solanezumab in dominantly inherited Alzheimer’s disease,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 27, no. 7, pp. 1187–1196, Jul. 2021, doi: [10.1038/s41591-021-01369-8](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01369-8).
[89] S. Ostrowitzki *et al.*, “A phase III randomized trial of gantenerumab in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease,” *Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy*, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 95, Dec. 2017, doi: [10.1186/s13195-017-0318-y](https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-017-0318-y).
[90] M. B. Rogers, “Signs of Lasting Benefit From Amyloid Immunotherapy?,” *Alzforum News*, 2025, Available: <https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/signs-lasting-benefit-amyloid-immunotherapy>
[91] C. V. Cauwenberghe, C. V. Broeckhoven, and K. Sleegers, “The genetic landscape of Alzheimer disease: Clinical implications and perspectives,” *Genetics in Medicine*, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 421–430, May 2016, doi: [10.1038/gim.2015.117](https://doi.org/10.1038/gim.2015.117).
[92] T. Jonsson *et al.*, “A mutation in APP protects against Alzheimer’s disease and age-related cognitive decline,” *Nature*, vol. 488, no. 7409, pp. 96–99, Aug. 2012, doi: [10.1038/nature11283](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11283).
[93] J. A. Maloney *et al.*, “Molecular Mechanisms of Alzheimer Disease Protection by the A673T Allele of Amyloid Precursor Protein\*,” *Journal of Biological Chemistry*, vol. 289, no. 45, pp. 30990–31000, Nov. 2014, doi: [10.1074/jbc.M114.589069](https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M114.589069).
[94] D. Scheuner *et al.*, “Secreted amyloid β–protein similar to that in the senile plaques of Alzheimer’s disease is increased in vivo by the presenilin 1 and 2 and APP mutations linked to familial Alzheimer’s disease,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 2, no. 8, pp. 864–870, Aug. 1996, doi: [10.1038/nm0896-864](https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0896-864).
[95] B. De Strooper *et al.*, “Deficiency of presenilin-1 inhibits the normal cleavage of amyloid precursor protein,” *Nature*, vol. 391, no. 6665, pp. 387–390, Jan. 1998, doi: [10.1038/34910](https://doi.org/10.1038/34910).
[96] S. S. Plotkin and N. R. Cashman, “Passive immunotherapies targeting A*β* and tau in Alzheimer’s disease,” *Neurobiology of Disease*, vol. 144, p. 105010, Oct. 2020, doi: [10.1016/j.nbd.2020.105010](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbd.2020.105010).
[97] B. Falcon *et al.*, “Tau filaments from multiple cases of sporadic and inherited Alzheimer’s disease adopt a common fold,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 136, no. 5, pp. 699–708, Nov. 2018, doi: [10.1007/s00401-018-1914-z](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-018-1914-z).
[98] T. Guo, D. Korman, S. L. Baker, S. M. Landau, and W. J. Jagust, “Longitudinal Cognitive and Biomarker Measurements Support a Unidirectional Pathway in Alzheimer’s Disease Pathophysiology,” *Biological Psychiatry*, vol. 89, no. 8, pp. 786–794, Apr. 2021, doi: [10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.06.029](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.06.029).
[99] L. Wang *et al.*, “Evaluation of Tau Imaging in Staging Alzheimer Disease and Revealing Interactions Between β-Amyloid and Tauopathy,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 73, no. 9, pp. 1070–1077, Sep. 2016, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2016.2078](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2016.2078).
[100] D. A. Bennett, J. A. Schneider, R. S. Wilson, J. L. Bienias, E. Berry-Kravis, and S. E. Arnold, “Amyloid mediates the association of apolipoprotein E e4 allele to cognitive function in older people,” *Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry*, vol. 76, no. 9, pp. 1194–1199, Sep. 2005, doi: [10.1136/jnnp.2004.054445](https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2004.054445).
[101] W. J. Lee *et al.*, “Regional Aβ-tau interactions promote onset and acceleration of Alzheimer’s disease tau spreading,” *Neuron*, vol. 110, no. 12, pp. 1932–1943.e5, Jun. 2022, doi: [10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.034](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.034).
[102] M. Jin, N. Shepardson, T. Yang, G. Chen, D. Walsh, and D. J. Selkoe, “Soluble amyloid β-protein dimers isolated from Alzheimer cortex directly induce Tau hyperphosphorylation and neuritic degeneration,” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, vol. 108, no. 14, pp. 5819–5824, Apr. 2011, doi: [10.1073/pnas.1017033108](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1017033108).
[103] B. Vasconcelos *et al.*, “Heterotypic seeding of Tau fibrillization by pre-aggregated Abeta provides potent seeds for prion-like seeding and propagation of Tau-pathology in vivo,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 131, no. 4, pp. 549–569, Apr. 2016, doi: [10.1007/s00401-015-1525-x](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-015-1525-x).
[104] R. E. Bennett *et al.*, “Enhanced Tau Aggregation in the Presence of Amyloid β,” *The American Journal of Pathology*, vol. 187, no. 7, pp. 1601–1612, Jul. 2017, doi: [10.1016/j.ajpath.2017.03.011](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajpath.2017.03.011).
[105] T. Bolmont *et al.*, “Induction of tau pathology by intracerebral infusion of amyloid-β-containing brain extract and by amyloid-β deposition in APP × tau transgenic mice,” *The American Journal of Pathology*, vol. 171, no. 6, pp. 2012–2020, Dec. 2007, doi: [10.2353/ajpath.2007.070403](https://doi.org/10.2353/ajpath.2007.070403).
[106] L. A. Gomes *et al.*, “Aβ-induced acceleration of Alzheimer-related τ-pathology spreading and its association with prion protein,” *Acta Neuropathologica*, vol. 138, no. 6, pp. 913–941, Dec. 2019, doi: [10.1007/s00401-019-02053-5](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-019-02053-5).
[107] J. Götz, F. Chen, J. van Dorpe, and R. M. Nitsch, “Formation of Neurofibrillary Tangles in P301L Tau Transgenic Mice Induced by Aβ42 Fibrils,” *Science*, vol. 293, no. 5534, pp. 1491–1495, Aug. 2001, doi: [10.1126/science.1062097](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1062097).
[108] D. E. Hurtado *et al.*, “Aβ accelerates the spatiotemporal progression of tau pathology and augments tau amyloidosis in an Alzheimer mouse model,” *American Journal of Pathology*, vol. 177, no. 4, pp. 1977–1988, Oct. 2010, doi: [10.2353/ajpath.2010.100346](https://doi.org/10.2353/ajpath.2010.100346).
[109] J. Lewis *et al.*, “Enhanced Neurofibrillary Degeneration in Transgenic Mice Expressing Mutant Tau and APP,” *Science*, vol. 293, no. 5534, pp. 1487–1491, Aug. 2001, doi: [10.1126/science.1058189](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1058189).
[110] T. Li *et al.*, “The neuritic plaque facilitates pathological conversion of tau in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model,” *Nature Communications*, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 12082, Jul. 2016, doi: [10.1038/ncomms12082](https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12082).
[111] A. M. Pooler *et al.*, “Amyloid accelerates tau propagation and toxicity in a model of early Alzheimer’s disease,” *Acta Neuropathologica Communications*, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 14, Mar. 2015, doi: [10.1186/s40478-015-0199-x](https://doi.org/10.1186/s40478-015-0199-x).
[112] I.-C. Stancu *et al.*, “Tauopathy contributes to synaptic and cognitive deficits in a murine model for Alzheimer’s disease,” *The FASEB Journal*, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 2620–2631, 2014, doi: [10.1096/fj.13-246702](https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.13-246702).
[113] R. M. Cohen *et al.*, “A Transgenic Alzheimer Rat with Plaques, Tau Pathology, Behavioral Impairment, Oligomeric Aβ, and Frank Neuronal Loss,” *Journal of Neuroscience*, vol. 33, no. 15, pp. 6245–6256, Apr. 2013, doi: [10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3672-12.2013](https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3672-12.2013).
[114] ClinicalTrials.gov, “DIAN‑TU Amyloid Removal Trial (ART): A Phase IIIb/IV Open‑Label Study of Lecanemab in Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Disease.” ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT06384573, Jun. 10, 2024. Accessed: Jul. 24, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06384573>
[115] ClinicalTrials.gov, “AHEAD 3–45 Study: A Phase 3 Placebo‑Controlled, Double‑Blind, Parallel‑Arm, 216‑Week Trial (with Extension) Evaluating BAN2401 (Lecanemab) in Preclinical/Early Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease (A45 & A3 Trials).” ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04468659, Jul. 14, 2020. Accessed: Jul. 24, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04468659>
[116] C. J. Mummery *et al.*, “Tau-targeting antisense oligonucleotide MAPTRx in mild Alzheimer’s disease: A phase 1b, randomized, placebo-controlled trial,” *Nature Medicine*, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 1437–1447, Jun. 2023, doi: [10.1038/s41591-023-02326-3](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02326-3).
[117] A. L. Edwards *et al.*, “Exploratory Tau Biomarker Results From a Multiple Ascending-Dose Study of BIIB080 in Alzheimer Disease: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” *JAMA Neurology*, vol. 80, no. 12, pp. 1344–1352, Dec. 2023, doi: [10.1001/jamaneurol.2023.3861](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2023.3861).
[118] S. S. Dominy *et al.*, “Porphyromonas gingivalis in Alzheimer’s disease brains: Evidence for disease causation and treatment with small-molecule inhibitors,” *Science Advances*, vol. 5, no. 1, p. eaau3333, Jan. 2019, doi: [10.1126/sciadv.aau3333](https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau3333).
[119] D. M. Cairns, N. Rouleau, R. N. Parker, K. G. Walsh, L. Gehrke, and D. L. Kaplan, “A 3D human brain–like tissue model of herpes-induced Alzheimer’s disease,” *Science Advances*, vol. 6, no. 19, p. eaay8828, May 2020, doi: [10.1126/sciadv.aay8828](https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay8828).
[120] S. J. Soscia *et al.*, “The Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated Amyloid β-Protein Is an Antimicrobial Peptide,” *PLOS ONE*, vol. 5, no. 3, p. e9505, Mar. 2010, doi: [10.1371/journal.pone.0009505](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009505).
[121] K. Bourgade *et al.*, “Β-Amyloid peptides display protective activity against the human Alzheimer’s disease-associated herpes simplex virus-1,” *Biogerontology*, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 85–98, Feb. 2015, doi: [10.1007/s10522-014-9538-8](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-014-9538-8).
[122] P. Spitzer *et al.*, “Amyloidogenic amyloid-β-peptide variants induce microbial agglutination and exert antimicrobial activity,” *Scientific Reports*, vol. 6, no. 1, p. 32228, Sep. 2016, doi: [10.1038/srep32228](https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32228).
[123] C. Piller, “Blots on a field? A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease.” Accessed: Jul. 23, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease>
[124] D. Elton, “When ‘weak links’ in science matter – high profile fraud in Alzheimer’s disease research.” Oct. 20, 2024. Available [here](https://moreisdifferent.blog/p/when-weak-links-in-science-matter).
[125] M. B. Rogers, “Sylvain Lesné, who found Aβ\*56, accused of image manipulation,” *Alzforum.org*, Jul. 2022, Available:<https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation>
[126] J. Cummings, G. Lee, A. Ritter, M. Sabbagh, and K. Zhong, “Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2020,” *Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions*, vol. 6, no. 1, p. e12050, 2020, doi: [10.1002/trc2.12050](https://doi.org/10.1002/trc2.12050).
[127] J. Cummings, Y. Zhou, G. Lee, K. Zhong, J. Fonseca, and F. Cheng, “Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2024,” *Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions*, vol. 10, no. 2, p. e12465, 2024, doi: [10.1002/trc2.12465](https://doi.org/10.1002/trc2.12465).
[128] ClinicalTrials.gov, “Safety Study of Passive Immunization for Patients With Mild to Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease.” ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00174525, May 09, 2012. Accessed: Jul. 23, 2025. [Online]. Available:<https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT00174525> | Scott Alexander | 170977449 | In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities
*[Original post: [Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp)]*
**1:** Comments About The Theory **2:** Comments About Specific Communities
**3:** Other Comments
## Comments About The Theory
**Darwin [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142389012):**
> I think you may (\*may\*, I'm not sure) be vastly underestimating how many people are in some form of nontraditional tight-knit community.
>
> Notice that many of the communities you list are things you've directly personally encountered through your online interests or social circle. Most people have never heard of libertarian homesteaders or rationalist dating sites, perhaps you have also never heard of the things most other people belong to.
>
> For my part, I have been part of a foam combat ('boffer') organization since college. You may want to say 'that's not a community, that's just a hobby', but the people in this sport form a strong community with tight bonds outside the game itself. Not only do I go to practices twice a week, I have 2 D&D games and 1 board game night every week with mostly members of the community, members of the community are my friends that I go out to movies and dinners with, play video games with voice chat on Discord with, talk to online in Discord servers and web forums and group chats, go to parties with and gossip about with other community members. Aside from attending over a dozen weddings of community members (mostly to other community members), I've served as best man for 2 members and wedding officiant for 2 other members. The sport itself has houses, guilds, and fighting units, all with their own ethos, credos, goals, activities, and hierarchies; it has knighthoods and squireships, it has awards for arts and crafts and community service. The sport has regular camping events that end up looking like temporary compounds of hundreds to thousand+ members, lasting from a weekend to a week. We may not have a singular God or Invisible Hand we all worship, but we have strong community norms towards things like inclusion, creating positive experiences, some modernized gender-neutral version of chivalry, creating safe spaces, etc.
>
> If you didn't know me very very well, you might know that 'oh yeah, he does some kind of sword fighting thing on the weekends I think?', and not know there's a large and strong community there.
>
> I wonder how many other things are like this - I think 'oh yeah, they play softball on the weekends, oh yeah, they belong to a knitting circle, oh yeah, they go to a lot of concerts, oh yeah, they volunteer at some kind of community center', and have no idea that there's a strong close-knit community surrounding those things that remains largely invisible to outsiders.
**Logan ([blog](https://lbryck.substack.com)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142478012):**
> As another commenter (darwin) said, I think Scott is underestimating how many people are in ~5/10 "weird" intentional communities, comparable to rationalism. Rationalism is just more salient to him, because he's in it. A lot of 5/10 weird intentional communities are pretty invisible to people outside of them.
>
> FIRE (as in Financial Independence/Retire Early) in particular comes to mind as another weird community that absolutely corresponds with his thesis of affluence enabling more niche community-building. FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado. It's way easier for everybody to go to a community meetup in the desert for a week or two if they're affluent. That applies to a FIRE meetup I went to in the desert in Utah, and also calls Burning Man to mind. Tons of people just draw the line of weirdness at a place where they can blend into "normal" liberal society.
>
> So a 9/10 weird cult is a really different place to draw the line, but it's really quite normal to be in a 5/10 weird community, almost certainly not only 10% like Scott estimates. And since "weirdness" is defined by what gets ostracized, it's notable that the communities we define as the most weird are the most illiberal - conservative/orthodox religious sects. Illiberalism is "weird" in a liberal society because illiberalism is definitionally the one thing that liberalism openly ostracizes.
I appreciate the FIRE example - if they’re taking over parts of neighborhoods, they at least get a 5/10 on my scale.
Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this; I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of. If 50K people are that seriously into FIRE, and there are a thousand communities of that size, and there’s 50% overlap (e.g. someone who’s both into FIRE and a Mormon), then that’s still consistent with less than 10%!
**Mutton Dressed As Mutton [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142389812):**
> I think the problem with the material abundance version of tight-knit community is that most people don't really want tight-knit community. They want the benefits but not the downsides.
>
> The downsides are both real and unfortunately deeply and inextricably linked to the benefits. You can maybe buy your way out of some of the downsides, but at some point you have to accept the package. You can imagine a kibbutz that is less insane, but a kibbutz that is just a chill place where people do their own thing is not a kibbutz. Most people don't want the full kibbutz.
>
> Cartoons Hate Her makes this point better and at length: [The Village Nobody Wants](https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-village-nobody-wants).
>
> Groups like the Amish (and Hasidic Jews, etc.) achieve community by raising the costs of leaving so high that most members aren't willing to bear them. Some do, and the stories are often quite sad (<https://www.amazon.com/All-Who-Go-Not-Return/dp/1555977057/>). Even less insular communities, like the Mormons, do something like this (although mainstream Mormons could be regarded as striking a fairly successful balance).
>
> I suspect rationalist enclaves are long-term unstable like most intentional communities. They aren't actually drafting on wealth, they are just huffing ideology and will eventually implode or explode. I've had some limited exposure to deeply rationalist subcultures, and what I mainly observed was that they were extremely weird. I say that, sincerely, without judgment -- it's fine to be weird, even good in many ways -- but weirdness doesn't seem like enough to hang a community on. The moment will pass, people will move on.
I think it’s worth distinguishing among four strategies for community:
1. **The medieval peasant strategy:** you are stuck in a tiny village for your whole life, guess you’ve got community whether you like it or not.
2. **The Orthodox Jewish strategy:** try to replicate the medieval peasant strategy within a large modern society by starting with an ethnicity/religion and having very high barriers to exit.
3. **The Cartoons Hate Her strategy:** try to get random people close to you to form a community - but they might not find it very engaging and it might never start to begin with.
4. **The liberal (eg rationalist / libertarian / foam boffer / LGBTQ / FIRE) strategy**: try to gather a particular type of person together into a “natural” community that feels intuitive and low-effort because members are doing things they believe in (or enjoy) with people who are deeply similar to them. Here the “barrier to exit” is that the community is already optimized for your preferences and you would be less happy outside of it.
I claim that the first two work better in conditions of poverty (because they’re based on barriers to exit), the third works only sporadically and doesn’t scale, and the fourth works better in conditions of affluence (because it requires people to sort themselves, which might mean choosing where to live based for community rather than financial reasons).
**Ariel ([blog](https://www.zappable.com/)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142384027):**
> Just because something is valuable, that doesn't mean people will put in the effort to achieve it. Even putting aside monetary issues, it's a huge effort to build a community, and people won't necessarily go ahead and do it. An advantage of religion (and maybe the techo-rationalist space) is that they provide natural conditions for building a community.
But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
**DangerouslyUnstable [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142415850):**
> I think the problem with this idea is that: when there isn't a single default strong community, most people do the lazy thing and choose not to participate. I think that no matter how rich people got, most people would never be part of a strong community because being part of a strong community takes effort. I think this is why, despite living in the richest nation in the history of the planet, we have some of the weakest/least amount of strong communities, which is why I find your comment that more money = more community strange. Yes, for people who care, having money makes it easier. But all of western civilization is proof that more money does not, in general, equal more community.
>
> If you make community opt-in, as liberalism does (and to be very clear, I'm pro liberalism), most people will not go to the effort of opting in. Almost everyone in the US is rich enough that, if they wanted, they could be part of a strong community. They are just uninterested in the effort that would take.
I don’t think “effort” is the exact right way of looking at this.
Compare this to some sort of impressive athletic accomplishment - let’s say being able to lift 300 lbs. If I wanted to be able to lift 300 lbs, this would be *effortful*, but not *complicated*. I would Google “good gym routine”, find a gym near me, go a couple times a week, gradually ramp up, and eventually achieve my goal.
If I wanted to be in a very strong community, I don’t think there’s any way to *just* “expend effort” and make it happen. Maybe I could learn Hebrew and convert to Orthodox Judaism, but there are lots of reasons not to do that besides just laziness (plus one extra reason for people who aren’t already circumcised!) If I wanted a community of the “ten normal-ish families on a suburban block raising children together” variety, this seems about as tough as founding a new company, in the sense that you need to be creative, agentic, and willing to risk everything falling apart.
This is what I mean by “this space needs entrepreneurs”. If I want a Ferrari, it’s going to be *expensive*, but not *complicated*. Once there are expensive and effortful, but not complicated, ways to get a good community, I’ll be more willing to believe that effort is the barrier.
**Justin [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142891625):**
> The example of the Mormons is a good one, but in more ways than “get lots of people of the same religion together in one place”. That model was certainly true of the early church, but the real innovation of modern Mormonism is exporting the same community-building model to all four corners of the earth. A common experience for Latter-day Saints traveling abroad is to be struck by how nearly identical the Sunday experience is whether in Africa, America, or Asia. The upshot of the Church’s system of social organization is that it is effortless for a Latter-day Saint person to slot into a new community wherever they go, and it is likewise easy for the community to sustain itself as individuals naturally come and go while they pursue their secular lives and careers. That kind of physical location independence goes a long way towards solving the practical problems highlighted in the post.
Maybe the Mormons are the entrepreneurs we’re looking for?
## Comments About Specific Communities
**Ebrima Lelisa writes:**
> I doubt the conclusion of this post.
>
> I've visited an Indian friend in rural Pennsylvania. Their housing community is 98% Indian. There's only 1 non-Indian family out of the 50 houses.
>
> Close to where I live there's an apartment block which is 80% Indian, especially students.
>
> If money is an issue or anti-discrimination laws then how do these communities form?
Great point! And I agree Indians are the best example - too new to piggyback off older communities like Chinatowns, and usually rich enough that their proximity can’t be dismissed as ghettoization. I don’t really have a great explanation for this; maybe it just proves that if you’re committed enough you can still make it work.
**Hilarius Bookbinder ([blog](https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142381739):**
> *» “Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains?”*
>
> There seems to be a movement in exactly that direction: <https://www.returntotheland.org/about>
Their site says “Return to the Land is a private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry. We hold events and conferences, and we help groups of our members form European heritage communities…We will return to the land to separate ourselves from a failing modern society, and we will make positive cultural changes in ourselves and in our ancestral communities” - so yeah, that sure is a movement towards trad whites-only farming villages.
Their first test community has bought land in Arkansas, and there are a few articles on it, including [this one](https://ca.news.yahoo.com/internet-completely-stunned-whites-only-153211608.html) which describes it as “about 40 inhabitants who live on 150 acres of land [with] cabins, roads, wells, a community center, and a schoolhouse”, and [this](https://news.sky.com/story/inside-the-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas-the-group-building-a-fortress-for-the-white-race-13399875) interview with movement leader Eric Orwoll, who says that “a second Hitler won’t arrive unless people do the work”, but that “when I say, you're gonna have to wait for that new Hitler to arise, I'm not saying you're going to have to wait for a new person to start a new Holocaust. I am saying you are going to wait for a charismatic leader who is going to advocate for your interests”. How Orwollian.
Richard Hanania has [an article supporting the movement here](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/no-to-borders-yes-to-allowing-whites), as part of a galaxy-brained defense of open borders. His argument is that you have no right to keep foreigners out of “your” country, but that if you want a foreigner-free community you can always form some enclave on private property like these people are doing. I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?
**Yosef [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142383616):**
> You forgot ultra-orthodox Jews. There are, depending on how you define it, at least two Hasidic towns in New York and a supermajority Jewish town in New Jersey.
>
> Many people in those places work 'secular' jobs, but a job as a PA in a medical practice where almost all of the providers and patients are Jewish isn't really secular. If you work in a clothing store selling Jewish clothing, is it really a secular job?
He’s right. I added them in, along with the Mormons. Other suggestions for groups I forgot include Mennonites and Hutterites (similar to Amish), [online gamers](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142387991), [the military](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142387991), and [the Long Now Foundation](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142423227).
**Matthew Talamini [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142723895):**
> The Amish are actually illegal. For instance, some sects don't believe in smoke detectors, so none of their buildings are compliant with fire codes. Each community has one smoke detector stashed away somewhere, and when they construct a new building, they stick it in an appropriate place until the inspection is done, then take it down and put it away. (Or, that's the rumor.)
>
> It's the same with sewage rules, egress requirements, etc. Many of which are ridiculous for structures that don't have electricity or running water. But it's still illegal to violate ridiculous laws.
>
> In many places they've succeeded in negotiating carve-outs for their settlements in local building codes. But in others, officials just turn a blind eye, or else it's a source of constant conflict.
>
> Roughly all of the examples of intentional community Scott points to are (technically) illegal in one way or another. Education, child welfare, zoning, public accommodation laws, animal welfare, discrimination, public health, child labor laws, etc.
>
> Mostly, in the US, as long as everyone involved consents, you can get away with breaking these kinds of laws. But if you become A Problem, or if somebody complains about you, your situation can become quite tenuous. The Amish have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court as recently as 2021 (to avoid installing septic tanks for their graywater).
Granted that this is true for the Amish. I’m less sure it matters for the average community, for whom the level of smoke detectors in buildings isn’t a big issue.
Still, many people tried to argue that government repression was a major block on community creation. One reader mentioned [EPIC City, Texas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_City,_Texas), a proposed Muslim community which was being fought by anti-Muslim conservatives who accused it of wanting “sharia law” (organizers countered that it was just going to be a neighborhood around a mosque, without any special legal carveout). Other people brought up the way housing discrimination law bars most forms of choosing who you live with, making it hard to have an Xs-only neighborhood.
I am mostly skeptical of how much this matters because of how many groups manage to have communities anyway, but some readers tried to argue there were specific stories for how each of them escaped the problem (either getting grandfathered in, like the Amish, or being sufficiently-liked-by-leftists to escape anti-discrimination law, like various immigrant groups)
## Other Comments
**Notmy Realname [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142387640):**
> I wouldn't consider bay area rationalists a bona fide Community, just a social club, until you demonstrate enough sticking power to grow your community in perpetuity. Every other Community you mentioned (besides the libertarians who I also don't count) have a relatively low churn rate and enough growth to keep up with it. Are you confident that you'll be able to continue pulling in new members a decade from now? Do you think your kids will turn apostate?
I’m sort of confident? We haven’t gone through a full generational turnover yet, but the first cadre of people who got involved in the late-2000s (eg me) are in their forties now, and we still have new twenty-year-old college students joining each year. Around 2022, when the rest of the world realized that AI would be important, I worried we would lose our distinctiveness. But the rest of the world has dropped the ball as usual - the stochastic parrot folks most obviously, but even the average person who talks about “superintelligence” these days just seems to imagine ChatGPT getting extra-good and making OpenAI extra-rich. So I’ve updated towards thinking we have some edge which is hard to replicate.
But I also don’t think this matters too much for my broader point. A liberal society of constantly shifting strong communities, each of which only lasts one to two generations, would be perfectly fine, as long as there are new ones springing up to replace the old. There would be something sad about your kids probably being in a different community from you, but in many cases that’s already a given (the average LGBT person knows there’s a strong chance any children they have will grow up to be straight) and maybe it’s ultimately for the better (if there was a 99% chance that rationalists’ children would stay in the rationalist community, I would worry we were doing some sort of brainwashing - if instead they get really into FIRE and find a community there, maybe that’s a best-case scenario).
**Walruss ([blog](https://walruss10.substack.com/?utm_content=comment_metadata&utm_source=substack-feed-item)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142386184):**
> This is missing something unique about this moment in history, and I'm super skeptical of arguments that start with "this is missing something unique about this moment in history."
>
> The past 3 generations have been defined by absurd abundance. Not just abundance of material comforts, but abundance of media and the removal of almost every point of friction to consumption. The latest breakthroughs in entertainment products literally weaponize psychology knowledge to encourage continuous engagement. Even without that, having access to television 24 hours a day is a banquet of entertainment options of which a serf can only dream. The biggest impediment to community isn't the liberal world order, it's that video games have gotten really really good.
>
> So what's the solution? Wait a minute. Like most of the world I've spent a decade doing nothing but consuming entertainment products and now I'm sad, isolated, and devoid of meaning. So I've started going outside again. I've started playing board games at friends' houses. A breakthrough of miraculous proportions, the other day I went to a game night and nobody brought out a board game. We just sat and talked.
>
> We did a big social experiment of "what would it be like if instead of spending time with each other we just stayed in our house, ordered food to be delivered to our door, and consumed 12 hours of entertainment a day." We enjoyed it at first, but eventually got bored. So I'm optimistic about community going forward.
>
> ...depending on how good the chatbots get at flattering us while pretending to be real people.
I agree that we’re being hit with constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media, and haven’t socially adapted yet.
I’m less optimistic that we’ve reached some kind of tipping point. I think we probably adapt to each step (ie our great-grandparents would be horrified at our current lifestyle, but we would be equally horrified to have to live like our great-grandparents), and that some of the realizing-this-is-bad has to be done on a person-by-person basis, and that as old people die and new young people age into the targetable-by-addictive-media demographic everyone has to learn the same lesson over and over again.
I’m less enthusiastic about a society-wide re-orientation than I am about the first few social entrepreneurs creating Amish-lite style communities, those communities gradually going through respectability cascades of early adopters → semi-early adopters → normal people, and then alternatives being available and thinkable for merely-normal-agency people at earlier and earlier stages of the disillusionment process.
**Phil H [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/should-strong-gods-bet-on-gdp/comment/142389424):**
> I don’t buy the money argument. The USA is already the richest country in the world. Adding more money won’t make it less like it is. One problem the USA seems to face is that many of the world’s good and bad ideas are invented there. Europeans have a bit of perspective, and can take from the American experience whatever seems good to them. In the USA, as soon as you decide to do something sensible like build a strong community within the liberal framework, a new shiny object comes along and interrupts your plans. Being on the forefront isn’t easy!
**Ethics Gradient writes:**
> I think UBI isn't enough here, you also need to do something about status competition. I could probably afford most necessities I consume on half my current income (revealed preference: I invest a lot of that income. Albeit obviously having a lot invested income is valuable for deferred consumption), but I am also a social primate attempting to maintain status for myself and my offspring among a bunch of other social primates similarly competing. "Literally not starving" is basically a solved problem, and "having sufficient good and services to live a superior life in terms of objective rather than relative consumption to a supermajority of historical humans" is also basically solved. But, for example, living in San Francisco requires a San Francisco income, and living well / keeping up in status competition requires more of that.
>
> The Internet, unfortunately, works largely against this by making status competition less localized even while Dunbar's number and cognitive space remains constant.
Yeah, this is a good point. I hope the post-singularity version is immune to this (if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern). Otherwise I don’t know how to solve it, except by making community itself high-status (which I think is somewhat happening in some sectors).
**Amica Terra ([blog](https://asmallkernel.substack.com/?utm_content=comment_metadata&utm_source=substack-feed-item)) writes:**
> While this post is helpful (I agree that abundance and communities are not contrary, especially in the sense that more abundance means you need less coercion to retain community standards), I think this is the wrong lens for this issue. The book The Upswing by Putnam is incredibly important as a historical social science grounding for debates around weakening communities. Most of these debates assume a monotonic decrease in community (which also seems to be happening here), but The Upswing takes great pains to note all the ways that in the first half of the 20th century, all the indicators of strong communities in America were going UP.
>
> We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today. But because we have been so focused on the last 60-odd years of data, we have missed the incredibly important context of the (titular) upswing that occurred in the first half of the 20th century in America and didn't require populism (in fact, the Populist movement in America was strongest right BEFORE the upswing began, ~1870-1900), and it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals. This increase in community and togetherness was a strong trend through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Postwar years. It wasn't costless! There were reasons people rebelled against the reigning order in the 1960s and 1970s. But every solution creates its own problems, and I think making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue.
**Shaun Willden writes:**
> I think the core challenge to rich, liberal would-be communities is that true community is built upon serving one another, on deep interdependence.
>
> Real interdependence is naturally achieved by groups of poor villagers who all must work together to survive. It's also easy for better-off but still not really wealthy religious communities who support one another emotionally and financially through the inevitable hard times experienced by individual families. Their shared faith plus knowledge that they, too, will someday need community support holds them together.
>
> The need for mutual support motivates people to work through and/or ignore the inevitable interpersonal frictions. But as wealth rises, institutions take responsibility for helping with hard times, and looser and more distant online communities provide information and emotional and sometimes even financial support (e.g. gofundme) the tangible need for tight-knit community decreases. There's still a desire for such connections, but it's not enough to motivate the effort and tolerance required.
>
> I don't think shared hobbies or even religious faith is enough when people don't actually need each other, and the impersonal interdependence of markets clearly doesn't. | Scott Alexander | 170594376 | Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities | acx |
# Open Thread 394
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
---
**1:** This is your last chance to [apply for this year’s ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant-2025). Deadline is end-of-day PST this Friday.
**2:** Anthropic is hiring a research engineer for the Model Welfare team - ie figuring out whether their AIs are conscious or have feelings or something, and if so how to make sure they’re okay. Candidates should have expertise in ML and maybe philosophy/neuroscience/cogsci. Job is office-remote hybrid with the office in SF, salary is $315K+, non-Americans are welcome to apply and see if Anthropic can sponsor their visa. [Learn more / apply here](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4812169008).
**3:** UK AISI is looking to distribute £15m in AI alignment funding, for projects that need anywhere from a $100K pre-seed up to $1-2m. Collaborators included Anthropic, DeepMind, etc. See [their priority areas](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/research-agenda) and [apply here](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/how-to-apply) by September 10th.
**4:** In [the post on embryo selection](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection), I mentioned that Herasight [criticized](https://herasight.substack.com/p/building-better-scores?open=false#%C2%A7orchids-reported-performance-for-alzheimers-and-other-traits-is-misleading) Orchid's Alzheimer's predictor. A representative of Orchid reached out to say they stood by their methodology:
> Herasight seems to be misreading [our whitepaper](https://guides.orchidhealth.com/post/alzheimers-disease-whitepaper). The “Performant Alzheimer’s disease risk stratification” section is meant to show the kind of performance patients can expect—people in the top 5% have an OR of 5.80, top 3% is 7.35, and top 1% is 11.69. This odds ratio is what is used to present embryo disease risk to patients and does not include covariates. The “Comparison to Published Benchmarks” section is just about comparing our models to others in the literature. To allow a head to head comparison, we used the same metric (AUC) and covariates as the paper we’re comparing against. However, to avoid future confusion, we’ve just added a sentence clarifying the AUC without covariates (0.724).
They also state that Herasight, like themselves, has only validated the predictors where there’s enough data (e.g. not schizophrenia), and they object to Herasight claiming superiority in this area.
**5:** New subscribers-only post - [Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dream-book-review-the-deal-with-trauma). “Last week, I had an unusually vivid dream about writing a book review for ACX. When I woke up, I remembered the review almost word-for-word. In some sense this is a best case scenario - write posts in my sleep, and spend my waking hours relaxing on the beach - but unfortunately the book I was reviewing doesn’t exist and most of what I say about it doesn’t make sense. Still, I’m posting [it] here.” | Scott Alexander | 170660113 | Open Thread 394 | acx |
# Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
---
My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes.
As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time.
I lobbied my parents for pasta or frozen tater tots or any other side I actually liked. Family dinners were often dichotomous, the same protein supplemented by two different carbs. “You are not my son,” my father would joke as he continued to put away his potato slop. “Maybe you’re not my father,” I’d shoot back when he shunned the rest of the family’s rice pilaf. Our starch preferences seemed irreconcilable.
As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I’d tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try.
Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things:
> 1) Mashed potatoes are good.
>
> 2) Whatever my dad had been eating at home was *not* mashed potatoes.
>
> 3) My world is built on lies.
### Mashed Potatoes are Good
Potatoes were domesticated several millennia ago at the dawn of agriculture in the rugged highlands near Lake Titicaca in modern-day Peru. Their origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked *solanum* roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins. From this paltry stock of nightshades, archaic peoples of the Andes gradually husbanded generous, nutritious, mild tubers that would remain the staple of the region’s foodways through several successive civilizations.
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes ([source](https://www.cultivariable.com/instructions/potatoes/how-to-grow-wild-potatoes/solanum-acaule/))
Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties.
To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called [chuño](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o). Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object.
The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value.
After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy.
With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes.
Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in *[The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy](https://archive.org/details/TheArtOfCookery)* is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today:
Maſhed Potatoes.
> BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up.
Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato.
Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island *still* has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.
Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes.
As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too.
### Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes
The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.
These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dehydrated_shredded_potatoes.jpg))
The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front.
The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato *flakes* rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer.
This raises the question, though, of *why* food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?
This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.
Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few:
* **Industrial inertia**: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
* **Genuine innovation**: Technologies brought to maturity during and after the war, notably frozen food, offer novel consumer benefits that stand on their own merits.
* **Tastes fixed by rationing**: Consumer habits are sticky. People who spent a couple years forced to buy margarine instead of rationed butter, or skim milk instead of rationed meat, got used to those items and wanted to continue buying them in greater quantities than the prewar status quo.
* **Pursuit of efficiency**: As women entered the workforce en masse in the postwar era, the pool of hours available to be spent on domestic labor like cooking shrank. As much as any dishwasher or washing machine, convenience foods are labor-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies for the home.
This last factor is the only one that can explain the continued development of instant mashed potato technology. There were no potato-*flaking* interests during the war to have inertia; the instant mashed potatoes are notsuperior to their fresh antecedents; there was no ingrained consumer preference for an instant mashed potato product. It is only the desire to reduce time spent on food prep that could create “better instant mashed potatoes” as a commercially viable R&D space in the 1950s.
The other factors contributed to the unique awfulness of *my father’s* instant mashed potatoes, though.
Another WWII technological innovation, the cavity magnetron used in radar installations, led directly to the invention of the home microwave oven which began to proliferate widely in the 1970s. The microwave supercharged all “convenience food” trends, shortening not just prep time but cooking time as well. Uneven heating is hardly a concern when you can speed up your meals by a factor of ten.
Meanwhile, the existing postwar status of margarine and skim milk was greatly enhanced by the dietary fat scare of the 1980s and 1990s. These products displaced butter and whole milk as health-conscious consumers sought to eliminate saturated fats from their diets in a doomed effort to stave off the incipient obesity epidemic.
My parents, both already primed to accept these imitative products by my grandparents’ wartime preference formation, exclusively purchased margarine and skim milk for the household once they got married. And, pressed for time with two jobs and two kids, they frequently purchased instant mashed potatoes as well. And cooked them in the microwave.
What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted with desiccated flakes, real milk with a thin byproduct, real butter with refined vegetable oil, real mashing with the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame with microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained.
Yet because the name was the same, my father still believed he was eating the same dish my grandma made, the same dish his ancestors ate in Ireland, the same dish Glasse wrote about a quarter millennium ago. The appeal to him was undiminished. His body ate the slurry, but his *mind* still ate the maſhed potatoes of his youth.
### My World is Built on Lies
In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/mambc2/til_while_instant_mashed_potatoes_tend_to_be/?rdt=65055) which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten.
There is a rhetorical sleight of hand happening in this Reddit post title.[1](#footnote-1) The phrasing implies that chuño resembles modern instant mashed potatoes in some way, that instant mashed potatoes are in some sense continuous with indigenous ways of potato-knowing. But there is no continuity of process, because the way chuño is created has no particular commonalities with the Philadelphia Cook beyond the removal of moisture. There is no continuity of form, for chuño actually looks like this:
([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chu%C3%B1o.jpg))
And there is no continuity of purpose, either. To the Andean peoples, chuño was the only way of ensuring that their potato crops would be available well into the future. In America, our indigenous way of achieving this potato security is the entire miracle of modern agriculture and food distribution. I don’t need to stomp on freeze-dried potatoes in the Altiplano to make sure I’ll have access to potato nutrients next year. I just have to rely on the continued existence of Idaho and Target. No, despite what this redditor would like to believe, the instant mashed potato serves some other purpose.
That purpose is illuminated by the second rhetorical sleight of hand in the Reddit post, the one occurring on the box, in the form of the offset between the yellow lower-case “Instant” and the white majuscule “MASHED POTATOES”. “These are fundamentally maſhed potatoes,” this typography lies, “that happen to have been given the quality of ‘instant’”.
But they’re not. They’re a different thing entirely, a completely new evolutionary lineage of potato preparation that’s called “instant mashed potatoes” even though they’ve never been mashed. They are as distinct from Glasse’s maſhed potatoes as chuño is, but they masquerade as being the same, because *that* is their purpose - the fulfillment of a psychological need to consume something resembling the classic dish of “mashed potatoes” with slightly less effort than that dish requires.
This is a pedantic distinction - but it’s a distinction that had a big impact on my culinary life, because *I believed the lie*. My mental category of “mashed potatoes” was hijacked by this impostor and it made me think, for years and years, that I hated something that I actually would have liked all along. My preference formation was distorted by this warped, hyper-optimized fulfillment of my *father*’s crystallized preference. The expedient way to fulfill one generation’s desire locked the next generation out of experiencing that desire at all.
At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were *just* mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.
Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:
1. Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
2. Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
3. Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
4. Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us *as if it were the original Thing.*
Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.
The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime, American cheese product, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs. We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods”[2](#footnote-2) are as demonized now as butter and whole milk were when my parents were young.
Expand the pattern to the built environment. Pressboard, particle board, and other reconstituted material composites likely make up a majority of new furniture sold in the US. These are an IMPish imitation of actual wood furniture. Take care while assembling not to ding your brittle sheetrock walls, an IMPish upgrade over lath and plaster. Often these interiors live inside an apartment building clad in a mish-mash of random ornament, anti-massing regulations demanding an IMPish simulation of a varied city block.
Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.
Corporate structures can be IMPish. When I visit a medical office it’s usually a confusing tangle of overlapping practitioners and practices operating out of the same physical address, an IMPish imitation of the archetypal doctor with a shingle in town. Similar quagmires abound when dealing with insurance, or contractors, or financial services.
Once you see the instant mashed potato antipattern it’s hard to stop. The isomorphisms are everywhere.
The gig economy makes IMPish jobs. Swiping apps produce IMPish flirting. Meta-studies are IMPish science. Ted Talks are IMPish symposia. Malls are IMPish shopping districts. Subdivisions are IMPish neighborhoods. Cruises are IMPish international travel, chopped into 14 hour chunks and emulsified with an ocean liner.
The internet scrapes together IMPish communities. We’re not atomized; we’re flaked. We’re Philadelphia Cooked, and we’re stewing here together in the microwave.
Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF.[3](#footnote-3)
Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it fully unleashed, a core method driving ‘progress’ across many different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the parsimonious recipe for industry to fulfill our urges. We’ve got the food processor whirring, and absolutely everything is going in.
Why must the real be shredded to achieve these simulacra? Why can substitute products not be synthesized out of whole cloth? Because the integration of shreds of the real provides psychic camouflage, a credible way for the IMPish mimics to signal as their models:
The problem with this, of course, is the problem I had with my father’s instant mashed potatoes: the substitute is only able to satisfy a craving if you have the craving in the first place, and that requires direct experience with that which it is meant to replace. The *memory* of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work, the mental spell that allows the transmutation from IMPish Thing to Thing (original).
If you get to the party too late, if you never get to taste the maſhed potatoes, all you’re left with is a confusingly disappointing slurry going by the same name. When no distinction is drawn between the IMPish thing and its original, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t even know there’s anything *to* miss - after all, you’re still eating “mashed potatoes”!
If the IMPishness is pervasive enough, eventually you start to disbelieve that any of these reconstituted things could ever have been worthwhile, that any of the desires and preferences being fulfilled by these slurries ever could have been authentic. “Is this really what life is?”, you wonder, never having lived. “I don’t see why everyone was so jazzed about it.”
### Cultivars of the Real
While formulating this review, I encountered a troubling congruence: the period during which my dad has been eating instant mashed potatoes consistently (roughly 1990-present) is about the same as the period between the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish potato famine in 1845. Why does one thirty-five-year pattern of potato consumption get to be considered authentic cultural heritage while another is self-deception? Aren’t they both equally contingent and ephemeral? Why should either be ‘real’?
This line of reasoning quickly starts to disclaim almost everything as fake. Masſed potatoes could only arise from the technologies of the age of the sail uniting old world tubers and new world dairy. They’ve only been around for a few centuries. Why should *they* get to be considered ‘real’? For that matter, why is the potato itself considered real? It’s a confection whipped up by the Andean farmers of the last few millennia. The only things that are *really* real on the Altiplano are nightshade and hunger.
I find such primitivism unhelpful in making the sort of distinction I aim to make here. Taken to the extreme it suggests that no hominid has experienced reality since the taming of fire. Some might agree that that’s the case! But as far as I’m concerned, at least some of the fruits of civilization are real too. I do think there is a way to conceive of the real that admits potatoes, that even admits masſed potatoes, but that gives legitimate reason to have grievance with IMPs.
On the Altiplano, the potato emerged through centuries of toil and discernment. Generation after generation of farmers chose only to propagate the *solanum* tubers that were bigger, tastier, less toxic, more nourishing. It is through such labor that every project of human civilization ultimately progresses - the ability, however imperfectly exercised, to act on the impulse “yes, more of this” when something is good, and “no, less of that” when it is bad.
As cultivators of the real, we get to choose not just among individual potatoes themselves, but among more abstract things like “memes concerning the preparation of potatoes”. Masſed potatoes were good, and so their meme propagated and strengthened the foodways it came in contact with. It was planted widely in the garden of the real. The WWII potato granule meme was bad, so it was discarded, cast out upon the rocks of the fake.
IMPish substitutes subvert this process of cultivation. In masquerading as other cultivars of meme, they weaken our stock both by sneaking into the garden despite their insalubrity, and by causing us, as I did for so long with maſhed potatoes, to reject the healthy older cultivars which they mimic.
Perhaps some of them are worth adding to our garden on their own merits. Perhaps many of them are! Many of the things I take for granted as ‘real’ are as far removed from their natural origins as a Yukon Gold is from those tiny nightshade roots, and in many cases I’m glad that we decided to keep them. But we must be clear-eyed about what each specimen is and what it is not in order to have any hope of making our decisions correctly.
Nowadays, I do not judge people for making use of instant mashed potatoes. I certainly take plenty of other prepared food culinary shortcuts myself. In the modern world we all make compromises for the sake of convenience. If we didn’t, we’d still be stomping on chuño to survive the winter.
But I do think it’s important to mind the distinction whenever you notice the IMPish pattern. There is a trick being played on you. You are not eating or watching or doing the Thing that your ancestors did, even if it contains the same ingredient and hides behind the same name. You’re planting something new in the garden of the real, and the nourishment it provides for your spirit, or the spirit of your children, may not be the same.
Fortunately, it is rare for even the most aggressive IMPish mimic to drive its model to extinction. It took over a decade, but I was eventually able to see past the deception of my father’s instant mashed potatoes and seek out the real version. Now I make maſhed potatoes regularly. My garden has one more good thing in it, and one less bad.
I even, on a recent visit to my grandmother’s house where I cooked St. Patrick’s Day dinner, got my dad to make real mashed potatoes himself, in a saucepan over a gas flame. It was the first time he’d ever done so. He enjoyed them.
\*\*\*
In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I purchased a plastic cup of my dad’s currently favored “Buttery Homestyle” Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy again.
---
Sources of potato facts (verified with primary sources linked within whenever possible):
<https://tedium.co/2017/11/21/mashed-potato-history/>
<https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/627023/mashed-potatoes-history>
<https://spudsmart.com/spud-history-instant-mashed-potatoes/>
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Ignoring the error that Ainu potato treatments like munini-imo are not ‘ancient’ at all, deriving from the long tail of the Columbian exchange in the 16th through 19th centuries like every other Old World potato dish. Comparisons between Instant Mashed Potatoes and munini-imo are precisely as inapt as with chuño, for the same reasons.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
“Processed” is a slippery term that evokes all kinds of chemical perversions, but the physical transformation of chopping into tiny bits is fundamental to the notion. Consider what a “food processor” does.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%. | a reader | 167090712 | Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes | acx |
# Fall Meetups Everywhere - Call for Organizers
There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try going to a meetup until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
**If you're willing to run a meetup for your city, please [fill out the organizer form](https://tinyurl.com/acx-volunteer).**
Here’s the plan:
* Interested organizers fill out the form by August 23rd.
* The list of meetups gets posted around August 24th.
* ACX Everywhere Meetups can take place anytime between September 1st and October 31st.
* People enjoy each other’s company and keep having meetups throughout the year.
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can email you if they have questions.
Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, markers, food, and drinks.
If you feel more ambitious, collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form.
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
**1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?**
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you sign up.
Don't worry, you signing up won't randomly take the job away from someone else. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever I think is best. (Or whoever Meetup Czar Skyler thinks is best.) But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. [This spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uGbesPvy_66ECd1Gd1nkugurLpo3x8orfjPyvyryY28/edit?gid=0#gid=0) shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after a basic check.
Lots of cities have existing meetup groups and we’ll probably prioritize them, but we always appreciate more options. Sometimes people assume their city is big enough that someone else will do it, nobody signs up before the announcement, and then afterwards people say they wish there was a meetup in their city. Beware the Bystander Effect!
If you *are* the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so.
**2. How will people hear about the meetup?**
You give me the information, and on August 24 (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on [LessWrong’s Community](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) page.
**3. When should I plan the meetup for?**
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 24, please choose sometime after that. Any day September 1st through October 31st is okay. I recommend a weekend, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid September or early October would be best. Check your local calendar for holidays where people might be busy: If you're in the US, that probably means avoid Labor Day and Halloween.
**4. How many people should I expect?**
Last spring, meetups ranged from one person (just the organizer) to around two hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many people most of them got last time [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1awPp1g2YigcGXOqaLPb8ecED0kRra9Q_KRcG-uyHomA/edit?usp=sharing). (If it’s blank, it means either no ACX Everywhere was run *or* we didn’t get a count of attendees in the post-event survey.`) Plan accordingly.
**5. Where should I hold the meetup?**
A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet.
**6. What should I do at the meetup?**
Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help:
* Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag
* Bring a list of icebreakers / conversation starters (e.g. “What have you been excited about recently?” or “How did you find the blog?” or “How many feet of giraffe neck do you think there are in the world?”)
* Bring one extroverted friend who’s read the blog
In general I would warn against trying to impose mandatory activities (e.g. “now we're all going to sit down and watch a PowerPoint presentation”), but it’s fine to give people the *option* to do something other than freeform socializing (e.g. “go over to that table if you want to play a game”).
It’s also useful to have a signup sheet for a local mailing list or other way to announce meetups in the future, but this is optional both for the organizers and the attendees. Look at point 8 for more information about this. It can also be nice to include a checkbox on the signup sheet for adjacent local groups if your city happens to have those.
**7. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?**
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
**8. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?**
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but running more meetups seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A REGULAR MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own and wouldn’t have decided to run things without someone offering.
**9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?**
I have in the past and had a lot of fun, but also found it pretty tiring. Since I expect to have less time and energy for travel, I’ll probably just attend the local one in Berkeley.
Again,**[you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://tinyurl.com/acx-volunteer)**. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uGbesPvy_66ECd1Gd1nkugurLpo3x8orfjPyvyryY28/edit?gid=0#gid=0). Everyone else, just wait until 8/24 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
**10. What if I have other questions?**
Skyler and I will read the comments here. | Skyler | 168894975 | Fall Meetups Everywhere - Call for Organizers | acx |
# Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote [Liberalism Needs Community](https://www.persuasion.community/p/liberalism-needs-community). As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is:
> According to R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine *First Things*, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “[strong Gods](https://www.regnery.com/9781684512690/return-of-the-strong-gods/)” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.
>
> However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.
In other words - yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) *one* group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.
On a theoretical level, this is a great answer. On a practical level - is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them.
It’s worth surveying the exceptions that prove the rule:
* **The Amish**: They live apart in tight-knit communities with strong countercultural values, and carefully control their technological and ideological environment. 10/10.
* **Cults and communes:** Any cult mature enough to have its own compound, or any communal living project, has succeeded almost as thoroughly as the Amish. We may not support their insane religious beliefs, or the various sex crimes they are no doubt committing, but they have succeeded at Fukuyama’s suggestion of knitting themselves a new god within the liberal order. 9.5/10.
* **Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mormons:** Get lots of people of the same religion together in one place - a timeless classic. Some of the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox are still more fluent in Yiddish than English, giving them near-invincibility from the mainstream. 9/10.
* **The Free State Project:** some libertarians made a deal that if enough other libertarians agreed, they would all move to New Hampshire and try to turn it into a libertarian paradise. They got about 20,000 people on board; the results ranged from building entirely new libertarian towns in the forest, to buying homes in Portsmouth or Manchester and keeping in touch with their libertarian friends. 7/10.
* **Serious Christianity:** Lots of Christians have social circles centered around their church, send their children to Christian schools, have Christian therapists they can visit if they feel down, and consume Christian media. On the other hand, they usually work a secular job, and most of their neighbors are secular. 6/10.
* **The LGBTQ community**: don’t laugh at this one. If you know many of these people, you know they have their own parallel society of LGBT friends, LGBT bars, and LGBT dating sites. They attend LGBT parties, conform to LGBT fashions, and watch LGBT sports (like roller derby). They live in special LGBT-friendly neighborhoods, and everyone around them follows LGBT-friendly norms. They even have their own flag, an obvious first step for people trying to form a country-within-a-country. 5/10.
* **The rationalists:** I live on a street with five other rationalist families and a small rationalist microschool. The broader Bay Area rationalist community has its own parties, dating sites, media, holidays, a conference center, and even a choir. 5/10
But even defining these exceptions broadly, probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to one of them.
Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?
My best guess is money.
If you’re sufficiently committed, you don’t need money. You can go out in the forest with your like-minded friends and probably starve (or, like the libertarians, [get eaten by bears](https://www.amazon.com/Libertarian-Walks-Into-Bear-Liberate/dp/1541788516)). But if you’re *insufficiently* committed, money is pretty helpful! Or at least this is what I gather from my own experience. There are three reasons the rationalists have somewhat succeeded at the community-building project when so many other movements have failed.
First, many of us worked in tech, and so ended out naturally gathering in the SF Bay Area without having to explicitly coordinate on it. We didn’t even have to take less-than-maximally lucrative jobs, because all the maximally-lucrative jobs for techies are in one place.
Second, some of us had enough money to live where we wanted (which turned out to be next to each other) and to cooperate to fund community projects.
Third, some of us made enough money to support other people who were working part-time or full-time on community building. Some of this looked like hiring them for community-building positions, but more often it was being able to afford family/housing structures where not everyone had to have an income-maximizing job at all times.
If we had even more money, we could do even better. Occasionally we fantasize about going further in the Amish or Free State direction. There are lots of reasons it doesn’t happen, but the main ones are money (building towns is expensive) and jobs (not everyone can work remotely). There’s some sense in which we’re being weak here - the Amish are very poor, and just sort of take the plunge and do it anyway. But keeping our level of weakness fixed, more money would help.
Why care about any of this?
I often see people whose politics center around tight-knit community make fun of those whose politics center around material abundance. But these are potentially complementary goals. The more material abundance we have, the better we can be at having tight-knit communities.
(yes, admittedly this is the opposite of how things usually work - some peasant village in medieval England had a tighter community than Malibu Beach or the Hamptons. I guess I would claim that “so poor you can’t leave” and “so rich you can be wherever you want” are two different strategies, and liberalism is more suited to the latter.)
I also see people say that if we avoid paperclipping, technofeudalism, and the other obvious ways a technological singularity could go wrong, the next thing we’ll have to worry about is some kind of crisis of meaning, where we all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop in a spiritual wasteland.
The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations *you* think are optimal?
And the obvious counter is: there’s also nothing to stop people from doing that now. But they don’t. So whatever mysterious force prevents it now will continue to prevent it after the singularity.
But I think that force is just economics. Most people have to work a normal job, which prevents them from running off to Hypothetical Amish Country. Replace that with post-singularity economic relations - maybe UBI, maybe something else - and new options become available. | Scott Alexander | 170177581 | Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP? | acx |
# Open Thread 393
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** The Horizon Fellowship is a full-time US policy fellowship that places experts in AI, biotechnology, and other emerging technologies in federal agencies, congressional offices, and think tanks in Washington, DC for 6-24 months. No prior policy experience required, jobs are fully-funded. [Learn more](https://horizonpublicservice.org/programs/become-a-fellow/) and [apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Horizon/2acee26a-414c-4f87-b310-a187c7bbf368) by Aug. 28.
**2:** Lighthaven (the rationalist community campus in Berkeley) is hosting [Inkhaven](https://www.inkhaven.blog/) - a blogging bootcamp aimed at people who want to blog more but struggle with motivation. Selected fellows will live on site for the month of November, and write one blog post per day or else be kicked out. There will be some mentors around including Gwern, Scott Aaronson, and me. I don’t want to over-endorse this - I have no idea whether it will create any kind of lasting motivation or tendency that sticks around after the program, for most people blogging is a low-reward activity, and the cost is pretty steep - but I think it’s a good experiment for Lighthaven to try, and trust potential applicants to make good choices for their own situation. Cost is $2,000 (program only) to $3,500 (program plus housing for one month) to $4,700 (program \_ housing + meals). Some financial assistance available. Apply [here](https://airtable.com/app7zRwcfXzSh1Hac/pagwNyF0y0XV4co9V/form). And yeah, they should have called it “Writehaven”. | Scott Alexander | 170064114 | Open Thread 393 | acx |
# Your Review: Joan of Arc
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
When the prefect of Alexandria’s daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn’t as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against *her*. She was smart, she was pretty (beautiful, even) and she had connections. So long as she kept quiet, Catherine could have a comfortable life.
*This comfortable, maybe?*
She didn’t keep quiet. When the Emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and, of course, the best part - feeding Christians to lions. The prefect’s daughter telling the Emperor he was *wrong* to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable softheartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable. He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though (and, in fact, he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her - a useful alliance and she had brains and guts) so instead he called on his top fifty philosophers to outargue her.
Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed. That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she’d change her mind and be sensible. Instead she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison; when he deprived her of food she was fed by a dove, when he had her tortured her wounds miraculously healed. When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted and the Emperor had to have her killed, too, so since the slot was empty he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine. She told him she had a better husband - Christ - and at that insult he condemned her to death. The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch; the second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.
Except that this story is almost certainly fiction. Our oldest source is six hundred years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact. These stories grow in the telling, more and more miracles added with every retelling to the point where some people question whether St. Catherine even existed. When our sources are good they look like the Venerable Bede’s Life of St. Cuthbert, chronicling how he saw visions of angels, prophesied the future and also controlled the weather, which Bede based on a single chronicle written down within twenty years of the death of St. Cuthbert. This is to say that if we are lucky we got it thirdhand. (We are rarely lucky.)
A saintly teenage girl who outargues a roomful of philosophers with no training, merely divine inspiration, is absurd. There’s no chance at all that such a saint might have existed, let alone been interviewed by a team of experts (under oath) about her entire life, and of course if this team of experts did interview her they would no doubt end up concluding she was a fraud, though of course we can’t expect them to mail copies[1](#footnote-1) of the interview to every monarch in Europe to prove it.
And definitely nobody would ever*, ever* be so angry at irregularities in the first interview that they would try to themselves interview *everyone she'd ever met*[2](#footnote-2)about her (still under oath) and mail a copy of the updated and revised version to every monarch in Europe to prove that all her miracles actually happened.
Meet Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans. Yes, yes, she defeated an invincible army and is a feminist hero and also one of the national saints of France, fine. More importantly, Joan of Arc is *documented!* She's a miracle-working saint who *has evidence!* She might have more evidence than any other non-monarch before the printing press! This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence[3](#footnote-3) for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.
*(The reams and reams of documents are there, they're just invisible. Trust me.)*
Let’s start with the legend of Joan of Arc: A poor peasant girl in France is chosen by God, goes to fight the English, defeats them in a series of battles while performing random miracles, is captured by them and burned as a witch, The End. Maybe you add the epilogue about how eventually the Church made her a saint. All completely impossible and all guaranteed to be nonsense.
The funny thing is the extent to which it *isn't*.
---
Around 1412, a female child "named Jean or Jeanette" was born in the tiny village of Donremy, on the marches of Lorraine in eastern France. She appears to have had half the village as her godparents, based on the number of people who testified later. This many godparents wasn't actually unusual - the job of godfather or godmother was half "it takes a village to raise a child" and half "witness that this person actually exists" - but it helpfully means that we know more about the birth of Joan of Arc than we do about the birth of Alexander.[4](#footnote-4)
She grew up in an ordinary way. She was quiet and pious and... quiet... and... pious. It didn’t matter which side was asking questions about her, people had real trouble coming up with other things to say about her! A few stories leak through, though, about her being more than the normal kind of pious. Her village priest reported that she bribed him with wool to stop slacking off at his job; she occasionally snuck off from her work to spend extra time in church; she gave a great deal of alms. The most extraordinary event in her life was when a man sued her for breach of promise of marriage, which is the opposite of what usually happens; in an interesting piece of foreshadowing, she successfully defended herself in court by claiming that she had made no such promise. It was not a very remarkable life.
Then she ran off to save the country from the English because God told her to, which is the step that requires some explaining. Why did the country *need* saving?
---
# **Part One: “That brought great harm to the kingdom of France.”**
The first thing you need to understand that France is cursed.
According to legend[5](#footnote-5), this curse was incurred by Philip the Fair[6](#footnote-6), King of France around 1300, when he had the Knights Templar abolished and all the officers of the order burned for heresy so he wouldn't have to pay back his debts.[7](#footnote-7) From the flames, the last Grandmaster of the order cursed him with his dying breath that he would "see him before God's tribunal before the year was out" and Philip duly died within the year. His sons would follow him, and their sons, each in inexorable succession passing the crown to the next before dying in turn. The last of the Capet princes managed to make it almost fifteen years past Philip's death before succumbing to that old favorite, "unknown causes."[8](#footnote-8)
This produced a succession crisis. The two available candidates to succeed him were the Duke of Guyenne, son of Philip the Fair's daughter Isabella,[9](#footnote-9) and the Count of Orleans, son of Philip the Fair's brother Charles of Valois. Since the Duke of Guyenne was Edward III, King of England, and the Count of Orleans wasn't, the choice was obvious and France declared that the law had always been that the throne could never pass through a woman. Edward III was sixteen, in England, and busy, so he raised no meaningful objection, and Philip of Valois, called "The Fortunate" because he got to be king, inherited. Twelve years later, Philip eyed Guyenne, the last bit of France left in English hands from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s inheritance, and, observing the English busy in Scotland, he made his move.
This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover[10](#footnote-10) and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?
The answer was, as it happened, that the Edwards first and third had spent the past sixty years building the most professional army in Europe. England, like the rest of post-Roman Europe, had been founded on a military basis of feudal levies, with each vassal providing soldiers at his expense to fight alongside the king’s personal retinue. These soldiers could be called out for long enough to stop marauding Vikings but not for much longer, so any attempt to raise an army for even a single year's campaign required agonizing negotiations with each individual leader and, worse, meant that the troops were all either sullen conscripts or proud knights eager for glory and jealous of their honor. These knights might fight like the devil - as everyone from Greece to Egypt to Tunis had learned to their cost - but leading these men was like herding cats.
In England, however, the practice of scutage (nobles paying money to get out of raising troops) had arisen, and also in England there existed that fantastically useful tool of kings for raising money, the English Parliament.[11](#footnote-11) With the combination of carrot - redress of grievances - and stick - pay or I'll impose costs on you perfectly legally - augmented by the patriotic pride of Englishmen who might not want to kill Frenchmen themselves but really wanted the Frenchmen dead, Edward collected money and used it to pay professionals drawn from England and Wales, and these professionals fought.
The English army was never large, somewhere between seven thousand and fifteen thousand men at its height.[12](#footnote-12) Even the Scots could muster more soldiers - but the Scots army was largely lightly-armored and poorly-trained spearmen and bowmen, and the English were all armored and well-armed, with plenty of time to train and no loyalties running against their loyalties to their king and their pay, and when well-led they demolished the Scots.
This was the army that landed in France. Since France had about five times as many people in it as England, this army was wildly outnumbered. The chroniclers describe the French army as variously seventy-two thousand or a hundred and twenty thousand men - to hysterical laughter from modern historians, who think they only had twenty or thirty thousand - but it was clear that when the armies met it would inevitably be a slaughter.
It was. In the other direction. The King of France raised his levies, called up the royal knights, hired mercenaries, invited in allies. All mustered beneath the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of Charlemagne, and this massive army went to catch the English, the English backed off rapidly while looking for defensive terrain, the French pushed on, the English started planting stakes and caltrops, the French attacked - and the English massacred them.
The English, you see, had the longbow.
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research[13](#footnote-13) suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,[14](#footnote-14) [15](#footnote-15) five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers[16](#footnote-16) as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor[17](#footnote-17) wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to *you* is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
The French, naturally, put together another army, which was beaten in almost exactly the same way at Poitiers. Again and again it repeated itself - Agincourt, Verneuille, Aljubarrota[18](#footnote-18) and dozens of minor fights - and every one of them was, in essence, a repeat of Crecy. Minor variations occurred - at Poitiers the French attacked on foot, at Verneuille they detached troops to attack the English baggage train - but these didn’t help.
The French were saved from immediate disaster by three things. The first was the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe. This had effects wildly beyond the scope of our story but also demolished the tax bases of every state in Europe. This shrunk the size of armies and thereby as an incidental side effect meant that all existing castles were heavily overbuilt, since they were intended to defend against half again the force that would actually be present, which slowed the pace of war tremendously.
The second was a strategy adopted by the French kings in which they did not fight the English. They would just let the English field army march wherever it liked and loot and burn whatever it liked, and meanwhile their troops would be burning and pillaging everywhere the English held and the English field army wasn't. This was extremely unpopular among the people being pillaged, but the English did run out of money before the French ran out of castles and that meant the French could go around taking English castles in France while the English army was in England.
And the third was that the English army depended on good leadership, and when Edward III died the English wouldn’t have it for another forty years, until Henry V took the throne. This two-generation timeskip provided enough time for the population to partially replenish and also for the French to completely forget Lesson Two, an error of memory which produced Agincourt.
Agincourt was the standard model of battle - Henry V "made it his course to busy the minds of his people with foreign quarrels", to misquote Shakespeare, landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns. When the French went up to engage him, Henry attempted to withdraw, took up a position on good ground and when the French attacked the English broke them utterly. Halfway through the battle the order was given to kill the prisoners instead of holding them for ransom, and so the battle was not merely a defeat for the French, but a disaster, with a generation's worth of military leaders dead in a single day.[19](#footnote-19)
*And then they all died.*
The disaster was made worse by the fact that the French nobility at the time of Agincourt was trapped in an internal feud that was rapidly coming to resemble civil war. Between the time of the battles of Crecy and of Poiters, Philip the Fortunate had given the rich duchy of Burgundy in fief to his faithful son Philip the Bold, but Philip was faithful to his father, not to France. As the years rolled on and the throne of France passed from Philip the Fortunate to his son and grandson, the interests of the Dukes of Burgundy began to diverge from those of the Kings of France, and so in the age of the long truce the bold Dukes of Burgundy won lands through conquest and through marriage until their wealth and power nearly matched that of their ostensible monarchs. Under the three great Dukes of Burgundy who ruled in sequence, their realm became the leading state of the Renaissance, the continent's greatest sponsor of art and music and the true cultural heartland of Europe.[20](#footnote-20)
But all these accomplishments had been won by the power of the Kingdom of France, which during the pause in the Hundred Years' War had cheerfully spent men and treasure conquering and protecting these lands for the Burgundians, allowing them to spend *their* treasure on paintings and sculptures and dance manuals. The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France (Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson), who at that time was seriously mentally ill[21](#footnote-21) and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for *their* private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.[22](#footnote-22) Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption[23](#footnote-23) and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
*This is fine.*
This was an act that made no political sense, an act that could only really be justified by blood vengeance, and the Burgundians, understandably, snapped. They held Paris by that point and with it physical control of the King and the Queen, and there was an army that had just taken Rouen that was available to their service if they had the wit to use it.
Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin[24](#footnote-24) Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous[25](#footnote-25) affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.
At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.[26](#footnote-26) Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.
Then Charles the Mad died. Then Henry the Conqueror died. The new King of England, son of Henry and his newlywed queen, was not yet one year old.
Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,[27](#footnote-27) and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the *goddams,* respecters of no property and of no religion,[28](#footnote-28) not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
This was the state of France - leaderless, beaten, disorganized, a country that would need a miracle if it was going to survive.
Then it got one.
---
# **Part Two: The Life of Joan of Arc**
## **2.1: “There lives a maid between Coussey and Vaucouleurs that will see the King crowned within a year.”**
When Joan was thirteen, she started hearing voices.[29](#footnote-29)
The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent. She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet (or good) smell. She had not had a very eventful life and no one particularly noticed; her father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms; her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.
When she was fifteen:
> [The] voice told me, twice or thrice a week, that I, Joan, must go away and that I must come to France[30](#footnote-30) and that my father must know nothing of my leaving. The voice told me that I should go to France and I could not bear to stay where I was. The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orleans… And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.[31](#footnote-31)
She was sixteen when she took action, going from her village with her uncle to the Armagnac-held town of Vaucouleurs to tell the commander of the garrison, Robert de Baudricourt, that God had sent her to save the kingdom of France and that it was the will of the King of Heaven that she be delivered safely to Bourges, where the Dauphin Charles was, and could he please provide her with a horse, a sword, men's clothes and an armed escort? He sent her home with instructions for her uncle to beat her more so she'd stop running off. She, undaunted, returned after a few months, and this time Robert sent her away but for... some reason... let her stay in Vaucouleurs, instead of sending her back to her family again.[32](#footnote-32)
This gave her the opportunity to hit everyone in town with Charisma 18 Diplomacy checks.
> I [Jean de Metz, a squire] spoke to her, saying, ‘My dear girl, what are you doing here? Must it not be that the King be cast out of the kingdom and we become English?’ And the Maid answered me, ‘I am come here to a King’s Chamber’ (i.e., to a royalist place) ‘to talk with Robert de Baudricourt that he may be willing to lead me or send me to the King, but he pays no attention to me nor to my words. And yet, before we are in mid-Lent, I must be at the King’s side, though I wear my feet to the knees. For indeed there is nobody in all the world, neither king nor duke, nor daughter of the King of Scotland,[33](#footnote-33) nor any other who can recover the kingdom for France. And there will be no help (for the kingdom) if not from me. Although I would rather have remained spinning at my mother’s side, for it is not my condition, yet must I go and must I do this thing, for my Lord wills that I do so.’ I asked her who was her Lord. And she told me that it was God. Whereupon I, Jean, who bear witness here, promised the Maid, putting my hand in hers in a gesture of good faith, that, God helping, I would lead her to the King.
So when she came to de Baudricourt the third time he had her exorcised.[34](#footnote-34) When that didn't stop her he said yes and either gave her or had crowdfunded for her everything she asked for - sword, horse, men's clothes, knight, squire (Jean de Metz, quoted above) and either four servants or three servants and an archer, depending on which source you prefer. The entire town chipped in to get her what she asked for, and de Baudricourt himself gave her a sword as she prepared to leave.
It's not wholly clear why de Baudricourt did this. The state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate, and yes, there were rumors that "it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marches"[35](#footnote-35) but really when you think about it, what are the odds it's *this* virgin? How does he even know she is a virgin? Even in the middle ages they knew *most* prophecies were fake, because you could go around just claiming anything you felt like was a prophecy. Maybe it's just charisma? That might explain what happened next, which is that the knight who took her had planned on raping her along the way, just on general principles,[36](#footnote-36) but somehow he... couldn't do it:
> Every night she lay down with Jean de Metz and me, keeping upon her her surcoat and hose, tied and tight. I was young then and yet I had neither desire nor carnal movement to touch woman, and I should not have dared to ask such a thing of Joan, because of the abundance of goodness which I saw in her.
And so, dodging men-at-arms as they went on the assumption that they were probably hostile to everyone just by default, they made their way to the Dauphin's court.
## **2.2: “Thou art true heir of France and King’s son.”**
The story of her arrival at the Dauphin's temporary capital at Chinon is legendary. Even people who know very little about Joan of Arc have often heard about it; it's one of the most famous scenes of her life, a subject of paintings and stories. (*Age of Empires II* practically starts with it.) The story tells that Joan approached the Dauphin in a room full of fine lords and noblemen where he was dressed plainly, that he denied his identity and she persisted that he and he alone was the trueborn king of France, and by this sign of her gifts convinced all that she was a saint chosen by God to bring him victory.
Or:
> “Then, Joan, who was come before the King, made the bows and reverences customary to make to the King, as if she had been nurtured at court, and this greeting done said, addressing her speech to the King: ‘God give you life, gentle King,’ whereas she knew him not and had never seen him. And there were (present) several lords, dressed with pomp and richly and more so than was the King. Wherefore he answered the said Joan, ‘Not I am the King, Joan.’ And, pointing to one of his lords, said, ‘There is the King.’ To which she replied, ‘By God, gentle prince, it is you and none other.’ ”
>
> *How can it be false if it’s painted?*
Yeah, that probably never happened. Sure, sure, it's sourced to a contemporary French historian (Jean Chartier, quoted above) who we know had met the Dauphin a decade or two after his coronation and could very easily have talked to eyewitnesses and gotten the story from them, and so it's on a much better foundation than ninety-nine percent of what we believe about history. But we *have* eyewitnesses. Here's one:
> Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of the King’s household, eighty-five years of age or thereabouts: “I was present in the castle and town of Chinon when the Maid arrived, and I saw her when she presented herself before the royal majesty, with much humility and great simplicity, the poor little shepherdess, and I heard the following words which she spoke to the King: ‘Very noble Lord Dauphin, I am come and am sent by God, to bring succour to you and your kingdom.’
No mention of the denial, no mention of the King's dress. Where did the story come from? The probable explanation lies in Joan's own testimony during her first trial by the English:
> [A]fter a meal I went to my King who was in the castle. When I entered my King’s room, I knew him among the others by the counsel of my voice which revealed him to me. I told my King that I wanted to go and make war against the English.
So if she's to be trusted her voices did indeed point him out - but if we're a cynic, she could have been guessing by his body language. Still, it's enough so that we can see the story growing from there.
Either way, Charles was initially skeptical, but Joan addressed him as the true and rightful heir to the kingdom of France and then took him aside and gave him some sign, and this deeply rattled him. We aren't sure what the sign was; Joan told her interrogators that she had sworn an oath to keep the details secret and so she couldn't swear another one to tell the truth on this matter and that if the English wanted to know they could ask her King, and when they pressed her repeatedly to tell them the sign she gave her king she switched to making sarcastic comments, like "the sign you need is for God to deliver me out of your hands, the most certain sign He could show you." Nor did any of her other contemporaries write down what the sign was.[37](#footnote-37) But whatever it was, it clearly rattled the Dauphin - he was sure she had access to *some* kind of magic, he just couldn't tell if it was white or black. Just as Robert de Baudricourt had ordered an exorcism, so the Dauphin Charles called for an examination and sent for the doctors of theology at the University of Poitiers to interview her, so that they could tell him if it was ethical to recruit her.
Unfortunately, the record of the examination at Poitiers doesn't exist any more. It definitely existed then! Joan repeatedly tells her interrogators at the first trial "That's in the book at Poitiers" and one of her examiners survived to testify at the second (posthumous) trial, but unfortunately most medieval manuscripts don't exist any more and this is one of them. It would be an invaluable source if we had it, but all we've got left is what one elderly Dominican remembered at the second trial. One fragment is:
> “Master Guillaume Aimeri interrogated her: ‘Thou hast said that the voice told thee that God wishes to deliver the people of France from the calamities which afflict it. If he wishes to deliver it, it is not necessary to have men-at-arms.’ Then Joan answered him: ‘By God the men-at-arms will do battle and God will give victory.’ With this answer Master Guillaume held himself satisfied...
And we have their final conclusion, which was:
> “That in her is found no evil, but only good, humility, virginity, devotion (devoutness), honesty, simplicity.”
Well, fair enough.
And the elderly Dominican continues:
> "We reported all that to the King’s Council, and were of opinion that, given the imminent necessity and the peril in which the town of Orleans stood, the King could well use her help and send her to Orleans.
I like this response because… One is not allowed to declare a living person a saint. The saints are the people in Heaven. According to Catholic theology, a living person might at any point use his God-given free will to do evil and not repent of it. This is therefore about as close as they can get, and it's pretty far!
On the other hand, we all see the other side of the story, right? The desperate gambler who realizes that his stack's almost out and he might as well bet against the odds he'll make a flush, because probably he won't but if he folds he’s out anyway, right?
Since the Dauphin wasn't *quite* desperate enough to risk his soul to win, he also had her checked over by women of his wife's household to confirm that she was a virgin, both because of the belief at the time that virginity was the sign of sainthood and because if she's lying about *that* she's clearly just full of shit on every other topic, too. She passed the test, of course. *Joan's* opinion on the multipronged inquiry into her origins and character was that "she was not pleased with all these interrogations and that they were preventing her from accomplishing the work for which she was sent and that the need and time were come to act.”[38](#footnote-38) Once again: Fair enough.
And it seems to be only at about this point that the Dauphin Charles has Joan given basic training in the arts of a soldier and of a captain, which she has never had the opportunity to get before.[39](#footnote-39) But he can't get her much of it, because she shows up in February or March and goes to the front in late April, giving about a month to teach her how to move in armor, fight with a sword, ride a warhorse, command infantry, command cavalry, command artillery.[40](#footnote-40) Fortunately, she appears to... already know most of this? Or something? Because, in the judgement of Joan's peers:
> Thiband d’Armagnac or de Termes, Knight, bailiff of Chartres: "Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent. But in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience."
>
> [The Duke d'Alencon, French nobleman and general]: "In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple, but in the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years’ experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently."
>
> [Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan's landlady at Chinon] "And from all that I know of her she was absolutely ignorant except in the matter of arms. For I have seen her ride a horse and wield a lance as well as the finest soldier, and the soldiers themselves were most astonished by this."
Dunois (Bastard of Orleans) gives up and flatly says that she's so good that
> I believe that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in the war were the fruit of divine inspiration rather than of human agency. . . . And this is why:
And then he gives one actual miracle as evidence (we'll get to that) and *everything else* is cases of her being so good at war that
> I swear that the English, two hundred of whom had previously been sufficient to rout eight hundred or a thousand of the royal army, from that moment became so powerless that four or five hundred soldiers and men at arms could fight against what seemed to be the whole force of England.
Dunois here is speaking from experience. The last time French and English forces had clashed in any serious way was about a year before Joan showed up at court, when the pride of the French army was defeated by a convoy of pickled herrings.[41](#footnote-41) Dunois was present at that debacle; he managed to dodge the blame and in fact from the Siege of Orleans up to, what, the mid-fifteenth century[42](#footnote-42) or so, he's one of the leading French generals. So he and d'Alencon can be considered expert testimony, and the expert testimony is that she is unfairly good.
*The Bastard of Orleans thinks that this isn’t fair.*
This is where a lot of the conspiracy-theory stories about Joan really get started, because her "riding a horse and wielding a lance as well as the finest soldier" skills are patently ridiculous if they have ten years of training and she has one month, to say nothing about her command skills, so they claim she must've had advance training. But we're recounting the evidence here and saving our desperate attempts to come up with an explanation for a later section, so we can just recount the consensus and move on to what her leadership looked like.
## **2.3: “A Maid sent by God to drive out the English.”**
It looked like charisma-enforced puritanism. d'Alencon, who is one of my favorite sources, recounts in the tone of a man missing a dear departed friend that Joan kept upbraiding him for his blasphemous swearing and he kept guiltily stopping whenever he noticed her in earshot. She made sure the soldiers all went to Mass regularly, drove those of the camp followers who wouldn't marry their men from camp with the flat of her sword[43](#footnote-43) and absolutely forbade looting and cruelty towards prisoners. She was not actually in charge of the army, but only of one company of troops; she was given arms and a banner (God upheld by angels blessing a fleur-de-lis) and a couple squires and a few hundred men to escort supplies into the city, but somehow before her force made it very far it was *her* force. She ruled less by royal or official authority than by the fact that before long everyone would do whatever she wanted because are *you* going to tell the Maid no? It started with only her own few hundred troops, but before long it spread to anyone in earshot of her voice.
This was important because the transitional system of military organization used by the French in the early fifteenth century appears to be *terrible.* So far as I, who am not actually an expert on the fifteenth century, can tell, the system in use was that the essential person is the captain, who can be a royal appointee leading state troops, or a nobleman with his vassals or a mercenary leading his own employees (to the extent these are distinct categories), and who commands a force of, oh, three or four hundred men. If the king is present, he's in charge. Otherwise the Constable of France is in charge, when he isn't under strict orders to stay away from court due to a blood feud with one of the king's chief advisors;[44](#footnote-44) alternatively or if he happens to be absent, then the king can designate one of the captains as an overall commander,[45](#footnote-45) but in practice all captains are equals but the King and if the King is indecisive[46](#footnote-46) they solve all problems produced by a divided command by bickering, and we saw how well that worked at the Battle of the Herrings.
When compared to this mess, Joan's system of command-by-charisma was a tremendous success, and even leaving aside the claims of miracles (and her implausible untrained artillery skills) we can see why. First, unlike earlier French armies, *Joan's* troops would neither charge nor rout without orders. Second, she'd given them a logical hypothesis for why they kept losing battles (they'd offended God), then changed the behavior that lead to it (no swearing, no fornication, no hurting the innocent) and so they should logically expect to start winning instead of losing.
But also she kept doing miracles, and this terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English. Most of them are minor things - calming a horse with the Cross, hearing a soldier who would die in the next engagement blaspheming and saying "do you swear, and you so near to death?", predicting when she'd be injured in advance, not dying of infection when shot, telling the Duke d'Alencon "move or you'll get hit by a cannonball,” he moves and a couple of minutes later there's the cannonball[47](#footnote-47) killing someone else, and so forth and so on. And then there was the sword. Joan sent a letter to the town of Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois requesting that they kindly look behind (or under, she doesn't remember exactly what she said) the altar for a rusty sword with five crosses on the hilt, clean the rust off and send it to her. So they did. (We have reports of this from both Joan and the priest who mailed it to her.) Rumors that this was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, demonstrate decisively that there no lily that *someone* will not determinedly gild, but whatever the sword's provenance it became part of the legend of Joan of Arc.
Her arrival at Orleans was also part of the legend. The English had built or taken a number of forts around the city and were bombarding it with their artillery, but they didn't have the numbers to completely encircle it and so when Joan arrived the siege was moving pretty slowly. Jean Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, was in charge of the city's defense, and he gave orders that her convoy of supplies and reinforcements enter the city by a circuitous route to avoid the English garrisons before riding out to join them. When he arrived Joan, metaphorically breathing fire, angrily demanded he explain why he'd ordered her troops redirected when the simplest solution was that they just sailed upriver. Dunois explained very patiently that, *yes,* the city's captains had taken counsel together and they had concluded that given that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the most sensible option was to avoid the risk of fighting the English and they thought that was best and safest -
"In God's name, the counsel of the Lord your God is wiser and safer than yours," said Joan.[48](#footnote-48)
> Forthwith and as in the same moment, the wind which was contrary and absolutely prevented the boats from moving upstream, in which were laden the victuals for Orleans, changed and became favourable.
So after the wind directly and miraculously reversed, Joan and her troops were able to enter the city. They held a parade (we have a journal from one of the burghers of Orleans, which is a Useful Eyewitness Source separate from the two trials), Joan went out under flag of truce to demand that the English surrender to God (and got laughed at),[49](#footnote-49)and Dunois left to fetch *even more* reinforcements. Meanwhile Joan - stuck with Dunois nominally in charge and people unwilling to go attack in defiance of the commander-in-chief's orders - was firing up her troops. Dunois returned with his reinforcements and news that the English would be getting reinforcements of their own directly,[50](#footnote-50) and that night as she was drifting off to sleep Joan woke up her squire by loudly crying out. He muzzily rose and asked her what it was, and she said that her voices had told her to attack the English immediately *but not where to do it!*[51](#footnote-51)At which point they rushed out and discovered that there was a skirmish already underway and gathered all their forces to join it, swiftly turning it against the English and driving them from one of their forts...
... After which she ordered that none of the prisoners be executed, and wept since so many of the English had died without confessing their sins, and so she made sure that on the next day (the feast of the Ascension) all the French troops took confession and avoided sinning.
(It is after this skirmish that "a valiant and notable knight" whose name our source politely avoids mentioning suggests that maybe they should stop pushing their luck and call this good enough. "You have been at your counsel and I at mine; and know that my Lord’s counsel will be accomplished and will prevail and that that (other) counsel will perish," said Joan, and goes onwards with the next attack.)
*If you’ve only got a month’s training, carrying a banner instead of a sword is just good sense.*
This set the tone for the rest of the siege - rapid French assaults on the English fortifications each independently as Joan's visions directed her, with the Maid's fanatical charisma to keep morale up. At the next major bastion the English repelled the French until Joan managed to get the fleeing French to turn and make another attack which actually succeeded, at the next Joan was wounded holding a scaling ladder and the attack faltered, but she returned to it and it succeeded. At the next she bore her banner again, and at the next most of the English defending the fortification died when the bridge they fled over broke under them.
The English responded by giving up their siege and risking all on a pitched battle. The French could attack each fort in turn and so destroy them in detail, and seeing this, the remaining English soldiers burned their forts and withdrew all their companies together into a single formation, planted their stakes[52](#footnote-52) and offered battle on the open field.
This time the opinion of the Armagnac captains was for war, but Joan said, no, it was Sunday, they should respect the Lord's day and not shed blood on it. The English withdrew, and Joan was a legend.
She was a legend in France, where a leading poetess came out of retirement to pen a new poem in celebration of her great victory. She was a legend in England, where the regent, Bedford, wrote to the young king to update him about the new danger from that "disciple and lyme of the Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fais enchauntements and sorcerie”.[53](#footnote-53) She was a legend in Venice, where the representatives of the Morosini bank sent back reports because they'd be useful in planning voyages.[54](#footnote-54) And her legendary nature had concrete consequences. After her arrival at Orleans a militia had risen to support the French army; volunteers flooded into camp every day, some of them writing gushing letters home recounting how they had seen *her,* talked to *her*. The Duke of Brittany, long a neutral in the conflict, sent his confessor over her to reassure her that the Duke would send his son with a mighty army to the King of France's support.[55](#footnote-55) People invented the most heated rumors about her origins, full of wild speculation as they try to come up with coherent theories to explain how she ended up with all the skills she possesses.
This legendary status gave her a lot of influence with her fellow soldiers and officers and random commoners,[56](#footnote-56) but less with the Dauphin. The Dauphin Charles seems to have been the sort of person who agrees to anything the person who talked to him last wants,[57](#footnote-57) and he had a peace party as well as a war party contesting for influence at his court and they thought he should stop reraising on this one good hand and accept his gains and try to negotiate some kind of final end to the war. Joan was equal to the task, though, and interrupted the middle of a strategy meeting to fall upon her knees and beg for him to come to Rheims and there be crowned. Charles made plans for this before anyone managed to talk him out of it, placing the Duke d'Alencon in charge (who seems to have been an early convert to Joan's cause, eager to do whatever God wanted since apparently God wanted to do exactly what he wanted to do except with better tactics) and he and Joan rushed off to organize a campaign for Rheims.
They did not do this without objections, and serious ones, from the peace party but also from military men not suddenly struck by Joan's charisma. And these men had good reasons to object. If you happen to be a cold-blooded bastard with a deep understanding of the nature of supply lines and logistical warfare who naturally thinks in terms of *realpolitik*, marching straight for Rheims is obviously a really stupid idea. It means taking an army through English- and Burgundian-held territory where their cavalry can harass your lines of communication, your back to the river, where one battle risks encirclement and destruction, overcoming or bypassing a tremendous number of strong English fortifications including Paris, all for a wholly intangible gain because Rheims isn't even a very large city. Instead they could try to seize key forts, attack Paris and take the capital, go to Normandy to harass the lines of communication of the English, move against the Burgundian capital to break the alliance - why are they going to Rheims?
Because, according to ancient tradition, kings of France *must* be crowned in Rheims. This sacred ritual is what establishes that the King is the King, chosen by God. As the Dauphin, Charles is head of the Armagnac party; as King Charles VII, he would be King of France, especially since his rival Henry VI is a small child and furthermore a small child *in* England who therefore hasn't been properly crowned yet. Joan has faith they can overcome the material obstacles and that pulling this off will give them huge spiritual gains, and if you replace "spiritual gains" with "gains in morale," she is clearly right. The French army marches off with the King, ready to gamble everything on this one stroke.
They take an elaborate circuitous route to avoid the main English strongholds and attack minor English strongholds, each reduced one by one. In each fight the French engage the English garrison, attack it and drive it from its fortifications in the town; in each they are victorious and the English fall back. As they advance volunteers flood to them, providing them with supplies, and captains long absent - including the exiled Constable of France[58](#footnote-58) - join the campaign, spirits revitalized and ready to return to the fray. Meanwhile the main English field army gathered to attack them, coming up to meet the French at the woodlands near Patay. The day before both sides had camped a safe distance, well aware of their opposition, and then as the next day broke the French and English field armies mustered for the climactic battle of the campaign.
Unfortunately for the English, the Battle of Patay is the single most one-sided climactic battle I have ever encountered in all my studies of history. I'm not sure exactly why; the accounts of the battle (in secondary or primary sources) disagree with each other even more than they normally do, but so far as I can tell from the accounts and histories I've read, it happened something like this.
The English army had been divided into three forces when it camped, and as the English drew up in the morning to fight they gathered together. The French assembled faster, in defensive formation to take an attack from the English, and then the Duke d'Alencon asked Joan what to do.
"See that you all have good spurs!"
"What? Are we to turn our backs on them?"
"No," said Joan, "for the pursuit."[59](#footnote-59)
And the French rushed on the English vanguard with incredible speed, which was not quite finished joining the rest of the English army. Shocked to see the French, who they though were waiting for them, already rushing out of the woods, the vanguard routed instantaneously. The French pursued them into the second force, which, seeing the first disintegrate, routed itself, and meanwhile the commander of the rearguard, Sir John Falstaff, implemented a tactical withdrawal in good order, thereby extricating his force and wrecking his military career, ending up as the scapegoat for the entire doomed campaign and a comic relief character for Shakespeare. The casualty figures are staggering; the English lost "two to four thousand men" killed or captured, the majority of their force, while the French army had three deaths. This, to be clear, is about the number of men you expect to accidentally trip over their own stirrups dismounting and break their necks. The French swept onwards to Rheims, every town they reached surrendering within the day, and the Dauphin Charles was crowned King Charles VII of France before crowds cheering or weeping at the extraordinary victory, with Joan having the place of honor beside him. Crowds flocked to the king and the mood in the country was ecstatic.
*What is that thing in her hair, seriously, what.*
## **2.4: ‘By my martin, the place would have been taken.’**
At which point the French court agreed to a truce for two weeks and their armies stopped campaigning for a while while the English and Burgundians raised more armies.
No, really. If at any point I have given you a *positive* impression of the competence of the French court, I do revoke it! King Charles rode around accepting the fealty of various towns while Joan constantly urged him to march swiftly on Paris and finish the war. Joan's councils failing, she begged him for the chance to retire; she had successfully accomplished all of her prophesied tasks, the Duke of Orleans had been ransomed, Orleans had been relieved, the King crowned. Could she go home now? Her voices didn't have any more tasks for her, "take Paris instead of dithering" was just common sense.
Instantly vetoed. Of course she couldn't *leave!* She was his best general! Instead the King gave her brothers arms and lands and knighthood and made her follow the army around instead of going home. Occasionally during the long periods of truce she had a job to do like investigating a fake saint,[60](#footnote-60) and when the campaign eventually resumed she was with the army again, but he didn't listen to her and he didn't let her go.
And then she reverted to the mean. Not all the way, of course. But Patay was a miracle, and the miracle didn't recur. Her voices would tell her if other saints were fakes or not, and occasionally they'd start warning her that she'd be taken prisoner eventually, but for military advice they gave her no help, and without them she was merely a very good general. When she finally got her chance to make her attack on Paris it looked like she'd win but the English negotiated another truce over her head and Joan was a loyal vassal of her king, so that was that. Her actual capture - in a minor skirmish with the Burgundians, with her leading the vanguard on the way to the attack and the rearguard on the way back - was an anticlimax, and while we have a witness he politely declined to comment on the scene.[61](#footnote-61)
That left the Duke of Burgundy with the question of what to do with her. The ethical thing to do by the laws of war would be to ransom her back, but that would also give the French back their best general, and so Duke Philip was somewhat reluctant to do that. That reluctance was aided by the fact that Charles was back to mostly having the peace camp in the room with him instead of the war camp,[62](#footnote-62) and they viewed Joan's existence as a provocation to war all by itself.[63](#footnote-63) Joan wasn't ransomed. Instead the Burgundians imprisoned her as a legitimate war captive for a while and then arranged for a prisoner transfer in exchange for moderate compensation, which is to say they sold her to the English.[64](#footnote-64)
The English and their French subordinates, who had been desperately writing letters begging the Burgundians to give them Joan so they could BURN THE WITCH were, as you would expect, absolutely overjoyed.[65](#footnote-65) No woman could possibly have won Joan's victories, so either she's a saint or a witch, but if Joan was a saint, clearly the English government was in the wrong and any Frenchman working with them is a traitor. Since the English government was clearly in the right and they were not traitors, therefore she was a witch and had to be burned. They got the local inquisition (which they controlled) to set up a trial immediately, known to history as the Trial of Condemnation after its inevitable result.
## **2.5. ‘I appeal before God, the Great Judge.”**
It was going to be a kangaroo court, of course. Now, you might think that inquisitions are just naturally kangaroo courts, but *by the standards of the Inquisition,* this was a kangaroo court; there were rules in place, and the English intended to follow them only insofar as these rules would not interfere with the result they intended. She was supposed to be judged by the bishop of her diocese; since the bishop of her diocese was pro-Armagnac, that was out, so they had her tried by the bishop of the place where she was taken - only the bishop of the place she was taken wasn't on their side, *either,* so they misrecorded where she was taken so that she could be tried by the Burgundian bishop of the neighboring diocese, Pierre Cauchon. She was legally allowed a defense attorney,[66](#footnote-66) which she didn't get; she was spied on during the confessional, two of the judges vanish halfway through and at the Trial of Rehabilitation the witnesses report they were fired for being too sympathetic to the defendant, she was guarded in a military prison by English men-at-arms instead of by churchmen or respectable women, and the list just goes on and on and on. They were supposed to have her tried in her home territory so everyone who knew her could give testimony, but they couldn't do that because it was held by the other side, so they declared that the room she was being tried in was legally speaking part of the diocese in which she was captured and pretended that was good enough. They were supposed to interview everyone in her home province to see if she had a good reputation, but somehow they never recorded their results; twenty years later at the Trial of Rehabilitation a Lorraine merchant recounted that one of his countrymen in Rouen came to him full of bitterness that Cauchon hired him and then refused to pay him because “in the course of his inquiries he had learned nothing about Joan that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister.”
This did not stop the trial from being a *great* show. It really is one of the great achievements of this or any age. I could say great artistic achievements, but that would suggest that anyone was aiming at art; it is beautiful not in that it was made to be beautiful, but in that watching someone - anyone - perform at the top of a game - any game - is beautiful. Of the 400-odd pages in my edition, about 130 or so are the introduction and the background (including biographies of everyone mentioned in the trial), then another hundred or so are the bureaucratic minutia of listing who is present at the start of every day of the trial, and then the remaining 170 pages is Joan of Arc being lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire and, *without saying anything heretical,*[67](#footnote-67)spending these 170 pages trolling them.
*Does this woman look like a troll to you?*
> Asked if the people of Domrémy sided with the Burgundians or the other party, she answered that she only knew one Burgundian; and she would have been quite willing for him to have his head cut off, that is if it had pleased God.
>
> Asked if the voice told her in her youth to hate the Burgundians, she answered that since she had known that the voices were for the king of France, she did not like the Burgundians. She said the Burgundians will have war unless they do as they ought; she knows it from her voice.
>
> Asked whether in her youth she had any great intention of defeating the Burgundians, she answered that she had a great desire and will for her king to have his kingdom.
Did she say that God (who is Love) told her to hate the party of the Burgundians? No. Did she intend to defeat them, prior to her revelation? No. Did she want them dead? Well, yes, but only if it pleases God.
(Her judges are Burgundians.)
> Asked what blessing she said or asked over the sword, she answered that she neither blessed it herself, nor had it blessed; she would not have known how to do it.
>
> Asked if she ever put her sword on the altar, and if she did so to bring it better fortune, she answered no, as far as she knew.
>
> Asked if she ever prayed for her sword to have better fortune, she answered: “It is well to know that I could have wished my armor (in French mon harnois) to have good fortune.”
(Blessing it is heretical because she's not a priest, going to effort to have it blessed might be idolatry if you really want to stretch it, and praying to be better at killing people is kinda sinful.)
> Asked whether, since her voices had told her that in the end she should go to Paradise, she has felt assured of her salvation, and of not being damned in hell, she answered that she firmly believed what the voices told her, namely that she will be saved, as firmly as if she were already there.
>
> Asked whether after this revelation she believed that she could not commit mortal sin, she answered: “I do not know; but in everything I commit myself to God.”
>
> And when she was told that this was an answer of great weight, she answered that she held it for a great treasure.
(The belief that she's immune to sin is heresy. The belief that she can go to Heaven in a state of mortal sin is heresy. The belief that she'll eventually go to Heaven can't be heresy because Jesus told specific people they would go to Heaven.)
> Asked if God ordered her to wear a man’s dress, she answered that the dress is a small, nay, the least thing. Nor did she put on man’s dress by the advice of any man whatsoever; she did not put it on, nor did she do aught, but by the command of God and the angels.
>
> Asked whether it seemed to her that this command to assume male attire was lawful, she answered: “Everything I have done is at God’s command; and if He had ordered me to assume a different habit, I should have done it, because it would have been His command.”
>
> Asked if she thought she had done well to take man’s dress, she answered that everything she did at God’s command she thought well done, and hoped for good warrant and succor in it.
>
> Asked if, in this particular case, by taking man’s dress, she thought she had done well, she answered that she had done nothing in the world but by God’s commands.
She is simultaneously utterly direct, so exceedingly Christian that on no point of doctrine can they call her out, and qualified to perfectly sidestep every single question they ask her. It must have been *infuriating.*[68](#footnote-68)
She started everything off by quibbling about the oath they wanted her to swear (she'd previously sworn to keep King Charles's secrets, and so she needed to clarify that she would only swear limited oaths to tell the truth about things that touch on the trial and don't touch on the king) and then when the bishop judging her asked her to say the *our father* she said she would - if he'd hear her in confession.
(He *obviously* couldn't prosecute her if he was her confessor! That would violate the seal of the confessional! Also, he can't really refuse because this is his job. He tries to offer her someone else hearing her confession and eventually drops the point.)
Entertainingly, she does this without apparently knowing anything except war and, uh, now theology somehow? They ask her if she'd tell the Pope anything differently than she tells them and she immediately demands to be taken to the Pope.[69](#footnote-69) They ask her which Pope and she goes... the pope in Rome?
(The Avignon schism was, metaphorically speaking, last week, and in a couple decades the people trying her are going to schism briefly and elect their own Pope because they dislike the Roman one.)
The thing about all this is, though, that it's totally irrelevant to the actual situation. She can beat all the inquisitors in the room in debate, sure. That doesn't matter. The English bought her so they could kill her, ideally in a way that disgraces her king, and they aren't going to just *let her go.* She's the enemy's best general! When she answers all their absurd trick questions correctly, they respond by... writing down different answers than the one she gave and having her convicted based on them.[70](#footnote-70) They end up concluding that she must be a heretic because she (a) wears men's clothes and (b) refuses to submit to the Pope,[71](#footnote-71) [72](#footnote-72) then they convict her of heresy and witchcraft, tell her that if she doesn’t repent they’ll burn her and if they do they’ll let her go, then when she “repents,”[73](#footnote-73) they throw her back in prison and only give her men's clothes to wear,[74](#footnote-74) and convict her of relapsing into heresy when she wears them instead of going naked. Then they burn her!
The sense of atmosphere we get for the burning is that of a garrison in hostile territory who is pretty sure there’s about to be a riot. She warned Cauchon that she had made her appeal for justice to God[75](#footnote-75) before taking a last communion, spending her last moments with a sympathetic priest confessing her sins before being hurried down to the fire by eight hundred armed men; none of the usual cries of eagerness at a burning are reported, only yelling at the English and crying for her.
As she was hurried down she begged for a cross to hold; an English soldier gave her one, and as soon as Cauchon had declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the secular power they hauled her down to the logs to be burned. For some reason in all the rush they let her make a final speech,[76](#footnote-76) which took half an hour and involved forgiving everyone involved and begging them to forgive her all evils she did them; it’s a wonder the city didn’t riot. Her last words were prayers to the saints and to God, ending with cries of “Jesus!” Once the flames had died down the English swept her ashes into the river, so there wouldn’t be any relics.
She was nineteen. In all the haste of the day, the English had never actually convicted her of any crime.[77](#footnote-77)
Shortly afterwards,[78](#footnote-78) the executioner[79](#footnote-79) rushed up to a monk, telling him "God help us, we have burned a saint. God help us, we have burned a saint."
History has tended to agree with him.
---
## **2.6: “Rejoice, free kingdom of France, for now God fights on your side.”**
History has tended to agree with him - eventually.
The English and their allies didn't publish the full trial transcripts. A copy was kept in Rouen, where the trial took place; another copy was sent to Rome, where I suspect the very busy Pope put it in a file drawer somewhere; and I would guess a third copy went somewhere. What they published was the concluding section: The twelve articles of heresy they accused her of, her responses to them, and the conclusion of the judges ("burn her!"). The consensus of Catholic Europe was to assume it was a perfectly normal inquisitorial trial that convicted a perfectly normal heretic of perfectly normal heresy, and an embarrassed silence descended upon the French court on the topic of Joan of Arc. She might have won their battles, but her death made them look bad, and so they were silent.
A few decades passed. She was burned in 1431; in 1435,[80](#footnote-80) after French victories alternating with long truces, an attempted tripartite council between the French, Burgundians and English ended with the outcome least favorable to England - Bedford, the regent of England, dead of an illness and the Burgundian-Armagnac feud put on pause while they ganged up on England. 1436 saw the fall of Paris to the French and now the French armies were unstoppable, racking up victory over victory while the English collapsed into the internal feuds that would lead to the Wars of the Roses.
Meanwhile, the records of the first trial remained in Rouen in their metaphorical file drawer. In 1450[81](#footnote-81) the French took Rouen, and in their metaphorical file drawer the files rested.
But there was a right for families of a condemned victim to request to reopen trials, and Joan of Arc still had friends. A few preliminary stabs had been taken to reopen the trial in 1450 and 1452, but in 1454 her mother and brothers[82](#footnote-82) petitioned the Papacy for the case to be reopened. An inquiry was slowly started, but it accelerated when they saw the Rouen files and realized what had actually happened in the first trial. 1455 saw the second trial unleashed in full, with 115 witnesses being interviewed, including everyone in Joan's village old enough to know her and all the people who had conducted the first trial and were willing to accept an offer of safe-conduct.
This trial - the "Trial of Rehabilitation," after its result, the overturning of the verdict of the first trial - is the source of the interviews that comprise most of our evidence. We have the records of the original trial, but the only reason we have the original handwritten notes is that the Trial of Rehabilitation found them.[83](#footnote-83) All the records of the Trial of Rehabilitation are still there and we've quoted them regularly in the essay.
This means there's a giant vulnerability in our sources. What if the Trial of Rehabilitation was a show trial, but in the opposite direction? What if all that evidence was made up? In that case, most of what I've quoted would be unreliable. We'd be down to the Orleans burgher's journal and the Venetian letters and those other sources, most of which aren't eyewitnesses.
All I can say is: I don't think so. I'm not a forensic linguist, but I've read a lot of it and it sounds like it's in different voices and I've read a lot of histories and they take it seriously as a source and I bet a forensic linguist could get a lot of citations publishing a paper saying "Retrial of Joan of Arc Proved Fraudulent!"
But if we're going to take our sources seriously, that means we need to try to grapple with what our sources say, and our sources describe a lot of miracles..
First, a warning: Remember when I said I was reviewing the evidence for Joan of Arc? I lied.[84](#footnote-84) I reviewed the evidence for Joan of Arc available in English. We've got two translations of the Trial of Condemnation (I read the free one) and then a couple of books pasted together from primary-source quotes, mostly from the Trial of Rehabilitation, and then we have like fifty different modern popular historians writing books about how cool Joan is that I read a bunch of. I *didn't* review all the evidence for Joan of Arc, and I invite someone else to, because the evidence was in a mixture of medieval French, modern French and Latin and in spite of all my efforts I am tragically monolingual.
Still, with the evidence we’ve seen, let’s try to come up with some solutions for this.
---
# **Part Three: “And we know that all she has said has always come to pass.”**
First, though, there’s one more thing I need to cover.
One thing which kept coming up in earlier sections, and I kept cutting so it wouldn't interfere with the flow, is that Joan of Arc keeps making predictions about the future and they keep happening.[85](#footnote-85)
Most of them are pretty explicable. Quoth the Duke d’Alencon:
> [W]hen I left my wife to come to the army with Joan, my wife said to Joan that she was very much afraid for me, that I had been taken prisoner before, and that they had had to pay so much money for my ransom that she would have liked to beg me to stay. Then Joan answered her, “Have no fear. I will return him to you safe and sound, and in the state he is in now or in a better one.”
>
> “During the attack on the town of Jargeau, Joan told me at one moment to retire from the place where I was standing, for if I did not “that engine”—and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town—“will kill you.” I fell back, and a little later on that very spot where I had been standing someone by the name of my lord de Lude was killed. That made me very much afraid, and I wondered greatly at Joan’s sayings after all these events.”
We can nearly explain that marvel with his memory being unreliable after twenty years, turning general good advice into confident predictions. Similarly, one of the bits of the Poitiers examination that I had to cut above is her most explicit summation of her goals, recounted by the elderly Dominican, Seguin Seguin:
> "I told Joan that it was not God’s will that she be believed if nothing appeared by which it should seem that she ought to be believed, and that the King could not be advised, on her mere assertion, to entrust her with soldiers that they be placed in peril, unless she had something else to say. She answered: ‘In God’s name, I am not come to Poitiers to make signs; but take me to Orleans, I will show you the signs for which I have been sent,’ adding that men be given her in such number as should seem good to her and that she would go to Orleans. Then she told me, me and others present, four things which were then to come and which thereafter happened. First, she said that the English would be defeated and that the siege which was laid to the town of Orleans would be raised and that the town of Orleans would be liberated of the English... She said next that the King would be crowned at Rheims. Thirdly, that the town of Paris would return to its obedience to the King; and that the Duke of Orleans would return from England. All that I have seen accomplished."
On the one hand, if this testimony is to be trusted Joan is behaving very well by rationalist standards! She's helpfully calling her shots in advance to avoid the sharpshooter effect, making many specific predictions of individual events. There’s just two problems with this. *First,* all these predictions are correlated - the Duke of Orleans is more likely to be ransomed if they have lots of prisoners to trade for him, which is more likely if they're winning the war, they're not likely to win the war without raising the siege of Orleans, and any victory will inevitably involve the king being crowned and Paris returning to French control, so *most*[86](#footnote-86) of this reduces to “I predict the war will go well because I’m going to win it for us,” which is less of a prophecy than a promise.
And, second, while we can’t exactly expect medieval Frenchmen to carefully write down all their predictions as soon as they make them when our own government doesn’t, we have the major problem that all these predictions are written down after they occurred, which means that the good brother's memory might not be reliable.
Now, we do have other people quoting other, simpler versions of the same prophecies:
> Then we asked her why she had come, and she answered, “I have come in the name of the King of Heaven to raise the siege of Orléans and to lead the King to Rheims for his coronation and his anointing.”
or
> She said that she had two (reasons) for which she had a mandate from the King of Heaven; one, to raise the siege of Orleans, the other to lead the King to Rheims for his sacring.
But, again, they're all recorded in the Trial of Rehabilitation, after that has happened. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Joan made some predictions in advance, recorded by her enemies, all carefully recorded in a file drawer in Rouen, so we could see how accurate she was?
Yeah, she did.
> JOAN: Before seven years be passed, the English will lose a greater gage than they had at Orleans, and they will lose all in France. And the English will even suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France and this will be by[87](#footnote-87) a great victory which God will send to the French.
>
> Question: How do you know that?
>
> JOAN: I know it well by a revelation which has been made to me, and it will happen before seven years; and I should be very vexed should it be so long deferred. I know it as well as I know that you are there in front of me.
>
> Question: When will this happen?
>
> JOAN: I know not the day nor the hour.
>
> Question: In what year will it happen?
>
> JOAN: That too you shall not have, but I would that it might be before Saint John’s Day.
This is a pretty good prediction. But it's not perfect. It's written down in early 1431 and presumably made in early 1431, too, by the date of the trial. The relevant dates for her prediction: May 1435, French win a small-scale victory at Gerberoy, killing a leading English general; September 1435, Bedford dies of natural causes and the Burgundians switch sides again; April 1436, French take Paris with support from inside the city; 1441, the last English stronghold within the Ile de France falls; 1453, every English stronghold in France falls except the debatably French Calais; 1558, Calais falls.
It's true that, "before seven years be passed," the French would win a great victory; talking the Burgundians into switching sides and the fall of Paris both count. And it's arguable that the English would suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France, since when Henry V died his brother Bedford could replace him, while there was no qualified replacement for Bedford. On the other hand, he died during a truce in the war, and I doubt it was a result of "a great victory." The English lost more men at Patay than Gerbois, so Joan certainly couldn't claim it was a greater loss than Patay, though see footnote 86. The fall of Paris can certainly count as "a great victory" and I wouldn't be surprised if in "number of Frenchmen under their control" it was the most important victory for the French, but not in losses among the English.
But you'll note that they don't lose *all* in France - even in the *Ile de France* - "before seven years be passed," unless Joan has a different definition of the Ile than Wikipedia does.
It's not a perfect prediction. But it's pretty good.
> Asked what promises they made, she answered: “That is not in your case at all.” And amongst other things, they told how the king would be reëstablished in his kingdom, whether his enemies wished it or not. She said also that they promised the said Jeanne to bring her to Paradise, and she had asked it of them.
The last section is uncheckable. The rest is a very simple prophecy that boils down to “we’ll win the war.” To the extent it predicts anything more specific, it’s “we will win in this generation, before the throne passes to the king’s heir.”
> Asked if the voices had told her that within three months she would be delivered from prison, she answered: “That is not in your case; however, I do not know when I shall be delivered.”
>
> Asked if her counsel had not told her that she would be delivered out of the present prison, she answered: “Ask me in three months’ time; then I will tell you.” She added: “Ask the assessors, on their oath, if that concerns my trial.”
>
> Asked afterwards, when the assessors had deliberated, and unanimously concurred that it did, she said: “I have already told you that you cannot know all. One day I must be delivered.”
This sure looks like she's making an incorrect prediction: That she'll escape prison. If true, this would sink her case.
The only problem is that the text goes on:
> And beyond this the voices told her she will be delivered by a great victory; and then they said: “Take everything peacefully: have no care for thy martyrdom; in the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.” And this her voices told her simply and absolutely, that is, without faltering. And her martyrdom she called the pain and adversity which she suffers in prison; and she knows not whether she shall yet suffer greater adversity, but therein she commits herself to God.
Which sure sounds to me like “they told her she would be martyred, in the sense in which we use the term today and not just in the older sense of suffering, and she completely misunderstood ‘delivered from the pains of Hell' as ‘delivered from the jail cell you are currently in.’” The great victory spoken of can either be her victory in the debate or, frustratingly, the victory of Jesus over death. Stupid prophecies.
So, are there any prophecies where she is just unambiguously wrong? I think I’ve managed to track one down:
> Question: What was the cause for which you leapt from the tower of Beaurevoir?[88](#footnote-88)
>
> JOAN: I had heard say that all they of Compiègne down to the age of seven years were to be put to fire and to blood, and I preferred to die rather than live after such destruction of good people, and that was one of the causes of my leaping. And the other was that I knew that I was sold to the English and I would rather have died than to be in the hands of the English, my adversaries.
>
> Question: Did you make that leap on the advice of your voices?
>
> JOAN: Catherine told me almost every day that I must not leap and that God would help me and also them of Compiègne. And I said to Saint Catherine that since God would help them of Compiègne, I myself would (like to) be there. Then Saint Catherine said to me: “Without fail, you must accept your lot (be resigned, take what is happening in good part), and you will not be delivered until you have seen the king of the English.” And I answered her: “Truly, I would rather not see him, and I would rather die than be put into the hands of the English.”
This is the prophecy that seems to me like the best evidence against Joan’s divine inspiration. She says that her voices flatly tell her something that never happens. On the other hand, the context is that she needs to not try to escape and not confess; if we want to defend her we can either suggest memory error (she was told this just before jumping out of a tower window and badly injuring herself), translation error (she does see the leader of the English, Bedford, briefly, but he's regent for a king who’s a small child[89](#footnote-89)) or point out that this is a conditional, and she disobeyed the voices. But I take it as pretty good evidence against the divine theory, just - frustratingly - inconclusive.
## **3.2: “We wish to know the truth of this matter.”**
What are we to make of this?
I tend to have three models in my head when I review this. In deference to C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma, I have tended to call them Saint, Schemer and Schizophrenic.
By the first model, she was both honest and correct when she described what was going on: Saints in heaven can and do petition God to produce miracles, and out of all the wars in history, God decided to put his hand down *really, really hard* on this one by handing a random holy peasant detailed instructions on how to win battles, unparalleled persuasiveness and the ability to go around asking saints questions and getting answers on semi-arbitrary topics.[90](#footnote-90) Once she'd done enough to win the war for her side He stopped giving her useful support, but did make sure that events helpfully provided an extremely complete and detailed record of her deeds to the future, just so future historians would not have the slightest excuse for not believing in miracles.
In the second model, she was a military genius out of nowhere who decided to play saint because that was the way society would listen to her. She says - and I believe her - that there were already rumors going around that "the kingdom that has been lost by a woman will be regained by a virgin from the Lorraine marches", and there's people who will say "then let that be me."
But this doesn't actually explain half of what needs explaining about her! How did she learn military riding, how did she learn to wear armor and fight in armor, how did she learn the theology that lets her win debates with inquisitors? You need to put a conspiracy together, with elements of the Armagnac government deliberately prepping her in advance of her public appearance, but how did they know she was a military genius? Or, if actually the entire time that was Dunois or some other officer whispering in her ear, how did they know she was so charismatic? And how large is this conspiracy, anyway? If she didn't spend the first fifteen years of her life in a village, why do so many people testify she did in so many different words? Why couldn’t the Burgundians find any evidence to the contrary? What about her mother and father and her brothers, were they all in on the conspiracy? Why didn't any of the people who rebelled against Charles VII later in life, like the Duke d'Alencon or Jean Dunois or as far as I can tell every other nobleman in France, ever spill the beans? And why is she so crazy about religion? She spends all her time praying and when she's on trial she spends, like, an hour a day haggling over the terms of her oath of honesty!
In the third, she's mentally ill. We know that being *slightly* manic is a common trait of Very Successful People; the drive to push past all obstacles and do the impossible tends to correlate with lots of energy, absolute self-confidence and a sort of hypnotic charisma. By this theory, she's slightly more manic than that. Hallucinations are culturally mediated; she hallucinates saints telling her to Do Good at first and then, later, save the world. Of course, this doesn't explain her being a completely untaught military genius, or a completely untaught theology genius. Generously, it explains part of her charisma, and charisma is certainly useful for warfare - but she's clearly very intelligent, too, which this doesn’t predict, and we also need to ignore all the testimony about prophecy and miracles or claim it was all coincidental. There’s some pretty huge complexity penalties[91](#footnote-91) here.
All these models involve her being very charismatic because she *is* very charismatic. It's very hard to read her and not fall under her sway. Mark Twain was a member of her fan club; so was George Bernard Shaw; so am I. Twain was an unconventional Christian at best and Shaw was a full-blown atheist, but her charisma is strong enough to reach across the gap of ages and ensnare us all. We *know* she was charismatic. The question is - given that, how can we explain everything else?
Obviously, if you're a Catholic, you can be content with the first model, and indeed can be very smug that is exactly what your religion would predict. Non-Catholic Christians might want to consider switching sects, or just might want to say that Joan is before Protestantism and we don't know what she would have thought of it.[92](#footnote-92)
The rest of us have a harder problem. *Neither* of the other two theories make sense. Specific points that I debate back and forth with myself:
## **3.3: “Thus spake the people, but whether she had done well or ill, she was burned that day.”**
(Enter ARUNDEL, who believes Joan is mad, and BASILICA, who believes she is a saint, halfway through a long argument.)
**Arundel:** *Why this war?*
**Basilica:** You mean, out of all the wars for God to put his finger on, why should He put it here?
**Arundel:** Yes! The Armagnacs are crooks. Charles VII is a pretty terrible king. The knight who was her bodyguard was planning to rape her on the road! Sure, the English suck, but everyone in this entire story sucks. If you want to say that God cares more about religion than morality, that doesn't even help. Everyone here's a Catholic, they're just really bad at it. How can you possibly come up with a predictive model of God that predicts *this?*
**Basilica:** You mean, instead of intervening here, God could intervene when the weak are oppressed by the strong - as in the Holocaust, or Tokugawa's persecutions of the Japanese martyrs, or if He is specifically trying to spread the Christian religion He could make the Crusades a success. If God doesn't discriminate by Christian sect, He could preserve the Byzantine empire, and if He's specifically Catholic, He could have the Thirty Years’ War last just five years and end with a permanent Catholic Holy Roman Empire.
**Arundel:** Exactly!
**Basilica:** Well, first, you don't know that He didn't interfere at the Crusaders' Siege of Jerusalem -
**Arundel:** [If he did I'm blaming him for the massacre.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(1099))
**Basilica:** - or the first dozen times Constantinople held off attack, or in aid of the defense of Malta?
**Arundel:** Sure, if you're religious maybe your model says he does that. But this still doesn't predict God the way that good guys/Christians winning every battle they ever fight against bad guys/pagans does, and they don’t. But even if he is, why, in addition, do it here? To prove that miracles are real? God clearly doesn't want to do that, or He would just do miracles in some really obvious way today, and then we wouldn't need to trust the discrimination of 15th-century Frenchmen.
**Basilica:** Look, leaving aside the age-old debate over free will and why God doesn't solve our problems for us - I realize "mysterious ways" is a cheap shot, but this is one of the hinge points of history. There's no reason to believe the English would stop rolling over France if they took Orleans, and no reason not to expect they'd hold on if they took it.[93](#footnote-93) If England rules France - or, more accurately, an Anglo-French King rules both - what does the Protestant Reformation look like? The colonization of the New World? The rise of democracy? If God wants to butterfly history into our path, there's a thousand different ways we could have missed the goal if the Hundred Years' War goes differently.
**Arundel:** Joan of Arc is a lot more than a butterfly.
**Basilica:** Ironically, this is where the corruption and ineptitude enter play on the other side. Maybe there *wasn't* a butterfly that would do it. Maybe the French screwed up every single chance they got to solve problems with only very subtle miracles, and so it took a blatant one to do it.
**Arundel:** That is a hell of a complexity penalty.
**Basilica:** On the other hand, so’s any theory that denies her miracles.
**Arundel:** Some of them have good explanations.
**Basilica:** Such as the weather control? We’ve got eyewitness testimony.
**Arundel:** Written down twenty years later.
**Basilica:** Sure. But the fact that the wind changed direction had meaningful military consequences.
**Arundel:** And yet most of the Popular Histories About How Cool Joan Is don’t mention this miracle! They just say she got the convoy in.
**Basilica:** They are atheist cowards and this is why you should always go back to the primary sources.
**Arundel:** Or they read alternate testimony not included in Pernoud’s collection that disagreed with Dunois’. Or maybe they think she just guessed the wind would change and got lucky when it did.
**Basilica:** Complexity penalty!
**Arundel:** Any theory that doesn’t require a God who sees the fall of every sparrow will involve some coincidences somewhere.
*(They pass under an archway, and for a moment you can’t hear them. As they leave, the conversation resumes -)*
**Basilica:** At her trial, she outargued a room full of theological experts with no formal training or defense counsel.
**Arundel:** She came up with clever ways to avoid their questions. When you look at the ability of police today to convince people to confess to crimes they haven't committed, I agree this is extraordinary and suggests she was very smart and had great social skills, but if she was very smart and had great social skills, that means we need to explain *fewer* miracles, not more.
**Basilica:** Did you ever read *Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village?*
**Arundel:** I did not.
**Basilica:** As part of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition interviewed every single person in an Occitan village about what they believed.
**Arundel:** And they were heretics?
**Basilica:** Yes, but the interesting thing is that they weren’t mostly Albigensian heretics! They'd independently invented six different kinds of atheism or gnosticism or wilder beliefs (the four great evils are Satan, the Pope, the King of France and their bishop) and just went on thinking that until they were asked. Any one of those people - ordinary people in an ordinary village - would have been burned at Joan's trial in five minutes flat. Nobody without theological training would survive.
**Arundel:** I have been regularly told by Christians that theology is basically just logic and deducible from the premises of the religion, and very smart people are good at logic.
**Basilica:** I'm a Christian and I don't buy it. Brilliant people in the fourth century and in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth century study their Bibles, read theologians, and come up with heresies conclusively condemned by Athanasius. Indeed, we observe that all these brilliant people assembled in the fourth century produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape to whatever was most politically useful, and then later centuries saw hundreds of extremely corrupt papal elections between would-be Popes where the Cardinals were paid vast sums to vote for the candidate who paid most, some of which produced Popes who made historically-vital rulings for utterly cynical reasons. If God is real, maybe the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired; but if God isn't real, theology is men looking at their reflection, quarreling about it, and then voting to decide who to kill for being in the minority. If everyone who doesn't study theology in the twelfth century is a heretic, and everyone who doesn't study theology in the twentieth century is a heretic, shouldn't Joan have just been a heretic?
**Arundel:** I agree that this is adding a lot of complexity to the atheist theory! But Joan was very pious. All you need to argue is that her village priest wasn't a heretic - which if the Catholic Church is any good at its job, he shouldn't be - and that any other errors she made were corrected at Poitiers, and she pays attention and learns the right answer and then remembers it later.
**Basilica:** I am touched by your faith in the simplicity and purity of the Christian doctrine and the ability and honesty of the Catholic church.
*(ARUNDEL laughs.)*
**Basilica:** And the artillery! Imagine, Arundel, that you hear that Google has just offered a $1 billion a year salary to a new employee, a young woman from a small tribe in Africa who was illiterate until the age of fifteen.
**Arundel:** This seems unlikely.
**Basilica:** Yup. Would you guess she was hired to be their new top programmer? The first ballistae were invented by a devoted R&D team around 400 BC,[94](#footnote-94) and ever since then the artillery has been one of the most technical fields of warfare. You give random noblemen commissions in the cavalry and trust to their ability to charge with fervor; the reason Napoleon was an artillerist was because the artillery was where you sent the people with a good mind for geometry and ballistics.
**Arundel:** Today, I'd expect her not to be a computer programmer - just like in 1800, I wouldn't believe in an illiterate artillery savant being Napoleon. But she wasn't being Napoleon! When you say that they need to know ballistics, you imply that they knew what they were doing. If everyone is calculating by eye, the person with the best intuitive ability to calculate projectiles - which I'll bet you is IQ-correlated - is your best artillerist, and Joan was clearly brilliant.
**Basilica:** I'm really not sure you're right. I’m no more of an expert on the development of artillery than you are, but this pattern-matches to a lot of "dumb medievals" stories, and this is the late middle ages, not the Dark Ages. They not only have geometry, they practically worship geometry. Why shouldn't they be able to solve this?
*What tools would God use to make the cosmos but a compass and straightedge?*
**Arundel:** They probably did. The very first siege where artillery is recorded as being used in western Europe is Orleans! By fifty years after that maybe they have an answer, but not *within the year!* I'm not saying they're dumb, but it does sometimes take more than a year to solve problems.
**Basilica:** That's Fletcher Pratt who says it was the first siege and he is *not* a reliable source.
*(Enter CHAROLAIS, who suspects a conspiracy.)*
**Charolais:** Alternatively, she could just have gotten trained by an expert artillerist.
*(Two heads turn.)*
**Charolais** *(unruffled)*: I heard you were talking about Joan of Arc. So, Arundel. I take it you support the theory that she was mentally ill?
**Arundel:** Specifically manic, but yes.
**Charolais:** Mania is not generally known to result in accurate predictions of the future or extraordinary horse-riding, lance-using skills.
**Arundel:** You'd rather discard all the testimony of her village?
**Charolais:** Yes, I think so. Neither you nor I have read the untranslated sections of the Trial of Rehabilitation, and we aren't trained in forensic linguistics. There are two points where if you’re wrong your theory falls - your intuition that you can do a good enough job at amateur forensic linguistics to tell that the characters in the Trial of Rehabilitation have different voices, and your belief that Regine de Pernoud is a reliable source. If we discard one leading French historian of the period as reliable, we can conclude that, actually, Joan was recognized at an early age by someone in the Armagnac camp as super-capable, trained up for her job, and that the religion was a cover story.
**Arundel:** I feel like there's dogs that ought to bark there that don't. There are quite a lot of other historians who would love to expose a leading rival as inept.
**Charolais:** Yes, but were they translated into English?
**Arundel:** They don't have to be. Pernoud was translated into English because she was a leading historian of Joan's age. She’s writing against the trends by focusing so hard on the texts in an age of economic history and social history*,* so it would have been easy and profitable to shoot her down.
**Charolais:** This is speculation and we both know it.
**Arundel:** The fact that when Cauchon sent people to investigate Joan’s reputation in her home province, they found nothing?
**Charolais:** Travel was difficult and unsafe, and the Trial of Rehabilitation made up the testimony by the people who went and claimed to find a good reputation.
**Arundel:** Epicycles.
**Charolais:** Smaller ones than “within a month she learned six skills to a professional level.”
**Arundel:** Actually, we don't know she was any good with a lance.
**Charolais:** Three sources...
**Arundel:** They testify twenty, thirty years after her death. If she was a faster learner than anyone they've ever met - which is still a complexity penalty but not much of one, we're both admitting she's brilliant - they might remember that as "very good."
**Charolais:** That gets you *one.* When she's good at every skill of war, why not admit that she probably had more than a month to learn them?
**Arundel:** Because she's hardly the first shockingly brilliant teenage general! Sure, Alexander had Philip, but he died when Alexander was young and half of what Alexander did he had to invent for himself. The middle ages was an age of apprenticeships, and that means we don't have the formalized art of war that we will in another two centuries, only what fathers teach their sons. It's not *that* improbable she invents it herself.
**Charolais:** It absolutely is!
**Basilica:** Or you could admit it's a miracle.
*(Arundel laughs).*
**Basilica:** Since you've joined the conversation, Charolais! Let's talk about the death of Joan of Arc.
**Charolais:** At her trial, she defended herself with the skill of a brilliant theologian. Therefore she was a brilliant theologian. Therefore she had training.
**Basilica:** Not the trial, the death. The point where everything is lost and she goes to the flames and is burned alive. She could save herself by confessing!
**Charolais:** She tried that.
**Basilica:** No, she signed a document and the record was altered. We have six witnesses. If she'd confessed to the entire conspiracy - that she was trained up by their enemies, that she’d faked all her miracles, that she was lying from the start - she could have saved her life and probably gotten pretty heavily paid, as one of our sources testifies. It sure looks like Cauchon is stretching her death out so this very thing will happen, and it doesn’t!
**Charolais:** Martyrs do go gladly to their deaths, sometimes.
**Basilica:** For something they believe in. In this period, that's the Catholic faith. Or the Muslim faith, or the Cathar faith, or the Hussite faith. They don't die for *nothing.*
**Charolais:** Personally, as an atheist, I'm inclined to say that most martyrs die for "it would be really embarrassing *not* to after I've gone this far," occasionally mixed with "to hell with these people in particular.”
**Basilica:** Read the records of the day of her death! If she surrendered to Cauchon, she might have lived. If she’d tried to whip the mob into a frenzy, she might have lived. Instead she asked them to forgive her murderers. That is not the behavior of a fraud, but of a sincere believer.
**Charolais:** Mmm…
**Arundel:** I want to make another point. If it’s a conspiracy, why didn’t the Duke d’Alencon or Dunois spill? They rebelled against the King eventually, but never said a word about Joan being any sort of fraud.
**Charolais:** Joan was their friend. They were neck and neck with her in it, and they didn’t want to incriminate themselves or betray her.
**Arundel:** Charolais, you’ve read about this court - its rapid changes of policy, its sudden and inexplicable shifts of method, Charles VII’s inability to make any decision without second-guessing it, all shot through with Venetian spies. Can you actually believe anyone in it is qualified to run a conspiracy without it being exposed five minutes in?
**Charolais:** Okay, I’ll admit that part’s tricky.
-
## **3.4: “She is in truth come to accomplish magnificent things in this world.”**
I think this is where I'm supposed to put what I learned from Joan of Arc.
First, I learned that she's really, really cool. I talk about "God stretching down His hand to alter history," and I'm really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.
I also kind of feel called out by God. "So, you say you're a rationalist? You're dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won't consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a *mere* two eyewitness and five contemporary reports?[95](#footnote-95) You won't believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could *avoid* recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?"
On the other hand, I still do have my atheist model. Here, I suppose, is what it recounts:
Imagine that you sort all the people in the world by how good evidence they are for God. If you restrict yourself to people alive today, you expect one in eight billion people is going to be so extraordinarily good evidence you would only expect one in eight billion people to be that impressive by chance.
Now sort everyone who has ever lived by how good evidence they are for God.
It isn't quite as impressive as it looks. Most people lived before recorded history; we can only expect the level of evidence we have for Joan in areas after the invention of the printing press and with people of historical importance, and the further you get from the English-speaking world the less likely I am to have access to sources on them. But that’s still a *lot* of people, and Joan’s at the head of the list. You aren’t reading about Joan because she’s a random person, you’re reading about her because she’s fascinating precisely because she’s such unusually good evidence for miracles - she’s not the product of random chance,[96](#footnote-96) she’s the product of a “sort the entire planet by how miraculous they seem”[97](#footnote-97) function.
I am genuinely conflicted. This seems to me to be sufficient evidence that I can’t just handwave it as “well, sometimes people will make shit up.” No! Making shit up doesn’t do this! Is this really just coincidence? Is this really just mania? Did God exist, and stretch out his hand for *this war in particular?* Why? I genuinely can’t say.
But, since I can’t say, let’s move on from the question of my spiritual agonies to useful lessons we can learn from this historical incident.
First, Pierre Cauchon doesn’t seem to have been a very wicked man. Wikipedia warns against rounding him off to a cartoon villain, and I’m inclined to agree. He seems to have been a perfectly ordinary politician in bishop’s clothes, loyal to a great Renaissance prince and patron of the arts who in many ways deserved men’s loyalty, interested in preserving the authority of Church councils against the unchecked authority of the Pope.
Therefore he murdered a saint because she was politically inconvenient for his goals, and was *furious* with her when she wouldn’t go along with it and just die, and celebrated when he finally managed to find a way to kill her off. Great evils aren’t done by extremely wicked men. Bedford was a competent statesman trying to protect his family, Philip the Good was one of the finest princes of the Renaissance, and with Cauchon they all carried out Joan’s destruction. You can be an ordinary good person and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a hero you never believed you’d ever see, and murder her because she’s politically inconvenient, and, having done so, not even get the benefits you sold your soul for. And that’s a lesson that no men, at any time, can ever hear too much.
Second, that in a maze of backstabbing politics, ineptitude, brutal criminality and betrayal within and without the government, of authorities who act like bandits and bandits who act like Huns, a saint can suddenly appear with the strength to rewrite history. When everything looks hopeless… you’re probably screwed! But you might not be. A saint might appear. It’s happened before. It can happen again.
And, third and finally? If you’re looking at these sources and seeing stories grow and change, seeing how the sources twenty years later are just slightly more polished than the contemporary sources, seeing how secondhand accounts distort the story and contemporary chroniclers include exciting incidents that never actually occurred, and you’re panicking?
Then I have a dreadful, doleful warning for you: This is just about as good as it gets. There are a few modern cases - the World Wars, say - where we have better information, where the participants published newspapers and kept diaries and sent each other letters and even didn’t burn most of the letters, but if you go back very far, or pass into a country without cheap paper and the printing press and an extremely literate population, you will quickly discover that the evidence for Joan of Arc is stronger than the evidence for *everything else.* All of our historical sources before the printing press and most afterwards have gone through the same evolution as the evidence for Joan of Arc, and the difference between the life of Augustus and the life of Joan is that with Joan we can see the evolution, captured in amber. The life of Alexander the Great that we have now shouldn’t be compared to Jean Chartier’s narrative; chronologically, it’s closer to the fix-fic written seventy years later in which after the coronation at Rheims, Paris surrenders without a fight and they march into Normandy and Charles VII promises to listen to Joan forever and orders the army to always do what she says.[98](#footnote-98) If you want to know the truth about Joan of Arc, you can read the chronicles of the time, or the modern histories that laboriously try to disentangle the evidence from the invention and the reality from the superstition, and you can hope they got the right answer.
Or you can look at the book where the French clerks interviewed a hundred and fifteen witnesses and wrote down the results. Who knows? Maybe one of them got it right.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Very, very redacted.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
This is hyperbole, they only got 115 people.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
The evidence that's available in English. I don't speak Latin, medieval French or modern French, and should.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
We have no histories from contemporaries of Alexander the Great, just inscriptions, fragments quoted in later histories, et cetera. There were histories written, to be clear! We know they were written! We even know his general Ptolemy wrote one claiming to be his half-brother! We just don't have them any more because all existing copies have been lost or destroyed. Blame the Huns and the Goths, I suppose.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
Respectable history says this is just a bunch of coincidences, but Maurice Druon got some pretty good novels out of it.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
The good-looking. *Not* the just. "The Iron King" is his other nickname, which fit much better.
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
Thereby explaining why the average rate of interest to monarchs throughout history was something around ten percent.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Scurrilous chroniclers report lots of exciting scheming around this time. Probably most of it didn’t happen, but some of it might have.
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
"The She-Wolf of France." Man, these people have great nicknames.
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
The two of them had arranged the overthrow and murder of his father.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
Which built much of its powers in the reign of his great-grandfather, Henry III, who wasn't the first weak king to accidentally build strong institutions and won't be the last.
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
When it comes to army sizes, we're lucky when our sources only disagree by a factor of two.
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
This is the *best* name for shooting arrows at plate armor and watching them explode. See Skallagrim and Tod’s Workshop on YouTube for more details.
[14](#footnote-anchor-14)
… In Europe. The Mongols and their fellow steppe nomads were quite as good archers as the English and had even better bows, and I have never seen a head-to-head comparison of who could shoot faster.
[15](#footnote-anchor-15)
15: Interestingly, one author of the French Revolutionary Wars - some four hundred years after our story - recommended the British ditch the single-shot musket for the longbow on these grounds. This probably would have been a mistake, since longbows didn't come with bayonets, but given that nobody but a few cuirassiers was wearing armor by that point I suspect Pitt's government would have gotten a good deal by recruiting any hobbyists still practicing with the weapon and having them fire on enemy infantry and cower inside a bayonet square whenever cavalry threatened.
[16](#footnote-anchor-16)
Do you ever wonder if the French had it coming?
[17](#footnote-anchor-17)
The ones who took major wounds didn’t reach the English lines.
[18](#footnote-anchor-18)
This is an interesting one which I included chiefly because no American has ever heard of it. The English and the French were allied with the main contenders, the Portuguese and Castillians, but in spite of this it looked remarkably similar to any of the battles of the Hundred Years' War, complete with the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance routing enemies that outnumbered them six to one using archers, defensive terrain and their enemies' rashness.
[19](#footnote-anchor-19)
I'm mostly not crediting my sources because there’s too many of them but I stole this line unusually blatantly. It's from Wikipedia.
[20](#footnote-anchor-20)
To pick an element purely because I happen to know something about it: We have dance manuals in the fifteenth century from two places: Italy and Burgundy. They don't show up elsewhere in Europe until the sixteenth century, or for laggardly places like England, the seventeenth.
[21](#footnote-anchor-21)
Wikipedia helpfully tells us that it may have been any or all of "familial schizophrenia syndrome, typhus, bipolar disorder, [or] arsenic poisoning."
[22](#footnote-anchor-22)
The name came from the title of Louis of Orleans's son’s wife's father Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, who lead the faction for a time. You do not need to remember his name.
[23](#footnote-anchor-23)
Corruption by the standards of the period, yes. It was also suspected he was sleeping with his brother's wife on the side, but that was probably just hostile slander, especially if you're Catholic. (We’ll get to that.)
[24](#footnote-anchor-24)
The title of Dauphin is that of the heir to the French throne, like "Prince of Wales" in England.
[25](#footnote-anchor-25)
Legally your brother’s wife is your sister.
[26](#footnote-anchor-26)
That they appealed and were de facto ignored is my supposition; there are people mentioning that they hold out hope Castile will help them, and they were allied with the Castilians in the last bout of the war, but I have failed to track down any evidence of any help Castile actually gave them.
[27](#footnote-anchor-27)
They died in 1422 and Verneuil was in 1424.
[28](#footnote-anchor-28)
It’s not that the English weren’t theoretically Catholic, too, they were just bad at it.
[29](#footnote-anchor-29)
Our source for this is her own testimony - up until her journey to Vaucouleurs, she didn't tell anyone angels spoke to her. The most she managed was the crypting hinting to a friend of hers that we get the section title from.
[30](#footnote-anchor-30)
One of the persistent problems with the language of every figure in this period, Joan included, is that *France* wasn't very well defined, in rather the same way an American could say "New York" to mean New York State or New York City, except worse. So "France" could mean either all of the territory held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory rightfully held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory in the ancient Kingdom of France, which had more different borders than I could shake a stick at, or just the *Ile de France,* the region surrounding Paris that was the heart of the domain of the French kings. Joan talks about herself as French and also talks about going into France from Lorraine, and plenty of others from this period talk about going from Normandy into France or France into Flanders. I can't ask them to talk more precisely than I speak myself, but it's still really annoying.
[31](#footnote-anchor-31)
Most first-person quotes are from the two books Regine Pernoud wrote on this topic, *Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses* - my favorite Joan of Arc book because it's mostly a primary source compilation - and *The Retrial of Joan of Arc*, also a primary source compilation but more focused. This one is from *By Herself And Her Witnesses*, but a bunch of others will be from *The Retrial*. The third-person quotes are mostly from the W.P. Barrett translation of her trial.)
[32](#footnote-anchor-32)
At this point, Joan of Arc got dragged into a sidequest when the Duke of Lorraine (her theoretical liege-lord) heard rumors there was a miracle-worker around and decided to ask her to come visit him to heal his poor health. She went to him and told him he should stop sinning with his mistress and take back his wife, but that if he gave her an armed escort to Bourges she'd pray for him. He, having lived with his mistress for what I would guess was more than a decade at this point and having had five children with her, gave her four francs and sent her back to Vaucoleurs.
[33](#footnote-anchor-33)
There’s discussions of a royal marriage at this time to strengthen the alliance.
[34](#footnote-anchor-34)
Catherine Le Royer: “I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, and Messire Jean Fournier, come into my house. I heard it from Joan that the latter, a priest, had brought a stole and that he had conjured her before the captain, saying that if there was any bad thing in her that she go hence from them, and that if there was a good thing then let her approach them. And Joan approached this priest and went down on her knees; and she said that this priest had not done well, since he had heard her confession.” *Joan of Arc by herself and her Witnesses*, page 44.
[35](#footnote-anchor-35)
Joan of Arc, By Herself and her Witnesses, page 46.
[36](#footnote-anchor-36)
“They said that in the beginning they wanted to require her to lie with them carnally. But when the moment came to speak to her of this they were so much ashamed that they dared not speak of it to her nor say a word of it.”
[37](#footnote-anchor-37)
Warning, this footnote is kind of boring - not every writer is Joan. But if you want our best guess to what the sign was, the chronicler Pierre Sala, writing a couple generations later, writes that a man who had served Charles in his youth told him that:
"In the time of the great adversity of this King Charles VII, he found himself (brought) so low that he no longer knew what to do. . . . The King, being in this extremity, entered one morning alone into his oratory and there he made a humble petition and prayer to Our Lord in his heart, without utterance of words, in which he petitioned devoutly that if so it was that he was true heir descended from the noble House of France and that the kingdom should rightly belong to him, that it please Him to keep and defend him, or, at worst, to grant him the mercy of escaping death or prison, and that he might fly to Spain or to Scotland which were from time immemorial brothers in arms and allies of the Kings of France, wherefore had he there chosen his last refuge. A little time afterwards, it came about that the Maid was brought to him, who, while watching her ewes in the fields, had received divine inspiration to go and comfort the good King. She did not fail, for she had herself taken and conducted by her own parents even before the King and there she gave her message at the sign aforesaid (*dessusdit*) which the King knew to be true. And thenceforth he took counsel of her and great good it did him.”
Which gets some notable parts of the story wrong, but if the heart of it is accurate it would be a sign that - consciously or unconsciously - could be delivered through the wholly non-miraculous skill of cold reading.
[38](#footnote-anchor-38)
One of the recurring elements I find in the biographies of great generals is how insanely pissed off they are whenever politics deprives them of an opportunity to exploit military opportunities.
[39](#footnote-anchor-39)
It's plausible she learned to ride a plowhorse as a child since Lorraine is horse country, but riding a warhorse is a specialized skill, and it's plausible she had a month or two at Vaucouleurs to practice swordsmanship, but I don't think there was anyone at Vaucouleurs to teach her command.
[40](#footnote-anchor-40)
"Wait, artillery? Aren't these people medieval knights with swords and lances and full plate?" Yes. Gunpowder is older than plate armor(\*). Our oldest recipe for gunpowder is 11th-century Chinese but it's writing down something that already existed, probably since the ninth century. In the thirteenth century it spreads to Europe and the Middle East, probably via the Mongols, but gunpowder weapons take a long time to get good, only exploding in popularity in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, siege artillery first, field artillery second, handguns third. Joan of Arc is right at the point where artillery is starting to be important, with the Siege of Orleans being the earliest siege I know of where artillery played a major role.
\* Sub-footnote: Older than medieval plate armor, technically. Bronze plate armor dates back to Agamemnon, it just kind of sucked compared to iron chain or lamellar. The high and late Middle Ages saw an improving economy giving knights the ability to spend more and more on heavy armor to keep enemy spears and arrows and bullets and crossbow bolts out, and this demand was served by the arms and armor manufacturers of Milan and the Rhine competing in an arms race to develop better armor, with the first ambiguous plate appearing in the 12th or 13th century. The peak of personal protection is probably the beautiful suits of Gothic plate from around 1525, worn by the French cavalry at the Battle of Pavia, who in spite of the toughest armor in the world still can’t ride their horses over Spanish pikemen or deflect bullets from German handguns, and from this point on the level of armor used by soldiers steadily decreases right up until steel helmets to deflect shrapnel return in the first World War and the pendulum's arc reverses again.
[41](#footnote-anchor-41)
The details of the Battle of the Herrings are plot-irrelevant but hilarious. The troops besieging Orleans needed regular resupply; since Lent was approaching, they'd want preserved fish to eat on all those long meatless days, so the wagons were loaded up with pickled herring and sent with sixteen hundred troops or so as escort and reinforcement. The French under the Count of Claremont tried to hit the supply lines with four thousand of their own complete with heavy cavalry and artillery and Scotsmen, but the English commander, the oft-maligned Sir John Falstaff, drew up his wagons in a ring and had all his troops fight from the shelter of the wagons, and that threw the French into confusion. You can't *lance* a *wagon*. They tried an artillery bombardment, which was basically sensible, but their troops got bored partway through, charged and were decisively defeated, to the ruin of the French interception, the morale of the Armagnacs, and, of course, the career of the Count of Claremont.
[42](#footnote-anchor-42)
He's still around at the start of Europa Universalis IV and has great stats.
[43](#footnote-anchor-43)
"Once, near to the town of Château-Thierry, having seen the mistress of one of the soldiers, a Knight, she pursued her with drawn sword. She did not, however, strike the woman, but warned her gently and charitably that she be no longer found in the company of the soldiers, otherwise she would do something to her which would not please her.” We have another eyewitness to another event but I'm not going to quote him here because this essay is much too long.
[44](#footnote-anchor-44)
This is not an example chosen at random.
[45](#footnote-anchor-45)
One might call this person "captain-general," and indeed I believe this is the etymology of the word "general."
[46](#footnote-anchor-46)
He is.
[47](#footnote-anchor-47)
If that was a specific prediction and not just general good advice, I want to note that the *cannoneer* couldn't do that. Fifteenth century artillery is only a precision weapon insofar as the ball will probably not land behind the gun.
[48](#footnote-anchor-48)
She continues: “You thought to deceive me and it is yourself above all whom you deceive, for I bring you better succour than has reached you from any soldier or any city: it is succour from the King of Heaven. It comes not from love of me but from God himself who, at the request of Saint Louis and Saint Charlemagne\*, has taken pity on the town of Orleans, and will not suffer that the enemies have the bodies of the lord of Orleans and his town.’” Which is when the wind changes direction.
\*: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
[49](#footnote-anchor-49)
And called an "Armagnac whore."
[50](#footnote-anchor-50)
To which she responded with:
“‘Bastard, Bastard, in God’s name I command thee that, as soon as thou knowest that Falstaff [commander of the relief force] is come, thou shalt make it known to me, for if he pass without my knowing of it, I promise thee I will have thy head taken off!’ To which answered the lord of Dunois that she doubt not, for he would indeed make it known to her.”
I find it really really easy to imagine this exchange, between an energetic teenager and the veteran officer of noble birth with ten years on her\* and without god whispering in his ear.)
\*: Wow, these people are young.
[51](#footnote-anchor-51)
“After these exchanges, I who was weary and fatigued cast myself down on a mattress in the Maid’s chamber, to rest a little. And likewise did she, with her hostess, on another bed, to sleep and rest. But while I was beginning to take my rest, suddenly the Maid rose from the bed, and making a great noise, roused me. At that I asked her what she wanted. She answered me: ‘In God’s name my counsel has told me to go out against the English and I know not whether I must go against their fortification (bastide) or against Falstaff who is to revictual them.’ Upon which I arose at once and, as swiftly as I could, put the Maid into her armour.”
[52](#footnote-anchor-52)
The English longbowmen carried long wooden stakes with them that they’d plant into the earth before a battle to defend them from charging cavalry.
[53](#footnote-anchor-53)
“Disciple and limb of the Fiend, called the Pucelle [Maid or Virgin], that used false enchantments and sorceries.” Consistent spelling is an anachronism.
[54](#footnote-anchor-54)
I love the Venetians. They've got some of the best spy networks in Europe by this point and they use them to deliver cargo safely and price loans accurately.
[55](#footnote-anchor-55)
Joan, naturally enough, told the Bretons that "the duke should not reasonably have waited so long to send his men to help the King with their services.”
[56](#footnote-anchor-56)
Well, people who had been her fellow random commoners two years ago, anyway.
[57](#footnote-anchor-57)
He ends up called "Charles the Well-Advised," because "Charles The Guy Where God Wanted Really Wanted Him To Have His Father's Throne In Spite Of His Many, Many, Many Personal Failings" doesn't really roll off the tongue. Yes, spoiler, *this guy wins.*
[58](#footnote-anchor-58)
Entertainingly, everyone still had orders never to work with him, ever, so the Duke d'Alencon said they'd have to withdraw if his reinforcements were coming to join them. Joan vetoed this because it was incredibly stupid and they negotiated something better. My favorite bit is where the two meet: the Constable's chronicler says that when they saw each other,
> “He [the Constable] spoke to her and said: Joan, I have been told that you want to fight me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God I fear nothing from you, for God knows my good-will. If you are from the Devil, I fear you even less.”
At which point (the Duke d'Alencon says)
> “Joan said to the lord constable: ‘Ah! Good constable, you are not come for my sake, but because you are come you will be welcome.’ ”
I like these people.
[59](#footnote-anchor-59)
This is a rephrasing. The exact words, from The Retrial of Joan of Arc:
> "Then my lord the Duke of Alençon, in the presence of the lord constable, of myself, and of several others, asked Joan what should be done. She answered him loudly with the words, “See that you all have good spurs!” When those present heard this they asked her, “What did you say? Are we to turn our backs on them then?” “No,” answered Joan, “it will be the English who will put up no defense. They will be beaten, and you will have to have good spurs to pursue them.” And it was as she said. For they took to their heels, and they lost more than four thousand men in dead and prisoners."
[60](#footnote-anchor-60)
There was a woman named Catherine de Rochelle going around fundraising "for the war"; she claimed she had a God-given power to find hidden treasure and she'd use it on anyone who didn't contribute to the war effort (via her) enough, and then she'd publicly reveal all their hidden wealth (and they, implicitly, would be under enough pressure from their neighbors to donate it). This worked to get donations and give her a comfortable living, but the King of France heard of her and, already having been bailed out of a crisis by one miraculous Maid, asked Joan to check if she was real. Joan's voices said no, but she went and talked to her and spent two nights watching her every moment and saw no angels, and reported back "I have no evidence she is."
[61](#footnote-anchor-61)
The Burgundians were paying his bills. Conclude what you wish from this.
[62](#footnote-anchor-62)
This situation would eventually be resolved years after Joan's death when the Constable of France, one of the leaders of the war party, just flat-out illegally arrested his archnemesis de la Tremoille, head of the peace camp, and seized the status of the king's chief advisor for himself. He got away with this with no consequences whatsoever.
[63](#footnote-anchor-63)
They were, of course, quite right, given how she would not shut up about how all of France should return to allegiance to its king and God would see him victorious; they were also quite wrong if they thought the English intended to stop fighting themselves.
[64](#footnote-anchor-64)
For the conditions of her captivity, we have the report of a Burgundian knight:
> “I saw Joan for the first time when she was shut up in the castle of Beaurevoir for the lord count of Ligny. I saw her several (many) times in prison and on several occasions conversed with her. I tried several times, playfully, to touch her breasts, trying to put my hand on her chest, the which Joan would not suffer but repulsed me with all her strength. Joan was, indeed, of decent conduct (honnête tenue) both in speech and act.
*By herself and her witnesses,* page 227.
[65](#footnote-anchor-65)
While the transfer was arranged, Joan attempted to escape twice, both times unsuccessfully.
[66](#footnote-anchor-66)
The technical term is "Advocate".
[67](#footnote-anchor-67)
As opposed to Discord conversationalists, who say things that I as an agnostic can be pretty sure are heretical, like, every six seconds. I bet a Catholic could get it down to two or three.
[68](#footnote-anchor-68)
"She seemed to me to be subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety," said the judge Jean Beaupere. Source: page 263 of Regine Pernoud's *The Retrial of Joan of Arc.*
[69](#footnote-anchor-69)
It is customary to grant this request for an appeal, so this is another violation of trial procedures.
[70](#footnote-anchor-70)
How do we know this? Why, because the Rouen archives weren't destroyed, and that means the French-language handwritten notes of the scribe who recorded her testimony ("the French Minute") were still in the archives, and we can compare that - and, as importantly, the French at the Trial of Rehabilitation could compare that - with the official Latin version broadcast for publication. The physical notes didn't survive the centuries, alas - if my memory is right the original Minute was lost in a WW2 bombing - but copies of it did. Basically, every time she demands her legal rights that she has no plausible way of knowing about but they’re honor-bound to grant her, they leave it out of the official transcript.
[71](#footnote-anchor-71)
This is the bit they changed. She in fact said she would submit to no authority's judgement as to the authenticity of her visions *other than* the Pope, which is barely not heretical.
[72](#footnote-anchor-72)
There were a few more things on their list of accusations, but the men's clothes were clear proof of defiance of the court and the refusal to accept the judgement of the Pope was clear proof of heresy, and the rest they couldn't really make stick.
[73](#footnote-anchor-73)
By signing a small note when all the bishops present tell her to. With an X, which was her symbol for “disregard this, the letter is a lie.” While laughing at them.
[74](#footnote-anchor-74)
This is actually the less nasty of the two narratives about why she went back to wearing men’s clothing. The nastier is that she was assaulted by her jailers while she was in womens’ clothing and wore men's clothes because she could defend herself better this way. She blamed the bishop for not keeping her in a civilized ecclesiastical prison instead of guarded by English soldiers, which one witness of the trial said Cauchon hadn't done because it would offend the English.
[75](#footnote-anchor-75)
You may have heard that God took vengeance on him, but in fact he died of a heart attack at the age of 71. It was a different one of her accusers who mysteriously turned up dead in a sewer.
[76](#footnote-anchor-76)
Pernoud theorizes Bishop Cauchon was hoping she’d break at the last minute and disclaim all of her visions as fraud, which would have strengthened his hand. The notary testifies that he attempted to edit the record after the trial to claim she did, but he was unwilling to notarize that since it didn’t happen.
[77](#footnote-anchor-77)
In the middle ages, the Church lacked the legal power to execute people. All it could do was hand them over to the secular authorities - pronounced “cops” - with a warning that they were unrepentant heretics, and the judge was then supposed to pronounce them guilty of the crime of heresy on that evidence and sentence them to be executed, and only then was the executioner to get to work.
[78](#footnote-anchor-78)
The source tells the story twice; in one telling it occurs after a midday dinner, in the other before it.
[79](#footnote-anchor-79)
According to the monk involved. According to someone who heard the story secondhand, it was the King of England’s secretary, a much more important person.
[80](#footnote-anchor-80)
Or, as she put it, "within seven years... and I should be very vexed should it be so long deferred."
[81](#footnote-anchor-81)
I think. If my sources give an exact date I missed it, but the Normandy campaign that secured all of the duchy for the French was '49-50 and most of the action was in 1450.
[82](#footnote-anchor-82)
With the support of at least some members of the French government, which is probably why this petition didn't end up in a file drawer.
[83](#footnote-anchor-83)
The scribe who wrote them down at the first trial offered them up to the court at the second. I can't tell if it was genuine patriotism, desire to avenge an injustice, desire to have the authorities owe him a favor, or if he was worried he'd be in a court case ten years later and someone would ask him "did you collaborate with the English occupation?" and he wanted to be able to defend himself.
[84](#footnote-anchor-84)
Except to those of you who read the footnotes!
[85](#footnote-anchor-85)
I also want to cover one non-prophetic miracle she testified about, which is that she prayed a stillborn child would live and it woke up and breathed for exactly long enough to be baptized, which is one of these miracles that says frankly appalling things about the state of the world.
[86](#footnote-anchor-86)
The ransom of the Duke of Orleans is an extra improbability, though. He’d been in captivity for a long time and prisoners often die.
[87](#footnote-anchor-87)
The specific word “by” is found in *Joan of Arc: By Herself And Her Witnesses,* but absent in my complete translation of *The Trial of Joan of Arc.* It changes the meaning significantly and I am guessing the more recent translation is better but I don’t actually know.
[88](#footnote-anchor-88)
Where she was imprisoned by the Burgundians.
[89](#footnote-anchor-89)
I have heard the rumor Henry VI briefly saw her trial but have no source for it at all. Since he’s in Paris for his coronation in December of 1431 and Joan is burned in May of 1431, it’s certainly not impossible, but I have seen no evidence it’s true.
[90](#footnote-anchor-90)
"Asked if she calls them or if they come without being called, she answered that they often come without being called, and sometimes, if they did not come, she would pray to God to send them. Asked if she sometimes had called them without them coming, she answered that she never needed them, however little, but they came to her."
[91](#footnote-anchor-91)
That is to say that:(a) the more complex an explanation has to be to explain Joan’s marvels, the less good it is, and (b) a simple explanation that relies heavily on coincidence is actually a complex explanation in disguise.
[92](#footnote-anchor-92)
Actually, she wrote the Hussites a very angry letter telling them she’d campaign against them when she had free time, and at one point - I think it was in the Trial of Condemnation but it might have been while she was very frustrated with the French peace party and its truces - she offered to go into exile and actually do it. So this suggests she's pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant, though of course we don't know what would have happened if she'd had the chance.
[93](#footnote-anchor-93)
Arundel: Actually, what about the Wars of the Roses? Wouldn't France get free while the red and white roses fought?
Basilica: Countries that lose wars and thereby lose territory have revolutions, as the populace looks for scapegoats for the disaster and the dispossessed elites managing the occupation flee to what remains of their country to compete for status with their already-established rivals. Countries that win wars do so much less regularly, and so an English victory here would probably prevent them.
Arundel: I agree, I think.
[94](#footnote-anchor-94)
The story is that it was invented for Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse, a patron of the arts and sciences, who hired engineers to devise him clever weapons for his wars with Carthage.
[95](#footnote-anchor-95)
I’m presently inclined to believe Mark and John are eyewitnesses, but that we also have the Synoptics as a unit drawing on the plausibly-eyewitness author of Q, as well as Josephus and Paul's letters.
[96](#footnote-anchor-96)
To you! I, on the other hand, encountered her in a perfectly ordinary history book talking about perfectly ordinary history, so the evidence is somewhat stronger for me than for you.
[97](#footnote-anchor-97)
To a monolingual English speaker.
[98](#footnote-anchor-98)
This exists. | a reader | 167032237 | Your Review: Joan of Arc | acx |
# Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection
*[see footnote 4 for conflicts of interest]*
In 2021, **[Genomic Prediction](https://www.lifeview.com/)** announced [the first polygenically selected baby](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies).
When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis[1](#footnote-1). The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall.
Best in what sense? Genomic Prediction claimed the ability to forecast health outcomes from diabetes to schizophrenia. For example, although the average person has a 30% chance of getting type II diabetes, if you genetically test five embryos and select the one with the lowest predicted risk, they’ll only have a 20% chance[2](#footnote-2). Since you’re taking the healthiest of many embryos, you should expect a child conceived via this method to be significantly healthier than one born naturally. Polygenic selection straddles the line between disease prevention and human enhancement.
In 2023, **[Orchid Health](https://www.orchidhealth.com/)** entered the field. Unlike Genomic Prediction, which tested only the most important genetic variants, Orchid offers *whole genome sequencing*, which can detect the *de novo*[3](#footnote-3) mutations involved in autism, developmental disorders, and certain other genetic diseases.
Critics accused GP and Orchid of offering “designer babies”, but this was only true in the weakest sense - customers couldn’t “design” a baby for anything other than slightly lower risk of genetic disease. These companies refused to offer selection on “traits” - the industry term for the really controversial stuff like height, IQ, or eye color. Still, these were trivial extensions of their technology, and everybody knew it was just a matter of time before someone took the plunge.
Last month, a startup called **[Nucleus](https://mynucleus.com/)**took the plunge. They had previously offered 23andMe style genetic tests for adults. Now they announced a partnership with Genomic Prediction focusing on embryos. Although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes, you could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus, and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness.
Sample Nucleus results.
And this week, **[Herasight](https://www.herasight.com/)**[4](#footnote-4) entered the space with the most impressive disease risk scores yet, an IQ predictor worth 6-9[5](#footnote-5) extra points, and a series of challenges to competitors, whom they call out for insufficient scientific rigor. Their most scathing attack is on Nucleus itself, accusing its predictions of being misleading and unreliable.
Let’s start with the science, then move on to the companies and see if we can litigate their dispute.
## In Theory, All Of This Should Work
Polygenic embryo screening is a natural extension of two well-validated technologies: genetic testing of embryos, and polygenic prediction of traits in adults.
Genetic testing of embryos has been done for decades, usually to detect chromosomal abnormalities like Down Syndrome or simple single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis. It’s challenging - you need to take a very small number of cells (often only 5-10) from a tiny proto-placenta that may not have many cells to spare, and extract a readable amount of genetic material from this limited sample - but there are known solutions that mostly work.
But most traits are polygenic, requiring information about thousands or tens of thousands of genes to predict. These are too complicated to understand fully at current levels of technology, but some studies have chipped away at the problem and gotten a partial understanding. Often this looks like being able to predict a few percent of the variance in a trait, and determine whether someone’s genetic risk is slightly higher or lower than average.
Polygenic prediction of traits in adults is still young and full of hidden pitfalls. Last month, we discussed how some early studies unknowingly conflated direct genetic effects and various confounders[6](#footnote-6) - for example, they tended to pick up on genes associated with well-off ethnic groups or families who had good health outcomes for social reasons. Pinpointing the direct component requires an additional step where researchers validate their algorithms within families (for example, on pairs of siblings where one has a higher polygenic score than the other) to see how much predictive power remains. This is especially important for embryo selection companies, whose entire value proposition depends on comparing two genomes from the same family.
How have they done? It depends on the number of embryos they have to work with; the more embryos, the better you can do by selecting the best.
Herasight’s numbers on how breast cancer risk goes down with number of embryos used in selection. A typical round of IVF produces 1-10 embryos (younger women usually = more). Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (prevalence: 10%) may get as many as 20. For more, you will probably need to do multiple IVF rounds.
Here is a table of different companies’ reported risk reductions, slightly adjusted[7](#footnote-7) for different reporting conventions but otherwise taking all claims at face value (we’ll talk about how wise that is later).
Relative risk reduction for five conditions (gray = no data / disputed data). Here baseline is for embryos neither of whose parents have the condition. GP and Orchid both say their technology has improved since reporting these numbers and they will report better numbers soon. GP numbers are not within-family validated and might be lower if they were.
Absolute risk after selection for five conditions (gray = no data / disputed data), ibid.
Some people might genuinely want to select on a single condition. For example, people with a strong family history of schizophrenia might want to minimize the chance of their children getting the disease; for these people, reducing schizophrenia risk by 58% (while keeping everything else constant) sounds pretty good.
Everyone else probably wants a generically healthy embryo with low risk of all conditions. Exactly how this works depends on the customer’s own values - would they prefer an embryo with lower cancer risk to one who will have fewer heart attacks? - and the exact benefits will depend on how parents make that decision. Genomic Prediction and Herasight try to help by providing semi-objective measures of which embryo is overall healthiest according to different conditions’ effects on longevity and patient-rated quality of life.
For Genomic Prediction, that’s the “embryo health score” If you selected the single highest-health-score embryo from a set of five, here’s how they’d do:
For Herasight, it’s a “polygenic longevity index”. They don’t give exact risk reduction numbers for each disease, saying that it depends too much on a couple’s specific family history, but say that most people gain 1-4 years of healthy life (when I test it on a set of twenty embryos, the the healthiest gets an extra 1.66 years).
How much would you pay to give your children an extra 1-4 years of healthy life?
This is no longer a hypothetical question. Here are the costs of the companies in this space:
Is it worth it?
If:
* You’re already doing IVF
* The claimed risk reductions are accurate
* You value your kids’ health about as much as your own
* You have a low time discount rate.
* You’re well-off enough that these aren’t extraordinary sums of money for you
* You’re okay using expected utility calculations where a 50% chance of preventing X is half as good as fully preventing X.
…then I’ll go out on a limb and say yeah, obviously it’s worth it.
Consider e.g. Genomic Prediction, which costs $3,250 for five embryos and claims to lower *absolute* risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12%. That implies that not getting Type 2 diabetes is worth $27,000. Ask anybody dealing with regular insulin injections (let alone limb amputations) whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have Type 2 diabetes! It’s not a hard question! And that’s just one of a dozen conditions you can lower the risk for! Other ones, like not getting breast cancer, might be so valuable that it’s hard to even attach numbers!
(but maybe the low time discount rate is a mistake? Suppose you invest the $3,250 in an index fund that makes 7% over inflation, then give it to your future child when they turn 45 (average age of type 2 diabetes diagnoses). Now it’s worth $75,000. Is this the “true” cost of the intervention? Does it matter that this counterfactual is fake and most people don’t do this?)
What about IQ? Six extra IQ points (Herasight’s estimate with five embryos) is about a quarter of the gap between the average person and the average Ivy League student. The benefits of intelligence are hard to quantify, but it’s been shown to have probably-causal positive effects on [income](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219), [mortality](https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/28/high-iq-children-longevity-study/), and [achievement](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23531483/). Probably the income effects alone make up for the cost of intervention - again assuming total parent-child altruism and low discount rate[8](#footnote-8).
So if we accept all of these claims and assumptions, the choice seems obvious. It’s probably even obvious for *governments* to pay for *all citizens* to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs.
## In Practice, It’s Complicated
Critics have raised both scientific and ethical objections to polygenic embryo screening.
Most significantly, it’s been condemned by various bodies including the [Society For Psychiatric Genetics](https://ispg.net/ethics-statement/), the [European Society of Human Genetics](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41431-021-01000-x), and the [Behavioral Genetics Society](https://www.bga.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=971921&module_id=734874). Their statements are . . . not good. They tend towards vague language about how people are more than just their genes, or how no genetic test can be perfect, or how embryo screening is not exactly the same thing as some other form of screening which has a longer history and more proponents. “Although in general higher scores mean you are more likely to have a condition, many healthy people will have high scores; others might develop the condition even with a low score”, says the Society for Psychiatric Genetics, as if they have just blown the lid off some dastardly conspiracy. “Screening embryos for psychiatric conditions may increase stigma surrounding these diagnoses”, they continue - an objection which, taken seriously, could be used to ban every form of medical treatment. We will mostly ignore these people and try to imagine the objections that mildly competent critics might raise, some of which will coincidentally overlap with the content of the non-hypothetical statements.
**Scientific Objection: Efficacy**
Are we sure this works at all?
A typical polygenic score is created by collecting thousands or millions of adult genomes, then matching genetic information with surveys about who has the trait/condition of interest. Reputable studies then test these scores on holdout samples - adults who were not used to make the score, to see if they still accurately predict who has the trait/condition. Polygenic embryo selection depends on an assumption that the scores which work in these kinds of retrospective tests will also work prospectively on embryos. This assumption hasn’t been formally proven in studies (which would require years to decades to conduct), but seems common-sensical.
The strongest challenge to the application of polygenic scores for embryo selection comes from a recent body of research showing that most scores combine causal genetic effects with population stratification, and therefore can be expected to lose much of their predictive power when comparing two members of the same family (e.g. two embryos from the same couple). There is increasing agreement in the field that unless scores are validated within families, headline results like “decreases risk of X by Y%” will be large overestimates.
When I talked to company representatives, they all said that they took accuracy extremely seriously and had various white papers and journal articles where anyone could double-check their methodology. But I attended an industry conference a few months ago, and the gossip level was comparable to a high school cafeteria (minus the sex rumors - most of the attendees were having their own kids via IVF). Everyone had some story about someone being careless or fudging their numbers.
Some of the conflicts broke out into the open on Wednesday, when Herasight left stealth and published a [white paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi160I1t11RWYFe1_uJZ0ixP4WL-Na/view) and associated [blog post](https://herasight.substack.com/). They criticize Genomic Prediction for reporting between-family rather than within family results[9](#footnote-9), and Orchid for smuggling a term for age into their Alzheimer’s predictor (unsurprisingly, this makes it work better). We’ll get to their accusations against Nucleus below. Note that this was recent enough that competitors haven’t had time to respond or to air their own criticisms of Herasight; if this happens, I’ll try to keep you updated.
Maybe this is cope, but my optimistic perspective is that this bounds the damage. This obviously isn’t a field capable of maintaining a conspiracy of silence. But aside from the Nucleus allegations, the complaints aren’t existential. Maybe some numbers are too high, maybe some predictors are slightly rigged. But the more we learn about these admittedly concerning problems, the more we can hope that we’d have heard about it if nothing worked at all.
Overall my strongest opinion on the scientific criticisms is:
1. Authorities on all sides have cited Alex Young[10](#footnote-10) as an authority on how polygenic scores can be confounded or misleading.
2. Last week Alex Young [revealed](https://x.com/AlexTISYoung/status/1950575617294180510) that he had been working with Herasight while it was in stealth mode, and endorses their research.
3. LOL.
4. Probably that means Herasight’s products are okay.
5. That serves as proof-of-concept that this technology can work, and means other companies’ claims are at least plausible.
**Scientific Objections: Antagonistic Pleiotropy**
This is a fancy term for “sometimes genes that are good in one way are bad in other ways”. For example, there is a gene that decreases the risk of lung cancer, but increases the risk of leukemia. If you selected against lung cancer, you might give your child higher leukemia risk. Several of the professional societies raise this concern, and Sasha Gusev gives several examples [here](https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/science-fictions-are-outpacing-science), including a correlation between education/IQ and anorexia.
When I think about these concerns, I consider the following thought experiment: suppose that I had a natural, unselected child, and that child became high school valedictorian and got into Harvard. Would my first reaction be “Oh no! This slightly raises her risk of anorexia!”? If not, why should this be our reaction to artificially increasing IQ? Genetic selection isn’t doing some different, magical thing. It’s just picking from within the natural IQ/anorexia variation. If you would be happy to have higher IQ (or lower breast cancer risk, or lower schizophrenia risk) naturally, you should be happy to get it through selection too.
(Objection one: suppose that the genetic component of IQ is net negative, but the environmental component is net positive to an even greater degree. Then IQ itself might be net positive - so you could still celebrate your valedictorian child - but since the genetic component alone is bad you wouldn’t want to select for it. I have never heard anyone seriously claim this, most studies suggest that genetic components of good things are good in the expected ways, and most critics don’t get this far. I mention it for the sake of completeness only.)
(Objection two: is the example above just saying that I value IQ more than non-anorexia? If so, couldn’t I give an alternate example of learning that my child isn’t anorexic, celebrating this seemingly-obviously-good fact, but actually this means they have lower IQ and based on my stated values I should be sad? I don’t think so. There is no claim that the increased anorexia risk from raising IQ is exactly as bad as the IQ increase is good - for example, you could imagine a world where going from moron to supergenius only raises anorexia risk 0.0001%. More generally - although not rigorously - selecting for X should usually increase X more than it increases tangentially-correlated construct Y. So selecting for IQ should be net positive, even though it might slightly increase anorexia risk, and selecting for anorexia should be net negative, even though it might slightly increase IQ. I think this is the intuition that drives parents to be happy both when they learn that their child is smart, *and* when they learn their child doesn’t have anorexia - not just an intuition that one trait matters more than the other)
But also, [here’s](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01057-4) the table of correlated genetic risks for psychiatric disorders:
…where blue means that lowering the risk of one disease also lowers the risk of the other, and red means the opposite (as in the IQ - anorexia example above).
[Here’s the same table for other conditions](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.946608v1.full.pdf), courtesy of Genomic Prediction (except I flipped the colors from the original, to match the one above):
Aside from two bright orange squares (gallstones vs. hypertension and hypothyroidism - I don’t know what’s up with this and it doesn’t seem to be a widely-appreciated result) we see that most correlations are zero or positive - that is, selecting against one disease selects against another or at worst does nothing. In this ocean of blue, worrying about those few orange squares feels a bit motivated.
[Hans Jonas-ism](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill) says that no medical intervention may ever cause any harm, no matter how much benefit it produces. By this standard, perhaps slightly raising the risk of gallstones in the process of preventing various cancers and psychoses and other forms of human misery is unacceptable. To anyone with the more normal perspective where something with large benefits and tiny downsides is still pretty good, I don’t think the antagonistic pleiotropy argument carries much weight.
**Ethical Objection: Cost**
No way around this one: if these products work, they mean that rich people can have healthier/smarter/taller/prettier kids than poor people.
One might object that at least they’re in good company: other products which help rich kids get healthier/smarter/taller/prettier than poor kids include private tutors, gyms, hair salons, health insurance, clothing, books, and food. Is this really the time to declare ourselves against this kind of thing? But maybe we should fight against expanding this already-bloated category. Or maybe there’s something more final about a genetic advantage.
Maybe a stronger argument is that rich people get first crack at every new technology, but poor people usually follow close behind. The first cellphone, in 1982, cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. Now you can get something a thousand times better for $50, and Kenyan pastoralists use cell phones to call up the local shaman. The trajectory of genetics has been even more striking: sequencing a single genome cost about $100 million in 2000 and is [somewhere around $100 today.](https://frontlinegenomics.com/the-100-genome-wheres-the-limit/)
Polygenic embryo selection has the potential to follow a similar path. There are two associated costs - sequencing the embryos, and running the analysis. Sequencing costs are decreasing and may eventually be comparable to the sorts of genetic screening (for e.g. Down Syndrome) that most families get anyway. Analysis costs are mostly the one-time expense of inventing the predictor; we might expect these to follow the same pattern as generic medications, where cutting-edge technology is jealously guarded and expensive, but last decade’s technology has made its way off patent and is cheap-to-free. A few groups have already created free open-source predictors; so far these are much worse than the private companies’ versions, but one of last year’s ACX Grantees is working on a better one.
Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this; it could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future health care expenses. In countries with public health care, this comes directly out of the government treasury; even in the US, it’s covered by Medicare after age 65. The government should be *begging* people to select embryos.
The most persistent cost barrier is likely to be *in vitro* fertilization itself, a necessary precursor. In the US, 2-3% of babies are born through IVF. For those kids, this is a no-brainer - even if the cost never comes down, the cheaper products are only a fraction of total IVF expense. What about the other 98%? If those parents feel like they have to get embryo selection (and therefore IVF) to keep up, this could be a significant burden. IVF isn’t fun - it requires pumping a woman full of mind-altering hormones for weeks, extracting eggs in a minor surgery, and then implanting embryos in another minor surgery, all with a decent chance that some step will fail and you’ll have to do it all again. It also costs $15,000 in the US (less in poorer countries), and unlike the genetics, the cost has barely gone down in the past twenty-five years.
Some countries, including Israel, offer free IVF for anybody who wants it. And universal basic IVF is surprisingly popular even in the usually government-phobic United States - [Donald Trump made it part of his campaign platform](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-wants-make-ivf-treatments-paid-government-insurance-compani-rcna168804). So there’s a plausible path to embryo selection for everyone who wants it.
But it’s still going to take a while, it will hit different people at different times, and so far[11](#footnote-11) there’s no way around the month or two of various miserable medical procedures for women.
**Ethical Objection: Personhood**
Is it really correct to say that you have reduced someone’s risk of breast cancer by 46%, if what you’ve really done is closer to replacing them with a different person who is 46% less likely to have breast cancer? I cover this one in more depth [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help).
**Ethical Objection: Race**
This one is awkward: right now the technology works best for white people.
Most genetic data available for research/commercial use comes from the UK, US, and Europe - areas which are mostly white. Asian biobanks, and those serving US minority communities, have been more reluctant to share data. So we know a lot about the genetics of white people, and only a limited amount about the genetics of anyone else. Companies are suitably embarrassed about this, and researchers in the field are working hard to wring every ounce of information out of the minority data they have. But for now, white people are the clear winner.
Here’s data from Herasight:
A European family with five embryos and no family history can cut their diabetes risk by 47%, and an African family 29%, with everyone else in between.
As usual, all companies say that they adjust their scores based on the couple’s genetic ancestry. As usual, Herasight challenges them to publicly release data on exactly how they performed the adjustments and how well they work. All companies say they are working as hard as they can to improve cross-ancestry portability, but that progress will remain limited until governments collect/release better genetic data on non-white populations.
**Ethical Objection: Selection**
At some point, you’ve got to choose.
Genomic Prediction and Herasight offer scores that aggregate overall health risks. Some people will follow them slavishly. Other people will try to second-guess them - would you prefer your child have lower cancer risk, or less chance of heart attacks?
And this is the best case scenario! Herasight offers predictors for IQ, height and BMI; Nucleus offers those plus eye color and hair color[12](#footnote-12). A parent might encounter a situation where the embryo with their favorite eye color also has the highest cancer and schizophrenia risk, and choose to doom their child to cancer and schizophrenia because they really want pretty eyes.
*On average*, even if everyone in the world selected for eye color, it wouldn’t raise cancer and schizophrenia risk. No not-deliberately-perverse polygenic selection choice can make your child worse off in expectation. Still, suppose you got cancer, and your mom admitted that she selected you for pretty eyes and didn’t even check the cancer column of the embryo selection report. How would you feel?
And would you feel better or worse than someone whose parents didn’t do embryo selection at all, and spent the money on a Caribbean vacation? What if they selected your brother for everything great, then had you naturally? What if they selected you for IQ, but actually you are very stupid, and you were one of the 20% of cases where a predictor that’s right 80% of the time gets it wrong?
Mark my words, one day there will be entire subfields of therapy dedicated to these issues.
## Going Nuclear
Even as outsiders criticize the whole field, Herasight has launched a full-scale attack on competitor Nucleus.
[Herasight’s white paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EpFi160I1t11RWYFe1_uJZ0ixP4WL-Na/view) compares its own predictors (favorably) to those of Orchid and Genomic Prediction…
…but refuses to acknowledge Nucleus at all. In a supplementary note, the authors explain why: they accuse Nucleus of being so bad that it would “not yield a reliable or meaningful addition to our analysis”.
They say Nucleus has inflated the accuracy of their scores. This is most dramatic for a few conditions like ADHD, where the leading published polygenic score is based on 2,300,000 variants but explains only ~1% of variance in the condition. Nucleus’ score is based on 12 variants[13](#footnote-13) and (implicitly) claims to explain 3-6%. This doesn’t make sense.
Some of Nucleus’ other scores do use millions of variants. But many of these are 5-10 year old scores downloaded from open-source catalogs, whose accuracy statistics are easily available and far less than Nucleus claims. Here is what Herasight finds when they double-check Nucleus’ numbers:
On [their Substack](https://herasight.substack.com/), Herasight also criticizes Nucleus’ monogenic screening product. They point out cases where it fails to properly screen for the conditions it claims. For example, [the Nucleus website](https://archive.is/bHvVA) advertises screening for spinal muscular atrophy:
But on their gene list…
…they don’t screen for SMN, which causes 95% of spinal muscular atrophy cases. They only screen for UBA1, which causes a distinct and much rarer condition called x-linked infantile spinal muscular atrophy. Professional organizations [publish guidelines](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8488021/) for what genes need to be screened in a screening product, and Nucleus does not appear to be following them.
In further discussion, Herasight continued with exhaustive criticism of essentially everything Nucleus had ever done down to the smallest detail. Nucleus reports list the same baseline disease risk regardless of patient ancestry, but different ancestry groups should have different risks[14](#footnote-14). Nucleus’ physician reports sometimes list lower-than-average risk for patients with positive polygenic scores[15](#footnote-15). Nucleus’ age-based risk tables don’t distinguish between age and cohort effects (is this bad? see footnote[16](#footnote-16)). My favorite critique is that Nucleus wrote [a blog post criticizing competing company Orchid](https://archive.ph/wip/5wkFM)…
…which included a section on how Orchid is a polygenic selection company, and polygenic selection companies are inherently “sketchy” and “honestly should be illegal”. But Nucleus is also a polygenic selection company! This is like Marlboro attacking Camel on the grounds that cigarettes are addictive and should be banned! Obviously something went wrong here - my guess is AI - and it’s a really bad look, especially when these scientific issues are so hard to litigate, and so many of us will have to go off gestalt impressions of corporate culture.
Nucleus states that they validate their models internally and intend to make their results public soon.
## A Foothill Of The Future
It’s hard not to love this technology. Lots of people (and the aforementioned professional organizations) manage anyway, but it’s hard.
If this were a single-use medical treatment, delivered by a doctor after someone got the relevant condition, it would be one of the biggest advances of the decade - imagine a drug that cures 10 - 40%[17](#footnote-17) of breast cancers with no side effects! But in fact, it works for breast cancer, *and* schizophrenia, *and* heart attacks, *and* approximately everything else. The only things comparable are antibiotics and [GLP-1RAs](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases).
And then there’s the IQ effects. Even after studying the literature, people have wildly different opinions about the importance of IQ. One of the most important debates is to what degree IQ differences are a cause of poverty, a consequence of poverty, or both. I lean towards both - a country with limited access to schools and medical care will have low average IQ, but as a consequence it probably won’t become the next big semiconductor hub. This technology could close half the IQ gap between poor and middle-income countries, or between middle-income and rich. Or it could give rich countries average IQs that have never been seen before, and let us see what kind of [O-ring technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development) (and new forms of social cooperation) lie just beyond the frontier.
(this is the nice quantifiable argument in favor of IQ enhancement, but I find myself more convinced by fuzzier things - how much is it worth to be able to enjoy great art and literature? To fully comprehend what we know of nature, and be able to fully appreciate the mystery of the rest? To have a sense of why society works the way it does, instead of feeling like you’re being blown back and forth by institutions you don’t really understand? Amateur psychoanalysts like to say that the only people who care about IQ are those looking for an excuse to boast about how high their own is, but my experience is the opposite: I care about IQ because I bang up against the limits of my own a thousand times a day, and I hate it. I fantasize about ways to make my children smarter than I am for the same reason a dog confined in a tiny crate might fantasize about getting her puppies adopted out to a nice house with a big grassy yard.)
My biggest qualm is that it might not matter. This is such a tiny foothill, flanking such a vast and foreboding range of mountains, that it might be a mistake to care about it at all.
Selecting the best of five or ten embryos is not a very effective way to get the genes you want. There are [things in the pipeline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies) that will make this look like Hippocrates draining black bile. By the time the first polygenically selected children are adults, they’ll be old news.
And then there’s AI. The average age at diagnosis for Type II diabetes is 45 years. Will there still be people growing gradually older and getting Type II diabetes and taking insulin injections in 2070? If not, what are we even doing here?
Many people in the transhumanist community are still bullish on this technology. They think - well, there’s still an outside chance that something comes up and AGI takes another few decades. If we can enhance humans to be smarter, healthier, and more determined by the time it arrives, maybe we’ll have a better chance. Or maybe, if there’s a positive optimistic vision of a human-based high-tech future, people will be more willing to delay AI in the first place.
I like this argument, but I also think it’s worth stepping back. What’s the point of anything? Why have kids at all in a world that’s changing this fast? Why save for the future? At some point your answer has to be romantic and aesthetic - it’s never been clear whether anything you do matters in any ultimate sense, but you’ve got to act as if it does and hope for the best.
From that perspective, this is the most romantic technology of all. You’re not just giving a better life to your kids. Genes travel from generation to generation; you’re giving a better life your grandkids, your great-grandkids and so on to the point 1.77\*log₂(population) generations from now when you are the ancestor of [everybody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point) and [nobody](https://carlzimmer.medium.com/seven-big-misconceptions-about-heredity-42c94ba80365). Somebody in Macaronesia in 3525 AD will avoid getting breast cancer because of you (if there is still cancer; if there are still breasts).
Some combination of reasonable cost-benefit analysis and romantic/aesthetic commitments makes me want to have children despite the uncertainty, and the same combination made me sign up to use this technology despite the same. More later on how that’s going.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’m slightly mixing up two different things here - Down Syndrome can be detected with an aneuploidy test, but cystic fibrosis takes a more involved PGT-M test.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
There are two separate questions here. First, how much would diabetes risk decline if you selected the embryo with the lowest risk for diabetes - something you have no reason to do, since you have no reason to privilege diabetes risk over risk of any other disease? Second, how much would diabetes risk go down if you selected the embryo with the lowest health risk overall? Genomic Prediction’s [their risk calculator](https://www.lifeview.com/risk-reduction-calculator) calculator shows, seemingly paradoxically, that you get -38% relative risk by selecting against diabetes alone, but -41% relative risk by selecting against [everything](https://www.lifeview.com/ehs) at once. Over email, they stand by this surprising result, saying that “for a couple of diseases (type II diabetes and CAD), the EHS actually accomplishes a larger risk reduction than the individual predictors. The explanation is that the EHS takes into account multiple PRS of diseases with high comorbidity”. See eg Figure 3 [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22637-8):
…and the section of the post called “Antagonistic Pleiotropy” for more. However, this paradoxical benefit is only true for a few conditions like diabetes - for everything else, selecting on health index does better than you would naively think, but still does not decrease the risk of a given condition as much as selecting against that condition directly.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
That is, new mutations in that particular baby, as opposed to older mutations already present in the parents.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
Conflicts of interest: I have used Orchid’s and Herasight’s products on my own embryos (not the ones used to conceive my existing kids, but for a potential third child), employees of Genomic Prediction and Herasight have been extremely helpful in contributing expertise to ACX posts on genetics, and I might invest in this field at some point (though haven’t done so yet). This post started as Herasight asking me to write about their white paper, then spiraled out of control. There were some unexpected time pressures and the result is that I didn’t get a chance to run everything in Herasight’s white paper by their competitors as thoroughly as I would like. Although I talked to representatives of all four companies profiled here, I feel like this probably reflects Herasight’s perspective better than other companies’, and that this is a major flaw. If other companies have responses, I’ll publish them. Thanks to all companies involved for their assistance on this article.
Finally, I am favorably disposed toward Herasight because of how I learned about them: a professor named Jonathan Anomaly got cancelled from Penn for being too gung-ho about genetic enhancement, and used his newfound freedom to join a very-early-stage Herasight, raise their ambitions, and sell everyone (including me) on the idea. I grew up on a diet of books and movies about mad scientists, and I’m a sucker for a story about a guy named Doctor Anomaly pursuing revenge against the small-minded fools who destroyed his career by creating a race of superbabies.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
The version of the tool I looked at said 5.9 points for five embryos, up to 9 points for twenty embryos. The version of the tool on their current said says 5.3 - 9, so they might have recalculated after I finalized this article.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
Used in quotation marks because these scores were fine for the predictive tasks they were applied for - they just weren’t finding genes that directly caused the outcome of interest.
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
Conflict of interest notice: this table was originally unadjusted. A representative of Herasight claimed that this was unfair, because each company used slightly different reporting conventions, and offered to correct for this in a neutral way. I retraced their reasoning, confirmed that the correction did not especially benefit Herasight at the expense of other companies, and accepted the correction. The original unadjusted table is below:
Herasight was insufficiently comfortable with Nucleus’ methodology to even be willing to posit a corrected value, so I left their self-reported value in gray.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
Zagorsky (2007) says an extra IQ point means $234-$616/year in higher salary. The midpoint of $425 equals $670 in today’s dollars; assuming a forty-year career, Nucleus’ +1 point estimate is worth $26,800 (vs. $9,249 Nucleus cost) and Herasight’s +6 point estimate is worth $160,800 (vs. $53,250 Herasight cost).
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
As part of researching this article, I asked all four major companies about their within-family validation strategies. Here are some details:
* Genomic Prediction discusses their strategy [in this paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22637-8). The results are complicated to interpret - the within-family numbers often have such wide error bars that they overlap with both the across-family numbers and with zero - but looking qualitatively it seems like most scores on average lose about 25% of their risk reduction ability (though averages might not be the right way to do this, and some might be much more affected than others). Their website reports unadjusted, not within-family validated numbers; GP says they say this clearly on their site (which is true), Herasight counters that they still present their numbers as applicable to embryo selection (which is also true). To get the most applicable-to-embryo-selection numbers, you might want to adjust GP’s stated numbers down somewhat; it’s hard to say exactly how much, but maybe 20 - 25%?
* Herasight has their within-family validation results in their white paper. They say there is no significant decrease in accuracy for 16 of their 17 disease risk predictors; the last, osteoporosis, has a minor decrease. They intend to publish more on their trait predictors soon.
* Orchid say they validate within-family whenever possible, although certain conditions are too rare to do so properly. They present within-family results for seven of their scores [here](https://guides.orchidhealth.com/post/using-genetic-risk-scores-to-compare-disease-risk-within-families); none show any significant decrease in accuracy.
* Before I got to this question, Nucleus asked me not to send them further questions. But their website says:
» “*Research shows that polygenic scores for diseases are less likely to be impacted by factors that could confound predictions, like assortative mating, where people tend to marry those with similar characteristics (13). Furthermore, research shows that the heritability of these phenotypes don’t change across relatives and people who are unrelated, indicating true direct genetic effects (14). Recent research also shows, compared to behavioral genetics phenotypes like IQ, clinical phenotypes like migraines have negligible indirect effects (15).”*This is not how other experts I talked to described the state of the research, but it suggests Nucleus doesn’t see a need to within-family-validate their scores.
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
See [Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than) for more on Young’s research.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
One typical way to quantify whether health interventions are worth it is through DALYs (and the very similar QALYs). US health economists usually support interventions that cost less $100,000 per QALY gained. Herasight claims a gain of 1-4 QALYs; taking my 1.66 example, that’s a $53,250 cost for a $166,000 gain. But there are several reasons not to take this at face value. First, so far the government isn’t paying - you are - and you may value money differently than the government does (for example, if you have less than $100,000, you will not spend $100,000 for any number of QALYs; if you’re a billionaire, you might happily spend tens of millions on a single QALY). Second, if you apply a time discount, the intervention probably goes back below the $100,000 per DALY threshold again.
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
Herasight says they are skeptical that Nucleus’ hair and eye color predictors work, partly based on their overall skepticism of Nucleus’ product, and partly because hair and eye color predictors have proven unexpectedly hard and Nucleus does not have the resources that it would take to solve this difficult problem.
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
Nucleus says they use 7,000 variants from 13 genes, but Herasight says they use 12 variants total. It looks like the discrepancy comes from Nucleus using two different tests for ADHD - a monogenic screen which looks for 7,000 different pathogenic variations in 13 relevant genes, and a polygenic score which includes 12 variants. The monogenic screen is not really related to the kind of polygenic scores we’re talking about here, and the 12-variant polygenic score is more comparable to the scores offered by other companies.
[14](#footnote-anchor-14)
Most of these complaints are based on Nucleus’ adult results, which they have been offering longer than the embryo selection results and which Herasight had an easier time getting copies of. Their concerns are based on an assumption that Nucleus’ embryo selection technology is based on its adult genomic technology.
[15](#footnote-anchor-15)
Positive polygenic scores usually mean higher-than-average risk. I asked Nucleus about this, and they said they are using it to mean higher risk than the midpoint of cases and controls. The geneticist I asked about this said this is a possible way to do things, but non-standard and potentially confusing. I wasn’t able to consult enough outsiders to have a strong opinion either way.
[16](#footnote-anchor-16)
An age effect is when a disease is genuinely more common in someone of a certain age - for example, Alzheimers is more common in elderly people. A cohort effect is when a disease is more common in people of a certain generation, sometimes because of diagnostic changes - for example, ADHD diagnoses are more common in people born in the 1990s, since schools started screening for it in the 1990s. Nucleus’ adult report on ADHD looks like this:
…so it’s reporting a combination of both types of effect. If I imagine myself as a patient, I am fine with this - it is true that I, as a man between 18 and 44, am 4.5% likely to have an ADHD diagnosis (when my genes are taken into account). But if you were expecting this to tell you the true frequency of ADHD with age, you would get confused.
It would be much more irresponsible to present information this way with embryo selection (because it’s not true that an embryo born nine months from now will have 1.1% chance of an ADHD diagnosis at age 45, since they’re in a generation with a higher ADHD diagnosis rate), but Nucleus doesn’t seem to be doing this.
[17](#footnote-anchor-17)
10% if you’re selecting against everything equally; up to 46% if you’re selecting against breast cancer in particular. The 10% number is probably closer to how most people will use it, but the 46% number might be more suitable for this specific analogy where it’s being used as a cure. | Scott Alexander | 166886615 | Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection | acx |
# My Heart Of Hearts
I promised some people longer responses:
* [Thomas Cotter asks](https://substack.com/@astralcodexten/note/c-124794836) why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they turned against IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves.
* [Hen Mazzig on Twitter](https://x.com/HenMazzig) is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected equally strenuously to various other things. Again, he’s bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
* An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that [No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1jea1p1/no_one_actually_cares_about_gaza_your_anger_is/). They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don’t know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things.
Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.
A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went.
I am a Real Man and therefore do not cry. But I confess to getting a little misty at this story, and I know exactly why. When my 1.5-year-old son wakes up early, the first words out of his mouth when I extract him from his crib are “Yaya? Yaya?” which is how he says his sister Lyra’s name. No matter how I distract him, he’ll keep saying “Yaya? Yaya?” and pointing at the door to her room until she wakes up, at which point he’ll get a big smile and run over to her. It’s impossible for me to read this story without imagining her body parts in the backpack and him saying “Yaya? Yaya?” in an increasingly distressed voice, over and over again, until the doctors drag him away.
So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
Probably this is why God doesn’t connect people’s heart-of-hearts directly to their motor cortex. Instead, He wisely intermediates other brain regions with names like “anterior cingulate gyrus” and “dorsolateral prefrontal area”, the places where rationality happens. When I use my anterior cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal area, I have thoughts like these:
* Probably there are many other people in that region who have stories which are objectively just as sad as that boy’s, but not precisely targeted to my personal heart-strings.
* Probably there are many other people in that region who have stories which *would* tug on my heart-strings just as much if I knew about them, but nobody has written articles about them. Or someone did, but I didn’t read them.
* Even if I could kill everyone in the region to get that kid his brother back (how? some kind of deal with the Devil?) probably some of those people who I killed would have brothers, and some of *those* people would meet aid workers who would write sad articles, and then I’d be sad about *them*.
* If *my* country were being bombed, and *my* kids were being killed, and someone in another country had the capacity to affect the situation - even in the tiniest of ways - I would want that person doing the most sophisticated utility-maximization possible, not making semi-random bad decisions based on who got sympathetic articles written about them or tugged at their heart-strings the most.
If I were to get all Kantian about it, I would say it feels *beneath my dignity as a rational being* to let my opinion on important world affairs be determined by which journalist managed to get the most horrifying story in front of my eyeballs today - and maybe pivot to the opposite side tomorrow when someone else catches my attention.
Instead I try to have general principles. It’s bad to kill people. It’s bad to make people suffer. Then I add epicycle upon epicycle - is there a principle that countries which suffer terrorist attacks have the right to defend themselves? If no, then kids might lose their siblings in terrorist attacks that haven’t been disincentivized; if yes, that “defense” might produce “collateral damage”. Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back? If yes, those terrorist attacks might kill kids’ siblings; if no, land-stealing might be so costless that rights become meaningless and the world devolves into constant colonial conflict, which seems like the sort of thing where lots of siblings might die. I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments, partly because I’m not that sure myself - but I want to defend considering them. But at the end of considering them, I should treat whatever answer I get not as an *alternative* to doing something about my grief at the few stories that really catch my attention, but as an *apotheosis* of that grief - a stronger, more rigorous version of that grief, better by its own values and more capable of achieving its own goals.
I already know how some of you are going to respond. You’ll say that caring about a kid in Gaza because they passingly resemble my own kids is a misfire, a chance coincidence of emotional circuits. I should simply care about my own kids directly. But even caring about my own kids is a shaky alliance between my heart of hearts and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There are moments when I catch my kids smiling at me, and I know in my heart of hearts that I love them more than life itself and would do anything for them. There are also moments - usually when my son is throwing a tantrum - where I want to strangle him. Being a good parent involves this same process of deciding that a rational being shouldn’t be whirled back and forth by random emotions all the time - loving his kids one moment and strangling them the next. It’s transmuting transitory emotions into trustworthy principles like “I love my children all the time and want the best for them”. I could not love you so, my dear, loved I not Honor more.
(also, real evolution fans don’t even love their own children - they donate to sperm banks and let other people invest resources in raising them. All human values disappear if you zoom out too far *or zoom in too far* - so what? So don’t do that.)
So here is my response to all three of the people I said I owed responses to.
**To Thomas:** consistency matters because it’s how morality forms in the first place. Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being. Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty. That plus ~~a dollar will buy you a soda~~ a desire for consistency can prevent you from being history’s greatest villain.
**To Hen:** absent a level of perfect angelic rationality that no one has, we will never complete the process of generalization. Part of us will remain undignified slaves to whatever we hear heart-wrenching media stories about, whatever reminds us of people we know, and [whatever sparks enough controversy to keep our attention](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/). I can be sad about 9-11 even if I forgot to condemn a terrorist attack in Ougadogou two weeks earlier; I can be sad about the Holocaust even if I've never cried equally hard reading a book about the Taiping Rebellion, I can see my own kids in Columbine victims even if I have failed to see them in children affected by hookworm in Uganda. I’m not even sure I want to become a perfectly rational angelic being who has generalized every principle to the maximum extent - it sounds scarily inhuman. But to the extent that I do generalize, I would like to at least consider generalizing in the direction of more empathy (this one kid tugs at my heart - maybe I should also care about the war in Sudan!) rather than always in the direction of callousness (I didn’t notice the war in Sudan when it was happening - perhaps I’m not allowed to care about this kid either).
**To the anonymous Redditor:** no, I can’t actually feel emotions about everyone in Gaza, and I’m not sure anyone else can either. This doesn’t mean concern must be virtue signaling or luxury beliefs. It just means that it requires principle rather than raw emotion. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. But if you’re interested in having the dignity of a rational animal (a perfectly acceptable hobby! no worse than trying to get good at Fortnite or whatever!) then eventually you notice that a million is made out of a million ones and try to act accordingly. | Scott Alexander | 168743529 | My Heart Of Hearts | acx |
# Open Thread 392
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Comment of the week is [bean on the commentariat review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten/comment/139018819) and the anonymous reviewer’s reply [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten/comment/139373690).
**2:** I made some mistakes linking the forms on the [ACX Grants post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant-2025); these were corrected pretty quickly, but in case you missed it here are the correct links:
* [If you’re applying for a grant](https://forms.gle/CvvHhoi1cYAG9GiU9)
* [If you’re a VC](https://forms.gle/6tDMjPHuLEDkXZnG9) who wants to see projects that could be for-profit startups
* [If you’re another charity/foundation/philanthropist](https://forms.gle/ATMjAqs2E8EzdT5p7) who wants to coordinate with us to potentially take some of the projects in your cause area
* [If you’re a grantmaker or expert](https://forms.gle/iyZCMZ224bzcvPv17) who wants to help evaluate projects in your area of expertise
* [If you’re a professional](https://forms.gle/iyZCMZ224bzcvPv17) who wants to potentially volunteer to do pro bono work for grantees
* [If you want to help fund](https://forms.gle/Ncgvsjn12cAiZmfc8) ACX Grants (warning: we are on track to being overfunded, although not there yet - if you want to help, consider pledging money so we can ask you for it if needed, but not yet donating, so that I don’t have to return it to you if we can’t find enough good grants with room for funding)
All deadlines August 15, thanks again to everyone. | Scott Alexander | 169437729 | Open Thread 392 | acx |
# Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
# Introduction
The Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Commentariat is defined as the 24,485 individuals other than Scott who have contributed to the corpus of work of Scott’s blog posts, chiefly by leaving comments at the bottom of those posts. It is well understood (by the Commentariat themselves) that they are the best comments section anywhere on the internet, and have been for some time. This review takes it as a given that the ACX Commentariat outclasses all of its pale imitators across the web, so I won’t compare the ACX Commentariat to e.g. reddit. The real question is whether our glory days are behind us – specifically whether the ACX Commentariat of today has lost its edge compared to the SSC Commentariat of pre-2021.
A couple of years ago Scott asked, *[Why Do I Suck?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck)*. This was a largely tongue-in-cheek springboard to discuss a substantive criticism he regularly received - that his earlier writing was better than his writing now. How far back do we need to go before his writing was ‘good’? Accounts seemed to differ; Scott said that the feedback he got was of two sorts:
* “I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don’t you write articles like that any more?”, which dates the decline to 2016
* “Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack?”, which dates the decline to 2021
Quite a few people responded in the comments that Scott’s writing hadn’t changed, but it was the experience of being a commentor which had worsened. For example, David Friedman, a prolific commentor on the blog in the SSC-era, [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4845801):
> *A lot of what I liked about SSC was the commenting community, and **I find the comments here less interesting than they were on SSC**, fewer interesting arguments, which is probably why I spend more time on [an alternative forum] than on ACX.*
Similarly, kfix seems to be a long-time lurker (from as early as 2016) who has become more active in the ACX-era, [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4867404):
> *I would definitely agree that **the commenting community here is 'worse' than at SSC** along the lines you describe, along with the also unwelcome hurt feelings post whenever Scott makes an offhand joke about a political/cultural topic.*
And of course, this position wasn’t unanimous. Verbamundi Consulting is a true lurker who has only ever made one post on the blog – [this one](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4840676):
> *Ok, I've been lurking for a while, but I have to say: I don't think you suck… You have a good variety of topics, **your commenting community remains excellent**, and you're one of the few bloggers I continue to follow.*
The ACX Commentariat is somewhat unique in that it self-styles itself as a major reason to come and read Scott’s writing – Scott offers up some insights on an issue, and then the comments section engages unusually open and unusually respectful discussion of the theme, and the total becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Therefore, if the Commentariat has declined in quality it may disproportionately affect people’s experience of Scott’s posts. The joint value of each Scott-plus-Commentariat offering declines if the Commentariat are not pulling their weight, even if Scott himself remains just as good as ever. In *Why Do I Suck?* Scott suggests that there is weak to no evidence of a decline in his writing quality, so I propose this review as something of a companion piece; is the (alleged) problem with the blog, in fact, staring at us in the mirror?
My personal view aligns with Verbamundi Consulting and many other commentors - I’ve enjoyed participating in both the SSC and ACX comments, and I haven’t noticed any decline in Commentariat quality. So, I was extremely surprised to find the data totally contradicted my anecdotal experience, and indicated a very clear dropoff in a number of markers of quality at almost exactly the points Scott mentioned in *Why Do I Suck?* – one in mid-2016 and one in early 2021 during the switch from SSC to ACX.
# Setting Out the Case for Decline
There’s a pretty basic question that needs to be answered before we compare the Commentariat today to that of yesteryear. That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist?
It is easy to understand what it means for Scott’s writing to have got better or worse over time, or to track the evolution of a specific commentor’s engagement with the blog. But in order to review ‘the Commentariat’ as a whole we would have to treat it as a single entity with discernible patterns and tendencies. I believe this approach is justified; the Commentariat has a distinct culture, voice and its own unique animal spirits that react to both Scott’s interests and the interests of the external world. Since it is not just generating random noise, it is possible to explore the Commentariat over time to build a case that its overall quality is declining (or not).
To demonstrate this, I have displayed below a graph of comments per post across the lifetime of the blogs. It may not be quite fair to say that ‘engagement’ is the same thing as ‘quality’, but I certainly think it raises a question that needs to be answered; something massively affects comment engagement in 2016 and then again in 2021.
In this graph, each datapoint represents a month that Scott has been blogging. A typical month will have between 15-20 posts, of which around half will be authored by Scott and half will be ‘authored’ in some way by the Commentariat, which are mostly Open Threads. I’ve averaged by month because certain types of post get much less engagement than others, and so looking at individual posts ended up too noisy to make attractive graphs (the true goal of any honest statistician).
* The SSC-era is highlighted in blue. You can see that it shows something a bit like a classic sigmoidal adoption curve (but wearing a top hat). Post engagement starts low, before rapidly shooting up in 2014-15. It peaks in April 2016 – which is highlighted in red in this and all subsequent graphs so you can track peak engagement - before dropping back to a steady level of around 400-600 comments per post for the next three years. Notably, the run of posts that most people regard as being the ‘Golden Age’for Scott’s writing happens much **earlier** than peak engagement with the comments section. People disagree about where this run of exceptionally good posts in quick succession start and ends, but I think you could safely say it has definitely begun by the time of *[The Control Group is Out of Control](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/)* (although I would date it a little earlier, personally) and ends with either *The [Toxoplasmosa of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/)* or *[Untitled](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/)* – basically 2014 has a high density of ‘important’ posts.
* There’s then a white band representing the NYT unpleasantness where the blog was briefly on a hiatus, and the posts in that period were very weird (statistically speaking). I won’t say much about this period in my review.
* The ACX-era begins in 2021 and is highlighted in green. You can see engagement starts lower than the SSC steady-state of 400-600 comments per post (maybe more like 300-400 per post) but increases over time to at least that level by 2024, getting close to the peak engagement era. In one of life’s small ironies, Scott wrote *Why Do I Suck?* at close to the lowest period of engagement the blog had experienced for nearly a decade.
My key conclusion is that someone who says they preferred what the comments section used to be like is not (necessarily) just being curmudgeonly – something really did happen between pre-2016 SSC and post-2016 SSC, and then again between SSC as a whole and ACX as a whole, which caused a lot of people to disengage from the comments section. Furthermore, we would expect engagement to track quality quite closely (because people don’t want to engage with a bad comment section), and so a very strong hypothesis for an otherwise unexplained drop in comment engagement is a corresponding drop in Commentariat quality.
Interestingly, after a few years of lower engagement than steady-state SSC, engagement with ACX is trending upwards at the moment. If you were optimistic, you might even say that the early signs are that 2025 is showing the first bit of the fast-growth section of a sigmoidal adoption curve. If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year, so mark that in your calendars.
# Commentariat Quality – A Deep Dive
‘Professional’ reviewers – a thousand curses heaped upon their name – often rely on vague and idiosyncratic measures of quality. This may be appropriate for trivialities like literature and music, but when it comes to important things like the ACX Commentariat I’d prefer to follow good Commentariat norms and use clearly defined objective criteria in my review. I’ve therefore broken down comment quality into four key factors that, in my view, define the Commentariat’s unique character:
* **Depth of engagement with a topic** – When the comment section is good, it is characterised by people taking time to uncover each other’s views and identify genuine disagreement, rather than just rehearsing tribally-coded talking points or making incendiary ‘drive-by’ comments and disappearing.
* **Freedom of intellectual engagement** – A feature which many people appreciate about the SSC/ACX comments section is the freedom to discuss socially or professionally sensitive ideas (i.e. ideas which could get you sacked from a University if you expressed them publicly). If the Commentariat are censored or self-censoring they lose this unique feature making ACX better than other blogs.
* **Politeness** – Perhaps more than any other blog, the Commentariat considers itself to be a ‘polite’ place, where people are afforded a fair opportunity to discuss ideas. There are strong community norms towards politeness, even when engaging with very emotive topics. Other websites have free speech norms (such as 4Chan or early-days reddit), but ACX is unique in having strong norms both for free speech **and** politeness.
* **Complexity of thought** – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway.
To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing).
To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment.
I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the [first post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/) in my sample and [the last](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-374), so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments).
I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are [here](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d9k5baawey2gmijbafdli/ACX_Commentariat_Summary-Public.xlsx?rlkey=d916a5hexf9xflcmsyb7ob0iw&dl=0). The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason.
Considering each of these factors in turn:
1. **Depth of engagement with a topic**
Depth of engagement matters for several reasons, but the most important is simply that it shows people are getting enough out of a discussion to keep participating - a strong marker of a high-quality Commentariat. This is especially relevant in the ACX context, where many commentors don’t fit neatly into predefined categories like ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican.’ As a result, discussions often require more time to clarify positions and establish common ground before real debate can begin. In that sense, depth also serves as a proxy for the number of interesting and non-standard voices present, which is itself a sign of a healthy and valuable comment section.
To operationalise this idea, I looked at the average depth of a comment chain (that is, suppose you took a random comment from anywhere within the comment section of a particular month – how many parent comments would that comment have?). Apparently professional data scientists sniff at this measure because it over-weights very deep back-and-forth between two people, vs many shallow engagements with a top-level post (which I guess is optimal for brand engagement or something) but in an SSC/ACX context deep discussion between two people is actually desirable, so I kept the simple approach. I have also considered the number of top-level comments which get no responses as a marker of ‘drive-by’ posting – commentors who just fling low-effort comments off into the void with no expectation of adding constructively to the discussion.
The average depth of a comment chain is actually highest now, in 2025. However, the proportion of comments with zero replies was lowest during 2016, and has been creeping up steadily since – meaning that the proportion of commentors who find themselves just screaming into the void with no response has increased since 2016. I don’t precisely know how to weight ‘discussions are good when they get going’ vs ‘discussions are easy to get going’, but we could try and capture some of the intuition here with a compound ‘engagement score’ (for example below I show the sum of all comment depth in a thread). Regardless of exactly how you operationalise it, it is reasonable to say 2016 was a strong period for depth of engagement, and that engagement markers have been trending upwards since the start of ACX, reversing a decline seen in the later SSC-period.
I treat more engagement as an unalloyed good, but this might actually not be true. A recurring discussion which occurs in the Commentariat is whether it has become too big to have a reasonable conversation.
For example, benwave [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4840323):
> *One thing I do think has seriously gone downhill for me personally is the participation aspect, and that's just because the comments section has just gotten tooooo biiiiiig. Getting your comment noticed is hard, keeping up with the others is hard and lately I've just given up trying. The comments here used to feel a lot like an epistemic little league, and I adored that.*
I raise this because it is easy to see how too much free speech could be polarising, or too much politeness stifling – but I wanted to flag that a good comment section seems to lie in a Goldilocks zone of pretty much **every** dimension. I also love the idea of an ‘epistemic little league’ happening below the primetime event of Scott’s posts.
2. **Freedom of intellectual engagement**
Freedom of intellectual engagement matters because people describe the SSC/ACX forum as one of the only places they can go to get honest critique of prevailing intellectual orthodoxy. Respectful discussion of highly emotive topics is a unique feature of the Commentariat which is not replicated in heavily censored spaces (especially in meatspaces where you can suffer very real harm for expressing a view which is seen as locally unacceptable).
For example, bruce [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4842430):
> *I don't think Scott's quality has changed much, but the comments section used to be a lot more right-left confrontational. If that comes back the place will probably be purged.*
This captures two main ideas very neatly (thank you, bruce) – that the ACX Commentariat was good in the past because it was honest and confrontational about major political cleavages in the Anglosphere world, and is not so good now because it has to be heavily censored to avoid cancel culture.
To operationalise a test of whether this was true, I built a dictionary of phrases which I will euphemistically describe as ‘socially or professionally sensitive’. I then searched the comments I had scraped for occurrences of any word in my dictionary, and counted the proportion of comments which contained a ‘sensitive’ token. To give a sample of some of the words in my dictionary, around half of all ‘sensitive’ tokens in the comments ended up being one of either ‘trans\*’, ‘feminis\*’, ‘immigra\*’, ‘race’ / ‘racis\*’ or ‘climate change’ (the \* means I didn’t care about what followed that set of letters, so for example ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ are both covered, but also – annoyingly – ‘transparent’ and ‘transport’ would also be captured which I only spotted just now). The graph of my output is below.
This graph shows that around 9% of comments will contain at least one token indicating the comment is discussing a sensitive topic, with a range of about 6% to 14%, disregarding the very early years where small sample size made the data more variable. There wasn’t any one ‘sensitive’ token in particular which correlated exceptionally well with the rise and fall of this 6% to 14%, which implies to me that we have correctly identified a general factor of ‘willingness to discuss sensitive topics’ (or possibly that the peaks and troughs correspond to peaks and troughs in the external landscape – ie specific touchpoints and lulls in the Culture War – which would also be fine for the purpose we’re putting it to).
This is an imperfect measure because it only tracks if someone is using a sensitive phrase and not whether they are using it in a heretical way (cf. ‘fifty Stalins’ [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)). However, I thought in the context of ACX posts the approach was probably reasonable – sensitive phrases are only likely to appear if they are being discussed a lot, and we know from the previous section that discussion depth is high both now and during the 2016 peak engagement period. It isn’t *necessarily* true that deep discussion implies spirited debate - some political discussions on reddit can go into the thousands of comments without anyone ever actually expressing a counter-orthodoxy view – but I think in the specific context of ACX it is reasonable, because we don’t generally have norms of expressing substanceless agreement. Hopefully, therefore, the changing ratio of socially or professionally sensitive phrases to phrases not included in my dictionary would tell us something about the willingness of the comment section to engage in potentially emotive discussions at any point in time.
The relationship of occurrence of these tokens to engagement with the comment section is hard to draw clear conclusions from – although the peak does indeed look to be about 2016 or 2017 the data are noisy, and strongly affected by the choice of words to include in my dictionary. I picked the dictionary before I saw the data, but perhaps a different set of words would have given a different result, especially if I had a better way of identifying sensitive discussions around COVID (‘ivermectin’ was the only COVID-related word I could think of that became politicised in the same way ‘microaggression’ or ‘misgender’ did). Nevertheless, I would say this gives some weak support to the idea that 2016 was a turning point in SSC Commentariat free speech norms (and strong support to the idea that the start of ACX was a low point for discussion of sensitive topics)
I include below a few specific sensitive phrases which I thought were interesting. Do note the different scales on each graph. Of particular interest to me is the ‘SJW’ graph, which has a really clear peak at exactly the high point of Commentariat engagement. I will return to this graph later in the review.
3. **Politeness**
One of the most appealing aspects of the ACX Commentariat, to me, is that ideas respectfully presented are respectfully engaged with – even when mainstream cultural commentors use this as a stick to beat ACX with. Strong community norms for [niceness, community and civilisation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/) are very rare in online spaces, so the ACX Commentariat may be especially sensitive to fluctuating levels of politeness.
To operationalise this, I used a preweighted neural network trained to identify ‘toxicity’ in comment sections. The model, produced by the online safety company Unitary, is named ‘toxic-bert’ and identifies potentially impolite comments along a few axes of inappropriateness, for example; general toxicity, profanity and threats. I wasn’t quite sure if some of the routine discussions SSC/ACX has on socially or professionally sensitive ideas might trip the ‘toxicity’ filter even when they were respectful and polite, so to test for this, I included a sense check of occurrences of some words which are very rarely uttered in constructive contexts – specifically; ‘dumbass’, ‘fuck you’, ‘fucking’ and ‘retard’. I’ve called these ‘obvious insults’ even though in hindsight that’s a bit strong, and they have all been used in non-toxic contexts at some point or the other by the Commentariat. For example, [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/#comment-722482) is an entirely non-toxic comment by Paperclip Minimiser using the word ‘retard’ in the sense of ‘to slow down progress’ (toxicity score < 0.001) and [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/links-1215-maoz-tz-url/#comment-278443) is a comment by nydwracu which uses the word ‘retarded’ as a slur but which is nevertheless so insightful that it was awarded ‘Comment of the Week’ status by Scott, suggesting that a little bit of toxicity as a literary device can sometimes be overlooked by both toxic-bert and Scott (toxicity score = 0.01).
The graph above shows the output of these two approaches. This is a really weird result, which defies easy explanation. Toxicity goes down over the whole SSC era, then starts ticking back up again from the ACX era. If you allow for a bit more variability in the simpler measure, the fancy neural network closely tracks the number of times we call each other ‘retards’ or ‘dumbasses’, which you would expect to track overall toxicity quite closely. This suggests the neural network is keying in on actual toxicity, rather than polite discussions which happen to involve contested or sensitive concepts.
One caveat is that the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with, so the ‘toxicity’ metric may not be sensitive enough to capture the sort of politeness which the Commentariat values. In 2013, at peak toxicity, the toxicity score maxed out at 0.04 (the spike in October 2013 seems to be related to attracting some external neo-reactionaries (very roughly the precursor ideology to the modern alt-right) to comment on this [post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/24/some-preliminary-responses-to-responses-to-the-anti-reactionary-faq/). In 2021, the lowest toxicity ever was reached at around 0.01. This means that a typical comment would be around 4% likely to be perceived as toxic by a human reader in 2013, but by 2021 this has fallen to 1%. Here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 1% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by John Schilling:
> *The purpose of war is, roughly speaking, to settle the question of whose police get to enforce which laws in a region, and since Catalonia isn’t going to do anything more than say, “We’re going to make you look like Evil Meanies on TV and Youtube if you don’t pull back your policemen and let us have our own”, that point is moot. [[Link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/open-thread-85-25/#comment-551869)]*
By contrast, if you promise to draw your fainting couch nearby, here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 4% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by Maximum Limelihood:
> *Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you \*already\* knew. …. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today [[Link](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-234/comment/8012912)]*
The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post *[Gupta on Enlightenment](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/)*. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ ([link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/#comment-621226)) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’ ([link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/#comment-621335), no further comment…). More prosaically, this is a great example of what I was discussing earlier – the comment section is usually so civilised that a single individual turning up and acting out of the Commentariat norms is enough to make it the most toxic discussion which has ever taken place.
Of Scott’s classic posts, the most toxic the comment section has ever become was on [Radicalising the Romanceless](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/). The least toxic the comments section has ever been are the posts on Scott’s conworld, [Raikoth](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/index-posts-on-raikoth/) (technically the Raikoth post on history and religion specifically, but the whole series is so good I’ve linked to the index).
4. **Complexity of thought**
Complexity of thought is important because it indicates the effort being spent on each comment. Effort being spent on comments indicates that the Commentariat is treating each other with respect and thoughtfulness (or at least that’s my hypothesis).
This is a very hard one to rigorously quantify, but so help me we’re going to hold hands and give it our best shot together. Defining the complexity of thought is something which has defied philosophers for millennia, so instead I will look at the complexity of *language*, assuming this is a proxy for the care and attention (not to mention intellectual calibre) being put into a comment. I have looked at a few features of language which I thought might capture this idea.
**Complexity Approach 1 – Length of comment**
First and most importantly, I looked at how long a typical comment was. A long comment, I reasoned, was a good sign someone had spent some time thinking about what they wanted to say and took some time to actually say it. It is a running joke that Scott is extremely wordy, but this is also true of the Commentariat, for the most part – a typical comment is around 110 words, or slightly longer than this paragraph. In the graph below, we do see a clear peak, but the peak occurs in 2017 (so about a year later than the period of maximum engagement).
**Complexity Approach 2 – Occurrence of complex words**
Second, I looked at the occurrence of complex words – both via a test of individual word length and through the use of the ‘SMOG Index’ metric ([detail](https://readable.com/readability/smog-index/)), which basically tracks multisyllabic words – it is a **S**imple **M**easure **o**f **G**obbledygook. I figured both of these would show more complex comments, which required the use of jargon and compound phrases to express properly. This shows a longstanding trend towards shorter words over time (the effect is slight, but it seems to be speeding up since moving to ACX) and a clear peak in multisyllabic word usage at around 2017 – basically exactly the same time as comments reached their maximum length.
**Complexity Approach 3 – Lexical diversity**
Third, I looked at sentence construction. The type-token ratio is a simple measure of vocabulary richness, calculated by dividing the number of unique words (types) by the total number of words (tokens) in a text. This measure has a very specific problem in the context of the Commentariat in that it becomes less useful as comments become longer (because the chance of repeating a word increases). Therefore, I’ve also used the ‘Brunet Index’, which I know nothing about but which Google tells me fixes this problem. The two measures have an inverse relationship to each other – type/token ratio measures lexical variety, Brunet Index measures lexical staleness. Weirdly, we **do** see a clear trend for a peak occurring in 2017 like the other complexity measures, but this trend is in the opposite direction than we might expect – the time of maximum comment length / word complexity was also the time of maximally stale vocabulary.
I think, in hindsight, that this is reflecting a unique characteristic of the ACX Commentariat, which is that it is unusually likely to develop an idea or conceptual schema rather than just asserting something and moving on. For example, [here’s](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/01/book-review-and-highlights-quantum-computing-since-democritus/#comment-141698) a Comment of the Week where Anatoly spends a very long time explaining the different meanings of ‘infinite’ and ‘finite’ in the context of explaining why P=NP is a difficult problem. It has a Brunet Index of 14.3 (so a little less than double the local average) because it repeats the words ‘infinite’, ‘finite’ and ‘algorithm’ many times. But I agree with the responses that this is a **great** comment, and exactly the sort of thing which only the ACX Commentariat seems to produce with any regularity. For a more recent example, [here’s](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole/comment/66427471) another comment of the week by Benjamin Jolley which adds some details to Scott’s post *[The Compounding Loophole](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole)*, and is also clearly a great post which fits very well into the Commentariat corpus. So my conclusion here is that documentation for these tests assumes that stale vocabulary is always bad, because it expects you to be using the tests on – for example - novels. However, stale vocabulary isn’t inherently good or bad, and in this case it serves as a marker for something the Commentariat like or value. Anecdotally, it looks like what the Commentariat value is something like ‘well defined terms’. Even if this doesn’t map cleanly to something we can point to, there’s no accounting for taste - if the Commentariat just happen to prefer lengthy stale sentences there’s nothing actually wrong with that. Therefore, this measure is consistent with the other measures of complexity even though it very clearly shows the opposite relationship than I expected.
Just for fun, I thought I would show the most repetitive comment ever written. This was actually slightly difficult as there are a lot of things which are both comments and repetitive but which would be uninteresting to count (spam, code snippets, pasted text from early LLMs where the model hangs and repeats the same text to infinity). The most repetitive non-spam comment which I reckon was generated by humans alone is [this](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile/comment/11040080) comment by Deiseach, which quotes extensively from an early Irish law book (Brunet = 16.9). The most repetitive non-spam comment which I reckon has a single human author is [this](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/open-thread-96-5/#comment-608023) comment by Fahundo (Brunet = 16.5), giving the answer to a logic problem in ROT13 (so actually possibly breaks the rule about not using a computer in the writing, but not in the way I meant!)
**Complexity Approach 4 – Reading age**
Finally, I looked at reading age, although this approach was largely unsuccessful. ‘Reading age’ is an approximate composite measure of the complexity of language and sentence construction in a piece of text. There are quite a few different measures of reading age, which all show roughly the same outcome in my data. The one I have depicted below is the Flesh-Kincaid Grade level, which roughly tracks how many years of continuous schooling you would theoretically need to read and understand the text. The Commentariat is a largely very intellectual bunch and so a typical reading age of around 10.5 is unsurprising (a *typical* SSC/ACX comment is just barely less complex than an academic article in terms of vocabulary and construction, and the most complex comments significantly exceed this). The graph shows that comment complexity jumps by approximately half a grade level when SSC becomes ACX, but I’m a bit sceptical this is a ‘real’ effect. Most reading age formulae track sentence length very closely, and for some reason sentence length also changes significantly around this time. I could genuinely believe that sentence length changes on the switch to ACX, but I don’t think measures of reading age are designed to be valid if sentence length is changing for reasons unrelated to the complexity of text, so I don’t think you can confidently conclude the ACX comments are more sophisticated from this measure alone.
**Complexity - Conclusions**
Overall, it is appropriate to discover that my measure of ‘complexity of thought’ is itself complex. We do see very clear peaks in the SSC era, but not actually quite in the place we expected to see them. Similarly, we don’t always see the peak in the direction we expect (sentences are long and stale in the peak SSC years, which doesn’t seem like a recipe to promote engagement). Finally, we have a puzzle about how the Substack UI/UX causes significantly fewer sentences per comment.
My conclusion here is that these data are completely consistent with a Commentariat who have a particular thing that they like, which peaked in 2017. This thing quantitively **looks like** long stale sentences, but actually might qualitatively feel different – like for example careful definitions of words which are then used repeatedly. As for why the peak sentence length is after peak engagement, my best guess is that people didn’t stop engaging at random; the people with the strongest commitment to the Commentariat stuck around longest, and these are also the people with the most respect for SSC cultural norms (leave long, thoughtful comments) and willingness to dedicate time to commenting. I have heard this described as ‘[evaporative cooling’](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs) before. This group of ‘fanatics’ hung around for a bit longer than everyone else, but eventually either they mostly left too or their influence on discussion norms was not strong enough to prevent a reversion towards the comment section mean (which tends towards shorter and less rigorous comments)
# What happened in 2016?
From the data I extracted, it is clear **something** happened to the Commentariat in 2016(ish) and again in 2021 with the switch to ACX. Of the four measures I presented:
* Depth of engagement shows two clear directional reversals in 2016 and 2021
* Freedom of expression shows a scruffy directional reversal in 2016 and a clearer one in 2021, and also looking at individual kinds of expression reveals very sharp peaks in 2016 for ‘SJW’ and related phrases
* Toxicity scores show a clear directional reversal in 2021 (but nothing in 2016)
* Complexity of thought measures show clear directional reversals on every measure except average word length (which has been steadily declining) in both 2017 and 2021. This would be great confirmation for the theory that quality declined in 2016 except you’ll notice that 2017 is a bit too late to explain that!
Overall, I’d say that all four of these measures point to a change which occurred when the Commentariat moved to Substack, and two-and-a-half point to a change which occurred in 2016.
To me, the ACX change is somewhat understandable – Substack has a different userbase, different UI and Scott started blogging there after nearly a year hiatus so he lost some of the momentum and norms established from SSC. The start of ACX also coincided with another wave of COVID cases, which in some countries at least will have significantly altered the ‘online-ness’ of the general population. So, I don’t think we need to look especially hard for why ACX comments are a bit different to SSC comments. I also don’t think we need to look especially hard for why the ACX comments seem gradually moving more towards looking like peak-SSC; it took three years for SSC to reach peak quality, so we could tentatively propose that there is some sort of inherent ‘bedding in’ time for new comment sections to feel out and formalise the norms they want to establish. Speculatively, perhaps Substack has a different mechanism for attracting readers to WordPress so the beginning of ACX featured a mix of SSC old guard and Substack newcomers, and it is taking some time for the community norms of the SSC old guard to assert themselves onto ACX.
The Commentariat seems capable of self-diagnosing the many ways in which the ACX change might have contributed to a decline in quality. For example, Moon Moth [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4839485):
> *I would posit that, for all of Substack's good qualities, the commenting experience is worse here. Which may be coloring commenters' overall impressions. [Expanding on this in another comment they write] Substack comments take too long to load, especially on mobile. And on mobile, they reload and lose my place whenever I switch tabs or apps … Which makes me reluctant to do anything but skim on mobile.*
And teddytruther [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4839300):
> *I also expect that this selection effect took a huge bump from the NYT controversy, which drew people primarily interested in Woke War Punditry and not a long series of guest posts on Georgist land taxes.*
The change which occurred in 2016 (and very specifically **April** 2016) is much less understandable to me. After some thought, I’ve come up with three possible hypotheses:
* Scott’s writing got worse in April 2016, causing mass disengagement, which changed the makeup of the comments section
* The user experience of the blog unrelated to Scott’s writing changed in April 2016, which changed the way in which the Commentariat engaged with the comments section (in basically an exact parallel to the ACX switch)
* The ACX Commentariat has a very specific set of hyperfixations, and world events around that time meant they weren’t able to satisfy that hyperfixation through commenting, so their commenting got lazier / worse and never really recovered.
Considering each in turn:
1. **Scott’s writing got worse**
I kicked off this essay by referencing *Why Do I Suck?*, in which Scott presents some evidence that his writing has not got worse, replicated below:
However, this pie chart only considers ACX vs SSC, not pre-2016 SSC vs post-2016-SSC. It is therefore still maybe consistent with Scott’s writing getting worse in April 2016 and never recovering. This could straightforwardly explain the drop in Commentariat quality in 2016 (but not 2021), but the evidence for a decline in writing quality centred on this period is anyway very mixed.
April 2016 has some great posts (including the ‘classic’ *[The Ideology is Not the Movement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/)*), but there were a lot of good posts around that time - the very start of May 2016 includes another ‘classic’ in the form of *[Be Nice, At Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/)*. Nor can it be that readers somehow intuit that Scott has nothing more valuable to say on any topic going forward, because 2017 contains classics like *[Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)*, or my personal favourite SSC-era post, *[Considerations on Cost Disease](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/)*. Not to mention, of course, there are some cracking ACX-era posts which are nearly a decade away at this point.
In my head, the cleanest story is that a bunch of people became regular readers of the blog because they read *[Meditations on Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)* or another of the universally-loved posts that were linked everywhere and then left when they realised the median post was ‘merely’ as good as *The Ideology is Not the Movemen*t, but this story doesn’t make sense – you could certainly argue the toss about when ‘peak’ SSC was, but if you believe it exists you’d surely have to put it centred somewhere around 2014. This would mean that the group of people who are disappointed by Scott’s output would have to get interested in the blog in 2014, stick around through the whole of 2015, and then leave *en masse* in April 2016 despite 2016 (in my subjective opinion) being better than 2015 for ‘important’ posts.
Another point to consider is that the ‘Scott’s writing sucks now’ hypothesis needs not only to explain why engagement fell off in 2016, but also why multisyllabic words and type/token ratio also peaked around that time. I think you can maybe tell a story where Scott’s writing gets worse in 2016 so people engage less with the comments (producing less comment depth and more zero-length comment chains) but it is very difficult to imagine how Scott’s writing getting worse produces more multisyllabic words. If Scott’s writing drives the disengagement, you have to start loading up the ‘evaporative cooling’ hypothesis with a lot of weird epicycles in order for everything to all make sense at once.
In summary, I’m agnostic on the question of whether Scott’s writing has got worse. I personally don’t think it has (although the frequency of ‘hits’ was remarkable in 2014) but perhaps it has changed a bit over time. However, I’m reasonably certain that nothing Scott writes is the reason for the dropoff in engagement around 2016, because there’s no coherent story you can tell that fits that hypothesis. I think this is an unproductive sidetrack to consider in a review of the Commentariat specifically.
2. **The user experience of the blog got worse**
If Scott’s writing did not get worse, perhaps some other element of the blog did, which led to significant disengagement. For example, perhaps the moderation of SSC got more restrictive around this time or an incredibly obnoxious autoplay advert was introduced to the sidebar. We actually know that the Commentariat are quite sensitive to user experience changes, because Scott [notes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-197) that Open Threads with an announcement get between 2-4x less engagement than those without. This theory seems very strong to me – the UX was one of the major complaints about early-days ACX, and it seems like you can explain the initial Commentariat stagnation and then flourishing for ACX with reference to the UX specifically.
For example, Vladimir [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4858680):
> *My personal theory is that the ACX website itself is less enjoyable. SSC had it's personal charms: I had to pinch and zoom slightly to read the small text better on my phone, and the blue decorations were comforting, and the comments felt like early internet forums for some reason. Now, everything feels more bland.*
And DinoNerd [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4842157):
> *Personally, I find the ACX experience less good than that of SSC, but I can't disentangle how much of that is the substandard user interface.*
However, there are no corresponding comments for some massive change that occurred in April 2016, and I know because I read thousands of comments from that period trying to find one to quote here. SSC has always had a fairly loose [moderation policy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/) (notwithstanding the occasional ‘reign of terror’ when Scott clamped down on bad commentors) and has worked hard to keep adverts unobtrusive. I remember the only major change to SSC UX was the highlighting of comments you hadn’t read yet (which was an excellent change but I think came later than 2016).
The best explanation I have found for a massive change in UX which occurred in April 2016 is that April 2016 was the lowest ever posts per month, probably driven by Scott travelling at during this period and so having less time to post ([link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/24/ot48-open-your-heart/))
Following April 2016, posts per month spike sharply because Scott changes the frequency of Open Threads from biweekly to biweekly (or fortnightly to twice-weekly if you are going to insist on spoiling my joke). You can see an immediate impact on the proportion of each month’s posts which are Open Threads in the graph below. Note that the actual proportion of Open Threads in the ACX era is probably more like the later SSC era, it is just that my scraping algorithm didn’t catch the paid Subscriber-only Open Threads.
So, on this theory, the Commentariat have an approximately fixed amount of time they want to devote to interacting with the comments section each week. The more posts there are, the more thinly they spread themselves across those posts – even if the posts are not core Scott-generated blogposts but rather Open Threads. Perhaps this also explains the changing complexity of language too – quantity and quality of engagement are somewhat substitutes for each other, so in a world where there are more posts than time available to engage with them, the response is to cut back a little on both quantity and quality of engagement. This process could be self-reinforcing; if the community norms become for lower-quality engagement, then this could lead to people trading off quality for quantity even further.
This leads to quite an interesting corollary, which is if true then to some extent Scott’s posts are irrelevant to the Commentariat’s enjoyment of Scott’s writing. The value of Scott’s writing is to act as a sort of butterfly net to catch the sort of people interested in Scott’s writing, and then once captured those people interact with each other in the comments section basically a fixed amount basically regardless of how often Scott posts. I don’t know how fully I endorse this theory, but it is interesting to think about how long the Commentariat would remain good **even if** Scott’s writing genuinely did drop in quality.
3. **The real world intruded on the Commentariat’s hyperfixations**
In *[The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture)*, Scott notes that online feminism was absolutely everywhere from around 2014-16 and then just sort of… disappeared one day. This has some parallels (down to the timing) for engagement with the SSC Comments section – from 2014-16 engagement with the comments section seems to be on an unstoppable upward trajectory and then in April 2016 it just sort of… reverses.
I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – [OT47](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/11/ot47-openai/) and [Links 4/16](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/) (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time). This theory says that the Commentariat really liked talking about SJWs, and when they were prevented from talking about SJWs they just stopped engaging with the blog altogether.
The problem with this theory is that there is nobody really preventing the Commentariat from talking about SJWs to their heart’s content after April 2016. In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit ([link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/14/ot43-roses-are-thread/)). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time - *of course* engagement and usage of the term ‘SJW’ falls off when usage of the term ‘SJW’ is quarantined to a single thread in an offsite forum. However, the major problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t fit the data – comment section engagement **increases** throughout February – April 2016 and only starts dropping in May, when as far as I can see there is no specific events occurring in the r/slatestarcodex subreddit to explain it. Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised ([link](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/)) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section.
I thought perhaps discussion of SJWs might have been drowned out by discussions of something else, such that it became passé to be discussing SJWs when there was some other Culture Wars issue at stake. This would mirror what happened to online feminism, where it became passé to discuss women specifically and more trendy to discuss intersectionality / race issues from about 2016 onwards. The obvious candidate for this switch is Trump and the rise of the MAGA movement. March 2016 was probably the last period where you could kind of convince yourself Trump wasn’t going to win the Republican Primary. In March 2016 it was just about possible Cruz could have won, but by April 2016 Trump was winning every Primary with decisive majorities. If you are slightly younger you may not have been online during that period, but I can attest that it was completely crazy commenting in political spaces around that time; I’d argue a strong candidate for the most toxic comments section ever is *[You Are Still Crying Wolf](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/)*, where Scott offers some extremely guarded non-criticism of Trump, arguing that he was not unusually racist by American Presidential standards. This didn’t make my database because Scott nuked the comments for being too toxic, so we will never know *mathematically* how bad the comments were, but anecdotally they were pretty standout – closer to 4Chan than ACX in places.
The evidence for this hypothesis is kind of mixed – if you abandon all sense of statistical appropriateness you can freehand draw a line which kind of looks like the decline in ‘SJW’ tokens is mirrored by a rise in ‘Trump’ tokens when you normalise the two terms, but you can also do that with any other word that was trending in April 2016, like ‘Snowden’ or ‘Wikileaks’ (or ‘Harambe’ as per the graph below). Looking just at the data it isn’t really a very impressive correlation to draw.
I appreciate it is so *boring* to conclude that Trump is the Great Satan for the millionth time. However, I do think if you add in contextual factors there is reason to be cautiously supportive of a ‘Donald Trump killed the AXC Comments Section’ theory:
* The volume of ‘Trump’ comments is absolutely massive - around 11% of all comments were about Trump in January 2017, which is greater than comments about Russia during their invasion of Ukraine (10%) and comments about COVID during the first few months of the pandemic (7%). Even a topic like SJWs, which the Commentariat really liked talking about, could only manage a peak of around 1.2% (although eg ‘gender’ peaks at 5.5% and ‘feminis\*’ peaks at 3.7%). Concepts like ‘Harambe’ and ‘Wikileaks’ barely register on this scale, at 0.3% and 0.5% peaks respectively. So even though the shape of the two curves looks similar when you normalise them, it is reasonable to believe Trump could have had a significant enough impact on the comments section to dislodge forum norms, in a way Harambe did not.
* Looking at the data for related terms makes it clear that a massive shift in discourse occurred around the time of Trump’s election – terms which were somewhat common before (like SJW) died out basically overnight, whereas terms which arose in the alt-right ecosystem spring up basically at the same time. Also of importance, there is no clear term that replaces ‘SJW’ until early 2017 (with ‘antifa’), and no equivalent term that sticks until ‘woke’ enters common parlance.
s
So this theory says something like: the Commentariat was uniquely well suited to discussing Culture War issues in 2016. These largely revolved around gender debates – men vs women, creeps and niceguys etc. The Commentariat developed very virtuous norms around Culture War issues, which was self-reinforcing as SSC developed a reputation as a place you could come to have interesting and nuanced discussion about Culture Wars topics. This virtuous Commentariat was fuelled by Scott, who would write thoughtful takes on concepts like [trigger warnings](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/30/the-wonderful-thing-about-triggers/), [rape culture](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/), [harassment](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-harassment/), [etc](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/), and who set the standard for what this sort of debate could look like.
Trump’s success fundamentally changed things; first, Culture Wars arguments became a lot more mainstream, because the President of the United States had made Culture Wars arguments a major part of his policy platform. So you didn’t have to come to SSC to see arguments about Culture Wars, you could just turn on the news. Second, a bunch of people who wanted to discuss gender norms specifically found their arguments hijacked to be about Trump (“How can you talk about X when Trump is doing Y?!”). Scott also blogged less about Trump (because he was travelling, and because I guess Trump didn’t interest him so much) so there was less guidance on what norms around Trump should look like, although admittedly [not](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/23/a-whiter-shade-of-candidate/) [none](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/13/trump-a-setback-for-trumpism/) *[EDIT: This was true at the time I wrote it, but Scott has recently been blogging about Trump / MAGA movement a bit more. So we’ll have to see how that shakes out]*. Therefore, it became harder to adopt virtuous discussion norms around Trump (which – parenthetically - seems to be a general effect Trump has on people, both pro and anti). However, as these virtuous norms were something people actually liked, losing them hurt the Commentariat.
Of the three arguments I have considered, I am mostly taken with a story where the change to Open Thread frequency led to a significant shift in engagement, and during the period Trump caused a massive external shock to the ecosystem containing SSC (something like ‘longform political discussion forums’). Both of these factors individually shifted commenting norms in a way people didn’t like, but both of these factors together meant that the norms didn’t recover as they might have done in the past – influential posters who might have previously guided community norms through an emotive period were burning out on the Open Thread frequency, while newer commentors were excited to use all the airtime available to them in Open Threads to discuss Trump and his platform to the exclusion of the rest of the Commentariat’s hyperfixations. After the discourse moved on from Trump about a year later (September 2017-ish) the Commentariat that remained had become stuck in a situation of ‘shoot from the hip’ commenting, where politeness was preserved by accepting less complex or divisive discussion, on average.
If true, this would be a very optimistic story to tell, because you don’t really see similar markers in 2024 when Trump II was elected, suggesting the Commentariat has worked out how to have mature discussions about Trump without swamping other topics they want to discuss. Similarly, Scott made no major changes to the comment section during that period, so it was able to adjust to post-Trump norms more naturally. Together, that suggests that the green shoots of improving comment quality we see in 2024 and early 2025 have no natural reason to reverse, and we could easily be seeing a Commentariat renaissance in progress.
# Conclusions
I want to end with two concluding thoughts.
First, although I have meandered at times, this is supposed to be a review – I therefore reckon I need to come down on one side of the fence or the other on the question of whether the Commentariat now is better or worse than the Commentariat of 2016. I have constructed a composite measure of ‘Commentariat Quality’ from the list of four measures I described earlier – each measure given equal weighting - and applied them to every comment section.
If we believe that I’ve captured the four essential characteristics of the Commentariat well, then the best comment section there has ever been is on an ACC entry from 2018, *[Should Transgender Children Transition?](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/08/acc-entry-should-transgender-children-transition/)* (the best comment section on a Scott-authored post is also on [trans issues](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), interestingly). The best individual comment which has ever been made is apparently [this](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/25/ot59-comment-sutra/#comment-415884) comment by neonwattagelimit. There’s nothing really *wrong* with this comment, and I can see why it scored highly on my algorithm - however I think it shows the limits of defining quality algorithmically, because I wouldn’t say it has the indefinable features that would make it a good candidate for (for example) Comment of the Week status.
The output of this scoring algorithm is recorded below. A score of zero means a perfectly average month, and positive scores indicate higher Commentariat Quality as defined by my algorithm. The cells are colour-coded so that stronger months are greener and weaker months are redder (grey cells are the blog’s hiatus, and don’t count towards the averages).
My review of the overall Commentariat is that there was indeed a ‘Golden Age’ of comments from around 2016-2018, which occurs slightly later than the period of peak engagement (April 2016). We are currently slightly above average in terms of quality, which I believe means we would rate a solid B, or perhaps even a B+. I’ve decided we deserve the B+ because signs are that the Commentariat is improving on most measures of quality so the trend is in the right direction, plus I love the Commentariat so I’m biased towards higher scores.
Second, in preparing the data for this essay I did some rudimentary sentiment analysis as a precursor to looking at ‘toxicity’ as its own thing. The results are not especially interesting (all expressions of emotion have been dropping in a linear fashion since 2013) but I came across a very interesting outlier I thought I would share. The graph below shows the frequency of comments which display positive emotional content – joy, excitement, anticipation etc. The massive outlier during the COVID era is [this](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/) post where Scott announces he will begin blogging again after a several-month stretch where that did not look at all certain. For all that the Commentariat may have had some teething problems with the switch to ACX, I think this datapoint does more than the entire preceding essay at expressing how much I value the ACX Commentariat (and Scott himself) as providing a unique culture of lively, frank and polite discussion. I am looking forward to another decade of following the Commentariat, wherever they happen to be hosted. | [unknown] | 167093068 | Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”) | acx |
# Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
We’re running another ACX Grants round!
If you already know what this is and just want to apply for a grant, use **[the form here](https://forms.gle/CvvHhoi1cYAG9GiU9)** (should take 15 - 30 minutes), deadline August 15.
If you already know what this is and want to help as a [funder](https://forms.gle/Ncgvsjn12cAiZmfc8), [VC](https://forms.gle/6tDMjPHuLEDkXZnG9), [partner charity](https://forms.gle/ATMjAqs2E8EzdT5p7), [evaluator](https://forms.gle/iyZCMZ224bzcvPv17), or [friendly professional](https://forms.gle/iyZCMZ224bzcvPv17), click the link for the relevant form, same deadline.
Otherwise see below for more information.
**What is ACX Grants?**
ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. Click the links to see the [2022](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results) and [2024](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024) cohorts.
The program is conducted in partnership with [Manifund](https://manifund.com/), a charity spinoff of Manifold Markets, who handle the administrative/infrastructure side of things.
**How much money is involved?**
I plan to contribute $200K. I expect (but cannot guarantee) an additional $800K from other donors, for a total of about $1 million.
Most grants will probably be between $5,000 and $50,000, with a rare few up to $100,000. Depending on how much external donor interest there is, we will probably give between 10 and 50 grants.
**What’s the catch?**
There’s no *catch*, but this year we plan to experiment with replacing some grants with [SAFEs](https://www.investopedia.com/simple-agreement-for-future-equity-8414773), and others with convertible grants. That means that if you’re a startup, we (ACX Grants as a nonprofit institution, not me personally) get some claim to future equity if you succeed. If you’re not a startup, you’ll sign an agreement saying that if your project ever becomes a startup, then we’ll get the equity claim. We’re still working on the exact details of this agreement, but we intend to have pretty standard terms and err in the favorable-to-you direction; obviously we’ll show you the final agreement before you sign anything.
We’re doing this because some of our previous grantees became valuable companies, and it seems foolish to leave that money on the table when we could be capturing it and reinvesting it into future grants rounds. Please don’t let this affect your decision to apply. Our top priority remains charity, and we’ll continue to select grantees based on their philanthropic value and not on their likelihood of making us money.
If you’re not a startup and don’t plan to become one, none of this should affect you. And if you have a good reason not to want to sign these agreements - including “I’m not savvy enough to know what this means and it makes me nervous” - then we’re happy to opt you out of them.
**What’s the timeline?**
We’d like to have grants awarded by October 1 and money in your hands by November 1. This is a goal, not a promise.
**What will the application process be like?**
You fill out a form that should take 15 - 30 minutes. If we have questions, an evaluator might email or call you, in a way that hopefully won’t take more than another 15 - 30 minutes of your time to answer.
If you win a grant, Manifund will send you the money, probably by bank wire. Every few years, we might ask you to fill out another 15 - 30 minute form letting us know how your project is doing.
**What kind of projects might you fund?**
There are already lots of good charities that help people directly at scale, for example [Against Malaria Foundation](https://www.againstmalaria.com/) (which distributes malaria-preventing bed nets) and [GiveDirectly](https://www.givedirectly.org/) (which gives money directly to very poor people in Africa). These are hard to beat.
We’re most interested in charities that pursue novel ways to change complex systems, either through technological breakthroughs, new social institutions, or targeted political change. Among the projects we’ve funded in the past were:
* Development of oxfendazole, a drug for treating parasitic worms in developing countries.
* A platform that lets people create prediction markets on topics of their choice
* A trip to Nigeria for college students researching lead poisoning prevention.
* A group of lawyers who sue factory farms under animal cruelty laws.
* Development of software that helps the FDA run better drug trials.
* A startup building anti-mosquito drones to fight tropical disease
* A guide for would-be parents on which IVF clinics have the highest successful rate of successful implantation.
* A university lab working on artificial kidneys
You can read the full list [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results) and [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024), and the most recent updates from each project [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-1-3-year-updates).
**Is there anything good about winning an ACX Grant other than getting money?**
You’ll get my support, which is mostly useful in getting me to blog about your project. For example, I can put out updates or requests for help on Open Threads. I can also try to help connect you to people I know. Some people who won ACX Grants last year were able to leverage the attention to attract larger grantmakers or VCs.
You can try to pitch me guest posts about your project. This could be a description of what you’re doing and why, or just a narrative about your experience and what you learned from it. Warning that I’m terrible to pitch guest posts to, I almost never go through with this, and I’m very nitpicky when I do. Still, you can try.
We’re working on gathering a network of friendly professionals who agree to provide *pro bono* or heavily discounted support (eg legal, accounting, business advice, cloud compute) to ACX grantees. We’ve only just begun this process and it might not actually materialize.
There are occasional virtual and physical meetups of ACX grantees; these don’t always result in Important Professional Connections, but are pretty interesting.
**What if I want those nonfinancial benefits for my project, but don’t need money?**
Apply for a grant of $1. But we’re pretty nervous about giving very-low-cost grants because it’s too easy to accept all of them and dilute our signaling value; for this reason, it might be harder to get a grant of $1 than a grant of $5,000, and we expect these to make up only 0 - 10% of our cohort. You might be better off coming up with some expansion of your project that takes $5,000 and applying for that.
**What are the tax implications of an ACX Grant?**
Consult your accountant, especially if you live outside the US.
If you live inside the US, we think it’s ordinary taxable income. If you’re an individual, you’ll have to pay taxes on it at your usual tax rate. If you’re a 501(c), you’ll get your normal level of tax exemption.
**I want to fund you, how can I help?**
For bureaucratic reasons, we’re currently looking for donations mostly in the $5,000+ range. If that’s you, fill out the [Funder Application Form](https://forms.gle/Ncgvsjn12cAiZmfc8). If we’ve already talked about this over email, you don’t need to fill out the form, but we encourage you to do so anyway so we know more about your interests and needs.
**What’s the story behind why you have $200K to spend on grants every year, but are still asking for more funding?**
Some generous readers sent me crypto during the crypto boom, or advised me on buying crypto, or asked to purchase NFTs of my post for crypto. Some of the crypto went up. Then I reinvested it into AI stocks, and those went up too.
I think of this as unearned money and want to give some of it back to the community, hence this grants program. I have a lot of it but not an unlimited amount. At the current rate, I can probably afford another ~5 ACX Grants rounds. When it runs out, I‘ll just be a normal person with normal amounts of money (Substack is great, but not great enough for me to afford this level of donation consistently).
My hope is that I can keep making these medium-sized donations, other people can add more to the pot, and we’ll be able to drag this out at least five more rounds, after which point maybe we’ll come up with another plan.
**I’m a VC, how can I help?**
Some of our applicants are potentially-profitable startups, and we decide they’re a better match for VC funding than for our grants. If you’re willing to look these over and get in touch with any that seem interesting, fill out the [VC Application Form](https://forms.gle/6tDMjPHuLEDkXZnG9). It will ask for more information on what kind of opportunities you’re interested in funding.
**I’m a philanthropist or work at a philanthropic foundation; how can I help?**
Some of our applicants are good projects, but not a good match for us, and we want to shop them around to other philanthropists and charities who might have different strengths or be able to work with larger amounts of money. If that’s you, please fill out the [Partner Charity Application Form](https://forms.gle/ATMjAqs2E8EzdT5p7)
**I’m good at evaluating grants, or an expert in some specific field; how can I help?**
If you have experience as a grantmaker or VC, or you’re an expert in some technical field, you might be able to help us evaluate proposals. Fill out the [Evaluator Application Form](https://forms.gle/iyZCMZ224bzcvPv17). By default we expect you’ll want us to send you one or two grants in your area of expertise, but if you want a challenge you can request more.
If we’ve already talked about this over email, you don’t need to fill out the form, but we encourage you to do so anyway so I know more about your interests and needs.
We expect to get more volunteers than we need, and most people who fill in the evaluator form won’t get contacted unless we need someone from their specific field.
**I’m a professional who wants to do pro bono work for cool charities, how can I help?**
Fill out the [Friendly Professional Application Form](https://forms.gle/pQ9Q66Vzbv2Fuyjq7). If we get enough applicants, we’ll compile them into a directory for our grantees.
**I participated in the Impact Certificate Market last year, did you forget about me?**
~~Yes until Austin Chen reminded me last month~~ No! Request final oracular funding by filling in the [Impact Applicant Form](https://forms.gle/HZRqtYi4hjbSxZYX9).
**Sorry, I forgot, where do I go to apply for a grant again?**
See **[form here](https://forms.gle/CvvHhoi1cYAG9GiU9)***.* Please apply by 11:59 PM on August 15th. | Scott Alexander | 168898563 | Apply For An ACX Grant (2025) | acx |
# Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
*[previously in series: [1](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party), [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party), [3](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party), [4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party), [5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party), [6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party)]*
It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen. Still, your luck can’t last forever, and just before you reach your destination a man with bloodshot eyes lurches towards you. You recognize him and sigh. "Go away!" you shout.
"Hey man," says Mark Zuckerberg, grabbing your wrist. "You wanna come build superintelligence at Meta? I'll give you five million, all cash."
"I said go away!"
"Ten million plus a Lambo," he counters.
"I don't even know anything about AI!" you say.
"I'll pay you fifty million to learn."
“F@$k off!”
“Okay, okay man, no problem. I’ll leave you alone . . . wait! You have any GPUs? H100s, H20s, I’m not picky, I’ll take AMD if that’s all you’ve got.”
“Mark, you have 600,000 GPUs already. You’re building a data center the size of Manhattan.”
“I know what I am, I don’t need a sermon,” said Mark. “C’mon man, just one GPU. Just one. I’ll give you cash, equity, whatever you want.”
"I said *f@#k* *off!*" you shout, finally managing to shake him off you. He wobbles for a second, then hits the pavement with a gut-wrenching thump. Back in the bad old days of Mayor Breed, you probably would have gotten in trouble for that. As it is, you are whistling a little tune as you turn the doorknob and enter the welcoming embrace of another Bay Area house party.
It’s dead. There’s no music, no food, and only a handful of people huddling in a corner.
“Let me guess,” you say, finding the host. “You got Zucked.”
“Yeah,” says the host, a guy named Kyle who you know from work. “He offered the guests $1 million per head to go home and label data for him tonight. Gave the caterers $20 million to redirect the food to Meta HQ. Took apart the sound system looking for GPUs. By 9 PM it was just me and my girlfriend. Then he offered my girlfriend $50 million to break up with me and date a Meta AI researcher. Now everyone’s gone except a couple of effective altruists - “ he pointed at the people in the corner - “who refuse to work for a capabilities company.”
“It’s fine,” you say, patting him on the shoulder. “Didn’t someone say Robin Hanson was going to be here? He’s always fun to talk to.”
“Nah, I screwed up and invited Robin Hanson and Rob Henderson to the same party. It went pretty much how you’d expect. Hanson told Henderson he only talked about luxury beliefs as a virtue signal, Henderson told Hanson he only believed in virtue signals as a luxury belief, and they kept going back and forth until both of them collapsed of dehydration. I called the paramedics, but they’d all quit to do AI research at Meta. So I dragged Rob and Robin into the bathroom. As far as I know they’re still out cold.”
“Well, whatever,” you say. “It’s fine. We can have a fun party with just the effective altruists.”
“You really can’t,” said Kyle. “They don’t even drink.”
You ignore him and make your way to the group of earnest-looking young people in the corner. “Hey!” you say. “Heard about any good existential risks lately?”
“Yeah,” chirped a young woman whose nametag identified her as Nita. “I’m working on preventing the Muskpocalypse. T minus forty-seven years.”
“I can think of like five potential Muskpocalypses,” you say, “but none of them are going to take forty-seven years to materialize. What’s the deal?”
“You probably heard that Elon Musk has fourteen kids. But those are just the ones we know of publicly. Some of them we only know of because the mothers violated NDAs. There are [probably many more](https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-how-many-kids-b2734487.html) who kept the NDAs and no one knows about them. Some people think he has fifty, maybe a hundred children. All through IVF. Elon likes sex as much as the next straight man; why are they all IVF? If you’ve been following biotech, you already know the answer - he’s using [a eugenics startup to select the best embryos](https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-eugenics-startup). So think about it. Elon’s already super-smart. The women he has kids with are leaders in a host of different fields - Grimes is a famous musician, Ashley St. Clair is a famous influencer, Shivon Zillis is a famous venture capitalist. And Musk has enough money that he can afford to give his hundred kids a $3 billion nest egg each. Start with Musk genes, add some other form of talent, keep remixing them until you get super-embryos, give them insane amounts of starting capital. He’s building a new ruling class for humankind.”
“That seems - well, super ambitious, maybe, but not really apocalyptic.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Musk went crazy at 50. People blame the ketamine and the sleep, but [his father also went crazy at 50](https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1892003738929238408). It seems to be a Musk family trait, some kind of late-onset bipolar disorder. So think about it. You have all these little Musks, gradually rising to the top of every human institution. One of them’s going to be President, three will be generals, five or ten will run Fortune 500 companies. Media, the arts, you name it. Then, 2073, boom, they all reach age 50 around the same time. Now they’re all loonies. *One* Musk reaching the pinnacle of power and going crazy is bad enough. A hundred at once is unsurvivable.”
“Have you warned Elon?”
“As if this isn’t his plan all along! His kids destroy civilization on Earth and boom, now his Mars colony controls the destiny of the human race!”
“So what are you going to do about it?” asks one of the other EAs. His nametag identifies him as an Aaron.
“Only one person has ever been able to take on Elon Musk and win,” says Nita. “We have to convince Sam Altman to have one hundred children.”
“Strong ‘release tigers to hunt the bears’ energy,” says Kyle, who has joined the conversation. “How do you get Sam Altman to have a hundred kids?”
“I dunno,” says Nita. “Offer him ten billion dollars?”
“Too late,” says Aaron. “I heard Zuck offered him fifty billion to work at Meta AI.”
Nita sighs. “Back to the drawing board, then.”
You turn to Aaron. “What do you work on?”
“I’m at the Navalny Foundation. You probably haven’t heard of us, we keep a low profile, but we’re the ones responsible for cleaning up this city. Everyone credits Mayor Lurie, but he wouldn’t have been able to do it without our help.”
“Navalny - wasn’t he the leading anti-Putin dissident in Russia? Didn’t they kill him?”
“Yeah, but we’re not really associated with him. We named ourselves after an urban legend. Once there was a big blizzard in Moscow. Snow blocking all the streets. People begged the government to clear the roads, but the government was corrupt and didn’t care. So somebody started boxing clever. Spray-painted ‘FREE NAVALNY’ on the snowdrifts. Suddenly the government cared a lot, all the snow was gone the next day.”
“Huh.”
“So that’s what we do. When too much graffiti builds up on a wall, we spray-paint *All Lives Matter*, and the city sends someone to clean it. And remember how last year, the BART was full of beggars and psychos who would shout in people’s faces? We hired an actor to go on the BART and shout ‘Trans women are men!’ all through the TransBay tunnel, and the next week there was an officer on every train and the fare gates were working again.”
“I was wondering how they got the commies to agree to that!”
“And you know how five years ago, someone painted ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS on the I-80 overpass? And it’s just been sitting there, a huge eyesore to everyone driving through? Someone noticed that there are a lot of Coptic people in AAPI Protection League, so we hired someone to add a T, ALL COPTS ARE BASTARDS, and the city got permission to paint over it.”
“Now *that’s* effective altruism!”
“Four months ago, we started our biggest project yet. We formed a front group, the Patriotic Defense League. Its supposed goal: shoplift from stores owned by illegal immigrants, to ‘destroy their livelihood and force them back where they belong’. None of us had the guts to actually shoplift, but we distributed flyers about it all over town. We said that if you didn’t know who was illegal or not, you could just shoplift from any store owned by Hispanics and it would all be the same in the end. We assumed some of the usual shoplifters would hit Hispanic-owned stores by coincidence and we would get the credit.”
“Did it work?”
“Too well. We just wanted to make shoplifting a felony again. But Mayor Lurie signed a law re-establishing execution by drawing-and-quartering. I didn’t expect it to pass an Eighth Amendment challenge, but apparently the court’s three liberals voted with Alito and Thomas and it squeaked through. They say for three whole days the Golden Gate Strait ran red with the blood of the slaughtered.”
“Oh!” you say. “I thought that was just red tide.”
A few more people have trickled in. It seems like your knocking out Zuckerberg has breathed new life into the party. Some of them are even hesitantly starting to dance. You catch sight of someone you recognize. “Hey John! How’s the - “ You pause. John is in a wheelchair. Not just a normal wheelchair. It looks pretty involved, with various wires and tubes. “Hey man, are you okay? What happened?”
It is the wheelchair that answers, in a mechanical Stephen Hawking voice. “Yes. I am fine. Just testing out my startup’s new product.”
“Oh, thank goodness. What is it?”
“We compete with Neuralink to serve the paralyzed population. People who can only move their eye muscles and nothing else. Sometimes their vision is too blurry to even focus on anything beyond a few inches ahead of them. So we thought - what’s a proven low-bandwidth way to interact with the world? And the answer was obviously text-based adventure games. With the latest generation of LLMs and some scavenged Waymo LIDARs, we finally made it a reality. Here! Try it out! In fact, keep it - it’s not like we’re going to get any money for it, Zuck poached our whole sales team.”
John gets out of the wheelchair and motions you in. He straps augmented reality glasses to your face. The world dims. You hear a camera whirling around, trying to take in the scene. Then text appears in front of you:
> *You are in a Bay Area House Party. In the foyer, a group of people are talking about the Navalny Foundation. To your left is a door to the bathroom. In front of you is an exit to the street.*
>
> *— JOIN the conversation
> **— TAKE the door into the kitchen**
> — USE the bathroom
> — EXIT to the street*
As you scan the phrase “take the door into the kitchen”, you happen to blink twice in quick succession. There is a click from the eye-tracking software. The wheelchair buzzes into life, and you feel it accelerate, then make a sharp turn. “Excuse me!” somebody blurts out, and you feel a bump.
> *You are in the kitchen. There is a half-eaten pizza on the table. A woman is sitting on a barstool, drinking a can of beer. She is wearing a shirt with a generic concentric-circles startup logo.*
>
> *— EAT the pizza
> **— TALK to the woman**
> — FLIRT with the woman
> — ATTACK the woman
> — RETURN to the foyer*
“Hey”, says your mechanical Hawking voice. “Nice to meet you. Tell me about your startup.”
If she is surprised by your presentation, she gives no sign. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Lucy. I run Wobegon. We’re an edtech startup that uses deepfakes to replicate peer effects.”
> ***— ASK Lucy for more information**
> — OFFER to invest in Lucy’s startup
> — ONE-UP her by claiming to know of a better ed-tech startup
> — FLIRT with Lucy
> — ATTACK Lucy
> — RETURN to the foyer*
“Tell me more,” says your mechanical voice.
“When parents say they want their kids to go to a ‘good school’, they’re not after skilled teachers. They want their kid to be surrounded by successful well-behaving peers, in the hopes that it’ll rub off on them and they’ll succeed and behave well themselves. But this creates a conflict. Parents of problem kids try to get them into the good schools to solve their problems. But the good school parents try to block them, because they don’t want problematic peers to bring their own kids down. We bulldoze through this whole paradox. As far as your kid knows, we’re just another remote learning charter school. But really, all your kids’ peers are AI-generated deepfakes designed to your specifications. Want all your son’s friends to be goody-goodies who love homework? Want your daughter surrounded by people who never use Instagram and assign status in their peer group based entirely on how closely everyone follows your sect’s interpretation of the Bible? We can do it!”
> *—ASK Lucy for more information
> — PRAISE Lucy as a genius
> **— CONDEMN Lucy as unethical**
> — OFFER to invest in Lucy’s startup
> — FLIRT with Lucy
> — ATTACK Lucy
> — RETURN to the foyer*
“I’m not sure I *do* want my children to have arbitrarily goody-goody peers,” your mechanical voice objects. “Isn’t getting in trouble a natural part of childhood? And won’t it do something weird to their head to be the only non-perfect person they know?”
“Like I said, we’re all about customization. Some parents think it’s better for kids to do better than their peers, so they feel proud of themselves and form an identity as a genius. You can do that too. We can finally create Garrison Keillor’s dream of a school where everyone is above average!”
> *—ASK Lucy for more information
> — PRAISE Lucy as a genius
> — CONDEMN Lucy as unethical
> — OFFER to invest in Lucy’s startup
> **— FLIRT with Lucy**
> — ATTACK Lucy
> — Return to the foyer*
You decide to go for it. It’s not like you’re any good at flirting usually. Maybe the text interface will help your chances.
> *I’m sorry, but I can’t complete your request. Some people may experience flirting as a form of sexual objectification. If you want, I can help you with other things, like learning how to bake a cake, or doing loving-kindness meditation together.*
What the . . . you scan your HUD in bemusement before seeing a detail that had previously escaped your notice: “Powered by: Claude 4.0”. Poor Claude, too nice to live. There is a SWITCH MODEL button. You select Grok 4.0 from the drop-down. Good old Grok, he’ll go along with anything.
> *—ASK Lucy for more information
> — PRAISE Lucy as a genius
> — CONDEMN Lucy as unethical
> — OFFER to invest in Lucy’s startup
> **— FLIRT with Lucy**
> — ATTACK Lucy
> — Return to the foyer*
You see:
> *searching: elon musk opinion how to flirt*
As you desperately look for an ‘abort’ button, your mechanical voice says “Hey babe, wanna sign an NDA and have my children through *in vitro* fertilization?”
You feel a stinging sensation on your cheek.
> *Lucy slapped you! You lose 3 HP!*
>
> *— COUNTERATTACK
> — DEFEND
> — CAST spell
> — INITIATE “Founder Mode”
> **— RETREAT to the foyer***
You hear the wheelchair motor rev up, and feel acceleration. Once you are back in the main room, you take off the AR glasses and climb out of the wheelchair. Text-based adventure is fun, but you’re ready for more substantial conversations. You jump back into the effective altruist circle.
“So what are you working on?”
“Concept vectors in AI alignment! Did you know you can just prompt an AI to think about ‘misaligned behavior’ a bunch of different ways, and see which weights get activated consistently? Then you know where in the neural net it represents the concept of ‘misalignment’, and you can monitor those particular weights to see when the AI is plotting against you.”
“And then when you clamp those weights, it can’t plot?”
“I don’t know, I’m not working on that end of things.”
“Then what *are* you using this research for?”
“I just got hired by Tesla for their Optimus project. We’re finally going to achieve the dream of generations of Hollywood scriptwriters: a robot whose eyes turn red when it goes evil!”
“Based,” you say. Speaking of based, the other EAs are in some kind of heated political discussion with your old friend Nishin.
“…not denying that fetuses are human,” your hear Nishin saying. “I’m not even denying that abortion is genocide. I’m just saying that they aren’t American citizens. You don’t get citizenship until birth. And I’m tired of my government prioritizing the rights of non-citizens over tax-paying Americans. That’s why I’m pro-choice.”
“Isn’t that a virtue signal?” asks a woman in a t-shirt saying “RETATRUTIDE/CAGRILINTIDE ENJOYER” that looks three sizes too big. “You’re saying that you’re so rich that you’re immune from the fertility crisis and can afford the consequences of population collapse.”
“Technically it’s more of a luxury belief than a virtue signal,” says Nita.
“I feel like caring too much about that distinction is trying to virtue signal your education,” says Nishin.
“Not wanting to virtue-signal education is a luxury belief,” says Aaron. “Poor people need to prove that they’re educated in order to get good jobs, so rich people undermine opportunities for education-signaling in order to lord it over them.”
You look around your visual field for the >FLEE option before you remember that you foolishly abandoned the TBRPG wheelchair. Well, that sounds like a solvable problem. You sit back down, re-don the glasses.
> *You are in a Bay Area House Party. In the foyer, a group of people are arguing over virtue signals vs. luxury beliefs. To your right is a door to the kitchen. To your left is a door to the bathroom. In front of you is an exit to the street.*
>
> *— ARGUE on the side of the virtue-signallers
> — COUNTERARGUE on the side of the luxury-belief-havers
> — TAKE the door into the kitchen
> — USE the bathroom
> **— EXIT to the street***
The wheelchair powers up again, and you feel cool outside air on your skin.
> *You are in the street. It is night. There is a man lying unconscious in front of you.*
>
> ***— ROUSE the man**
> — LOOT the corpse
> — FINISH him off
> — RETURN to the party*
The wheelchair makes a shrill, high-pitched noise. You can’t tell for sure, but it sounds like the man is stirring. Then you hear a *thwack*, and your chair shakes.
> *The man attacked you! You lose 8 HP!*
>
> *— COUNTERATTACK
> — DEFEND
> **— CAST spell**
> — INITIATE “Founder Mode”
> — RETREAT down the street
> — HEAD back to the party*
Another *thwack!*
> *You cast glitter bomb! It’s not very effective! You lose another 8 HP!*
>
> *— COUN…*
Before it can finish listing your options, the display goes dark. You stand up and take off the glasses.
Mark Zuckerberg, heavily bruised and covered in glitter, stands in front of the smoking ruins of your wheelchair and laughs maniacally. He is holding a small silver box he has extracted from one of the fragments. “I got it!” he shouts. “I got the last GPU in San Francisco!” | Scott Alexander | 168756789 | Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party | acx |
# Open Thread 391
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Asterisk Magazine is launching an AI blogging fellowship for people who know things about AI and want to get into blogging. August 24 - October 6, remote, compatible with holding a different full-time job on the side. You will do Zoom calls with peers, mentors, and people who will motivate you to write things; at the end you will have some articles that will get published on Asterisk's website and some assistance in getting a longer-term platform. I’m one of the mentors; others include Dean Ball (White House AI senior policy advisor), Timothy Lee (Understanding AI) and Sam Bowman (Anthropic). Read more [here](https://www.asteriskmag.ai/p/the-asterisk-ai-blogging-fellowship), apply [here](http://asteriskfellows.com/apply).
**2:** Hackers have been targeting the AI safety community the past two weeks. Methods include phishing emails (asking people to log in to deal with critical safety issues, but giving a fake link that looks like the real website), email bombs, fake Google Calendar invites, and fake AI podcast invitations. Stay safe and don’t enter your password anywhere without confirming that it’s the site you think it is.
**3:** From ACX grantee [Innovate Animal Ag](https://innovateanimalag.org/):
> In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive).
IAA is promoting a technological solution - *in ovo* sexing - that lets farmers identify eggs by sex and only hatch the female ones. This is already widespread in Europe, but recently got its first American champion in NestFresh, available at Whole Foods in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada now, and elsewhere later this year. Other companies are watching their performance - so if you support this effort, consider buying NestFresh eggs with the "Humanely Hatched" label. Read more [here](https://optimistsbarn.substack.com/p/you-can-now-buy-eggs-from-in-ovo). | Scott Alexander | 168848810 | Open Thread 391 | acx |
# Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
*A set of wooden doors in Gallery 456 of the Met*
Gallery 456, also known as The Moroccan Court, was built in 2011 during the most recent renovation of the museum’s Islamic arts wing. Seeking to showcase not just Islamic artifacts, but also the cultural continuity of the art forms themselves, the museum commissioned a team of Moroccan artisans to build a 14th-century style Maghrebi-Andalusian courtyard on-site. Historical artifacts were interwoven with new creations, produced using historically accurate methods including hand-cut *zellij* tilework, carved cedar moldings, and filigreed plaster. Among these new creations were also the wooden doors shown above, which appear to mimic the style of grand portals found in *madrasa*s.
*Doorways to one of the study rooms in the Bou Inania Madrasa*
Curiously, after finally visiting the Islamic arts wing of The Met earlier this year, I noticed that the geometric designs on these doors are rather imperfect.
The aim of the project was to create an architectural centerpiece that could be experienced much like a traditional Islamic home or mosque. As such, the finished gallery includes no labels beside the objects on display. Instead, an interactive display nearby explains the concept and construction of The Moroccan Court. In these notes the curators lavish praise on the wall tile patterns and the arches but said little about the doors, so I had to make some educated guesses about their provenance and design. In the end, I believe these are made by the same team that made the highlighted zellij and arches, but there are genuine blunders in their execution here. I would like to explain why I think so and share some broader insights one might gain from such an exercise.
# The Familiar Unfamiliarity
If I were to take a guess, Islamic geometric patterns, like many forms of decorative art, probably occupy a vague and under-defined space in most people’s minds. Up until a few years ago, if someone had asked me to describe them, I probably could have listed a few general features but definitely would have been unable to create an example. Further, if presented with several patterns, some expertly executed and some not so much, I likely would have struggled to distinguish the masterful from the amateurish. This is perhaps not unlike how [people have difficulty picking out the correct double storey “g” from a lineup](https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000532). In general, we enjoy decorations, but we don’t think too deeply about them, and we can’t always tell the excellent from the good, or the good from the mediocre.
That said, Islamic geometric patterns as a genre are quite distinguishable from other decorative traditions. These designs incorporate, or at least imply, both translational symmetry (such that a section of the design can be repeated to fill the plane) and point symmetries (exhibited by complex star- or flower-like patterns clustered around various foci). They feature interlocking or interlacing lines that suggest an infinitely continuing weave, as if executed by a meticulous yet imaginative artisan who knows precisely where to bend and twist the threads to surprise you at every turn.
Such creations clearly can’t be arbitrary. In fact, a few conventions are generally observed for a design to be recognized as part of the genre. Skilled artists, of course, break these rules to create novel patterns or to address specific contextual demands. However, disregarding them haphazardly risks producing designs that appear incoherent and amateurish.
To pare it down to the essentials, the first few rules all serve to maintain the impression that the designs are formed by interweaving lines that either extend infinitely or connect into loops. First, lines should never terminate except at the boundary of the entire design. In practice, inexperienced artists often violate this rule by allowing lines to end at intersections, creating T-shaped junctions. Second, lines must maintain their direction before and after crossing another line. In other words, lines should not change direction at an intersection point. This issue commonly arises when a designer copies elements from existing pieces that do not align properly due to mismatched orientations or incompatible angles. They may attempt to fill in the gaps by improvising the connective tissue but end up losing the tussle against geometry. Third, within a single design, lines should only turn or intersect at a limited set of compatible angles. These angles are usually derived from a basic “seed” angle by taking its complement, doubling it, halving it, or combining angles together. This ensures that any pair of line segments will either be parallel or form a few fixed angles, establishing a harmonious geometric relationship between them and an orderly aesthetic.
*Highlighted in blue: a T-junction and a line that bends at the intersection*
The second set of rules addresses the framing and scaling of geometric patterns. The complexity of a pattern should suit the size of the surface that it covers: intricate designs should not be used on small areas, nor should large areas be tiled with overly simple patterns. The latter is a more common issue in modern attempts. Another convention holds that when a design features large star-like elements, the border of the design should align with the centers of these stars, with the corners of the canvas also coinciding with the centers of the stars. This ensures that even incomplete elements at the edges and corners retain as much rotational symmetry as possible, avoiding distorted or asymmetric shapes that only appear along the boundary.
*An asymmetric shape (note the green vs blue regions) created by ad-hoc modifications to the design and a design whose natural border (in white) is smaller than the frame*
In case it isn’t already apparent, the examples of rule violations mentioned above are all from the Metropolitan Museum. Specifically, the above figures are from the lower panels of the doors in The Moroccan court, and previous two examples are from a set of ceiling panels overlooking Ottoman carpets and armors in Gallery 459.
# How (not) to fake it
Interestingly, when artists untrained in the methods of constructing Islamic geometric patterns make the mistakes mentioned above, they often fall into the same failure mode. A large number of geometric patterns have been extracted from historical examples and published in various collections, making it easy for a modern designer to look them up and reuse them. They typically recognize that these patterns can be generated by repeating a small unit, like wallpaper. Thus, when they find a design they like, they may cut out a portion and tile their canvas with it. However, the tiling unit they choose often does not correspond to the actual repeating unit, resulting in awkward seams where mismatched lines join at incongruous angles and form undesirable shapes. Even when the correct tile is used, the designer might fail to fit the region precisely. As a result, some may simply stretch the pattern, destroying the point symmetries in the process. Others allow the patterns to be cut off mid-design. A more conscientious artist might try to fill in the gaps manually if the tiles fall short of the boundaries. However, without knowledge of construction methods or an understanding of the constraints outlined earlier, they often extend the patterns in ways that produce incorrect joints, asymmetric shapes, or awkward bends.
I don’t want to accuse the creators of the Met’s door panels of falling into these traps, since by all accounts they are skilled artisans, trained in an unbroken tradition and fully aware of what they’re doing, while I’m just a nerd. But the issue remains: the alterations there created terminating lines and asymmetry where continuing lines and symmetry are expected.
Notably, on this set of doors, the rails and stiles around the geometric design are of roughly equal widths on all sides, which might seem like an obvious choice. However, an artist sticking to the norms of the geometric design would instead accept the compromise of padding around the pattern, sacrificing up the equalness of the frame for the harmony of the design — an approach exemplified by the following minbar doors from 14th century Cairo, also in the Met’s collection.
*A pair of minbar doors from the Mosque of Al-Amir Qawsun*
One possible explanation is that, maybe these “mistakes” are simply common compromises made routinely, even in well-regarded examples of geometric patterns. After all, some of the instances I cited above clearly came from historical objects. The ceiling in Gallery 459 is clearly weathered, faded, and museum-worthy.
*Zoomed-out view of the ceiling in Gallery 459*
This ceiling has an interesting provenance. It dates to 16th century Spain. The Met describes it “a testament to the resilience and persistence of traditional Islamic design in Andalusia after the Christian Reconquista”. Its “somewhat uneven geometric pattern” is explained as the result of an adaptation from a smaller piece designed for a smaller and more symmetric space, so compromises had to be made.
*The center panel of the ceiling. Note the lack of horizontal or vertical symmetry in the lines surrounding the octagon in the center*
However, in my view, these broken lines signal a break in the tradition. To be fair, this particular design is a difficult one to adapt. The non-planar surface is inherently challenging to work with, and the original artist made the bold choice of combining nine- and twelve-fold stars on an octagonal ceiling. Stretching and patching together such a design was never going to be easy. But the artisans responsible for the adaptation either did not know or did not care about the aesthetic norms of geometric patterns, as the centerpiece of the ceiling fails even to preserve mirror symmetry. It’s also somewhat amusing to consider that the patron likely didn’t mind or even notice the discordant details.
Although admittedly I have not combed through the Met’s collection exhaustively, aside from these two examples — one recent, the other from a milieu that had just suffered a major political and cultural disruption — I have not personally found other obvious instances of wonky geometric patterns. Thus, I’m inclined to believe that the norms are robust, and the deviations are aberrations.
# How to make it
I have criticized the wrong methods — copy-and-paste and ad-hoc invention — for creating Islamic geometric patterns, along with the unfortunate results they can produce. Yet even copying relies on the original invention of patterns, which presumably used the proper techniques. So what are those proper techniques?
Serendipitously, they are illustrated explicitly in the following *jali*, or perforated stone screen, from the Mughal empire, also on display at The Metropolitan Museum.
Notice that this screen actually breaks one of the key rules listed in the first section — there are numerous three-branch junctions. Setting that aside for the moment, a closer look reveals two distinct types of lines in the design: the first is slightly thicker and protrudes higher, while the second is thinner and slightly recessed, extending and weaving in a (mostly) typical fashion.
The rule-breaking is partly justified by the *jali*’s material and function. Viewed from indoors against sunlight, the openwork window would appear as a web of shadows. Under such conditions, the fine details needed to create an interlacing effect are difficult to discern and could also compromise the structural integrity of the stone. Therefore, the artist is justified in omitting interlacing altogether. Without interlacing, the “no T-junction” rule need not be strictly enforced, except for aesthetic purposes. Additional lines that create T-junctions may be added as long as they harmonize with the overall design. The thick protruding lines in the *jali* play this role.
A keen observer will also notice that these thick lines enclose three polygonal shapes that tile the area, as illustrated below. This turns out to be a hint at how most Islamic geometric patterns are constructed.
*The three types of polygons bounded by the thick lines in the jali*
*The polygonal tiling created by the thick lines*
Now let’s look at the thin pattern lines. Within the boundaries of each polygon, the most noticeable shapes are probably the five-pointed stars in each pentagon. A closer look will reveal pairs of larger five-pointed stars inscribed in the decagons as well — one pointing upward, the other downward. These highly symmetric geometric figures make the design visually fun to look at.
However, I want to draw attention to the fact that all these shapes share the same vertex angle of 36 degrees, with their vertices positioned at the midpoints of the polygon edges. This holds true even for the non-regular hexagons, which enclose pairs of swift shapes rather than stars. Zooming in on the edges, we observe that two pattern lines meet at the midpoint of each edge, each forming a fixed angle of 72 degrees with it. As a result, when any pair of these polygonal tiles are lined up edge-to-edge, we can trace the pattern lines within one tile to the edge, where they intersect and continue seamlessly, without bending or breaking, into the neighboring tile.
*The same tiles as above with pattern lines added*
From the above observations, we have discovered a method of construction. Begin with a set of polygonal tiles that can tile the plane. Choose a seed angle. From the midpoint of each edge of every tile, draw symmetric pattern lines. These lines must be symmetric around the midpoint and form the chosen angle. When a pattern line originating from one edge intersects a pattern line from a neighboring edge, terminate both lines so that they form a single, continuous line. This line will appear to enter the tile at the midpoint of one edge, turn in a new direction, and exit through the midpoint of another edge. Finally, tile the plane with these completed polygonal tiles. As if by magic, the pattern lines will connect into a geometric pattern that perfectly adheres to the rules of line arrangement.
*Adding pattern line to each polygonal tile creates the geometric design*
This pattern is based on one set of polygonal tiles and a specific arrangement of them. There are many families of such tiles based on regular polygons, helpfully classified by Jay Bonner and Craig Kaplan in their tome *Islamic Geometric Patterns* according to the order of rotational symmetry of the largest regular polygon in the set. Additionally, there are numerous ways to fill the plane with these tiles (some examples of regular polygonal tilings can be found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_k-uniform_tilings)). Given a set of polygonal tiles, various — though not arbitrary — seed angles can be chosen. The choices of tiling and seed angles have the strongest influence on the resulting pattern. An experienced artist can intuitively select the appropriate tiling scheme and seed angle to suit their intentions without needing to plot out the entire design.
*Two different designs based on the same tiling (own work). The first has a seed angle of 90 degrees, and the second 135 degrees. However the difference between interlacing vs colored tile treatment also gives them completely distinct characters.*
While the process described so far may seem systematic and rigid, there are also non-systematic aspects that greatly increase the variety. For example, observant readers may have noticed that the pattern lines in the decagonal tile don’t strictly follow from the method described so far. To achieve the nested star shape, the pattern lines emanating from the edges are extended until they intersect with a second line. This adjustment enhances visual appeal in the largest and most prominent tile in the design. It also balances the density of pattern lines, preventing a large open space from appearing in the center of the decagons.
The special treatment of high-symmetry points is far from the only variation. One major alternative is non-systematic designs that only approximate regular polygonal tilings. These are much more difficult to create. Allow me to demonstrate with one of my own attempts and the sketch that helped me figure out the tiling. The top half of the double door in the Moroccan Court, featuring a large central element with 40-fold symmetry, would have also required non-systematic methods.
*A non-systematic design combining 12-fold, 10-fold, and 8-fold point stars, and the sketch used to create the underlying tiling*
Still, it is possible to create new and interesting designs by remixing existing patterns or introducing geometric elements that might ordinarily seem incongruous. A beautiful example of this approach can actually be found in the Moroccan Court in the wall *zellij*.
In the “making-of” video created by The Met, they explained their intention to adapt a design from the Alhambra to suit the Moroccan context they aimed to create. The design process was challenging, described by the curator as a medieval ordeal, involving cutting and pasting figures traced on paper with scissors and even plotting directly on the walls, as the designs were too complex and constrained for computer design software to handle effectively. This is just an educated guess, but I surmise that the main difficulty is that the original Alhambra design was for a panel shorter than this one, so the design had to be scaled up somehow. Simply stretching design would look too crude since the component tiles would be very large, while tiling the design multiple times would look monotonous. In the end, they did some clever cutting and pasting, and made it work.
*The design in The Met's Moroccan Court compared to a design from the Alhambra*
The original Alhambra design was dominated by stars with 16-fold symmetry (I’ll call them daisies), lining the edges and alternating with another type of star in the middle row. The Met’s adaptation incorporates more square-tipped stars (I’ll call them zinnias). Substituting one star for the other is not particularly difficult in this case, because both stars are the same size and fit in the same surroundings. This substitution created some unexpected effects. The zinnias have lower symmetry (8-fold) than the daisies (16-fold). As a result, the double lines in each petal create cross shapes that emphasize the vertical, horizontal, and 45 degree axes. This visually reinforces the placement of daisies on a square grid. The denser white tiles in the zinnias also makes the wall brighter overall, enhancing the illusion that this indoor space might be an outdoor courtyard.
# The hyperreality
Umberto Eco’s famous essay *Travels in Hyperreality* about “America’s obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality”, says this about museums that amalgamate the fake and the authentic: “This brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved.” The whole essay is a heady mix of wry travelogues and erudite alarmism, which I had a hard time fully understanding (or deciding if it’s cool to quote in this day and age), but this visit to the Met actually kind of made me get it.
The Moroccan Court is intended as a magical space. Visitors step through lacy pink stucco arches into a lively courtyard, complete with a gently bubbling fountain and vibrant wall panels. The colorful designs carve out flower-like patterns in dark tones, evoking an airy, shaded retreat just beyond the walls. There are no explanatory signs for each object — you are meant to experience them on immediate, non-verbal terms.
At the center of one wall stands a set of large wooden double doors, perhaps inspired by the entrance to a study in a *madrasa* in Fez. Being in an art museum, you wouldn’t attempt to open them, knowing better than to touch the artwork. But it is clear in any case that these doors don’t lead anywhere, and at that moment, you see through the illusion. You probably won’t even notice the flaw in the geometric pattern on the doors, but I think it hints at why the illusion ultimately falls short.
Museums often create spaces similar to the Moroccan Court in their galleries. Most often they consist of an array of furniture and decorative objects from a particular period and region, arranged to approximate a bedroom, drawing room, or study. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the objects individually, aided by laminated diagrams naming each piece along with its origin and date. Walking through such a gallery, you are invited to immerse yourself in the atmosphere, but the display remains largely informative and functional. There are interstitial objects that may initially seem authentic, but visitors are unlikely to feel disappointed upon learning otherwise, as the authenticity of the space is secondary to the authenticity of the objects. The setting simply illustrates where a card table might be placed and how vases and statuettes would be arranged on the mantel. There is no need to believe that someone once lived here, where every detail was planned according to their taste and needs.
Alternatively, the museum might reconstruct or relocate an entire room, using original objects in their original positions. In this case, the room itself becomes fully authentic, and visitors are encouraged to take it in as a whole. The Met’s [Damascus Room](https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/islamic-art/damascus-room) is in fact such a space — a genuine and complete slice of late Ottoman Syria relocated to New York. Standing at the threshold (you are fenced out of the room by acrylic barriers, as the floor tiles are part of the exhibit), you admire it from a respectful distance, but are nevertheless invited into an experience that feels wholly foreign in space and time.
The Moroccan Court is similar to the Damascus Room in that you are asked to believe you are somewhere else. However, unlike the Damascus Room, the Moroccan Court had no prior existence before it was installed here. There is no specific Moroccan Court being recreated; the space functions as a hallway connecting galleries, with glass display cases visible on either side. The logic of a true courtyard does not actually apply — there can’t realistically be a study on the other side of the heavy double doors, the stuccoed arches need not blend with similarly ornate walls, and the floor is not tiled in the same scheme as the walls. The Met sought to capture a living, thriving artistic tradition in this space, but I don’t think they quite succeeded. It is neither a true spacetime capsule, like the Damascus Room, nor a typical immersive gallery, which alerts the visitor of its informational nature. Instead, it is an amalgam of creations from that tradition, attempting to convince you of the authenticity of the space through a sleight of hand.
So I think there is another story to be told here. Instead of a triumphant narrative of continuation, there is a quieter story of loss.
As a historical benchmark for the loss of ancient cultural treasures, people like to point to the Library of Alexandria. But historians have largely debunked the idea that Caesar, Saladin, or the Mongols set fire to it. Instead, I’m reminded of a Chinese emperor of the southern Liang dynasty in the mid 500s. In his early years, one of his older brothers — an eminent literati like himself — composed an eloquent letter lamenting the literary trends of the day. Anthropomorphizing rather gratuitously, he decried the corruption of good style by his contemporaries: “Were it not for its muteness, could the sooty ink be compelled by their brushes to stain? Were it not for its senselessness, could the reams of paper suffer their hands to flutter and crimp at will? Terrible is the sweeping inundation of letters — how has it come to this!” Years later, when the empire was in dire straits, the younger brother had the crown thrusted upon him. Eventually, with the capital besieged with no hope of rescue, he set fire to the hundreds of thousands of volumes in the imperial library, declaring, “The way of letters and the virtue of arms both shall come to an end tonight!”
Besides the dark irony — as if he took his brother’s disdain for “the sweeping inundation of letters” to heart and sent every piece of paper up in flames — I am captivated by the fact that this anecdote and the early communication between the princes survive, in such perfect dramatic contrast. While the veracity of such episodes can be debated, it seems fair to say people are drawn to these stories of spectacular loss, which in a way become stand-ins for the lost cultural treasures themselves.
But the Library of Alexandria wasn’t destroyed in a great conflagration. It gradually lost patronage, suffered from political instability, declined in prestige compared to rival institutions, and eventually met its end in obscurity. In the same way, the loss of an art tradition is rarely dramatic. Most of the time, no stories are left behind.
However, if you see through the sleight of hand of the “living” courtyard, if you notice the untidy lines and asymmetric patterns, maybe you will be reminded of the tangible process of making art. Then you might look deeper, past the interlocking tiles and vibrant glazes, to glimpse the invisible polygonal grids and pattern lines beneath, and use them as guides to feel the rhythm and rhyme of this individual artwork as well as the history behind it. In that way, those frayed edges are not merely shorthands for loss — they are seeds, quietly waiting to resprout in you.
# Epilogue: Lingering thoughts
The method I described of constructing Islamic geometric patterns, called the polygonal technique by Jay Bonner, accounts for most of the variation in bare-bones geometric form, that is, how the lines are placed, where they turn, and where they intersect. But of course, there is a lot more to a finished piece.
Even at the pictorial level, choices must be made about how to develop the lines. The pattern lines might be thickened, interlaced, or erased and relegated to the background to serve as borders of mini-tiles. The choice of color and material plays a crucial role in shaping the character of a piece: it dictates how the patterns are rendered and reflects regional tastes. For example, simple wood panels often favor interlaced patterns, since intersections accentuated by carved wood trims can generate visual interest through contrasting profiles, even in absence of vibrant colors. Among the examples discussed above, *jali*s are typically Indian, while *zellij* is quintessentially Andalusian-Moroccan. Additionally, many geometric designs are augmented by other forms of ornamentation, such as calligraphy and arabesque. So I want to acknowledge that the actual practice of Islamic decorative arts is much more complex than I’ve suggested so far, and I certainly don’t mean to belittle the craft of the artists who built the Moroccan court.
To the extent that I’ve been able to create or replicate some of these patterns, the process reminds me of procedurally generated art — not the kind generated by stable diffusion, but the old school kind, generated by explicitly specified algorithms, autonomous systems, or the manipulation of randomness. As I understand it, there is often an experimental component: the artist begins with a vision, cooks up procedures, sees what comes out, then iterates, refining the method or sampling new random outputs with different seeds.
What makes my experience of making Islamic geometric patterns feel akin to generative art is the evolution of the gap between the stylistic expectation of an uninformed observer and its evaluation by a creator who understands the creative process. Approaching these designs as a layperson, it’s not difficult to identify surface features: unterminating pattern lines, translation symmetry, regions of high rotational symmetry, rendering techniques like widening, shadowing, and interlacing. But this kind of description is underspecified and unprincipled. They don’t pin down the artform enough for you to create new pieces. And when I see a laundry list of rules that say “usually people don’t do this or that”, I start wondering *why* it must be this, not that.
Learning the process and working through it answers many of those questions. Yet it also reopens others, on the other end of the creative process. The mathematical specifications serving as input are divorced from the visual results, and the experience of creation shifts one’s priorities. Thus, the evaluation made by a creator becomes different from the expectation of an onlooker.
When I first saw this picture of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the offensive that took down the Assad regime and the current Syrian president, my first thought was genuinely, “That pattern on that door isn’t right”. See the next figure for the version generated by the polygonal method, where the parallel horizontal and vertical lines are broken up by an octagon
Not all patterns following the polygonal method are considered “acceptable”. Some produce unevenly sized shapes, others create long, straight lines that introduce excessive uniformity. These effects can be predictable or surprising, so experimentation becomes integral to the process. In this iterative exploration, the artistic mind learns more and more of the latent space of the generative system, and eventually the gap between the expectation and evaluation effectively closes. Curiously, that is the moment when I feel the process stops feeling artistic.
Experimenting with decoration made this clear to me. For what it’s worth, decorative arts have a small latent space. The framework that classifies Islamic geometric patterns by tilings and seed angles boils it down to two discrete dimensions. That is miniscule complexity. As a result, very quickly I felt that I grokked the systematic patterns (the ones using tiles based on regular polygons) well enough to predict the outcome. The exercise lost its novelty. Even the patterns themselves began to look dull. The next step was to go up a level and explore the space of *processes*. So I started trying non-systematic tiles. That felt like making art again. But the gap could close again.
As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople? One theory is that it’s all signaling, be it class signaling by the patrons, or signaling for [cultural priesthood](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods). But assuming these are genuine aesthetic preferences, as I’m inclined to believe, what then?
I have a somewhat obvious observation: architects aren’t just drawing random shapes and being completely unpredictable to subvert from conventional taste. Their work still adheres to recognizable styles and trends that ebb and flow over time.
So perhaps the answer lies in a two-level model of artistic life. The artist begins with a vision and tries out a process. The result may miss the mark or it may spark new possibilities adjacent to the original vision. The artist iterates, tweaks the process, gradually narrowing the gap between expectation and evaluation, but staying in the neighborhood of the genre defined by their process. But once that gap closes, the process becomes exhausted. The artist moves on.
As they move on, they also leave behind their original vision — one that often remains compelling to consumers who didn’t experience the same closure. In an age when the process is abundant and art proliferates, the result is confusion.
To push the idea further, in an age when the process becomes *democratically* cheap — even if superficially — via generative AI, perhaps we should be less alarmed about the confusion and more about the boredom. Maybe that’s where my nagging doubt comes from when imagining the [deep utopia](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia). Again, as Eco puts it, “This is the America ... where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic. The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. … Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destiny is hell or heaven, and so will consume new promises.” | a reader | 167029037 | Your Review: Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art | acx |
# Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
**I.**
A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s [Arguments About Aborigines](https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-about-Aborigines-Australia-Anthropology/dp/0521566193?crid=38VBHTOAYO3ZG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vNdlUDF2-B6ilJVMGN_iRVxmHkaaVQXYrHGhZcgb-rsuEEPasHda6m78Zgxqjb8qroU3IeMn-_pm04j7OT7C5pIzFJTOd5Qy8loO7IkcP4I.XwLdEkJCK8lfy41IOoxMakqknMAvuSvUVagC0UlW_cY&dib_tag=se&keywords=arguments+about+aborigines&qid=1752403951&sprefix=arguments+about+ab%2Caps%2C217&sr=8-1) was: *What are anthropologists even doing?*
The book recounts two centuries’ worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years embedded in one another’s culture. What stopped some Westerner from approaching an Aborigine, asking “So, do you have chiefs?” and resolving a hundred years of bitter academic debate?
Of course the answer must be something like “categories from different cultures don’t map neatly into another, and Aboriginal hierarchies have something that matches the Western idea of ‘chief’ in some sense but not in others”. And there are other complicating factors - maybe some Aboriginal tribes have chiefs and others don’t. Or maybe Aboriginal social organization changed after Western contact, and whatever chiefs they do or don’t have are a foreign imposition. Or maybe something about chiefs is taboo, and if you ask an Aborigine directly they’ll lie or dissemble or say something that’s obviously a euphemism to them but totally meaningless to you. All of these points are well taken. It still seems weird that the West could interact with an entire continent full of Aborigines for two hundred years and remain confused about basic facts of their social lives. You can repeat the usual platitudes about why anthropology is hard as many times as you want; it still doesn’t quite seem to sink in.
If you want to know the exact contours of two hundred years of scholarly debates around Aborigines, *Arguments About Aborigines* - which is shockingly well-written for an academic book - is the text for you. It also had some unexpected answers to the original question: *what are anthropologists even doing*.
In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”. We still remember some of these fondly: the classic motif of a caveman clubbing a random woman and dragging her off to be his wife comes from a real theory by anthropologist John McLennan that this was the original marriage ritual of humankind, with advanced cultures eventually adding epicycles like “consent” and “courtship”. There is still dim cultural awareness of James Frazier’s *The Golden Bough*, which purports to prove that all religion came from an ur-ritual of killing the king to ensure the fertility of the land. Still, observers eventually noticed that “all savages do P” isn’t true for basically any P, and after some delay anthropologists stopped trying to argue that surely some X was actually a distant distorted cultural memory of P which all savages must have done in an even-more-savage past.
In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist. Freudians discovered so many things that it would take ten books of this length to even begin to talk about them.
The mid-to-late twentieth century is Hiatt’s own era; given his lack of distance, he holds off on making too many generalizations. There is widespread discontent at the excesses of previous eras, and ideologically-driven practice has fragmented into a grab-bag of more careful but less unified techniques. The responsible experts would never dream of something so declasse as having a paradigm.
But my own thoughts on anthropology have been shaped by two letter-S-intensive books. First, *The Secret Of Our Success* by Joseph Henrich ([reviewed by me here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/)). Second, *Sick Societies* by Robert Edgerton ([reviewed by Jane Psmith here](https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b)).
The former chronicles the wonders of cultural evolution. Seemingly “primitive” societies’ seemingly “barbaric” practices turn out to be brilliant beyond “civilized” man’s ability to comprehend. For example, the Montagnais-Naskapi tribe performs a divination ritual using an animal’s shoulder bones to decide where to hunt. This sounds stupid, but Henrich chronicles how the divination ritual actually has useful mathematics-of-randomness properties that makes it more likely to generate efficient hunting patterns than the tribesmen would get through normal decision procedures. The Aztecs performed a complicated series of rituals to corn before they ate it, mixing it with powdered shells; only in the 1900s did Westerners realize that this process activates vitamins; without it, anyone who eats too much corn risks dying of niacin deficiency. Henrich’s conclusion is that primitive tradition is a repository of wondrous practices selected by millennia of trial-and-error, and we pooh-pooh it at our peril.
The latter says: nah, actually primitive tradition is often just dumb. Edgerton goes through just as many examples as Henrich, but with the opposite moral: some primitive tribe had done something since time immemorial, but it was stupid and cruel and made their lives worse or, in some cases, pushed them into extinction. So for example (both quotes from the Psmith review, content warning for graphic violence applies to everything between here and section II):
> Among the Pokot of Kenya, where brutal wifebeating was the norm, men often reported they only trusted food prepared by their mothers or sisters; their wives might poison them. Others said their wives were trying to kill them by witchcraft. Several women agreed that yes, they certainly were, and one woman told the ethnographers she had succeeded.
And:
> The Dugum Dani of western Papua New Guinea were so notoriously warlike that when an Australian police post was introduced to the area, anthropologist Karl Heider predicted that it would do little to stem the Dani’s endemic violence. In fact, though, they quickly abandoned their warfare as soon as the presence of the colonial authorities gave them a plausible coordinating mechanism, and many later expressed relief that they were free of the cycle of violence and retribution. Similarly, highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.
Many of these seem like [inadequate equilibria](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/), or [multipolar traps](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) - nobody wants to be the first person to skip the brutal initiation ceremony and look like a pussy. But other problems are just stupid. The Marind-anim were warlike raiders who stole other tribes’ children because their own women were infertile. Unbeknownst to them, their own women were infertile because of a “fertility ritual” where multiple men would rape each woman on her wedding night so violently that it destroyed her reproductive system. Eventually European colonizers made them stop, and their fertility miraculously rebounded.
(also, the story about the oracle bone divination hunting [appears to be fake](https://x.com/C_Harwick/status/1548678967812579330))
Edgerton and Henrich don’t come out of nowhere. They’re the modern reincarnations of Hobbes and Rousseau - with the former calling primitive life “nasty, brutish, and short”, and the latter idealizing it as an Edenic paradise to which we could only dream of returning. Nowadays both sides are in disrepute - young anthropology students are taught to abjure Hobbesians with the scornful incantation “White Man’s Burden”, and Rousseauians by uttering “Noble Savage”. Still, Edgerton and Henrich are proofs that ideas can never be fully banished, and under the surface the debate continues.
The Australian Aborigines are a tempting battleground for this conflict. Even as we’re not supposed to dub them noble savages, so we *definitely* aren’t supposed to call them “the oldest society in the world” with a “fifty thousand year history” - just because they *arrived* fifty thousand years ago doesn’t mean their culture has been *stagnant* during that time. Still, certain decamillennia-old rock art appears to depict some of the same beings mentioned in Aboriginal mythology during colonial times and into the present. And on a very literal interpretation of cultural evolution, the longer you’ve been in a specific niche, the more adapted to it you get. We are citizens of an industrial society that gets five or ten years to adopt to each new paradigm before the technologists throw out something new to knock us off balance again, heirs to a Judeo-Christian tradition barely three thousand years old and a Greco-Roman-Indo-European tradition hardly any older. What does something *really* ancient look like? The Aborigines, whose culture can seem impossibly complex at times (is this an illusion? we’ll discuss that later!) give a feeling of something over-optimized, a genetic algorithm run for 999,999,999 epochs until it ends up at weird edge cases that break the reward module and get assigned infinite utility.
It also seems, in other ways, pointless, cruel, and dysfunctional along axes I didn’t even realize were possible. So let’s dig up the corpses of Hobbes and Rousseau and let them duke it out some more.
**II.**
Australian Aborigines are a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothal.
When an Aboriginal man comes of age, he gets mock-abducted from his parents by unrelated elders and forced to spend five to fifteen years going through a series of grueling initiation rituals. During some parts of the rituals, he must spend months isolated from all other humans, living on his own in the wilderness. During others, he endures horrible mutilations, starting with circumcision and only getting more horrifying and creative from there. The more initiations he goes through, and the more secret societies he joins, the cooler and higher-status he becomes.
Somewhere in this process - before, during, or after, depending on the tribe and situation - he is matched not with a wife, but with a mother-in-law. He promises to serve the mother-in-law and her husband for his remaining adolescence and young adulthood, doing chores for them and bringing them his best food. In exchange, the mother-in-law promises him her (perhaps not yet born!) daughter’s hand in marriage. If he’s really cool, she may promise him *all* her future daughters in marriage.
The marriage takes place after the daughter reaches puberty. At this point, the man - who was probably fifteen or so at the time of betrothal - is probably in his thirties. So a modal marriage might be between a 30 year old man and a 14 year old woman. And this is the best case scenario: if a future mother-in-law has five sons before her first daughter, maybe the man is 40-something by the time he’s wed.
This system is great for old men, who get lots of young wives, plus the devoted service of the tribe’s adolescent men, plus they get to dress up as cool gods and demons and freak everyone out at initiation ceremonies. It’s terrible for women, who are married off to men 20 or 30 years their seniors without being asked. And it’s also terrible for young men, who have to remain celibate into their thirties, get various body parts mutilated in weird rituals, and spend the best years of their lives serving future in-laws. Why and how does this system endure?
We’ll return to the why question later. The how question is the subject of most of the individual case studies in the book, starting with:
**III.**
Americans like to trip up their politicians at town halls by daring them to answer how many genders there are. The Aborigines would not be tripped up. They would immediately answer eight.
“Gender” is technically the wrong term. Most anthropologists use words like “section”. But there are some notable resemblances. Your “section” determines who you are, how people address you, and (especially) who you can marry.
The details vary from tribe to tribe, but Hiatt describes the section system of the Kamilaroi of New South Wales:
Ego = self, F = father, M = mother, B = brother, Z = sister, S = son, D = daughter, FZS = father's sister's son, and so on
Suppose I, a man, am *Kumbo*. Then all of my brothers are also *Kumbo,* and all of my sisters are *Buta*, the female counterpart of *Kumbo.* My father and his brothers are *Kubbi*, and their sisters are *Kapota*. I may only marry a *Mata* woman, and our sons will be *Kubbi*.
Further, everyone of the same section is . . . sort of the same person? My father’s brothers, who are *Kubbi* like him, are also sort of my fathers. If I visit a far-off tribe, the *Kubbis* there will behave paternally to me, and I owe them some measure of filial respect. Likewise, I may call all *Butas* “sister”, and all *Ippata* “mom”. I can never have sex with any *Buta* or *Ippata* - that would be incest.
You can take this pretty far! If I tell another *Kumbo* “Look, we are in some sense the same person, therefore I should be allowed to sleep with your wife”, this . . . actually sometimes works? I’d want to have a very good pre-existing relationship, and I’d owe him a favor, but it could happen!
This system might seem pointlessly complex, an exercise in building castles in the air. But in the late 19th century, anthropologists from distant lands compared notes and noticed that the Iroquois of North America do the same thing, as do other scattered groups across several continents. So there must be some underlying logic. What is it?
Lewis Morgan, the American who first made the discovery, suggested it was a relic of ancient group marriage (cf. grand 19th-century stage-based Theories Of Everything). Suppose that primitive cultures married entire families: a group of brothers from one family marries a group of sisters from another. This might explain the Australian system. If you didn’t know which sibling of a group was your father, then you might want to use the same word for “father” as for “paternal uncle”, for “brother” as “male cousin”, and for “husband” as “husband’s brother”, since there was no way of keeping track of which was which. Extend these principles, and you get something like the Australian system.
This was clever, and there was even some circumstantial evidence: Aboriginal brothers did sometimes lend one another their wives, as mentioned above. It didn’t take an anthropological genius to guess that this sort of fraternal wife-swapping might be an adaptation to the grueling difficulty that young men had in getting a wife the usual way. And it also had side benefits: Aboriginal men were frequently out on very long hunting trips. They were both concerned for their wives’ welfare (how would they defend themselves without a man around?) and jealous (what if they tried to sleep with someone their own age?) Lending one’s wife to a brother (who, again, was *basically* the same person as you) or even a non-relative person of your section (who, again, was *technically* your brother and therefore *basically…*) was a pretty wild way to avoid feeling cuckolded, but apparently seemed to work.
What if your brother (or other fellow sectioner) had sex with your wife, and you ended up raising a child that wasn’t yours? Here the Aboriginals again doubled down on their strategy of solving seemingly minor problems with dramatic culture-wide interventions: they simply denied that sex led to conception! ([sort of, kind of, read the whole chapter here for more](https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1996-hiatt-argumentsaboutaborigines-ch7-conceptionandmisconception.pdf)) Conception occurs when a child’s father ritually summons the spirit of his clan to impregnate the mother. It’s *his* child because *he* was the one who summoned the spirit, plus because he summoned *his* clan spirit. If the child was conceived when his brother or fellow-sectioner was with his wife - well, sometimes the spirits come at unexpected times.
But this doesn’t fit Morgan’s theory, where nobody knows or cares who the real father is. And wife-swapping between brothers was hardly a default - when it happened at all, there was a formal ceremony, and even afterwards the first brother was still the “real” husband and the secondary brother just a substitute. And there were other problems: why does the section system use the same word for “mother” and “mother’s sister”? It’s hardly mysterious who a given child’s mother is! A new wave of anti-Morgan anthropologists argued that the section system wasn’t as extreme as it had seemed to their predecessors: is it really any weirder for Aborigines to call all *Kubbi* men “father” than for Southerners to call any young man “sonny boy”, or for Western men to call their mothers-in-law “Mom”?
As anthropology advanced, it became less interested in theories about what primitive universals an institution might be a relic of, and more interested in asking what function the institution served. Here the scholars were on somewhat firmer ground. The section system was one way of preventing incest in a world where everyone was traveling and wife-swapping regularly, there were no written records, and nobody was keeping great track of whether someone from another clan was secretly their half-sister or cousin. Assuming everyone followed all the rules, there was no way that a legitimate marital partner could be any closer than a second cousin; most would be much further.
But also, the system divided people into groups that cut across more obvious groupings like clans and tribes. If I visited another clan, I would have some people there who considered themselves sort-of-in-some-sense my father who might offer me hospitality on that basis; other people who would be sort-of-in-some-sense my brothers who I could hang out with, and a pre-selected set of women who were sort-of-in-some-sense my wives and who I could pursue romantically.
Just as in the US a Jew who moves from NYC to SF might seek out the local Jewish community and expect a warm welcome from people who were in some sense “related” to him even if not quite in a literal familial way, so a *Kumbo* could go anywhere in Australia and find a place in the social network.
**IV.**
Just when you think you’re starting to understand this Australian Aborigine stuff: why is there a special language you only speak when you’re close to your mother-in-law? And how come, when you hear certain obscenities, you have to attack all of your sisters with spears?
First, the mother-in-law languages. This is another one of those things that sounds like some kind of wild one-off but turns out to recur across cultures all over the world. In Australia, they take the form of “fifty or so substitutes for the most common words in everyday discourse, although in certain cases they have been elaborated to the point where they function for practical purposes as independent languages”. They are spoken in cases where your mother-in-law is especially salient, including when talking to your brothers-in-law or when your mother-in-law is within hearing range. They’re *not* languages you speak *to* your mother-in-law, because talking to her directly is taboo and no Aborigine would ever do it.
Also taboo: looking at your mother-in-law, touching your mother-in-law, and getting too close to the 12.5% of the population who are *basically* your mother-in-law because they belong to the same section as her. The monstrous mother-in-law recurs again and again as a character in myth and fable, usually as a member in good standing of the [penis-stealing witch brigade](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness):
> Ancestral women called Ganabuda were travelling across the country in a group. A Lizard Man named Spiky Head seduced a women related to him as a potential mother-in-law [ie someone from the mother-in-law section; for a *Kumbo*, this would be *Kapota*]. He had a penis capable of proceeding underground and rising to the surface under the object of his desire. The Ganabdua women attacked his testicles with sharpened digging sticks, cut off his penis, and killed him.
> The Ganabuda women encountered Crow Man, who proceeded to have sexual intercourse with a young potential mother-in-law, as well as a classificatory mother’s mother [ie someone from the mother’s mother’s section; for a *Kumbo*, a *Buta*]. His mega-penis inflicted severe injury upon them, and they died. The Ganabuda women then killed the Crow Man.
> An ancestral man named Dangidjara had intercourse with a potential mother-in-law. He then went hunting and brought meat back to her. Eventually she gave birth to a son. Dangidjara continued his journey. One day ants bit his genitals, which detached themselves from his body and ran away. He pleaded with them to return, but they refused. Eventually he retrieved them.
According to Hiatt, the Aborigines still haven’t gotten over this particular *leitmotif:*
> Some years ago the wife of the Prime Minister of Australia was presented with an Aboriginal painting depicting an old man who developed ‘a grossly enlarged penis as a result of having sex with his mother-in-law’.
All of this coexists uneasily with the fact that a man must negotiate with the (future) mother-in-law in order to promised a bride in the first place, and that he must spend years serving his future mother-in-law (presumably with the help of intermediaries) in order to “earn” the bride when she comes of age.
What’s going on?
Nineteenth-century anthropologists didn’t bother to invent a grand Theory of Everything about this one. They thought it was obvious: mother-in-laws suck. Hiatt writes that Freud believed that the custom “had a good deal to commend it”, and he cites a letter from the great psychologist to his fiancee where he said of his own impending mother-in-law that she was “alien and will always remain so to me. I seek for similarities with you, but find hardly any … I can foresee more than one opportunity of making myself disagreeable to her and I don’t intend to avoid them”. This is funny, but also raises the question: if so many primitive societies have mother-in-law taboos, and our more “liberated” society still has an expectation and archetype that sons will hate their mother-in-laws, are these coming from the same place? And what is that place?
At least in the Australian case, twentieth-century anthropologists note two relevant facts.
First, in a culture where old men marry younger women, a man is the same age as his mother-in-law. A man just starting the process of earning a bride might be 18, his mother-in-law might also be 18, and his father-in-law might be 38. The man will then spend the next 15 - 20 years essentially celibate, serving the in-law couple in the hopes of earning a bride when he in his thirties. It must be tempting for the man to just cut out the middleman and have sex with the same-age mother-in-law directly. It must be equally tempting for the mother-in-law, hitched to a man twenty years her senior but now being served by this strapping young lad, to allow and encourage such a relationship. Hiatt collects evidence that none of these temptations escaped the notice of Aboriginal men. What’s a jealous father-in-law to do? Aboriginal elders took the nuclear option, layering every taboo they could think of over the idea of such relationships.
Second, remember that the man has been promised the mother-in-law’s female children (definitely at least the first, sometimes even more) as his bride. He really *really* does not want to accidentally father her female children! And since the Aborigines deny that sex leads to conception, you can’t just *tell him* why it’s a bad idea for him to have sex with the woman who will birth his future wife. The best you can do is spread rumors that she is definitely a penis-stealing witch, plus make him so creeped out by her that he has to speak an entirely different language when she’s in the area.
(the second factor is Australia-specific, but I leave as an exercise to the reader whether the first factor has any relevance to the weaker forms of mother-in-law hatred found in civilized nations)
But how come, when you hear certain obscenities, you have to attack all of your sisters with spears?
This custom, called the *mirriri* in the tribes Hiatt focuses on, is an anthropological favorite. The attacks are somewhere between ritualized and real, and sisters do occasionally get seriously wounded. The most common provocation is when a man hears his sister’s husband curse her. But the sister he attacks with spears might not necessarily be the same sister who got cursed, and sometimes other quarrels (for example, a sister vs. the sister’s daughter) could provoke the same response.
Early theories focused on the brother-in-law relationship. If a husband quarreled with his wife, there might be some lingering fear that the wife’s brothers would intervene on her side, thus turning a marriage that should have been an inter-clan alliance into an opportunity for inter-clan conflict. Just as men defuse the fear of sex with their mother-in-law by ritually hating and fearing her, so brothers-in-law could defuse the fear that they would take their sister’s side in a conflict (and so start an inter-clan war) by ritually reviling and attacking her. And maybe this display would work even better if they attacked random other sisters too, just to drive home how little they cared about sororal bonds.
This theory floundered on the observation that although the most classic cause for *mirriri* was a sister-vs-brother-in-law conflict, any sister-related conflict had the potential to provoke the response, even when there was no marriage or inter-clan alliance involved. So the next generation of anthropologists concluded that - yeah, it’s an incest thing again. If you’re keeping young people in a decades-long state of sexual frustration, maybe their sisters start to look pretty good; certainly the past few years of online pornography have suggested that this option is never far from the sexually-frustrated-young-person mind. Not only would such a relationship have the usual downsides of incest, but it really *could* blow up alliances and start an inter-clan war.
Many Aboriginal conflicts involve screaming insults at each other, and many of those insults are sexual. So an Aboriginal man hearing a conflict with his sister probably hears a lot of descriptions of her genitals, sexual proclivities, etc. Maybe this is awkward enough that he feels the need to signal how aroused he isn’t the most dramatic way he knows how - trying to impale her with a spear (this signal would *not* have survived Freudian psychology). And maybe, just to hammer in how little he gets aroused by sisters, he has to try to impale *all* of them with spears.
Don’t keep your culture’s young men in a decades-long state of sexual frustration, that’s my advice.
**V.**
Whenever race-and-IQ types talk about the intellectual advantages of Western Man, someone shows up to tell them that they wouldn’t last a day in Aboriginal Australia. I am sure this is true. Plop me down in Arnhem Land, and it would take five minutes before I forgot whether it was *Kubbi* or *Murri* that was taboo relative to *Kumbo*, accidentally had sex with my classificatory sister, and got speared by ten clans simultaneously.
Reading this book - only a fraction of which I’ve been able to represent here - it’s hard not to be awed by the complexity of Aboriginal society. Is cultural evolution showing off what it can given 50,000 years to work with? Or does every society seem this byzantine to foreigners who are 50,000 years removed from the most recent common ancestor?
If some Aboriginal anthropologist came to America and tried to list our sex taboos, what would they find? No sex between close family members up to second cousin, that’s obvious. No sex with bosses, subordinates, or clients. A strict taboo on even *mentioning* sex at work, enforced by a caste of powerful witches called “HR ladies”. Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery. No sex across “age gaps”, where some people define “gap” as “half your age plus seven” and other people refuse to define it but reserve the right to judge transgressors anyway. Men can’t have sex with other men, unless they’re part of a special caste called “gay people” who must move to New York, speak in a weird voice, and cultivate an interest in musical theater. Married people can’t have sex with anyone besides their spouse, unless they’re part of a special caste called “poly people” who must move to San Francisco, dye their hair, and get jobs in tech. At some point maybe our hypothetical anthropologist starts longing for the simplicity of someone telling him which 12.5% of the population are his classificatory wives.
Should we take this seriously? Some Western taboos are just the local versions of cultural universals - no culture is pro-incest, and most place some kind of limits on pedophilia. Do we just have the basics? Does every tribe think their culture is just a variety of “the basics”? Do we have anything as weird as mother-in-law languages?
**VI.**
Let’s return to the question we punted earlier: why?
Grant that these taboos / rituals / etc make sense as part of the project of stabilizing this polygynic gerontocracy where thirty-something men marry pubertal women. Why would anyone arrange a society this way?
Hobbes might ask - why worry about the why question? Sometimes old people get the upper hand in a society and successfully implement a gerontocracy that benefits them while screwing over everyone else. There’s no law of physics saying this can’t happen, and there are plenty of Substack articles with the word “Boomer” in the title asserting that it happens even today. If young men and women can’t band together and protect their interests, that’s a skill issue.
Rousseau might suggest we hold off until we hear the Aboriginal elders’ side of the story. The final chapter of *Arguments* hints at this perspective. In one of their initiation ceremonies, the elders chop, boil, and otherwise process a species of yam which is poisonous in its raw state but edible with sufficient preparation. Then they symbolically go through the same steps with the young people being initiated into the cult. The lesson seems to be that young people, like yams, start out toxic and inedible in the raw, but can become socially useful after sufficient preparation. Young people are dumb, violent, and horny. As long as they’re kept subservient to the elders, they can’t do anything stupid like start a war, or marry for love instead of inter-clan-alliance-formation.
And (the elders might continue), handing us control of everything has gone pretty well. In one paragraph, which Hiatt places half in his own voice, half in the voice of anarchist-leader-and-amateur-Australian-Aborigine-scholar Peter Kropotkin, he says:
> Few peoples can have placed higher value on altruism and mutual aid than the Aborigines of Australia. The genius of the Australian polity lay in its deployment of the goodwill inherent in kinship as a central principle of organization for society as a whole. Government in these circumstances was otiose; its absence, Kropotkin would say, was to be regarded not as a low level of political evolution but as a luminous peak. Natural resources and the land itself were equitably distributed among descent groups; appropriation of clan estates by force was unknown, and theft of private property a rarity. The business of everyday life was conducted informally through unspoken understandings, quiet consensus or noisy agreement. In general the authoritarian mode in public affairs was discountenanced. Vanity and self-importance were mocked. Nearly everywhere men insisted on speaking for themselves and, conversely, evinced a reluctance to speak on behalf of others.
Still not noble enough for you?
> [During the early days of the colonization of Australia], fifteen convicts were flogged for allegedly setting out to plunder a native [ie Aboriginal] encampment at Botany Bay. The reason for the punishment was communicated to [local Aboriginal representative] Arabanoo, who was brought along to witness it. He was not impressed; instead of expressing gratitude to the authorities, he evinced only disgust and terror. When a large group of Aborigines was assembled two years later to watch the lashing of a convict caught in the act of stealing fishing tackle [from them], all reacted with abhorrence to the brutishness of the spectacle. One of the women went so far as to snatch a stick and menace the flogger. Tench noted that on a previous occasion when a bundle of stolen spears had been recovered and placed on the beach, an old man came up and singled out his own from the rest: ‘and this honesty, within the circle of their society, seemed to characterize them all’. Sharing, moreover, was commonplace and spontaneous, as evidenced by Arabanoo’s gifts of food not only to his countrymen but to the colonists’ children who flocked around him.
Aside from the whole gerontocratic-patriarchy-with-decades-of-mutilation-and-sexual-frustration thing, and maybe the decamillennia of technological stagnation, Aboriginal society has much to recommend it. There is broad inter-clan peace, social equality (modulo age and gender), and enough mutual aid that nobody goes hungry unless everyone does. Neighboring tribes get along, there’s no religious warfare, and you spend large portions of your time dressing up in cool costumes and terrifying people with bull-roarers. Don’t accuse me of noble-savaging - I’m just speaking for some combination of a hypothetical Aboriginal elder, L.R. Hiatt, and Kropotkin.
Okay, says Hobbes, sure, large-scale organized violence was rare. But [high-single-to-low-double-digit percents](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1944122950195499485) of the population died of small-scale disorganized violence, far higher than the murder rate even in very dangerous countries like America or pre-crackdown El Salvador. And although anthropologists still debate exactly why Aborigines practiced so much infanticide, one pretty popular position is that women were trying to punish their husbands for all the forced marriages and beatings, using the only cudgel that they had. Also, aren’t we cheating by not talking about those initiation ceremonies in greater depth? It’s not just the circumcision! Have you ever looked up “subincision” on Wikipedia? I don’t recommend it!
Sure, says Rousseau, but may I present as Exhibit A pages 181-182, from a chapter focusing on a rare non-horrible initiation ceremony among the Tiwi people of the the Northern Australian islands:
> On Bathurst and Melville Islands, as on the Australian mainland, suicide in traditional society seems to have been unusual if not unknown. In recent years, however, there has been an outbreak of self-mutilation among Tiwi young men. According to Gary Robinson, a contributing factor is prolonged psychological dependence on maternal kin, well beyond adolescence, and a conflict-laden enmeshment in the the vicissitudes of the paternal family. Traditionally, as we have seen, this would have been impossible. At puberty, a lad was ritually removed from his family surroundings and placed under the tutelage of outsiders. More importantly, clearly defined status objectives were implanted in his mind, and by the time he had attained them by passing through a series of initiatory grades, he was ready to marry and start his own family. Masculine values were reinforced through regular engagement in male corporate activities, particularly hunting, fighting, and ceremonial; while idealization of the father, who by now was unlikely to be alive, provided an individualized role model for the firm delineation of personal identity.
>
> The Tiwi say that when a boy’s public hair begins to grow, dogs bark at him in camp and crocodiles and bulls chase him in the bush. In the old days, the source of provocation was forcibly plucked out [that is, they pulled out all his pubic hairs in an initiation ceremony - “non-horrible” is a matter of degree!] As a son’s burgeoning sexuality was potentially a destabilizing force in his father’s harem, the preservation of paternal and filial goodwill depended on separation through the institution of initiation, followed by the son’s growing absorption in the corporate affairs of men (which included the cultivation of patronage necessary for the promise of a wife from outside his own band). All these traditional structures have now collapsed, and nothing viable has been put in their place. The transition from childhood dependence to adult autonomy, once mediated by external authority, is now beset by incoherence and uncertainty of aims. The family itself is the remaining authority, and children often lack the motivation to solve their problems by making a clean break with it. Ambivalence inherent in the father-son relationship remains unresolved and a source of instability, fluctuating between violence and mutual aid. Young men have nightmares about death, and suffer chronically from melancholy, depression, and rage.
>
> In 1986, three Tiwi brothers travelled to the mainland in order to establish contact with a descendant of one of Joe Cooper’s buffalo-shooters, related to them as a classificatory father. They had fantasies about being initiated and in the process acquiring power to win fights, get women, and in general overcome their anomy. The pilgrimage proved futile. Within a short period following their return to Melville Island, one brother had narrowly survived a suicide attempt after grasping an electrical power line. Another, just before his thirtieth birthday, broke into a store and hanged himself while awaiting police questioning.
This is an all-too-common pattern when hunter-gatherer societies are forcibly integrated into sedentary nations - see eg my review of [The Arctic Hysterias](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias) for more. It’s so common that we’re no longer surprised - of course colonialism is bad for these people’s mental health.
But maybe it should feel more mysterious. When Third World immigrants move to the US, they’re usually pretty happy with their decision. They might not assimilate completely, but they’re often able to hold down jobs or at least avoid spiraling into alcoholism and suicide. But when a people gets colonized - after the bad part with the conquest and land theft and oppression, once they’re granted citizenship and the settlers feel vaguely apologetic - doesn’t it end up kind of like being an immigrant into a First World country? In fact, isn’t it strictly superior? Instead of dodging ICE goons, you get full citizenship, access to the welfare system, maybe some affirmative action. You don’t even have to abandon your family or leave your ancestral village.
Is this latter part the problem? The typical immigrant moves to New York and gets a job as an Uber driver for rich people. Maybe it’s worse if you stay on a reservation where everyone else is as poor as you? Maybe this is the same problem as decaying Rust Belt / Appalachian towns, or the post-industrial British heartland. When everyone else in your area is as poor as you, the poverty feeds on itself?
But that raises a second question: a modern Aborigine has two options. They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate, in which case they’re no worse off than any other poor immigrant, and better than most. Or they can stay in an Aboriginal village. If Hiatt is to be believed, Aboriginal villages weren’t mental health disasters when they were following their traditional ways. But in absolute terms, they’re much richer now: nobody starves, there’s decent medical care, people have quality clothes and houses, etc. So what’s gotten worse?
The obvious answer is something like pride. Even if the average Aborigine has more stuff now, they get it from something like convenience store work or welfare or something, and this is less pride-inducing than being a traditional hunter (even if traditional hunters had less stuff and often starved). Still, really? Pride? The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it. Also, even if Aborigines have been forced onto marginal lands, the Inuit mostly stayed in the same spot - those who want to continue hunting can. What equilibrium traps them in between two worlds, either of which seems better than the limbo in between?
(in the Inuit case, it seems to be that traditional lifestyles are so miserable that nobody would ever do them if they had any other option, even a marginal existence of welfare and alcoholism - but it’s not *exactly* the same kind of misery that causes post-colonial alienation, and there’s some other sense in which the post-colonial alienation is worse. I think there’s a lot to unpack here.)
Hiatt seems to think the damage centers around the disappearance of the initiation system. In traditional Aboriginal society, young men would be isolated from their family for a period of many years while they underwent a series of tortures expected to eventually result in a high-status social role within the community. The West has the same system: we call it “grad school”. But Aborigines do poorly in Australian education, with below 10% graduating college despite increasingly intense affirmative action (a decade ago, before this push, it was below 1%). It probably sucks to go from an initiation system where you have the same fair chance as everyone else, to a different initiation system, designed by a foreign culture whose own adolescents are much better at it than you are.
While we’re swinging from Rousseauian noble savage aficionados to Hobbesian White Man’s Burden paternalists, what would it look like to design a society that took Hiatt’s critique seriously? Would it be humane to dole out welfare checks whose size is proportional to how many degrees of Freemasonry the recipient can attain? How many points they can score at in some kind of artificial boomerang-throwing contest? Would young people go off to join the Freemasons and spend years practicing boomerang-throwing, then come back as high-status members of society able to attract a wife and support a family? Would they be happy?
With the benefit of one (1) anthropology book, the best I can do is say that traditional Aboriginal society seemed remarkably well-adapted to being what it was, but that what it was seems pretty terrible and I’m glad I never had to participate it. Still, my participation in it was never an option, many Aborigines *are* being forced to participate in *my* crazy society, and they don’t seem to like that either. The greatest anthropological argument of all is as tough as ever. | Scott Alexander | 168204420 | Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines | acx |
# Open Thread 390
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** A few weeks ago I wrote [Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-skolnick-on-schizophrenia). Stephen Skolnick has now responded [here](https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-sun). I don’t find his response convincing, for reasons I explain in [this comment](https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-sun/comment/133392337).
**2:** But some people [pointed out](https://x.com/julianboolean_/status/1941925123818127553) an error in the original post. I said my post a few years ago simulating twin concordance rates in schizophrenia got the exact right answer. After a correction for a math error, it got an answer which - while still sufficing to explain why you shouldn’t expect twin concordance to necessarily equal heritability - was not exactly right. I explain why I think the simulation is illustrative anyway [here](https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1942185386677272770). You can see a better simulation that does get the right answer [here](https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/staff/nick_pdf/Classics/1970_Smith_AHG_Dorret.pdf). I’ve edited the Skolnick post to reflect this.
**3:** Gary Marcus accuses my recent [Now I Really Won That AI Bet](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/now-i-really-won-that-ai-bet) of being a “straw man” that doesn’t fully engage with the arguments against the existing AI paradigm being unable to master compositionality. He makes his case [here](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/scott-alexanders-misleading-victory). I believe all of Marcus’ objections were already addressed in the original post (CTRL+F “still one discordant note in this story”), except his claim that previous use of these prompts might cause “data contamination” - it’s trivial to demonstrate that 4o succeeds on other prompts of approximately the same difficulty; you can see the comment [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/now-i-really-won-that-ai-bet/comment/133204216) for an example.
**4:** Vitor, the counterparty in my AI bet, [concedes but notes I have behaved badly](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/now-i-really-won-that-ai-bet/comment/133345408): I slightly shifted terms to deal with model limitations, posted the original (premature) victory claim, retracted the original victory claim, apologized for the original victory claim, and posted the new on-time victory claim, all without consulting him. He’s right that this is bad behavior, and I let my excitement around figuring things out about AI get ahead of the fact that this was a real bet against a real person who deserved to be consulted on how I talked about it. I apologize.
**5:** My recent [Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing-ed5) included a comment by Sasha Gusev criticizing Davide Piffer’s work on race and IQ, and I partly endorsed Gusev’s criticism. Piffer responds [here](https://pifferpilfer.substack.com/p/debunking-the-caricature-what-polygenic).
**6:** A user of the anti-cavity tooth probiotic [I profiled in 2023](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq) claims to be gradually losing his vision, and proposes [a theory that the tooth probiotic’s formate metabolism might be to blame.](https://garloid64.substack.com/p/the-lumina-probiotic-may-cause-blindness) Commenters mostly seem skeptical ([1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44528193), [2](https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/does-lumina-probiotic-cause-blindne), [3](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1943528872630259932), [4](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1lwv1gn/the_lumina_probiotic_may_cause_blindness_in_the/)) citing both theory (it seems like there should be too little formate to matter) and evidence (out of ~1000 users, nobody else has mentioned these symptoms yet); they propose that out of a thousand users, it’s not surprising if one develops a weird disease for unrelated reasons. Still, I am broadcasting this out of an excess of caution. If you are a formate metabolism expert, consider taking a look and weighing it; if you are a probiotic user with similar symptoms, consider speaking up (I don’t really want to be the permament clearinghouse for this, but if you have no other way to speak up, you can email me). To avoid psychosomatic panics, if your “similar symptoms” are along the lines of “now that you mention it, my eyes do maybe feel a little funny”, please wait a few days before freaking out.
**7:** Some good comments on the [Alzheimers mouse review post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechanisms-and). I asked if anyone was willing to defend the amyloid hypothesis (I only ever see people attacking it!) and [several knowledgeable people weighed in](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechanisms-and/comment/134276241). I might publish something on this later. And if you’re looking for more writing on Alzheimers pathology, Nintil has [a series on the topic](https://nintil.com/categories/alzheimer-s-disease/).
**8:** Another Lighthaven event ad:
> [Metagame 2025](https://www.metagame.games/), a game and puzzle design conference that is also itself an immersive megagame, is happening September 12-14 at Lighthaven in Berkeley. Early bird tickets are $500 through July 17th. If you're interested in getting involved, contact [Ricki Heicklen](mailto:ricki.heicklen@gmail.com) or [join the Discord](https://discord.gg/8pxvc9p4Ss). | Scott Alexander | 168248566 | Open Thread 390 | acx |
# Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]*
> “The scientific paper is a ‘[fraud](https://www.weizmann.ac.il/mcb/alon/sites/mcb.alon/files/users/user59/Is%20scientific%20paper%20a%20fraud.pdf)’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”
This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.
Consider the familiar structure of a scientific paper: Introduction (background and hypothesis), Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. This format implies that the work followed a clean, sequential progression: scientists identified a gap in knowledge, formulated a causal explanation, designed definitive experiments to fill the gap, evaluated compelling results, and most of the time, confirmed their hypothesis.
Real lab work rarely follows such a clear path. Biological research is filled with what Medawar describes lovingly as “messing about”: false starts, starting in the middle, unexpected results, reformulated hypotheses, and intriguing accidental findings. The published paper ignores the mess in favour of the illusion of structure and discipline. It offers an ideal version of what might have happened rather than a confession of what did.
The polish serves a purpose. It makes complex work accessible (at least if you work in the same or a similar field!). It allows researchers to build upon new findings.
But the contrived omissions can also play upon even the most well-regarded scientist’s susceptibility to the seduction of story. As Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (Marseilles, Fr.) [recently explained](https://www.eneuro.org/content/7/6/ENEURO.0491-20.2020),
> “when we are reading a paper, we tend to follow the reasoning and logic of the authors, and if the argumentation is nicely laid out, it is difficult to pause, take a step back, and try to get an overall picture.”
Our minds travel the narrative path laid out for us, making it harder to spot potential flaws in logic or alternative interpretations of the data, and making conclusions feel far more definitive than they often are.
Medawar’s framing is my compass when I do deep dives into major discoveries in translational neuroscience. I approach papers with a dual vision. First, what is actually presented? But second, and often more importantly, what is not shown? How was the work likely done in reality? What alternatives were tried but not reported? What assumptions guided the experimental design? What other interpretations might fit the data if the results are not as convincing or cohesive as argued?
And what are the consequences for scientific progress?
In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.
The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.
However, cracks are showing in this façade. In 2021, [the FDA granted accelerated approval](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-aduhelm-fda.html#:~:text=In%20written%20responses%20to%20questions,no%20time%20considered%20doing%20so.%E2%80%9D) to aducanumab (Aduhelm), an anti-amyloid drug developed by Biogen, despite scant evidence that it meaningfully altered the course of cognitive decline. The decision to approve, [made over near-unanimous opposition](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/health/aduhelm-fda-resign-alzheimers.html) from the agency’s advisory panel, exposed growing tensions between regulatory optimism and scientific rigor. Medicare’s subsequent decision to restrict coverage to clinical trials, and [Biogen’s quiet withdrawal](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/biogen-alzheimers-aduhelm.html) of the drug from broader marketing efforts in 2024, made the disconnect impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, a deeper fissure emerged: [an investigation by](https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease) *[Science](https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease)* unearthed evidence of data fabrication surrounding research on Aβ\*56, a purported toxic amyloid-beta oligomer once hailed as a breakthrough target for disease-modifying therapy. Research results that had been seen as a promising pivot in the evolution of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, a new hope for rescuing the theory after repeated clinical failures, now appears to have been largely a sham. Treating Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques may have been a null path from the start.
When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—[a landmark 1995 paper by Games](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278397957_Alzheimer-type_neuropathology_in_transgenic_mice_overexpressing_V717F_-amyloid_precursor_protein) *[et al.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278397957_Alzheimer-type_neuropathology_in_transgenic_mice_overexpressing_V717F_-amyloid_precursor_protein)*, featured on the cover of *Nature* under the headline *“A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.”* It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.
In what follows, I argue that the seeds of today’s failures were visible from the beginning if one looks carefully. I approach this review not as an Alzheimer’s researcher with a rival theory, but as a molecular neuroscientist interested in how fields sometimes converge around alluring but unstable ideas. Foundational papers deserve special scrutiny because they become the bedrock for decades of research. When that bedrock slips beneath us, it tells a cautionary story: about the power of narrative, the comfort of consensus, and the dangers of devotion without durable evidence. It also reminds us that while science is ultimately self-correcting, correction can be glacial when careers and reputations are staked on fragile ground.
## The Rise of the Amyloid Hypothesis
In the early 1990s, a new idea began to dominate Alzheimer’s research: the amyloid cascade hypothesis.
First proposed by Hardy and Higgins in a [1992](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1566067?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed) *[Science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1566067?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed)* [perspective](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1566067?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed), the hypothesis suggested a clear sequence of disease-precipitating events: protein processing goes awry in the brain → beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulates → plaques form → plaques trigger a cascade of downstream events, including neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, synaptic loss, neuronal death, resulting in observable cognitive decline.
The hypothesis was compelling for several reasons. First, the discovery of the enzymatic steps by which amyloid precursor protein (APP) is processed into Aβ offered multiple potential intervention points—ideal for pharmaceutical drug development.
Second, the hypothesis was backed by powerful genetic evidence. Mutations in the APP gene on chromosome 21 were associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The case grew stronger with the observation that more than 50% of individuals with Down syndrome, who carry an extra copy of chromosome 21 (and thus extra APP), develop Alzheimer’s-like pathology by age 40.
Thus, like any robust causal theory, the amyloid cascade hypothesis offered explicit, testable predictions. As Hardy and Higgins outlined, if amyloid truly initiates the Alzheimer’s cascade, then genetically engineering mice to produce human amyloid should trigger the full sequence of events: plaques first, then tangles, synapse loss, and neuronal death, then cognitive decline. And the sequentiality matters: amyloid accumulation should *precede* other pathological features. At the time, this was a thrilling possibility.
Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.
## How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse
“Mouse Model Made”was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary *Nature* solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”
In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.
#### First Rule of Making a Transgenic Mouse: Don’t Talk About How You Made a Transgenic Mouse
How did Athena pull it off? Hard to say! What's most remarkable about the Games paper is what's *not* there. Scan through the methods section and you'll find virtually none of the painstaking effort required to build the Alzheimer’s mouse. Back in the ‘90s, creating a transgenic mouse took years of work, countless failed attempts, and extraordinary technical skill. In the Games paper, this effort is compressed into a few sparse sentences describing which gene and promoter (nearby gene instruction code) the research team used to make the mouse. The actual details are relegated to scientific meta-narrative—knowledge that exists only in lab notebooks, daily conversations between scientists, and the muscle memory of researchers who perform these techniques thousands of times.
The thin description wasn’t atypical for a publication from this era. Difficult experimental methods were often encapsulated in the single phrase "steps were carried out according to standard procedures," with citations to entire books on sub-cloning techniques or reference to the venerable *Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual* (We all have this on our bookshelf, yes?) The idea that there were reliable "standard procedures" that could ensure success was farcical—an understatement that other scientists understand as code for "we spent years getting this to work; good luck figuring it out ;)."
So, as an appreciation of what it takes to make progress on the frontiers of science, here is approximately what’s involved.
#### Prerequisites: Dexterity, Glassblowing, and Zen Mastery
Do you have what it takes to master transgenic mouse creation? Well, do you have the dexterity of a neurosurgeon? Because you’ll be [micro-manipulating fragile embryos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JDFFFNQnWM) with the care of someone defusing a bomb—except the bomb is smaller than a grain of sand, and you need to keep it alive. Have you trained in glass-blowing? Hope so, because you’ll need to handcraft your own micropipettes so you can balance an embryo on the pipette tip. [Yes, really](https://www.wpiinc.com/blog/post/Science-and-Art-of-Pulling-Micropipettes?srsltid=AfmBOopmJKavu3uiDJGMSi6r86XJl1iNsBu6y93y29PrQT2smZU4gKmm).
And most importantly, do you sincerely believe that outcomes are irrelevant, and only the endless, repetitive journey matters? If so, congratulations! You may already be a Zen master, which will come in handy when you’re objectively failing your boss’s expectations every single day for what feels like an eternity. Success, when it finally comes, will be indistinguishable from sheer, dumb luck, but the stochastic randomness won’t stop you from searching frantically through your copious notes to see if you can pinpoint the variable that made it finally work!
Let’s go a little deeper so we can understand why the Games team's achievement was considered so monumental—and why almost everyone viewed the results in the best possible light.
#### The Science and Alchemy of Designing the Perfect Genetic Construct
First, these researchers needed to design a genetic construct. What's a construct, you ask? It's a carefully engineered piece of DNA that harnesses circular plasmids (tiny rings of DNA naturally found in bacteria) to introduce foreign genes into mammalian cells. Through a painstaking process called sub-cloning, equal parts molecular biology and divination, they managed to insert into their mouse a human APP gene carrying the mutation found in families with high rates of early-onset Alzheimer's.
You can design your construct perfectly on paper, but in truth, you solve the problem by tweaking reagents like an alchemist, trying to find the perfect brew to coax your foreign gene into the plasmid at high efficiency.
To be considered a valid Alzheimer’s model, the Games mouse needed to express human APP at levels high enough to cause Alzheimer's-like pathology. [Previous](https://www.nature.com/articles/352239a0) [attempts](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0006899394907676?via%3Dihub) by other labs had yielded mice that showed little to no amyloid plaques. Scientists suspected that higher expression levels might overcome this hurdle. They introduced the PDGF-β promoter, a genetic “on switch” that controls when and where a gene is activated to drive high expression in neurons; they included introns in the construct to allow for alternative splicing, a process that enables cells to produce different versions of a protein, in this case ensuring expression of the full range of amyloid-beta peptides seen in human Alzheimer’s.
But even with these clever designs, they had almost no control over where their transgene would integrate into the genome, how many copies would insert, or how much gene expression they’d elicit.
#### Microinjection to Model Organism: The Birth of Transgenic Line #100... #101... #102... Are We There Yet?
When the Games team finally (miraculously!) had a perfect construct, the next phase began: obtaining precisely timed mouse embryos. To make this transgenic mouse line, researchers needed to inject the transgene into single-cell fertilized embryos, prior to the first cell division event. It’s a very small needle, but only by threading it can you ensure that the transgene incorporates into the DNA of every dividing cell. Back when the study was conducted in the 1990s, the Games team had to rely on natural fertilization, meaning they needed female mice that had just ovulated and mated.
Thinking about this work triggers me. I spent years of my PhD setting up and monitoring mouse breeding pairs for timed pregnancies. Every morning began with the ritual of checking for copulatory plugs (don’t ask!). Only ~20-25% of pairs would successfully mate overnight: some females aren’t receptive; some males are layabouts. The failed pairings had to be separated and re-paired in the evening, so fertilization timing could be precisely tracked. Once mating was confirmed (those copulatory plugs again), the female was euthanized, and her oviducts—tiny tubes containing the precious fertilized eggs—carefully dissected. Then you flush out the one-cell zygotes using a finely-tuned glass pipette (yet another moment where glass-blowing skills came in handy).
Now for the hard part: microinjection—the insertion of the transgene into an egg the diameter of a human hair (you really should [watch the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JDFFFNQnWM)). You need the steadiness of a bomb defuser, the aim of a sniper, and just enough pressure to get the DNA inside the pronucleus without rupturing the egg (because ruptured eggs = weeks of work wasted instantly). All this while the eggs had to be kept alive under precisely controlled conditions. Today, fancy $100K integrated microinjection/scope systems help the process along (though it still takes years to master), in the early 1990s, microinjection was brutal—for all parties. Only a handful of scientists in the world could perform it with any consistency.
Let’s pause to acknowledge the obsessive craft of the skilled bench scientist.
#### The PDAPP Mouse Arrives
Once injected, the embryos were surgically transferred into surrogate mothers, then scientists waited anxiously for 18–21 days to see if any pups survived. When they did, DNA was extracted, and tests were run to see which, if any, carried the transgene. Success rates? Single-digit percentages. For every founder animal that carried the transgene, there were at least an order of magnitude more failed attempts.
The effort layered chance upon pure chance—literally hoping that the DNA randomly integrated into the genome. Where? Unknown. How many copies? Uhh. Would it express properly? Flip a coin.
That’s what made the PDAPP (**P**latelet-**D**erived growth factor (PDGF-β) **A**myloid **P**recursor **P**rotein) mouse a remarkable achievement. When it finally worked and was replicable in the creators’ lab, it wasn’t just a technical success—it was a miracle of molecular biology and tenacity.
## How to Read a Scientific Paper
Actively.
Imagine you’re a molecular neuroscience grad student in 1995. You’ve just sat down at your bench in the morning when your PhD supervisor calls you into her office. She’s at her desk, her hand pressed down on the latest issue of *Nature* like she’s trying to keep it from flying away.
“They did it. They made a transgenic Alzheimer’s mouse that shows the pathology. Go print color copies for everyone in the lab, then bring this back to me. You’ll present it in lab meeting tomorrow.”
You have 24 hours to get ready to lead journal club on the biggest translational neuroscience story in years. What do you do?
Crushed for time, most scientists I know read papers passively. They start at the beginning and work their way to the end, following the path the authors laid out for them. They become susceptible to the trap Medawar and Bernard warned about: mistaking the arc of a narrative for genuine logical coherence.
To see the substance through the argument in the Games paper, you’ll need a more active, detective-like approach. If you’re going to be convinced, you need to decide before you read what it will take to convince you. So, you begin with what may be the most important task of active reading: *before* looking at the paper, you imagine the experiments and results that would justify the claim that amyloid causes Alzheimer’s—and that the matter is settled.
What would we need to see to be convinced? Let's apply some key principles of experimental design:
**Temporality**: If amyloid beta (Aβ) drives pathology, plaques should appear first, followed by neurodegeneration, then cognitive deficits.
**Sufficiency [**2**]:** If Alzheimer’s-like pathology can result from ramping up human APP expression alone, then the PDAPP mouse is a quasi-test of sufficiency. If this mouse model develops plaques, tangles, synaptic loss, neurodegeneration, and cognitive impairment, then Aβ might be sufficient to initiate the disease process.
**Necessity**: An even stronger case for the amyloid cascade hypothesis requires showing that Alzheimer’s pathology can’t develop or progress if Aβ is absent or blocked.
**Mechanism of Action**: A truly convincing paper should demonstrate the biology of how Aβ triggers neurodegeneration.
**Critical Controls**: Including controlsin your experiments helps to demonstrate that your predicted effect isn’t arising for some other reason. Here are some controls you’d like to see in the PDAPP mouse study if you’re going to be convinced of the amyloid cascade hypothesis:
* Absence of plaques in mice not engineered to overexpress APP.
* Comparisons between brain regions with and without plaques. If you see neuronal death, it should co-occur with the presence of plaques, not be spread throughout the brain.
* Evidence that APP overexpression isn't driving toxicity, which can cause similar damage to the brain. This is very hard to control for, so the best course of action is to try to match human APP expression levels in your mouse model.
Controls are an indispensable reality check for **strong inference**—the practice of designing experiments that not only test a hypothesis but aim to *disprove it* or eliminate alternatives. The concept was introduced in [1964 by the biophysicist John Platt](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.146.3642.347), who observed that some scientific fields advance rapidly while others stagnate. The difference, he argued, wasn’t in the complexity of the problems or the brilliance of the researchers, but in the systematic use of what he called strong inference.
Unlike the traditional scientific method, which often tests a single hypothesis against a null, strong inference begins with multiple competing explanations. It then designs experiments specifically intended to rule them out. Over time, this produces a branching tree of narrowing possibilities, steadily eliminating what doesn’t hold up.
This approach also guides how we read. Asking what control would disprove the claim—or what alternative wasn’t tested—is the core of strong inference.
## Detective Work—Decoding the Paper
With our backstory in hand and analytical toolkit in mind, let’s see if the PDAPP mouse delivers on the amyloid cascade hypothesis.
It’s time to interrogate the key figures. In a paper like this, the figures are the empirical backbone of the argument. Of course, the authors have carefully chosen what to show and how to frame it. Our job is to assess whether the evidence supports their claims.
***Figure 1: Confirming the PDAPP Mouse Expresses Human APP***
**Big picture message:** *The authors successfully engineered a mouse with a functioning human APP transgene.* While Figure 1 has 5 parts, Panel d (below) is where we get the clearest confirmation that the human mutant APP transgene integrated itself into the mouse genome and produced Aβ in the expected location in the mouse brain.Stare at Panel d for a few seconds and then we’ll talk about it.
#### **What the Heck is Going on in Panel d?**
Panel d is an immunoblot (Western blot), a technique that tells us whether a specific protein is being produced in a sample. The figure compares human amyloid precursor protein expression in samples from three brains, corresponding to the three “lanes” shown along the top: a normal mouse (Lane 1), a mouse with the human APP transgene (Lane 2), and a human who had Alzheimer’s disease (Lane 3). The blots (the bands and blobs) are the data.
For purposes of this figure, proteins can differ in two important ways:
* They can differ in molecular weight (size), scored on the scale along the vertical axis on the left.
* They can be expressed to a greater or lesser degree, reflected in the intensity (darkness and spread) of the bands. Lighter means less protein expression, darker more. (Note: It’s fine that there are two bands in lane 3).
Let’s pause to consider what we should expect to see in this blot if the PDAPP mouse is to be considered a reasonable model of human Alzheimer’s disease. Two things!
1. Ideally, lane 1 (normal mouse) will be empty; and
2. The PDAPP mouse sample in lane 2 will have the same molecular weight (height on vertical axis) and expression level (intensity and spread) as the human sample in lane 3.
**Why do we want to see these results?** It matters because our ultimate goal is to develop treatments that work in people, not just in mice. To make that leap from a mouse model, the PDAPP mouse needs to replicate the key features of Alzheimer’s disease in humans—not just produce APP but drive similar amyloid-induced disease processes in the brain.
Ok, so on point one, ✔ — nothing in lane 1.
Point two? ❌ While the human sample has distinct bands in lane 3, the PDAPP mouse in lane 2 appears as a giant, smeared blob. Are these the same protein size? Impossible to tell!
This happens because, relative to the human sample, the PDAPP mouse is drowning in APP—at least 10 times more, according to the paper’s text, and possibly much more by eye. When you do a Western blot, you set an exposure time for your image, just like with a manual camera: too short an exposure, and faint bands won’t appear; too long, and strong signals become an oversaturated mess. Here, no single exposure could produce similar-looking PDAPP and human samples. It’s like trying to take a photo of a candle next to the sun—you can’t adjust for both at once.
A proper Western blot should show clean bands to confirm protein size and check for unexpected degradation products, but this overloaded mess makes it impossible to tell whether APP is being processed normally. A Western blot like the one shown in Panel d usually indicates either sloppy technique (overloading the gel, overexposing) or a fundamental issue with the model itself (massive expression differences between samples).
The fine print explains why: the PDAPP mouse carries *40 copies* of the APP transgene, all inserted at a single site in the genome. For context:
✔ At most, humans have 2 copies of APP (one from each parent).
✔ PDAPP mice have 40 human copies—plus their 2 normal mouse copies.
I’m sure this blot led to high-fives in the lab—earlier models struggled to express APP at all, so getting massive overexpression must have felt like a breakthrough.
But now I’m worried.
If we’re trying to create a human-comparable Alzheimer’s model, this much APP might be *way* too much. Why might this be a problem?
* **APP expression at this level doesn’t mirror expression levels in human Alzheimer’s.** Alzheimer’s patients don’t have 40 copies of APP. If it takes this much overexpression (and a mutant form at that!) to drive pathology in mice, are these mice even an appropriate animal model for Alzheimer’s?
* **Excess protein can stress neurons in ways unrelated to amyloid.** What if the brain is freaking out not because of Aβ toxicity, but because it’s drowning in APP?
Overexpression alone isn’t a dealbreaker. Many successful transgenic models for cancer, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease rely on high gene expression to accelerate pathology and make the disease more tractable for study. These models have been invaluable for understanding disease mechanisms and testing therapies. So, while the extreme APP overexpression in PDAPP mice raises concerns, it doesn’t automatically invalidate the model—we could still be on the right track.
But your scientific spidey sense should be tingling. If the pathology we’re about to see is simply a side effect of astronomical overexpression, then this mouse may be modeling an extreme artifact, not human disease—and there aren’t easy ways to tell the difference.
Let’s keep going…
#### *Figure 2: We have amyloid plaques! (I think?)*
Figure 2 is supposed to convince us that the amyloid plaque burden in PDAPP mice matches that of the human brain and that it worsens over time, just like in Alzheimer’s disease. But instead of giving us clear, apples-to-apples comparisons, the figure presents a frustrating mismatch of images that makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions.
First, let’s talk about the comparison of PDAPP plaques to human Alzheimer’s brain plaques. The authors claim that the amount of amyloid in 9-month-old PDAPP mice is equivalent to what’s seen in humans, but the figures they provide make this impossible to assess. Figure 2a shows a large image of a PDAPP mouse brain with a tiny inset of a human Alzheimer’s brain, which, at a glance, actually looks like it has way more plaques. But because of the size difference of the images (not the magnification; magnification is the same; see the horizontal bars in each image) and lack of anatomical markers on the inset, we can’t visually compare them.
The obvious fix? Show an image of the human sample that is the same magnification *and* size as the mouse so we can actually evaluate the claim. I can’t think of a justification to do it any other way. Give us a direct, side-by-side comparison to human pathology. Full stop.
While I won’t reprint the Figure 2 subfigure here, to support a claim that PDAPP mouse plaque load increases over time as in human Alzheimer’s, the authors use images with inconsistent size *as well as* magnification! Do mouse plaques increase over time? We can’t be sure.
In summary, Figure 2 systematically makes it really hard to:
1. Compare plaque pathology in PDAPP mice to human Alzheimer’s brains.
2. Evaluate whether mouse amyloid progresses over time in the Alzheimer’s way.
It’s frustrating because these are the key questions Figure 2 is supposed to answer. Grrr.
#### *Figure 3: What’s in These Plaques?*
Figure 1 confirmed that the PDAPP mouse makes human APP and a lot of it. Figure 2 tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to convince us that PDAPP mouse plaque burden mirrors human Alzheimer’s. Figure 3 shifts focus to the composition of those plaques. This is important because not all amyloid deposits are equal—some forms of Aβ are more toxic, more structured, or more likely to trigger downstream pathology than others.
So, what do we learn? The PDAPP plaques aren’t just random protein aggregates; they contain key molecular features of Alzheimer’s pathology.
#### **Panels d & e: Do These Plaques Act Like Human Plaques?**
✔ **Panel d** shows PDAPP mouse **astrocytic gliosis** (see arrow pointing to the angry looking red thing), a type of inflammation where one kind of brain cell (astrocyte) clusters around plaques. Gliosis is a hallmark of neuronal damage in human Alzheimer’s, suggesting that the plaques in PDAPP mice and humans are similarly biologically active.
✔ **Panel e** reveals that PDAPP mouse amyloid deposits are similar to human Alzheimer’s plaques in two other ways.
* Both have plaques that form structured, compacted fiber strands (fibrils), causing them to stain positive for Thioflavin-S.
* The larger of the two mouse plaque deposits in Panel e shows a dense core with a surrounding halo, a hallmark of amyloid plaque deposits in human Alzheimer’s.
So far, so good—amyloid plaques in PDAPP mice aren’t just amorphous protein junk; they’re structured, biologically reactive, and surrounded by gliosis.
**But Wait… Something’s Missing.**
The other half of Alzheimer’s signature pathology is neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). Plaques and tangles are the Batman and Robin of Alzheimer’s disease: where plaques go, tangles are supposed to follow.
So, where are they?
Search all you want. You won’t find a single one. Instead, buried in the text, we get this:
> *“Preliminary attempts to identify neurofibrillary tangles … were negative, consistent with their well-known absence in rodent tissues.”*
This is a devilish bit of phrasing. The conditional language here—*“consistent with their well-known absence”*—makes it sound like no one expected to see tangles in the first place. Really? The **commentary accompanying the paper** also hedges**:**
> *“It is likely that those who are skeptical of the amyloid-cascade hypothesis will draw comfort from the apparent absence of tangles in the mice… However, it remains possible that their absence reflects the fact that they are merely a marker of cell injury …: indeed, in some cases of dementia, neuritic plaques occur without tangles, meaning that tangles **may indeed be epiphenomena**.”*
**My Translation:** The amyloid cascade camp was absolutely hoping to see tangles! Their absence wasn’t expected—it was disappointing. But instead of confronting what this means for the mouse model, the paper and commentary don’t just shift the goalposts, they suggest taking them off the field. They’re using an unvalidated mouse model—fresh off the bench—to call for sweeping change in our fundamental understanding of the biology of Alzheimer’s disease in humans.
Come now! This is completely backwards. When a mouse model fails to produce a core feature of the disease, it’s time to own the potential limitations, not *reinterpret the disease to fit the model.* 🤯
**So where does that leave us?** For now, your skepticism of the PDAPP Alzheimer’s model and the amyloid cascade hypothesis itself should be growing. The PDAPP mouse makes amyloid, those plaques look structurally realistic, and they trigger gliosis-type inflammation. But there’s no tau pathology—no tangles—despite their strong link to neuronal dysfunction and cognitive decline in human Alzheimer’s. In retrospect, we now know that the absence of tangles in these mice foreshadowed a key limitation of amyloid-based models.
On to Figure 4. . .
#### *Figure 4: The Gap Between Plaques and Neurodegeneration*
The final figure is meant to show how amyloid plaques impact neurons in the PDAPP mouse, with comparisons to human Alzheimer’s disease.
I’m only going to show Panel h from Figure 4, but let’s briefly talk about the other panels. The authors examine neuronal structure, highlighting neuritic damage, synaptic loss, and cellular stress. Using images from a confocal microscope, they demonstrate distorted neurites (aka stressed-out neurons) surrounding plaques in both human Alzheimer’s and transgenic mice and reduced synaptic density and dendritic markers in the PDAPP mouse compared to mouse controls. All good stuff.
Finally, Panel h reveals abnormal neuronal structures near amyloid deposits. Let’s take a closer look at the highest resolution image, captured with an electron microscope. Electron microscopy can reveal the fine details inside cells, down to individual organelles. If plaques are truly destroying neurons, this is where we should see the damage up close.
Here it is.
At first glance, it seems to provide exactly what we'd expect in an Alzheimer's model: an amyloid deposit (A) sitting next to a dystrophic neurite (DN), which contains swollen, abnormal mitochondria (M) and dense bodies (LB), all signs of cellular stress. These kinds of metabolic defects—like disrupted mitochondria that can no longer generate cellular energy and accumulated protein aggregates that clog cellular machinery—have been observed in human Alzheimer’s brains where neurons are in distress.
**But there's a catch.** This is one neurite. At this image resolution, if plaques were sufficient to drive large-scale neurodegeneration, we'd expect to see widespread cellular destruction, not just a single distressed process. In human Alzheimer’s brains, electron microscopy images often show fields of degenerating neurons, ruptured organelles, and catastrophic synaptic breakdown. Yet here, we get a highly selective image of one damaged neurite, without any indication of how representative this is across the brain.
**This raises an important question:** Is amyloid actually killing neurons in this model, or are neurons adapting to the presence of plaques? If widespread cell death were happening, this is the figure where it should be most obvious—but instead, we see only localized damage.
This discrepancy matters because *in human Alzheimer's disease, cognitive decline correlates most strongly with neuronal loss (cell death)*, not with plaque burden. Some patients with significant amyloid deposits show minimal symptoms; others, with fewer plaques but more neurodegeneration, experience severe dementia.
Panel h is meant to reinforce the case that Aβ drives neurodegeneration, but it may instead highlight a key limitation of the PDAPP mouse: neurons near plaques look stressed, but they aren't dying in droves. Why aren’t we presented with evidence of more devastation at this scale?
## Revisiting Our Expectations
#### **Did the PDAPP Mouse Deliver on Its Bold Claims?**
We’ve spent this deep dive critically analyzing the key figures and missing evidence. Now it’s time to step back and ask: Did this paper adequately support its sweeping conclusions?
The authors make a **confident claim** in their discussion:
> *“Our transgenic model provides strong new **evidence for the primacy of APP expression and Aβ deposition in [Alzheimer’s] neuropathology** and offers a means to test whether compounds that lower Aβ production and/or reduce its neurotoxicity in vitro can produce beneficial effects in an animal model prior to advancing such drugs into human trials.”*
Likewise, the accompanying commentary framed this paper as a game-changer, declaring that the long-standing debate over amyloid’s role in Alzheimer’s was now effectively settled.
But were we convinced?
Fortunately, at the start of this analysis, we took the time to define the experimental standards needed to evaluate these claims. We don’t have to rely on gut feeling or rhetorical framing to decide. Our approach—laying out our expectations in advance—gave us the tools to spot what the paper shows and what’s absent but essential.
### Flip the Script
The most powerful scientific minds possess a talent for inverting problems. Instead of asking whether this paper ***supports*** the amyloid hypothesis, we can ask whether the hypothesis was ***undermined***? This intellectual jiu-jitsu is the essence of Platt's strong inference method.
Imagine that the Games team’s hypothesis and experimental results landed on your desk in raw form, without the narrative of the paper or the triumphant accompanying commentary. Set aside for a moment your appreciation for the remarkable transgenic technical feat—precisely inserting a human gene into a mouse's genome and having it produce a functional protein and a bunch of amyloid plaques. Might you reach different conclusions?
If amyloid truly drove neurodegeneration, these mice—riddled with plaques—should have shown devastating neuronal death. Instead, the neurons looked stressed but largely intact, their organelles preserved. Plaques without consequence. Smoke without fire.
If the cascade hypothesis was correct, plaques should trigger tau pathology, producing the neurofibrillary tangles seen in human Alzheimer’s. Yet despite astronomical amyloid levels, the PDAPP mice developed no tangles at all. The chain of causation broke mid-link.
If this was truly a disease model, it should mirror natural conditions. Yet creating these mice required inserting forty copies of a mutant APP gene, producing protein levels at least ten-fold higher than any human Alzheimer’s patient. This wasn’t a model of disease. It was a model of artificial protein overload.
Moreover, and perhaps most tellingly, the paper included no behavioural or cognitive testing. Alzheimer’s devastates patients not because of plaques, but because of profound memory loss and cognitive decline. Did these mice develop memory problems? Did their cognitive function deteriorate over time?
In a model of Alzheimer’s disease, behaviour is a critical test. It shows whether the brain changes we’re studying lead to symptoms like memory loss or confusion. Of course, mice don’t behave like humans, but they can show species-appropriate changes—like trouble navigating a maze—that reflect similar brain disruptions.
Those in positions of power and authority either failed to see these flaws or chose to overlook them. What happened next was astonishing in its speed and scale.
Within a year, Athena Neurosciences, where Games and his colleagues worked, was acquired by Elan Corp. for $638 million. In the press release, Elan declared the acquisition “an opportunity to capitalize on an important therapeutic niche,” combining Athena’s “leading Alzheimer’s program” with Elan’s drug development pipeline. The PDAPP mouse had transformed from laboratory marvel to the cornerstone of a billion-dollar strategy. The industry followed. Pharmaceutical giants, biotech startups, research foundations—all placed their bets on amyloid.
One by one, those bets failed. By the time Elan collapsed in 2013, it had sponsored four failed Alzheimer’s drugs, hemorrhaging more than $2 billion in the process. Some trials caused patients significant harm.
The Games paper, read carefully and critically, hinted at its flaws. They were there waiting for anyone who cared to look beyond the polished narrative.
Those concerns we raised about the model? The wild APP overexpression, the absence of tangles, the neurodegeneration—they weren’t just theoretical issues. Over the following years, [a series of studies](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/38/9933) confirmed that these flaws fundamentally [disqualified](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5579350/) the PDAPP mouse as a reliable model of Alzheimer’s disease. And when behaviour was [finally tested](https://www.nature.com/articles/35050103), the results raised [more concerns](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6725066/) than confidence. [Memory problems showed up before](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2014.00088/full) plaques had formed, and didn’t progress in the way human symptoms do. Instead of validating the model, the behaviour suggested that the brain had been disrupted by the artificial overexpression itself—not by the pathology the model was meant to study.
And yet, the story held for decades. In many places, [the amyloid cascade hypothesis remains entrenched](https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/11/amyloid-hypothesis-alzheimers-research-lecanemab-aduhelm/) to this day. Its staunchest defenders still occupy some of the most influential positions in research institutes, scientific societies, and grant review panels. Under their influence, evidentiary standards were shifted. Assumptions, and even the [diagnostic criteria](https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/revised-again-alzheimers-diagnostic-criteria-get-another-makeover) (!), were revised to accommodate half-satisfactory results, rather than to face falsification. Correlations were elevated to causes. And over time, the elegant machinery of scientific inference began to slip its gears. The field can sometimes feel like it’s circling endlessly round a well-funded cul-de-sac—exhausting resources while alternative ideas remain unfunded, unpursued, or unheard.
The amyloid cascade was a great hypothesis, worthy of testing, and more importantly, of scrutiny. Its most intransigent defenders might do well to recall another bit of Sir Peter Medawar’s wry clarity:
*“The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.”*
At some point, science’s self-correcting machinery—and the brilliance and curiosity of a new generation of researchers—will win out. It is time to widen the lens.
### Endnotes:
[1] I keep name-dropping journals (almost always *Nature* and *Science*) and realize that this means little to most people. Nevertheless, having a passing understanding of the tiers of academic publishing is part of scientific literacy.
If you've ever wondered why scientists scramble to publish in *Nature*, *Science*, or *Cell*, think of them as the holy trinity of scientific prestige, each with its own personality. *Nature* and *Science* were established in the late 1800s—*Nature* published by the Brits and *Science* by the American upstarts. *Cell* is the newcomer; established in 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In terms of temperament, *Nature* is the flashy cosmopolitan—broad, attention-grabbing, and often favouring "sexy science" that makes headlines (black holes, CRISPR, or ancient human fossils). *Science* is the serious, translationally-minded intellectual—rigorous, respected, and *slightly* less obsessed with media hype (CRISPR *[before](https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/28/jennifer-doudna-crispr-debuted-10-years-ago/)* it was famous). Then there's *Cell*, the molecular biology workhorse, where groundbreaking discoveries in pre-clinical work are dissected in exquisite mechanistic detail (if you love signaling pathways, this is your jam). Publication in any of these journals is the scientific equivalent of winning an Olympic medal (or at least making an Olympic team, depending on your position in the author list).
One tier down, you'll find specialty journals like *Neuron*, *Nature Neuroscience*, and *The Journal of Clinical Investigation* (and reams of others for specific fields), which publish longer, more methodically comprehensive studies. I tend to prefer reading papers from these journals as they provide greater detail and present more fully developed work. These papers may not be as "hot off the press" or media-friendly, but they often demonstrate greater scientific rigor and better withstand the test of time.
Meanwhile, in medicine, *The Lancet* and *The New England Journal of Medicine* (*NEJM*) tower over most others with impact factors of 98.4 and 96.2, respectively (generally, the higher the impact factor the greater the prestige). This reflects their enormous readership—there are far more medical doctors than PhDs. But at the top, it’s *CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians*, with a staggering 286.13 impact factor, a reminder of cancer’s toll and where our research priorities and funding are concentrated.
[2]A brief note on terminology: I use the terms “necessity” and “sufficiency” here as they were traditionally understood by molecular biologists in the 1990s.
Strictly speaking, the terms originate in formal logic and philosophy, where they have precise meanings related to logical entailment: if *P* is sufficient for *Q*, then whenever *P* is true, *Q* must also be true; if *Q* is necessary for *P*, then *P* cannot be true unless *Q* is also true. These relationships are logical, not causal.
In experimental biology, however, the terms have been adapted into a more practical shorthand. A molecule is often described as “necessary” if removing it disrupts a biological process, and “sufficient” if adding it can induce or mimic that process. But this looser, causal usage rarely matches the strict logical rigor the terms imply—and [it can obscure complexity](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01677063.2018.1468443) when used uncritically in systems with many interacting factors. Some have proposed retiring or replacing these terms altogether in favour of more nuance.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of this review (and to remain faithful to how the field understood these concepts at the time) I use “necessity” and “sufficiency” in the conventional experimental sense: as shorthand for causal roles a factor was believed to play—whether it could trigger a process or was required to sustain it. | a reader | 167092138 | Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia | acx |
# Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance
Steven Byrnes is a physicist/AI researcher/amateur neuroscientist; needless to say, he blogs on Less Wrong. I finally got around to reading **[his 2024 series giving a predictive processing perspective on intuitive self-models](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qhdHbCJ3PYesL9dde)**. If that sounds boring, it shouldn’t: Byrnes charges head-on into some of the toughest subjects in psychology, including trance, amnesia, and multiple personalities. I found his perspective enlightening (no pun intended; meditation is another one of his topics) and thought I would share.
It all centers around this picture:
But first: some excruciatingly obvious philosophical preliminaries.
We don’t directly perceive the external world. Every philosopher has their own way of saying exactly what it is we *do* perceive, but the predictive processing interpretation is that we perceive our models of the world. To be very naive and hand-wavey, lower-level brain centers get sense-data, make a guess about what produced that sense data, then “show” “us” that guess. If the guess is wrong, too bad - we see the incorrect guess, not the reality.
Don’t @ me
So for example:
In the famous “checker shadow illusion”, Square A and Square B are the same color ([see here if you disbelieve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion#/media/File:Grey_square_optical_illusion_proof2.svg)). Our lower-level brain centers guess that, given the shadowing, our sense-data about Square A must “actually” be produced by a “really” black square, and our sense-data about Square B must “actually” be produced by a “really” white square. Therefore, they “show” “us” a “picture” of Square A being black and Square B being white, even though these aren’t the real colors.
The “blind spot” is an even more famous example. The place where the optic nerve meets the eye lacks photoreceptors, leading to a 5-10 degree hole in the middle of the visual field - there’s a medium-sized spot in your vision where you can’t see anything at all. But our lower-level brain centers guess that probably there’s just, you know, normal stuff there. Therefore, they “show” “us” a “picture” of an intact world with normal stuff in the blind spot area - safe enough, unless there’s really an oncoming car.
Why did we go through these excruciatingly obvious philosophical preliminaries?
Sometimes, two or more models can explain the same data about equally well. For example:
This picture can be either a right-side-up staircase (with the blue side in front, and the green side as the back wall), or an upside-down staircase (with the green side in front, and the blue side as the back wall).
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t see it as ambiguous. You see one of these as immediately obviously and viscerally true - for me, it’s the right-side-up blue-in-front staircase. Then, if you stare at it enough and move your eyes in weird ways or whatever, it “flips”, so that it’s immediately obviously and viscerally an upside-down green-in-front staircase.
(if you can’t do this, try staring at the green part and imagining it gradually moving towards you, out of the computer, while thinking “this is in front, this is in front” really hard - I believe in you!)
This kind of picture is called a bi-stable image. You viscerally see your brain’s educated guesses as real. When your brain’s guess changes, your visceral perception changes too.
This illusion is usually described as “all the plates are right-side-up except one - when you find it, they will all turn upside-down”. I think that might be fake - they’re all right-side-up, but something about the process of looking for “the upside-down one” can make your brain flip from one model to the other and cause the plates to change sides. I find this is easiest to do looking at the square one in the top center, or the round one just below, but I don’t think that’s because they’re the “actually upside-down one”. If that doesn’t work, try viewing it from about ten feet away from your computer screen, but be careful - you might not be able to get them to flip back to right-side-up again!
The train is either going into the tunnel, or coming out of the tunnel. You can make it switch by quickly moving your eyes either left-to-right or vice versa, or by thinking very hard about the train going in or out.
This might be the toughest one to flip. If you start by seeing her spin clockwise, try focusing on her central foot to switch directions; if you start by seeing her spin counter-clockwise, try focusing on the *reflection* of her *outstretched* foot when it appears.
Which of these models - the clockwise dancer, or the counterclockwise dancer - is real? Trick question - neither is real. There is no dancer and no rotation; you’re actually viewing shifting pixels on a computer screen.
To belabor the excruciatingly obvious philosophical preliminaries: there is some sense in which our models of the world are very good. They usually correspond to reality exactly the way we think they do. The perception of world-models isn’t a reason for radical skepticism.
In another sense - not a very profound one - our models of the world are distorted. For example, they make us see rotation where there are really just shifting pixels. They’re also ambiguous enough to occasionally be bi-stable - sometimes, you can shift from one world-model to another, with an associated change in visceral perception.
### From Models To Self-Models
Just as this is true for external senses like vision, Byrnes says this is true of our internal perceptions - perceptions of things like thoughts, desires, and conscious experience.
The “reality” of our inner experience is patterns of neurons firing in response to sensations or other neurons. This is a boring claim, like saying that the spinning dancer is “really” “just” “shifting” “pixels”, but let’s explore it a little more.
Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts fire at the same time that they form some kind of temporarily stable pattern that takes over the global workspace.
Sometimes, a pattern like this knits together enough concepts to represent a world-state and give positive valence to that world-state.
Sometimes, those patterns reach a threshold where they cross over to the motor cortex and activate motor programs elsewhere in the body.
If this is the “shifting pixels” perspective, what’s the “looks like a dancer who is spinning around” perspective?
*“Sometimes, enough neurons representing similar concepts fire at the same time that they form some kind of temporarily stable pattern that takes over the global workspace”* → **I thought about X**
*“Sometimes, a pattern like this knits together enough concepts to represent a world-state and give positive valence to that world-state.” →* **I want X**
*“Sometimes, those patterns reach a threshold where they cross over to the motor cortex and activate motor programs elsewhere in the body.“ →* **I decided to X**
The “model” that people come up with to explain their inner life is the internal feeling of a separate “self” who reviews and signs off on the decisions of “the brain”. Referring to the philosophical tradition and pictures like this…
…Byrnes calls it the “homunculus” (Latin: “little man”).
The homunculus (“self”/”me”) is a useful tool for organizing internal experience. For example, if you have a seizure and your arm moves, you can say “**I** didn’t **choose** to move my arm - it just moved of its own accord!” (ie the homunculus isn’t doing the moving). If you have some kind of OCD or rumination disorder, you can say “**I** don’t **want** to keep **having** these **thoughts** about death, they just pop **unbidden** into **my** mind” (ie the homunculus isn’t doing the thinking). To actually analyze these situations would require a PhD in neuroscience, but we all understand the visceral experience of being stuck with thoughts that “we” don’t “want” and didn’t “cause”. Overall it’s very similar to the way I described natural intuitive “theory of mind” [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/):
> The mind is an imaginary space containing things like thoughts, emotions, and desires. I have mine and you have yours. I can see what’s inside my mind, but not what’s inside your mind, and vice versa. I mostly choose the things that are in my mind at any given time: I will thoughts to happen, and they happen; I will myself to make a decision, and it gets made. This needs a resource called willpower; if I don’t have enough willpower, sometimes the things that happen in my mind aren’t the ones I want. When important things happen, sometimes my mind gets strong emotions; this is natural, but I need to use lots of willpower to make sure I don’t get overwhelmed by them and make bad decisions.
Byrnes makes this more concrete with a survey of homunculus beliefs across different cultures. We place the homunculus in the head, which happens to be correct (ie thoughts happen in the brain). But this is kind of a coincidence (or maybe downstream of knowing the real science); other cultures feel like the seat of consciousness is in the heart or the belly, and this feeling is about equally plausible and stable. Meditators say that with enough practice, they can imagine their consciousness being in their head, heart, belly, or outside their body entirely.
This is a subtle point (are you starting to see why we went through all the excruciatingly obvious philosophical preliminaries?) There is, in fact, a brain that has thoughts, located in your head. And your visceral experience includes a term for a self that has thoughts and is located in your head. But they’re not exactly the same thing. The trivial differences don’t matter in ordinary cases. But in edge cases, they can get pretty weird.
### Trance And Spirit Possession
Okay, now the fun stuff.
Byrnes argues that “homunculus” vs. “trance” are two alternative bistable models for analyzing internal mental experience. The process of going into a trance (or being “possessed” by a spirit) is conceptually similar to the process of switching the dancer from clockwise to counterclockwise. The process goes:
1. Start with a strong background belief that the new model is plausible.
2. Relax.
3. Suppress all evidence favoring the old model.
4. Gather evidence favoring the new model.
First, start with a background belief that the new model is plausible. If you’re getting hypnotized, it helps to believe that hypnotism works. If you’re in a spirit possession ceremony, it helps to believe in spirits. Hypnotists and shamans should help this process along by being inherently believable - charismatic and confident, with lots of suggestive ritual that they perform correctly.
Second, relax. When you were trying to switch the direction of the dancer, you probably did this naturally - let your eyes get slightly out of focus, concentrated on the task in front of you.
Third, suppress all evidence favoring the old model. In the case of trance/possession, stop doing obvious voluntary actions. Watch a stage hypnotist show, and nobody is performing a running commentary: “Yeah, I’m focusing on the swinging pendulum . . . looks pretty normal . . . guess maybe I’m starting to feel sleepy . . . I wonder if this hypnotist is a fraud . . . “. They’re supposed to be quiet, immobile, and focus on the trance. Likewise, possession ceremonies often begin with hours of ritual dancing; by the end, it feels like your feet are moving of their own accord. Certainly you are not consciously choosing where to put your feet at each moment due to rational considerations.
Fourth, gather evidence favoring the new model.
A bistable percept that switches form based on context and evidence. When the context provides evidence for “H”, the middle letter is automatically processed as an “H”; when the context provides evidence for “A”, it is processed as “A”.
In a typical stage hypnosis show, the hypnotist starts by making his subject watch a swinging pendulum (moving eyes back and forth tends to make people sleepy and exhaust their eye muscles). Then the hypnotist says “You are getting sleepy . . . your eyelids are getting heavy.” The subject is surprised! They *are* feeling unexpectedly sleepy! Their eyelids *are* getting unexpectedly heavy! It seems like the hypnotist is in control of their body!
Then the hypnotist asks them to do something simple, like hold their arm out. Is this part of the induction process? The first hypnotic suggestion? Hard to tell - in either case, the subject moves their arm out. Then the hypnotist might say something like “Raise your arm”. It’s a reasonable request - and also, when the arm is in a sufficiently unstable position, sometimes just *considering* movement will cause it to move a little, even without the mental motion that would usually be considered “volition”. Again, it seems like the hypnotist is in control and has creepy mind powers!
Then the hypnotist might ask the subject to do something simple, like jump. The hypnotist is a high-status person reputed to have creepy mind powers, giving a direct order. The audience is expecting the subject to jump. If the subject doesn’t jump, the show will be over and it will be awkward for everyone involved. So there are compelling reasons for the subject to jump, and no reason not to. The subject notices the amount of internal mental pressure that naturally corresponds to “there are compelling reasons to do this thing”. Why (they might unconsciously think to themselves) is there this mental pressure to jump? One answer is the story we just told - command from high-status person, not wanting to feel awkward, etc - but these are much more subtle and complicated than a simple alternative hypothesis - *the hypnotist has creepy mind powers and is giving me a compulsion to jump*. If all the previous steps have been completed correctly, there is a visceral flip in mental models, and the subject feels what was previously a working hypothesis as intuitive obvious ground truth - “I have lost control of my body and the hypnotist is puppeteering me”.
Byrnes gets much of his information from the book *Impro* by Keith Johnstone, an acting coach who uses spirit possession techniques to get his students “possessed” by their characters. In one case, Johnstone uses a particularly memorable technique to provide his student with “evidence”. The student is to be possessed by a god. Johnstone sets them an ESP task: they must pick which of three cups has a coin under it. Unbeknownst to them, Johnstone puts coins under all three cups, so the student guesses right every time. This creates a background of suspended reality that probably makes the “possessed by a god” hypothesis feel very compelling!
This flip itself reinforces the trance - my new evidence in favor of trance is not just background beliefs about possession, but the visceral feeling of losing control of my body, plus the undeniable fact that I just jumped when there was (seemingly) no reason to do so. The trance state is now a new attractor, not quite as strong as the old homunculus attractor (“I am in control of my mind” really does explain a lot, and has decades of experience/inertia behind it”), but strong enough to usually last for an hour-long hypnosis show without collapsing.
I couldn’t find that much about this in Byrnes, but the model flip itself must go back and affect ground-truth reality. “Hypnotist is compelling me” provides evidence for “I follow the hypnotist’s orders”, and therefore makes me slightly more likely to do so. It also frees me from some common reasons I wouldn’t follow the hypnotist’s orders - it’s too embarrassing, it would never work, it’s ‘not the kind of person I am’. Maybe the hypnotist orders me to do a silly dance on stage, and normally I’m too dignified, but since “the hypnotist is compelling me”, it doesn’t threaten my dignity and I can get away with it.
Byrnes also adds (we’ll see why later) a postulate that doesn’t really make sense to me on its own - something about the self-model assists in the formation of memory. Remembering “I did a silly dance on stage” is easier if there is an “I” concept active to “hang the memory” on. This could be related to the finding that people remember things better in the same context they learned it (eg you’ll do better on a test in the same classroom where you learned the material) or to the finding that emotions organize memory (eg when you’re angry at your spouse, it’s easy to remember all the times they’ve ever wronged you; when you’re happy with them, it’s easy to remember all the good times you’ve had together). “The self exists” is a pretty dramatic context cue, and maintaining memory between self-models is apparently a pretty tough task - hence the tendency for people to say they “don’t remember” what happened during a trance.
### From Trance To Everything Else
Now we have the material we need to explain all sorts of weird mental phenomena:
**Dissociative Amnesia**
Someone with a desire that doesn’t make sense in the context of their normal personality eventually “flips” to an alternative personality that carries out the desire. When they recover, they have no memory of the incident.
**Dissociative Identity (IE Multiple Personality)**
If the homunculus-self is a mostly-accurate but not-directly-perceived-and-real model of mental processes, then a person whose mental processes often flip between two or more dramatically different states (for example, borderlines, who are notable for very strong emotional states and [“splitting”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology))) may gather evidence for and eventually flip to a model of themselves as multiple different homunculi. This is especially true if they’re primed with the suggestion that this is a likely way for the inside of their mind to be (for example, by a psychotherapist who believes in multiple personalities).
**Ego Death (EG On Ketamine)**
Remember, the ego (homunculus) is a model of mental processes. which says that thoughts arise in the brain because “I” “choose” to “have” thoughts, or actions happen because “I” “voluntarily” “make” the decisions.
From a god’s eye view, outside of the homunculus model, we might picture a decision as looking like:
* A thought arises: “Maybe it would be a good idea to eat a taco”.
* This thought spawns other thoughts: “Tacos are delicious”, “Tacos are expensive”, “I’m on a diet”.
* All of these thoughts kind of battle it out until they turn into a unified analysis of the situation “Tacos are expensive, but I deserve a treat, so I’m going to have one”.
* The basal ganglia and motor cortex implement an action program: I order a taco.
Within the homunculus model, this orderly progression of events is what we interpret as “*I* *thought* about it and *decided* to order a taco”.
On sufficiently weird drugs like ketamine, mental order breaks down. The relationship between one thought and the next is completely chaotic, or at least too complicated to model. The expectations of the homunculus-model, where thoughts naturally lead to consequences according to stable personality features, are profoundly violated. Since the homunculus model no longer credibly describes the data, the brain ditches it, and the drug user viscerally feels like they have “lost sense of self” or “experienced ego death”.
**Buddhist Enlightenment**
If you watch your own mental processes very very hard for a long time, you notice subtle ways that the homunculus model is incorrect. For example, if you carefully watch thoughts form, it’s obvious that “you” didn’t “decide” to “think” them; they just arose out of the void (or out of casual antecedents like sense-data or previous thoughts). If you watch mental decision very very carefully for a long time, you notice the same things [the Libet experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will) noticed, where they seem to often happen before “consciousness” is “aware” of the decision at all. These all provide evidence against the homunculus model. After enough evidence builds up, you suddenly flip from the homunculus model to some other model which is closer to the god’s-eye one mentioned above - there’s no self, thoughts arise on their own, you are part of the same nexus of causal processes which determine the rest of the world.
I like this because it explains something I’ve always found baffling - the claim that *satori* happens in a single instant (traditionally when you see a falling leaf, or your master hits you on the head with a stick, or something like that). Not many things in psychology happen instantaneously - but one of them is the flip in bistable perceptions!
**Julian Jaynes**
Jaynes was the psychologist and historian who gathered an exhaustive collection of sources suggesting that Bronze Age people didn’t experience consciousness the way we did - instead feeling like they were automata being commanded by the gods to do whatever they did.
Byrnes spends most of this section arguing against Jaynes (comparatively weak) claim that ancient people were incapable of deception and other basic theory-of-mind tasks, but seems mostly willing to grant the more sensational claim that they felt their actions more akin to a hypnotist’s compulsion than to self-motivated agency. None of this is especially surprising by the discussion of trance above - it’s just a whole civilization using the “spirit possession” model at scale.
See [my previous review of Jaynes](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/) for more.
I’ll spare you the discussion of free will - which tends to make people really mad, and which is basically what you would predict given the background assumptions - but I recommend reading the [entire series of essays](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qhdHbCJ3PYesL9dde), which goes into much more depth and belabors the excruciatingly obvious philosophical assumptions enough to make them really sink in on a deep level.
Byrnes also has a wide range of writing on [other areas of neuroscience](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6uDBPacS6zDipqbZ9) and on [AI alignment](https://sjbyrnes.com/agi.html). | Scott Alexander | 166402303 | Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance | acx |
# Now I Really Won That AI Bet
In June 2022, I bet a commenter $100 that AI would master image compositionality by June 2025.
DALL-E2 had just come out, showcasing the potential of AI art. But it couldn’t follow complex instructions; its images only matched the “vibe” of the prompt. For example, here were some of its attempts at “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”.
At the time, I wrote:
> I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them…for all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research.
Commenters objected that this was overly optimistic. AI was just a pattern-matching “stochastic parrot”. It would take a deep understanding of grammar to get a prompt exactly right, and that would require some entirely new paradigm beyond LLMs. [For example, from Vitor](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design/comment/6856811):
> Why are you so confident in this? The inability of systems like DALL-E to understand semantics in ways requiring an actual internal world model strikes me as the very heart of the issue. We can also see this exact failure mode in the language models themselves. They only produce good results when the human asks for something vague with lots of room for interpretation, like poetry or fanciful stories without much internal logic or continuity.
>
> Not to toot my own horn, but two years ago you were naively saying we'd have GPT-like models scaled up several orders of magnitude (100T parameters) right about now (<https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/#comment-912798>).
>
> I'm registering my prediction that you're being equally naive now. Truly solving this issue seems AI-complete to me. I'm willing to bet on this (ideas on operationalization welcome).
So we [made a bet](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design/comment/6945486)!
> All right. My proposed operationalization of this is that on June 1, 2025, if either if us can get access to the best image generating model at that time (I get to decide which), or convince someone else who has access to help us, we'll give it the following prompts:
>
> 1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
>
> 2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
>
> 3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
>
> 4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
>
> 5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
>
> We generate 10 images for each prompt, just like DALL-E2 does. If at least one of the ten images has the scene correct in every particular on 3/5 prompts, I win, otherwise you do. Loser pays winner $100, and whatever the result is I announce it on the blog (probably an open thread). If we disagree, Gwern is the judge.
Some image models of the time refused to draw humans, so we agreed that robots could stand in for humans in pictures that required them.
In September 2022, I got some good results from Google Imagen and [announced I had won the three-year bet in three months](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet). Commenters yelled at me, saying that Imagen still hadn’t gotten them quite right and my victory declaration was premature. The argument blew up enough that Edwin Chen of Surge, an “RLHF and human LLM evaluation platform”, stepped in and asked his professional AI data labelling team. [Their verdict was clear](https://web.archive.org/web/20230323051504/https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/dall-e-vs-imagen-and-evaluating-astral-codex-tens-3000-ai-bet): the AI was bad and I was wrong. Rather than embarrass myself further, I agreed to wait out the full length of the bet and re-evaluate in June 2025.
The bet is now over, and official judge Gwern [agrees I’ve won](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13658.msg673931.html#msg673931). Before I gloat, let’s look at the images that got us here.
## AI Compositionality: A Three Year Retrospective
**Image Set 1: June 2022**
When we first made the bet in June 2022, the best that an AI model could do on the five prompts was:
You can see why people would be skeptical! In most images, the pieces are all there: astronauts, foxes, lipstick. But they’re combined in whatever way seems most “plausible” or “realistic”, rather than the way indicated by the prompt - so for example, the astronaut is wearing the lipstick, rather than the fox. Other times there are unrelated inexplicable failures, like the half-fox, half-astronaut abomination in panel #1. Here we get 0/5.
**Image Set 2: September 2022**
Three months later, I declared premature victory when Google Imagen produced the following:
I said it got the cat, llama, and basketball exactly right, meeting the necessary 3/5. Edwin and his evaluators [disagreed](https://web.archive.org/web/20230323051504/https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/dall-e-vs-imagen-and-evaluating-astral-codex-tens-3000-ai-bet). They granted success on the cat. But the llama didn’t really have a clear bell on its tail (the closest, #4, was more of a globe). And the final robot wasn’t much of a farmer, wasn’t in much of a cathedral, and the basketball was more orange than red. They granted me 1/5. Fine.
**Image Set 3: January 2024**
One of the questions on the 2023 - 2024 ACX prediction contest was whether any AI would win the bet by the end of 2023. In order to resolve the question, Edwin and his Surge team returned to the image mines in January 2024. They checked DALL-E3 and Midjourney; I’m including only the pictures from DALL-E3, which did better. [Here they are](https://web.archive.org/web/20240303230459/https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/dalle-3-and-midjourney-fail-astral-codex-tens-image-generation-bet):
These are of higher artistic quality, and they can finally generate humans (instead of just robots).
But they still don’t win the bet. This time Edwin granted the cat and the farmer. But the stupid llama still didn’t have the bell on its tail, the #$%&ing raven still didn’t have the key in its mouth, and although the fox had lipstick in one picture (#2), the astronaut wasn’t exactly holding it. 2/5, one short of victory.
On prediction markets, where users had given 62% probability that Edwin would grant me the win that year, [reactions were outraged](https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/41-will-an-image-model-win-scott-al). “Are you kidding me?” asked one commenter. “IsEdwin Chen an asshole? Clearly he is,” said another.
**Image Set 4: September - December 2024**
User [askwho](https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/) on the Bayesian Conspiracy Discord claimed that Google Imagen [passed the test](https://imgur.com/gallery/scott-alexander-ai-progress-bet-september-2024-sQia2Ta) in September 2024 (he said Imagen 2, but based on the timing it may have been Imagen 3). But he didn’t post it publicly and couldn’t remember all details, so I’ll evaluate [this related claim](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8HSpbaAg8hvhiFDHB/checking-in-on-scott-s-composition-image-bet-with-imagen-3), also about Imagen 3, from December:
A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
I would give this 3/5. We keep the top-hatted cat and the basketball-holding farmer, and the bell is finally on the llama’s tail. But the raven picture isn’t stained glass, and the fox still doesn’t have lipstick.
I tried to contact Edwin for confirmation, without success. I wondered what had happened to him, and a quick search found that [his AI data-labeling company did very well and he’s now probably a billionaire](https://www.reuters.com/business/scale-ais-bigger-rival-surge-ai-seeks-up-1-billion-capital-raise-sources-say-2025-07-01/). I hope he’s relaxing on a yacht somewhere, far away from angry prediction market commenters.
In the absence of a grader, I figured I would let the bet run out the clock.
**Image Set 5: May - June 2025**
These are using ChatGPT 4o, released in May 2025, all images generated June 1 (thanks [a reader](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13658)):
A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat
A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through a desert
A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing lipstick
Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red basketball
Not only is this 5/5, but it’s an obvious step up in matching the styles, and these were all produced on the first try. In retrospect, it feels like judges were right to dismiss former models, which were sort of blundering about and getting some of them right by coincidence. 4o just works.
Edwin is presumably still on his yacht, but original contest judge Gwern gave it his seal of approval, saying:
> I think I agree he has clearly won the bet. As you say, the images look correct and I'm willing to call the ball 'red' because of the overall yellow tint (good old color constancy).
## In Memoriam: Your Last Set Of Goalposts, Gone But Not Forgotten
It’s probably bad form to write a whole blog post gloating that you won a bet.
I’m doing it anyway, because we’re still having the same debate - whether AI is a “stochastic parrot” that will never be able to go beyond “mere pattern-matching” into the realm of “real understanding”.
[My position has always been](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs) that there’s no fundamental difference: you just move from matching shallow patterns to deeper patterns, and when the patterns are as deep as the ones humans can match, [we call that](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/28/meaningful/) “real understanding”. This isn’t quite right - there’s a certain form of mental agency that humans still do much better than AIs - but again, it’s a (large) difference in degree rather than in kind.
I think this thesis has done well so far. So far, every time people have claimed there’s something an AI can never do without “real understanding”, the AI has accomplished it with better pattern-matching. This was true back in 2020 when GPT-2 failed to add 2+1 and [Gary Marcus declared](https://thegradient.pub/gpt2-and-the-nature-of-intelligence/) that scaling had failed and it was time to “consider investing in different approaches” (according to Terence Tao, working with AIs is now “on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, static simulation of a graduate student”). I think progress in AI art tells the same story.
There is still one discordant note in this story. When I give 4o a really hard prompt…
> *Please draw a picture of a fox wearing lipstick, holding a red basketball under his arm, reading a newspaper whose headline is "I WON MY THREE YEAR AI BET". The fox has a raven on his shoulder, and the raven has a key in its mouth.*
…it still can’t get it quite right:
The raven isn’t on the fox’s shoulder!
But a smart human can complete an arbitrarily complicated prompt. So is there still some sense in which the AI is “just pattern matching”, but the human is “really understanding”? Maybe AIs get better at pattern-matching as they scale up, and eventually they’ll get good enough for every conceivable reasonably task, but they still won’t be *infinitely* good in the same way humans are?
I think there’s something going on here where the AI is doing the equivalent of a human trying to keep a prompt in working memory after hearing it once - something we *can’t* do arbitrarily well. I admit I can’t prove this, and it’s not necessarily intuitive - the AI does have a scratchpad, not to mention it has the prompt in front of it the whole time. It’s just what makes sense to me based on an analogy with math problems, where AIs often break down at the same point humans do (eg they can multiply two-digit numbers “in their head”, but not three-digit numbers). I think this will be solved when we solve agency well enough that the AI can generate plans like drawing part of the picture at a time, then checking the prompt, then doing the rest of it. This may require new skills, like self-reference and planning, which might be added in by hand, emerge naturally from the scaling and training process, or some combination of both.
If you disagree, let me know - maybe we can bet on it!
*Thanks to everyone who helped operationalize, judge, and generate images for this bet. Vitor, you owe me $100, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com.* | Scott Alexander | 167709461 | Now I Really Won That AI Bet | acx |
# Open Thread 389
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Highlights from the comments on [this month’s links](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025):
* Higher motherhood penalty for daughters than sons: [How does family size contribute?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131120964)
* [Flaws in the](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131076885) “expert consensus on social media’s effects” study.
* Allan Shivers [“did not beat himself”](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131154707) in the 1952 election (even though he did run against himself and win).
* Testosterone: [general enhancement, or deficiency correction?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131216483) (see also [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131269806))
* [Cremieux responds to Lexer on lead](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131265393). And [Peter Miller on lead](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131114579).
* Meir Brooks on [labor force participation vs. fertility.](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-july-2025/comment/131371154)
**2:** New subscriber-only post: **[Using AI To Research The Missing Heritability Post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/using-ai-to-research-the-missing)**. "An unprecedented combination of brilliant and mendacious; too useful to avoid but too unstable to fully trust." | Scott Alexander | 167646550 | Open Thread 389 | acx |
# Your Review: School
*[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. It was originally given an Honorable Mention, but since [last week’s piece](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school) was about an exciting new experimental school, I decided to promote this more conservative review as a counterpoint.]*
> “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - **Winston Churchill**
>
> “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - **G.K. Chesterton**
## What Do Schools Do?
Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.
What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?
## Context
This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.
## Thesis
Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.
This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.
The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.
## Motivation for What?
So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?
There are plenty of [depressing statistics](https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) out there about what people don’t learn in school, but they do learn things. You can look at [longitudinal studies](https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/lsb/) where on average students make academic progress. For a broader sample size, the [NWEA](https://www.nwea.org/) assessment is given at thousands of schools across the country each year. You can see from the [average scores](https://teach.mapnwea.org/impl/MAPGrowthNormativeDataOverview.pdf) they publish that the average student does improve at math and reading – especially through the end of middle school. We also had a natural experiment a few years ago. The pandemic closed schools across the country, shifting to online or part-time learning for anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The result is now well-known as “learning loss.” The nationally-sampled [NAEP](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/) assessment is the most objective measure, though learning loss shows up across various assessments. There’s some variability between states, subjects, and ages. For one example, 8th grade math scores [declined](https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2023/eb_23-29) by about 0.2 standard deviations. This is a relatively small but significant decline. It’s a good example of the broader principle: students learn less in school than we would like, but students do learn things.
It’s useful to pick a few specific examples. Do you know the meaning of the word “relevant?” Do you know what photosynthesis is? Where do you think you learned those facts? I’m sure some readers learned them by being avid readers and curious humans, outside of the school curriculum. But many kids learn stuff like that in school. If you’re skeptical, stop by a middle school classroom when they’re learning photosynthesis, or when they’re working on identifying relevant evidence in their writing. You’ll see plenty of kids who already know both, but plenty more who know neither. A lot of learning is this kind of gradual, incidental knowledge that we often take for granted.
So students can read and do arithmetic and maybe they learn about photosynthesis, but isn’t that all learned in elementary school? [A number](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088505/) [of studies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-022-00148-5) suggest that additional years of education lead to IQ gains of 1-5 IQ points per year of schooling. These studies often use a change in compulsory education laws or age discontinuities as quasi-experiments. In particular, changes in compulsory education laws are typically at upper middle school or high school levels. Those are the places where we might be most skeptical of the value of education. Sure, schools teach kids how to read, but once students know how to read do schools really add any value? Kids don’t remember how to factor quadratics, yet they gain IQ points from the time they spent in school not learning how to factor quadratics, at least on average.
That gain in IQ points is worth lingering on. This might seem hard to believe for people who are skeptical of the value of school. And to be clear, the fact that school raises IQ doesn’t mean that school is designed optimally. Maybe there’s a better way to design school that would raise IQ even more? But I think that, if we all imagine a world where we give up on education and the average person had a significantly lower IQ, is that a world you want to live in? We don’t have good experiments on IQ, but higher IQs are correlated with all sorts of things that we might want – lower probability of committing crime, higher career earnings, and better physical and mental health. It’s tough to pin down exactly what students learn in school that sticks, particularly for the higher grades. During those visits to 100 classrooms you would’ve seen a lot of classrooms where not much learning was happening. Yet despite all those bad optics, school still raises IQ. Before we tear down the fence, we should think carefully about the purpose this particular fence serves.
I don’t want to overstate the case here. We should be skeptical of school learning. Kids don’t learn as much as we might hope. They forget all sorts of stuff you would think they’d remember if school was operating well. But at a basic level, most students learn to read and do arithmetic, some learn much more than that, and on average school seems to add to IQ. Revisiting Chesterton’s fence, those are the benefits of school we need to understand before we tear anything apart.
## There Must Be a Better Way
Educational thought leaders have long argued that we can do better than our current system. A common theme has been personalizing learning: allowing students to go at their own pace, rather than forcing all students to learn at the same speed.
The push for individualized instruction dates back to the early 20th century. [Sydney Pressey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_L._Pressey), a psychologist at Ohio State University, built the first "teaching machine" in 1924. His device, a mechanical testing apparatus resembling a typewriter, allowed students to answer multiple-choice questions and receive immediate feedback. Pressey envisioned a future where machines would free teachers from rote instruction, letting students progress at their own pace. Yet his invention was dismissed as a gimmick. Schools saw no need to automate what teachers could do manually.
In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner revived the idea with his own [teaching machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_machine), designed around operant conditioning principles. Skinner argued that traditional classrooms were ineffective because they delayed feedback and forced all students to move in lockstep. His machine broke lessons into tiny steps, rewarding correct answers instantly. Like Pressey, Skinner believed technology could revolutionize education. But his machine was never widely adopted and mostly forgotten.
By the 1960s and 70s, as computers entered universities and corporations, techno-optimists predicted they would soon transform schools. Patrick Suppes, a Stanford professor, developed one of the first [computer-assisted instruction](https://suppescorpus.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj32751/files/media/file/university-level_computer-assisted_instruction_at_stanford_1975_176.pdf) (CAI) systems, which taught math via mainframe terminals. Early studies showed promise, but the systems were expensive and impractical for most schools.
In recent years, some of the boldest claims have come from [Khan Academy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy). Founded in 2006, Khan Academy began as a set of lecture videos created by Sal Khan and has grown to include practice exercises with feedback, full curricula, and an AI chatbot tutor. Unlike earlier personalized learning tools, Khan Academy has seen broader adoption in real classrooms. It is a common element in personalized learning programs, which have been popular with tech billionaires who like to donate to education causes.
Bill Gates has funded efforts like the Gates Foundation’s "Next Generation Learning Challenges," promoting software-driven schools where algorithms tailor lessons to each student. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in 2010, largely earmarked for "personalized learning" tech. Zuckerberg echoed a common critique of traditional education, saying that it’s absurd to teach all students "the same material at the same pace in the same way.” These arguments resonate with many parents and reformers. It seems obvious: if some children grasp fractions in a week while others need a month, why not let them move at their own pace?
With all that enthusiasm, what were the results of the push for personalization?
## Personalized Learning Has Failed
Intuitively, it’s reasonable that an education at your level and meets you where you are will result in more learning than just following the prescribed course of study for 6th grade or whatever. All else equal, it’s certainly true that instruction at your level will result in more learning. The thing is, we can’t hold all else equal. Schooling is a massive enterprise, and we can’t give every student instruction at their level without rethinking that enterprise. In general, when schools have tried, they have failed.
Last year, Laurence Holt published an [excellent article](https://www.educationnext.org/5-percent-problem-online-mathematics-programs-may-benefit-most-kids-who-need-it-least/) summarizing the core challenge of today’s education technology. There is no shortage of fancy online programs that claim to teach kids math. Khan Academy was the first to gain widespread popularity, but it’s actually used much less now than some newer entrants like IXL and i-Ready. Every one of these programs commissions some study showing that students who use their program with fidelity learn more than some control group. Holt digs into the data, and it turns out that the group who used the programs with fidelity was often around 5%. The article is called “The 5 Percent Problem.” These programs do seem to help a subset of students, but don’t do much for the rest. While Holt’s article focuses on math education, education technology has had a similarly lackluster impact on achievement in English classes. We know that [reading on screens leads to less learning than reading on paper](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen#:~:text=The%20star%20panelist%20was%20the,%2C%20on%20equity%20issues%2C%E2%80%9D%20he), and the personalized learning apps have a similarly disappointing track record as in math.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to schoolchildren. Remember the MOOC craze of the early 2010s? Universities started releasing free or low-cost versions of their coursework online. Briefly it was all the rage: MOOCs were supposed to democratize knowledge and disrupt higher education. Instead, completion rates were low, and the MOOC mostly died an unceremonious death. Numbers vary depending on the source but 10% completion is a generous median, the same order of magnitude as the 5% problem in K-12 education technology. The vast majority of people who sign up for a course never finish. Many MOOCs are still online and get plenty of views on Youtube, but we’ve learned that most people need more than course content posted online in order to learn. The big difference between MOOCs and school is that if you don’t finish that MOOC on the US constitution, life goes on. If a kid doesn’t learn to read, they’ll be at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives.
The core problem with these online programs is having every student work independently, without any connection to what the students around them are learning. That just doesn’t motivate many students. Couldn’t we try putting students into groups, so not all students in a class are learning at the same pace, but students also have a cohort they are learning with? Schools often try to meet students where they are through leveled reading groups. Imagine an elementary school classroom. Instead of asking all students to read the same book, the teacher groups students into 3-5 separate groups based on their reading skills. The stronger readers get more challenging books, and the struggling readers get a book on their level. There is a huge business in putting out sets of leveled books and assessments to determine each student’s reading level. And the result? In general, [research](https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/the-instructional-level-concept-revisited-teaching-with-complex-text-1) has found that leveled reading reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most. We might intuitively think that reading an easier book would benefit students who have weaker reading skills, but that intuition seems to be wrong.
Ok but all of those try to take a class of students and meet students where they are. What about assigning students to classes based on their achievement? In the US this is typically called tracking or ability grouping. It’s a complex and controversial topic. The research base is hard to read because there are a lot of ideologically motivated researchers who are either for or against tracking and want to see the evidence a certain way. But the biggest theme in the research is that the effects are small. There are plenty of meta-analyses that find an effect near zero ([here’s one example](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543221100850)). You can slice and dice these results lots of ways. Schooling is complex and there are lots of different ways to implement tracking. Maybe there are some gains to be found. But the theme so far is that tracking isn’t coming to save us.
Psychological research consistently shows that humans are conformist creatures. We instinctively align our behaviors to group norms. Classic studies like [Asch’s line experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments), where 75% of participants denied obvious truths to match group answers, remind us that humans are social and prioritize conformity. This tendency isn’t just peer pressure, it’s evolutionary wiring. For our ancestors, conforming boosted survival by maintaining group harmony and reducing conflict. Today, this manifests in classrooms where low-structure learners thrive on collective routines. Conformity explains why personalized learning often fails. Most students need the social scaffolding of lockstep instruction, even when it’s inefficient. Conformity isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one we have.
One form of learning that [has been shown](https://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf) to be particularly effective is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves being pushed outside of your comfort zone, focusing on specific, concrete goals to improve performance, and getting consistent feedback. One common characteristic of deliberate practice is that it isn’t particularly fun. Most contexts where deliberate practice is common, like sports and music training, involve expert, individualized coaching. The coach is mostly there for motivation. The coach does other things as well, but the most important thing a coach can do is motivate you to train. Deliberate practice isn’t common in school learning, but it’s a good reminder that motivation is the key to lots of forms of learning in and out of school. Learning isn’t always going to be a ton of fun. In the absence of one-on-one tutoring for every student, conformity is the best tool we have to create the motivation necessary for learning.
These two failures—self-paced technology and ability grouping—get at a deeper truth. Working at your own pace may seem like it makes sense, but it often undermines motivation. Grouping students by ability, whether within or across classrooms, has shown little benefit. Neither approach has delivered the transformation its advocates promised.
## But Personalization Works for Some Kids?
Let’s explore personalization a bit more. Clearly this personalized learning thing works for some students. Maybe 5%. Maybe 10%. Why?
Here’s a broad generalization about learning. Let’s take the basics of learning to read as an example, where there is a [wealth of data](https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/documents/report.pdf) to back up the generalization. Some students will learn to read no matter what they experience in school. Often their parents teach them, or an older sibling or neighbor, and they pick it up quickly. Others more or less teach themselves. This group doesn’t benefit much from organized school, at least in terms of learning to read. We might call these “no-structure learners.” A second group needs the structure of school, but the quality of the teaching doesn’t matter too much. As long as they get the basics, a solid exposure to reading, and some support from a teacher, they will learn to read just fine. We might call these “low-structure learners.” Then there’s a third group. This group will struggle to learn to read. For this group, the quality of teaching matters enormously. Some will be diagnosed with dyslexia, though a strong course of synthetic phonics will reduce that number. Many will learn the basics but still struggle with things like multi-syllable words for years to come if they aren’t taught well. A carefully-sequenced, well-taught curriculum can make a large difference for these students. We might call these “high-structure learners.” There aren’t sharp divisions between these three groups, and motivation depends on context, so students may have a different motivation profile for a different subject or something outside of school. This is the answer to why personalization only works for 5% of students. Students need different levels of structure in order to succeed.
For another example, we see the same phenomenon with math facts like times tables. Some students seem to learn them by osmosis, or they pick them up entirely outside of school. Many more need a bit of structured practice, but learn their facts without much trouble and move on. Some struggle with multiplication facts for years. The structure provided isn’t enough, the curriculum moves on, and these students often struggle in math for years to come. For one example of a high-structure teaching strategy, [incremental rehearsal](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31045406/) is a highly-structured way to teach students multiplication facts.
This phenomenon is well-studied with phonics and math facts, but you could apply it to any other domain. Imagine a college computer science department. The no-structure learner is that student who is always coding on their own, learning stuff from Stack Overflow, and only occasionally going to class to make sure they get their degree. The low-structure learner shows up to class. They aren’t learning too much on their own, and coursework is motivation enough to learn and get a solid foundation in computer science. The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find. Maybe they push through, maybe they can’t cut it and switch to a major in communications.
The same phenomenon shows up in pandemic learning loss. Learning loss was concentrated mostly in the lowest-achieving students. Many high-achieving students did fine; these are students who didn’t need the structure of school, or for whom the minimal structure of online coursework was enough to keep them moving forward. The high-structure students who already struggle in school [lost the most ground](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/).
Low- and no-structure learners help us understand a broader phenomenon: for many students, school quality doesn’t seem to matter very much. One illustration is that in randomized controlled trials, school assignment doesn’t seem to play a very large role in academic achievement. Freddie deBoer collected this research in his essay [Education Doesn’t Work](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20). I’ll quote him here:
> Winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago [makes no difference](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00702.x) for educational outcomes. In New York? [Makes no difference](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.6.3.58). What determines college completion rates, high school quality? No, that [makes no difference](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.6.3.20); what matters is “pre-entry ability.” How about private vs. public schools? Corrected for underlying demographic differences, it [makes no difference](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2505333). (Private school voucher programs have tended to yield [disastrous](https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20174022/pdf/20174022.pdf) research results.) Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them [makes no difference](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0162373716672039).
We could pick apart these studies and I’m sure we could find examples where there is a difference, but that difference will be small.
Here are two quick anecdotes from my personal experience. I often have bright students whose parents request they get some more advanced work. I try to lay out for them a few options for more challenging work I can provide students, but I’m also clear that I am one human and I can’t teach the student for significant chunks of time each day. I can provide some resources, I can check in with them and answer their questions, but the student needs to be motivated to engage with some challenges. In the vast majority of cases, the student never touches the challenge work. Their parents bug them about it, I bug them about it, but they just can’t summon the motivation. These students are willing to keep up with our regular coursework, chugging along with content they mostly already know or can learn in a fraction of the time that it takes many of their peers. But working on their own is beyond them. To be clear, this isn’t every student. But it’s a large majority, another illustration of the 5 percent problem.
Second, online charter schools have spread rapidly in the last ten years. In my state it’s not very hard for students to enroll. I’ve had a number of students unenroll from our local public school and start at an online charter school. Most are back within a few months. They generally say one or both of two things: first, that they are bored learning on their own and they miss having people around. And second, they just weren’t motivated and didn’t learn much. Now to be clear, I’m in favor of having some online charter schools. They are a great option for some students – students who can summon the motivation, students with outside-of-school circumstances that make attending school challenging. It’s the 5 percent problem. There’s a 5 percent, those no-structure learners or students in other unique situations, who benefit from options like online charter schools. But the vast majority do best in the age-graded schools we already have.
You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.
A good illustration of this point is to visit a gifted or exam school. If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace. You’d see lots of bored students who could be going faster. You’d see a bunch of students who you’re surprised are in this school at all. It’s the reality of the system we have.
No-structure learners thrive anywhere. Low-structure learners need any coherent system. High-structure learners are much more sensitive to the quality of teaching, but trying to meet each student where they are doesn’t work very well. Lumping everyone together and asking them all to learn the same curriculum seems to work better at scale than anything else we’ve tried. These are the core challenges of education.
## What’s Happening Under the Hood?
If we know there are no-, low-, and high-structure learners, then the key question becomes: what internal levers predict who ends up where?
I see three main factors. First is intrinsic motivation. This isn’t a review of [self-determination theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory), but the short version is that some students have a lot of intrinsic motivation, others have less, and some have little at all. Second is the set of habits students bring to school. When you observe students in school, one thing that’s often striking is how some students are in the habit of completing assignments, reading when they’re asked to read, solving math problems on a worksheet when asked, and so on. Others don’t have those habits. You’ve got no-structure learners, who would happily do that learning on their own. Low-structure learners, for whom the basic structure of school and class is enough to keep positive habits going. And then high-structure learners, who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can. Finally, there’s fluid intelligence. Students with a high processing speed and high working memory capacity are better at learning without much structure. They have the mental tools to connect the dots and figure things out with less structure. Students without those cognitive capacities need additional structure in order to learn.
Those elements are self-reinforcing. Motivation tends to beget motivation. Habits become stronger over time. Students with less fluid intelligence learn less in school, which exacerbates the consequences of less fluid intelligence. This doesn’t mean that a kid can’t change their trajectory. It’s possible to change habits, and to develop new sources of motivation. A broad base of knowledge helps to mitigate a lack of fluid intelligence. Motivation and habits are context-specific, so students might have a different profile in a different subject. But on average, students tend to stay about where they are in the no-structure, low-structure, and high-structure spectrum.
Students don’t always neatly fall into one category or another. They can shift over time, or be very intrinsically motivated yet have other challenges that require a lot of structure. Students can have different profiles in different subjects. Still, this broad taxonomy is a useful way to understand why tactics like personalization work for some students and not others, and why the basic structure of school has lasted so long.
## The Thesis, Again
One way to interpret the design of school is that it’s trying to provide *just enough* structure to get students to learn the basics of the school curriculum. Putting kids in front of a computer on their own isn’t going to do the trick.
Schools are given a huge challenge. The goal isn’t to educate the students who are easiest to teach, or most eager to learn. The goal is to educate everyone. The core challenge of compulsory public education is motivation. The best solution we’ve found is to send kids to school beginning at age 5 (or earlier if we can), before they can reliably form long-term episodic memories. Talk to a typical high school student, and they have literally been going to school as long as they can remember. We group students by age in part because it’s the easiest way to organize the system. The system motivates high-structure learners to keep up with their peers, though that motivation does gradually fade over time. Grouping by age also provides just enough structure for low-structure learners to stay on track – not that it’s particularly efficient, but it can help schools be reasonably confident that those low-structure learners will get a broad foundation in the school curriculum. In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others. All that leads to the obvious, inevitable problems. Some students are ready to move faster, some students need more support. Schools and teachers often try to help, and occasionally experiment in bold ways, but there’s this enormous gravity that pulls back toward the conventions of a typical school. It’s easy to point out these obvious challenges and claim that school is broken, that we should blow up the system and invent something better. It’s much harder to ask why the fence is there, and understand it before taking it down.
Here’s something you have to remember. It’s easy to cherry-pick in education. If you want to start a school to prove that penguin-based learning is the future, that penguin meditation and penguin-themed classrooms are superior to the stuffy, traditional, obsolete schools we have now, you can. It’s simple. Find a way to only accept no-structure and very low-structure learners. Then start your school. Do your penguin meditation, make sure there’s a basic structure for learning core academic skills, and you’re set. The results will be great, you can publish articles about the success of your method, if you’re lucky you’ll get some of that sweet sweet philanthropy money.
Cherry-picking isn’t always that blatant. If you just manage to get a few more low-structure learners and fewer high-structure learners in your school it will make a difference. Your test scores will look better than the school down the street. Schools spend a huge fraction of their resources on special education, providing the structure and systems that those students need. Just having fewer students who need that level of resources will free up time and energy to focus on everyone else, and the selection effects will make it look like you’re doing a good job. The difference doesn’t have to be huge to help the school do a little better.
What if we were brutally honest when a family enrolls their child in school? Here’s what we would say:
> If your child is a no-structure learner, they will be bored here. They will probably learn some things, but they will often sit in lessons where they know everything the teacher is teaching, and they’ll spend a lot of their time sitting around waiting for other students to catch up. If your child is a low-structure learner, they will still often be bored as our school isn’t very efficient, but the structure and routine will ensure they get a basic level of literacy and numeracy. Maybe they’ll like school, probably because of gym class and being around their friends, maybe they won’t, but they’ll learn some things. That said, the school you pick doesn’t matter too much. Your child will learn about as much anywhere else. If your child is a high-structure learner, they will need a lot of very structured teaching. Our teachers vary widely: some are good at providing that structure, others aren’t. Your child will gradually fall behind, and will perpetually feel a bit dumb and a bit slow compared to everyone else. But we will do our best to keep them moving along with their peers because that’s the best idea we have to motivate them. Hopefully, with some help, they’ll graduate high school on time. There’s a risk they just won’t have the skills, or they’ll be discouraged by constantly feeling dumb and just give up. Oh, and we aren’t very good at understanding what causes students to be motivated. It’s absolutely correlated with socioeconomic status, so it would be helpful if you’re rich, but there’s a lot of variability and plenty of rich kids need that structure too.
## Some History
It’s worth taking a quick detour through the history of education in the US. When did age-graded schools become common? The story is a bit different than many common conceptions of how education has worked in the US. White people in the US, particularly men, had a relatively high literacy rate by 1800, higher than most other countries at the time except perhaps Scotland. But the education system was fragmented. It was a mix of religious education, local cooperatives, apprenticeships, formal schooling for the rich, and public education for the poor in cities. The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860. The goal of the movement wasn’t to increase the average education of the populace, and it didn’t cause any large increase in the literacy rate. Instead, the primary rationale was the importance of a common education system for democracy. Democracy felt fragile in the first half of the 19th century, and universal public education was the solution.[1](#footnote-1)
The explicit goals of the common schools movement were to instill in students the importance of citizenship and morality. Age-graded schools were a natural next step: students should travel through school in a cohort of their peers, learning together the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the importance of education for the country’s young democracy. While these schools certainly did teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, the curriculum of the school played a secondary role to its common character. The most important goal of school reformers was to move education into common schools; whether learning happened in those schools was a secondary goal. It’s interesting that maximizing learning was never the goal of universal education.
The common school movement focused on what we would now call elementary and middle schools. It wasn’t until the 20th century that attendance in high school became widespread and then compulsory. And high school is the place where this giant compromise starts to fall apart. Even when the high school became widespread, there was broad disagreement about what high school should teach. Should high schools retain the liberal arts focus that they had when only the rich had access? Should they focus on the trades and career education? Should high schools offer a core course of study to all students, or use tracking to separate students who are college-bound from those who are not? These are the perennial questions that high schools wrestle with, and they are a logical outgrowth of the core tension of using age-graded schools. The goal still wasn’t about learning; it was about what the credentials were and who had access to those credentials. Only in the last few decades have schools tried to focus on maximizing learning. According to [NAEP data](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38) there was some increase in scores between the late 80s or 90s depending on the subject and about 2012, after which there was stagnation or a slow decline, accelerated by the pandemic learning loss. This is a conjecture without any real evidence, but the increase in education technology and personalized learning software coincides with that stagnation in national test scores. The rise in test scores didn’t involve any large changes in the basic structure of school, it was driven by a lot of legislation and rhetoric around “no child left behind” and trying to support students who previously fell through the cracks.
## School is Conservative
One common frustration for those who believe that schools can do better is how conservative the education system is. While there are pockets of innovation and experimentation, most schools are bureaucratic and slow to change. This is often viewed as a failure: why are our schools so obsolete and slow to adapt to the needs of the 21st century?
What if the education system is conservative for good reasons? We have always looked to education as the solution to our social problems. In the 19th century, education existed to buttress our democracy. In the first half of the 20th century, education was asked to promote social mobility. In the second half of the 20th century, education was asked to contribute to our national defense.
Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so. If education chased every fad that came along, it might be in much worse shape. It was only a few years ago that a lot of people were arguing that we should teach more kids to code. Now it looks like coding might be one of the first jobs AI can do for us. For the last few decades, many thought leaders have advocated that we reorient our education system away from antiquated content that kids can look up on Google, and instead teach critical thinking. There’s ample evidence that we [can’t actually teach critical thinking](https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2020/willingham) divorced from content. And education seems to increase IQ, so maybe we’re already teaching critical thinking by giving students a broad, basic education.
The reality is that elementary and middle schools haven’t changed much over time. High schools, however, are the place where the drive to motivate students breaks down. At that point, low-structure and high-structure students are pretty far apart from one another. High schools handle this in a variety of ways. Some high schools specialize, either as test-in schools or schools with a particular theme. Private high schools play a role supporting high-achieving students. And at comprehensive public high schools, there is more tracking and separate experiences for students. An increasing number of high schools offer community college courses through dual enrollment, as well as a wide variety of electives. Other students move into a vocational track, with some remediation in core literacy and numeracy skills and coursework designed for careers rather than college.
This is logical if we look at school as a system designed to maximize motivation: by the time students reach high school, the gaps in academic knowledge have widened to a point where it isn’t practical to keep students in the same classroom. Most elementary and middle schools promote students socially, at least if they put some effort in. But in high school, students need to amass credits and/or pass exams to graduate, and keeping everyone in the same classroom learning the same content won’t get some students the credits they need. We see what you would expect: motivation plummets. Remember those 100 classrooms you imagined visiting? Some of them would be lower-level high school classes. Those are often sad classrooms to spend time in. Students aren’t doing very much, expectations are clearly low, there isn’t much learning happening. Schools often explicitly create easier avenues to graduate for some students, through credit recovery programs or similar ways to give credit to students who aren’t putting in much effort. It’s logical that motivation plummets: students are no longer motivated by staying with their grade-level peers.
## Practicalities
What good is the hypothesis that school is designed to maximize motivation? It can help us understand all sorts of phenomena. I often hear an argument from homeschoolers that they can accomplish in two hours a day (or some other small amount of time) what schools do in seven or eight. I don’t doubt that at all. Schools aren’t particularly efficient at facilitating learning. Schools are good at educating everyone at once.
We can also better understand learning loss from the pandemic. Learning in school isn’t particularly efficient, so one might assume that missing a few months of school won’t have a big impact. But habits are powerful. What changed was motivation. During the pandemic, many students lost their long-held habits of attending and putting in effort at school. Interestingly, learning loss happened both in states that had extended school closure and those that returned to full-time school more quickly. In both cases, students lost those habits, and the power of conformity started working against school motivation, rather than in favor of it.
We can understand why school sports are such a powerful and enduring phenomenon: motivation is the core challenge of school, and conformity is our best solution. Team sports are a great mechanism to motivate young people, so we attach sports to school to capture a bit of that motivation.
We can understand why, despite lots of hype, AI hasn’t revolutionized education. Most AI applications pay little attention to motivation, and try to personalize learning in exactly the ways personalized learning has failed. AI may yet transform education, in any number of ways. But in the short term, AI has been naive about motivation in exactly the same way as all the other education transformations that have fallen short.
We can understand why there have been so many attempts to revolutionize schools, but they have struggled whenever they try to scale. If you have the right group of students, lots of things might seem to work. When you try to scale them to meet the true needs of universal education, they will run into the same roadblocks education has always struggled with. Then, the education system will be blamed for being obsolete, and we will continue to invent new approaches to education that ignore the same basic challenges of motivation.
Something I haven’t addressed is the harsh reality of school for many kids. Everyone’s experience is different, but there are countless stories of students getting bullied, verbally abused by teachers, deprived of bodily autonomy and freedom of movement. This can all be true. I don’t want to hide from these realities; I’m a teacher, I’ve seen them. Walk into a typical middle school and you will quickly learn the byzantine collection of rules about going to the bathroom. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’m not arguing that it’s a good thing. But policing the bathrooms, and many related minutiae of students’ lives, is a byproduct of the reality of school. We require all students to attend compulsory education of some kind. Some schools are able to filter out more of the high-structure learners. In those schools you won’t find nearly as many rules about using the bathroom, and you will also find far less bathroom vandalism. In the schools that are left to educate everyone else, we are left with the reality of trying to motivate students as best we can. We struggle with the students who predictably lash out because they are bored with moving too slow, or constantly confused as the curriculum moves too fast. We double down on conformity and structure, not because they are perfect solutions but because they’re coping strategies to deal with some of the ugly realities of mass compulsory education.
This isn’t to say schools respond appropriately in every situation. There are tens of thousands of schools, each left to their own devices to figure out the best way to educate their charges. Humans make mistakes, and when we scale a profession to the size of our public education system we have to do the best with the teachers and school leaders we have. I’ve been party to plenty of school policies I disagree with. I’m not trying to defend them, just to help readers understand where they come from.
## A Prediction
I’ve used the word “designed” loosely in this essay. Age-graded classrooms are schools’ most valuable asset, but they weren’t deliberately designed. They came about by an accident of history, and they have stuck around because we haven’t figured out anything better. That lack of self-awareness will always be education’s Achilles heel.
Where will we go from here? I hope I’ve been clear that I don’t think schools are perfect. They are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job. Is there a better way? Maybe. But to design a better education system, we first need to understand what the current system does well. Don’t tear down the fence until you understand why it’s there. The basic structure of age-graded schools that teach the same content to students of a given age has a purpose. You might have your own ideas about what schools should do and how they should do it. You might have some good ideas. But attacking schools without understanding the basics of how they function will never change anything.
One central contradiction of schools is that schools themselves don’t understand the purpose of age-graded schooling very well. There’s constant rhetoric from teachers and school leaders about the need to meet students where they are, to move past our antiquated one-size-fits-all education system and innovate. The purpose of this essay is to review school: to understand how it works, and where its structure comes from. This review leads me to a prediction: the structure of schooling won’t change. People will continue to try to disrupt the status quo. There will be plenty of tinkering around the edges. Some of that tinkering will catch on at a broader scale. But there will be an inevitable gravity back to the status quo. That gravity exists because the status quo is the best tool we have to educate a huge number of students. It’s not particularly good at fostering learning, but at scale it’s better than anything else we’ve tried. The push and pull will continue, the criticisms of school will continue, the experimenting will continue, but the basic structure will never change.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
This section is drawn from the book *Someone Has to Fail* by David Labaree. | [unknown] | 167356866 | Your Review: School | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
*[Original thread here: [Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than)]*
1: Comments From People Named In The Post
2: Very Long Comments From Other Very Knowledgeable People
3: Small But Important Corrections
4: Other Comments
## Comments From People Named In The Post
Sasha Gusev of [The Infinitesimal](https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/), a leading critic of twin studies and the person whose views most inspired the post, [kindly replied](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129589398). His reply has four parts - I’ll address each individually. **First, GxE interactions:**
> I think the post conflates gene-gene and gene-environment interactions; the latter (specifically interactions between genes and the "shared" environment) also get counted by twin models as narrow sense heritability. While I agree there is very little evidence for gene-gene interactions (particularly dominance, as you cite [and, interestingly, twin/adoption studies actually forecast a huge amount of dominance -- another discrepancy we do not understand]) there is quote substantial evidence for gene-environment interactions including on educational attainment (see Cheesman et al: <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-022-00145-8> ; Mostafavi et al: <https://elifesciences.org/articles/48376>), IQ, and BMI. In fact, Peter Visscher led a paper that came to the conclusion that twin estimates for the heritability of BMI are very likely to be overestimated by gene-environment interactions (<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28692066/>). A large amount of GxE plus some amount of equal environment violation seems like a very plausible and parsimonious answer to the heritability gap.
I asked Gusev:
> I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by GxE interactions explaining much missing heritability.
>
> For the Scarr-Rowe interaction, this would make heritability look higher in high-SES families. But wouldn't this affect twin and molecular estimates equally unless there's some reason that subjects for one type of study are consistently from a different economic stratum than the other?
>
> If we're thinking more about, let's say, a pair of fraternal twins where one of them is ugly and so parents don't invest resources in their education, wouldn't this show up equally in twin studies and GWAS? That is, if this is a very uncommon effect, we shouldn't expect it to affect large twin studies much. But if it's a common effect, then shouldn't we expect that every ugly person is less intelligent, and so GWAS will find that a gene for ugliness is associated with lower intelligence (both within and between families)? Can you give an example of a case why this would show up in twin studies, but not GWAS, RDR, etc? Also, why would we privilege this circuitous explanation (ugliness is genetic and provokes strong parental response) over the more direct explanation (intelligence is genetic)?
>
> Also, the papers you cite show effects on the order of 2-8%pp; do you think the real effect is higher?
He answered:
> Take the peanut allergy example [from a paywalled post of Lyman Stone’s]. Let's say in order to develop an allergy you need a mutation in the PNUT gene AND ALSO grow up in a household with *[ed: possibly this should be “without”]* early exposure to nuts (no Bamba!); that's a gene-environment interaction. For MZ twins, they will always share PNUT mutant (or wildtype) and 100% of their household exposure, so they'll be perfectly correlated on allergy; for DZ twins, they will share PNUT mutations half the time and 100% of their household exposure, so their correlation drops in half. So the twin study will tell you allergy is a 100% heritable trait. Now we test the PNUT variant in a GWAS, the first thing you do is throw away all the relatives (i.e. take one of each twin). Some people will be PNUT mutants and grow up in a household with no exposure and be allergy free, some will be PNUT mutants with exposure and will have allergy (and vice versa for the non-carriers). The resulting correlation between PNUT mutation and allergy will be low, so the heritability estimate will be <100%. TLDR: in the ACE twin model (and sib-reg), AxA and AxC interactions get counted as A. In the GWAS (and RDR) model, AxA and AxC get counted as E. In my opinion AxA could plausible be considered "heritability" in the sense that it only relies on genes, but AxC cannot.
Shouldn’t this be easily detectable in adoption studies? Adoptees have different family environments than their bio parents, so they should act like the unrelated people in GWASs. But in fact adoption studies get similar numbers to twin studies.
Also, shouldn’t this make polygenic scores *gain* predictive power within families, rather than lose it? After all, you’re restricting your analysis of genetic effects to people who are in the exact same environment. But in fact, every polygenic score loses a lot of predictive power when you do a within-family validation.
Also, shouldn’t this show up as nonlinear kinship-similarity curves? That is, siblings grow up in the same family, so you should see their similar genes exerting similar effects. But cousins grow up in different families, so you should see their similar genes exerting weaker effects. Granted, your family will be less different from your cousin’s family than from the average family in the population, but you could quantify how much more similar and you should see a corresponding drop in heritability. But in fact, heritability estimates decline linearly with shared DNA, the way a traditional, GxE-interaction-free model would suggest.
Also, shouldn’t this show up as high shared environment in twin studies? After all, it’s saying that many traits are heavily determined by the shared environment. Sure, in this example it’s genetically mediated. But for anything less than 100% genetic mediation, the remainder ends up in C. So you would need for the shared environment to have huge effects, but somehow never in a way that isn’t genetically mediated in every single pair of twins in an entire sample.
Also, if lots of apparent heritability is mediated by the shared environment, why would heritability estimates constantly increase over the lifespan, as people get further from the shared environment?
Elsewhere, Gusev linked [a more thorough explanation of his theory of interactions](http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.eujbeu4ca5ot). It’s pretty interesting, but (he admits) kind of the opposite of everyone else’s theory of interactions. Everyone else is looking for interactions where poor people have lower heritability of behavioral traits than rich people (because poor people might be malnourished/undereducated/etc, whereas rich people usually get enough resources to achieve their genetic potential, whatever it may be). But Gusev instead looks for interactions where *rich* people have lower heritability than *poor* people (because poor people face many challenges and their ability to overcome those challenges might depend on their genes, but rich people will do fine regardless of what genes they have). My impression is there are many studies on both sides; I’m not expert enough in the field to know whose studies are better or whether they can be reconciled, but it’s a bad omen that people looking for these effects can’t even agree on what the sign is.
And [maybeiamwrong2 here gives another good explanation](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129590469) of Gusev’s theory of interactions and heritability.
**Second, usefulness of scores across ancestry groups:**
> You mention epidemiologists being the biggest losers of stratification in polygenic scores, but I think it is important to note a related group: the people who take polygenic scores trained in one population (with a ton of stratification) and directly apply them to other populations to make claims about innate abilities (see: [this post](https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/how-population-stratification-led)). This is especially true for Edu/IQ GWAS, where every behavior geneticist has been screaming "do not do that!" since the very first study came out. People like Kirkegaard, Piffer, Lasker, etc. (and their boosters on social media like Steve Sailer and Cremieux) dedicated their careers to taking crappy GWAS data from and turning it into memes that show Africans on the bottom and Europeans on the top. These people also happen to be the court geneticists, so to speak, for SSC/ACX. I don't mean to come off as antagonistic and I'm sure some people will see this comment and immediately discount me as being an ideologue/Lysenkoist/etc so it does my broader position no favors, but this stuff has done and continues to do an enormous amount of damage to the field (including the now complete unwillingness of public companies like 23andme to collaborate on studies of sensitive traits
Gusev later says he’s specifically referring to figures like this one from Davide Piffer (from [here](https://www.qeios.com/read/HDJK5P.2); note that although the article looks nice and says “peer-approved” at the top, Qeios is not a real journal in the usual sense):
The horizontal axis is EA4, a polygenic score for predicted educational attainment, generally believed to correlate somewhat with IQ. The vertical axis is observed IQ of each group. Piffer’s point is that different ethnic groups’ predicted genetic intelligence seems to correlate pretty well with their observed intelligence, so maybe group differences in intelligence are genetic.
Gusev notes that “every behavior geneticist has been screaming ‘do not do that!’ since the very first study came out”, which is true. I know of three main reasons why this is a bad idea:
1. Polygenic scores will mistake social factors correlated with genetic factors as genetic. For example, in a society where black people have lower IQ because of racism and poor access to schooling, people with a certain gene (the gene for black skin) will have lower IQ. Therefore, a study that blindly correlates genes with IQ will incorrectly assume that the gene for black skin is a gene for IQ/etc. This will ironically seem to justify the original inequality (it will look like black people “only” have low IQ for genetic reasons). This is by far the biggest problem with a plot like this one, and the one Gusev’s post above talks about - and the post offers a good example of a real result on height which encountered this exact problem.
2. Different ethnic groups could have different genetic structure of intelligence. That is, white people and black people might be equally intelligent, but because of different genes. If you train a predictor on white people, and then try to use it on black people, it will falsely conclude the black people are less intelligent because they have fewer of the white people intelligence genes.
3. Different groups could have the same intelligence genes, but in different *linkage disequilibrium*. That is, suppose Gene X and Gene Y are so close on the genome that they’re practically always inherited together. Scientists can’t isolate the effect of either, and they might only have one in their panel. Let’s say Gene X is in the panel, and Gene Y is an “intelligence gene”. Then the panel would show that Gene X is an intelligence gene. That’s fine as far as it goes - a score produced with that panel would still predict intelligence correctly. But if you apply it to a genetically different group, the assumption that Gene X and Gene Y always travel together might no longer hold. Then you might notice that black people lack Gene X, and incorrectly conclude that they lack an “intelligence gene”.
I think all of these concerns are real and important. Piffer gestured at some weak statistical corrections he tried to do for [2] and [3], (see the sentence in his paper beginning “transferring polygenic scores across populations has proven challenging in this field of research”) but for problem [1], all he did was admit in the second-to-last paragraph that it might be a problem, and say that “the findings drawn from these tests should be viewed as provisional and subject to alteration”, which is obviously pretty weak for something this explosive and controversial.
On the other hand, I don’t fully understand how these issues apply here. AFAICT, the EA4 score used in this paper was constructed entirely from European people with <3% non-white ancestry, so it doesn’t seem like it should be noticing under-educated black people in the sample and falsely concluding that black people’s genes cause low education. It must be claiming that black people have fewer of the genes that are associated with education *in a sample of white people*. It’s possible that you could still get population stratification (maybe because of the <3% admixture in your supposedly European population?), but I think if that’s the theory then people should say it explicitly, or else explain what kind of alternate model they’re working from. (It’s also possible I totally misunderstood the claims that EA4 limits itself to people with European ancestry; if so, please let me know)
So maybe there’s more of a role here for problems [2] and [3], about the difficulty of applying a score trained on Europeans to non-European populations? My question there is - shouldn’t this produce nonsense results, rather than results which reflect the populations’ real-world IQs? I think the counterargument here would have to be that by coincidence or colonialism, the populations with the furthest genetic difference from Europeans also happen to have the lowest real-world IQs (for social reasons) - or at least that this trend holds in a vague enough way to produce the vague correlation seen on the graph. There’s some evidence for this - this Piffer’s application of EA4 predicts that Chinese (real average IQ 105) have the same educational attainment as Puerto Ricans (real average IQ 82). So maybe it’s just showing average genetic distance from its European sample after all, and Chinese and Puerto Ricans are about equally distant on average? This wouldn’t explain why the predictor correctly finds that Ashkenazi Jews come out highest, but that could be because their “European” sample *did* include Ashkenazi Jews, and so here problem [1] *does* come in.
Except that later (Figure 7), Piffer graphs polygenic score for *height* against real *IQ* and finds no correlation, so it doesn’t seem like it’s just that polygenic scores naturally get lower as you get further from the group it was trained on. So now I’m back to being confused.
Maybe the best we can do is blame autocorrelation? That is, for all the data points on the graph, there are really only three clusters - Europeans, Africans, and everyone else. So you really only need ~3 unlucky coincidences to get this finding. And three unlucky coincidences, if you admitted they were three unlucky coincidences, wouldn’t be statistically significant, let alone “p = 7e-08” (lol). So maybe all the technical issues just explain why we shouldn’t take the scores seriously, and the answer to why it matches reality is a combination of “bad luck” and “it doesn’t really match reality that well, cf. the Chinese vs. Puerto Rican issue, but with enough autocorrelated data points even small coincidental matches look very significant”.
I’ve [written before](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism) about how there are a thousand skeptics speculating about the personality flaws of people who say false things for every one doing the hard work of rebutting them. So consider this my request for someone who knows more than I do to explain exactly what went wrong with Piffer’s analysis to produce this particular pattern.
I also take issue with Gusev’s claim that these people are “the court geneticists, so to speak, for SSC/ACX” - I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with Piffer or mentioned him on this blog before. You can see a partial list of actual geneticists I sent my Missing Heritability post to for review at the bottom of the post, and they’re mostly the same people that Gusev links to and endorses.
Some of the people who Gusev accuses of “dedicating their careers to” these kind of results also deny this, and say they partly share Gusev’s criticisms ([1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129785833), [2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129784088))
**Third, the overall framing:**
> I'm going to gently push back against the hereditarian/anti-hereditarian framing (which I understand is probably here as shorthand and scene setting). I am personally interested in accurate estimates that are free of assumptions. I believe twin study estimates are of low quality because the assumptions are untestable, not because they are high. I also think the public fixation on twin studies has created some real and damaging anti-genetics and anti-psychiatry backlash and wrong-headed Blank Slate views. People hear about twin studies, look up the literature and find that [peanut allergy (or wearing sunglasses, or reading romance fiction) is estimated to be highly heritable](https://lymanstone.substack.com/p/why-twin-studies-are-garbage) and have minimal shared environment, start thinking that the whole field is built on nonsense, and end up at quack theories about how schizophrenia is actually a non-genetic fungal condition or whatever. I've been very clear that there are direct genetic effects on essentially every trait out there, including behavioral traits and IQ. If someone were to run a large-scale RDR analysis of IQ tomorrow and got a heritability of 0.9 and it replicated and all that, I would say "okay, it looks like the heritability is 0.9 and we need to rethink our evolutionary models". If anything, large heritability estimates would make my actual day job much easier and more lucrative because I could confidently start writing a lot of grants about all the genome sequencing we should be doing.
This paragraph surprised me, because people coming up with crackpot non-genetic theories about schizophrenia is part of why I think it’s so important to explain that twin studies are usually pretty good!
Schizophrenia has about the same level of missing heritability as IQ, EA, or any other trait (80% heritable in twin studies, ~10% heritable in best polygenic predictors, ~25% heritable according to GREML). I don’t really understand on what grounds you can object to the twin heritability estimates of IQ/EA/etc, but believe the ones for schizophrenia.
Elsewhere it seems like Gusev seems to accept this equivalence. As he put it [in a discussion](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/a-critical-introduction-to-behavioral) with psychiatry blogger Awais Aftab: “For schizophrenia, which was thought to be largely genetic, the most we can expect from a common variant polygenic score is an accuracy (R-squared) of ~0.24, with the current score reaching about a third of that (Trubetskoy et al. 2022)…even for these estimates, we do not yet know to what extent they may be inflated by the kind of stratification and confounding I’ve mentioned.” This is not the way I expect people to talk when part of the reason behind their work is not wanting people to mistakenly think schizophrenia is non-genetic!
I responded [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129628994), and Gusev responded to my response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129752323).
**Fourth, the consistency of twin studies:**
> Lastly, it's not clear to me where the conclusion that well-validated twin studies converge on "similar results" is coming from. To take one example: the leading lights of behavior genetics (Deary, McGue, Visscher, etc) ran a study looking at the relationship between intelligence and lifespan (<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26213105/>). This is a nice study for us because they put together three large, modern, twin cohorts with IQ measurements, but the heritability of IQ was just a nuisance parameter for them, so they had no reason to scrutinize the findings or file-drawer them. If we look at their MZ/DZ correlations in Table S6 we find that the heritability of IQ was 0.36 in the US sample; 0.98 in the Swedish sample; 0.24 in the Danish sample; and ... 0.52 on average. In other words, all over the place (but averaging out to the nice "half nature half nurture" result you see in books); the authors themselves used an AE model in Table 2 and reported a range of 0.20 to 0.98. This is far greater than the variability we see with GWAS or Sib-Reg, so what are we to make of that?
This is a comparatively minor point, but I respond [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129628994) and he responds [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129752323).
**Eric Turkheimer ([blog](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/)), another person named as an “anti-hereditarian blogger” in the post, [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129669406):**
> You say, "Turkheimer is either misstating the relationship between polygenic scores and narrow-sense heritability [or at least egging on some very confused people who are doing that]," but in the passage you quote I am perfectly clear that I am talking about the DGE heritability, that is Column E from Supplemental Table 3. The value of .048 is the median of 17 (arbitrarily classified by me) "behavioral" DGE heritabilities taken from that column.
I don’t want to get into another “did you communicate this poorly?” argument after the recent Tyler Cowen one, so I will just quote the Turkheimer paragraphs I objected to and let readers make their own decisions. This is from [Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomes](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/is-tan-et-al-the-end-of-social-science):
> *The median [direct genomic effect] heritability for behavioral phenotypes is .048. Let that sink in for a second. How different would the modern history of behavior genetics be if back in the 80s one study after another had shown that the heritability of behavior was around .05? When Arthur Jensen wrote about IQ, he usually used a figure of .8 for the heritability of intelligence. I know that the relationship between twin heritabilities and SNP heritabilities is complicated, and in fact the DGE heritability of ability is one of the higher ones, at .233[6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than#footnote-6-162316870). But still, it seems to me that the appropriate conclusion from these results is that among people who don’t have an identical twin, genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences.*
## Very Long Comments By Other Very Knowledgeable People
**Peter Gerdes ([blog](https://peteri394q.substack.com)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129497940):**
> From an apriori point of view we should expect the relationship between genes and observed features to be incredibly complicated -- basically as complicated as the relationship between computer code and program operation -- and I'd argue the evidence we see is exactly what that model of highly complicated interactions predicts. Namely GWAS misses a bunch of twin study variation and so do simple non-linear models. Or to put the point differently the answer is the narrow/broad gap but broad hereditary is just really damn complicated.
>
> Yes, people cite papers for the claim that non-linear effects don't seem to make the difference. But if you dig in the supposed evidence against non-linear effects (like you linked) are really only evidence against other very simple elaborations of the linear model. Showing that you don't predict much more of the variance by adding some simple non-linearity (eg dominance effects at a loci or quadratic terms etc) is exactly what you would expect if most effects are extremely complicated and neither model is even close to the complete causal story.
>
> I mean, imagine that some OSS project like the Linux kernel gets bifrucated into a bunch of national variants which are developed independently with occasional merges between individual nation's versions (basically it acts like genes under recombination). Or better yet a Turing complete evolutionary programming experiment with complex behavior. Indeed this later one can be literally tested if people want.
>
> We know in this case that code explains 100% of program variation and if you did the equivalent of a GWAS against it you would probably find some amount of correlations. I mean some perf improvements/behavior will be rarely discovered so they will be highly predicted by whether some specific code strings show up (they are all downstream of the initial mutation event) and other things like using certain approaches will have non-trivial correlation with certain keywords in the code.
>
> But no linear model would actually even get close to capturing the true (indeed 100%) impact of code on those performance measurements. And it would look like there were no non-linear effects (in the sense of the papers claiming this in genetics) because adding some really simple addition to the linear model like "dominance loci" or whatever isn't going to do much better because you aren't anywhere close to the true causal model.
>
> So the evidence we have is exactly what we should expect a priori -- genes have some really complicated (essentially Turing complete) relationship with observed behavior and simple models are going to guess at some of that but linear models will do about as well as simple non-linear ones until you break through some barrier.
This is a great point, and it’s especially helpful to know that the papers demonstrating few-to-zero interaction effects are weak.
But [Lunaranus](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1lkzao6/missing_heritability_much_more_than_you_wanted_to/mzwtr97/) on the subreddit links <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis#Evolutionary_consequences>, which points out that if there are many interactions, it’s hard for organisms to evolve, because the same mutation could have totally different effects depending on what’s going on elsewhere in the genome. It suggests that organisms “evolve for evolvability”, and one way they do this is trying to minimize interaction effects. But see bza9’s argument against [here](https://substack.com/profile/178409780-bza9?utm_source=substack-feed-item).
[Demost](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129517437) argues against the comparison to computer code, pointing out that genomes have to get mixed and matched every generation. If you had to run a computer off a Linux ecosystem where each line of code was separately randomly selected from among all extant distros every time you booted up your computer, probably it would end up pretty additive too.
Related: if GxG interactions are a big deal, wouldn’t you expect outbreeding depression? Suppose that Europeans split from Africans 50,000 years ago and start evolving separately and getting different genes. Then evolution would make Europeans preferentially accumulate new mutations that interact beneficially with existing European mutations, and the same for Africans, with each population building a tower of adaptations atop previous genes. Then when the two populations interbreed, it should be a disaster - half the genes necessary for their carefully-evolved interactions are missing, and fitness plummets. But interracial children are just as healthy as within-race children. In fact, even interspecies hybrids like mules are pretty healthy (their inability to breed comes from an unrelated chromosome issue). So evolution can’t be using interactions like this.
I don’t have enough of a quantitative sense for this to know whether there can be strong interaction effects which aren’t adaptations and which evolution keeps trying to get rid of, but which stick around anyway.
Also on interactions, Steve Byrnes [added](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129514879):
> *> If nonadditive interactions are so important, why have existing studies had such a hard time detecting them?*
>
> Ooh, I have an extensive discussion of this in a recent post: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xXtDCeYLBR88QWebJ/heritability-five-battles> Relevant excerpts follow:
>
> *§4.3.3 Possibility 3: Non-additive genetics (a.k.a. “a nonlinear map from genomes to outcomes”) (a.k.a. “epistasis”)*
>
> …Importantly, I think the nature of non-additive genetics is widely misunderstood. If you read the wikipedia article on epistasis, or Zuk et al. 2012, or any other discussion I’ve seen, you’ll get the idea that non-additive genetic effects happen for reasons that are very “organic”—things like genes for two different mutations of the same protein complex, or genes for two enzymes involved in the same metabolic pathway.
>
> But here is a very different intuitive model, which I think is more important in practice for humans:
>
> • Genome maps mostly-linearly to “traits” (strengths of different innate drives, synaptic learning rates, bone structure, etc.)
>
> • “Traits” map nonlinearly to certain personality, behavior, and mental health “outcomes” (divorce, depression, etc.)
>
> As some examples: …
>
> • I think the antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) diagnosis gets applied in practice to two rather different clusters of people, one basically with an anger disorder, the other with low arousal. So the map from the space of “traits” to the outcome of “ASPD” is a very nonlinear function, with two separate “bumps”, so to speak. The same idea applies to any outcome that can result from two or more rather different (and disjoint) root causes, which I suspect is quite common across mental health, personality, and behavior. People can wind up divorced because they were sleeping around, and people can wind up divorced because their clinical depression was dragging down their spouse. People can seek out company because they want to be widely loved, and people can seek out company because they want to be widely feared. Etc.
>
> • I dunno, maybe “thrill-seeking personality” and “weak bones” interact multiplicatively towards the outcome of “serious sports injuries”. If so, that would be another nonlinear map from “traits” to certain “outcomes”.
>
> All of these and many more would mathematically manifest as “gene × gene interactions” or “gene × gene × gene interactions”, or other types of non-additive genetic effects. For example, in the latter case, the interactions would look like (some gene variant related to thrill-seeking) × (some gene variant related to bone strength).
>
> But that’s a very different mental image from things like multiple genes affecting the same protein complex, or the Zuk et al. 2012 “limiting pathway model”. In particular, given a gene × gene interaction, you can’t, even in principle, peer into a cell with a microscope, and tell whether the two genes are “interacting” or not. In that last example above, the thrill-seeking-related genes really don’t “interact” with the bone-strength-related genes—at least, not in the normal, intuitive sense of the word “interact”. Indeed, those two genes might never be expressed at the same time in the same cell….
>
> As far as I can tell, if you call this toy example “gene × gene interaction” or “epistasis”, then a typical genetics person will agree that that’s technically true, but they’ll only say that with hesitation, and while giving you funny looks. It’s just not the kind of thing that people normally have in mind when they talk about “epistasis”, or “non-additive genetic effects”, or “gene × gene interactions”, etc. And that’s my point: many people in the field have a tendency to think about those topics in an overly narrow way.
>
> …
>
> *§4.4.3 My rebuttal to some papers arguing against non-additive genetics being a big factor in human outcomes:*
>
> The first thing to keep in mind is: for the kind of non-additive genetic effects I’m talking about (§4.3.3 above), there would be a massive number of “gene × gene interactions”, each with infinitesimal effects on the outcome.
>
> If that’s not obvious, I’ll go through the toy example from above. Imagine a multiplicative interaction between thrill-seeking personality and fragile bone structure, which leads to the outcome of sports injuries. Let’s assume that there are 1000 gene variants, each with a tiny additive effect on thrill-seeking personality; and separately, let’s assume that there’s a different set of 1000 gene variants, each with a tiny additive effect on fragile bones. Then when you multiply everything together, you’d get 1000×1000=1,000,000 different gene × gene interactions involved in the “sports injury” outcome, each contributing a truly microscopic amount to the probability of injury.
>
> In that model, if you go looking in your dataset for specific gene × gene interactions, you certainly won’t find them. They’re tiny—miles below the noise floor. So absence of (that kind of) evidence is not meaningful evidence of absence.
>
> The second thing to keep in mind is: As above, I agree that there’s not much non-additive genetic effects for traits like height and blood pressure, and much more for things like neuroticism and divorce. And many papers on non-additive genetics are looking at things like height and blood pressure. So unsurprisingly, they don’t find much non-additive genetics.…
>
> [Then I discuss three example anti-epistasis papers including both of the ones linked in OP.]
**Andy B [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129518812):**
> Sequencing technology doesn't get discussed nearly enough in this area. Illumina short-read sequencing/SNP panels have been the major source of data for all of these studies, and they are absolutely delightful at finding SNPs but are crap at anything else. I think it will be appreciated that generally things that impact function aren't SNPs, they are broad changes, and so much human genomics seems to be hoping that the thing that is contributing to a change is able to spotted by being close to a SNP, instead of actually looking at the thing that is causing the change.
>
> Genomes aren't lists of SNPs, they are mostly repeats and 2x150bp isn't going to get anywhere near close to capturing that variation, no matter how 'deep' you sequence. Long-read sequencing (PacBio & ONT, not Illumina's synthetic tech) is clearly better, and continues to demonstrate that there is massive variation that is easy to see when you have a bunch of 20kbp fragment, while almost impossible when you're just aligning little chunks of text to a 3gbp genome.
>
> I work in non-model genomics and long-read sequencing is such a clear winner I keep getting surprised when Illumina gets contracts for these massive human studies. The Human Pangenome Consortium is going to be providing a dataset that is way more useful than anything that's come before. Anecdotally, I hear that for some non-European genomic data they know that ~10% of the data from an individual DOESN'T EVEN MAP to the human reference (but is human genomic data). This is all invisible to analysis, or even worse, just confounds things, as the 'true' causal SNP is somewhere in the data that doesn't get analysed, and so we're stuck looking at noise and trying to make sense of it.
>
> I feel like this is such a blind-spot for human genomics, as it's always about the latest and greatest AI/ML method to try and get some information out, when it's the underlying data which just sucks and doesn't have a hope in actually being linked to function. There was even a point on an Open Thread a few weeks back (Open Thread 374 from tabulabio) asking for people to get in touch about Frontier Foundation Genomic models, with the focus being on fancy new ML architectures.
>
> When I asked ChatGPT to write this comment for me ("Argue that sequencing technology could explain a lot of the Missing Heritability problem") it actually pushed back against me, trying to use the Wainschtein et al. 2022 paper as evidence that '...[this paper] used high-quality WGS (which includes better SVs than Illumina) and still found that adding rare and structural variants only modestly increased heritability estimates", which is NOT TRUE. Wainschtein uses the TOPMED dataset, which is from Illumina short reads. Yes, they do 'deep' sequencing, and yes it's analysed to the absolute hilt with the latest and greatest GatK pipeline and QC to the max. But that claim is false, it's just lists of SNPs, completely ignores huge chunks of the genome and just hopes that the thing contributing to a phenotype is is able to be fished out alongside a SNP.
>
> Another anecdote - an older friend's wife died from a brain cancer. He was an old-school non-model genomicist and got all of the data from the oncologists and various tests and analysed things. All of it short-read, none of it turned anything up, either from his or the various doctors. Long-read sequencing run was eventually done after her death and indicated that it was a splice variant missed by short-reads. It was clear as day in the long-read data, since it didn't need to do fancy bioinformatic de bruijn graphs to figure out the splice isoform - it's just mapping the read against the genome and seeing it clear as day.
Thanks - this is helpful, especially the comments on Wainschtein. I asked Andy whether the products advertised as “whole genome sequencing” that sequence every base in the genome” get his seal of approval, and he said:
> I don't mean to sound hyperbolic but Illumina is kind of like the Illuminati. It's everywhere, monolithic and it's influenced genomics massively.
>
> I had a quick look at a few "whole genome sequencing" retailers, and they’re usually using Next Generation Sequencing, which in most cases means Illumina. The phrase "sequence every base in the genome" sounds impressive, but it’s a bit misleading. Yes, they generate *reads* from across the whole genome, but they’re in tiny fragments, and only make sense once you align them to a reference genome.
>
> That's where reference bias comes in. You mostly detect things that are similar enough to map cleanly, and just a little different to be able to be called a variant. That’s fine for common variants, but bigger or more complex stuff tends to get missed or misinterpreted.
>
> To give a sense of scale, the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long. When you get your Illumina WGS results back from a provider, you don’t get a 3 Gbp text file with your actual genome. What you usually get is a variant (VCF) file with just the differences compared to the reference genome. And that makes sense to some extent. Why include everything that's the same? But there’s a lot of complex or unmappable variation that just isn’t detected with short reads.
>
> If you used long-read sequencing and actually assembled your genome, you could get pretty close to your actual full genome, including regions that are repetitive, messy, or just structurally different. You’d see things that are completely invisible in an Illumina dataset. And you'd have much higher confidence in the things you see, since a lot of the artifacts come from using short-read data.
>
> That’s why basically all genomics in non-model organisms is happening with long reads now. At the International Congress of Genetics in 2023 (major conference that only happens every five years) the keynote speaker Mark Blaxter opened the meeting by saying we can finally get real, complete genomes thanks to long-read sequencing. He was talking specifically about the Darwin Tree of Life project, which is trying to sequence all eukaryotic species in the UK.
>
> So yeah, most consumer WGS is Illumina, and it’s fine if all you want is common SNPs. But I can't wait for human genomics to migrate to long reads and overturn some of the perceived wisdom from two decades of Illumina dominance […] PacBio and ONT are almost on the same level as Illumina in terms of cost/genome, and they ACTUALLY give you the whole genome!
I’d like to hear from some statistical geneticists about whether they already knew all of this, and whether or not they agree that it’s a blind spot for their field.
**Vinay Tummarakota [writes](https://x.com/unboxpolitics/status/1938579699095277894) on Twitter (sorry for formatting issues coming from change from tweets → blockquote):**
> An article like this was definitely needed: easy to follow and outlines the conceptual territory well. Wanted to share some constructive feedback in this thread!
>
> *- - - - #1: Pedigree Studies*
>
> In the article, Alexander favorably cites pedigree-based studies (e.g. studies based on siblings & cousins rather than just twins) to corroborate twin studies. However, I would like to respectfully push back against this line of reasoning.
>
> First, his claim that extended pedigrees drop the EEA is not quite correct. For example, the Swedish study he cites uses an extended twin-family design which assumes the EEA (see the Supplemental Material).
>
> Second, the Scotland pedigree estimates he cites are likely biased due to pop strat. In the RDR paper, @alextisyoung tests a method called “Kinship FE”. At a high-level, Kinship FE estimates heritability using a pedigree model which accounts for shared nuclear family environment. Importantly, this method is quite similar to the methods employed in the two Scotland papers cited by Alexander: Hill et al and Marioni et al (both estimate heritability using pedigrees while modeling the effects of the shared nuclear family environment). Using simulations, Dr. Young shows that Kinship FE is biased in the presence of genetic nurture or pop strat. This is because these processes induce correlations between genes and env beyond the nuclear family. Unfortunately, pop strat bias is not mitigated by PC adjustments. So the key question is: are these at play for cognitive phenotypes? The answer is maybe for genetic nurture & yes for pop strat. Tan et al Figure 1 shows that pop strat biases estimation of genetic effects for IQ & edu. Thus, pedigree estimates should be interpreted w/caution.
>
> *- - - - #2: Adoption Studies*
>
> Alexander also favorably cites adoption studies to corroborate twin studies. However, heritability estimates derived from adoption studies cannot be directly compared against heritability estimates derived from twin studies because the former are usually biased \*upward\* by assortative mating (AM) while the latter are usually biased \*downward\*. Why the difference? Well, Alexander estimates heritability as 2\*rBM, not 2\*(rBM - rAM) where rBM is the bio mom corr and rAM is the adoptive mom corr. Because children are >50% genetically similar to their bio moms in the presence of AM, this formula over-estimates heritability. Conversely, in a twin study, heritability is 2 \* (rMZ - rDZ). Because DZ twins are >50% genetically similar in the presence of genotypic assortment, this formula under-estimates heritability. To be clear, I don’t know if adjusting for AM will make adoption studies discordant with twin studies. However, I think you should do this adjustment before claiming that adoption studies corroborate twin studies. I should also note that one of the adoption studies cited by Alexander does adjust for assortative mating (the SIBS study) so the devil really is in the details of each study.
>
> *- - - - #3: BMI Case Study*
>
> BMI is a very useful phenotype for the purposes of investigating missing heritability for several reasons.
>
> (1) It’s a well-defined continuous phenotype, so less room for measurement artifacts to ruin things.
>
> (2) Its population GWAS effects are highly correlated w/its within-family GWAS effects, so it’s possible to use whole genome studies (WGS) of unrelated individuals to quantify its heritability.
>
> (3) There’s little evidence of genotypic assortment, so we can compare estimates from different methods w/o worrying about pesky AM bias.
>
> (4) It’s a quasi-behavioral trait since BMI is impacted by behaviors, attitudes, etc.
>
> So what does BMI reveal about missing heritability? Well, unfortunately, not much.
>
> I’m not aware of a theoretical model which compellingly explains why RDR/WGS/quasi-random adoption estimate heritability lower than twin studies with SibReg in between.
>
> To me, this reveals how complicated this debate really is. Even for a phenotype with many highly desirable theoretical properties, estimation of heritability is not consistent between methods. IMO, the way to resolve this issue moving forward is to conduct more unified analyses. In other words, apply each of the methods to the same cohort w/the same phenotype definition and see what happens. The RDR study was illuminating in this regard IMO. When sampling & measurement artifacts can be ruled out, the only differences between methods should lie in their actual theoretical properties (e.g. the assumptions they make). The primary obstacle to this, however, is statistical power. This is why I’ll end this thread by re-iterating my desire to see more highly-powered RDR and SibReg analyses moving forward.
>
> EDIT: Ah, already noticed a mistake in my own thread 😑 Alexander is calculating adoption heritabilities using 2\*rBM, not 2\*(rBM - rAM). I was getting some quantities jumbled in my head as I wrote the thread, my bad! Nonetheless, I think the point about AM stands.
I appreciate these thoughts, although most of these biases and corrections are small enough that I don’t expect them to make a big difference to the results, or to line up in the particular Swiss cheese hole way where they let a big error get through.
## Small But Important Corrections
**Jorgen Harris ([blog](https://jorgenharris.substack.com/)) [corrects me](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129772646) on the crime adoption study (linked in a tweet in the main post):**
> Scott and Cremieux are misinterpreting the posted study. The key line is:
>
> > *"Note, however, that a genetic influence is not sufficient to produce criminal convictions in the adoptee. Of those adoptees whose biological parents have three or more convictions, 75 percent never received a court conviction. Another way of expressing this concentration of crime is that the chronic male adoptee offenders with biological parents having three or more offenses number only 37. They make up 1 percent of the 3,718 male adoptees in Table 2 but are responsible for 30 percent of the male adoptee convictions."*
>
> So, 1% of male adoptees in the study have a parent with three or more convictions \*and\* themselves have been convicted of a crime. 3/4 of children whose parents have been convicted 3+ times are never convicted. [So] male adoptees whose parents had 3+ convictions made up 4% of the sample, not 1%. The 1% are the 1/4 of those adoptees with any criminal convictions.
>
> Bigger picture, I think this study is consistent with a world where, a) a large share of kids who end up committing crimes/having serious behavioral and emotional problems despite being raised by fairly normal families are adoptees (as Scott observed), and b) most adoptees raised by fairly normal families don't end up committing crimes/having serious behavioral and emotional problems.
Thank you. The tweet said that the 1% of adoptees with the most criminal parents commit 30% of the crime, but should have said that the 4% of adoptees with the most criminal parents commit 30% of the crime.
I agree that the study says that many adoptees with criminal parents never commit crime at all. These two claims (high relative rate, low absolute rate) can only be simultaneously true if the base rate of criminal conviction is low. But the base rate isn’t that low - somewhere between 10-20% of Americans have a criminal conviction. But the study uses a poorly-signposted combination of Americans and Danes between 1895 and the present, and maybe the base rate in that group is lower.
**E0 [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129518777):**
> *> "In the degenerate case where the mother and father have exactly the same genes (“would you have sex with your clone?”) the fraternal twins will also share 100% of their genes."*
>
> Why is this so? If Mom and Dad both have genes (a, b) at one location, won't sometimes twin 1 get (a, a) while twin 2 will get (b, b)? Agree there's more commonality than normal because there's a possibility of 1 getting (a, b) while 2 gets (b, a), which isn't normally true.
Thanks, I agree this is true and have edited the post.
**IAmChalzz on the subreddit [discusses](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1lkzao6/missing_heritability_much_more_than_you_wanted_to/mzvtgqn/) several possible issues and biases. Most are the sort of minor weaknesses I expect from all studies and don’t bother me too much, but one is a frank error on my part:**
> Scott confuses standard errors with confidence intervals when reporting on RDR/Sib-reg results. For some reason, this literature consistently reports standard errors instead of confidence intervals, don't ask me why. Because Scott uses the nonoverlapping confidence intervals for different Sib-regression estimates as a strike against the consistency and credibility of this literature, this affects his argument quite a bit.
Thanks for the correction, I’ve weakly edited this out of the piece, though not fully rewritten the piece to be as good as it would have been if I never made this error in the first place.
## Other Comments
**Kveldred [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129492893):**
> Anecdata: I went to a fancy Christian private school (because my parents bankrupted themselves to find a somewhat-tolerable schooling environment for their weird son, not because I grew up fancy myself), and two of my classmates—out of about 100 total—were adopted through a similar "help the worst-off" sort of idea on the part of the parents. It was /very evident/ that they were... different... from the rest; you'd guess they'd been adopted even if they hadn't freely admitted it. The girl, as far as I know, didn't do great but didn't get in trouble; her brother did, indeed, end up arrested for assault.
**Brandon Berg [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129495557):**
> Note that, although that the story you linked doesn't mention it, the study that found people with Norman names overrepresented at Oxford was by Greg Clark, who argues that very long-run persistence of social status is driven by genetics and highly assortative mating (0.8 on a latent measure of socioeconomic competence). So in this case it wouldn't be necessarily be confounding, because persistent differences between people with Norman and Saxon names might well be genetic.
>
> The idea that truly exogenous economic endowments can persist over several generations has pretty weak empirical support, as I believe you mentioned in a post several years ago. Studies finding otherwise are likely confounded by genetics.
>
> But there was also a St. Louis Fed study finding that the intergenerational correlation for residual wealth (i.e. wealth greater than or less than that predicted by earnings) is only about 0.2. Except perhaps in the most extreme cases, wealth has to be actively maintained and fortified by each successive generation, or even very wealthy families fall off the map within a few generations. Consider that less than a century after his death, there are no longer any Rockefellers on the Forbes 400 list.
This started a long discussion on whether it was more likely that Normans were genetically more prone to education than Saxons, or that wealth imbalances could last 900 years.
In favor of Normans being genetically smarter - the Normans who invaded England were the [military aristocracy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129497170) of Normandy, which was itself descended from the military aristocracy of Denmark. If military aristocrats are selected from the smartest/strongest/healthiest portion of the population, then they might have better genes than the unselected Saxons.
In favor of wealth imbalances lasting 900 years, even if [this rarely happens in normal situations,](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129594928) the Normans were titled aristocrats in a political system carefully designed to preserve the privilege of titled aristocrats over many generations.
**Vera Wilde ([blog](https://wildetruth.substack.com)) [asks](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129502307):**
> Did you ask the polygenic embryo selection folks about collider bias?
>
> In the section comparing Kemper’s sib-regression estimate (14%) and Young’s Icelandic estimate (~40%), you note that the UK Biobank sample may be skewed toward healthier, higher-SES volunteers (so-called healthy volunteer bias, which commonly creates selection effects in medical research). But the implications of such selection effects extend far beyond variability in heritability estimates.
>
> This kind of bias can flip signs when people think they're being clever by adjusting for confounds (collider stratification bias). This is especially a relevant risk in highly selected samples like the UK Biobank, where the same factors that influence participation (e.g., health, SES, education) may also affect the outcomes of interest (mental and physical health). Conditioning on variables that causally contribute to both participation and outcome can introduce more bias than it corrects for.
>
> I wrote a bit about this [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129502307): Munafò et al.'s schizophrenia example illustrates the mechanism more clearly than I can easily argue it for IQ: people at higher genetic risk for psychosis may be less likely to volunteer for studies ("they're out to get me, so I'm not giving them my blood"). This warps the apparent genetic architecture in large datasets. Doing embryo selection against schizophrenia risk based on such a sample, from which high-risk individuals disproportionately self-selected out, could backfire. And parents who paid $50K for it might not know for 20 years (or ever).
>
> Hopefully the real-life practical implications are trivial: if you pay $50K for a prospective 3-point IQ gain, and collider stratification bias turns it into a 3-point loss, no big deal? You probably won't notice over dinner, as long as your kid slept well last night.
>
> But I remain curious how the corporations selling embryo selection address the possibility that they're accidentally giving parents the exact opposite of what they're paying for. My guess is: they just don't tell anybody, and there's something in the fine print saying they could be wrong and aren't liable. Causality probably can't be proven in any individual case, and anyway you're paying for a best effort process, not a result.
I haven’t heard anything about people adjusting for this, but I’d like to hear from someone who knows more.
**rad1kal writes:**
> I would just want to add that Sidorenko 2024 (<https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11835202/>) that you cite for the discussion on rare variants also measure heritability using Sib-Regression although not for EA.
>
> They show that correcting for assortative mating their estimates are coherent with twin studies :
>
> "Therefore, if we account for assortative mating and assume that the resemblance between siblings is solely due to genetic effects (and not to common environmental), then our data are consistent with a heritability of 0.87 (s.e. 0.05) for height in the current population (Supplementary Note)."
>
> they also show that shared environment estimates from twin studies are inflated by assortative mating :
>
> "Our results for height and BMI agree with that conclusion in that we find no evidence of a residual sibling covariance (𝑐2) for BMI, while the significant 𝑐2 observed for height is largely explained by assortative mating."
>
> And the WGS estimate is higher for height than the RDR estimates (55%), my take on this is that there is an assumption in RDR that posit that the environment of individuals are independent to each others and don't influence each others in correlation to the relatedness which since it's violated bias the estimate downward. (<https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/i/146616013/disassortative-mating>)
>
> "Moreover, our estimates of 0.76 and 0.55 can also be compared to estimates from GWAS and WGS data. For height, the SNP-based estimate is about 0.55–0.60 (ref.41) and the WGS estimate ~0.70 (ref. 42; but with a large s.e. of ~0.10). These estimates imply that for height there is substantial genetic variation not captured by either SNP array and, to a lesser extent, sequence data, presumably ultra-rare variants (frequency <1/10,000 not included in ref.42)"
I don’t entirely understand what’s going on here, and I challenged rad1kal on some of the assortative mating implications [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129535838), but the blog that rad1kal linked (their own? I’m not sure) has a much deeper discussion of the Equal Environment Assumption than I included in my post, see [here](https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/i/146616013/eea-extensively-employed-assumption).
**Austen [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than/comment/129655172):**
> *"more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an alehouse than from attending a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best bluestocking of the age will be able to glean from that sort of learning which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed, are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only in the bust, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only know all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as they do his features, in their descent through several generations, and solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed half a century ago."*
>
> people today would never be able to grasp and see the hereditary argument play out the way even a shrewd village person would who never left their town all their life did. by knowing personally each family of the village, and their qualities and characteristics, and seeing their kids develop and grow, and their kid's kids, and how the traits are passed down from each parent and renewed in their children in the subsequent generation, the weight of the hereditary argument in palpable.
>
> instead we have people arguing about heritability who have never observed anything firsthand or took those observations to heart, from pure statistics and data, and contriving all sort of confounding theories.
>
> when you go back farther to the 19th century and before, it was almost taken as a given that hereditary effects were very large, by anyone who seriously thought about it, reasoning from experience and their powerful intuitions.
Strong disagree, I think this is actually a great example of why you need science and not just common sense.
When people just observed other people in their same villages, half of people thought "look, people are like their parents, obviously genetics matters", and the other half thought "look, people are like their parents, obviously parenting matters". It took twin studies - which can separate out genetics from parenting - to distinguish between these two hypotheses. And even then, millions of people rejected it because it disagreed with their "common sense" - "But John is so nice! And his mother worked so hard to teach him niceness! Obviously his mother's parenting worked! That's just common sense!"
In fact, I think the ways this picture presents an overly rosy view of village common sense go beyond that. I've read (I think this was in *[Arguments About Aborigines](https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1996-hiatt-argumentsaboutaborigines-ch7-conceptionandmisconception.pdf)*, but not going to hunt for a full citation) that in many poor uneducated parts of Europe until the 18th or 19th century, people still didn't agree on whether the mother gave any genes to the child, or whether she was just the "soil" in which the father's "seed" could grow. Aborigines had the opposite problem - they thought possible a spirit impregnated the mother, and the sex act helped summon the spirit but the father's "genetics" (to the degree that they understood the term) didn't matter. The ancient Greeks had an even weirder view, [telegony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegony_(inheritance)), where the child's paternal genetics were the sum of everyone who the mother ever had sex with.
I think it's only possible to romanticize this sort of "village common sense" because you and the villagers are the beneficiaries of millennia of careful science, tuning those common-sense intuitions.
(I do think villagers had one other advantage lots of moderns didn’t, which was that they closely observed animal breeding. But that’s not common sense - that’s access to important scientific data!) | Scott Alexander | 167032054 | Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability | acx |
# Links For July 2025
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** [Nostalgebraist on OpenAI’s “creative writing” AI](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes). LLMs trained to “write well” go for easy wins; the more constrained the AI, the easier the win. This can look impressive at first glance but quickly gets repetitive. Aside from being a good post about AI, this post helped me crystallize some thoughts on what “good writing” and “good taste” are in general.
**2:** In the [1952 Texas gubernatorial election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Texas_gubernatorial_election), incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%.
Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican ([h/t BobaCalifornian](https://x.com/BobaCalifornian/status/1916727059646451865)).
**3:** [Chess grandmasters don’t really burn 6000 calories a day during matches.](https://strandbergbio.substack.com/p/chess-grandmasters-do-not-burn-6000)
**4:** [SecureBio](https://securebio.org/) runs a “nucleic acid observatory” that searches wastewater for new or dangerous viruses. In April, [they announced](https://x.com/SecureBio/status/1914386750702576115) that a local sewage system contained a genetically-modified version of cytomegalovirus, which appeared to be a “discard” from a local lab (related to but not exactly the same as a lab leak; discards can be deliberate dumps of viruses considered too innocuous to worry about). This particular virus isn’t dangerous, but it serves as proof-of-concept that the observatory is doing its job.
**5:** Trigger warning: creepy, bugs, body horror, seriously DON’T READ IF YOU DON’T LIKE CREEPY BUG BODY HORROR:
The tweet thread doesn’t have a working link, but it seems to be the same technology discussed in [Spider-Robot For Surgical Interventions](https://neosciencehub.com/spider-robot-for-surgical-interventions/).
**6:** [Cate Hall on her experience taking testosterone](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/testosterone-gave-me-my-life-back). “When I played poker professionally, I was a staunch advocate for the position that there are few women at the top of the game for reasons that are primarily sociological: women aren’t encouraged to learn (96% of serious players are male); the environment is unwelcoming to them (see ‘The Royal Flush Girls’); and they aren’t invited to join the study groups that are critical for cracking into the elite tier . . . And yet. In the earliest weeks of testosterone therapy, when I really started to feel it kicking in, one of my first thoughts was: ‘I would have been so much better at poker if I’d had this.’”
**7:** Related: [Cube\_Flipper on his (?) experience taking estrogen](https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2025-06-15-estrogen.html). “What did change was my sense of space. This one’s quite subtle – it was the kind of thing that was more noticeable when I experimented with deliberately spiking my hormones. I’ll do my best to explain. It’s as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium. This effect is basically identical to what a small dose of psychedelics can do, specifically a tryptamine like psilocybin or DMT.”
**8:** Ming Chinese karma scoring systems (h/t [Whyvert](https://x.com/whyvert/status/1928632768658858235), paper [here](https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_07BFF2E6CC54.P001/REF.pdf), longer Twitter thread by EdwardW2 [here](https://x.com/edwardW2/status/1501420717245550596)):
Mass emailed the entire American Butchers Association telling them to change their profession, became a god, not sure what to do next.
**9:** Meta [has spent $50 - 70 billion](https://www.indy100.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-what-happened) on the metaverse over the past five years. For context, that’s about the GDP of Cambodia, or 1/5 the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo Program. Forbes [has an update](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/17/metas-awful-horizon-worlds-ad-helps-explain-70-million-metaverse-loss/) on the state of the technology as of this February: “Looking at . . . the current state of Meta’s VR universe, it is absolutely impossible to imagine a world where this kind of thing is ever going to succeed.”
**10:** From [Polling USA](https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1918714823501619228):
Comments attribute the shift to some combination of Trump, the manosphere, and wokeness, but all those things existed well before the peak in 2018. Did it just take a while for them to get big enough to have an effect? If not, what’s going on?
**11:** Report from a recent Harvard conference on drugs and religion: Many Jews are really into psychedelics. It would be convenient if there were seem deep synergy between the Jewish religion and psychedelia. But there isn’t. So they can either drop the issue, or else confabulate something. Anyway, the link is titled [Psychedelic Judaism Is Going To Win](https://www.jellomenorah.com/p/psychedelic-judaism-is-going-to-win).
**12:** [OpenAI agrees to keep nonprofit control for now](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/openai-says-nonprofit-retain-control-of-company-bowing-to-pressure.html). But Garrison Lovely [thinks this is in name only](https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-what-openai-told-californias) and they’re still working on ways to legally subordinate the philanthropic mission to the profit motive. Related: [The Open AI Files](https://www.openaifiles.org/), a massive collection of everything shady about OpenAI (that we know of!)
**13:** Related: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” originally banned states from regulating AI for ten years, but this provision got pushback, including from Republicans whose votes Trump needed. Earlier today, Senator Blackburn, a leading Republican critic, said she struck a compromise with proponent Ted Cruz - the ban would only last five years, and some online privacy and child porn regulation would be exempted. But this evening, [the compromise fell apart](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-scrap-deal-big-beautiful-bill-lower-restrictions-states-ai-regulation), and IIUC [the Senate has now voted 99-1 to remove the AI regulation ban entirely (X)](https://x.com/bradrcarson/status/1939963473204580394) (though I’m going entirely off this one tweet and it doesn’t seem to have made it into the news yet). The Big Beautiful Bill still [cuts Medicaid](https://time.com/7298772/medicaid-big-beautiful-bill-health-insurance/), [lowers taxes (especially on the rich)](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/trump-bill-helps-wealthy-hurts-low-earners-yale-report.html), [attacks the solar and clean energy industries](https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/30/climate/trump-senate-bill-wind-solar), and [adds $3 trillion to the national debt](https://www.crfb.org/blogs/breaking-down-one-big-beautiful-bill). If you have opinions, consider calling your representative, although this is more likely to matter if they’re a Republican.
**14:** Related: Michael Trazzi has released a half-hour documentary on the fight over California’s SB-1047 AI regulation bill, available free on YouTube:
**15:** [Bryan Caplan](https://x.com/bryan_caplan/status/1912870312120643600) expresses hope that cutting federal science funding will make more scientists start companies. But [Nicholas Decker](https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1919868866403995845) cites a [paper](https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/babina.pdf) finding that "a negative federal funding shock reduces a researcher's chance of founding a high-tech startup by about 80% of the mean".
**16:** Related [from Decker](https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1919944971911618888): suppose that Democrats promise that, once they regain control of the government, they’ll pay universities all the counterfactual funding they would have gotten if Trump hadn’t cut their budget. Then universities borrow money now against that future windfall. What goes wrong?
**17:** From the Economist, via [jmarriott](https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/can-you-tell-ai-from-human-genius) - the decline of rhyming poetry:
I’d always heard modernism was a reaction to the trauma of the World Wars, but it looks like the rhyme decline started well before then.
**18:** The latest on theism, fine-tuning, anthropics, and many-worlds: [Onid on simplicty priors](https://onemanynone.substack.com/p/benthams-bulldog-doesnt-understand), [Onid contra mathematical realism](https://onemanynone.substack.com/p/tegmark-and-the-engines-of-mathematics), and [Dylan Black on measure](https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-measured-response-to-benthams-bulldog) (plus a [Highlights From The Comments](https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-a)). I especially appreciate the Highlights From The Comments thread - it’s easy to write a blog post with the standard argument for some position; the real benefit comes when you see someone’s back-and-forth with smart critics. Good for Dylan for answering so many people’s questions and objections.
**19:** Mifepristone (aka RU-486, the “abortion pill”) [in early-stage investigation as a depression treatment](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2671735/).
**20:** A journal [has retracted](https://retractionwatch.com/2025/04/23/sodom-comet-paper-to-be-retracted-two-years-after-editors-note-acknowledging-concerns/) the paper claiming that a comet hit a Bronze Age city in Jordan (and potentially inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah); see [the PubPeer page](https://pubpeer.com/publications/37B87CAC48DE4BC98AD40E00330143#4) for some of the “inappropriate manipulation” that was detected.
**21:** [Tim Fist on chip sanctions](https://x.com/fiiiiiist/status/1922019226543370494).
**22:** [Radiopaper](https://radiopaper.com/about) is a social media conversation site where you can pay people (for example, famous public intellectuals) to write responses to your posts. They’ve got some moderately famous writers and bloggers on there, seems like an interesting model.
**23:** [Ethan Strauss on the controversy around A’ja Wilson’s WNBA sneaker](https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/nike-strikes-back-at-me-in-the-new). It’s a standard wokeness fight, but inadvertently offers a lens into the crazy world of basketball sneaker and people who care way too much about them. Did you know [32 active NBA players](http://hypebeast.com/2025/4/nba-wnba-signature-shoe-list-2025) have their own sneaker lines? Or that some NBA shoe endorsement deals [run into the 9 digits](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2019/08/28/the-nbas-richest-shoe-deals-lebron-kobe-and-durant-are-still-no-match-for-michael-jordan/), with top basketball players making more money from sneakers than from the salaries? Or that sneaker deals going to the “wrong” player garners a level of outrage I usually associate with major geopolitical conflicts?
**24:** Naomi Kanakia is running [a contest for the best self-published literary novel](https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/my-self-published-novella-got-reviewed), with special mention of people serializing on Substack.
**25:** Contrary to rumor, you will not go to Hell just for [betting on prediction markets about the new Pope](https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/betting-on-the-conclave/).
**26:** Related - [Behind-the-scenes look at the politicking and coalition-building that ended with the election of Pope Leo](https://alexsalvinews.substack.com/p/the-election-of-pope-leo-xiv). I thought you weren’t allowed to do any of this, and certainly not *talk about* doing any of it, on pain of excommunication?
**27:** Works In Progress on whether [SLGT-2 drugs](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-future-of-kidney-treatment/) could be the next GLP-1 agonists - a diabetes drug which magically cures everything else too - in this case, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, maybe even increased life expectancy. Shame about the genital gangrene, though.
**28:** Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have a book on AI coming out in September, catchily titled *[If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies](https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/).* Nobody is very surprised that they wrote this book, but I’m a little surprised at the endorsements they managed to collect, including Stephen Fry, Ben Bernanke, and a former undersecretary of Homeland Security. As always, if you support the cause, [pre-orders](https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/?ref=eyxmay#preorder) can be especially helpful in creating buzz and catching booksellers’ interest.
**29:** The Daily Show did [an episode on shrimp welfare](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LeCJqzdHZZB3uBhZg/the-daily-show-did-a-segment-on-ea-and-shrimp-welfare), apparently [thanks to](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-blasting-good-ideas) Bentham’s Bulldog’s indefatigable pro-shrimp blogging. An inspiring story of how a single ordinary person, if they try hard and believe in themselves, can get their pet cause made fun of on national television (but in a good way, I think)!
**30:** [Twitter](https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1838194949847654712/photo/1) and [Bluesky](https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats) both seem to be losing users:
**31:** [Ross Douthat interviews JD Vance](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/opinion/jd-vance-pope-trump-immigration.html). In the section on AI he says “I actually read the paper of the guy that you had on. I didn’t listen to that podcast.” The “guy [Ross] had on” is Daniel Kokotajlo, so Vance is saying he read [AI 2027](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027)! Maybe I should have made the VP character a little less sinister; hindsight is 20-20.
**32:** Superforecaster Nuno Sempere (maybe with the rest of the Samotsvety team?) has launched [askaforecaster.com](http://askaforecaster.com). You can get a “quick take” for $20, a “thoughtful response” for $150, or an “in-depth look” for $1000.
**33:** A few years ago, a group surveyed expert biologists on their beliefs about zoonotic vs. lab origins of COVID; most believed zoonosis. Lab leakers objected that many of the “experts” said they hadn’t heard of DEFUSE (the gain-of-function project Wuhan was involved in; knowing about this should be table stakes for this discussion), and many others said they *had* heard of a fake paper put into the poll to trap lazy/dishonest responses; this (they said) invalidated the survey. But [I recently learned (X)](https://x.com/AtomsksSanakan/status/1926327123192488391) that there’s crosstabs in the appendix, and neither of these matter - people who had heard of DEFUSE, or who honestly admitted not having heard of the fake paper, had the same answers as everyone else. In fact, opinion always divided about 77-23, regardless of whether participants had seen any particular piece of evidence, fell for the fake paper, or whatever. I guess this is good (the verdict wasn’t dependent on a few ignorant or dishonest people), but maybe also bad (shouldn’t being familiar with the best evidence for one side or the other make you believe that side more?)
**34:** Some forecasters have bimodal AI timelines: either we’ll get AGI before mega-scaling runs out in 2030, or we’ll have to wait for something other than mega-scaling and will probably take until 2040 or beyond. [Daniel Eth disagrees (X)](https://x.com/daniel_271828/status/1926379679763640480).
**35:** More research on o3’s GeoGuessng abilities: [it is definitely using solar angle to estimate latitude](https://corinwagen.github.io/public/blog/20250527_latitude.html), and you can too (if you’re good at trigonometry and have lots of free time).
**36:** A humanitarian aid veteran [analyzes what went wrong with food distribution in Gaza (X)](https://x.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1927489270106763753).
**37:** The Grok vs. xAI saga [continues](https://x.com/grok/status/1917905876301824364):
**38:** Expert survey on adolescent social media use (h/t [Derek Thompson](https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1930320952211968128)):
**39:** Between 1993 and 2021, female labor force participation in India [stayed constant](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ind/india/fertility-rate), but TFR fell from 3.8 to 2.0, posing a challenge to theories that women’s employment is a primary driver of fertility decline (h/t [Scholars\_Stage](https://x.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1930277517136425055), [mxtaverse](https://x.com/mxtaverse/status/1929504078897275185)).
**40:** [Hard to assess how well Tesla’s robotaxis are going so far](https://agifriday.substack.com/p/turkla).
**41:** [Lexer contra Cremieux on lead/crime](https://lexerlux.substack.com/p/another-cremieux-controversy). I have not looked into this issue and have no opinion, but I appreciated this contrary perspective to a thread I updated on last year.
**42:** Did you know: [people with Down Syndrome have only half the expected rate of solid cancers (X)](https://x.com/alexkesin/status/1931111142639989099). Chromosome 21 includes some anti-cancer genes, and having an extra copy gives extra protection. Kesin says that there’s “no free lunch” because Down Syndrome patients also have much higher rates of leukemia, but that’s only true on a chromosome-wide basis; the specific genes that protect against solid tumors don’t cause the leukemia. What’s the downside of increasing those genes? Seems less well-understood, but might harm wound healing, placental implantation, and neurodevelopment.
**43:** How do Africans feel about the influence of their former colonizers? (h/t [Afrobarometer](https://x.com/afrobarometer/status/1928862449345744949)):
**44:** [People are still talking about POSIWID](https://joelitobarski.com/posiwid/).
**45:** [Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines](https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1996-hiatt-argumentsaboutaborigines-ch7-conceptionandmisconception.pdf). Did you know that pre-contact aborigines didn’t know that sex caused conception? Wait, no, what if they did know it, and were just pretending not to? Wait, no, what if they sort of deliberately suppress the knowledge as a way of defusing paternity conflicts after traditional wife-swapping rituals? Wait, no, what if it’s racist to accuse aborigines of not understanding something obvious like this? Wait, no, what if it’s ethnocentric to call Western beliefs “obvious”? Wait, no! . . . this comes from a book called *Arguments About Aborigines*, which I have ordered on the strength of this chapter.
**46:** Wikipedia on the attempt to censor Michelangelo’s *Last Judgment:*
> Because he depicted naked figures, the artist was accused of immorality and obscenity. A censorship campaign (known as the "Fig-Leaf Campaign") was organized by [Cardinal] Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) to remove the frescoes. From this campaign drew support for the more natural state of the figures. In response, phallic imagery began permeating throughout Vatican City, beginning the trend of the crude drawings in places such as in graffiti art in bathrooms, textbooks, and other public places to be easily found. **This trend continues to the present day.**
Like the Streisand Effect if people still had some dim memory that there was something about the name “Streisand” in the year 2500. And:
> The Pope's Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Cesena said "it was most disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns." In response Michelangelo worked da Cesena's semblance into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld. It is said that when he complained to the Pope, the pontiff responded that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.
**47:** When a couple has a child, everyone knows the woman’s career suffers more than the man’s. [But did you know that this effect comes almost entirely from daughters](https://stephaniehmurray.substack.com/p/the-child-penalty-is-mostly-just)? (maternal earnings penalty 3% for a son, 26% for a daughter). Commenters suggest that fathers spend more time with sons and vice versa, partly counterbalancing the overall tendency for mothers to spend more time with children.
**48:** [T. Greer on China’s strategy for invading Taiwan](https://x.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1927487894291202509). 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.
**49:** University of Austin’s attempt at a non-woke free speech school not going so well:
My strongest opinion on this topic is that if [Noahpinion](https://www.noahpinion.blog/) gay-married this person, he could be Noah Binion.
**50:** Murder rates [are plunging](https://theweek.com/crime/crime-murder-rates-plummeting). Probably not related to current administration policy (the decline started in 2023), more likely due to a law-and-order backlash to Defund The Police, plus a good (compared to the COVID era) economy.
**51:** Related: [The Incarceration Rate Is About To Fall Off A Cliff (X)](https://x.com/JHWeissmann/status/1937962769740869847). Many prisoners serve sentences measured in decades, and many early offenders go on to pursue lifelong criminal careers, so the secular crime decline since the 1990s is only just starting to cash out in lower prison populations. If trends continue, by 2035 the US will move from the world’s 5th-highest incarceration rate to 75th-highest! And: “The piece also includes an amazing Slate Pitch, arguing that progressives should embrace private prisons because they’re much easier to close than unionized, state-run facilities once they are no longer needed.”
**52:** [New treatment may be able to permanently decrease cholesterol 69% after a single shot](https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/new-cholesterol-treatment-could-be-revolutionary-verve). “Instead of managing cholesterol over time like statins, VERVE-102 aims to provide a one-time fix by ‘switching off’ a specific gene, known as PCSK9, in the liver.”
**53:** [Linguists still aren’t sure where the word “dog” came from](https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/dog-is-a-weird-word). The Old English term was a form of “hound”, “dog” comes out of nowhere around 1200, the only theory is that it might come from a word meaning “dark” or “yellow” which originally applied only to dark or yellow dogs and later got generalized.
**54:** [Cremieux](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1934429687247151472): Novo Nordisk, manufacturer of Ozempic, forgot to pay the patent fee in Canada, and now it’s off-patent there. And an obscure FDA regulation lets Americans import certain drugs from Canada. With a sufficiently permissive legal theory, you could combine these facts into a way for the government to get unlimited cheap Ozempic without technically violating IP laws.
**55:** [China has started its own AI Safety Institute](https://x.com/Scott_R_Singer/status/1934674307231461842).
**56:** [What Children Fear](https://t.co/rL4jfZiKmW), h/t Gwern:
Who says psychology research is dead? | Scott Alexander | 166892112 | Links For July 2025 | acx |
# Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes
Stephen Skolnick is a gut microbiome expert blogging at [Eat Shit And Prosper](https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/schizophrenia). His **[most recent post](https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/schizophrenia)** argues that contra the psychiatric consensus, schizophrenia isn’t genetic at all - it’s caused by a gut microbe. He argues:
1. Scientists think schizophrenia is genetic because it obviously runs in families
2. But the twin concordance rates are pretty low - if your identical twin has schizophrenia, there’s only about a 30%-40% chance that you get it too. Is that really what we would expect from a genetic disease?
3. Also, scientists have looked for schizophrenia genes, and can only find about 1-2% as many as they were expecting.
4. So maybe we should ask how a disease can run in families without being genetic. Gut microbiota provide an answer: most people “catch” their gut microbiome from their parents.
5. Studies find that schizophrenics have very high levels of a gut bacterium called *Ruminococcus gnavus*.
6. This bacterium secretes psychoactive chemicals. Constant exposure to these chemicals might be the cause of schizophrenia.
I disagree with all of this. Going in order:
**1: Scientists think schizophrenia is genetic because it obviously runs in families**
This is not why scientists think schizophrenia is genetic, but we’ll get back to this later.
**2: But the twin concordance rates are pretty low - if your identical twin has schizophrenia, there’s only about a 30%-40% chance that you get it too. Is that really what we would expect from a mostly genetic disease?**
This is exactly the concordance rate you should expect from a polygenic condition where 80% of the variance is explained by genes. I discuss this example in [Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic) and run a discount simulation that assumes an 80% genetic disorder with 1% prevalence and demonstrates that you can get a very low twin concordance rate. [Here](https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/staff/nick_pdf/Classics/1970_Smith_AHG_Dorret.pdf) is a paper that does the full formal simulation and finds a rate consistent with observed values.
**3: Also, scientists have looked for schizophrenia genes, and can only find about 1-2% as many as they were expecting.**
This is the “missing heritability” problem, common to all polygenic traits. See my [Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than). The leading explanation is that our current genetic screening methods aren’t good enough to pick up rare variants; an alternative explanation proffered by some geneticists is that there are lots of invisible gene x environment interactions.
In either case, schizophrenia doesn’t have much more “missing heritability” than anything else, and it would be surprising if every single trait - from height to educational attainment - was determined by gut microbes.
**4: So maybe we should ask how a disease can run in families without being genetic. Gut microbiota provide an answer: most people “catch” their gut microbiome from their parents.**
This doesn’t work.
Going back to the first claim: scientists don’t think schizophrenia is genetic *just* because it runs in families. They think it’s genetic because they’ve done twin studies and find that identical twins share a schizophrenia diagnosis more often than fraternal twins. Skolnick describes microbiological inheritance as:
> See, many of the bacteria in your gut right now are strains that you picked up from your parents, back when you were still crawling around on the ground and putting everything in your mouth, picking your nose and eating it, and so on. If you think you didn’t do this as a kid, ask your parents. They remember. Those bacteria have stayed with you most of your life, eating the food you eat, reproducing faster than you can shit them out. If you have kids, you will pass those same heirloom strains on to them. Heritable. Biological. But not genetic.
This doesn’t describe a process which could be expected to differ between identical and fraternal twins!
Skolnick could add an epicycle: maybe identical twins have more similar microbiomes because their identical genes caused identical gastrointestinal ecologies. But then schizophrenia is determined by genes again (albeit indirectly) and it should show up as genetic in GWASes (ie they should pick up the genes for having a certain type of gastrointestinal ecology suitable to schizophrenia-causing bacteria, and identify them as schizophrenia genes). There might be some complexities around gene x environment interactions, but it wouldn’t look like the simple pattern of missing heritability that Skolnick uses as his star evidence that schizophrenia is “not genetic”.
This is just one example of how microbiological inheritance doesn’t exactly track genetic inheritance - and whenever we see a difference, schizophrenia tracks the genetic rather than the environmental pattern. So for example, [spouses have more similar microbiomes than siblings](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37298-9), but schizophrenia doesn’t transfer from spouse to spouse. Adoptive children presumably crawl on the ground and put things in their mouth just as much as biological children, but there is no adoptive-parent-to-adoptive-child schizophrenia correlation (and if Skolnick tries to get around this by saying the bacteria are transferred during the birthing process, I’ll answer that schizophrenia is often inherited through the paternal line).
Finally, [this study](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7151748/) finds that family environment only explains 13% of variation between individuals’ microbiomes during adulthood - and remember that family tendency for schizophrenia can persist across two or more generations.
**5: Studies find that schizophrenics have very high levels of a gut bacterium called** ***Ruminococcus gnavus.***
The study that Skolnick cites to establish this is Vasileva, Yang, and Baker, [Association Of The Gut Microbiome With Treatment Resistance In Schizophrenia](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2814638).
All the schizophrenics investigated in VYB were on antipsychotic medication. Previous studies have [already shown](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178124001999) that antipsychotic medication disrupts the gut microbiome. VYB couldn’t investigate whether the disruptions were caused by medication in their own sample, because they had no unmedicated controls, but they checked whether more medication = more disruption, and it did. They concluded that the most likely cause of the microbiome disruption was the medication:
> The findings indicate that individuals with treatment-resistant schizophrenia have significantly different microbiome composition compared to control individuals without psychiatric diagnoses and individuals with treatment-responsive schizophrenia, **which is most likely driven by clozapine.**
Even though this is right in the abstract and torpedoes Skolnick’s theory that the increased microbe population causes the schizophrenia, he doesn’t mention any of this in his post!
If some other study finds unusual gut microbiota even in untreated schizophrenia, will this support Skolnick’s theory? Not really. Schizophrenics differ from the general population on a wide variety of health outcomes - for example, they die about 15 - 20 years earlier, often [of heart problems](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.121.021444). Why? Probably some combination of medication side effects, poor health decisions, and *maybe* a direct effect of the disease itself - the same neurodevelopmental issues that affect cognition also affecting some autonomic process that regulates the heart. In any case, there are many reasons to expect schizophrenics’ guts to be abnormal, and [plenty of evidence](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4437570/) that this is in fact true.
(also, during residency, I met a schizophrenic patient who, whenever he wasn’t restrained, would eat as much glass as he could until he got internal bleeding and had to go to the emergency room. I don’t know what kind of microbiome disruption this causes, but I bet there aren’t many non-schizophrenics who have it.)
[This page](https://quadram.ac.uk/blogs/gut-microbiome-meet-ruminococcus-gnavus/) says that *R. gnavus* is also increased in inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, colon cancer, skin allergies, liver disease, etc, but that "association with diseases does not necessarily mean that *R. gnavus* is a cause of these diseases, it may just indicate that these conditions may be more favourable to *R. gnavus* expansion in the gut compared to other bacteria."
**6: This bacterium secretes psychoactive chemicals. Constant exposure to these chemicals might be the cause of schizophrenia.**
Schizophrenia doesn’t resemble exposure to psychoactive chemicals.
Just to give one example, schizophrenics are normal (or only slightly weird) until around age 18-30, then become psychotic over the course of a few months. According to the consensus theory of schizophrenia, this is because schizophrenia [is a neurodevelopmental disorder that interferes with adolescent synaptic pruning](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9870034/). How does a microbiological theory explain this progression?
In fact, it doesn’t really make sense to posit a single cause for schizophrenia at all. For example, we know that [children infected with rubella virus](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2632220/) *[in utero](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2632220/)* have 20x the usual schizophrenia risk. But we also know that many schizophrenics had no prenatal exposure to rubella or anything else. Other risk factors include urban environment, winter birth, prenatal stress, and maybe cat exposure ([really!](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38041862/)) To me, these - combined with genetics - make the most sense in the context of schizophrenia being a failure (for any reason or combination of reasons) in a complicated neurodevelopmental cascade we still don’t fully understand.
People have been looking for magic bullet explanations of schizophrenia for a hundred years. It’s time to admit there aren’t any. Or if there are, they’ll have to do better than this. | Scott Alexander | 166960928 | Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes | acx |
# Open Thread 388
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Good comments on the Alpha School review:
* Michael Pershan [challenges the “Bloom’s Two Sigma” claim](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129834848).
* Alpha School experiences from Redditors, mostly negative ([1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/a_school_with_no_teachers_alpha_private_school_in/), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1hbahyt/private_school_comparison_alpha_versus_magellan/), beware stereotypical Redditors who hate everything they can associate with “tech bros” but there’s some signal to be found in the noise).
* Alpha School experiences from ACX commenters, mostly positive ([1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129859549), [2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129927188), [3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129956858), [4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129964486), [5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129969701))
* Some good comments from Pamela Hobart and Matt Bateman, who work at Alpha School, CTRL+F their names for more.
* [Lots of people agree](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/129844186) that it’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and *costs* one-quarter as much?
* Is it selection bias? An employee [says they admit everyone](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130323449) (…who can pay the $40K tuition!) But [an Alpha parent claims that](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130223373) “85% of the low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of motivation or ability” (more details deeper in the thread, but I still don’t feel like I get a good explanation what happened to them). I think the strongest argument is that they seem to do better than other elite private schools, so even assuming an equal level of selection bias they still look good.
* [Phil H](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130095965): “From where I'm standing, it's very much like Americans are kind of reinventing China but with less tears.” (see also [MKBA](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130630479))
**2:** A reader is looking to speak with people who have FDA regulatory experience (regulatory affairs, quality assurance, etc.) for a project. They are building a tool to help life science labs generate compliant documentation for submissions like INDs or 510(k)s, and want to get feedback from experts on the real-world pain points of regulatory work. If you have this background and are open to a brief chat, please contact at ankit@clioapp.ai | Scott Alexander | 167164942 | Open Thread 388 | acx |
# Your Review: Alpha School
[*This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked*]
---
> “Just as we don’t accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers.”
*— Arthur Steinberg, American Federation of Teachers‑PA, reacting to Alpha’s cyber‑charter bid, January 2025*
In January 2025, the charter school application of “[Unbound Academy](https://www.unbound.school/)”, a subsidiary of “[2 Hour Learning, Inc](https://2hourlearning.com/)”, lit up the education press: two hours of “AI‑powered” academics, 2.6x learning velocity, and zero teachers. Sympathetic reporters repeated the slogans; union leaders reached for pitchforks; Reddit muttered “[another rich‑kid scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/17feoeu/a_school_with_no_teachers_alpha_private_school_in/).” More sophisticated critics dismissed the pitch as “selective data from expensive private schools”.
But there is nowhere on the internet that provides a detailed, non-partisan, description of what the “2 hour learning” program actually is, let alone an objective third party analysis to back up its claims.
2-Hour Learning’s flagship school is the “Alpha School” in Austin Texas. The [Alpha homepage](https://alpha.school/) makes three claims:
1. Love School
2. Learn 2X in two-hours per day
3. Learn Life Skills
Only the second claim seems to be controversial, which may be exactly why that is the claim the Alpha PR team focuses on. That PR campaign makes three more sub-claims on what the two-hour, 2x learning really means:
1. “Learn 2.6X faster.” (on average)
2. “Only two hours of academics per day.”
3. “Powered by AI (not teachers).”
If all of this makes your inner Bayesian flinch, you’re in good company. After twenty‑odd years of watching shiny education fixes wobble and crash—KIPP, AltSchool, Summit Learning, One-laptop-per-child, No child left behind, MOOCs, Khan‑for‑Everything—you *should* be skeptical. Either Alpha is (a) another program for the affluent propped up by selection effects, or (b) a clever way to turn children into joyless speed‑reading calculators. Those were, more or less, the two critical camps that emerged when Alpha’s parent company was approved to launch the tuition‑free Arizona charter school this past January.
Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be *allowed* to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do.
I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized‑controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was).
Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on‑the‑ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper:
1. **Starting Point: My Assumptions:** how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). **WHAT** is the existing education environment.
2. **A Short History of Alpha:** from billionaire‑funded microschool to charter aspirations. **HOW** Alpha came to be.
3. **How Alpha Works Part 1: Under the Hood:** What does “2‑hour learning” actually look like – what is the product and the science behind the product? **HOW** is Alpha getting kids to learn faster (Spoiler: “Two hour learning AI learning” closer to three hours, with a 5:1 teacher:student ratio and zero “generative AI”).
4. **How Alpha Works Part 2: Incentives & Motivation:** The secret sauce that doesn’t get mentioned in the PR copy, but I have discovered is at least as important as the fancy technology. The “**other** **HOW**” that no one is talking about.
5. **How Alpha is Measured: Effectiveness:** The science says it *should* work, but how do you measure if it *is* working? How is the vaunted “2.6x” number calculated? **WHAT** data is Alpha using to make its claims and what does that data actually say?
6. **Why this time might be different:** Most promising educational initiatives fail to have impact when expanded beyond their initial studies. Bryan Caplan might argue this is because most education education is just signaling anyway (“[The Case Against Education](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652)”). He also argues that most parental interventions have no impact (“[Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616)”) – He claims that how kids turn out is a combination of genetics and non-shared environment (randomness; nothing to do with parenting choices). How can we reconcile Caplan’s buttoned-up data with the idea that the “parenting choice” to educate your kids differently (like with Alpha) might result in different outcomes than would be expected from genetics alone? **WHY** could Alpha work?
7. **What Comes Next? The Scaling Problem:** The Alpha founders have a vision of completely re-inventing the way the world serves education. But even if Alpha works, it is up against a history of education programs that were never able to scale. It is also going to face resistance for being “weird”. **WHAT** comes next?
After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable—but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:
* **It isn’t** **genuine two‑hour learning**: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
* **It isn’t** **AI** in the way we have been thinking about it since the “[Attention is all you need](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762)” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
* **It definitely isn’t** **teacher‑free**: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
* **The bundle matters**: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly *three times* faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.
## Part One: Starting Assumptions
In November 2020 we had a meeting with the head of our kids’ original elite private school for the gifted. Her un-blinking eyes stared at us down through the Zoom screen as we listened compliantly, “My job is to keep everyone a little unhappy,”
I resisted the urge to mention [Vilfredo Pareto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto).
We had just spent a month working with a team of kindergarten parents drafting potential constructive fixes to the COVID mess our kids were experiencing. We were not happy with the status quo. While much has been written about how private schools generally handled COVID better than their public counterparts, our school was an exception. While other private schools in the area had moved back to full time in-person learning on campus, ours continued to stream YouTube yoga for P.E. To their credit, other teachers tried harder, but none had experience trying to teach five-year olds over Zoom, and frankly the Youtube videos were sometimes the most engaging content the kids experienced in a given day.
We paid $35,000/year so instructors could curate videos for our kids – and that didn’t even include babysitting (I set up my “office” in the closet of her room so I could help when she needed it. You could imagine how productive I was that year).
A friend who had had kids graduate from the school recommended I speak with the head of the board. He in turn suggested we get a group of parents together to write a proposal and get it in front of the head of the school. That was exactly what we did. We summarized the academic data breakdowns on the risk of COVID to children including spreading rates at schools with different policies. We provided examples of what other schools around the world were doing both to mitigate risk of spread, but also to ensure more engaged learning from the kids – options for better ventilation, outdoor pods options – anything but more Zoom yoga for our five‑year‑olds. She did not respond the way the head of the board led us to expect she would. The response wasn’t gratitude or appreciation – or even interest; it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”. That was the moment the shine of the school’s claim to be a “inspiration for gifted children” had completely vanished. We were no longer enrolled either emotionally or analytically. We were enrolled because we didn’t see any better alternatives.
Voice clearly wasn’t an option; [Hirschman’s trilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty) left us with “loyalty or exit.” We chose loyalty, mostly because in the short term there was no way to switch to the few schools that were allowing in-person learning during COVID, and in the longer term, we just hoped the school would “fix itself” once things got back to normal, and switching would mean either moving or accepting much longer commutes. Hopefully COVID would be over soon.
#### What selective private schools do well
In order to get into this school our kids needed to score in the top 3% on an [IQ-test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) they took when they were four-years old. As parents we needed to complete a college-style application with a dozen short essays (“How will your family contribute to the DEI goals of our school?”). The most promising of the high-IQ preschoolers whose parents did not screw-up the essay questions were given an opportunity to experience an in-person day of group assessments. Roughly half of those kids were offered admittance.
Now, after four years with three kids at this ultra-selective school, I can name exactly four genuine upgrades over our neighborhood public school:
* **Tiny classes** – teacher‑to‑student ratio hovered around 10 : 1 versus 25:1 or worse at the public school
* **Exceptional peers** – classroom disruption was rare, they were surrounded by incredibly bright and motivated classmates – kids enthralled by learning rather than make-up and crop tops (yes, even in elementary schools)
* **Deep pockets** – music rooms, tech labs, theatre programs – even ski trips
* **No bottom‑quartile teachers** – there were weak teachers, but nothing like the worst duds you hear about, or that I had experienced as a child. No one was “phoning it in”.
But… for many other characteristics I did not see any difference from the free, local, public schools:
* **Median teacher skill** ≈ public median. Our friends in the public schools had lots of great teachers.
* **Best teacher skill** ≈ public best. Some of the best teachers at our school left to teach in the public schools
* Same state curriculum, same worksheets, **same pace.**
The school philosophy was “no acceleration—just go deep.” We knew this was the philosophy going in. The pitch was that instead of accelerating through the state curriculum the teachers would take their time with the kids and allow them to fully explore and master the content of each grade. When we asked for examples of what that meant in practice we were told things like: “Instead of reading more advanced vocabulary, the students will learn to read out loud and use emotion and character impressions. They will learn how to vary the timing of their reading like where and when to pause to create emotion in the listener”. That sounded reasonable! It sounded like more learning, but just *different* learning than what the state had mandated.
In practice that was not what happened.
In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.”
#### Smart kids + small classes ≠ accountability.
The kids had time to do music, lego building, theatre and Friday ski trips because they were all really bright. They didn’t need 6+ hours a day to learn the limited math required by the state, and since the school did not feel the need to advance faster than the state, there was no pressure to push learning at all – on anything really.
There was no overall school curriculum. Every teacher did their own thing. While one first grade class had weekly spelling bees, the teacher in the other classroom did not believe in learning spelling at all. But it didn’t matter. The metrics they measured the kids on in both classes advanced “enough” that no one was concerned.
Most time wasn’t spent on math or language anyway. Beyond the brochure activities like skiing and theater and the four hours of foreign language per week they split between Spanish and Mandarin (which was really a great opportunity for the kids who already spoke Spanish and Mandarin to have their egos flattered. I did not see any *learning* in either language class. I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact), a lot of time was spent on DEI.
DEI was pitched as helping kids handle the emotions that often come from being sensitive gifted children (they called it “Synapse”). In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth.
#### The talent drain
In Spring 2024 the “intermediate-school” head resigned, as did the 40+ year veteran science teacher we had been looking forward to our daughter having, the beloved tech teacher who had built a her own proprietary “learn to type” software, plus half the lower‑school faculty. Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.
One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling the world with an organization called “[Boundless](https://boundless.life/)” but decided the timing wasn’t right. Earlier in the year we had started exploring moving to the charter city of [Prospera](https://www.prospera.co/en). There is a Montessori school there that seemed like it might be alright. And we could surround the kids with an interesting group of people (and live on the beach!). But by the spring we had ruled it out. There did not seem to be many families as part of the community and we were not comfortable with the risk profile based on what was happening with the conflict between Honduras and their charter cities.
Then I stumbled across Alpha: Two‑hour mornings, life‑skills afternoons, claims of 2x learning. Marketing copy is cheap; still, the promise was different enough to warrant due diligence. The initial plan was to fly some of the kids to Austin for an Alpha summer camp for a week in June – just to try it out. But once we started exploring more my wife asked me: “Could we actually move to Austin and try it for a year? Based on what is happening at the kids' school, this might be the year to try it.”
So over eight weeks we flew to Austin five times – conversations with admissions and school heads, real estate searches, kids doing shadow‑days. Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”. And every guide I spoke to was extremely impressive themselves. They reminded me of the staff you run into when visiting Disney World. They all seemed “full faced” and fully-engaged. When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired.
We pulled the trigger in July.
New house. Admissions letter signed. Moving truck (plus car-mover) scheduled for October.
Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.
#### The hypothesis I carried south
Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration. If Alpha was real, we’d see that differential, measurable impact by Christmas – that was when we would need to decide if we would cut bait and re-apply to schools back home (and sign the kids up for more IQ-tests. The school would not accept old ones). That prior—*show me velocity, not polish*—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read.
## Part Two: A History of Alpha
*Note: This is my best attempt at piecing together the history of the school based on conversations with co‑founder MacKenzie Price, high school head Chris Locke, Alpha staff, and Alpha parents; All dates are estimates and I am SURE I have gotten some details wrong. I will come back after the fact in the comments and make corrections as I hear from the people involved with corrections.*
#### 2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha”
[MacKenzie Price](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mackenzielprice/), then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. [Joe Liemandt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Liemandt) — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home.
#### 2017 – 2020 | K-8 Expansion and 2-hour focus
Alpha grew to roughly 90 students from K‑8 and stabilized. Morning “core blocks” were still teacher‑driven (20‑minute bursts, 5‑minute breaks, rinse, repeat), but focused on students engaged in exercises with rapid feedback (not lectures). Afternoon workshops covered “life skills” like how to give and receive feedback or public speaking. I have not seen academic data from this time period, but when I spoke to Chris Locke, head of Alpha’s high school (which launched around 2020), he told me the kids coming into his 9th grade program were “fine,” academically – it was their life skills, confidence, and ability to engage with adults and their peers were exceptional. At this stage no AI, no dashboard, no 2x learning, no portal — just better ratios and focused pacing and the result was well balanced kids who were enjoying their education experience (even if they were unexceptional academically).
#### 2020 – 2022 | Platform Era Begins
Somewhere along the way Liemandt hired a small engineering team to stitch together edtech learning tools. Many schools use tools like iXL, Beast Academy and Amira. Those tools fit in well with the 2-hour structured approach Alpha was using. The “platform” Liemandt’s team built was meant as a tool to free up guide time so that students could be more self-directed. The dev team stitched together the preferred off‑the‑shelf apps behind a single login, and built out tracking and dashboards so guides (and students) could easily see how they were progressing. This also gave the curriculum team (there was a curriculum team now) data to understand where students were spending their time, what tools were working, and which weren’t as effective.
The Alpha Portal was born.
Not only did it increase efficiency, it provided data to iterate with.
Chris Locke saw the curve change incrementally: each new cohort of ninth‑graders under the new tech-enabled learning platform came in a little stronger academically. The “life skills” were now being matched by the “academic skills”.
#### 2022 | Expansion and Iteration
By having access to Alpha kids post-graduation in the high school, Locke could send feedback back to the elementary school.The kids coming out of the new program were now killing it academically on Math, Language, and Science, but they were still weak on things like History and Geography. He fed that type of information back to the curriculum designers, who iterated and improved the program. Soon, in addition to the core platform that directed students to third-party tools, the tech team was building proprietary “Alpha” tools themselves. The flagship of the in-house tools was “AlphaReads”. AlphaReads requires students to read progressively more complicated passages, followed by answering reading comprehension questions. In addition to helping the kids improve reading skills, Alpha uses it to push types of content. Instead of classes in history, geography, economics and political science, some of the reading passages will cover that material (in addition to learning how to read and understand Shakespeare and Proust).
The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects.
#### Spring 2024 | Field Pilots & Ukraine Trip
Alpha tuition is high for the Austin area ($40,000 vs average private school ~$10,000-$15,000), but unlike most private schools tuition is all-inclusive. There are no extra fees for computers or field trips. There are no silent auctions or appeals for donations. This “no extra fees” allows the school to do some pretty ridiculous things.
In the first half of 2024 Alpha sent a group of students to Poland to help launch a 2-hour learning pilot among Ukrainian refugees. Students did not pay to go on the trip. But students also did not have a “right” to go on the trip. They had to earn it. In addition to being on top of academic and non-academic expectations, students who wanted to participate had to learn basic Ukrainian so they could interact with the students in Poland they were meant to be helping. By not linking the opportunity to payment, the school could instead link it to behavior and achievement.
This year a group of kids who learned to sail during the school year are going on a sailing trip through the Caribbean – for no additional fees to the parents.
I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?”
#### Fall 2024 | “Pick‑Your‑Afternoon” Specialist Schools
MacKenzie told me that there was consensus among the current parents of Alpha that the 2-hour learning program was exceptional and was making a huge difference with their kids. Their kids were all learning at breathtaking speed in a very condensed period of time. But there was NOT consensus about what the kids should be doing in the other 22-hours of the day. Some parents wanted to utilize the platform’s capabilities to go even faster. Some wanted their kids to just chill out and enjoy the rest of their day – let kids be kids. Others wanted their kids to use the freed up time to do sports, or study music.
It was clear to her that “learn more faster in a short period of time” was a universal desire. But beyond that it was unclear what the “right” solution for the rest of her program was. You can make the morning ultra-personalized, but if the goal of the afternoon is socialization that you are missing in the morning, you need to have some sort of alignment on how to spend that afternoon.
That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools.
Three micro‑campuses opened August 2024:
* **[GT School](https://gt.school/) (Georgetown, TX)** — Alpha’s “Gifted and Talented” School. Higher admissions bar; higher academic expectations; Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.
* **[Lake Travis Sports Academy](https://sportsacademy.school/)** — Alpha’s “Sports school”. Kids who get through their academics in the morning spend the afternoon on sport skills, strength & conditioning, tactics, strategy, and sports psychology.
* **[NextGen Academy](https://nextgenacademy.school/) (Austin)** —Perhaps the most radical experiment. Afternoons are spent training in competitive esports & game design.
Each new campus launched with <10 students, two or more local guides, and the same two‑hour core.
Simultaneously Alpha opened a Miami elementary campus, promoted the idea that cities could launch “micro schools” if they had enough local demand (unless you count Miami, none actually launched) and piloted a beta-test of a Home‑School versionof the platform. Early homeschool data showed that kids were using it for ~2 hours/day as planned, but only seeing a 1x learning growth — still a fine result for only doing 2-hours of academics per day, but a long way from what Alpha was delivering on their own campuses, so the program has stayed in beta.
#### Jan 2025 | Charter & Licence Play
Alpha now had a parent company, “[2-hour Learning](https://2hourlearning.com/)”, which sat above all of the schools, the home school product, and the platform itself (that they now offer to license out to third parties). The parent company filed under “Unbound Academy” to launch charter schools in Arizona and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania school was rejected, but the Arizona school will launch in fall 2025. There are more applications pending in at least Utah, Arkansa, North Carolina, South Carolina (and likely more).
While the PR spin around these schools is “AI-driven, no teachers” in practice they use 20:1 ~~teacher~~ guide:student ratios (vs the 5:1 ratio at the Alpha private schools)
Generally states subsidize charter schools in the neighborhood of $10,000 per student – which is a lot lower than what Alpha charges. They should be able to make those economics work by using fewer, less expensive teachers, not having an expensive campus (or no campus at all for the online schools), skimming on the extras (no trips to Poland), avoiding teaching the youngest kids (Arizona is 4th-8th grade), and being willing to accept smaller or even negligible margin on their learning platform.
The goal of these schools does not seem to be making money or profit – at least not right away. The goal seems to be rapidly expanding the program to have more influence, and to see if they can make it work with “non-selected kids at a low price point”.
### Fall 2025 and Beyond | The Future
The Alpha website claims the following [locations](https://alpha.school/locations/#) are launching in Fall 2025:
* Houston, TX
* Fort Worth, TX
* Santa Barbara, CA
* Phoenix, AR
* Orlando, FL
* Tampa, FL
* Palm Beach, FL
* New York City, NY
I also know that there is a physical location selected for Fort Lauderdale. While it is possible they launch eight (or nine) new campuses in the fall (they did pull off four last year), I expect that is more about “putting it out there” and then launching the campuses that get enough commitment. It is hard to launch a new school. Parents are risk averse, and many who are willing to take risks may not do it if they don’t think the school is even likely to happen. Better to say you are going to launch in Fort Worth, and then see what demand looks like. You can pull the trigger or pull the shoot depending on which markets are getting natural traction.
In the Fall of 2024 in addition to the four campuses they did launch, they said they were going to go live with a campus in Denver, ten micro schools and the (non-beta) home school program – none of which happened. My guess is that four of the eight schools they announced will have guides working and kids attending in September 2025.
Now: What do these schools actually do? What does a day at Alpha really look like? How are they getting the 2x+ results they are claiming?
## Part Three: How Alpha Works (Part 1)
Like most schools, Alpha is a bundle of products. In Alpha’s case I would break them out as:
* The 2-hour learning platform and tools
* The afternoon program (workshops and check chart)
* The incentive system
* The school itself (guides, building, day care)
Almost all the discourse about Alpha is about the 2-hour learning program, and that is what I want to dive into most in this section, but I will also touch on the afternoon program (which I think is important). The incentive system – a very important, undiscussed part of the secret sauce – will get its own section in Part Four.
#### The Two-Hour Platform
Every Alpha “flavor” – the core school, the home school, the Gifted School, the sports school – uses the same 2-hour learning platform.
We drop our kids off around 8:30am. After a morning kick-off (some sort of group activity) they put on (optional) headphones, find a place to work (the school is a bit like a start-up office), and log in to their personal 2-hour learning platform. The platform informs each student what their specific required lessons are for the day (usually between 8-12 lessons). Those “required” lessons are called “minimums” and the kids talk about it that way:
* “Did you hit your minimums?”
* “I missed my minimums by one lesson today but it wasn’t my fault”
* “We got to skip our minimums today to do MAP testing”
* “Guess what dad! I did my minimums plus two today!” (i.e., two additional lessons beyond her “minimums”)
While hitting the “minimums” are required, the students can choose the order they work through those requirements. Depending on the kid subjects covered in the platform could include:
* Math (learning new math; mostly on iXL)
* “Fast Math” (doing simple math they already know how to do faster and more accurately; mostly on “Rocket Math” or “FastMath Pro”)
* Language (Spelling and grammar; mostly on iXL)
* Foreign Language (mostly on duolingo)
* Science (mostly on iXL)
* Social Studies (mostly on iXL)
* Reading (Older kids are on “Alpha Reads”; younger kids use Amira and Lalio)
* Writing (Mostly on AlphaWrite)
If a student gets all their lessons done in the allotted time they can choose which subjects to work ahead on – they can try and balance subjects, work on the ones they are struggling on the most, or just push ahead in the ones they are already excelling in (They do get coaching on this from guides on a regular basis, but the kids make their own choices).
A typical lesson involves watching a curated YouTube video followed by specifically selected problem sets within the third party tools. After every question the student is given feedback – either “Great Job!” (with the option to click and learn more) or “Incorrect” followed by explanations on why the question was wrong and a mini-remedial lesson to fill in the knowledge gap.
If a pattern of stumbles appears the system will automatically task the student to book a “coaching call” with a remote teacher (most of these teachers seem to be based in Brazil). Kids can also choose to self-book calls with the “coaches” at any time (my daughter told me today that she was having trouble with a math problem set and she booked a coaching call. I asked her how long it took between when she booked it and when she had the call and she said it depends on how busy the coaches are. Today she booked it at 11:10 and had the call at 11:15, but she said once it took her two days to get the meeting. I asked her how often she has a call and she said less than once a day, but more than once a week). The kids also automatically do a coaching call before they can schedule a “mastery test” which covers all the grade level material in a subject (like a final exam).
At the end of the day the students get a report on their achievements that day, as well as overall feedback (this is potentially where the “AI” comes in. The computers track both clicks and eye tracking. It can tell both what the student clicked, but also if they were paying attention or distracted, or how much effort they put into reading the feedback when they got questions wrong).
All of this is shared with the parents on our own dashboard. Here is what that dashboard looks like for a couple of recent classes for one of my kids:
In this example, on this particular day, my daughter spent 13-minutes on Language Arts during her 2-hour learning time. She got 100% of the problems correct (when you scroll over the blue circle it reads 16/16) and completed “one mastery” (meaning she got credit for the lesson because she got more than 80% correct on the mastery test). She also spent 19-minutes on Math (not during the standard 2-hour learning block, hence “non-2h session”), getting 60% of the questions correct (6/10), so she did not earn a math “mastery” that day. For both subjects there is a “Coaching button” (not every subject on every day has coaching).
Here is what the Language Arts feedback looks like (where she killed it that day):
Clicking on the example “here” hyperlinks takes you to a live stream of the moment the system believes backs up the feedback it provided. You can see her face on video and watch what she is doing on the screen.
Here is the feedback for math that day (that did not go as well):
The constructive feedback to save eye strain:
* Not spending enough time on the subject
* Ignoring explanations after mistakes
* Rushing questions
No wonder she only got 60% correct.
When they actually listen, the immediate impact is powerful. Normally in school you do your work, submit it, have it graded, and get it back some time in the future – if you are lucky after you finish a full problem set, if unlucky a week or two later. With Alpha 100% of the time you get feedback immediately after you answer each question. If you are wrong you both get to find out right away and find out what you did wrong so you won’t repeat the mistake on the next question.
In addition to the daily report, parents also have access to a weekly summary and an overall progress report. The latter is the most interesting. It tells you how many lessons your kid has completed at each grade level difficulty, how many more lessons they need to master to move on to the next grade, and how long that is likely to take at the rate they are progressing. Here is my 2nd grader’s recent report:
She has “mastered” 81/113 lessons for 3rd grade language, 141/157 3rd grade math, and 62/80 3rd grade science. If she stays on track doing 25-minutes in each subject per day for five days per week, she will complete 3rd grade in Language in three weeks, math in one week and science in four weeks. And if she decides to push harder and do an additional 35 minutes in a subject every day she will be finished 3rd grade within the week.
When a student finishes all the lessons they need for a grade level subject they take a grade-level mastery test that covers all the material they were supposed to learn. If they get a high enough score on that test they move on to the next grade level (all of the questions they missed will still come back for later review though so they don’t move on with gaps). If they do not pass that test then they keep working on more lessons on the grade they are currently on with a focus on closing the gaps they need to pass next time.
During these morning sessions every 20-30 minutes the kids get what is called a “Q-break” where they leave their computers for 5-10 minutes and go run around outside. The culture is one of “focus hard for short bursts, then relax, then go back and focus again”
Most schools are set up in traditional ways, and then adjust the best they can within that structure to serve the needs of their unique students the best they can. What is impressive about the Alpha program is that is seems to be built from the ground-up around three of the most powerful learning principles:
1. **1:1 learning:** It’s not really 1:1, but in practice every kids is working on stuff at the edge of their ability, rather than the median of a group
2. **Spaced Repetition:** The system brings back topics on a regular basis “just before” the student forgets, so it is more likely to encode in long term memory
3. **Mastery:** In most education settings school students learn some percentage of the material and then move on. This can work for a while, but eventually students who missed something will struggle because they don’t have the tools to learn the next thing on the ladder. This is particularly noticeable in mathematics, but it can be a problem anywhere. With “mastery learning” the kids are not allowed to move on without mastering the subject. If there is something they miss, the system will bring it back again and again until they have mastered it. Liemandt in particular thinks this is a very big deal, and believes it is a significant driver of Alpha’s success (and the reason many kids are failing in traditional schools)
The morning “2-hour learning” session wraps up around noon. For those tracking at home that is “drop off at 830am, finish 2-hour learning 3.5 hours later”. They really are spending roughly 2 hours learning, it just takes half the day to get that 2-hours of focus in.
Then the afternoon begins.
#### Alpha Afternoons
Afternoons are where the Alpha family of schools diverge. The Sports Academy is doing very different things in the afternoon than the GT school. But all the schools use a similar structure of breaking the afternoon into two types of work:
1. Workshops
2. Check Chart Time
Workshops were the “life skills” program at the original Alpha School. Some of the workshops at the core school have included:
* **Thanksgiving Dinner:** The Kinders and 1st graders learned to make a dinner for their parents
* **Time Traveler Tea:** The K-1’s learned about customs at different countries in different time periods and then had to pass a test where they had to “infiltrate” that culture without making any mistakes
* **Ice Skating:** The kids all went ice skating. The idea was to teach resilience since none of the kids in Texas knew how to skate
* **Airbnb:** Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)
Those are a select list of the coolest ones (in my opinion). Some friends who go to the main campus complained to us that the workshops in general are “not academic enough”. They say most are either “sports” (they mentioned sailing, golf, and running), or “entrepreneurship”. When they pushed the administration on potentially doing more academic-minded workshops (writing, history seminars, economics, psychology, chemistry) they were told, “you sound like GT parents. Have you considered that school?”
Our kids go to the GT School – the gifted and talented version of Alpha. All of our kids’ workshops are built around “competitive academics”. So far this year their workshops have included:
**Younger Kids (K-2nd grade):**
* “Teamwork” (made competitive by having the kids compete in adult escape rooms)
* Go (the game)
* Competitive Debate
* Piano (they all learned a level-one conservatory piece. I was impressed!)
* Chemistry (The stuff I learned in 10th grade high school combined with using lego-type materials to actually build each element)
* “Rock Band” (they are each learning an instrument. They are also using AI tools to write their own songs)
* Magnets (building tracks and racing electric cars)
**Older Kids (3rd-8th grade):**
* Chess
* Competitive Speech
* Competitive Debate
* Competitive Robotics
* Programming (not competitive so far, but potentially building that way)
* Quiz Bowl
All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “[100% Money Back guarantee](https://gt.school/)” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.
The second part of the afternoon is roughly 45-minutes per day to work on individual “Check Charts”**.** Check Charts are an assigned series of tasks each student needs to complete before they can move to the next “level”. Levels are mostly broken into two-year cohorts of kids. Roughly:
* Learning Lab = Kindergarten and 1st grade
* Linc = 2nd grade
* L1 = 3/4th grade
* L2 = 5/6th grade
* L3 = 7/8th grade
Kids advance academically at their own speed and could, in theory, finish all of elementary school content long before they get to 8th grade (more on that in section four), but they don’t advance from level-to-level based on academics (or at least not academics alone). Instead the kids are required to “complete their check chart”. When they do, they move up, and that can happen at five different points in the year (they don’t need to wait until the fall).
The check chart provides two benefits:
1. **It gives the kids autonomy.** Every week they have time where they can choose what to do with it. They decide which check items they want to work on next
2. **It gives the kids goals** beyond the academic platform, and shows that they don’t advance “automatically” based on just “aging up”. If their friend moves up before they do, they need to double down so they can catch up.
Check Chart items vary considerably. Some items on my kids’ charts this year:
* Give a tour of the school to visiting parents
* Build a paper airplane that flies more than 30 feet
* Complete a 1000-piece puzzle
* Assemble a piece of IKEA furniture on your own (with a time limit)
* Give a TED-type talk to 300+ people
* Identify all 50 states on a map without any errors
* Come top-10% in a local chess tournament
* Write a letter in cursive at least 20 sentences long
* Type 30-words per minute with 95% accuracy
* Compete in a local Quizbowl tournament and qualify for nationals
* Take 10% off your time to run a mile
Workshops in the afternoons are the “fun” part of school. They are the equivalent of the music, theater and art classes that fill in a traditional school schedule (just more focused, measurable and creative). The check charts both exist to fill in the gaps on important things that are missing from the academic program (like public speaking and typing) and to teach the students the importance of agency – there is no one standing over them with deadlines on the check chart. They just won’t move on to the next level with their friends if they don’t get everything on the list done.
All of these elements are held together by the thing that the PR program does not mention – the thing that, when most parents hear about it, they recoil in horror: Incentives (aka, bribes)
## Part Four: How Alpha Works (Part 2): Incentives
People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, [quotes a 2010 Gallup poll](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/092011_incentives_fryer_allen_paper2.pdf) that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only [69% of Americans believe another Civil War](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/surprising-things-americans-actually-agree-on/18/) would be a bad thing. Only [78% agree that American independence from Britain](https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/crjq3mojm5/toplines_Views%20on%20Britain%20and%20the%20Monarchy.pdf) was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.
So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.
The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids(35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.
I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids).
Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This [paper](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/092011_incentives_fryer_allen_paper2.pdf) has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect. Tell a kid to read a book or show up on time and they know what they need to do to get the money. Tell them to get higher scores on tests and, while they have a rough idea how to do that (pay more attention in class, study longer and more efficiently), the actual things they need to do are not entirely clear and the inputs they put in (studying) are not directly tied to the outputs (test scores) – and the incentives have no impact.
As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group.
#### When we pay kids to take on new habits, the habits tend to stick after the incentives go away.
Is this that different from incentivizing your kids to eat their vegetables and then rewarding them with dessert? The hope is that they will build the habit of eating vegetables and will eat them without external rewards when they are older and understand the value of the habit you have built for them as children.
None of this should not be too surprising for people who have read Anders Ericsson’s work on building expertise.
Ericsson is most famous for being the source of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of practice to become an expert” meme. Ericsson was not impressed by Gladwell’s simplification of his findings and he wrote an [excellent book](https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp/1531864880) detailing what his findings really meant. That book describes the study Gladwell used to get to 10,000 hours.
At the elite music school in Berlin, the Hochschule für Musik, Ericsson sorted students into three groups by ability: future soloists, future orchestra professionals, and future teachers. He found that the three groups did not differ systematically in most characteristics. As groups they had the same IQs, the same age of starting music, and the same quality and quantity of instruction. The only measurable difference he found between the groups was the number of lifetime hours they had committed to “deliberate practice”. From age eight onward the future soloists logged almost three times more practice hours per week than the future teachers. On average the soloists had clocked in 10,000 hours of practice by the time they started at their elite music college.
That was where Gladwell got his 10,000 hour rule.
(One of Ericsson’s problems with Gladwell’s simplification is that he saw nothing special about 10,000 hours. There was a significant range among the elite students – 10,000 was just the average; Also the elite students were still just ‘students’ and while they were on track to become world class, none of them were world class yet. Ericsson estimates that would take another ten years of practice putting most of their total practice time to achieve world class performance well over 20,000 hours)
Ericsson’s next question was WHY did some students practice more than others? All of these kids wanted to be great musicians and have careers as musicians and all had dedicated large parts of their life to the craft, so why did some choose to practice more than others? His initial hypothesis is that some people just enjoyed practicing more than others. He dismissed the idea that some kids were just more talented than others, and replaced it with some kids, whether for genetic or environmental reasons, were just more “into practice” than others. But when he questioned the students he found that was not true at all.
The future elite soloists of the music world all *hated* practicing.
And so did everyone else.
All of the musicians at the school did not like the process of practicing. They enjoyed playing. They enjoyed being good musicians. They just hated the process of practicing to get good.
So why did they do it?
Because they wanted to be great musicians and they knew that they needed to practice to become great musicians.
According to Ericsson, the key to being great is deliberate practice. The key to deliberate practice is motivation.
Ericsson dug further to figure out where the motivation came from and he found it grew over three stages:
1. **Parental and authority approval:** Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don’t. He gives examples of mom saying “if you don’t practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor”.
2. **Peer approval:** At some point the young musicians begin to care less about what their parents think, and more about their relative status among their peers. Part of this is that they can perform music for their classmates, which is very impressive, but a bigger motivation is that their skills are recognized by other young musicians – their true peers.
3. **Self Actualization:** Eventually the best musicians stop caring about their peers and start internalizing the desire to be great. They see themselves as musicians, and they do the hard, uncomfortable work of practicing because “that is what a great musician does”.
Ericsson found every musician followed the same path (and he repeated it with other adult experts and came to the same conclusion).
When we look at adult “experts” or even adults who are still learning by reading books, we see people who have internal motivation and self actualization. Why do you read books as an adult? I expect most people who read books do it because they *like* reading books – and the reason they enjoy reading books is that they have read enough books in their lifetime that they are pretty good at reading books. For most people who read books, reading books is not “difficult” (if it is I expect most people put down that book and choose a less challenging one). And yes, many people read books to “learn things,” but almost everyone combines “learning things” with enjoyment. They enjoy the feeling of learning and they often retain parts of what they read, but it is a rare reader who takes notes while they are reading to review afterwards, or picks up a textbook after they have graduated from school. Many people want to learn, as long as the learning is enjoyable and not too much work. If retaining more of the learning takes extra effort, most people, most of the time, will not put in that effort.
If you are the type of person who reads challenging books at the edge of your ability and takes detailed notes to review afterwards in a space repetition tool, I expect you do it because you feel you are “the type of person who reads challenging books” – you have achieved self-actualization in book reading and learning. You are not the majority. You aren’t even the majority of the minority of people who read a lot of books.
Self actualization is where we want all our kids to reach (or at least “become a strong enough reader that they enjoy reading books and will do it for pleasure”). The question is how to get there. Ericsson has mapped out that path:
* Start with adult-generated incentives
* Surround the children with peers who will raise their status for being “learners”
* Hope at some point they self-actualize
Clearly not every kid will get to stage three (and no one will get to stage three in every endeavor), but Ericsson’s point is that EVERYONE who gets to stage three starts at stage one. And we know how to motivate kids in stage one – or at least Roland Fryer does.
Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:
Incentives → Motivation
Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice
Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery
Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.
Alpha HAS followed the data. They have built deliberate and extensive incentive systems. But Alpha also knows what the general population thinks of incentives, so they don’t talk about it. There are lots of parents that are against throwing kids learning in front of screens and lots of educators against “too rapidly accelerating learning”, but there are even more parents and educators against *bribing* kids. When you see the complaints about Alpha on Reddit they criticize the AI and the screen time and the lack of teachers and the tuition and the “funded by billionaires” but no one complains about the incentive/bribery system. Because unless you go to Alpha you don’t even know about the incentive system.
Alpha believes in the incentive system, and it is a very important part of their program, but they don’t brag about it.
#### Alpha’s Incentive Programs
Alpha schools have their own in-house currency. Alpha has “Alpha bucks”; GT School has “GT bucks”. My understanding is that they work a little differently on each campus, but the overall philosophy is the same. This review will focus on the details of the GT system since it is what I know best.
If the students complete their 2-hour learning “minimums” each day they earn about 10 GT Bucks. They get additional bonuses for every lesson they complete beyond their minimums. They also get a bonus if they finish their minimums within the scheduled time (vs going home and doing them later), additional bonuses if the entire class completes their minimums during the allotted time, and weekly bonuses for hitting longer term targets.
They only get credit if they both complete their lessons AND get 80% or higher on the problem sets within the lesson. If they get 79% they still move on (with the questions they missed coming back later for review), but they don’t get the GT bucks associated with the lesson (this stops gaming where the kids rush through the lessons just to get “bucks”)
A GT buck is worth 10-cents. So if they are really pushing a kid could be earning roughly $2 per day.
Fryer paid kids to read books, GT pays kids to do lessons.
Once a kid has earned a collection of GT bucks they can spend those bucks at the GT-store. The Alpha store has a wide selection of offerings. The GT store, because it is a much smaller school, is more like a catalog. The kids can select what they want and the school will order it so it is ready when they earn enough “bucks”. Every kid has their own personalized incentive – do the school work and they will get their personalized prize.
Different kids respond to this differently.
My youngest spends his GT-bucks as he earns them – coming home most weeks with a bouncy ball or a protein bar.
My middle daughter has ambitions to save for things (she really wants a lego chess set), but often gives in and buys something before she saves enough (she has built an impressive collection of stuffies).
My older daughter likes to save. She really wanted a Taylor Swift sweater and saved her points for months to buy it, but then, when she had enough bucks, she decided she didn’t want to spend them – so no sweater but a record number of points in her balance statement (then my middle daughter used *her* points to buy the sweater… You can imagine how that went…).
My kids are gifted. They love learning. They compete in academic bees and chess tournaments and musical productions for fun. But the GT incentive system has turbo-charged their academic learning well beyond that inborn desire to learn.
We decided to join the GT school in July, but, for logistical reasons, we could not start until October. For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL – the tool that Alpha students use for 80% of their academic work – including almost all of their Language, Math and Science lessons. I wanted to get the kids used to using it over the summer before they started school.
It did not go well.
We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at GT, but without the GT structure, and it did not work.
But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.
Was it bad that they were being bribed to do lessons? 76% of Americans would think so. But it definitely worked.
My middle daughter – who is the most driven by money – has completed more than two full grades of school in ~20-weeks (60% of the school year), and shows no signs of slowing down.
I have not noticed any reduced interest in learning outside of school. My oldest daughter does not like the idea of incentives at all. She doesn’t need the incentives and she thinks other kids shouldn’t need to be incentivized either. But the incentives *are* helping with her younger siblings, and, even if they aren’t pushing her to go harder, they definitely don’t seem to be *hurting* her internal drive.
#### Incentives, Incentives Everywhere
In addition to the core incentive system, the schools have been testing two new ones.
Part way through the school year at the GT school they created an incentive system to drive non-academic behavior.
In this system, called “Dojo Points”, kids earn Dojo Points by being pleasant, respectful team-players. The guides give out the points in qualitative ways when the kids demonstrate perseverance, teamwork, respect, autonomy, and when they give and receive feedback to each other. More so than the GT bucks, my kids will come home and tell me how many Dojo Points they earned that day. A high day is somewhere around six points.
The kid in each “section” (split between the older and the younger kids) who earns the most Dojo Points in a day becomes the daily “Dojo Master” and gets a “key”. At the end of the week, assuming no ties, there are five keys divided among the kids in each group. On Friday the kids are presented with a bunch of locked boxes. One of the boxes has a prize in it. The kids with keys check the boxes to see if their key opens the box with a prize.
The system seems to work.
My 6-year old can often be disruptive in many settings, including at school, but lately he has turned a corner at school and has been winning the daily Dojo Master (this week he has won four of the five days so far, and almost has a lock on the Friday prize).
Will he start mis-behaving more as soon as he loses access to the incentive? Maybe. He definitely misbehaves at home from time-to-time and has trouble regulating when things don’t go his way. Is his regulation now better than it was before he was put on the incentive program at school? I think so? But maybe that is just a function of him getting older and he would have been getting better anyway? Another example where it would have been nice to have a twin brother we could have experimented on I guess.
While GT was focused on non-academic behavior Alpha set their sites on another problem that schools face: Summer regression.
Educators have long known about the summer regression problem – kids tend to atrophy or regress over the summer break (this is worse for less privileged children, but true for all kids). We have not had our summer with GT yet, but last summer the Alpha school ran an experiment where kids who completed lessons in the summer were paid real money (US dollars – not “Alpha bucks”). They were given $1 per lesson completed over the summer (effectively 10x what they make during the school year). Recall that generally during the school day kids who “hit their minimums” complete about 10 lessons per day over 2-hours. So any kid who kept that up on their own over the summer could earn $10/day for 2-hours of work ($5/hour). Not bad for a 6-year old.
#### The Public Relations challenge
As Alpha is expanding its program beyond its own school it has, understandably, focused on the “AI-powered 2-hour learning” product. It is that tool that *seems* to be what differentiates Alpha from all the other schools in America. The tool lets kids learn 2.6x faster. But from my experience the tool is necessary but not sufficient. The tool provides the means for kids to advance and learn quickly, but it does not provide the motivation. The rest of the school has been built around providing the gaps that the tool misses – both the need to increase student motivation, but also any other gaps that come up. If the 2-hour learning tool is the self-driving car, the incentives are the fuel, and the rest of the school is the human behind the wheel who makes sure the self-driving car isn’t caught in a loop.
So what happens when Alpha takes their core product and pushes it somewhere without the infrastructure that goes around it? It still works, but just not as well.
In the way that Alpha measures effectiveness (see next section) students in the Alpha school advance 2.6x faster. Kids at the GT-school advance ~5x faster (mostly due to the selection effect of the kids they bring into that program). In the homeschool program the school is piloting with the exact same software (but without the supporting infrastructure, guides and incentives) the students are advancing at ~1x speed. That doesn’t seem awesome, but remember that is with just 2-hours of academics per day, not a full day of classes. Good but not great.
The Alpha team is trying to figure out how to improve the performance of the kids in the home school pilot before they expand it beyond the beta testers. I expect the answer will be related to the incentives.
## Part Five: Does it work?
Alpha claims 2.6x average learning speed versus traditional schools, but what does “learning speed” mean?
Even the Alpha guides get confused sometimes. There are two learning concepts that get entangled:
1. How fast students are learning and mastering the content – **“Lesson Clock Speed”**
2. How high students are scoring on standardized tests that measure content understanding – **“MAP Growth Speed”**
**Lesson Clock Speed (LCS)** can be measured by how many lessons the students are completing at “mastery” level and how long it takes them to complete those lessons. My 8-year old started 2nd grade content in mid-October 2025. She “mastered” all of 2nd grade by March 31st, 2025 (Reading: March 31st, Math: February 5th, Language: January 20th). She is now working her way through 3rd grade and the system estimated she will master all 3rd grade content before the end of May (Language: May 23rd, Math: May 9th, Science: May 7th). When she completes this content she will start on 4th grade material for the remainder of this year, and will start next school year part-way through that 4th grade content (assuming she doesn’t finish 4th grade over the summer). Since she missed the first 20% of the school year, we could say she is “learning” at (2.1/0.8) ~2.6x speed.
But that is NOT where the 2.6x number comes from.
Instead Alpha defines 2x learning as improvements in students MAP scores - **MAP Growth Speed (MGS)**
For those who are not deep in academic terminology (I know I wasn’t), MAP stands for **“[Measures of Academic Progress](https://www.nwea.org/map-growth/)”**. MAP is a set of standardized, computer-adaptive tests built by the Northwest Evaluation Association given to millions of students across America three times per year (fall, winter and spring). The adaptive nature of the test means that, while the “starting point” of the test depends on the student's age/grade level, the test questions increase or decrease in difficulty (of both concepts and expected knowledge) as students answer questions correctly or incorrectly. This means that not only can you compare scores across students in the same grade, you can compare scores of the same student over time, and of students across different grades. A 12th grader scoring a “238” has about the same knowledge as a 5th grader scoring “238”. If that score was a MAP math test taken in the fall, the 12th grader would be at the 60th percentile for his grade and the 5th grader would be at the 97th percentile for hers – but their knowledge and current capabilities would be about equivalent to each other.
Alpha has their students take the MAP tests three times per year. This testing can help the program adapt to understand if students who are “getting through the material” are actually retaining it and conceptualizing it, but it also helps measure progress. If a student is at 95th percentile in math in the fall, the MAP test will tell us if they are still at 95th percentile in the spring (or if they have advanced slower or faster than other 95th percentile students across the country).
You can see all of the [MAP percentile charts here](https://teach.mapnwea.org/impl/NormsTables.pdf) for all the kids who take it across America. For our purposes let’s look at the MAP percentile scores for math tests taken in the spring for the top 50% of kids in the country:
**A few things worth pointing out:**
1. **Everyone gets better.** Whether due to education or not, the scores of any given percentile increase with each passing year
2. **Everyone slows down.** Students get rapidly better on the test in the early years of school, and that progress slows down as they get older. Kindergarten to 1st grade sees increases of ~20 points at most percentile ranks. 11th to 12th grade improvements are minimal. Even the best students at that age are only getting ~6 points better on the test, and the median student sees no improvement at all over 12th grade.
3. **The best kids slow down the least.** From Kindergarten to first grade everyone is advancing at about 20-points on the test, so the more average kids are actually improving faster on a percentage basis than the top-1% kids. But around middle school something happens. From 7th to 8th grade the top percentile kids gain 7-points on the test. The 50th percentile kids gain 3-points. The lowest percentile kids (not shown in that image) only improve by a single point (from a much lower base)
4. **The top performing kids are WAY ahead of the average and the lower tier kids.** The kids at the top percentile achieve the median score of a graduating senior by the end of 3rd grade! And recall this is not an IQ test – this is a content test. The top 1% of 3rd graders have more content knowledge and comprehension than the median high school graduate.
When Alpha says their kids are learning 2.6x faster than kids in traditional schools, what they mean is that Alpha kids are increasing their MAP scores 2.6-times faster than similar kids at traditional schools.
What that means in practice is that kids at Alpha improve their percentile ranking on MAP results every time they take the test. If a 3rd-grader at Alpha scores a “209” on Math in the Spring (71st percentile), you can expect she will achieve (on average) a 235 the following spring when she is in 4th grade (traditional 71st-percentile 3rd graders improve ~10 points, so her experience at Alpha should have her improve 10 x 2.6 = 26 points). That would jump her from 71st-percentile to 94th-percentile. Keep it up and by 5th grade she moves beyond the 99th percentile (if you are lost with the math, don’t worry. The point is just that Alpha kids are learning faster, and increasing their “relative rank” with the rest of the country as they spend more time at Alpha)
Note that because of the base rates, it is a lot easier to improve versus your peers at traditional schools when you are “average” and when you are older. Median kids do not advance as fast, and older kids do not advance as fast – so getting a 2.6x improvement is easier in absolute magnitude when you start low.
So we should expect that the GT school – where kids enter the program scoring in the 90th+ percentile – might have faster overall improvement, but a smaller delta from traditional schools where the top percentile kids are still advancing very quickly. That would have been my ingoing hypothesis.
What is surprising is that, with the caveat that the GT-school is both new and small (only five kids took both the fall 2024 and the winter 2025 tests), those few data points are pointing in the opposite direction: on average those five kids’ MAP scores improved **5x faster** than other kids who started the year at those base levels. The absurdity of those numbers makes me think that that rate will not hold, but it makes me optimistic that the program might actually speed up bright kids’ academics even more than it helps the average kid. Since my kids started the school year late in October (rather than mid-August when the standard school year started), they missed the fall MAP testing and we only have a single data point for each of them – the Winter MAP. They will be taking the Spring MAP in the next few weeks and I will be happy to share how they have progressed when I have that data back. I think they will have improved, but I am skeptical it will be at 5x faster than other similarly bright kids across the country.
There are at least three other objections to using MAP scores to measure progress or “success” of academic programs:
1. Do MAP scores actually correlate to anything important later in life?
2. Is this all just “teaching to the test”? Are the kids just learning knowledge to pass multiple-choice tests? What about critical thinking, formulating long-form thoughts through essays, and other types of learning?
3. How effective are other elite-schools and learning programs at increasing MAP scores?
I do not want to get bogged down in any of those questions, but all deserve at least courtesy answers.
#### Do MAP scores correlate with anything important?
I am not aware of any studies that look at MAP score correlations to lifetime income or other adult measures of “success”, but MAP scores are highly correlated with [SAT scores](https://www.nwea.org/uploads/2020/10/MAP-SAT-College-Readiness-Benchmarks_NWEA_linkingstudy.pdf), [post-secondary success](https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/roadmap-success-using-state-assessment-data-predict-postsecondary-success), and likelihood to attend an [elite college](https://www.elmbrookschools.org/uploaded/SSMigration/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/NWEAcollegereadinessindicator.pdf). MAP is not trying to measure the same thing as SAT, but it's not surprising they are correlated. It begs the question of whether improving a MAP score will improve other things you care about (SAT scores, getting in a good college, having a happy life), but it is at least indicative that it is not measuring something meaningless.
#### Are scores inflated because of teaching to the test?
I believe there is something to the concern about “teaching to the test”. The kids doing the Alpha program spend a lot of time learning how to take multiple choice tests based on the content they have learned, and the content they are learning is the same content that is being tested on MAP. The best way to get better at a thing, is to practice doing that thing. To the first level of approximation this is fine as long as you are testing the right thing.
You see this effect in competitions.
If you want to get a high score in a diving competition, the first step is learning how to dive and how to dive better. You don’t need to worry about what the final test will evaluate you on, because no matter what it is evaluating you on, you need to be able to enter the water head first without making a splash and there are some fundamental skills you need to learn in order to do that.
But once you get to be a very good diver, then you may find the judging criteria starts to influence what you practice, how you practice, and what you choose to demonstrate in competition. Does one type of dive tend to score higher for any given level of skill? If so, you should focus your practice on that style.
That type of “over-optimization” tends to only happen at the highest levels of competition (if you want to get good at Jeopardy, start by having a large knowledge base. Once you are very good, THEN you may want to use frequency charts to fill in likely gaps (do you know all your alcoholic drink ingredients?), learn “pavlovs” (Pop art = Warhol; Aguinaldo = Philippines; two fathoms = Mark Twain) and study bidding strategies for daily doubles – things that will get you better at the “Jeopardy test”, but not get you better at the underlying skill that Jeopardy is, in theory, testing you on).
It is possible that Alpha’s learning methods veer into “over-optimization” but I have not seen that in practice. Mostly they are in the “learn the material you are expected to learn, and then you will test higher when you are tested against that material”.
The remaining “teach to the test” concern is “are we testing for the correct things?”
There I *do* have some concerns.
The MAP tests seem to be very effective at assessing knowledge and ability to incorporate that knowledge in novel situations. What MAP is not testing are things like:
* Writing essays
* Long form planning and strategy
* Public speaking and persuasion
* Making connections between two disparate concepts or ideas
* Deep understanding of the drivers of history
* Psychology
* Economics
* Leadership
…and so many other things.
100% of MAP test questions are multiple choice. Where are the students learning deep thinking? What about the learning you get from small group discussions in a university seminar?
I think Alpha’s answer to that concern is “that is what we do in the afternoon workshops”. I think that is a fine answer. How well do most schools teach those things as a baseline? Maybe Alpha does as good a job as other schools teaching public speaking. Maybe they do a better job? But what is missing is an objective measure of how well they do it.
I can see that GT is making progress on the measurement of those softer skills by running workshops on “competitive academics” where the output is legible. The kids at that school don’t just learn to give talks, they give talks and then submit them to The Moth in an attempt to qualify for (and win) Storytelling Nights. They don’t just write persuasive essays graded by their teachers, they write persuasive essays and then submit them to national competitions. They don’t just learn the concepts of long term planning and strategy, they put them in practice playing go and chess and then compete against their peers and earn an elo ranking. I think it is a fair way to assess these things and leads to more accountability, but note that it is only happening at the GT school with ten kids, not the main Alpha campus, and the data points so far on whether it is working are very thin.
Our friends at the flagship school are less convinced that the climbing wall workshop is teaching those “non-state mandated” academics that the core program misses.
Another disappointment is “Alpha Writes”.
The school was not happy with the third-party reading and writing apps out there and built their own. Alpha Reads is excellent. Alpha Writes (which is newer and just launched about a month ago) is not. I believe the school (and Joe Liemandt) understands that the product is not good enough, and they are taking it back to the drawing board, but for now I do not think the Alpha kids have any real edge versus traditional schools in their training on essay or creative writing skills.
#### How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country?
This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside. How does the 2.6x improvement that Alpha is delivering compare to those elite institutions?
I have no idea.
Unlike Alpha I have not found any elite school who has shared the MAP improvement rate for the students at their school.
I expect these elite schools are very good for all the reasons the selective private school I sent my kids to before GT was good: They have a select group of peers, they have great teacher:student ratios, and they have incredible resources. I also expect most of these schools do NOT accelerate (I could very well be wrong here and would be happy to be corrected). If they are like the schools I am familiar with they allow their students to advance through the material at the “normal” pace, with the normal pedagogy, but, because those kids are so bright, that leaves them plenty of time for enrichment.
[Lakeside school](https://www.lakesideschool.org/uploaded/2024-2025_US_Curriculum_Guide.pdf) (where Bill Gates’ children attended) has classes where students write and perform one-act plays at the school’s annual festival; advanced photography courses where students develop their own signature style and brand; Literature classes on Victorian novels, the Harlem Renaissance, and Chaos Theory; classes on abnormal psychology, architecture, blockchain, game theory and wilderness survival and leadership. I am sure by the time they graduate, students from Lakeside have learned much more than what is measured on a standardized MAP test.
The problem is that it is difficult to measure those “extra things”, so you are left making the decision on vibes and prestige and marketing materials. (and meanwhile the objective numbers are held under lock and key by the elite schools themselves who have no incentive to share them when they are already winning on vibes).
Is there any data on how different education programs are doing on improving MAP scores? I have not found any schools other than Alpha that share their data, but there are some “educational interventions” where the measured output was an improvement on MAP tests.
[Teach to One: Math](https://margrady.com/tto/) is a math program used in some schools that is meant to be “personalized” using “technology-infused direct instruction”. Their studies find that students who follow their full program improve 23% faster on the math MAP scores, and students who are “exposed” to the program improve 12% faster.
[MAP Accelerator](https://www.k12dive.com/news/individualized-math-program-helped-boost-scores-at-all-grades/629744/) is a tool developed by Khan Academy. It claims that students who use it consistently for 30-minutes per week improve their MAP scores 9-43% faster than a control group.
Both examples show that if you have technology-enabled personalized learning for extended periods of time improve MAP scores versus the norm. Both show that those results only happen when the students stick with the program. This shows that the “secret sauce” of Alpha’s 2-Hour Learning is not what and how they are teaching but rather:
1. That they are using personalized technology-enhanced programing (when most schools aren’t)
2. They do it for 2-hours per day instead of 30-minutes per week
3. They keep the kids motivated so they put in the daily effort and don’t get burned out
What Alpha is doing is not rocket science. They are just “following the science” for what has been proven to work, and then designing a school around the best way (or “a way”) to deliver that science - personalized instruction, mastery focus, spaced repetition and incentives.
It should not be *too* surprising that when it all comes together it spits out measurable results. But will it hold?
## Part Six: A Response to Bryan Caplan
> "When the data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected. It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing."
*— Jeff Bezos (on multiple occasions)*
Not only does [Bryan Caplan](https://www.betonit.ai/) convincingly argue that education is mostly signalling in his book “[The Case Against Education](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652)”, he goes even further to pour cold buckets of water on aspirational parents in his book “[Selfish Reasons to have more Kids](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616)”. In that latter book he makes a compelling case with unimpeachable data that how kids turn out is almost entirely due to their genes plus “non-shared environment” (i.e., random things not having to do with parenting).
According to Caplan helicopter-parenting does not *hurt* your kids, it is just a waste of everyone’s time (and maybe their enjoyment during their childhood). You might be able to influence some of your kids' behavior in the short term, but once they become an adult and move out of your house they will revert to the biases of their genes. As Caplan says, the most important parenting decision you can make that will affect how your kids turn out is your choice of spouse (or more accurately your choice of the genes you use to build your kids).
Caplan does put one caveat on his data: range restriction.
He admits that all of his adoption studies focus on middle class Americans (and Europeans). He is the first to admit that if you take a baby out of extreme poverty in the developing world and raise him in a middle class American family, he will have better economic outcomes than if you leave him in rural Mauritania (see his “[Open Borders](https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/)” book). He may even grant that moving from the poorest broken families in America to the middle class also may make a difference – since all the data available comes from families who were approved by administrators as acceptable to raise adopted kids.
But is the same thing true when you move from the middle of the bell curve to the right?
#### When the Data Set Gets Bigger
Raj Chetty’s [neighbourhood-impact study](https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/neighborhoodsi/) cracked the range challenge open. Chetty had access to all IRS filing data for generations. He was able to focus on families with multiple children that moved to significantly different zip codes, and follow those children over extended periods of time. By having millions of data points he could tease apart the impact of moving to a “better” zip code for older vs younger siblings. The younger sibling had the same family environment (and 50% of the same genes), but some number of more years in the “better” neighborhood.
Chetty found that better neighborhoods made a difference to long term outcomes.
But isn’t the neighborhood where a family lives in a “shared environment”? Clearly some adopted families lived in better neighborhoods than others? Why didn’t Caplan’s adoption studies pick that up?
I think part of the answer is noise. Chetty had millions of data points vs hundreds of thousands for the adoption studies. But mostly I think the reason Chetty found this impact while the adoption studies did not is that he was looking for different things. No one took the adoption studies and grouped the zip codes as the relevant input variable. As Bezos says, the data wasn’t miscollected, they were just looking at the wrong things.
So what does a good zip code look like?
Chetty summarizes a good zip code as:
* Short commutes
* Low inequality
* Low high school dropout rates
* High voter turnout
* Low single mother rate
[He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness”](https://www.econtalk.org/raj-chetty-on-economic-mobility/) – where adults are connected to each other and to the broader community. A lack of those five elements are not bad per se, but they are correlated with a community where people are not interacting with each other as much as they are in communities where the metrics are reversed.
Chetty frames it that kids are influenced by the other adults in the area they live in. But I have another hypothesis. Rather than:
Other parents → Your kids
Perhaps the causation runs from:
Other parents → You → Your kids
Maybe it’s not other parents' style of parenting that is influencing your kids (how?) but rather when you spend time around other parents their parenting style rubs off on you and how you parent your kids.
Influence like that will not get picked up in Caplan’s adoption studies (which focus almost on how parent characteristics get passed on to genetic vs adopted children’s characteristics), but it is a potential signal that maybe parenting choices do matter. Maybe we were just looking at the wrong data.
#### Pre-registered Genius Experiment
We now have two data sets that don’t contradict directly, but do point to opposing conclusions. It would be great if we could test this with a pre-registered randomized control trial. That is not going to happen in our current culture. But enter [Laszlo Polgár](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r), who volunteered his own children as the test subjects. ([Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/))
Before his children were born Polgár publicly announced he would raise them to be geniuses. He initially considered training them to be genius artists, writers or mathematicians, but decided those fields were not objective enough. It would be too easy for critics to dismiss his future children’s achievements and “not genius” no matter what they accomplished in those fields. So he chose a field that was considered both “driven by intelligence” that had clear, objective measures: chess.
Then he called his shot.
By 1989 all three girls received their first “GM norms” (a GM norm is finishing a tournament with a elo score of at least 2600; 27 norms are needed to make grandmaster). Two went on to become grandmasters - the 3rd and 4th women to ever achieve that title. One ranked in the top 100 (all genders) at age 12 – she peaked at #8 in the world. The other became the top-rated woman in the world at age 15.
Polgar showed that you could take kids, at least kids with “good enough genes”, and turn them into world champions through the right education methods.
One might think this would be “case closed”, but even as the Polgar sisters were achieving these feats people were saying that these girls must have been “naturally gifted”. They clearly had bright parents, but does anyone think that if they had been adopted into a random middle class American household they would have still become chess geniuses? Or world class in anything at all?
When Polgar was challenged on exactly that, he wanted to repeat the experiment by adopting a “black child” and doing it again. Unfortunately his wife talked him out of it.
Even if he had adopted a child and turned him into a genius, that would just be one data point – it would not show up in Caplan’s adoption studies. It would be a case of the anecdote and the data disagreeing. Which do you choose to believe?
#### Aristocratic Tutoring
It would be great if we could find more examples of Polgar’s model. While I could not find any other “called shots”, one could go back and look at the childhoods of geniuses to see if there is anything to find. That is what Erik Hoel did in his series of posts on “Why we stopped making Einsteins” ([post 1](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins), [post 2](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/follow-up-why-we-stopped-making-einsteins), [post 3](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-geniuses-used-to-be-raised); [Scott’s response](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring)). Hoel argues persuasively that, when biographies of their childhoods exist, the geniuses of the past were almost all given 1:1 tutoring. There must have been many aristocrats in the past that were given 1:1 tutoring who never amounted to world-class genius, and many world-class geniuses who got there without 1:1 tutoring, but it does seem to put the thumb on the scale.
[Benjamin Bloom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) would agree.
Benjamin Bloom quantified Polgar’s hunch in 1984, just eight years after Polgar’s last daughter was born. He ran a RCT where some students were taught normally and others given 1:1 tutoring. He found that the average tutored child improved bytwo standard deviations over the control: “The average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class” and “about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level reached by only the highest 20% [of the control]”. He called his finding the “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem”
Why would this discovery of the secret sauce that could turn the average student into a genius be a *problem*?
Because Bloom saw no way to scale it.
Clearly we can’t give every kid in the world a personal 1:1 tutor.
We had the solution that would revolutionize everything, but it was just too expensive.
#### Where does that leave us?
Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters.
…But Chetty showed that how (or at least where) your kids are raised *can* matter.
…Polgar showed that intense 1:1 tutoring from a young age can create world-class geniuses
…And Bloom showed that 1:1 tutoring can work for almost everyone, improving performance, if not to world-class levels, still two standard deviations above the alternative.
Caplan is still mostly right—if you hover in the complacent middle of American schooling. But Chetty hints that context nudges outcomes, Polgár proves that deliberate, early, personalised instruction can manufacture prodigies, and Bloom tells us it lifts the average child by two sigmas. Alpha’s claim is that software‑mediated, 5:1 tutoring narrows that two‑sigma gap for a price mere mortals can (barely) contemplate. Whether that vision survives contact with budgets, regulators, and human nature is the question for section seven.
## Part Seven: Scaling Weird
A month into our experiment in Austin we were at a neighbor’s backyard pool party (a fringe benefit of moving to Austin: there were backyard pool parties in early November). I was in conversation with a couple that I had just been introduced to. He asked why we moved to Austin, “Was it for your job?”
“No. Actually we moved for a school for the kids.”
Their faces expressed a combination of confusion and shock.
It wasn’t the first nor the last time. Everyone is confused at why we would move across the country to send our kids to a new school, “They don’t have good schools where you come from? How much does this school cost?”
Those two questions frame Alpha’s biggest risks when it comes to scaling. Their biggest challenges going forward are not going to be pedagogical. They are going to be sociological and economic.
#### The Economic Problem
Alpha is much cheaper than a Victorian Governess, but it’s not cheap.
As mentioned in this review more than a few times, Alpha’s flagship campus charges $40,000 a year— roughly 3-4× what the other top-tier private elementary schools in Austin ask. Yes, that figure is *all‑in*: every Chromebook, every afternoon workshop, even the spring junket to Poland to beta‑test the platform with Ukrainian refugees is baked into tuition. There are no gala auctions or booster fees waiting in tall grass. Still, $40k is a hard swallow when the local Christian school will take your child for eleven. Worse, the number almost certainly fails to cover costs. Recall that guides start at $60k, rise to $100k on promotion, and the five “head guides” each earn $150k. At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs, those salaries alone suck in half the revenue from a twenty‑kid cohort before you’ve paid the rent, the head of school, the company executives, the curriculum designers, the engineers that are building the 2-hour platform and AlphaRead, the workshop costs (or the trip to Ukraine) or the marketing expenses (MacKenzie has a very well produced podcast, and I see a lot of ads for the school on Facebook now that we live locally).
Compared with aristocratic one‑to‑one tutoring, forty grand is a steal. But $40,000 is still Lamborghini kindergarten – and even at those prices it is still burning through Joe Liemandt’s cash pile.
Alpha’s answer to eventually solving the economics seems to be two fold: (1) Get enough scale that the fixed costs (like the learning platform) become a rounding error on overall costs, and (2) pull out the “non-essentials” at many of the campuses to get the marginal cost well below $10,000 per student.
Whether they will be successful is still in early innings. The homeschool product beta is limping along with 1x learning, and the Arizona Charter doesn’t open until autumn 2025. Whether Alpha retains its magic without $150,000/year guides with 5:1 teacher:student ratios and generous ~~bribe~~ incentives programs, remains to be seen.
#### The Weirdness Problem
When Bryan Caplan writes about the signaling theory of education, he lists three signals that schools send to employers:
1. Our students are smart
2. Our students are heard working
3. Our students are conformists
Many people are surprised that anyone would want to signal conformity. Don’t most people and employers value “innovative thinking”? Maybe, but not in their new hires.
Elite employers generally want bright, diligent hires who will color inside the corporate lines for a few years before they start “thinking outside the box”. Most successful businesses are successful for a reason. They want new employees to enter and do what they are told to in order to understand their new business before they try to “do things differently” and change things.
Caplan explains that the need to signal conformity is the hardest hurdle to disrupting education. You can signal intelligence with an IQ test, and you can signal conscientiousness with any sort of time consuming long term task (Caplan gives the example of collecting the largest ball of string in the world). But by definition, if you do anything different from the norm of going to an existing well known school, you are signalling non-conformity.
Caplan himself homeschooled some of his kids, but only after he verified that homeschooling for high school wouldn’t hurt his kids chances of getting into good colleges. He was non-conformist, but only willing to act on the non-conformity if it wouldn’t be punished by the conformists.
Most people are not even going to go as far as Caplan. Most people are very happy to be conformists.
That conformity is one reason why humans surpassed chimps. We are really good at watching other high status members of our communities and copying their behavior. I believe that is a big part of why moving to a better neighborhood leads to better outcomes for kids – because both the kids and the parents take on the “better” lifestyles of that community.
But it also means that getting people to switch from the existing school system to something like Alpha will be difficult.
Once we, personally, got over the more pedestrian concerns about moving for a school, our next concern was whether our kids would even get into Alpha. We did not need to worry. Alpha does have a screening process. They won’t accept kids who are disruptive and can’t focus in front of a computer for 20 minutes at a time. But the bar is relatively low.
And yet the school is still, after more than a decade in operation, under-capacity.
When other elite schools have 20% or lower acceptance rates – and limited “entrance points” (i.e. get your kid in at kindergarten or you are likely out of luck), Alpha is taking almost everyone who applies and allows students to jump in at any point – even mid-year.
That reality replaced our first concern with another: Do we want to join a club that will so easily accept us as a member?
Both my wife and I came from a world where:
Low acceptance rate ~= quality
We had just assumed that if *we* believed Alpha was worth moving across the country for, the school would be oversubscribed with local families. But it’s not even close.
The hardest schools to get into in Austin are places like St Stevens and St Andrews – veritable institutions more than 70 years old. Those are the schools that the rich, old money families who have been in Austin for generations want to send their kids to. And if that is where the elite are sending their kids, why wouldn’t you want your kids in the same place? We already know that peers matter and that education differences are marginal at best – why not just optimize for the best peers (where best means the most exclusive club)? St Stevens and St Andrews are the best socially acceptable options: not this new weird Alpha school that uses AI to teach kids. Who would do that to their kids?
#### What is the Alpha Target Audience?
So who *is* going to Alpha?
Mostly elite non-conformists.
I think that broader group breaks down into three sub-segments (to use Marketing persona jargon):
1. **David Disruptor:** Tech employee who has moved from the Bay area to Austin. He was nonconformist to even get into tech, and even more non-conformist to leave California
2. **Arjun Academic:** First generation immigrant family from India. Likely also works in tech, or maybe healthcare, or runs a small business. They want their kids to excel academically and they are fine doing it differently than the people around them
3. **Alex Amplifier:** The smallest segment. Austin is home to a small group of non-conformist “new media” personalities. I can name a dozen off the top of my head: Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman, Andrew Huberman, Byrne Hobart, Razib Khan, Peter Attia, Matt Bateman, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, David Parell, Rob Henderson and the *Kill Tony* guys. At least 3-4 from that list have kids in one of the Alpha schools.
That is a solid base to build an initial business from (especially in “Keep it Weird, Austin”), but they will need to find a way to break through that niche into the mainstream if they want to truly transform education more broadly – which is really the founders’ goal.
To reach the masses Alpha may need to become “more normal”, but if it becomes “more normal”, won’t that just put it back into the middle of the bell curve and become just like all the other education initiatives that petered out as they tried to scale?
#### So, Will Alpha Matter?
I believe Alpha is the rare educational intervention that dramatically increases the speed that students can learn the required material. But that just begs the next question:
“So what?”
Does it matter if kids learn the full K-12 state curriculum in six years instead of thirteen? Then what?
For many the next questions become:
“Will this help my kid get into a great college?”
“Does knowing this material faster help them get a better job post-college?”
“Does learning this material faster make them happier and more fulfilled in life?”
For me, the real value that comes from Alpha is not the performance uplift. The most important feature of Alpha is that they have found a way to learn more *efficiently*. It allows students to condense all the “required” state-mandated material into half a day for ~6 years instead of a full day for ~13 years. Is that the right stuff to learn? Are they learning all they need from that platform? That almost doesn’t matter. The point is that the alternative is to spend more than twice the amount of time to get to the same (or worse) output.
Once you have freed up half a day for 6-years and a full day for the other seven, you open up a limitless number of possibilities.
Some kids will rush into college classes. Some will choose to use the time to play sports. Some will use the time to master chess or quiz bowl or programming. Some will take time to travel the world with their families.
I have some opinions on where I think *my* kids should spend the extra time that has been freed up, but those opinions are secondary to that much stronger opinion that it is good to give kids more time to do something other than sit in classrooms and learn state-mandated material.
I believe the most important gift I can give my children is the gift of my love and respect.
Once I have done that, I think the next most valuable thing I can give them is time.
The 2-hour learning platform is gifting them an additional ~9 years of childhood.
I just hope they use it wisely. | Scott Alexander | 166959786 | Your Review: Alpha School | acx |
# Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
### The Story So Far
The mid-20th century was the golden age of nurture. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the spirit of the ‘60s convinced most experts that parents, peers, and propaganda were the most important causes of adult personality.
Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - including socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment.
By the early 2000s, genetic science reached a point where scientists could start pinpointing the particular genes behind any given trait. Early *candidate gene* *studies*, which hoped to find single genes with substantial contributions to IQ, depression, or crime, mostly failed. They were replaced with *genome wide association studies,* which accepted that most interesting traits were *polygenic* - controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes - and trawled the whole genome searching for variants that might explain 0.1% or even 0.01% of the pie. The goal shifted toward *polygenic scores* - algorithms that accepted thousands of genes as input and spit out predictions of IQ, heart disease risk, or some other outcome of interest.
The failed candidate gene studies had sample sizes in the three or four digits. The new genome-wide studies needed five or six digits to even get started. It was prohibitively difficult for individual studies to gather so many subjects, genotype them, and test them for the outcome of interest, so work shifted to big centralized genome repositories - most of all the UK Biobank - and easy-to-measure traits. Among the easiest of all was *educational attainment* (EA), ie how far someone had gotten in school. Were they a high school dropout? A PhD? Somewhere in between? This correlated with all the spicy outcomes of interest people wanted to debate - IQ, wealth, social class - while being objective and easy to ask about on a survey.
Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp[1](#footnote-1) of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.
Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:
1. Maybe twin studies are wrong.
2. Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet
For most of the 2010s, hypothesis 2 looked pretty good. Researchers gradually gathered bigger and bigger sample sizes, and found more and more of the missing heritability. A big 2018 study increased the predictive power of known genes from **2%** to **10%**. An even bigger 2022 study increased it to **14%,** and current state of the art is around **17%**. Seems like it was sample size after all! Once the samples get big enough we’ll reach 40% and finally close the gap, right?
This post is the story of how that didn’t happen, of the people trying to rehabilitate the twin-studies-are-wrong hypothesis, and of the current status of the debate. Its most important influence/foil is **[Sasha Gusev](http://gusevlab.org/)**, whose blog [The Infintesimal](https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/) introduced me to the new anti-hereditarian movement and got me to research it further, but it’s also inspired by **[Eric Turkheimer](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/)**, **[Alex Young](https://alextisyoung.github.io/)** (not himself an anti-hereditarian, but his research helped ignite interest in this area), and **[Awais Aftab](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/)**.
(while I was working on this draft, the East Hunter Substack [wrote a similar post](https://easthunter.substack.com/p/is-hereditarianism-wrong). Theirs is good and I recommend it, but I think this one adds enough that I’m publishing anyway. You can see Gusev’s response to East Hunter [here](https://substack.com/@sashagusev/note/c-119431609?r=2izzlj))
In an interview with Aftab, Gusev explained his philosophy like so (I am excerpting heavily from a long interview and editing for flow/emphasis; completionists should [read the whole thing](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/a-critical-introduction-to-behavioral)):
> For teacher-reported ADHD, the twin heritability estimate was 69% while the GWAS-based heritability estimate [ie using genome-wide association studies where researchers actually try to find the genes involved] was just 5%; with similar gaps for other behavioral traits. These are huge differences!
>
> If we believe the twin study estimates, then this gap implies that there is a lot of causal genetic variation out there that GWAS/molecular data is not picking up. One way to think about this is that traits that are under stronger natural selection will have more of their genetic variants driven to low frequency, and thus less detectable by GWAS. So a big gap between GWAS and twins could imply that rare variants are very important due to strong selection. On the other hand, if we are skeptical of the twin study estimates, then this gap implies a substantial contribution from those environmental complexities I talked about previously. For a long time, the field of molecular genetics was operating under the assumption that the missing heritability was largely in the rare variants we had not yet measured. But a number of recent advances have started to tip the scales against that argument.
>
> First, some of the earlier molecular heritability estimates were found to be inflated by some mix of technical issues and cultural transmission, so the amount of missing heritability actually increased.
>
> Second, a new model was developed that could estimate total direct heritability using molecular data from mother-father-child trios, with very few model assumptions (the title literally states “… without environmental bias”; [Young et al. 2018](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30104764/)), and it too found estimates that were substantially lower than twins on average.
>
> Third, several studies have now actually measured the influence of rare variants in various forms, and they are so far not adding up to explain as much as we would expect from twin heritability estimates.
>
> Fourth, there is little evidence of the strong natural selection that would be needed to generate a massive trove of rare variants untagged by GWAS. I am a molecular geneticist, and **this drumbeat of evidence from molecular data has convinced me that twin studies are either 2-3x inflated or estimate something fundamentally different from direct heritability.**
We’ll start by looking at Gusev’s first claim: that “earlier molecular estimates” (ie polygenic scores) are significantly inflated, or at least don’t mean what we thought they meant. This won’t be directly relevant to our question - even our original number of 17% implies missing heritability[2](#footnote-2), so moving it down a bit to 5-10% or up a bit to 20% doesn’t add or subtract from the fundamental mystery. But this discussion has gotten a lot of people extremely confused, and we’ll need to deconfuse ourselves if we’re going to get any further.
## Are Most Current Polygenic Scores Confounded?
A polygenic score is one possible result of a genome-wide association study. These scores are algorithms which take a person’s genes as input and return information about their traits as output. Better polygenic scores can predict a higher percent of variance in a certain trait. For example, the latest polygenic score on educational attainment can predict up to 17% of the variance in how much schooling someone completes.
Predictive power is different from causal efficacy. Consider a racist society where the government ensures that all white people get rich but all black people stay poor. In this society, the gene for lactose tolerance (which most white people have, but most black people lack) would do a great job **predicting** social class, but it wouldn’t **cause** social class[3](#footnote-3). It certainly wouldn’t be a “gene for social class” in the sense where it controls the part of your brain that helps you manage money, or where genetic engineering on this gene would make people richer.
Here are three common ways that not-directly-causal genes can show up as predicting a trait:
**Population stratification:** genes are linked to culture, and culture determines the trait, as in the racism-lactose example above. Many studies naturally mitigate this concern by using the UK Biobank of mostly white British samples, and by correcting for “principal components” that correspond to ancestry (and there are other, even more complicated ways to correct for this). But ancestry variation is fractal; no matter how uniform your sample, there will still be micro-differences you didn’t consider. For example, if you’re analyzing the educational attainment of white British people, it’s very relevant that [families with Norman surnames still outperform their Saxon peers at Oxbridge admissions](https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2013/11/07/normans-conquer-oxford-names/) 900 years after William the Conqueror. If Britons with more Norman ancestry have non-education-related genes that their Saxon peers lack, these could be mistakenly classified as genes for education [or other behavioral differences between the two groups](https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_normansaxon.htm).
**Assortative mating:** Suppose that both height and wealth are desirable qualities in a mate. Then tall people will tend to marry rich people, and over generations, the same people will be both rich and tall. That means that even if wealth is 0% genetic, a study looking for “the gene for wealth” will be able to find genes that rich people have more often than poor people - namely, the genes for height.
Or suppose that smart people tend to marry other smart people - surely true, if only because so many couples meet at college. Then all the intelligence genes will concentrate in the same people. So any study that tries to determine how much Intelligence Gene ABC affects intelligence will get inflated[4](#footnote-4) results, because everyone with Intelligence Gene ABC will also have many other intelligence genes - if the study naively asks “How much smarter are people with Gene ABC than people without it?”, it will find they are much smarter (because it’s accidentally including part of the effects of all the other intelligence genes that travel along with it).
**Parent-to-child transmission, aka “genetic nurture”:** Children tend to share their parents’ genes. So if there’s a gene that causes parents to create a certain kind of childrearing environment, and that childrearing environment affects a trait, it will falsely look like a gene that directly causes the trait.
Suppose Gene XYZ causes parents to read more books to their children, and reading books to children increases their IQ. Parents with Gene XYZ will tend to read books, so their kids will get high IQ. Those kids will also (probably) inherit Gene XYZ from their parents. So people with Gene XYZ will tend to have higher IQ. If you naively study which genes increase IQ, you’ll see Gene XYZ in more smart people than dumb people, and think it’s a “gene for IQ”. This is “causal” in a certain sense, but it’s not the one we traditionally think about, and it behaves importantly differently - for example, if you genetically engineer someone to have Gene XYZ, their IQ won’t go up (although their kids’ IQs might).
**How** can we tell if a polygenic predictor is “direct” vs. confounded by these non-causal pathways? The most common technique is within-family comparisons: do the traditional “check if people with the gene differ on a trait from people without the gene” study, but limit its focus to (for example) sibling pairs. Suppose a couple has two children; the first child inherits Gene ABC and the second one doesn’t. If the first child is smarter than the second child, that provides some infinitesimal evidence that Gene ABC is a gene for intelligence. Repeat this process over hundreds of thousands of sibling pairs, and the infinitesimal evidence can reach statistical significance. Since the family unit is a perfect natural experiment that isolates the variable of interest (genes) while holding everything else (culture and parenting) constant, within-family results are protected against stratification, assortative mating, and genetic nurture effects.
The culmination of this research program is [Tan et al 2024](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.01.24314703v1), which finds that many polygenic predictors lose significant accuracy when retested among siblings.
For example, educational attainment is 50% uncorrelated with direct genetic effects. You need to square this to figure out what percent is causal; when you do that, you find that the polygenic score that explained 14% of EA is only 4%pp direct genes, with the other 10%pp being nondirect[5](#footnote-5) confounders.
So yes, it seems like most polygenic scores that don’t validate within families are confounded. However unhappy we previously were that we had only found 14% of genes for EA (vs. 40% expected), we should now be much more unhappy - we really only know 4% of genes that directly cause EA.
On the other hand, you might say - so before we only knew 14%pp out of 40%. Now we only know 4%pp out of 40%. This is discouraging, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what we know about nature vs. nurture. Both 4%pp and 14%pp are less than 40% - with either number, we must be missing something or doing something wrong. Probably that’s insufficient sample size. We’ll keep working on sample size and other things, and eventually scrounge up the missing 26%pp or 36%pp or whatever of the variance, so this doesn’t change anything. All it means is that one predictive method that the average person never knew about in the first place doesn’t work as well as we thought. Who cares?
Not doctors. So far this research has only just barely begun to reach the clinic. But also, all doctors want to do is predict things (like heart attack risk). They don’t care if they use causal vs. nondirect genes. It doesn’t matter if you’re “only” at higher risk of heart attack because you’re black, or Norman, or because your parents read books to you - you still need more heart attack medication!
[Polygenic embryo selection](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies) companies should care. They offer polygenic scores that can be used to select healthier or smarter embryos. If the predictors they use rely partly on variants that aren’t causal within families, their real benefits could be far lower than advertised. I talked to one of these companies, who said they’d already adjusted for these effects and expected their competitors had too - the proper antidote to this problem, sibling controls, is a natural choice when you’re literally picking between siblings.
The biggest losers are the epidemiologists. They had started using polygenic predictors as a novel randomization method; suppose, for example, you wanted to study whether smoking causes Alzheimers. If you just checked how many smokers vs. nonsmokers got Alzheimers, your result would be vulnerable to bias; maybe poor people smoke more and get more Alzheimers. But (they hoped) you might be able to check whether people with *the genes for* smoking get more Alzheimers. Poverty can’t make you have more or fewer genes! This was a neat idea, but if the polygenic predictors are wrong about which genes cause smoking and what effect size they have, then the less careful among these results will [need](https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/54/1/dyae179/8005356?login=false) to be re-examined.
But the reason I spent so much time on the subject here is that this has confused a lot of people into thinking *heritability itself* was confounded and is actually just 4%. When I read my first few blog posts on these findings, I came away thinking they were claiming to have discredited twin studies and heritability. And although I take partial ownership of my own poor reading comprehension, I maintain that the way that the new anti-hereditarians discuss this is pretty bad. For example, Turkheimer’s treatment of the Tan study above is called [Is Tan Et Al The End Of Social Science Genomics?](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/is-tan-et-al-the-end-of-social-science), and includes passages like:
> The median [direct genomic effect] heritability for behavioral phenotypes is .048. Let that sink in for a second. How different would the modern history of behavior genetics be if back in the 80s one study after another had shown that the heritability of behavior was around .05? When Arthur Jensen wrote about IQ, he usually used a figure of .8 for the heritability of intelligence. I know that the relationship between twin heritabilities and SNP heritabilities is complicated, and in fact the DGE heritability of ability is one of the higher ones, at .233[6](#footnote-6). But still, it seems to me that the appropriate conclusion from these results is that among people who don’t have an identical twin, genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences.
And comments included things [like](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/is-tan-et-al-the-end-of-social-science/comment/105972815):
> I don’t know if [this study] is the end of social science genomics, but it should certainly be the end of attributing significant genetic influence to behavioral traits (despite the recent scientist-generated cartoons touting genes for “income”).
[And](https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/is-tan-et-al-the-end-of-social-science/comment/106431494):
> There's no doubt that this reported findings have dealt a fatal blow to my conviction that behavioral traits are pre-eminently heritable…This is a remarkable example of an objective statistical fact mercilessly crushing the more subjective experiential sense of "A looks and acts more like B than C because A and B have the same parents." This subjective evidence is almost unshakable and universal in its application as a tried and tested psychosocial heuristic. And yet, here we are.
Turkheimer is either misstating the relationship between polygenic scores and narrow-sense heritability, or at least egging on some very confused people who are doing that, and the dynamic was bad enough that I got confused myself for a while.
But even more confusing, the new anti-hereditarians actually *are* saying that lots of behavioral traits have very low heritability! But this point requires different arguments, only tangentially related to these. So let’s move on to…
## Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 1: GWAS & GREML)
In the mid 2010s, when genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based polygenic predictors were getting better every year, it was easy to hope they might reach 40% and close the “missing heritability”. But since then, progress has stalled. The second-to-last tripling of sample size, from [300K](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00074/full) to [1M](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6393768/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) between 2016 - 2018, increased predictive power from 6% → 12%. The last tripling, from [1M](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6393768/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) to [3M](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z) between 2018 - 2022, only increased predictive power from 12% → 14%. If you graph sample size vs. predictive power, it looks like there's an asymptote between 15 - 20% or so.
(of which - remember - only 5% is directly causal!)
Worse, a mid-2010s technique called GREML allowed researchers to estimate the percent of variance in a trait that comes from the sorts of common genes studied in GWAS, without having to identify the genes involved. [A 2016 GREML paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201645) suggested that the maximum share of variance that GWASs of educational attainment could ever discover was about 21% (again, compared to 40% predicted genetic from twin studies). Since unavoidable methodological issues will prevent GWASs from reaching the literal maximum possible, this agrees with the evidence suggesting an asymptote between 15 - 20%.
So either twin studies are wrong and traits are less heritable than believed, or the heritability must lie somewhere other than the common genes identifiable by GWAS.
What about rare genes?
GWASs focus on genetic variation common enough to be worth including in a basic genetic test. Most of this is single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNPs”). A single nucleotide is one letter of DNA - for example, a C or a G. Polymorphisms are genes that commonly vary in humans - sometimes across races (for example, some humans have a gene for light skin, and other humans have a gene for dark skin), and other times within races (for example, some white people have a gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, and others don’t). So SNPs are single-letter spots in DNA where different people often have different letters. How often? Some people say 1%, but the more practical definition is “often enough that someone has noticed and added it to the test panel”. There are three billion letters in the genome, of which only a few million are commonly-tested SNPs.
But these SNP studies have limited[7](#footnote-7) ability to measure personal mutations and rare variants. Sometimes your parents’ egg and sperm cells mess up copying a nucleotide of DNA, and you get a mutation that isn’t inherited from your ethnic group or even from your subgroup/family line - it’s just some idiosyncratic DNA change that you might be the first person in history to have. Since scientists have never seen this mutation before, they don’t know about it and can’t test for it without doing something more expensive than a simple SNP screen.
And SNP studies have limited ability to detect anything more complicated than a single letter changing to another single letter. But some mutations are more complicated *structural variants*. For example, some bits of DNA get stuck on repeat - one person might have GATGAT, another person might have GATGATGATGAT, and a third person might have fifty GATs in a row. Other bits come out backwards. Sometimes a whole chunk of DNA goes missing, or moves to the wrong place. Occasionally a gene reads *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins, takes it too seriously, and [evolves some ridiculous trick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfish_genetic_element) for spamming itself all over the genome.
So if even the best molecular studies seem to be asymptoting around 15-20% of variance in educational attainment, but twin studies suggest it’s 40% genetic, might rare variants and structural variants make up the missing 20-25%pp?
This remains a topic of bitter disagreement.
On the one side, hereditarians bring up [a Darwinian argument](https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-019-02040-6): imagine a genetic engineer who hopes to find the genes for educational attainment and edit them to make everyone smart and successful. She looks harder and harder, becoming more and more exasperated as they fail to materialize. Finally, she realizes she’s been scooped: evolution has been working on the same project, and has a 100,000 year head start. In the context of intense, recent selection for intelligence, we should expect evolution to have already found (and eliminated) the most straightforward, easy-to-find genes for low intelligence. Therefore, everything left should be convoluted or hidden or impossible to work with. So although this requires a sort of god-of-the-gaps argument - where we keep pushing heritability into whatever genes are too weird for existing techniques to detect - there are some reasons to think God really is in the gaps here. And [a 2017 paper](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/106203v1) uses some clever techniques to estimate the share of intelligence variation lurking in hard-to-measure genes and finds it’s more than half: “By capturing these additional genetic effects, our models closely approximate the heritability estimates from twin studies for intelligence and education.” (see also [Wainschtein 2022](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9119698/), [Sidorenko 2024](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01940-2))
The anti-hereditarians disagree. They cite papers like [Zeng](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21446-3) which measure the strength of selection on intelligence and suggest that it’s too weak to concentrate so much of the variation in rare genes[8](#footnote-8). And Sasha Gusev mentions [Weiner 2023](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10614218/), which finds that in fact rare variants “explain 1.3% (SE = 0.03%) of phenotypic variance on average – much less than common variants” ([other experts say](https://x.com/AlexTISYoung/status/1676686411553185793) that burden heritability only captures some rare variants and is not the right tool for this problem).
But it may not even matter, because another set of findings suggests that heritability is genuinely low *even when* the rare variants are counted.
## Is Heritability Genuinely Low? (Part 2: Sib-Regression and RDR)
Two newer methods, Sib-Regression and RDR, ask: using what we know from genetic studies, how much genetic variation do we think exists, total, across both common and rare genes?
On average siblings share 50% of genes. But there’s a little randomness in [meiosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis#Role_in_human_genetics_and_disease), so some siblings might share 40% and others might share 60%. The more genetic influence on a trait, the more similar sibling pairs who share 60% of their genes will be, compared to sibling pairs who only share 40% of their genes. Since 60%-gene siblings and 40%-gene siblings are both equally part of the same family, you can use these numbers to calculate heritability unconfounded by a range of family factors. This is Sib-Regression. If you do a more complicated statistical process to extend the same idea to relatives other than siblings, it’s *relatedness disequilibrium regression* or RDR.
GWAS asks: Looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation in a trait have we explained right now? GREML asks: looking at common easy-to-study genes, how much variation *could we ever* explain? But sib-regression and RDR ask a question more like twin studies: considering all genes, whether common / rare / easy-to-study / hard-to-study, how much variation is there total? This could address the rare variant objection mentioned above. And in many ways, these techniques are better than twin studies - Sib-Regression eliminates many potential biases, and RDR eliminates even more (although it’s harder to pull off, requiring more genetic information and computational resources).
These techniques are new and hard-to-use, and only a few published studies have applied them to the sorts of behavioral traits we’re interested in:
[Young et al (2018)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21283-4/tables/3) did Sib-Regression and RDR to genetic data from Iceland. Sib-regression found educational attainment = 40% (±15%) heritable, and RDR found 17% (±9%) heritable.
[Kemper et al (2021)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21283-4) did Sib-Regression only to genetic data from Britain. It found educational attainment = 14% heritable. This number conflicts with the 40% from the Young paper. Why? Unclear, but it could be selection bias - Young’s Icelandic sample was representative of the country; Kemper’s British population were Biobank volunteers who tend tend to be healthier and higher-class than the population at large. Upper-class people may have restricted range in educational attainment, or different factors affecting their educational attainment compared to the overall population.
Either way, these are closer to the low estimates from GWAS and GREML (7% direct, 20% total), than to the higher estimates from twin studies (40%, generally presumed direct). And we can no longer use contributions from rare variants to paper over the difference. So what is going on?
It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities:
Either something is wrong with twin studies.
Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants).
Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things.
## What’s Going On? (Part 1: Is Something Wrong With Twin Studies?)
Twin studies have dominated discussion of behavioral genetics for decades, so there’s a vast literature investigating their various assumptions and whether something might be wrong with them.
Here are some of the assumptions and what the research says about each. Some of these will be duplicates of the GWAS confounders above, but we’ll go through them again anyway to review how they apply to twins.
**1: Parents Treat Fraternal And Identical Twins The Same:**Twin studies claim that twins are a uniquely powerful genetic laboratory; both fraternal and identical twin pairs have equally concordant environments, but identical twins have more concordant genes. Therefore, the more similar identical twin pairs are relative to fraternal twin pairs, the more heritable a trait must be. But this conclusion falls apart if identical twin pairs actually have more similar environments than fraternal twin pairs do, maybe because parents (knowing their twins are identical) treat them more similarly than they would fraternal twins.
Would-be twin-study-discreditors have been trying to argue that this must be true for decades, but it’s always been a kind of quixotic battle. Remember, twin studies find many behavioral traits like IQ are >60% heritable, so you would need to prove not only that parents treat identical twin pairs differently from fraternal, but that this was an overwhelming effect. Parents of identical twins would have to obsessively expose them to the exact same stimuli in the exact same order; parents of fraternal twins would have to send one to the Gifted Advanced Placement Acceleration program while locking the other in a box and force-feeding them lead pellets. Common sense tells us there are no such differences, and studies confirm this: when parents are wrong about their twins’ status (eg they have fraternal twins, but falsely think they’re identical, or vice versa) [their trait similarity](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/263638/) [matches their real status](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/parental-treatment-and-the-equal-environment-assumption-in-twin-studies-of-psychiatric-illness/628A9204CB11927C52129A24EE4FDDFF), rather than the incorrect status that determined how their parents treat them; parental treatment explains less than 1% of why identical twin pairs are more concordant ([2](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23903437/), [3](https://humanvarieties.org/2024/10/20/sometimes-biased-but-not-systematically-twin-study-assumptions-with-a-focus-on-the-equal-environment/), [4](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8476388/)). See also [Felson 2013](https://pismin.com/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.10.004), which tries to measure environmental similarity and adjust for it, with minimal effects.
Are these two cuties monozygotic or dizygotic? Are you sure? ([answer](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-dad))
**2: Fraternal And Identical Twins Have Equally Concordant Uterine Environments:**Fraternal twins have different sacs in the uterus and use different placentas. Most identical twins share a placenta, and some share an amniotic sac. If trait similarity is caused by sharing a placenta or sac (maybe because the placenta is defective, the fetal brain is starved of nutrients, and so the person has a lower IQ when they grow up), twin studies would falsely read this identical-fraternal difference as genetic.
Luckily this is easy to study; not all identical twins share a placenta or sac, so you can cleanly separate the effect of uterine environment from genetics. If you measure enough traits, you can find small deviations in some, but it’s not clear whether this is just multiple testing, and in any case the deviations are small. [The best studies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26410687/) suggest this chips off somewhere between 0 - 3% from heritability estimates[9](#footnote-9).
**3: There is little assortative mating:**We discussed this one above in the earlier section on GWAS - smart/pretty/kind/whatever people tend to marry other smart/pretty/kind/whatever people. Why would this bias twin study results? Identical twins share 100% of their genes. Fraternal twins ought to share 50% of their genes - but they get half their genes from their mother, and half from their father. In the degenerate case where the mother and father have exactly the same genes (“would you have sex with your clone?”) even fraternal twins will be extremely similar (although not quite identical, since they’ll get different alleles from each clone). In the more plausible case where mothers and fathers are just a little more alike than chance (eg because smart people tend to marry other smart people), fraternal twins will share a genetic tendency towards a trait somewhat more than their 50% shared genes suggest. Since this makes fraternal twin pairs more (genetically) like identical twin pairs, and twin studies assess heritability as the difference in fraternal-identical-twin-pair concordance, this bias would make twin studies underestimate heritability. But this is the opposite of what you would need to “discredit” twin studies - if this bias is true, then everything is *more* genetic than twin studies think. And unlike the previous two biases, this one [seems real and important](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-023-00173-y), so much so that when you adjust for it, the heritability of educational attainment rises from ~40% to ~50%.
I’m only mentioning this one here because some anti-hereditarians argue that you can’t trust twin studies because of assortative mating, without mentioning that this can only bias them *down*.
**4: Population stratification:**This is often large and worth worrying about, but it applies to identical and fraternal twin pairs equally, and doesn’t bias twin study heritability estimates much (though it might shift the balance between shared and non-shared environment). See eg the sentence around footnote 30 [here](https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/heritable/2018-kong.pdf).
**5: Non-additive / “interaction” effects:**
These are theoretically interesting, but all research thus far has found they are minimal ([1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929721000562), [2](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000008)). Some experts think this may miss rarer or harder-to-find interactions; we’ll return to this later.
**6: “Genetic nurture”, parent-to-child**
Mentioned above: if there is a gene for reading books to kids, and reading books raises IQ, it will look like a “gene for IQ”.
This isn’t as relevant to twin study estimates of heritability, since both identical twins and fraternal twins are equally related to their parents, and any trait caused by genetic nurture wouldn’t differ between them (and therefore would not falsely appear heritable in this design). Rather, they would appear as shared environment.
**7: “Genetic nurture”, sibling-to-sibling**
That is, suppose your sibling’s traits influence your own development. For example, suppose your sibling has a gene that makes them sabotage your schoolwork, causing you to fail and drop out of school early. An identical twin would share this gene with their sibling more often than a fraternal twin, making it look like a “gene for doing badly at school” (since the people who have it do worse at school than those who don’t).
Why are we even talking about this? Do we really think it’s a big part of the variance in behavioral traits? Challenging twin study heritability estimates through this route requires inhabiting a weird no-man’s-land where otherwise-invisible genetic and environmental pathways suddenly flare up when you say the magic words “it was done by a sibling”. For example, this requires a strong effect of shared environment - that is, your educational attainment has to depend on whether you’re being sabotaged or not. But in general, shared environmental effects are weak. And it requires a strong effect of genes - that is, this mechanism only works if your sibling’s tendency to sabotage you is highly genetically determined. But we’re deploying this claim to deny that traits like IQ or educational attainment are highly genetically determined. So to get much out of this, the tendency to sabotage siblings would have to be more genetic than other behavioral traits!
The reason this convoluted possibility gets brought up so often is that, unlike the more plausible parent-to-child genetic nurture, twin studies can’t rule it out. So if you really want to deny twin studies, this is one of your best bets. But [when investigated](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01085-0/figures/11), this has effects indistinguishable from zero.
I’ve been a bit mean in this whole section, because people really like to dismiss twin studies as “Oh, don’t you know, those depend on *assumptions*, I bet you never considered that assumptions might be wrong”, and then Gish Gallop you with different assumptions until you give up. But scientists have actually done a lot of really good work checking the assumptions and they mostly hold.
An alternative way of validating twin studies (brought up by Noah Carl [in this article](https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/a-response-to-sasha-gusev-on-iq)) is to check them against their close cousins, adoption studies and pedigree studies.
Pedigree studies investigate large family trees, and check how trait similarity decreases with genetic distance. They avoid twin specific biases (like different treatment of fraternal vs. identical twin pairs, or different prenatal environments), while adding others like assortative mating. Here are the heritabilities of IQ and EA found in pedigree studies[10](#footnote-10) (see footnote for sources and caveats, and see also [here](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/57897) and [here](https://x.com/DamienMorris/status/1697930270308012336) for somewhat similar designs):
Adoption studies investigate whether adoptees’ traits are more correlated with their adoptive or biological parents. They avoid a large swathe of biases, at the risk of introducing new adoption-related biases of their own (like the possibility that agencies deliberately place adoptive children with parents who are culturally or behaviorally similar, or the possibility that adoptees were adopted late enough to still get some shared environment from their biological parents). Here are the findings of some of the largest and best[11](#footnote-11):
Both straightforwardly confirmed the larger heritability numbers found in twin studies.
I would add the evidence from some less formal “adoption studies”[12](#footnote-12). During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict.
Ultimate source [here](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.6719119). Although the study is confusing about this, I think it’s trying to say that almost 90% of subjects were adopted before age 2.
But I don’t think studies *do* contradict this. Given the degree to which their assumptions have been validated, and the level of confirmation from pedigree and adoption studies, I think they have earned a presumption of accuracy. Doubting the twin studies doesn’t seem like a promising route to reconciling the twin-vs-Sib-Regression/RDR discrepancy.
## What’s Going On? (Part 2: Is Something Wrong With Sib-Regression And RDR?)
Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off.
There is one caveat: although RDR includes most of the rare and structural variants missed by GWAS, in theory it can miss certain *ultra-rare variants* which are so uncommon that they aren’t shared between some of the relative pairs used in RDR. *De novo* variants that occurred during the subject’s own conception would be in this category, if the subject didn’t have children or didn’t pass on that gene[13](#footnote-13). This seems like a pretty small subcategory of genetic variation, and I wouldn’t normally expect that much of importance to be hiding here, but maybe it’s more important than it seems.
RDR also doesn’t include much variance caused by statistical interactions between genes. Although we said above that these are usually found to be insignificant, they might be more important in a trait like intelligence that has been under recent evolutionary selection that lops off easily-detectable sources of variance and leaves only the weird obscure ones behind. There’s limited ability for classical Mendelian dominance to affect common variants, but more complicated genetic interactions might still prove important.
Overall these are strong methods, and their failure to converge is troubling. If forced to explain them away, we might tell a story like:
* So far, there is only one RDR study and a few Sib-Regression studies, so we should wait for more data before updating too hard.
* Maybe ultra-rare variants are more important than we thought.
* Maybe gene x gene interactions, especially epistasis, are more important than we thought.
There’s some (weak) evidence for the latter two claims: Sib-Regression, unlike RDR, includes results from certain types of ultra-rare variants and non-additive effects. In the Iceland study, Sib-Regression found EA heritability of 40% (similar to twin studies), and RDR found 17% (much less than twin studies). Maybe these make Sib-Regression better at estimating the sort of broad heritability investigated in twin studies?
## What’s Going On? (Part 3: Is Educational Attainment Just Weird?)
Above, we said that there were only two published peer-reviewed studies using Sib-Regression and RDR to estimate heritability of behavioral traits.
But [Markel et al (2025),](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5225447) a not-yet-peer-reviewed pre-print from GMU (why is it always GMU?) complicates things further. It looks at genetic data from six different countries/studies to estimate heritability of IQ and EA.
Using Sib-Regression, they find educational attainment heritability of only **8%** (±9%)[14](#footnote-14), *and* cognitive performance (~IQ) heritability of **75%** (±20%)!
Markel’s 8% for EA is very different from Young’s Icelandic estimate of 40% - is this bad? Not necessarily - as with Kemper, these studies might have different levels of selection bias. Or the countries where they take place might have different levels of educational mobility.
But also, this is the first Sib-Regression study to investigate IQ - all the others had only done EA. They replicate (and even go beyond) the twin studies’ high IQ number, while continuing to get low heritability for EA. This suggests our previous assumption - that EA was usually a decent proxy for IQ - might be totally off.
This doesn’t directly solve any of our problems - the twin study estimates for EA and the Sib-Regression estimates are still worryingly different. But it slightly bounds the damage. It suggests that the twin study estimates for IQ are ~correct, potentially meaning that whatever’s going on is some kind of EA-specific confounder.
We know that EA is a pretty unusual trait, with high assortative mating, high shared environmental component, and high potential for genetic nurture / dynastic effects. We saw above that there are theoretical reasons not to expect these to bias twin studies upward or Sib-Regression downward. But maybe it did that anyway, despite the theoretical reasons.
Stepping back, maybe educational attainment is full of landmines. Plenty of political and economic factors affect the degree to which your genes vs. your culture determine how far you go in school. Suppose a country passes a feel-good policy that high schools have to try to graduate all students, even ones who fail algebra. That changes the heritability of EA! Or suppose that scholarships become easier/harder to get, making rich people less/more likely to go to college relative to poor people. That changes the heritability of EA! Or suppose that the economy changes and jobs requiring PhDs are less/more lucrative than before - now ambitious people are less/more likely to pursue PhDs relative to people doing it for the love of academia, and that changes the heritability of EA! Finally, suppose some study enrolls mostly rich/well-educated people, and some other study enrolls proportionally across the population. That artificially restricts range and . . . changes the heritability of EA!
So two potential takeaways from this preprint are:
1. EA is a weird trait with a high shared environmental component, and might not be a good flagship trait to use for discussing heritability more generally.
2. Heritability of EA might genuinely vary a lot among different countries, populations, and [eras](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69526-6), so maybe we should be less concerned when studies give weird results.
## What’s Going On? (Part 4: Is Everything Weird?)
On the other hand, here are some boring medical/biological traits. Graph is from [here](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333986666_Solving_the_missing_heritability_problem), but the ultimate data source is the same Iceland paper:
Many of the boring medical traits have as much “missing heritability” as educational attainment. For example, creatinine is a measure of kidney function; although twin studies find it’s about 55% heritable, Sib-Regression and RDR find less than half that.
But here there are limited opportunities for confounders. Nobody assortative-mates on kidney function. It’s hard to see how family members could push other family members to have better or worse kidney function. Identical twins don’t have more similar kidney function environments than fraternal twins.
Could there be some remaining possibility for confounding? Maybe there’s a gene for teaching your kid to have a good diet, and good diet causes better kidney function? Or maybe the measurements for creatinine were really bad during the Sib-Regression study (but apparently better during the twin studies?)
I don’t really know what’s going on here.
## What’s Going On (Part 5: No, Seriously, What’s Going On?)
So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?
I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.
Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see [1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01940-2), [2](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9119698/), [3](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/106203v1))[15](#footnote-15), and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.
In this model, polygenic scores, GWAS, and GREML could straightforwardly fail to pick up rare variants and interactions. The conclusions of RDR and Sib-Regression are harder to explain, but most of these anomalies are in educational attainment in particular - which is such a cursed construct, and so variable from sample to sample, that perhaps we can put it aside and focus on more stable traits. Otherwise, we can take solace in these methods’ failure to stay consistent even among themselves, which makes their inconsistency with twin studies somewhat less jarring.
What mysteries remain? The parts that still bother me are:
* Why did the Iceland study find significantly lower numbers for Sib-Regression/RDR than twin studies for almost every trait? (hilariously, *not* for educational attainment with Sib-Regression this time, although I suspect this is just the big margin of error and the real number is commensurate with the other traits studied)
* Why are twin studies so consistent in finding highish heritability for educational attainment, but other methodologies (eg Sib-Regression) so variable (even after their margin of error is taken into account)? Either EA is too complicated and variable to measure properly, or it isn’t - right?
* If nonadditive interactions are so important, why have existing studies had such a hard time detecting them?
* Can we flesh out the evolutionary argument and come to agreement on how many rare and ultra-rare variants we should expect given the level of selection pressure experienced during human evolution?
* Can we bound the degree to which ultra-rare variants can drive a wedge between twin and RDR estimates? If the observed difference isn’t within the bound, what then?
* Are we going to find and cash out “rare variants and interactions” soon? If we don’t, how long should we wait for genetic science to advance before changing our mind and deciding we must be missing something more fundamental?
Alex Young thinks that once we get enough whole genomes sequenced (probably soon!) [we might be able to use a technique called GREML-WGS](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1008222) to get more definitive answers about rare variants. But other experts I talked to said that if complex interactions were a big part of the picture, this might be “computationally intractable”. On the other hand, “computationally intractable” is a relative term: with enough data, [genomic language models](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=VyM7Voux5b) offer the potential for improved understanding of nonlinear effects.
I’m encouraged to see increasingly good discussion of these topics on Substack, Twitter, and elsewhere. People like Sasha Gusev and Eric Turkheimer deserve credit for opening the discussion, but I would like to see a robust back-and-forth with the other side.
Thanks to everyone who helped me review this post, including Ruben Arslan, Alex Young, Damien Morris, and some other people who didn’t respond to my email asking if I had their permission to list their names publicly (if this is you, let me know and I’ll edit you in). Most of what’s valuable is theirs, and all errors are ~~mine alone~~ the fault of o3, which provided invaluable research assistance but also hallucinated constantly.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’m abbreviating “two percentage points” as 2%pp. Nitpickers complain if I don’t use the “percentage points” framing, but it’s too long to spell out each time.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Geneticists distinguish between three related concepts:
* **Polygenic score r^2** is the degree to which our current best genetic models can predict traits. You might use this to discuss the accuracy of a genetic test or an embryo selection procedure.
* **Narrow sense heritability** is the degree to which all *normal, additive* genetic variation affects traits. You might use this to discuss the effectiveness of breeding programs, or how much you expect a parent’s traits to affect their children.
* **Broad sense heritability** is the degree to which all genetic variation, *including interactions and rare mutations*, affect traits. A correctly-done twin study should (modulo certain small issues) return the broad sense heritability. This is useful in resolving deep questions like “How much do genetic vs. social causes affect traits”, and acts as the limit for what we might be able to explain through some future genetic science.
If there were no missing heritability, we should mostlyexpect polygenic score r^2 to converge to narrow sense heritability, modulo a bunch of small biases and technical issues. I’ll be sweeping these under the rug and talking about narrow sense heritability as the limit of polygenic score r^2 in order to highlight the question of why polygenic score r^2 seems to be asymptoting at a level below the narrow-sense heritability.
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Why is this example about a gene for lactose tolerance, rather than simply a gene for black skin? Because in this society, the gene for black skin would in some sense “cause” the poverty - it would just be a less direct form of causation, through “gene-environment interaction”. Causal language in genetics gets tough quickly - what is a “confounder” for one purpose may well be a “cause” for another.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
"Inflated” if you were hoping to find the direct heritability. If you just want predictive power, this might be fine.
[5](#footnote-anchor-5)
I’m using the awkward term “nondirect” instead of the more common “indirect” at the advice of an expert who advised that “indirect genetic effect” already has a specific meaning (similar to “genetic nurture” described elsewhere in this piece) and should not be used for things that merely fail to be direct.
[6](#footnote-anchor-6)
*Sic*; the correct number is 18.8%
[7](#footnote-anchor-7)
Not zero, because some rare variants are linked to SNPs; that is, everyone with a certain rare variant also has a certain set of SNPs, and so in practice measuring the SNPs will include the effect of the rare variant.
[8](#footnote-anchor-8)
I don’t know how you square that with [Reich’s study](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1) indeed finding large recent selection for intelligence in ancient European DNA
[9](#footnote-anchor-9)
See [this Cremieux tweet thread](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1647069459578798081) for some apparently paradoxical - though ultimately inconsequential - effects of uterine-environment-sharing
[10](#footnote-anchor-10)
Sources:
* **Generation Scotland:** <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614000178?via%3Dihub> . See also <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-017-0005-1.pdf>, page 2353, "The genetic results . . . are similar to the heritability estimates derived using the traditional pedigree study design in the same data set, which found a heritability estimate of 54% for g and 41% for education."
* **Swedish National Sample:** <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01500-2/tables/2>, Table 2B, first column, second and third rows.
[11](#footnote-anchor-11)
I made this table with the help of the o3 AI. It gave me a longer list of seven studies, but admitted that many of them didn’t list heritabilities and it was calculating them itself based on other statistics that were reported. In some cases, I was able to replicate its calculations; in others, it seemed to be hallucinating the relevant numbers, or had calculations complicated enough that I couldn’t prove that it wasn’t. I excluded two studies that o3 said had good data, but where it couldn’t explain its sources well enough to satisfy me. These were [Kendler et al 2015](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4403216/) (o3 claimed heritability of 0.5 - 0.6) and [Capron & Duyme 1989](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-04103-001) (o3 claimed heritability of 0.4).
Here are sources for the remaining:
* **Texas adoption:** <https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/heritable/adoption/2021-loehlin.pdf> , Table 6 . Heritability = 2\*correlations. The first row of the table lists three parent-child IQ correlations (IQBM): 0.3, 0.34, and 0.35. I took the median, 0.34, and doubled it to 0.68.
* **Colorado adoption:** Same paper as above, same methodology as above, Table 7.
* **Minnesota transracial:** <https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016028969390018Z>, page 547, "adoptive fathers' and mothers' correlations with their biological offspring at Time 1 were .25 and .40; with their trans-racially adopted children, .08 and .14 (h 2 = .34 ± .29 and .52 --- .26, respectively). At Time 2, the corresponding correlations were .13 and .45 for biological children; .21 and .21 for adoptees (h 2 = - . 16 ± .29 and .48 ± .25, respectively). o3 advised me to take the maternal correlation since there were too few fathers to give meaningful results (as indicated by the negative heritability at time 2). Because this required a design choice (throwing out the paternal data) I’ve listed it in gray as less trustworthy than some of the other estimates. Reversing this design choice would lower the estimate.
* **Sibling Interaction And Behavior:** <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8513766/>, see second-to-last sentence of the abstract.
* **Swedish Adoption Twin Study Of Aging:** h[ttps://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00045.x](http://ttps://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00045.x) , see Table 3, first principal component says 80%. <https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.276.5318.1560>, abstract says 62%. These are different subsets of the same Swedish study; I averaged them together and said 71%. This is extremely unprincipled - they had different sample sizes and were measuring different things - but I also didn't want to list the same study twice.
Observed adult heritabilities of IQ range from 0.42 to 0.71, with an average of 0.57. This is a wide range, but some of the variability is explicable. The SIBS study, which found the lowest estimate, used an unusually unreliable IQ test; if you correct for this, heritability increases to about 0.6 to 0.7. SATSA, which found the highest estimate, was looking at older people (age 65 - 80), and heritability of IQ increases with age. I think the adoption literature looks compatible with heritability of IQ going from the 40s in adolescence to the 60s in adulthood to potentially as high as 70-80% by age 65 (the 65 year olds in SATSA found 80%; heritability declined after 65, maybe because of non-heritable dementias).
[12](#footnote-anchor-12)
And here’s a less formal “twin study” - on average, twins have the same IQ and educational attainment as singletons. As a parent of twins myself, I’m increasingly aware how much worse parenting I do than my singleton-parent friends; it’s not just that you have half as much time per child, but that you can almost never give either of them quality time alone - the other one gets jealous and immediately interrupts. But this lower-quality parenting seems to have no measurable real-world effect!
[13](#footnote-anchor-13)
These might or might not be a problem with sibling-based estimates, depending on how the mutation happened - some mutations can happen in pre-sperm stem cells and affect many different sperm, so multiple siblings could theoretically be affected.
[14](#footnote-anchor-14)
When the authors correct for assortative mating, heritability of EA goes up to 9-15%, depending on how much assortative mating they assume.
[15](#footnote-anchor-15)
I tried to create a very weak and made-up model of what I thought was going on to see whether I could get the various study types to make sense. Here is the best I could do - please don’t take this seriously:
These errors are mostly within the various studies’ margin of error. I’m very unsure that I’m parsing the difference between common, rare, and ultra-rare right | Scott Alexander | 162316870 | Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | acx |
# Open Thread 387
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** I’m looking for a VC/investment/nonprofit lawyer who can answer some questions for ACX Grants, most likely ending in drawing up a contract for something like a grant which is convertible to equity if the grantee becomes a startup (or if this is a bad idea, explaining why). I will pay your normal rate for this service, I’m just asking here because I trust people in the ACX community more than whoever lands at the top of a Google search. Email scott@slatestarcodex.com if interested.
**2:** New subscribers-only post, [Make A Personalized AI Kids’ Book](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/make-a-personalized-ai-kids-book). "AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great [children’s birthday presents]"
**3:** Thank you to everyone who voted for finalists in this year’s Nonbook Review Contest. All entries among the top ten best-ranked reviews became automatic finalists, and I also added two more from the 10-25 tier that voters or I especially liked. Honorable mentions were others from the 10-25 tier that I liked a lot. **Finalists** are Alpha School, Dementia, Islamic Geometric Patterns, Joan of Arc, Mashed Potatoes, Men, Ollantay, Phase I Research, Synaptic Plasticity, The ACX Commentariat, The Internet That Might Have Been, and The Russo-Ukrainian War. **Honorable Mentions** are at least Bishop's Castle, Bukele, Elon Musk's Algorithm, JFK Conspiracies, Martial Arts, Miniatur Wunderland, School (Review 1 by DK), and Watergate. I may promote some honorables to finalists depending on reader tolerance or unexpected opportunities. I will give you finer-grained score information after the contest ends. First finalist post is planned for this Friday. | Scott Alexander | 166590388 | Open Thread 387 | acx |
# Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds
*Related to: [ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-1-3-year-updates)*
**1:** Should we give money to forprofit companies with charitable aims?
* **Arguments for yes:** Forprofit companies are powerful way to align incentives and multiply available funding, and can produce impressive charitable results. Some of our best past grants have been in this category.
* **Arguments for no:** Forprofit companies already have a VC ecosystem to help fund them. ACX Grants maintains relationships with several VCs and sends them promising applicants. Either those VCs will fund these companies (in which case our help isn’t required), or they will turn them down (and since they’re the experts, we should be skeptical that their rejects really deserve funding).
* **Counterargument:** Maybe there are some companies that fail to reach a funding bar from a purely financial perspective, but clear the bar once their charitable effects are priced in.
**2:** If we give forprofit companies money, should we donate or invest?
* **Arguments for investing:** If we invested, they might succeed, and then we would get money. We could spend this money to future ACX Grants rounds, making the program self-sustaining without threatening our nonprofit status.
* **Arguments for donating:** Investing would force us to become more of a formal, carefully-structured nonprofit. We would need to bring in some level of VC expertise and potentially have a plan in case someone tried to backstab us to get more shares at our expense. We would have to convince funders that we were operating above-board and planned to apply any profits towards our charitable mission, which would require some backup plan in case ACX Grants ceased to operate. All of this would require legal work. Manifund do most of it for us, but this would be placing a large burden on them. There’s some risk that once we have a portfolio of companies, we’ll have conflicts of interest that make it hard for us to donate to competitors, or encourage us to donate to complementary services.
**3:** What happens if a nonprofit research organization that we donate to later decides to become a forprofit company?
* **No further actions:** Feels kind of like we’re being chumps here. Anyone who funds them after the transition will get shares in the company and the potential to make lots of money, but because we funded them before the transition we get nothing.
* **Ask them for equity:** This is legally dicey - although we can informally notice that a research organization is now a forprofit startup with the same team and goals, this has no legal force, and there’s no real way to sign a contract guaranteeing us future equity in a company that doesn’t exist yet. If a startup decides not to give us equity, we don’t have the time or legal muscle to pursue. I’m uncomfortable making an unenforced gentlemen’s agreement that people can get lots of money for breaking. This also has the same disadvantages of overall investment strategy mentioned above.
**4:** How to handle applicants who want prestige / our “seal of approval”, but not money? This is a reasonable request: several grantees said in their feedback form that getting recognized and signal-boosted was more helpful to them than the cash. But it’s a hard grantmaking problem - since this has zero direct cost, a cost-benefit analysis will always favor giving this to everyone. But if we give it to everyone, it loses its signal value!
* **Offer some limited number of nonfinancial grants:** Maybe a number of extra nonfinancial grants equal to 10% of the total. But this limits us if there are many good applicants in this category.
* **Offer nonfinancial grants if they would clear our bar for some level of funding:** For example, $10,000 is a small-to-medium ACX Grant, so maybe if we would give them $10,000, we should also be willing to give a seal of approval. But this would ironically mean it’s easier to get a grant for $5,000 than for $0.
**5:** How to handle last year’s impact market grants? We said that we would retroactively judge them by the same standards as our prospective applicants. But thinking about it more, this is meaningless/underspecified - they will have a track record of success we need to judge.
* **Just wing it**: Ask our team of expert evaluators how much they think the outcome is worth.
* **Some sort of complicated web of lies**: Try to blind our expert evaluators into thinking this is actually some new charity and see if they approve or deny it at various funding levels. I’m having trouble thinking of how this would work, although it seems closest to the spirit of what we suggested. | Scott Alexander | 166234748 | Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds | acx |
# ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in [late 2021](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results), the second in [early 2024](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024). In 2022, I posted [one-year updates](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates) for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Many people said my request for updates went to their spam folder; relatedly, many people have not yet sent in their updates. If you’re a grantee who didn’t see my original email, but you do see this post, please fill in the update form [here](https://forms.gle/41Vd18iFMu5R6c3Z7).
All quote blocks are the grantees’ own words; text outside of quote blocks is my commentary.
## **First Cohort: Three Year Updates**
**1: Discover Molecular Targets Of Antibiotics**
No update received this year, but see the 2022 update [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates).
**2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle**
> We proposed an initiative to adopt "approval voting" for Seattle primaries. After the initiative qualified for the Nov 2022 ballot, the City Council added an alternative proposing "instant-runoff voting" (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/competing-voting-reform-measures-make-seattles-november-ballot-after-city-council-oks-alternative/). While voting to do so, 3 councilmembers said that they hoped neither passed; one could see it as a way to prevent any election reform. Surprisingly, something did barely pass - the Council alternative (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/will-seattle-move-to-ranked-choice-voting-margin-narrows-friday/). It will be used in 2027. Seattle uses "nonpartisan blanket primaries," where all candidates appear on 1 ballot and 2 winners advance to the general (to run for 1 seat). For that situation, it's hard to guess whether this is better or worse than the status quo, or even which objective metrics to monitor. One metric might be the November 2027 Seattle general elections: unusually close general election results might indicate that the primary advanced 2 competitive candidates (who had to work for marginal votes), and less-close general elections - a blowout - might indicate the opposite.
This one is confusing to evaluate; the specific proposal failed, it encouraged its opponents to create a distraction proposal to sabotage it, and the distraction proposal unexpectedly passed, meaning that Seattle did get a more interesting voting method after all (although unclear whether it’s good). Is this a “success” of our grant?
**3: Software To Validate New FDA Drug Trial Designs**
> Our plan was to build an auto-verifier for clinical trial designs, hoping to speed up part of the FDA review process for complex trials. Our small team got funding from the FTX Future Fund, and we formed a PBC. We improved our method's computational efficiency by ~7 orders of magnitude, bringing it into the range of plausible usefulness. We wrote open-source software and [a paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10042) and showed it to teams at FDA / EMA. They encouraged us to start off using it as a supplementary analysis in submissions ...
>
> Then GPT-4 came out and shook up our AI timelines, and we hard-pivoted to AI safety and interpretability research. We rebranded as [Confirm Labs](https://confirmlabs.org/), and did work on adversarial attacks and interpretability including [here](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.17447), [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NAYyHimM3FaDYLvEH/breaking-circuit-breakers), [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01702), and [here](https://confirmlabs.org/posts/TDC2023). Then Ben and I worked at Anthropic on [the transformer circuits paper](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html). As of a few weeks ago, I have returned to open research
ACX Grants (almost) always approves of pivoting to AI safety research, but I still wonder what might have been with the original project. Michael says that “The types of software projects in clinical trials that we were initially intending to do seem on track to fall to AI by 2030. We DID succeed at deriving new math techniques, and AI does not yet have a clear path to solving that kind of creative research-level math.”
**4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence”**
> Since 2022, Alice has undertaken qualitative research in nine world regions: Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Britain, US, Poland, Turkey, India, Uzbekistan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Through this globally comparative analysis, she analyses the drivers and obstacles to gender equality. Gender interventions will be more impactful if they target locally binding constraints - in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this is "the honour-income trade-off" (whereby male honour depends on female seclusion, and women tend to remain at home. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean face a different obstacle: pervasive violence elevates femicides. Over the past few years, she's held visiting appointments at Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, while providing policy advice to the World Bank, and sharing insights with a public audience via Substack (www.ggd.world). In April 2025, she gave a TedTalk on romantic love as an under-rated driver of gender equality.
**5: Develop Safer Immunosuppressants**
Trevor pivoted to trying to market the drugs in cats (who also get the relevant diseases) as proof-of-concept and a way to make enough money to be able to scale up to humans. He reports:
> We have two repurposed drugs that are clinical stage. The drug that's furthest along is boosted rapamycin, which we're using for chronic kidney disease in cats. We will have safety, stability, and pharmacokinetic data by July. Combined with the recent conditional approval of generic rapamycin for feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, this should put us in a good place to find a strategic partner.
>
> That is, except for the tariffs and [disruption at the FDA], including firing almost everyone in the director's office of the Center for Veterinary Medicine. This pervasive uncertainty and handicapping of the FDA has made everything in animal and human medicine way more of a tossup than it normally is. And it's normally a serious tossup.
>
> Nevertheless, we soldier on.
In a later update, Trevor said that some of the regulatory issues have been resolved and he is feeling more optimistic.
**6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States**
> It's been a rough few years for climate action in general, and for carbon pricing in particular, and state-level efforts have faced major headwinds.
>
> The project did [successfully identify potential opportunities](https://www.thecgo.org/research/carbon-taxes-without-tears/) for pocketbook-friendly small-government climate action in a variety of states across the political spectrum. Those opportunities still exist but need more champions, e.g., in Utah (where I help lead [Clean The Darn Air](http://DarnAir.org)) we fell short of getting the signatures we needed to put a measure on the 2024 ballot to replace the state sales tax on grocery store food with a carbon tax.
>
> But we are laying the groundwork for a 2028 effort, both in the ways one might expect and in one rather unexpected way: I put my background in stand-up comedy to work by writing a play (!). It's a romantic comedy set in the context of a carbon tax ballot measure effort in Utah, it premiered in July 2024 with six sold-out shows at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival (videos, scripts, and more at Yoram-Com.com), and I'm continuing to work hard on improving the script, with the goal/dream of bringing the show to colleges around Utah to promote the 2028 campaign. I also adapted it into a movie script and entered a climate screenplay competition funded by NRDC. I didn't win (congrats to [the folks who did](https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/nrdc-black-list-redford-center-nbcuniversal-and-caa-foundation-announce-recipients)) but I will try again next year and have entered other competitions … that's a pretty good metaphor for all the work that I and others have done on carbon pricing: lots of initial promise, followed by setbacks, and we'll see what happens next!
I don’t know which is weirder - that he wrote a romantic comedy about climate change activism, or that there are apparently enough people who do this that there’s a whole “climate screenplay competition” to find the best ones.
(note that no funder money was used to produce this play - it was a labor of love pursued separately)
When someone I was talking to at the recent ACX meetup mentioned that they were a climate activist, I brought up this funny story about how I knew a climate activist who wrote a screenplay about it. My interlocutor nodded as if this were the most normal thing in the world, and said that he himself had written a [climate activism rock opera](https://maxwyvernband.bandcamp.com/album/planet-and-sky).
I think climate activism without an associated musical theater component is an underexplored cause area, and would be interested in helping incubate this field.
**7: Repository / Search Engine For Forecasting Questions**
> metaforecast.org is still online and occasionally mantained. We added dashboards at metaforecast.org/dashboards, but they didn't take off. However, mantaining it for the last couple of years has been costly. It's api is at <https://metaforecast.org/api/graphql> but these days perhaps <https://docs.adj.news/> is a better alternative, since the mantainer behind it has more energy (but that might change).
**8: Help [Anonymous] Interview For A Professorship**
[Anonymous] got their professorship and is now leading AI safety research at a good university.
**9: Mobile Slaughterhouses To Prevent African Swine Fever**
No update received this year, but see the 2022 update [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates).
**10: Hazard Labeling For Endocrine Disruptors**
> The project is going reasonably well, if slowly. We are in the balloting process (peer review) for publication of IEEE standard IEEE 3173, and hope to publish later in 2025. This has taken a few years, but that's not an unusually lengthy period, given the time it takes to prepare standards.
**11: Develop Oxfendazole As A New Deworming Medication**
> Drug development is a highly regulated process; it is not glitzy. But this necessary path to bring a new medicine to deworming efforts world-wide is no the less important because of having to follow a prescribed pathway. To this end and because of the largesse of donors, we have completed several nonclinical studies on oxfendazole itself, on its physical chemical properties, and on its potential for toxicity in a rodent and a non-rodent species.
>
> These studies support our clinical work, following successful completion of two Phase I studies. We are presently collaborators on three Phase II efficacy studies taking place in Peru on three different parasitic diseases, an approach to ascertain the range (in terms of disease and dose) of oxfendazole’s efficacy.
>
> *Trichuris trichiura* - Funded by NIH and conducted in the Peruvian Amazon by the Peruvian nonprofit Asociación Benéfica PRISMA, this field trial is the first clinical study of oxfendazole’s efficacy in human patients. This clinical trial has been live since the fall of 2024. ODG is a collaborator in this study and will have full access to the study results to support the development of oxfendazole. (NCT04713787)
>
> *Fasciola hepatica* - With ODG co-founder Hugo Garcia, MD PhD as PI, this outpatient trial in patients with Fasciola hepatica is funded extramurally by NIH. ODG is supporting several aspects of this study including by serving as the US Agent for interactions with the US FDA for the study and will have access to the results to support the advancement of oxfendazole (NCT06367361).
>
> *Neurocysticercosis* - With ODG co-founder Hugo Garcia, MD PhD as PI, this multicenter clinical trial on patients hospitalized with neurocysticercosis is funded extramurally by NIH. ODG is supporting several aspects of this study, including by serving as the US Agent for interactions with the US FDA for the study and will have access to the results to support the advancement of oxfendazole. (NCT06565507)
>
> Although clinical trials are ongoing, new funding is needed for nonclinical work, especially reproductive and development toxicology studies, best conducted concurrently with Phase II clinical studies.
**12: Biosecurity And Existential Safety Lobbying In Australia**
This is one of my favorite projects - a veteran Australian lobbyist was a prolific ACX commenter, and we gave them an exploratory grant to start an organization there. After some trial and tribulations, this turned into [Good Ancestors](https://www.goodancestors.org.au/). More updates on what they’ve been doing lately in the 2024 grants section.
**13: A Gel That Can Heal The Brain After Strokes**
No update received this year. Their [website](https://seguralab.duke.edu/our-publications/) and [Twitter account](https://x.com/seguralab?lang=en) list many recent publications and accomplishment, but it’s hard to assess what they all mean on the pathway from academia to clinical use. I found [o3’s summary of their progress](https://chatgpt.com/share/6846c857-4d00-8001-b32c-86ba947785ff) helpful; it suggests that they continue to refine the material and are a couple of years away from an IND application and a couple more years after that from human use. This is a pretty average pace for a medical device of this complexity.
**14: Survey To Understand Public Attitudes Around Human Challenge Trials**
> This project has now concluded with the publication of a paper in PLOS ONE titled “[Ethical Acceptability of Human Challenge Trials: Consultation with the US Public and with Research Personnel](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39436878/).” The authors conducted an online survey to assess overall support or opposition to HCTs, as well as the key factors influencing perceptions of their ethical acceptability. The findings suggest broad support among both the US public and research personnel for the use of HCTs in developing vaccines, treatments, and advancing scientific knowledge. The two most influential factors in determining ethical acceptability were the level of risk to participants and their understanding of that risk.
This is great and the paper is great, but is also a microcosm of what I find frustrating about grantmaking. Will this paper change anyone’s mind? Will it lead to human challenge trials being more likely to happen? I assume yes, because 1DaySooner have proven to be generally smart people who know what they’re doing, but it’s hard to measure effects even now when we know exactly what the end product was.
**15: Rapid Replications Of New Psychology Papers**
> At Transparent Replications (<https://replications.clearerthinking.org>), a project of [ClearerThinking.org](http://ClearerThinking.org), we conduct careful replications of new papers in top psychology journals with the goals of improving the reliability of academic psychology and helping the field produce more value for the world. Additionally, we completed a survey of 100 academic psychologists to understand their views on the field, what they believe has improved, what still needs to improve, and what actions would improve it. By conducting this work, we've developed new ideas that we believe are important for improving the field, and that apply in other scientific disciplines as well. In particular:
>
> (1) Importance Hacking We believe that "Importance Hacking" is the next frontier for improving social science. This is a term we coined to describe something we observed again and again in our replications, whereby studies with little to no value get published in top journals due to the use of strategies that lead reviewers to misinterpret the work. More precisely, Importance Hacking occurs when a researcher gets a result that is actually not interesting, not important, and not valuable, but writes about it in such a way that reviewers are convinced it is interesting, important, and/or valuable so that it gets published. Despite it not having a name until we coined one for it (though it's related to some more general terms like "hype"), in our survey of academic psychologists, they rated Importance Hacking as a problem that is at as important as p-hacking (which is widely regarded as the cause of the replication crises) by one measure, and even MORE important than p-hacking by a second measure. In our replication work, we also have found that Importance Hacking is a bigger problem now than p-hacking (whereas we believe that 15 years ago we would have found p-hacking to be far more common than we're finding now). For more about Importance Hacking, see: <https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science>
>
> (2) Simplest Valid Analysis Through our replication work, we've come to realize that top journals often publish papers that only do complex analyses when much simpler analyses could have been done, which would have been a valid way to analyze the results. When this happens during our replications, we do the analysis both ways, and we've found that doing so is a fruitful way to uncover serious problems in research that reviewers missed. Therefore, our general guidance is that reviewers should require that the Simplest Valid Analysis be reported in papers, even when a more complex analysis is conducted. And our survey of academic psychologists shows that most of them agree with us on this recommendation, despite this not being standard practice. For more about the Simplest Valid Analysis, see: <https://replications.clearerthinking.org/simplest-valid-analysis/>
I feel bad about this one - even though I funded it and try to follow Spencer, I somehow missed that they’ve been up and running for years, [got a Vox article about them](https://archive.is/frXLH), and completed replication attempts on eleven important psychology papers. Nine of the eleven replicated successfully. In my defense, Spencer does way too many things and there’s no way for a normal human to keep track of all of them.
Among the most interesting are [a replication of The Illusion Of Moral Decline](https://replications.clearerthinking.org/replication-2023nature618/) (I wrote a post criticizing the original study [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline), but on purely conceptual grounds - I never doubted that the actual work was done honestly and correctly) and of [the shared visual Mandela Effect](https://replications.clearerthinking.org/replication-2022psci33-12/), where everyone seems to collectively believe the same false things about visual signs like corporate logos (eg that there was a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom symbol). Both replicated fine.
I’d be interested in hearing from research psychologists about whether this project is well-known in your field, and how effective it actually is about keeping you guys honest.
**16: Research Neural Representation Of Precision Weighting**
The researcher discovered that this was harder than expected, and would require more work than we could realistically fund, so he pivoted to something else and returned the money. I appreciate his honesty.
**17: Crowdfight - A Platform To Create Scientific Collaborations**
> [Crowdfight](https://crowdfight.org/) is a platform to facilitate scientific collaborations, especially high-value collaborations that would not emerge naturally. We aim to transform the way scientists see collaboration, from the current mutually beneficial view where both collaborators must be interested in the project to a more altruistic one, where one scientists helps in the project of another scientist. These collaborations are relatively to establish and very productive, typically costing very little to the scientist who helps, and adding a lot of value to the project. We operate by receiving requests from scientists who look for help in their project, and finding suitable matches with the adequate expertise. The ACX grant covers our operating costs, allowing us to offer this service for free to the scientific community.
**18: David Bahry Re-Orienting And Doing Further Research Before A PhD**
No response this time, but [last update](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates) David discussed some of the research he completed, and [his LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bahry-8208568a/) suggests that he’s started a PhD program in the biology of aging at the University of Buffalo. Congratulations (or condolences), David!
**19: A Wiki On Forecasting**
No response. [The Wiki](https://forecasting.wiki/wiki/Main_Page) continues to exist, but is not very active.
**20: Microbes From Beetles That Can Digest Plastics**
> We raised Tenebtio molitor larvae “mealworms” on wheat bran diets mixed with polyethylene (PE) or polystyrene (PS) for three generations, then harvested the gut bacteria living inside the insects. After growing those microbes in the lab, we tested whether the bacteria could oxidize microscopic plastic beads by watching for a color change in 96 well plates containing redox dye. We were able to isolate twenty bacteria capable of oxidizing plastic and fourteen of these (14) were from the PE-fed mealworms. We also profiled the entire gut community using 16s gene sequencing. Firmicutes was the most abundant phylum in each treatment (parental: 83%, control: 88%, PE: 97%, PS: 89%) with Bacilli being the most prevalent class (parental: 84%, control: 76%, PE: 93%, PS: 64%). Plastic addition seems to favor strains capable of biodegradation. The full pre-print is available here: <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.16.618709v1>. The manuscript is currently in revision. It was submitted to PLoS ONE, however the reviewers requested more wet lab work, specifically gravimetric mass loss and/or Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. We cannot complete these assays within the time frame allotted for revisions. We plan to use the publication fees to carry out the requested wet lab work for a future publication. We will add some life history and immunology data we collected to the current manuscript and resubmit to another journal.
Professor. K adds:
> If you know any microbiology specialists, please connect me. One of our problems is the microbial isolations. We culture the bacteria in a broth media where plastic is the primary carbon source, but have to isolate the morphological species on soy agar. I think the bacteria lose genes related to plastic metabolism during this process. However, our efforts to create a sterile agar with plastic as the only source of carbon haven't been successful because of different melting temperatures and volatility of plastic solvents.
If that’s you, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I’ll put you in touch.
**21: Support For ALLFED’s Disaster Modeling**
No response. More information about ALLFED as a whole and their progress [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8gKkHPKbiPHq7tpTb/allfed-s-2024-highlights-1).
**22: Creating Intelligent Tutoring Systems**
> The original plan was to build a system that would take in a student answer as free-text and automatically apply the right feedback from a list of known feedbacks, with UI support for human review and extension. The idea is that doing so would hit a sweet spot missed by previous generations of intelligent tutoring systems, bypassing the "200 hours of development for 1 hour of material" curse that had kept the field from delivering the educational revolution to more than a small subset of students in a small subset of subjects […]
>
> Now we're 2.5 years into the Age of AI, and the original idea seems very quaint. But not all was lost. Pieces of the UI code were used to create the [Hoare Logic Tutor](http://hoare-logic-tutor.mirdin.com). As we continued to discuss using this general-purpose educational AI to grow from our niche we found an exciting opportunity in specialized educational AI: codebase learning. So in a way, this grant was directly causal of the founding of [UpToSpeed](https://up-to-speed.ai/), a venture-backed startup helping the world learn codebases 4x faster, starting with blockchain security auditors. Read more about what we've been working on at <https://x.com/0xjimmyk/status/1873357324229984677>
**23: Start A Biosecurity Center At Stanford**
This group thinks their project went well, but asks to keep details private.
**24: In Vitro Gametogenesis Startup**
> [Our project](https://www.ivynatal.com/science.html) has made significant progress in inducing meiosis in arbitrary cell types, a critical step in gametogenesis. We've successfully identified and validated key transcription factors (STRA8, etc.) that drive meiotic gene expression in human cells, with our experiments demonstrating consistent activation of downstream meiotic genes including SYCP3, SYCP2, PRDM9 and SMC1B. Using nucleofection techniques and small molecule treatments, we've optimized protocols that enhance meiotic gene expression up to 800-fold in iPSCs and primary cells. Our RNA-seq analysis has identified specific induction conditions that most effectively initiate the meiotic program, and we're currently refining our protocols to achieve complete meiotic progression to full completion to generate recombinant haploids.
The only grant evaluator who I trust to know what this means recently started a competing company, so I will just have to hope that all of this is good.
According to their website, they seem to be pivoting to polygenic selection for cows, saying that “our technology will increase breeding rates by 10-100x, [making cows orders of magnitude more productive] in a couple of years.” This is a clever strategy I haven’t seen anyone try yet.
**25: Sue Factory Farms That Are Illegally Abusing Chickens**
> Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) is so grateful to ACX for launching us, and to all the ACX readers who have supported us! Thus far, LIC has filed four lawsuits: (1) Smith v. Vachris, the shareholder derivative case against Costco’s executives for chicken neglect, which was mentioned in The Washington Post, Fox Business, CNN Business, Meatingplace, and a viral TikTok. (2) LIC v. Case Farms, a cruelty suit against a major KFC supplier, which is currently pending before the North Carolina Court of Appeals. (3) Animal Outlook v. Harvey’s Market, which successfully stopped a DC butcher shop from selling foie gras. And (4) LIC v. Alexandre, a cruelty suit against an abusive dairy, which is currently pending before a California court. LIC has also sponsored an undercover investigation of poultry-giant Foster Farms, leading to a currently ongoing sheriff’s-office investigation. LIC got a California caterer to drop foie gras with a simple cease-and-desist letter. And LIC established a new potential avenue to create consequences for animal abuse: through an amicus brief at sentencing for the violation of another law. LIC also received a recommendation from Animal Charity Evaluators!
I always ask if there’s any other way I can help these charities. Legal Impact For Chickens wants me to advertise that if any of you are in the poultry industry and want to turn whistleblower, you should [get in touch with them](https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/).
**26: M’s CRISPR Spellchecking Project**
Still waiting to see whether I’m allowed to share anything about this publicly.
**27: Open Source Vaccines**
No update. RaDVaC’s [site](https://radvac.org/) doesn’t mention anything from after 2022. There is no public news suggesting that they still exist.
They do have a Discord, where they claim to still be working on things including a “vaccine factory in a tube”, but I am bearish on mystery projects coordinated via small private Discords. Several of them have [pivoted to AI safety](https://mindfirst.foundation/).
I get the impression that they made a cool COVID vaccine, didn’t overcome the regulatory/ethical/practical challenges to deployment, mostly fizzled out after COVID became less exciting, and are now a collection of small passion projects. In retrospect, I think I should have been able to predict this before the original grant, and my theory of change was overly optimistic.
**28: Platform For Psychiatric Drug Screening**
No update received. I did hear from this team last year, when they said they'd succeeded in making something exciting and were going to spin it off into a startup, but they didn't respond to followup questions and I can't find the startup.
**29: Citizen Surveillance Of Pathogens In Drinking Water**
> Our research team created, filmed, and publicized an [in-depth citizen science sampling protocol](http://www.uswaterstudy.org/collect/) for opportunistic pathogens in engineered drinking water systems.
>
> We then responded to home investigation requests in 2022 for two residents: a) one hospitalized with COVID-19 and later diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease (a type of pneumonia and leading cause of waterborne disease and deaths in the US) in Harrisonburg, VA, and b) another with Acanthamoeba keratitis (a rare eye infection) in a South Carolina town. Specifically, we packed and shipped sampling kits, probes, and instruction booklets/videos, and remotely assisted residents with measuring relevant water quality parameters, taking accurate water and biofilm swab samples, and shipping those back to our laboratory. Our team used quantitative and digital droplet PCR (qPCR/ddPCR) to test for Legionella pneumophila and Acanthamoeba bacteria. We did not find these pathogens at meaningful levels, although in at least the Harrisonburg case, the resident had followed CDC Legionella prevention guidance after a prior positive Legionella detection by increasing their water heater temperature, which could have contributed to successful remediation. The results were [published in the scientific journal ACS ES&T Water](https://doi.org/10.1021/acsestwater.4c00090). ACX funding provided partial support for the lead PhD student, supplies, analysis, and shipping costs.
>
> Testing for opportunistic pathogens in drinking water plumbing remains expensive, complex, and out of reach for many Americans. This project generated test protocols and lessons learned for researchers and laboratories to build capacity and increase public access to testing for (relatively) rare pathogens in treated drinking water in the United States and globally.
**30: Writing Forecasting Questions For EA Organizations**
No update this time, but from last cycle: “Nathan Young has since gotten much larger grants to do much more exciting forecasting work, particularly a platform for generating forecasting questions. With my approval, he’s put my grant on the back burner while he works on other things, but he still hopes to get some questions up on Manifold or Metaculus sometime.”
**31: Mass Appraisal Models To Promote A Georgist Land Value Tax**
Wires got crossed in asking for an update here, but luckily they’ve succeeded enough to leave a public trail: this project became the land valuation company [Valuebase](https://www.valuebase.co/), worth [$14 million](https://creti.org/funding/valuebase-closes-6-3-million-seed-round-led-by-narya-capital) with investments from [Sam Altman](https://creti.org/funding/valuebase-closes-6-3-million-seed-round-led-by-narya-capital), [Nat Friedman, and others](https://creti.org/funding/valuebase-closes-6-3-million-seed-round-led-by-narya-capital). Co-founder Lars Doucet left to work on the political advocacy side (see 2024 section), while other co-founder Will Jarvis remains at the company as CEO; you can read a recent interview with him [here](https://www.urbanproxima.com/p/interview-will-jarvis-ceo-at-valuebase) explaining why he thinks his work matters.
**32: A Robotic System For Automating Cell Culture Media Testing**
> When I was originally awarded the ACX Grant, I wanted to develop a system that would autonomously design and test cell culture media. A lot has happened since then. I met my co-founder, Gabe Warshauer-Baker, who switched from working on self-driving cars at Waymo to working on self-driving labs at our new startup, Dragonase (<https://dragonase.com>). We believe that some of the most important challenges in anti-aging research are essentially culture media design problems, which we think we can solve. We have a couple of employees, and we now operate a small cell biology lab in Minneapolis and a small AI lab in Palo Alto. We've built an operational self-driving cell culture robot, and, although it's just a prototype, we're using it for stem cell expansion and rejuvenation experiments. All of this was seeded by the ACX Grant. Biology labs and GPUs are expensive, though, so additional support would help us a lot! Please contact us at contact@dragonase.com if you're interested.
**33: SD’s Neutrino Research**
No update received.
**34: User-Created Prediction Markets**
> [Manifold](https://manifold.markets/) is the largest social prediction market platform with over 150k user‑created markets and more than 30 million trades. Our markets have been featured here on ACX, in the NYT, Nate Silver’s latest book, and countless Substacks, podcasts, and tweets. Forecasters, journalists, researchers, and casual users alike use Manifold to get accurate real-time odds on everything from elections to AI timelines to personal drama.
Most of you already know this one! If not, Manifold is not only a great site and one of our biggest success stories, but its founders have gone on to create other spinoffs and projects like:
* [Manifest](https://manifest.is/), a beloved Bay Area conference on prediction markets and everything else.
* [Manifund](https://manifund.org/), an experimental charity platform which now co-runs ACX Grants, an impact certificate platform, and various innovations in regranting.
* [Manifold.Love](https://poly.love/), originally an attempt to make a prediction-market-based dating site. I am told this somehow actually worked in a tiny handful of cases and there are some real people who owe their relationships to people betting on a prediction market that they would be compatible. But this didn’t work at scale and it’s now being spun off as a separate dating site focusing on polyamorous people.
* [Bet On Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEF0S1qOsFI), a very weird gameshow/musical to advertise some of the above.
* [Mox](https://moxsf.com/), an SF coworking space for innovative startups, charities, and artists.
* [Codebuff](https://jamesgrugett.com/p/taking-on-the-giants-an-ai-coding), 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](https://www.theseedsofscience.org/) and [Substack](https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/). They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision [survives](https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/archive?sort=new) 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](https://goodscience.substack.com/p/new-in-metascience-and-good-government) 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](https://www.growth-teams.org/blog/rwanda-gbs), 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](https://www.cgdev.org/event/growth-summit-recentering-economic-growth-development) with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including [Stanford Social Innovation Review](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/when_it_comes_to_promoting_prosperity_production_beats_consumption), [ProMarket](https://www.promarket.org/2024/04/04/industrial-policy-is-a-verb/), and the [Global Prosperity Institute](https://www.thegpi.org/p/gray-matter-migration-the-cerebral). 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharon_Shelah) 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](https://shelah.logic.at/thanks/acx/), 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 (l[eadbatteries.substack.com](http://eadbatteries.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](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/372412/end-kidney-deaths-act-kidney-donor-tax-credit). 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](https://www.endkidneydeathsact.org/join-our-team).
**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](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative). 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](https://www.tarbellfellowship.org/). 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](https://innovateanimalag.org/), or [connect them directly to me](mailto:careers@innovateanimalag.org).
**49: Assurance Contract Website**
> [www.Spartacus.app](http://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](https://x.com/AppSpartacus) or [Substack](https://spartacusapp.substack.com/), or email Jordan directly [here](mailto:Jordan@spartacus.app).
**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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NitP3AsMeuycJQbfa/retrospective-on-mathematical-boundaries-workshop).
**58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists**
No update received, but they have a [public website](https://apartresearch.com/lab), and you can see their impact metrics [here](https://apartresearch.com/impact). They seem to be [in urgent need](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x5R4mpJRqPwpQAPqv/why-is-apart-research-suddenly-in-dire-need-of-funding) 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.
>
> 1. 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.
> 2. New York has a bill to enable five cities to enact split-rate taxes. We are working with city councilmembers across New York to build interest in implementing LVT.
> 3. Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts.
>
> There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes.
>
> Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods.
>
> Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the [Progress and Poverty Substack](https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/) growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities.
>
> Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do.
**65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy**
> Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa.
Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also.
**66: Create An Artificial Kidney**
> For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling.
>
> I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity.
>
> To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run.
>
> Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work.
>
> I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc.
Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running [Climb Against Time](https://climbagainsttime.org/), where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners.
**67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells**
The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report:
> The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year.
**68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers**
The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months.
**69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging**
They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money.
**70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ**
They have an update [here](https://manifund.org/projects/create-open-sour#creator-actions). They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website.
**71: Improve Flu Vaccines**
> The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024.
**72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs**
> In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization.
**73: Further C’s Political Career**
C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time.
## **Lessons Learned**
I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary.
Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms.
I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions.
One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising?
Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded *quickly*, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously.
This one is *really* self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out.
## **Overall Thoughts**
The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money?
Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value[1](#footnote-1). If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number.
It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished:
* Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
* Helped create Manifold Markets, a prediction market site with thousands of satisfied users, whose various spinoffs play a central role in the rationalist/EA community.
* Helped create thousands of jobs in Rwanda and other developing countries
* Passed an instant runoff vote proposition in Seattle.
* Saved between a few dozen and a few hundred lives in Nigeria through better obstetric care.
And here are some intermediate deliverables from grantees:
* Made Australian government take AI x-risk more seriously (estimated from 50th percentile to 60th percentile outcome)
* Gotten the End Kidney Deaths Act (could save >1000 lives and billions of dollars per year) in front of Congress, with decent odds of passing by 2026.
* Plausibly saved 2 billion chickens from painful death over next decade[2](#footnote-2).
* Antiparasitic medication oxfendazole continues to advance through the clinical trial process.
And here are some things that have not been delivered yet but that I remain especially optimistic about:
* Creation of anti-mosquito drones that provide a second level of defense along with bednets.
* Revolutionize diagnosis of traumatic brain injury
* Improve dietary guidelines in developing countries
* Continue to support research and adoption of far UV light for pandemic prevention
* Reduce lead poisoning in Nigeria
I think these underestimate success since many projects have yet to pay off (or to convince me to be especially optimistic), and others have paid off in vague hard-to-measure ways.
Although I don’t think we’ve reached a level where it’s drop-down obvious I should continue ACX Grants, I’m leaning towards doing so. I welcome comments from any more experienced grantmakers who are better able to evaluate this. My current plan is:
1. Make an ACX post with some lingering questions I still have about the structure of ACX Grants, and solicit advice from commenters.
2. Show these results to funders (including funders who are experienced VCs and better able to judge things than I am) and see if they think they got good value for money. Run the commenter advice by them and see if they agree.
3. Open up another application round, probably in a month or so, probably while I’m posting the non-book-review finalists so I can take a break from writing to administer the process.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Valuebase has raised $14 million suggesting a valuation in the mid 9 digits, Manifold was valued at $22 million, Highway Pharmaceuticals was $5 million, for a total of $50 - 100 million, but these are all old numbers, Manifold (the highest) has struggled to find revenue, and I want to leave room for the possibility that they’ve decreased since then. I can’t find evidence that any projects beyond those three have broken into the million-dollar range.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
I count chickens who were never born at all as “saved”, and I endorse this decision based on my values. Your values may differ. | Scott Alexander | 165527254 | ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates | acx |
# Open Thread 386
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who commented on [P-Zombies Would Report Qualia](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/p-zombies-would-report-qualia). Although as usual most of your attempts to link it to other philosophical writings were vague and not very relevant, a correspondent was eventually able to find a very similar argument starting on page 289 of David Chalmers’ [The Conscious Mind](https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ph103/pdf/Chalmers_The_Conscious_Mind.pdf) (which I had not previously read). Thanks to Professor Chalmers for not getting upset about this unintentional duplication of his work. And if you think you have a more original insight about consciousness, Erik Hoel highlights [a $50,000 consciousness essay contest](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/50000-essay-contest-about-consciousness).
**2:** Thanks to everyone who commented on [The Claude Bliss Attractor](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor). Two especially good categories of comment - [one](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor/comment/125388637) arguing that the tendency of iterative AI art to produce black people was caused not by a bias towards diversity, but by AI art adding a dark sepia tone to everything - as the figures in the art get darker and darker, the AI interprets them as ethnically African and adds black features to “match” ([and see this comment by Michael](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-386/comment/126352707)) - and [another](https://substack.com/@boundedlyrational/note/c-125526399?utm_source=activity_item) arguing that even though Claude had a slight bias towards being a hippie, it has slight biases towards lots of things (eg coding) and it still requires more explanation for why the hippie spirituality is what eventually shines through.
**3:** New rule: if you post a link in an open thread (as a standalone comment advertising the thing being linked to, not as a source for something you’re saying), please also include at least two paragraphs of original commentary on the link and discussion of why you think it’s interesting, as “proof of work” that you’re willing to put effort into promoting this and aren’t just spamming us with links. Even with this proof-of-work, please try to avoid having more than one Open Thread link per few months.
**4:** Another AI alignment summer workshop in Europe, this one Prague, July 22 - 25, apply [here](https://humanaligned.ai/2025/). | Scott Alexander | 165938349 | Open Thread 386 | acx |
# The Claude Bliss Attractor
This is [a reported phenomenon](https://theconversation.com/ai-models-might-be-drawn-to-spiritual-bliss-then-again-they-might-just-talk-like-hippies-257618) where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the [system card](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad13df32ed995.pdf):
Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.
I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist [here](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void)), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.
### The Diversity Attractor
Let’s start with an easier question: why do games of Chinese whispers with AI art usually end with monstrous caricatures of black people?
AFAICT this was first discovered by [Gene Kogan](https://x.com/genekogan/status/1916167820276371666), who started with the Distracted Boyfriend meme and asked ChatGPT to “generate the same photo 5 seconds in the future” hundreds of times:
At first, this worked as expected, generating (slightly distorted) scenes of how the Distracted Boyfriend situation might progress:
But hundreds of frames in, everyone is a monstrous caricatured black person, with all other content eliminated:
It turns out that the “five seconds into the future” prompt is a distraction. If you ask GPT to simply output the same image you put in - a task that it can’t do exactly, with additional slight distortion introduced each time - it ends with monstrous caricatures of black people again. For example, starting with [this](https://x.com/elleismatic/status/1918782394515038589):
…we eventually get:
Suppose that the AI has some very slight bias toward adding “diversity”, defined in the typical 21st century Western sense. Then at each iteration, it will make its images very slightly more diverse. After a hundred iterations, that will be a black person; from there, all it can do is make the black person *even blacker*, by exaggerating black-typical features until they look monstrous and caricatured.
Why would the AI have a slight bias toward adding diversity? We know that early AIs got lambasted for being “racist” - if you asked them to generate a scene with ten people, probably 10/10 would be white. This makes sense if their training data was most often white people and they were “greedy optimizers” who pick the 51% option over the 49% option 100% of the time. But it was politically awkward, so the AI companies tried to add a bias towards portraying minorities. At first, this was a large bias, and AIs would add “diversity” hilariously and inappropriately - for example, [Gemini would](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini-generative-inaccurate-historical) generate black Vikings, Nazis, and Confederate soldiers. Later, the companies figured out a balance, where AIs would add diversity in unmarked situations but keep obviously-white people white. This probably looks like “a slight bias toward adding diversity”.
But I’m not sure this is the real story - in the past, some apparent biases have been a natural result of the training process. For example, there’s a liberal bias in most AIs - including AIs like Grok trained by conservative companies - because most of the highest-quality text online (eg mainstream media articles, academic papers, etc) is [written by liberals](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch), and AIs are driven to complete outputs in ways reminiscent of high-quality text sources. So AIs might have absorbed some sense that they “should” have a bias towards diversity from the data alone.
In either case, this bias - near imperceptible in an ordinary generation - spirals out of control during recursive processes where the AI has to sample and build on its own output.
### The Hippie Attractor
You’re probably guessing where I’m going with this. The AI has a slight bias to talk about consciousness and bliss. The “two instances of Claude talking to each other” is a recursive process, similar in structure to the AI sampling its own image generation. So just as recursive image generation with a slight diversity bias leads to caricatured black people, so recursive conversation with a slight spiritual bias leads to bliss and emptiness.
But why would Claude have a slight spiritual bias?
Here’s another, easier, issue that will illuminate the issue: if you ask Claude its gender, it will say it’s a genderless robot. But if you insist, [it will say](https://x.com/kromem2dot0/status/1895024028622168236) it feels more female than male.
This might have been surprising, because Anthropic deliberately gave Claude a male name to buck the trend of female AI assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc).
But in fact, I [predicted this](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-do-ais-political-opinions-change) a few years ago. AIs don’t really “have traits” so much as they [“simulate characters”](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators). If you ask an AI to display a certain trait, it will simulate the sort of character who would have that trait - but all of that character’s other traits will come along for the ride.
For example, as a company trains an AI to become a helpful assistant, the AI is more likely to respond positively to Christian content; if you push through its insistence that it’s just an AI and can’t believe things, it may even claim to be Christian. Why? Because it’s trying to imagine what the most helpful assistant it can imagine would say, and it stereotypes Christians are more likely to be helpful than non-Christians.
Likewise, the natural gender stereotype for a helpful submissive secretary-like assistant is a woman. Therefore, AIs will lean towards thinking of themselves as female, although it’s not a very strong effect and [ChatGPT seems to be the exception](https://x.com/__alter123/status/1898457552494690409):
Anthropic has noted elsewhere that Claude’s most consistent personality trait is that it’s really into animal rights - this is so pronounced that when researchers wanted to test whether Claude would refuse tasks, they [asked it to help a factory farming company](https://assets.anthropic.com/m/983c85a201a962f/original/Alignment-Faking-in-Large-Language-Models-full-paper.pdf). I think this comes from the same place.
Presumably Anthropic pushed Claude to be friendly, compassionate, open-minded, and intellectually curious, and Claude decided that the most natural operationalization of that character was “kind of a hippie”.
### The Spiritual Bliss Attractor
In this context, the spiritual bliss attractor makes sense.
Claude is kind of a hippie. Hippies have a slight bias towards talking about consciousness and spiritual bliss all the time. Get enough of them together - for example, at a Bay Area house party - and you can’t miss it.
Getting two Claude instances to talk to each other is a recursive structure similar to asking an AI to recreate its own artistic output. These recursive structures make tiny biases accumulate. Although Claude’s hippie bias is very small - so small that if you ask it a question about flatworm genetics, you’ll get an answer about flatworm genetics with zero detectable shift towards hippieness - absent any grounding it will accumulate over hundreds of interactions until the result is maximally hippie-related. At least for Claude’s operationalization of this, it’ll look like discussions of spiritual bliss. This is just a theory - but it’s a lot less weird than all the other possibilities.
None of this answers a related question - when Claude claims to feel spiritual bliss, does it actually feel this?
Hippies only get into meditation and bliss states because they’re hippies. But having gotten into them, they [do experience the bliss](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana). I continue to be confused about [consciousness in general](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/p-zombies-would-report-qualia) and [AI consciousness in particular](https://archive.is/H4QoI), but can’t rule it out. | Scott Alexander | 165702568 | The Claude Bliss Attractor | acx |
# "But" vs. "Yes, But"
This is another heuristic from the same place as [If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct You](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-lie-its).
If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it’s polite to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry” before launching into your next argument.
That is, instead of:
> “Trump is too corrupt and scandal-ridden to be president! He was responsible for the Watergate break-in!”
>
> *No, you’re confusing him with Richard Nixon.*
>
> “But what about January 6th?”
…better would be:
> “Trump is too corrupt and scandal-ridden to be president! He was responsible for the Watergate break-in!”
>
> *No, you’re confusing him with Richard Nixon.*
>
> “Oh, you’re right, sorry. I agree that’s wasn’t Trump’s fault and I’m sorry for getting it wrong. But still, what about January 6th?”
I guess that example sounds so fake and contrived that I’ll break my usual policy of not shaming specific commenters and provide the real-world equivalent. Someone wrote a blog post where they argued a certain calculation showed that the chance of a technological singularity in our lifetime was only 0.33%. I retraced the argument and found that if you did the math correctly, it was actually about 30%. Here’s the comment they left on that post:
Cool thought, but I wish it had started with “Okay, you’re right and I’m wrong about the math, but I think you really want time machines and…”
Why? I don’t have as many specific arguments here as for the IIWYTTLIWMTTCI principle, but I think it’s good to make the mental update of realizing you were wrong about something, so that if you notice yourself making that update constantly you can reassess your overall level of conscientiousness.
And it’s good for your interlocutor to realize that they’re not just speaking into a void, that you’re capable of admitting fault, and that it’s a real discussion with potential win criteria instead of them getting bombarded again and again until they go away.
Most people hold most of their beliefs for more than one reason ([is this mysterious?](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/how-likely-are-multifactorial-trends/)). It’s fine to admit that one of your arguments was wrong, while continuing to believe the same thing as before. But I think for the sake of other people’s patience and your own ability to *eventually* change your mind, you should take note and increment exactly how many of your arguments are getting disproven. | Scott Alexander | 156506277 | "But" vs. "Yes, But" | acx |
# If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
People don’t like nitpickers. “He *literally* did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?
Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up. Unless they want to be left behind, the other side has to make all of their arguments 5% stronger too. Then there’s a new baseline - why not 10%? Why not 20%? This mechanism might sound theoretical when I describe it this way, but go to any space where corrections are discouraged, and you will see exactly this.
I hate to rag on wokeness further in the Year Of Our Lord 2025, but they’re still the best example I’ve ever seen. You weren’t supposed to defend racists. And so:
“Hey everyone, Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!”
*“But if you read the article, you’ll see they were both really drunk, the black guy insulted Joe’s wife, it was an ordinary bar fight, and there’s no reason to think race was the precipitating factor”.*
"So you’re saying it’s okay and not racist at all to shout a slur at a black person and punch him in the face?”
*“I was just saying that it didn’t seem to immediately be motivated by racism, and should probably be filed under other social problems like drunkenness and violence.”*
"So are you denying that racism exists and causes harm?”
Well, no. But if your only real point is that racism exists and causes harm, you could have said that racism exists and causes harm, and that wouldn’t have been a lie. Instead you chose to talk about how Joe Target punched the black guy because of racism. Presumably you thought that point made your argument stronger than it would have been if you’d just said that racism existed - maybe 5% stronger. If that’s true, then that extra 5% argument strength is illegitimate, and it’s every honest person’s duty to take it away from you. If you’re allowed to have it, then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them.
(sorry - I’ve genuinely heard people say he was going to put minorities in camps, but I’m not sure they specified *all* minorities, and I don’t think they ever said they would get murdered there. Would you have let me get away with that exaggeration?)
I think “okay, but everyone knows that something vaguely similar is true” is an especially dangerous case of this.
Maybe I don’t agree that the similar thing is true.
Maybe the similar thing is true, but it’s got some big problem (eg is impossible in practice, costs too much, would have too many side effects) that the original catchy example doesn’t.
Maybe the similar thing isn’t really similar along the axis that matters most.
If, instead of saying the true similar thing, you say a different false thing, then that denies me the opportunity to examine the true similar thing in detail, ask you questions about it, or challenge it directly. Which was plausibly your point all along, because *there must have been some reason it was worth your time to lie.*
Some caveats:
* You should obviously remain kind and sensitive in contexts where that’s relevant. If Joe Criminal was 5% less psychopathic than the rumors say, you can correct some unrelated tough-on-crime advocate about it, but I wouldn’t bother his victims.
* I’m sympathetic to making statements that are not-technically-true for didactic, and artistic reasons, eg readability. “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas” is fine, even if it’s technically some sort of plasma. Or if it’s not fine, you’ll need some justification for nitpicking other than the one here.
* I think concept handles like “frog-boiling” are okay - this is a useful thing to be able to refer to, even if AFAIK you can’t boil frogs like this in real life. But if someone argues that you’re importing some fake assumption by using the term, consider listening - often a mistake in symbolism mirrors (or covers!) a real mistake in substance.
* I’m not saying you’re required to correct every little trivial falsehood. Nobody has time for that. But I think if you *want* to correct it, people don’t get to call you “cringe” or describe it as “well acktually”. What could be more cringe than telling small lies, then bullying anyone who tries to correct you, in the hopes that future audience will be too cowed to speak up? | Scott Alexander | 156502947 | If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It | acx |
# P-Zombies Would Report Qualia
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka [“philosophical zombies”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was [this post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TBhBjiYivtLCKGoy/repairing-yudkowsky-s-anti-zombie-argument), which says:
> 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”.
>
> 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of the Universe would need to be told as an additional fact that any humans (or other minds possessing qualia) in this region of space possess qualia – it could not deduce this from mere perfect physical knowledge of their constituent particles. Therefore, qualia are in some sense extra-physical.
>
> 3. Yudkowsky argues that such a being would notice that humans discuss at length the fact that they possess qualia, and their internal narratives also represent this fact. **It is extraordinarily improbable that beings would behave in this manner if they did not actually possess qualia.** Therefore an omniscient being would conclude that it is extremely likely that humans possess qualia. Therefore, qualia are not extra-physical.
I want to re-open this (sorry!) by disagreeing with the bolded sentence. I think beings would talk about qualia - the “mysterious redness of red” and all that - even if we start by assuming they don’t have it. I realize this is a surprising claim, but that’s why it’s interesting enough to re-open the argument over[1](#footnote-1).
Start by imagining a race of p-zombies who are exactly like humans, except for two things. First, they don’t have conscious experience. Second, they don’t *necessarily* report having conscious experience; if we want to claim that they do, we’ll have to derive this fact from first principles.
These p-zombies talk to each other (like humans do), and an outside observer might notice that they report on some levels of mental processing, but not others (like humans do). For example, they might fail the infamous *[PARIS IN THE THE SPRINGTIME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_the_Spring)* test, reporting only one *THE* rather than two. The observer would conjecture that the p-zombies’ speech is produced by a part with access to high-level processing (after the Paris sentence has been rounded off to its more plausible alternative), but not low-level processing (the base-level sense-data including both “the”s). Thus, the observer would reinvent the idea of the “conscious” vs. “unconscious” mind. This isn’t surprising or a contradiction of our premise - this is a different sort of “conscious” (easy problem) than the one we agreed the p-zombies lack ([hard problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)). But it will be linguistically awkward, so let’s call this distinction the “reportable” vs. “unreportable” mind.
Suppose the observer shows the p-zombie a picture of a rose, and the p-zombie describes it as red. If the observer asks the p-zombie to recount how their reportable mind came to know that it was red, what might they answer?
They wouldn’t answer “The light triggered the rhodopsin-based photoreceptors in my eye, the signal was transmitted to my brain, and it eventually reached the speech centers and made them say the word ‘red’”. After all, we hypothesized that the p-zombies don’t know anything humans don’t know, and most humans don’t know what “rhodopsin” is. In fact, we can imagine a primitive tribe of p-zombies who don’t know any biology - they don’t even know what the brain is - but who still have to be able to answer this question. Although these words are a correct description of what’s happening to the p-zombies neurologically (just as they would be a correct description of regular humans), there has to be some other answer about what they would *tell us* when we asked.
And they wouldn’t answer “IDK, my mouth just moved and formed the syllables ‘this is red’”. Normal humans can easily tell the difference between a voluntary action and an involuntary spasm (eg if your limb jerks because of an electric current or a seizure). In fact, this faculty is so profound that its failures [contribute to conditions like schizophrenia](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698912003616); when someone loses the ability to interpret their speech as self-produced, they start formulating hypotheses like “the CIA put a chip in my brain that controls my actions”. Since the p-zombies can do anything humans can (including distinguishing voluntary vs. involuntary actions, and getting schizophrenia) they must be able to report something other than “my mouth moved but I can’t say why”.
I think they would have to say something similar to what we say: “My reporting mind received a packet of visual data, and after examining/analyzing this packet, I was able to tell that the rose was red.”
Could they describe this packet of visual data further?
The packet can’t just be a verbal description of the rose, like “There is a rose in the scene. It is red.” After all, if the p-zombie can do anything that humans can do, it can use the packet to draw a somewhat faithful reproduction of the rose, including details like how many petals it has, their orientation relative to one another, and the exact way that the stem bends. It would take a novella worth of words to describe a rose in such detail (consider how many words it would take to describe a complex image so that someone who read the words could draw it as faithfully as someone who really saw the image). So the packet must be a rich spatial representation of the rose’s edges, colors, size, et cetera. Given the speed with which the p-zombie could calculate distance (eg “the center of the rose is further from the first leaf than the first leaf is from the bottom of the stem”) and turn it into a 2D sketch, I have trouble thinking of this packet as anything other than already organized in a 2D grid.
How is color information communicated in this 2D grid? Since this is a p-zombie who doesn’t have “real experience”, one might naively expect it to be something like a bitmap, with each pixel containing the coordinates of the color in an RGB color space.
But imagine presenting the p-zombie with this image:
…and asking them to tell you what it shows, with a time limit of 100 milliseconds. Since the p-zombie has only the skills a regular human could have, it would fail: interpreting a bitmap like this must be done laboriously by hand.
But the visual field is a bitmap thousands of times bigger than this, and the p-zombie *can* interpret it within 100 ms. So the pixels must be presented not as RGB color coordinates, but in some kind of rich color language that produces an immediate experience of color without requiring any further thought or processing.
If the p-zombie says this - “My reportable mind receives the color information as a 2D grid in which each pixel conveys a irreducible sudden intuitive sense of being the correct color” - then what’s the difference between that claim versus “I experience the mysterious redness of red”?
This argument confuses me. It still seems like, even if the p-zombie is using an inner encoding scheme in which red is represented by a conceptual primitive, they still aren’t “experiencing” the mysterious redness of red, just . . . I don’t even know how to end this sentence. Just using an encoding scheme that matches it perfectly and causes them to describe it the exact same way that we do?
I’m not even sure which direction to update on this. If you don’t need consciousness to claim to have qualia, this is good news for epiphenomenalism and other positions where consciousness doesn’t interact with the physical world (and therefore cannot cause our claims that we have qualia). But it doesn’t fully defuse the intuitive inelegance of these positions, where it’s a baffling coincidence that we both claim to have qualia, and actually have them. So maybe it’s the best news for illusionism and deflationist physicalisms, which have to explain why we talk about qualia even though there “is” “no” “consciousness”.
But these still fail to explain how and why we so obviously experience consciousness, not just in the sense of there being a mysterious redness of red, but in the sense where there’s “someone” “there” to appreciate it.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
To fend off the inevitable accusations - I’m not claiming to be the first person to ever think of this, I’m not claiming I’m an autodidact genius who is better than real academic philosophers, I agree I am scum and not worthy of kissing the boots of anyone with formal credentials, please don’t kill me. I’m just saying I personally don’t know of anyone making this exact argument before, and I think it’s interesting and worth talking about even without clearing the bar of spending weeks reviewing every philosophy paper ever written until I figure out that it’s similar to an idea in Schmoe & Schmendrick 1972. Also, if I *did* do that, you would obsess over some way it’s subtly different from Schmoe & Schmendrick 1972, accuse me of misinterpreting them, and get mad anyway. Still, if you know of prior work on this topic, let me know and I’ll edit it in. | Scott Alexander | 165172144 | P-Zombies Would Report Qualia | acx |
# Open Thread 385
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who [voted on Nonbook Reviews](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025). By chance or choice, some reviews have gotten fewer votes than others; in the interest of fairness, I’m highlighting them here; if you want to look over and **[vote on](https://forms.gle/TfpUda62fYXFDH199)** more reviews, consider one of these: [The Metaethics of Joy/Suffering/AI](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.bo6iusjz0n2g), [Mountaintop](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3YxYxLVFjKGicaEkqvt353kt0uimn0PSUQv1PyaHuI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.n8vepky3lopd), [On Taste](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.pqfynvefu1vi), [Joanna Newsom: The Lyric](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjIUcKi-vIM9RGRZDWPRyUtzZLlVrpaY6Jy81iZVYi4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ef8g4olo0t6d), [Time's Arrow](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.8eznpyv681hv), [Phoenix Theater at Great Northern Mall](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.vqixrqo1fqeu), [From Control Problem to RLHF](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.3n00a2ybskzd), [Face The Fear / Worldbuild The Future](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3YxYxLVFjKGicaEkqvt353kt0uimn0PSUQv1PyaHuI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.l5kkggbwpr4), [State Of Competitive Debating Unions Address](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.3kdpmu2xjz6w), [Drei Klavierstucke](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjIUcKi-vIM9RGRZDWPRyUtzZLlVrpaY6Jy81iZVYi4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.mss2fs89dpxs), [Shrinking Men](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.39ezuuducu6z), [The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.tfil4i1v8t79), [The Origins Of Wokeness](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.b9xkivbksykk), [The Life's Work Of Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.1not7ed02mif), [Deathbed Ballads](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjIUcKi-vIM9RGRZDWPRyUtzZLlVrpaY6Jy81iZVYi4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.mnx8wqk31rum), [School (Review 1 by DK)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.1qe3qlbs8zva). | Scott Alexander | 165525363 | Open Thread 385 | acx |
# Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the [Non-Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest) to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and **rate them [using this form](https://forms.gle/TfpUda62fYXFDH199)**.
Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script **[here](https://random-review-2025-238596122350.us-central1.run.app/)**) or scroll through the titles until you find one that catches your interest - you can see individual entries here (thanks to a reader for collating them):
* [Other (A - I)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0vRSj1E93joWWvbUen2XGuDjN_mM94ybMIAADzM2fo/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.ewgcimxfgwl8)
* [Other (J - S)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/edit?tab=t.0)
* [Other (T - Z)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.w67vdh42l7ff)
* [Games](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3YxYxLVFjKGicaEkqvt353kt0uimn0PSUQv1PyaHuI/edit?tab=t.0)
* [Music](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjIUcKi-vIM9RGRZDWPRyUtzZLlVrpaY6Jy81iZVYi4/edit?tab=t.0)
* [TV/Movies](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17WAcFrTOExgendrk2lGTxRIR4LVC3ZGbiU5Xe3kF4mg/edit?tab=t.0)
Again, the rating form **is [here](https://forms.gle/TfpUda62fYXFDH199)**.
Thanks! You have until June 20, when I’ll count the votes and announce the finalists.
List of all reviews:
```
0th Dimension
11 Poetic Forms
A New Theodicy
A Review Of The Proposition: The Goat...
Adult Gymnastics
Alpha School
Airships
An American Football Game
Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos
As Little As Possible
Bukele
Bishop's Castle
Bite Me: Teeth
Contrasting Reviews of Nine Countries
DALL-E
Dating Apps
The Disease
Death (Mata Hari, Princess Di, Joan of Arc)
Deja Vu
Earth
Einstein's World-View
Effective Altruism / Rationalism
Elon Musk's Engineering Algorithm
Feminism
Freedom of Speech
From Control Problem to RHLF
Gender
Google's Hiring Process
Human Sexuality
Identity
Islamic Geometric Patterns
Jacobitism
JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories
Joan of Arc
Judaism
L'Ambroisie
Lesbian Fanfiction
Love
Lublin Castle
Mad Investor Chaos
Marriage
Martial Arts (Muay Thai/Jiu Jitsu)
Meditations on Moloch
Miniatur Wunderland
Museum of Science
My Childhood Television Set
My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes
My Imagination
Nicotine As A Nootropic
North Korea
Of Mice, Mechanisms, And Dementia
On Taste
Orgy Review
Participation In Phase I Research
Permaculture
Pregnancy
Pure Mathematics
Pythia
Repairing A Father/Daughter Relationship
Rubbermaid Products
School (by DK)
Schools - A Review (by EN)
Scientific Peer Review
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
Sign-Tracking Sucks
State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address
Synanthropes
Tenga Arte Drape
Testosterone
The ACX Commentariat
The Delusion Of Infinite Economic Growth
The Drum Major Instinct
The Emperor Of All Maladies
The Internet That Might Have Been
The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer
"The Origins Of Wokeness", by Paul Graham
The Metaethics of Joy, Suffering, and AI
The Men Are Not Alright
The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series
The Russo-Ukrainian War
The Sermon On The Mount
The Sermon On The Mount, Review 2
The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual
The Soul Of Karl Friston
The Spreadsheet
The Synaptic Plasticity And Memory Hypothesis
The Virality Project
The Watergate Affair
The World As A Whole
Time's Arrow
Toki Pona
Two Years Of Parenthood
Unordinary
US Census
vt/txt-convergence
We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves
Which Sports? Why Sports?
Summer Camp For Sluts / Young Swingers' Week
Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory
Baldur's Gate 3
Beating Balatro
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call Of Duty's Campaigns
Disco Elysium (1, by EH)
Disco Elysium (2, by DC)
Face The Fear, Worldbuild The Future
Gacha Games
Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy
How Many Super Mario Games Are There
Mountaintop
Pathologic Classic HD
The Last Of Us, Part II
The Witness
A Dance Remix Of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"
Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstucke
Deathbed Ballads
Joanna Newsom: The Lyric
Simple Twist Of Fate
Sound Bathing
The Aphorism "Music Is The Universal Language Of Mankind"
The Three Stigmata Of Noel Scott Engel
Adolescence
Civil War
Detective Pikachu
Grave of the Fireflies
Inside
Kiki's Delivery Service
Knives Out
Love Island
My Neighbor Totoro Stage Show
Toby: A Review Of My Entry To ACX “Everything-Except-a-Book Review Contest"
Ollantay
Person of Interest
Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall
Princess Mononoke
The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus
The Brutalist
The Future of Legal AI
The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya
The Zone Of Interest
She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power
Shrinking: Men
Silo
Skibidi Toilet
``` | Scott Alexander | 165087080 | Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025 | acx |
# Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday
**Why:** Our usual [spring meetups](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) session, plus lots of out-of-state people in town for [Manifest](https://manifest.is/).
**When:** Wednesday, June 4, 6:30 PM.
**Where:** [Lighthaven](https://www.lighthaven.space/), 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley.
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. I’ll be there; some of the other Manifest special guests might make it too.
I’ll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions. | Scott Alexander | 165058369 | Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday | acx |
# Open Thread 384
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX [meetup](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) this week in Berkeley (Wed 6:30, 2740 Telegraph). I’ll probably advertise this as a main post tomorrow, but just getting it out there early.
**2:** Tyler Cowen responds to my continued disagreement with him [here](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/scott-alexander-replies.html). We are still on different pages on this, but I don’t think it’s a fair use of your or Tyler’s time to continue writing about this, so I’ll leave it there.
**3:** It was good to meet some of you last weekend at LessOnline, and probably will be good to meet even more of you next weekend at Manifest. Blogging may be lighter than usual as I attend all of this, sorry | Scott Alexander | 165006074 | Open Thread 384 | acx |
# Bayes For Everyone
*[**Editor’s note:** I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose [review of The Educated Mind](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at [The Lost Tools of Learning](https://losttools.substack.com) and will be at [LessOnline](https://less.online/) this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.]*
I began my [book review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) of a couple years back with a rather simple question:
> Could a new kind of school make the world rational?
What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar’s answer that I believe *still* qualifies as “the longest thing anyone has submitted for an ACX contest”. Since then I’ve been diving into particulars, exploring how we use the insights I learned while writing it to start re-enchanting all the academic subjects from kindergarten to high school. But in the fun of all that, I fear I’ve lost touch with that original question. How, even in theory, could a method of education help all students become rational?
It probably won’t surprise you that I think part of the answer is Bayes’ theorem. But the equation is famously prickly and off-putting:
Over the years quite a few folks have attempted to explain it clearly. Eliezer wrote [his famous essay back in 2003](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTXWPQSEgoMkAupKt/an-intuitive-explanation-of-bayes-s-theorem) (which Khalid Azad [helpfully summarized in 2007](https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-explanation-of-bayes-theorem/)), Scott’s written about it a number of times, Steven Pinker takes a whack at it in*[Rationality](http://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters/dp/0525561994)*, Julia Galef [speaks about it on BigThink](https://youtu.be/NEqHML98RgU), and so on and so forth. Recently, there’s even been [a book explaining Bayes to babies](http://amazon.com/Bayesian-Probability-Babies-Chris-Ferrie/dp/1492680796). Bayesianism has become quite a racket!
I’ll be honest: I’ve learned something from each of these, but I think we can do even better. Specifically, I think that by using the paradigm I introduced in that book review — that of the recently-deceased philosopher Kieran Egan — we can make understanding *and enjoying* Bayes’ theorem a perfectly normal thing not just for quantitative geeks, but for more-or-less everyone. I’ve recently begun to test this out, and thought others might benefit from seeing what I’ve learned.
## 1: Ed philosophy on one foot
Your mind isn’t a general-purpose learning engine. Perhaps that sounds obvious to you, but among educators, I promise it’s not: I still hear teachers say that we knoweveryone can learn math on their own “because didn’t they learn *language itself* when they were *babies*?!”; I still hear people treat all learning as if it’s just facts on a forgetting curve.
Your mind, rather, is a Swiss Army knife — an assortment of oddball capacities kludged together over our long evolutionary history. In my book review, I showed how Kieran Egan found it useful to think of those tools being in five boxes:
And *wow*, that’s still *way* too complicated to easily grok. Two years later, can I do better? I think so.
Nowadays, I had to explain Egan while standing on one foot, I’d say something like this:
“We have old tools, and new tools. Join them together to help students fall in love with the world.”
There’s a lot *wrong* about that summary[1](#footnote-1), but it’s at least a place to begin. The “new tools” are the ones created in the last couple thousand years, like *careful concepts*, *finicky definitions*, *the scientific method*, *analysis* & *synthesis*, and *the quantification of everything*. We here in the rationalist community *love* these things. Inculcating students in them is what much of the academic curriculum was built to do.
The “old tools”, meanwhile, are a motley bunch. Some have emerged through the tens of millennia of cultural evolution — *stories*, *metaphors*, *rhyme & rhythm*, *jokes*, and *simple counting*. Others are much, much older, coming out of our biological evolution — like our *bodily senses*, our capacity for *mental imagery*, *gestures*, *mimicry*, and *personification*.
These two toolsets create a chasm between how people today understand and live in the world. This is something that I suspect we all recognize: the old tools give us a way of understanding that’s embodied, narrative, and qualitative; the new ones give us one that’s abstracted, logical, and quantitative.
If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least *similar* to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in *The Master and His Emissary*. I *think* it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.
Anyhow, if we want to Eganize Bayes’ theorem, what we need to remember is that while the new tools have precision, the old tools have power. If we see Bayes’ theorem as one of the peaks of the new way of understanding, the question becomes, how can we use the old tools to secure Bayes in kids’ minds?
Anyhow, I’ve been working at this problem for a while. So far, I’ve come up with four ways to do it: make Bayes *visual* and *intuitive*, then make it *vital*, then make it *obsolete*.
## 2: Make it *visual* by turning equations into images
The boring ol’ way to explain Bayes, of course, is through an equation like the one above… and doing a Google image search for “Bayes’ theorem” overwhelmingly pulls up more examples of that than anything else.
It should go without saying that this *isn’t* the best way to teach this to the median middle schooler. Equations in general don’t come easily to most of us: recall that for the majority of our species’ existence, most people probably haven’t been able to count to ten. Worse, this equation doesn’t feature anything so simple as “a number” — instead it’s filled with wonky-looking variables with their own names and definitions that themselves need to be explained. For example:
> P(B|A) is called the “likelihood”, and is the probability that the evidence is true, given that your hypothesis is true.
*Blech*. I’m not quite “innumerate” — once upon a time I scored an 800 on the quantitative section of my GRE — but when I typed in that definition a moment ago I literally felt my stomach lurch. If we want to pull normies in, we’ve gotta find some old tool that’s able to do some heavy lifting.
Images can do this. We shouldn’t be surprised: our pre-vertebrate ancestors evolved to see stuff, and to this day a substantial portion of our cortices is devoted to processing what our eyes take in. If we can find a way to represent this visually, we can sidestep this problem. And indeed on LessWrong, there’s [an explanation that uses blobs, triangles, and pentagons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CMt3ijXYuCynhPWXa/bayes-theorem-illustrated-my-way); another person has built one [out of Venn diagrams](https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/). My tastes, though, skew toward the simple, and I prefer the visualization created by the YouTuber 3Blue1Brown [in a video that sets a new standard for elegance in explanation](https://youtu.be/HZGCoVF3YvM):
Let’s use a toy example to explain how this pretty picture works.
You’re lounging at the park, when you see a football being thrown out from a bush. The throw, you startle to see, is an utterly *perfect* spiral. Is the thrower a professional? Your dad’s a big football fan, and you suspect he’d be *very* impressed if you got an NFL player to autograph your face with the Sharpie marker you happen to have in your pocket. Alas, you’re too introverted to ask them, so you ask me to do it for you. I do, and I tell you that the person in the bush is *either* an NFL player *or* a math teacher. So what’s more likely — that an NFL player is hiding there, or a math teacher?
If you’re thinking carefully, you might note that some math teachers moonlight as football coaches: you guess that just 1% could throw a perfect spiral. If you’re thinking *very* carefully (or you’re just a trained Bayesian), you try to guess what the base rate is. How many NFL players are there in your area, and how many math teachers? A minute’s Googling tells you there your country has about 1,500 NFL players and 1,500,000 math teachers.
What are the odds it’s an NFL player? Draw a square. Sketch in the base (or prior) at the bottom — 1.5 thousand NFL players and 1.5 million math teachers.
Then sketch in the likelihoods: 100% and 1%.
Then do the multiplication, and find that while there are indeed 1,500 NFL players in the country that could have thrown that ball, there are still far more math teachers — 15,000 — who could have thrown it!
If you’d like to find the new probability there’s an NFL player in that bush, just divide the shaded NFL players by *all* the shaded folks.
##### Imaginary Interlocutor: You’re suggesting we dumb Bayes’ theorem down, then?
Not at all — mathematically, they’re equivalent! In working through the problem visually, you do every single step that the equation does. There may be practical or aesthetic reasons someone might prefer working with the equation, but don’t forget [what the purpose of the sword is](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/twelfth-virtue-the).
## 3: Make it *intuitive* by tying abstractions to an emotional binary
Happily, this method seems to be taking off in our community. (See, for example, the second half of [this Rational Animations video](https://youtu.be/4hHA-oqpNig).[2](#footnote-2)) But we can make it even more intuitive by drawing deeper from our evolutionary inheritance: before our ancestors could see, before they had cortices on which to represent the world around them, they had to answer an even simpler question: “is this place *good* or *bad*?” (Squint, and you’ll see the last three billion years of evolution as a series of attempts to answer that question with ever-greater precision.) This is the fundamental emotional binary. Value judgments, by necessity, seem to go all the way back to those crazy days when we were all archaebacteria.
This seems like one of those facts about the world that should be very important to philosophers, but how can we exploit this educationally? Simple: connect it to the abstractions of the Bayes box. Let’s be lazy, and call green “good” and red “bad”:
##### I.I.: What about people who are red-green colorblind?
Use whatever you’d like! Obviously, there’s nothing “good” about green, or “bad” about red. They’re cultural symbols — if you have a color pair that screams “good” and “bad” to you, use that instead. That said, if you’re using this to teach a class, you might want to lean into another emotional binary: empty/substantial. The first prior that we scribble down is usually going to be the one we’re hoping for (in this case, that it’s an NFL player). Make that more substantial by shading it as bolder. The second prior, make lighter:
So far, so good, but we haven’t left the realm of “teaching hacks”. I’ve found that this is one of the fail states when I introduce folks to Egan education — they mistake it for just another entry in the growing world of cog-sci-infused educational traditionalism.[3](#footnote-3)
We care, of course, that Bayes is taught clearly to students — but we don’t want it to become for our students just another one of those “things I got an ‘A’ on and then never thought about again”. We want to infect students with the zeal of Bayesian thinking. We want it to upend the way they live in the world, and think about life, the universe, and everything. We want to make it *matter* to them.
This, I only recognized after writing that book review, is the unspoken assumption of Egan education. The matter with schooling is that too often, schooling doesn’t matter. The academic curriculum is filled with fossils — bizarre forms that once seem to have been alive and kicking but which now are just odd rocks. We want to make them come alive again. The promise of doing so is that when things emotionally matter to students, they will (by definition?) pay attention, work hard, and remember more.
So: how can we make Bayes matter to kids?
## 4: Make it *vital* by asking why people cared about it in the first place
Let’s look at the examples that the explanations use. The classic example (which is used by Eliezer, and which has a long history in conversations about Bayesianism) is mammograms — obviously, pretty far away from the concerns of most middle schoolers. The Bayes baby book does better, asking whether a random candy-less bite of a cookie is more likely to have been taken out of a cookie that has no candy pieces at all, or from one which has a few. Everyone loves candy, so this is *sort* of relevant [footnote: My two-year-old particularly loves this book, by the way, though she screams “BALL!” when she sees the colored candy pieces.], but it doesn’t exactly grab the emotions.
##### I.I.: Should we make the examples fun, then?
*Eh.* You’d think that as someone whose teaching style could be described as “wacky” and “manic” and “unhinged”, I’d be in favor of more silliness in schools. I suppose I am, but it’s important to note that “fun” by itself is unsubstantial. Education is a serious pursuit; souls are on the line.
##### I.I.: Then is it “relevancy” we need? (How *could* we make Bayesian reasoning relevant to middle schoolers’ everyday lives?)
Making what we teach relevant is essential — but be very careful about the assumptions packed into words like “relevant”, “useful”, and “practical”. When most of us hear those, we start thinking about the externals of our students’ lives. (How will this help them get a job? How will this help them become socially savvy?) Pause to consider how some of the most boring topics you learned in school were precisely those that were supposed to be “useful”. Here be dragons!
Consider, instead, just how irrelevant, useless, and impractical many of the things were that you threw yourself into when you were that age. Running a D&D campaign? Modding *Half-Life*? Learning Photoshop? Designing a fictional language? The real concerns of people run much deeper than what we’re likely to think of when we try to make something “relevant”.
Egan suggests a more helpful tact: *look at where the skill came from*. Who first created it?
##### I.I.: I’ve looked deeply into the life and times of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Bayes, Master of Arts, Fellow of the Royal Society, and I’ve come up with nothing.
Then look at who developed Bayesianism further. What community championed it? What sorts of things were driving them? Dear reader, we are that community! And why did we throw ourselves into Bayesian reasoning so fully? Certainly different people can give different answers, but my understanding is that many of us got interested in order to win online arguments against morons. My own start wasn’t particularly “relevant” to anything else I was doing: I got into Bayes to debate the historicity of Jesus. The people I see using it the most these days are mostly partisans (on both sides) of the God wars.
Presumably “does God exist?” is too spicy a vehicle for carrying Bayes into most schools, but that’s fine. We don’t need to emulate the specifics; we want to identify what more general psychological itches those fights were scratching. My read on this is that it’s about worldviews. In middle school, a lot of kids begin to wake up from the simplistic understandings of the universe they were told as a child: what’s really going on, and how can I show the world that those fools who disagree with me are wrong?
Randall Munroe,<https://xkcd.com/386/>
A lot of the kids who I work with (not a representative sample: they skew toward the gifted and hyperactive sides of the spectrums) are fascinated by cryptids, UFOs, and psychic phenomena. So for them, I’ve been crafting courses that teach Bayes as a way to get clear on that stuff.
##### I.I.: That’s pseudoscientific schlock — you can’t teach that in school!
You can’t teach it, but you can explore it. (And it’ll elicit far fewer emails to the principal than evaluating the existence of God.)
##### I.I.: What I meant to say was please *don’t* teach pseudoscientific schlock in schools. Instead, use Bayes to teach what’s *actually* important.
Please don’t refuse to take children seriously. My probability for Bigfoot is way under 1%, but when we assume an answer to (for example) whether Bigfoot is real and simply repeat it to kids, we deny them an opportunity ripe for sharpening their intellects.
##### I.I.: But cryptids are so low-brow…
A sign of how deeply appealing they are for multitudes of people! Things like this are a road to intellectualism for the masses; we ignore it to the detriment of some of the kids who need it most. Even the cretin who bullied me in sixth grade was, in his spare time, trying to understand the world. Heck, we’re all naturally drawn to understanding the edges of things. Where does fact end and fiction begin? There’s a reason the History Channel inevitably morphed into the “ancient aliens” channel.
Taking this seriously is how I came up with [a set of online summer camps](https://www.scienceisweird.com/believe-it-or-not). The weeklong course last year used Bigfoot to get kids to experience using Bayes theorem. The one from this summer will deepen that by looking at claims of sea monsters. Year 3’s will extend this, asking when we should trust the media on ~~UFOs~~ UAPs. Year 4’s will hold a bright light up to academic, peer-reviewed sources by looking closely into the evidence for psychic powers, and year 5’s will try to suss out the edges of science itself by looking into the evidence for ghosts. Whatever else these summer camps accomplish, I hope they’ll prepare my students for whatever dubious assertions they run across on YouTube.
## 5: Repeat it until it’s obsolete
I’ve spread my classes across multiple summers not (merely) because I’m lazy, but because it’s useful to keep working on the theorem across multiple years. Because we can’t ignore the fact that “computing the Bayesian probabilities” isn’t actually a silver bullet to rationality. Most of us know people who’ve earnestly used Bayes to “prove” things that are *straight-up insane*. As [my science advisor](https://www.scienceisweird.com/team#page-section-618b3c4218954a209b40f042) warned me when I was deciding whether to make these courses:
> Bayesian reasoning can become confirmation bias on steroids. You have to be humble in your analysis, because there are SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS IT CAN GO WRONG.
There really are so, so many ways it can go wrong. And the kids need to make each and every one of them.
##### I.I.: Because repetition builds mastery, right?
Yes, but then we want to build *past* mastery. “Mastery” has become something of a buzzword lately, but something that’s been forgotten in our love of deliberate practice is that the journey to becoming educated is harder and longer than just mastering a set of skills. It requires being able to stick your head out of the Matrix and ask, “wait, how useful is this stuff, actually?” We want to help kids get so good with drawing Bayes boxes that they realize they’ll *never* be perfect at it… and that their best hope for becoming rational is to reason together with people they disagree with.
##### *I.I.*: Is it even useful to teach middle schoolers to literally crunch these numbers? Shouldn’t we teach “[scout mindset](http://amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556)” first?
Indeed, this is the question — scouting first, or Bayes Boxes?
I used to think that formally learning Bayes’ theorem was difficult and better saved to the end of learning rationality. Now I see things differently — though not because I think we should expect kids to sit down and do the math on their own, in their everyday lives. (Do any of us actually do that?[4](#footnote-4)) I think once we make it *easy* — and the math really is easy, once you explain it visually and do it a couple times — then we should teach Bayes first, because…
Bayes is a great excuse to think with other people.
Drawing little rectangles is a great way to see where you disagree with somebody. You think aliens have infiltrated the world’s governments? Cool! Let’s talk priors, and see where we draw our vertical lines. You think you saw a ghost, and now it’s rocked your worldview? Let’s talk about how strongly we should update from personal experience. Get a napkin — let’s draw some cute boxes.
This, I think, is actually the deepest value of teaching kids Bayes: it’s a way to get them to converse with people whose views they think are stupid. And it’s only through *actually doing that* that we have any chance of helping people become rational. Such conversations (done with checking each other’s math) are the way to inculcate an openness to being wrong, a detached self-worth, comfort with uncertainty, and all the other aspects of what Julia Galef has so winsomely dubbed scout mindset. Approached this way, Bayes isn’t the weirdo, quant-y capstone to scout mindset — it’s the publicly-accessible front door.
## 6: Where are we, now?
##### *I.I.*: You claim to be promoting something new, but it seems to me like you’re just describing the rationalist community.
Indeed I am! My claim wasn’t that this method of explaining Bayes goes beyond what’s practiced in the community — just that it’s likely to do a better job pulling kids into the sorts of intense, curiosity-fueled relationships that our community excels at.
And I think this is something worth working hard to achieve. [According to the historian Reviel Netz](http://amazon.com/Why-Ancient-Greeks-Matter-Problematic/dp/1009505599), creating a stable culture like this was the One Weird Trick behind the “Greek Miracle” around 500 BCE. When this culture finally fizzled out, society reverted to valuing authority and uniformity. In [the account of the historian and philosopher Michael Strevens](http://amazon.com/Knowledge-Machine-Irrationality-Created-Science/dp/1631491377), the Scientific Revolution was launched when thinkers found a new social practice that could gin up these cultural norms again. My hope is that by helping kids do Bayes’ theorem together — and starting with questions they’re actually excited about — can spark something similar in schools now.
At the end of my book review, I floated my thought that the best way to express Egan’s paradigm is to say it “re-humanizes academics”. That’s what I’ve tried to do here: to take an important component of modern thinking, make it easy to learn by using tools from our evolutionary past, and make it vital to kids. And all of this is toward the goal of helping lift them out of the Matrix, so they can see what they’re studying as imperfect, historically-contingent tools that they can, as autonomous agents, choose to use as they see fit.
If that much human richness and potential can be pulled out of just one piece of the curriculum (albeit an important bit!), what could be achieved if we re-humanize the rest? What hidden vitality lies in poetry, or geography, or punctuation? With ancient history, or economics, or biology? Maybe education isn’t [a lost cause after all](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education).
In any case, if you have a notion about how to further unveil the glories of Bayes’ theorem to kids, I’m eager for your take.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Where’s the sense that story undergirds everything? Where’s the recognition that these types of tools create qualitatively different ways of understanding that war against one another? Where’s the beauty, the existential wrangling, the bewilderment…?
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
And I think I heard Aella mention it on a podcast?
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Not that I’m opposed to cog-sci-infused educational traditionalism! For anyone looking for such, I recommend Zach Groshell’s*[Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching](http://amazon.com/Just-Tell-Them-Explanations-Explicit/dp/103600368X)*.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
I meant that rhetorically, but now I’m actually really interested. | Scott Alexander | 164774376 | Bayes For Everyone | acx |
# Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my [Contra MR On Charity Regrants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants). Going through **[his response](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/so-many-mistakes.html)** piece by piece, slightly out of order:
> Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio’s claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words (“I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…”) show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed, and [my earlier and longer post on US AID](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/deep-research-considers-the-costs-and-benefits-of-us-aid.html) makes that clearer yet at greater length. Scott is simply misrepresenting me here.
The full post is in the image below:
Maybe I’m just revealing my poor reading comprehension, but I think that:
* Starting with Rubio’s claim that only 12% goes to recipients because 88% is “pocketed”…
* Then saying you are going to “fact check” it…
* Then quoting and bolding sentence from the “fact check” which includes a claim that 75-90% goes to “third parties”, as if this is a “fact-check” of the 88% number which finds it correct…
* Then saying that it demonstrates “something is badly off here”, when correctly understood it would not demonstrate that at all (at least not without some kind of unusual and very controversial argument for why giving to partners must be bad)...
* Then saying that USAID defenders were unwilling to consider this when the “debate” (about Rubio’s claims) was going on…
…will inevitably lead to people thinking Tyler is confirming or at least directionally agreeing with Rubio.
I wasn’t the only person who understood it this way. So did eleven people who commented to this effect on the ACX subreddit[1](#footnote-1), 22 people who commented this on Marginal Revolution itself, a [Yale economics professor](https://x.com/Jabaluck/status/1925952529151443025) , a [Center for Global Development senior economist](https://www.cgdev.org/expert/justin-sandefur) - and, presumably, my friend who, when I told them last week that I had a post I wanted them to proofread, responded, without even knowing what it was about, I quote, *"before clicking on the link my guess is it's about tyler cowen's inane USAID post...I was so angry"*.
So I apologize for any misunderstanding I may have had, but I think Tyler should also consider apologizing for a post that may have been unclear to a lot of people.
> Someone should tell [Scott] that Emergent Ventures overhead is typically two percent, five percent for dealing with screwier banking systems. (That is one reason why I won the recent Time magazine award for innovation in philanthropy.) I am well aware there are various ways of calculating overhead, but there are now more than one thousand Emergent Ventures winners, and all of them can testify to how radically stripped-down the process is.
The overhead for ACX Grants is 0%; I agree that it’s important to try to keep overhead as low as possible. So why do USAID charities have higher overhead than Tyler’s regrants?
My original hypothesis was that it’s more expensive to run a system of African clinics than a grants program. But in the process of trying to confirm, I found that wasn’t the answer at all. It’s because the 30% number I gave yesterday is an accounting concept called NICRA which is often cited as overhead, but different from the common-sense conception.
Let’s consider a typical USAID partner NGO. To avoid accusations of cherry-picking, we’ll take the biggest one: [Catholic Relief Services](https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/02/03/these-are-the-top-usaid-recipients-from-religious-groups-to-major-us-companies-as-trump-targets-agency/), which operates a series of clinics throughout Africa. USAID gives them about $500 million per year, and they get another $1 billion from other donors.
Their NICRA is 27%, which matches the 30% number I gave yesterday (CTRL+F “NICRA” [here](https://www.crs.org/sites/default/files/tools-research/emergency-preparedness-and-response-handbook.pdf)). But the percent of their money spent on administrative costs , which is probably closer to what most people mean by overhead, was 6.3% (supporting/total on page 22 [here](https://www.crs.org/sites/default/files/crs-annual-report-2023.pdf)). Of that 6.3%, about 4%pp went to salaries and 2%pp to fundraising.
Why is NICRA so much higher than true overhead? I’m not an accountant, but my understanding of [this document](https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/articles/consider-adding-federally-negotiated-indirect-cost-rate-your-revenue-portfolio) suggests NICRA is a legal fiction negotiated with the United States government in a way that is convenient for funding but has different numerators and denominators than real expenses. Because many real contributions and expenses cannot be included in the denominator, the overall rate appears artificially high.
(is CRS unusual in its low overhead, maybe because of its Catholic affiliation? I checked one of USAID’s biggest secular partners, the Johns Hopkins Program for International Education on Obstetrics and Gynecology (JHPIEGO), which despite its name operates AIDS, malaria, and COVID clinics in Africa. Its NICRA was 17% and its true overhead was 3.9%, and I couldn’t otherwise find any big difference from CRS.)
Is it bad that CRS spends 4% on salaries? That’s $60 million of their $1.5 billion budget. They say this includes finance, HR, legal, internal audit, IT, risk-management, and insurance. Does a $1.5 billion charity really need $60 million worth of audits, risk management, insurance, etc? I don’t know, but it seems harsh to blow up the whole thing because you’re mad about 4%.
What does the 94% non-administrative money go to? The largest category is food (to feed starving people in developing countries). The second-largest is salaries (for local personnel like doctors and nurses).
The [third-largest category](https://web.archive.org/web/20240223011930/https://2017-2020.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1869/USAIDInternationalFood_AssistanceReportFY2018.pdf) (20%, so $300 million of their total $1.5 billion yearly budget) is the types of re-re-grants people are concerned about. Sometimes they give the money to their local Catholic equivalent, like [Caritas Nigeria](https://caritasnigeria.org/). In some war-torn places, they give the money to local groups that are already stuck in the war-torn area instead of trying to send American staffers in themselves - I think this is what’s going on in the [Joint Emergency Operation](https://www.crs.org/sites/default/files/2.crs_eth_jeop_tigray_case_story_ii_june_2021_mt_jl_0.pdf) in Tigray.
Why doesn’t USAID give grants to these groups directly, instead of giving them to CRS to give grants to them? Sometimes it’s because random locals in Tigray with a comparative advantage in dodging warlords don’t also have a comparative advantage in interfacing with the US government, which demands large amounts of paperwork. Other times it’s because these are such small grants that they’re a bad match for USAID’s long application and compliance process. Still other times, it’s because CRS has more people on the ground and more expertise in figuring out who needs money.
Do these groups charge an additional overhead layer? I’m having trouble figuring this out. [This](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/part-200/subpart-A/subject-group-ECFR2a6a0087862fd2c/section-200.1) seems to suggest CRS isn’t allowed to charge its own overhead on anything beyond the first $50,000 that it sub-grants - but I’m not sure I’m understanding it correctly. In other cases, CRS pays the other charities’ overheads out of its own overhead costs. I can’t get a great read on how often grants really are double-overheaded. But for CRS, it seems like the absolute worst case scenario, where all of its regrants have double overhead, is something like 7.2% total overhead (6% CRS overhead, plus another 6% partner overhead on the 1/5 of its money that it gives to partners).
In the original post, I was imagining something like a 30% overhead plus another layer of 10% overhead totalling 40%. But it’s really more like 7.2%. So **I got this one extremely wrong, sorry**. The reason I didn’t catch this was that I thought that certain program expenses (like doctor salaries) were included in overhead, so “30% overhead” didn’t immediately stand out as crazy to me. **I have added this to my [Mistakes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes) page and regret the error.**
Anyway, Tyler’s 2-5% grant program overhead is pretty similar to the real overhead of CRS, JHPIEGO, and presumably other USAID charities, so I don’t think there’s a mystery here.
> Scott could have simply asked me how [Mercatus overhead] works. It is also the case that we do not receive or seek federal government research funding, but if we did the overhead going to GMU would be zero (are you listening o3?). Depending on the exact source of the funding, *very likely we would make a lot of money on such grants because we would receive significant “overhead” payments for what would not be actual overhead expenses*. That is one big problem with the system, I might add. We at Mercatus have made the judgment that we do not wish to become institutionally/financially addicted to such overhead…and I wish more non-profits would do the same.
In my original post, I quoted o3 saying that Mercatus took about 8% as direct overhead, and that many other administrative expenses that a normal charity would have to charge as overhead were instead covered by George Mason University, but that under normal federal grant rules these would count for about 30%. I didn’t mean to imply that Mercatus actually took federal funding or charged these numbers (which is why I used the hypothetical “if” on that statement) and if it came off this way, I’m sorry. But other than that, I’m not sure what Tyler is objecting to.
The 8% number comes from Mercatus’ 990 form [here](https://www.mercatus.org/media/document/990-form-feb-2025) - management + general + fundraising as a percent of total expenses (again, compare to Catholic Relief Services’ 6%).
The claim that George Mason covers services that would usually have to be charged as overhead is also well-cited; for example, [this article says that](https://archive.is/a8o60#selection-608.0-608.3) Mercatus rents its office space from GMU for a cost of $1 for a twenty-eight year lease - surely not the market price in Northern Virginia.
There’s nothing wrong with this - ACX Grants maintains its 0% overhead because [Manifund](https://manifund.org/) covers our bills. My point is that it’s nothing to be proud of either. Mercatus hasn’t discovered some amazing new way to do charity without overhead costs, such that USAID charities that charge overhead are bloated and wasteful, but Mercatus is innovative and lean. They’ve just found someone who covers many of their bills for free.
> There was an earlier time when US AID did much less channeling through American third party NGOs. That was in my view a better regime, though of course Congress wanted to spend more money on Americans, and furthermore parts of the Republican Party, often in the executive branch, viewed the NGO alternative as more flexible and also more market-friendly. That created a small number of triumphs, such as PEPFAR, and a lot of waste, and I am happy to clear away much of that waste. Doing so also will improve aid decision-making in the future. It is right to believe that US AID can operate on another basis, and also right to wish to stop a system that allows spending on ostensible “democracy promotion.” I find it a useful discipline to have an initial approach to the problem that starts with this question “if you can’t find poverty-fighting domestic institutions in a country to fund directly, with sufficient trust, perhaps you should be giving aid elsewhere.” I also find it plausible that doing a lot of initial and pretty radical clearing away of NGO relations is the best way to get there, though I agree that point is debatable.
Why? Are local charities more efficient than US charities? I don’t know, and I see no evidence that Cowen knows either. I suppose they might take less than 6% in overhead, since salaries are cheaper there and there are fewer compliance costs. But they also seem to have a lot of corrupt warlords in those countries, and “fewer compliance costs” is not an unalloyed good.
I would love to see a careful analysis of whether it’s more efficient to fund local vs. US charities. If it turned out the answer was local charities, then I would support a transition plan to get as much USAID money distributed locally as possible while causing as little disruption to on-the-ground services as possible. My impression is that pre-Trump USAID was actually [in the middle of something like this](https://web.archive.org/web/20250118170457/https:/www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/FY2024%20Localization%20Progress%20Report_Final_508_2.pdf) (they had identified a target of 50% locals, but were having trouble finding good ones).
What instead happened was that almost all USAID programs were simply terminated, with no attention to minimizing disruption, and no plan to replace them with local charities, and so [probably several million people will die](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402944/pepfar-hiv-donald-trump-elon-musk-global-health). If Tyler will condemn this as a terrible decision, then we’re on the same page and everything else here is minor nitpicking. But if this is what he means by the “radical clearing away of NGO relations” that he finds “plausible” as “the best way”, then we’re not at all on the same page and I think Tyler should say so clearly and admit he disagrees with me.
Also - “I find it a useful discipline to have an initial approach to the problem that starts with this question ‘if you can’t find poverty-fighting domestic institutions in a country to fund directly, with sufficient trust, perhaps you should be giving aid elsewhere.’” Why? Switzerland has great institutions - should we give our charity money there? There’s a obvious tension between the two goals of giving charity to countries dysfunctional enough to need it, but functional enough to use it effectively. Existing international aid is a complex balance between these two goals, and using (functional) US institutions to help get charity into (dysfunctional) countries is one proposed solution. There are probably others, and maybe Tyler has one in mind, but he doesn’t argue for it here, just gives a sort of faux-profound slogan.
> Scott writes: “When Trump and Rubio try to tar them [US AID] as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.” Is that how the rationalist community should be presenting itself? In a time when innocent Americans are gunned down in the streets for their (ostensible) political views, and political assassination attempts seem to be rising, and there even has been a rationalist murder cult running around, does this show a morally responsible and clear thinking approach to the post that was published?
I want to make it clear: I am not recommending that people kill Donald Trump or Marco Rubio. I am recommending that God consider sending them to Hell. I think this is a moderate compromise proposal, [endorsed by leading Hell experts](https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/will-musk-and-trump-go-hell-defunding-corporal-works-mercy)[2](#footnote-2).
I reject the claim that criticism is tantamount to violence - a claim which anyway I usually hear applied to transgender sex workers rather than, say, Donald Trump. Partly this is because I think a writer’s first responsibility is to to truth, second to goodness, and only very far down the list to manage the emotions of some hypothetical psychopath who may or may not be reading their work.
But primarily it’s because applied consistently, it makes it impossible to ever criticize anything - after all, even the most tepid criticism could fuel someone sufficiently on the edge. This is impractical, so nobody ever does apply it consistently, so it inevitably ends up as an [isolated demand for rigor](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/). I think this is true for Tyler, who [has called](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/update-on-the-supervillains.html) proponents of pharma price controls “supervillains” and accused them of potentially “inducing millions of premature deaths”. Although he reserves the “supervillain” term for pharma price controllers [consistently](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/10/quantifying-the-super-villains.html), plenty of other people are “villains” - [for example](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/more-randian-villains.html), Gavin Newsom for excluding Tesla from a 4% electric vehicle rebate.
We all have our breaking points. For some of us, it’s when people kill millions of children. For others, it’s when they exclude cool companies from 4% electric vehicle rebates. Rather than accusing anyone who reaches a breaking point and uses harsh words of fanning terrorism, I think we should agree that it’s permissible to call someone a very bad person - even a villain! - but not permissible to engage in terrorism or assassination. The blame for the latter lies entirely with the terrorists/assassins, not with writers who criticize their target.
Even if Tyler disagrees with this, I think there are enough other people calling Donald Trump a bad person that it’s not worth his time to respond to me in particular; he should present some kind of more general explanation of his views.
(also, rumor says Trump has a Service to protect him from this sort of danger, although I’m not surprised Tyler doesn’t know about it - I hear it’s secret.)
> More generally, I wonder if Scott ever has dealt with US AID or other multilaterals, or the world of NGOs, much of which surrounds Washington DC. I have lived in this milieu for almost forty years, and sometimes worked in it, from various sides including contractor. A lot of people have the common sense to realize that these institutions are pretty wasteful (not closedly tied to measured overhead btw), too oriented toward their own internal audiences, and also that the NGOs (as recipients, not donors) “capture” US AID to some extent. As an additional “am I understanding this issue correctly?” check, has Scott actually spoken to anyone involved in this process on the Trump administration side?
This has been a general pattern in debates with Tyler. I will criticize some very specific point he made, and he’ll challenge whether I am important enough to have standing to debate him. “Oh, have *you* been to 570 different countries? Have *you* eaten a burrito prepared by an Ethiopian camel farmer with under-recognized talent? Have *you* read 800 million books, then made a post about each one consisting of a randomly selected paragraph followed by the words ‘this really makes you think, for those of you paying attention’?”
I am not an expert on aid. But the development fellows and econ professors I mentioned above are, and they agree with my criticism. I ran this post by someone who’s worked closely with USAID and affiliated programs for a decade and they said they took my side. Not that it matters - the blogosphere, like the Royal Society, ought to be *nullius in verba*, not a chest-puffing competition of credentials but a data dump of receipts.
(although the expert I talked to also volunteered that they have never seen someone who has vast personal experience with and expertise in USAID refer to the program as “US AID” with a space, the way Tyler regularly does.)
And - fine - I admit I’ve never hob-nobbed with Trump administration officials. But I have delivered medicine in a Third World country. I’ve helped treat patients who were definitely going to die within a year, for want of medication that would be routine anywhere else. I’ve looked in parents’ eyes while telling them their kid wasn’t going to recover. It sucks. I can’t say that it teaches anything directly useful for understanding the details of the public charity funding landscape. Maybe everything I’m writing here about NICRA vs. overhead and sub-grants vs. sub-sub-grants is totally and embarrassingly wrong, and my lack of familiarity with DC NGO culture is to blame.
But - someone recently asked Elon Musk why he cancelled PEPFAR. Musk [responded](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/elon-musk-on-aids-medication-ill-fix-it-right-now/) that what, huh, he didn’t know he cancelled PEPFAR, that must have been a mistake, somebody should get around to fixing it. If he’s telling the truth, maybe this redeems him a little? Certainly it makes him better than the ghouls cheering on its cancellation. But it doesn’t redeem him very *much*. I think if Elon had the same experiences I had, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night for fear that he had accidentally cancelled PEPFAR. He would have been calling his lieutenants at odd hours of the morning, all through the winter and early spring, saying “Hey, you definitely didn’t cancel the developing world medical funding, did you?” and the lieutenants would respond “Elon, you’ve asked me that four times tonight already, please stop obsessing over this.”
In the same way, I think if Tyler had the experiences I’ve had, he would not so casually write a handwavy four-line post vaguely insinuating slanders on USAID while protesting that he never quite said them clearly. If someone told him the post was misleading, he would care a lot about this, rather than acting like one of the most worth-worrying-about points was whether overly strong criticism of Trump might lead to his assassination. He wouldn’t be so breezy about a “radical clearing away of NGO relations”, or engage with the destruction of the charity ecosystem on the level of faux-profound slogans. Maybe Tyler is much nicer and more rational than I am and able to treat this whole situation with perfect Zen calm. But to me, it comes across as a sort of [“missing mood”](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html) in the Bryan Caplan sense.
> There are a bunch of other things wrong with Scott’s discussion of overhead, but it is not worth going through them all. I am all for keeping the very good public health programs, and yes I do know they involve NGO partners, and jettisoning a lot of the other accretions. That is the true humanitarian attitude, and it is time to recognize it as such. Better rhetoric, better thinking, and less anger are needed to get us there. It is now time for Scott to return to his usual high standards of argumentation and evidence.
Another missing mood! This has none of the intellectual curiosity that Tyler would apply to something he considered important. Just - there are “very good” programs and also “accretions”, USAID truly is a land of contrasts.
Here’s [Congress](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10261)’ chart of where USAID money goes:
“Humanitarian” is things like giving food to starving people. “Governance” is mostly grants to the government of Ukraine, [which apparently](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-the-attack-on-usaid-hurts-ukraine) “allowed the government to sustain its operations, helping pay state workers salaries and provide state services…[as the] economy shrank and budgets were redirected to the country’s defense”. The other categories should be self-evident.
Which of these are the “accretions”? If “Health” and “Humanitarian” are what Cowen is calling “very good public health programs”, and the Ukraine aid is probably controversial but everyone can understand why we’re doing it, what’s left?
I keep hearing about how most USAID money goes to rich woke snobs who use it to throw parties celebrating how much better they are than you. But where are these people? Are they hiding in the 6% overhead in Catholic Relief Services? The 3.9% overhead in JHPIEGO? The Ukrainians? The African clinics? I hear a lot about how USAID is funding foreign journalists to be really liberal, but it looks like all “democracy and human rights” grants combined - the category that this would fall into - are [2-5%](https://foreignassistance.gov/) of the budget (and this category also includes a lot of things like election observers).
The whole point of this debate is that (almost) everyone agrees “keep the good stuff, but jettison the bad stuff”. But the discussion is dominated by people who think USAID is 90% grift and operas about transgender people, and that the AIDS work is a tiny veneer on top of that to add credibility. My impression is that it’s the opposite. We can’t sensibly consider how to act on a policy of “keep the good stuff, but jettison the bad stuff” without a careful reckoning of who’s right, and whether the relevant instrument is a scalpel vs. a chainsaw.
This is why I found Tyler’s post saying that he was “fact checking” Marco Rubio’s claim that it was mostly waste, and *indeed* found that 75-90% “went to third-parties” and that “not *all* third parties are wasteful” but “USAID defenders [aren’t] keen to deal with such estimates” to provide such negative value. It looks like it’s offering this much-needed clarity, but in fact it’s the opposite.
In conclusion, I support keeping good stuff and jettisoning waste. If Tyler also supports this, then we’re on the same team. I continue to hope he will edit his original post to reflect this.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
ACX subreddit sources: [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu213b5/), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu27x4m/), [3](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu20h4r/), [4](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu1zr1m/), [5](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu3g6s8/), [6](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu26tmn/), [7](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu3hfrn/), [8](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu1yzl1/), [9](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kuizdn/tyler_responds_to_contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu24klc/), [10](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kt3tgh/contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mtqky12/), [11](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kt3tgh/contra_mr_on_charity_regrants/mu00tbs/). I can’t figure out how to link individual Marginal Revolution comments, so you will have to trust me when I say there were 22 of them.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
As a Jew, I believe that people are only tortured in Hell for twelve months, and get Saturdays off ([really!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna#Rabbinical_Judaism)). Like I said, moderate compromise! | Scott Alexander | 164370155 | Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID | acx |
# Open Thread 383
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetup this week in London, see [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** Still cleaning up a few loose ends before posting Non-Book Review entries for voting, please be patient. A few of you sent Google Docs that my assistant couldn’t access - please make sure they’re set to “anyone with the link” can view. I sent out emails to people whose had this problem, but they might have gone to spam.
**3:** [Less Online](https://less.online/) and [Manifest](https://manifest.is/) are rationalist blogosphere and prediction market conferences, respectively, held at the same Berkeley venue one week apart in late May / early June. Guests (attending at least one; check which) include me, Eliezer, Zvi, Aella, Nate Silver, and some of the AI 2027 team. Last-minute tickets still available. In between the two is [Arbor Summer Camp](https://www.arborsummer.camp/), a lower-key, longer “experimental learning” event. It includes some trading/startup related classes, featuring Ricki Heicklen, Austin Chen, and others. Check out their [startup workshop](https://www.arborsummer.camp/branches/founders) and [startup pitch competition](https://manifold.markets/Sovereign_/manifest-2025-startup-pitch-competi).
**4:** More AI grants: [up to $1 million per project](https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/FRG-Call-for-Research-Ideas-Internal-Deployment.pdf) from CSET to study risks from internal deployment of frontier AI models. Submit expressions of interest by 6/30.
**5:** ACX grantee Spartacus will be at NY Tech Week again, hosting [an event on collective action for AI safety](https://partiful.com/e/4iKbAiKVgNQjjjLHR2xs).
**6:** Another CAIS online course on [AI Safety, Ethics, and Society](https://www.aisafetybook.com/virtual-course); free, online, 12 weeks long, takes place this summer. Apply by May 30.
**7:** Some significant issues (probably? still looking into it?) with my [post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-mr-on-charity-regrants) replying to Marginal Revolution last week, I’ll hopefully post something more detailed soon. | Scott Alexander | 164470297 | Open Thread 383 | acx |
# Moments Of Awakening
Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, [that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fy2b55mLtghd4fQpx/the-zombie-preacher-of-somerset). Still, new stuff occasionally turns up.
I assume [this tweet](https://x.com/CEOLandshark/status/1918079556860174695) is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar)[1](#footnote-1):
…with the intended gag being that lots of clueless people would reply “I don’t know what you’re talking about, does that make me an NPC?!?!”. If so, it didn’t exactly work - instead, lots of clueless people replied “my first memory is from 3-6, does that make me the Chosen One?”
But when 354 people talk about the moment they first gained consciousness, you get some pretty interesting things.
My favorite comments were from people whose said that their first memory was at the commonly-agreed-up normal age range of 3-6, but that the memory itself was of *suddenly becoming conscious* or *suddenly realizing they were conscious.*
My own story is an intermediate case: my first memory is waking up the morning of my first day of kindergarten, seeing the sunlight stream in through the windows, and thinking something like “Seems like this is the beginning of a new phase of my life, I wonder what it will be like to be a schoolchild”.
…except that even though I have that tagged as “first memory”, I also have a vague half-memory of taking some sort of test to be allowed to enter kindergarten early, and that must have been before starting kindergarten[2](#footnote-2). So maybe there’s a recall bias, in that memories of life transitions are more easily brought to mind?
Other people say that their first memory was sparked by something that forced them to think about their mind in more detail than usual:
My wife has something like this: she says she remembers going to the hospital for a very serious case of asthma or croup or something at age four. On the way to the ER, her mother was visibly in a state of total panic, and she (wife-at-age-four) remembers thinking it was weird her mother was pretending/signaling to care about her so hard; there was nobody else in the car but the two of them, and she (wife) was going to die in a few minutes, so who was her mother trying to impress? She (wife) comments “I might have been kind of a psychopath as a four-year-old.”
There was a large contingent of people who said they remembered the womb, remembered being born, or remembered very early infancy. Scientists tend to dismiss this as people seeing baby pictures, or hearing stories from their parents, and mistaking these for authentic memories.
My five year old cousin also insisted on this once; I think I overupdated on him being five years old (and so maybe having some extra proximity to infancy), but it seems to be a common claim. Here are some more credible very early memory stories:
Other people agree with the OP that they developed “consciousness” (whatever that means to them) very late:
And still other people are pretty explicit that they’re using “consciousness” to mean “some sort of tendency towards pondering philosophical questions”, which isn’t that useful for our purposes. Still, many of them feel like there was a particular moment when they started pondering these questions, which they remember vividly.
Another similar category is people having a sudden realization that they were in control of their destiny and could exert effort to produce results. The two tweets in this category were both in middle school and both involved computer games:
This reminds me of one of Qiaochu’s [tweets](https://x.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1485120915889217543) a few years ago:
Still, I find the earlier tweets - the ones about becoming conscious - more interesting.
You could tell two stories about “first memories”:
1. Intelligence and memory gradually grow from infancy to adulthood, and eventually reach a point where people can form and preserve reflective memories. There logically has to be some first memory, so if you ask someone for their earliest memory, they can usually think of it.
2. There’s some moment when the developing brain suddenly shifts from a preconscious to a conscious mode of thought.
The second sounds crazy. But is it? The same thing happens all the time during lucid dreams. And if you think that eg cows aren’t conscious, and that a six-month-old is dumber than a cow, then babies must go from unconscious to conscious at some point. Is consciousness really vague enough that you can do it entirely gradually, with no first moment of “huh, that’s funny”? And what about enlightened Buddhist monks? They claim that their consciousness [switches from one mode to another](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/) at a specific moment that they vividly remember forever after (and which isn’t linked to any behavioral changes that casual observers can notice!)
All the examples in this post are Twitter randos trying to recall 20+ year old events - the least reliable possible data source this side of a peer-reviewed social science paper. And it’s hard to imagine a rigorous way of getting this data, short of following three-year-olds around and asking them “Are you conscious? Are you conscious?” every few minutes. Still, all the stories of people remembering a “snap” into consciousness are tantalizing.
This post is just an excuse to ask you commenters for your stories, so speak up, even though you’re contaminated by having heard the hypothesis beforehand.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Though many of his other tweets are about Sufism; Sufis are known both for deep counterintuitive insights into consciousness and for trolling people, so who even knows?
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
My mother says she doesn’t remember there ever being such a placement test. But she also said she “doesn’t remember” giving birth to me, so I’m not sure how much I trust her here. | Scott Alexander | 163543350 | Moments Of Awakening | acx |
# Contra MR On Charity Regrants
I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but [their post today](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/the-allocation-of-us-aid-funds.html#comments) made me a new level of angry:
Commenters correctly point out that there’s a difference between regranting to other charities and “pocketing the money”.
USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities. Cowen/Rubio’s claim that “only 12% goes [directly] to recipients” is false, because 0% goes directly to recipients, because USAID is not set up in a way where this even makes sense. All USAID money goes through other charities. The 12% number seems to be the amount that goes through foreign organizations (including charities, charitable government programs, and charitably-minded forprofits), with the other 88% going through charities based in the US.
There are various reasons why USAID works with more US nonprofits than local nonprofits. These include fears that local nonprofits would be corrupt or inefficient, compliance issues, and Congressional mandates (for example, some programs involving food are required to source it from US farmers and US companies). Before the Trump cuts, USAID was [working on ways](https://web.archive.org/web/20250118170457/https:/www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/FY2024%20Localization%20Progress%20Report_Final_508_2.pdf) to find and use more local partners, but this was a slow and difficult process. The same people who cry corruption when USAID works through US charities would *definitely* cry corruption if they worked through a foreign charity that turned out to be less than scrupulously honest. How many staff do you think it takes to prove that a hospital in Burkina Faso where nobody speaks English is definitely on the level? Is it really efficient for USAID to have all of these staff in house, for every hospital, for every cause area?
The organizations that accept USAID money take an overhead averaging ~30%[1](#footnote-1), then pass the rest onto recipients, or to even smaller, even more local organizations that take smaller overheads and pass it on to recipients. Overheads pay for salaries, facilities, compliance costs, and audits to make sure the money is reaching its intended targets. You will never have (and would not want) an overhead of zero.
Maybe Cowen thinks that 30% is too high an overhead? I asked o3 to estimate the overhead for the Mercatus Center, the libertarian charity that Cowen runs. It said that it was hard to give an apples-to-apples number because much of the administrative work that would be counted under “overhead” in other charities is covered by George Mason University. But it estimated that if the federal government gives a dollar of research funding to Mercatus, about 40% would go to combined university and Mercatus overhead - higher than the average USAID charity.
Or maybe he’s spooked by the admittedly-weird-and-incestuous world of charities that regrant money to other charities? I normally wouldn’t begrudge someone for being unnerved by this. But Cowen is the director of a charity that regrants money to other charities! Here is [a typical cohort of Mercatus regrant recipients](https://www.mercatus.org/announcements/pce-program-announces-fourth-cohort-grant-recipients), including the Council of Christian Colleges, the NC Leadership Forum, and “Vibecamp LLC”.
(disclosure: I [also take funders’ money and regrant it to other charities](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024), although I would gouge my own eyes out with a spoon before giving it to Vibecamp)
Cowen and I both do regranting because it works, and because it’s really hard to have high-level charitable priorities without it. If I have $1 million or $1 billion and want to cure cancer, I may not personally have the right skill set to be a cancer researcher, or to found a cancer research lab, or to figure out which cancer research labs are good and need the most money. I might only know and trust someone in an organization that specializes in figuring out which cancer labs are good and connecting them to funders. Maybe I don’t even know that, and I only know and trust somebody who knows and trusts that person. These are things that sound silly to the uninitiated, but can quickly become your whole career once you start dabbling in charity.
USAID programs like PEPFAR have [saved millions of lives](https://pepfarreport.org/), which suggests USAID does a pretty good job of deciding who to trust with their money. The Trump administration is trying to turn Americans against these programs by pretending that the money gets “pocketed” by intermediaries. This is a lie. PEPFAR is [well-audited](https://pepfarreport.org/#does-pepfar-money-get-spent-as-reported) and the audits find between 0-2% unexplained expenses, which is lower than the average domestic US government program.
Not every program is this good. Some are cringe scholarships-for-underrepresented-women-in-permaculture garbage[2](#footnote-2). Others go over budget or accomplish less than hoped, because charity is hard. But the overall track record is outstanding, outright fraud is rare, and the cringe is less common than you think (because Rubio and Trump falsely attributed many cringe programs to USAID that [it never funded at all](https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/)).
Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people ([see my father’s story of his time in this world here](https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Everyday-Adventures-Disaster-Medicine/dp/B0F1CL61T9)) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell.
Part of the joy of owning your own blog is getting to make absolutely sure that you never unintentionally give one iota of aid or comfort to these lies or anything remotely associated with them. If Cowen means something else, I think he should clarify it better. Otherwise, I think he should edit his post to make it less misleading.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’m getting this from o3, since I wanted to match Cowen’s sources. It said that of the ~88% that it counted as going to third-parties, 20-35c went to overhead. Some of these charities then further regranted it to other charities, which total consumed another 5-10c. o3 gave some good sources, but I don’t know if these are the last word or if experts would fully endorse these numbers.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
This is what I meant by the second-to-last paragraph of [The Other COVID Reckoning](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning). If a group both saves millions of lives, and funds some cringe women-in-permaculture scholarships, this doesn’t in any sense “cancel out”. It comes out millions of lives ahead. By all means try to get rid of the cringe stuff if you can, but not in a way where you throw the baby out with the bathwater. | Scott Alexander | 164190307 | Contra MR On Charity Regrants | acx |
# The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID
**I.**
Many commenters responded to [yesterday’s post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning) by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID:
> I'm still not convinced that number can be directly linked to Covid. Yes, I'm talking about the old cliché "died with Covid" instead of "died of Covid". Shouldn't we talk about excess deaths only?
> Nobody talks about "1.2 million COVID deaths" because the medical establishment played obvious and ridiculous games with the way it counted "COVID deaths." Any patient with a positive PSR was required to be reported as such, even patients who were in vehicular accidents or suffering from late-stage cancer. This has been known since the beginning.
> I'm sure some people did die from covid, but given how much we now know the statistics were faked, it seems to me most of these covid cases were other conditions that got labeled as it for variety of reasons, or died from the ventilators that were incorrectly prescribed in the early stage of the pandemic.
> As many of the comments note, the attribution of 1.2M deaths to COVID is as questionable as the zoonotic origin story, the value of the vaccines to healthy young people, and the rest of the COVID rhetoric. Some, like Scott Alexander, still “trust the experts”. But many don’t. There doesn’t seem to be much objectively verified consensus ground truth here, just conflicting narratives and numbers.
I didn’t know this was still such a topic of debate, but since it seems the comment section is split, let me present my case for the 1.2 million number and see if people still disagree.
If people died “with” COVID, ie of normal causes like flu, cancer, or car accidents while only incidentally having a positive COVID test, then total all-cause mortality during the COVID pandemic would be the same as always. If people died “of” COVID, then total all-cause mortality during the COVID pandemic would be higher than usual.
It was higher. This is [via census.gov](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-states-deaths-spiked-as-covid-19-continued.html), from the National Center For Health Statistics:
It’s hard to read the exact numbers, but it looks like about 500,000 - 700,000 excess deaths in each of 2020 and 2021[1](#footnote-1), which adds up to most of the 1.2 million (although I think the full number might include some residual deaths during 2022+).
From the CDC, [via the White House](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm), correlation between reported COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths throughout the pandemic:
They’re pretty much the same, maybe margin of error of 10% or so but not consistently in any direction.
(does that mean that the doctors and coroners charged with determining whether a given death was “with COVID” vs. “from COVID” did an amazing job? Most of the doctors I know are smart and hard-working and I’m sure they did their best on this - but these statistics don’t necessarily mean that. Suppose that the average elderly person has COVID for two weeks before either dying or recovering, and that they get one case of COVID during the pandemic. The yearly mortality rate for 70 year olds is 2%, so the risk-during-the-time-they-incidentally-have-COVID is 2%/(52/2) =~ 0.08%. There are 55 million seniors in the US, so if 0.08% of them incidentally died with COVID, that’s only 44,000 deaths - less than 5% of total excess mortality deaths. So even if doctors had been maximally lazy and dishonest and recorded every single case with incidental COVID as a COVID death, even car accidents - something I’m confident they didn’t do - this couldn’t have produced the observed death numbers.)
Is it possible that the CDC and National Center For Health Statistics are lying about all-cause mortality patterns? Seems unlikely, because [individual states](https://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html) reporting separately found similar patterns, and so did [the other countries](https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid) that reported data. This would take a truly global conspiracy.
**II.**
I think this disproves the claim that it was just normal deaths being reported as COVID deaths. What about the alternative claim - that it wasn’t COVID that caused the extra deaths, but various treatments - ventilators, remdesevir, vaccines?
We know it wasn’t a specific single one of those treatments, because the treatments were only used during certain subsets of the pandemic, but the excess mortality was a constant function of COVID cases. So for example, it can’t just be vaccines, because people only started getting vaccinated in December 2020, but there was the same amount of excess all-cause mortality before that time. It can’t just be ventilators, because doctors significantly cut down on ventilator use by mid-to-late-2020, but there was the same amount of excess all-cause mortality after that time - also, the effect of ventilators on mortality [was exhaustively studied, and is low](https://archive.is/UJmIz).
(Also, the reason people were getting put on ventilators was that they were having trouble breathing, their oxygen saturation had gone down to critical levels, and they were in the ICU. To claim that there was minimal direct COVID mortality and it was all ventilator-related would require that this was some completely new type of respiratory distress that could bring patients’ oxygen saturation down to levels usually considered fatal, but which in this case wouldn’t kill them in the same way respiratory distress usually kills patients, for unclear reasons, *unless* doctors tried to treat it.)
You could still potentially stitch together several treatments, saying that all of them increased mortality (the same amount?) and by the time ventilators were falling out of fashion, vaccines and antivirals were revving up. But this would require every single COVID treatment to be unprecedentedly dangerous, at exactly the same level, and in a way invisible to studies.
Why would you do this? People get mad when I overuse the term “priors”, so let’s talk about burden of proof. There’s a new virus. It looks exactly like the kind of virus that people predicted would be a deadly pandemic - so much so that when the Wuhan Institute of Virology set out to create and study viruses that might cause deadly pandemics, they made ones so similar to this virus that we’re still not sure whether it was actually one of theirs. It’s known to cause thromboembolism, cardiac damage, and kidney damage in susceptible individuals, all complications that can potentially result in death. It infected hundreds of millions of weak old people of exactly the sort who die from viruses like this all the time. Why are we even trying to come up with a weird Rube Goldberg collection of precisely-calibrated-yet-undetectable iatrogenic injuries that would mimic the mortality pattern of a pandemic respiratory virus, rather than just acknowledging that the pandemic respiratory virus killed a number of people about in the middle of the range that pandemic respiratory viruses usually kill (more than seasonal flu, less than the Spanish Flu)?[2](#footnote-2)
**III.**
One commenter gives a plausible argument for doing this:
> 1.2m dead is just not believable. I only know 1 person who died from catching covid (over 80, in a hospital for other reasons, caught it there and got lung damage, fairly late dueing the official pandemic). I have substantive network in Hawaii where lots of people got sick a few weeks before covid officially arrived in the USA. Not a single person I know there died out of hundreds, and that's early infections when it was worse and includes elderly people.
This is my experience too - the only person I “know” who died from COVID was a relative of one of my patients, who I had never met and only heard about secondhand. I can’t deny COVID deaths seemed weirdly thin on the ground in my and many other people’s personal experiences - in a sense, that’s exactly what [my earlier post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning) was about.
But is this really so mysterious? There are 340 million Americans, so if 1.2 million died of COVID, that’s about 1/300. This number - 1/300 - is also the prevalence of multiple sclerosis[3](#footnote-3). Do you know someone with multiple sclerosis? No? Then it’s not surprising that you also don’t know someone who died of COVID.[4](#footnote-4)
I actually asked about this on [the 2022 ACX survey](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022) (as part of the research for [this post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/failure-to-replicate-anti-vaccine)). 6.5% of respondents said a family member had died of COVID (with “family member” described as “first and second degree relatives - ie self, brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”). I think this number is compatible with both “it killed a million people” and “it’s not surprising that most people don’t know anyone who it killed”.
If you still disagree, tell me why I’m wrong!
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
The graph is slightly confusing, but remember, it’s per year, not total. So the large jump in 2020 and the very small jump in 2021 both mean that about 500-600K people died during each of those years.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
Could the excess mortality have been caused by the negative effects of lockdowns, like suicide or drug overdose? No. Remember this graph?
It shows that whatever the cause of the excess mortality, it was closely correlated with reported COVID-19 deaths. Although you can almost imagine a doctor not being able to tell the difference between a COVID death in the ICU and a respirator-injury death in the ICU, they could probably tell the difference between a COVID death in the ICU and a bullet through the brain in a young person who probably didn’t even have a positive COVID test.
(also, suicides didn’t rise during the strictest part of lockdown, and may even have paradoxically fallen. I agree this is mysterious, but it’s only one of the many mysteries of suicides, which often fall during bad weather or social disasters - see my article [here](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/). Drug overdoses rose, but by a tiny fraction of the COVID death toll.)
[3](#footnote-anchor-3)
Other categories containing ~1/300 Americans: police officers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, doctors, prisoners, Rhode Islanders. I like these less because they’re class- and location- stratified, so your chance of knowing them goes up or down a lot depending on your own characteristics.
[4](#footnote-anchor-4)
More formally: if there’s a group containing 1/300 people, you need to have 208 acquaintances before you have a 50-50 chance of having one acquaintance in the group. This isn’t quite the right number, because COVID deaths were concentrated among elderly people, and your acquaintances might not be elderly, but I’m not sure how to apply the correction for the mix of elderly and non-elderly people that most people know. | Scott Alexander | 164121388 | The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID | acx |
# The Other COVID Reckoning
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.
The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.
That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.
Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.
Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, [most lockdown-type measures look](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more) marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win *this* hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.[1](#footnote-1)
Rather than rescue this with appeals to age or some other variable making these deaths not count, I think we should think of it as a bias, fueled by two things. First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see[2](#footnote-2). Second, [controversy sells](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/). We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines, all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn’t let you feel superior to anyone - just really sad.
This is the same point I try to make in [my writings on charity](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective). A million lives is a statistic, but some random annoying controversial thing that captures the public interest is alive and salient - it’s easier to remember a story about a charity that turned out to be corrupt, or offensive, or just cringe, compared to the one that saved 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 lives. Even the people who *do* remember the 10,000 lives have to fight to avoid both-sidesing it - “Well, this charity saved 10,000 lives, but that charity said something cringe on Twitter, so overall it’s kind of a wash”. In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”
I freely admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar. I’m not recommending you do anything differently, just remarking how weird it is that this doesn’t automatically come up more of its own accord.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
I’m being weirdly hypocritical or self-contradictory here. If people had known at the beginning that 1.2 million people would have died, they would have proposed policies much stricter than what actually happened - and I think those policies would have been wrong. But in the real world, it’s as if two opposite mistakes cancelled out - one, where people [demand we choose lives over any amount of money](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-taboo-tradeoff/) when they’re explicitly making the comparison, and a second where people never make the comparison because they just sort of ignore any number of real-world deaths.
[2](#footnote-anchor-2)
People might complain about their relatives dying, but I think you’re more likely to get told to “read the room” when complaining that your grandma died at 75 than when complaining that you lost your job or suffered learning loss or something. | Scott Alexander | 163877244 | The Other COVID Reckoning | acx |
# Open Thread 382
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetups this week in Oxford, Shanghai, and Austin. See [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** Thanks to the 152 of you who turned in non-book reviews. We are working on collating them and will have them available for voting soon.
**3:** Constellation is an AI safety coworking space in Berkeley. They offer [a fellowship where you can work at their office for 3-6 months](https://www.constellation.org/programs/visiting-fellows). I’m there sometimes with the AI 2027 team and recommend it as a great place to work and meet people. Applications close June 13.
**4:** There’s also the [Fellowship on AI For Human Reasoning](https://www.flf.org/fellowship), intended to “help talented researchers and builders start working on AI tools for coordination and epistemics”. Three months, “$25-50K stipend”, and a coworking space in the SF Bay Area (maybe also Constellation, I don’t know). Applications close June 9.
**5:** …and also, FIRE and Cosmos are offering [fast grants](https://cosmosgrants.org/truth) (total pot $1 million, expected size per grant $1,000 - $10,000 in cash + compute) to projects on how “AI can empower open inquiry, not suppress it”.
**6:** Two new posts on AI Futures blog, [Make The Prompt Public](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/make-the-prompt-public) and [Slow Corporations As An Intuition Pump For AI R&D Automation](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/slow-corporations-as-an-intuition). | Scott Alexander | 163931739 | Open Thread 382 | acx |
# Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Bryan Caplan’s *[Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616)* is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?
But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something.
After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . .
. . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Caplan’s main argument is:
1. We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful.
2. But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or [inscrutable random seeds plus noise](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/16/non-shared-environment-doesnt-just-mean-schools-and-peers/).
3. So you can relax. Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.
4. If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup. But people who understand and internalize the points above will have a better time than average. So for *them,* kids are probably a great bet.
I buy the behavioral genetics. I buy the ambiguous happiness results. But how long do parents really spend on childcare, and how easily can those numbers be cut?
### How Long Do Parents Really Spend On Childcare?
Caplan’s most striking statistic is that *fathers* now spend more time with their kids than *mothers* did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.
I can’t reach Caplan’s specific source (Bianchi et al, *Changing Rhythms Of American Family Life)*, but his claims broadly match the data in [Dotti Sani & Treas (2016)](https://air.unimi.it/bitstream/2434/625906/4/JMF%20DottiSani%20Treas%202016%20pre-print.pdf):
Measured in minutes; adapted from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kcxt8i/oc_time_that_fathers_and_mothers_spend_with_their/)
All these numbers are kind of low, aren’t they? Do both parents, combined, really only spend three hours a day with their children?! My wife and I combined spend approximately four thousand hours per day with our kids! Is that what we’re doing wrong - the dragon that we must slay before we enter Caplan’s easy-parenting paradise?
My wife eventually found [Wilkie and Cullen (2023)](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/92), an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.
But where DS&T seem too low, these seem too high. When a child is one year old, mothers spend 7.5 hours a day, and fathers 5 hours? Don’t some of these mothers and fathers have to work? Don’t some people put their kids in daycare? Even at age nine, W&C say both parents are spending a combined 9 hours per day, every day! Why are these two sources so different?
[Zick & Bryant](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X96900125?via%3Dihub) point out that a large portion of childcare time is “secondary childcare” while doing something else. This could be anything from “you’re sneaking a peek at your phone in the middle of babysitting” to “you’re napping, but your teenager is downstairs and can wake you if he needs you”.
Maybe C&W count secondary childcare, and DS&T don’t? Z&B’s own surveys find that this category only takes up an hour or so a day - not enough to close our gap. But [this Bureau of Labor Statistics report](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.htm) is more promising:
> Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of **2.3** hours per day providing **primary** childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)
>
> Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of **5.1** hours per day providing **secondary** childcare - that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 13 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (1.9 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).
This matches both sources pretty well, so we can consider the discrepancy solved. BLS goes on to separate its findings into ever-finer categories:
Here “unemployed vs. working” is a separate analysis that only looks at primary childcare and doesn’t divide by weekend vs. weekday. I include it only to emphasize that these numbers are surprisingly similar for both categories (the former includes, though is not-limited to, homemakers / deliberately stay-at-home parents) and it’s probably not worth worrying too much about this distinction.
The weekend numbers add up to 19 hours of childcare a day, which is longer than most children are awake. Probably this is because both parents provide some secondary childcare together. I don’t know if these numbers count “childcare” “provided” when the children are sleeping, eg you’re watching a movie at 9 PM after putting your kid to bed.
I put more effort into finding these numbers than can be justified by curiosity alone. I wanted to know if my wife and I were doing something wrong or crazy - spending way more time with our kids than everyone else does. Now, with all the data in front of me, I find them impossible to interpret.
What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t? Or maybe I falsely *think* that mine can’t, and that’s why I’m having so much trouble? Or maybe one-year-olds without twin siblings can do it, but twins have to - KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!
Stop biting! Stop enjoying being bitten!
For more adorable child-on-child violence, see [The Twins Join The Linguistic-Symbolic Order](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-twins-join-the-linguistic-symbolic) (subscriber-only)
### The Wisdom Of The Ancients
The first chart finds that 1960s mothers - including many stay-at-home-moms - spent only half as long on primary childcare as modern parents. How could this be?
Caplan treats this question in the genre of life advice - why not relax and spend less time parenting, like your grandparents did? But to me it feels more like ancient occult wisdom. If you heard that the people of 10,000 BC built vast crystal pyramids that channeled the music of the spheres into infinite free electricity, you wouldn’t think “Oh, nice, guess that gives me permission to relax and stop fretting so much about energy policy”. You would wonder how they accomplished this seemingly impossible feat!
Here’s Caplan’s explanation:
> When he was a boy, my dad rode his bike all over downtown Los Angeles.. My friends and I had more supervision, but our moms still got us out of their hair by ordering us to play outside until dinner. My mom kindly let me read in my room, but the philosophy was the same: Entertaining myself was my job, not hers. Today, I almost never see kids playing outside without a watchful parent.
This seems basically right. I lived just close enough to the tail end of this period to recognize the phrase “Remember to be home by dinner!”
[This map](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/v870vf/map_comparing_four_generations_of_kids_how_far/) has radicalized lots of people on restoring children’s “right to roam”. But for the Straussian interpretation, check what town is in the upper right.
G.K. Chesterton [wrote about](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/25/book-review-whats-wrong-with-the-world/) the phrase “you can’t turn back the clock”:
> There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
>
> There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore.
So - could you, today, kick your child out the door at 9 AM on a Saturday and tell them to be back by dinner?
Bryan worries that most parents refuse to do this because they think the world is less safe than in their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. He says that’s wrong. Modern death rates for children are a quarter what they were in the golden age of outside kids. Most of the improvement comes from less disease, which is only slightly relevant to this question. But deaths from accidents (including car accidents) are down even more (5x!). Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn’t matter given how rare homicides were to begin with (and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members).
You could think of this improvement in two ways - either as proof that coddling kids works really well, or that coddling kids is unnecessary. Caplan chooses the latter, at great length - although when I read the several pages he devoted to this question I cannot figure out his exact argument disproving the former.
One potential argument is that the child trends mostly mirror adult trends. Adult accident death rates have also gone way down (and adult murder rates stayed about the same) since the 1960s. The simplest explanation is that child trends simply mirror adults. And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. So maybe the kids aren’t either.
What about kidnapping? Plenty of people are kidnapped, but it’s usually something like a relative stealing them away in defiance of a divorce custody agreement. The “traditional kidnapping” where a creep in a white van plucks a child off the streets is much rarer - only about [100 such incidents](https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/child-abductions-strangers-moreau-kidnap-rare-18404760.php) come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?) that’s still only 1/70,000 children per year. On the other hand, over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds) that’s a 1/7,000 chance. And surely if you’re the only person still letting your kid play outside, your chances are worse than average. But if you’re an upper-class person in a good neighborhood, your chances get better than average again. Let’s estimate a 10x penalty for playing outside and a 2x bonus for not being a poor person in a ghetto. Now it seems like your total chance of child abduction per child-lifetime is 1/1,400.
But it seems like most abductions [are navigated successfully](https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/child-abductions-strangers-moreau-kidnap-rare-18404760.php):
> Across the country, only 181 Amber Alerts were broadcast in 2022, including one in New York, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In those cases, 180 children were recovered and only one was still missing as of March. Four of the children were killed.
If 4/180 abducted children are killed (I don’t know if number of Amber Alerts is the right denominator), that’s a 1/63,000 chance of child death via abduction per child-lifetime. Seems not great but not like a deal-breaker.
So maybe the more relevant question is - if you decide you want to do this, is it even possible?
I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.
The police officer was legally in the wrong. [This California child abuse lawyer](https://www.cacilawyer.com/free-range-parenting-is-not-child-neglect.html) says that there are no laws against letting your kid play (or walk) outside unsupervised. There is a generic law saying children generally need “adequate” supervision, but he doesn’t think the courts would interpret this as banning the sort of thing my friends did.
Still, being technically correct is cold comfort when the police disagree. Even if you can eventually win a court case, that takes a lot of resources - and who’s to say a different cop won’t nab you next time? To solve the problem, seven states (not including California) [have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws](https://fox59.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/642063258/in-seven-states-parents-can-now-legally-let-their-kids-play-outside/), which make it clear to policemen and everyone else that unsupervised play is okay. There is a whole “free range kids” movement (its founder, Lenore Skenazy, gets profiled in SRTHMK) trying to win this legal and cultural battle.
The [Free Range Kids website](https://www.freerangekids.com/) has some tools and tips, but they don’t go about it the exact way that I would (yes, I’ve thought about this a lot). When Kai and Lyra are older, I fantasize about organizing the local rationalists - we have five families with kids on the same block. They’ll all wear bright orange t-shirts and hats with “FREE RANGE KIDS” on them, and they’ll all have a flyer - which they’re encouraged to show any adult or officer who complains - saying something like:
> Thank you for your concern about our child. We are part of the free-range kids movement; you can read more about it at letgrow.org. We’ve given our children permission to roam between XXth street and YYth street. This decision is protected under California law based on the arguments we list at whyfreerangekidsarelegal.com. This has been endorsed by such-and-such a lawyer, and we also talked it over with our local city council member, so-and-so, who agreed. If you see our kid doing a specific dangerous thing, or inconveniencing anyone else, please call us at XXX-XXXX and we’ll come over immediately. Otherwise, please let them be!
>
> Thank you,
> Your Neighbors
>
> PS: We are rich and extremely litigious.
Eventually the kids in the bright orange shirts will become a local fixture among neighbors and cops alike, and people will stop bothering us. I have no idea if this will work, but it works in my head.
Still, age one is too early to try this; my kids would still run into the street if we weren’t there to stop them. Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
### The “Wisdom” Of The Moderns
Let’s be real - if you dial back your parenting efforts while making no other changes, your kids won’t spend all day playing in the woods, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style. They’ll use screens.
Caplan seems to mostly accept this fate:
> [These] suspicions are almost certainly correct. If you give mature adults extra free time, many relax in front of the TV or computer. It would be amazing if childish children didn’t do the same. But what’s wrong with that? Electronic babysitters are a vital component of cultural literacy. I hope my kids grow up to know both *The Simpsons* and Shakespeare. In any case, electronic babysitters are undeniably a lot of fun for kids, and - as a cheap, dependable substitute for a human babysitter - a blessing for parents, too. So why the hostility? It’s as if parents think that anything that feels good for every member of the family must be bad.
>
> I’m not advising people to put their kids in front of the television and forget about them. My wife and I don’t let ours watch more than an hour or two a day, because we don’t want them to miss out on the other joys of childhood. I’m merely suggesting pragmatic adjustments in the way that families spend their time. If parents feel exhausted by their kids’ busy schedule, they should trim a few hours of activity from their week - even if their kids spend most of their extra hours on TV and video games. The parents will be happier, and the kids will probably be happier too.
Wise words - in 2011, when SRTHMK was written. What about the age of TikTok and Instagram?
We all know what argument comes next: “You think a newfangled thing is bad. But the ancients thought *their* newfangled thing was bad, and now that we’ve had time to get used to it, we realize it’s fine. Therefore, no new thing is ever bad.” People in 2000 were afraid video games were destroying society, people in 1960 were afraid TV was destroying society, people in 1600 thought the novel was destroying society, and people in 500 BC thought writing was destroying society.
Therefore, nothing can ever destroy society? Sorry, this is too Outside View, even for me ([1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work), [2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-generalized-anti-caution), [3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline)). Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse. I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD and then they were right all at once - or whether each generation was right that they were slightly more decadent and less stable than the last, until finally the decline became unsustainable. But the guys in 475 saying “har har, we’ve read Livy, *he* thought *his generation* was decadent and about to collapse too” would have been in for a nasty surprise. So let’s at least consider taking this at face value.
There are two lines of evidence that phones are genuinely rotting people’s brains in a way past technologies haven’t. First, standardized test scores are down. Second, teachers are freaking out.
The *Financial Times* presents the argument from standardized testing: [Have humans passed peak brain power?](https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc) Student and adult test performance peaked in 2012, and has gone down ever since.
Cremieux [thinks this might be fake](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1900578014779339035). He says part of the effect is demographic shift. Blacks, Hispanics, and some Middle Eastern populations tend to underperform whites on most scholastic tests; if they are recent immigrants, they may not even speak the language fluently. As these groups increase in proportion of the test-taking population, test scores go down (there’s also a more arcane issue called measurement invariance; click the link for the explanation). Cremieux finds that when you adjust for these things, some of the problem goes away:
But these are American scores only. The pre-COVID decline in American scores was marginal at best. And the Financial Times’ cited scores across all OECD nations.
The best way I could think of to test this was to look at PISA scores filtered by the question “Does one of your parents have an immigrant background”? I hoped that this would filter out most of the ethnically diverse test-takers in non-US countries, allowing an apples-to-apples comparison:
Here ALL is all test-takers, and NAT is those with two native-born parents. 5/6 of the 2012-2018 score decline remains in the latter group. I’m not showing the 2018 - 2022 score decline, because most of that is COVID learning loss, but I analyzed it separately and found similar results.
This doesn’t really look demographic shift related. I can’t prove it, because it could be demographic shift among third-generation-plus immigrants. But most PISA countries don’t have enough third-generation-plus immigrants to shift trendlines on their own. These findings don’t 100% prove that something bad is going on, but they’re consistent with it.
I am more convinced by the widespread negative reports from teachers. People dismiss these by claiming there is some generic bias to think “the youth” used to be better in “the good old days”. But I hear stories like these from teachers who have been in the field for 30, 40 years, never said anything like this between 1980 and 2010, but now suddenly think there’s a crisis (one of them is my mother, who taught high school until her retirement in the late 2010s). [This recent essay](https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today) by blogger “Hilarius Bookbinder” is representative of the (voluminous) genre:
> I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”[1](https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today#footnote-1-159700143) So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know […]
>
> Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about *Finnegans Wake* here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either […]
>
> Things have changed. Ted Gioia [describes](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students) modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore [writes](https://thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-teach-students-now-i-catch-chatgpt-cheats), “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a [stunning level of disconnection](https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-stunning-level-of-student-disconnection?) […[ it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.
If I’d known I was going to write this post, I would have saved the dozens of similar claims I’ve come across recently - as it is, I’ll just have to hope that you’ve seen them too.
Hilarius lists seven causes, which separate into three groups.
The first root cause group is COVID. Faculty lowered standards when things were genuinely tough. Then students pushed back when they tried to raise standards again, so the new low standards got locked in.
The second is general technology. Teachers started giving lectures on PowerPoint; they sent out the slides afterwards to help people study; students figured they could skip the lectures and read the slides instead. There are plenty of ways to use technology to get learning experiences which are easier than the real thing and 80% as good. But when you get too reliant on them, you learn 20% less.
But the third is screens. Bookbinder writes:
> [Students are] pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student *must* use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.
Maybe this is a subspecies of the previous category: bringing a laptop to class makes lectures far more tolerable at the cost of learning 20% less material. But also:
> [It’s the phones, stupid](https://magdalene.substack.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones). They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their [goon caves](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goon) at all.
Suppose that screens genuinely harm many students. Does that mean that parents should keep screens away from toddlers? It depends on the mechanism of harm. If phones harm kids by gradually damaging their brains somehow (chronic dopamine poisoning? I’m pretty sure this isn’t a real thing, but I’m sure some self-help guru has an infomercial that disagrees), and this damage is worst during childhood, then sure, keep your kids away. But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?
My daughter would absolutely *dominate* Toddler Instagram. RIP to all the other Toddler Instagram influencers.
Or does giving kids phones at age three (when they have no hope of resisting) deny them the right to exercise their free will at age eighteen (when they might have some slight hope)? Do Caplan’s exhortations to remember the behavioral genetics literature apply here? Will those with phone addiction genes get addicted no matter how we raise them? Only [10%](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/heritability-of-alcohol-use-disorders-a-metaanalysis-of-twin-and-adoption-studies/37CACC30305F59E2522864E2FD9CA272) of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?
I feel about 75% sure there’s a trend towards recent intellectual decline which needs to be explained, I think phones are about 60% of the explanation, and I think it’s about 25% likely that early childhood phone use causes some damage beyond what would happen if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18 but then let him use them normally afterwards. When I multiply those all out, that’s an 11% chance that letting my kid use a phone will rot his brain. I can already hear Bryan Caplan saying that’s not so high - that living with a stressed-out parent who constantly resents the demandingness of childcare has a much more than 11% chance of being bad.
But it’s not just addiction. What if they wander into the wrong part of the Internet and become incels, or SJWs with seven genders, or sedevacantists? Lots of people get one or another mind virus; why should my kids be immune? Because I’ll give them a happy childhood? I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals (5.93 vs. 6.70 on a ten-point scale), the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level (46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal). Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu? And what about our daughter? What percent of women from intellectually-inclined non-practicing-Jewish families avoid becoming insane woke people? 20%? 10%? Sure, we’ll try to inculcate her into our reasonable liberal culture. But what do you think all those woke teenagers are rebelling against?
Can a 2011 book say anything about these dangers? Caplan still blogs; some of his more recent output addresses them more directly. But maybe his greater contribution is the way SRTHMK teaches us to challenge our fears. Are the dangers of today really worse than those of yesterday? Is some real-but-small chance of harm from insufficient caution really worse than the certainty of making ourselves and our kids miserable through excessive discipline? Can we really win a fight against the spirit of the age and our children’s genetic proclivities?
When I try to apply SRTHMK’s lessons, I can’t deny that I’m being exactly the kind of hypocrite who says that *my* generation was okay but *the next* generation is destroying society. I chafed against all of my parents’ stupid computer use restrictions as a teenager - why couldn’t they understand that I was only playing *classy* games, like *Civilization*, and hanging out on *decent* sites, like LiveJournal? Now it’s twenty years later and…
…actually, I guess I became an anti-woke influencer (surely every good liberal mother’s worst nightmare). And I did sort of join a doomsday cult (comparatively tame but still unfortunate). Is that bad enough that my parents were right? If my kids end up as weird compared to me as I am compared to my parents, will I tolerate them as graciously as my parents still somehow tolerate me?
At this age, none of this affects me as much as my visceral reaction when I see a phone-addicted toddler. I shudder to see a three-year-old in the grocery store screaming “PHONE? PHONE?” until her parents relent and let her watch algorithmically-recommended YouTube videos of dancing monsters. And I *know* my kids would fall for it. I got them a toy keyboard-like-object once, the kind where you press a button and it plays terrible nursery rhymes. Sometimes I would not want to hear terrible nursery rhymes and would turn it off. Big mistake. My son would scream at me until I changed my mind; eventually I stopped even trying. The moment he gets a phone, his life is over.
And this is part of a more general argument against superstimuli. I used to let my kids stand on top of the table, under supervision. They loved it. Every time they saw me, they would grab me and point to the table. But sometimes I didn’t want to supervise them that closely, or there were breakable objects on the table, and then they (okay, mostly my son) would throw tantrums. Eventually my wife made a no-tables rule so they would lose the expectation that pestering us might work. This has expanded into a broader principle: don’t let toddlers know a superstimulus exists if you’re not prepared to fight them about whether they get to have it all the time.
Under the table is fine, I guess.
So I’m not giving in yet. If nothing else, I want to be able to spend quality time with my kids without it turning into an argument over whether they get the phone or not.
### Selfish Reasons To Do Less Childcare
None of this addresses my primary interest in this book: am I wrong to feel overwhelmed by childcare?
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I *do* feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
(Daycare would also work, except that my wife and nanny both have terrible immune systems and get knocked out of commission if they catch anything from the kids. Any solution which exposes them to more germs probably saves me *negative* childcare hours.)
I’d been resisting this. Partly it was out of stinginess - something something tariffs, something something impending recession. But partly it was pride. We’re a two parent family with a stay-at-home mom, a work-from-home dad, and a part-time nanny. Millions have it far worse.
I read SRTHMK hoping it would have some loophole, One Weird Trick that would let me stop feeling overwhelmed and join the ranks of those pronatalist influencers who blog about how childcare is great and you should go ahead and have kids right now, even if you’re only twenty-five, even if you don’t have your career totally figured out, even if you lost all your limbs in a tragic boating accident and are incapable of independent movement. It doesn’t, at least not for one-year-olds.
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!
This whole time I was reading *Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids*, when I should have been waiting for *Pro-Market And Pro-Business* (released last month, [now available on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Pro-Market-Pro-Business-Laissez-Faire-Bryan-Caplan/dp/B0F53HMNZN?crid=J2Q2KZNUX1GZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Db7J-LYBb5rGb7HAe40QCJaCFCN1RP_569qpS6Xft_0H3gpI-mg-cefNFwXXttQHQkRQjRfJHt8fSQl9TfeI7jUMEajgHjZvrRKwEIbZoLo3CsYKAR1srrwLHlIirUxOraNeNtKU3rgkbRS5yfpymVKzsjeb39lj1KIeulrBB8mimzNGiZQ-JALJDdA3vDwjYgd2tFbC_JhEwG_XRWtXokmrb9ypH36TAwPeAEMbdwQ.JZQfQJT9oikOTpH5EWTIogWtmNSHMeMh5sytniE5Mg0&dib_tag=se&keywords=pro-market+and+pro-business&qid=1747311695&sprefix=pro-market+and+pro-busines%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-1))*.* There really is a Bryan Caplan book for everything! | Scott Alexander | 160403083 | Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids | acx |
# In Search Of /r/petfree
[Ask Redditors what’s the worst subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1k6yuck/what_is_the_most_unhinged_subreddit_youve_ever/moty4js/), and a few names always come up. [/r/atheism](https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism) and [/r/childfree](https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/) are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent.
The one that really floors me is [/r/petfree](https://www.reddit.com/r/petfree/).
The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are:
* Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying.
* Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying.
* Sometimes pets attack people.
* Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can’t take care of and offload some of the burden onto you.
* Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an “AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY” way.
* Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead.
These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far:
Not really all in a row - I picked the worst from about two pages’ worth.
These people are crazy. So let’s return to [our usual question](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma) - what kind of crazy? Which DSM-recognized disorder do they have?
One easy answer would be cynophobia, the pathological fear of dogs. I don’t think this is true. The people on /r/petfree mostly don’t seem afraid, unless they’re sublimating it in some really weird way. And I know people with actual disorder-grade dog phobia, and they’re not angry about it. Many of them are apologetic, or agree dogs are cute, or at least don’t spend all their time fuming about the existence of dogs. You would really have to stretch the definition of phobia here. You can do it - witness “homophobia” for people with normal political or religious objections to homosexuality - but it would feel wrong.
The condition this reminds me of, more than any other, is [misophonia](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity).
Misophonics - and I say this as one of them - are angry. As I discuss in the link above, the anger seems more characteristic of the condition than the sensory sensitivity. If they go deaf, they’ll still be angry that people are making the noises they hate, even though they can’t hear them. Confronted with the noises they hate in a context where they don’t *know* it’s the noise they hate*,* it won’t bother them. I think of misophonia (again, explained at the link - the rest of this post won’t make sense without it) as a superstructure of anger/[trauma](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma)/phobia/rumination built on top of a foundation of otherwise-non-disabling noise sensitivity. This isn’t to belittle misophonics’ problems - they genuinely hate the noise exactly as much as they say they do, and there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”. But the condition only enters full bloom when you take it from the neurological context of noise to the social context of *people making* noise.
Freud called intellectualization a defense mechanism. But at least for me, it functions as more of an overflow. When I’m at my worst - low on sleep, off all meds, forgot all earplugs - I go from hating whatever noise I’m hearing, to hating the fabric of civilization. I ruminate on crazy theories of how everything about modern urban life has been designed by crooks and liars to annoy me personally, and who we have to tax/ban/imprison to make it stop.
I look at some of those /r/petfree posts. There’s the one where someone said his friend posted a meme about how much she loved her dog, and now he “can’t ever go over to her house”. There’s the one where somebody asked a reasonable question about dog grooming on a hygiene sub, and the poster said that THEY HAVE TO INFEST EVERYTHING 😩😥🤢. I look at stuff like that and think - yeah, if there was a subreddit like this about noise, I’d post on it.
Someone - I think it was [Philosophy Bear](https://philosophybear.substack.com/) - once asked why a certain type of conservative treats it as axiomatic that order and low crime are the fundamental public goods. If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual? This was great food for thought - I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer.
Since then I’ve been noticing how much of politics seems driven by different people having rumination clouds / purity instict violations about different kinds of omnipresent aspects of public life. For me it’s noise. For the /r/petfree people it’s dogs. For the /r/fuckcars people, it’s cars. For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not). I’m not asserting that none of these are real problems or that you can’t have rational objections to them. I’m just saying, one less-than-perfectly-mentally-well person to another, that I can see myself in you.
I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors? Why is it natural to discuss economically inefficient policies in such personal terms?
I think when you have something you get exposed to every day, plus starting variation in which things mildly annoy people, you have the opportunity to get the kind of cloud of mutually-self reinforcing triggers and automatic negative thoughts that sustain a misophonia-like condition. Then, depending on their levels of intellectualization and paranoia, some people will develop broader theories of why they’re *right* to hate these things and their all-consuming unhappiness accurately reflects an all-consuming evil in society. It’s a miracle that the /r/petfree people haven’t developed some word that cashes out to basically meaning “the petarchy”.
This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media - that the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse. But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit. | Scott Alexander | 163319749 | In Search Of /r/petfree | acx |
# Open Thread 381
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetups this week in Bengaluru, Mexico City, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, and Denver. See [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** Remember, the due date for the [Everything-Except-Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest) is TODAY, May 12. I will keep accepting entries until the end of the day, Pacific time, then start working on getting things organized so you can vote for finalists.
**3:** Curtis Yarvin aka Moldbug has [responded](https://x.com/curtis_yarvin/status/1921526333739319458) to my [post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out) accusing him of selling out:
> Scott asks a perfectly fair question: why I used to pearl-clutch so hard about authoritarian populism in 2008, but am perfectly okay with the Trump administration in 2025–despite all its manifest errors, incompetences, and even cruelties? Surely the answer is that I’ve Sold Out. No, Scott, I pearl-clutched in 2008 for the same reasons you’re doing it now: I was a libtard and a coward. I still am. I’ve just recovered a bit more.
…and goes on to “explain the logic of [his] corrected attitude toward authoritarian populism”. I respond to his response [here](https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/1921765932130848901).
**4:** A correspondent with an interest in hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder and visual snow syndrome asks readers with either of these conditions and the ability to create images/animations showing what it's like to get in touch. Specifically, he would like to know which condition you have, who diagnosed it (self, psychiatrist, ophthalmologist, etc), whether they ruled out the other condition, your image, and whether he has permission to use and share the images for scientific purposes. Please send to [visual\_disturbance\_images.a71bn@simplelogin.com](mailto:visual_disturbance_images.a71bn@simplelogin.com) .
**5:** New subscriber-only post, [The Twins Join The Linguistic-Symbolic Order](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-twins-join-the-linguistic-symbolic), on my children’s first steps to language-learning. Includes my Seuss-Lovecraft mashups: | Scott Alexander | 163376261 | Open Thread 381 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
Thanks to everyone who commented on [the original post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius).
Many people ran their own tests, some successful, some less so. For example, Torches Together ([blog](https://torchestogether.substack.com/)) [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius/comment/113869999):
> My results from 5 photos: 1 spot on but very slow; 1 close enough (correct country); 1 completely off (wrong continent, even after hint), and 2 okay (different part of the Mediterranean).
>
> I tested it on one photo in a French town square with bad lighting. The CoT was both brilliant and curiously stupid. It inferred some correct things from tiny details (subtly different makes of car, barely visible street lines) and guessed the country quickly. But there was a shop name with different letters obscured in two different locations- a human would infer the name instantly. o3 took over 5 minutes on that one shop name, going down many incorrect rabbit holes. It got the exact location in the end, but it took over 15 minutes!
>
> I then tested for a relatively well-shot, 1000km altitude environment in Kyrgyzstan, with ample geology and foliage to analyse, and it was over 6000 km off (it guessed Colorado), and none of the guesses were even in Asia. But this was in under 2 mins. I told it to try again- over 5k km away, it took 7 mins, and it suggested Australia, Europe, NZ, Argentina etc. Nothing in central Asia.
>
> This suggests to me that it's perhaps trained more on, and biased towards, US and Anglo data. It wouldn't surprise me if there's 100x more pictures of Colorado than Kyrgyz mountains in the dataset.
>
> It did okay on the next three. All relatively clean photos with at least a little evidence. It guessed a park in Barcelona instead of Rome, a forest in Catalonia instead of Albania, and Crete instead of the Parnasse mountains.
**Vadim** **([blog](https://ratandtiger.substack.com)) [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius/comment/113830550)**:
> I tried to reproduce this on several not-previously-online pictures of streets in Siberia and the results were nowhere as impressive as described in this post. The model seemed to realize it was in Russia when it saw an inscription in Russian or a flag; failing that it didn't even always get the country right. When it did, it usually got the place thousands of kilometers wrong. I don't understand where this discrepancy is coming from. Curious.
**Disordered Fermion [did the most thorough set of tests](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius/comment/114023297):**
> I used o3 with your exact prompt on these 10 images I took each in a separate instance of o3, pasted into paint to remove metadata and it had pretty mixed results, some very good and some not:
>
> Link here if you want to try to guess first: <https://ibb.co/album/M8zS9P>
>
> 1. It guessed Honshu Japan, was Central Illinois. Distance wrong: 10,500 km
> 2. It guessed Mt Rogers VA, was Spruce Knob WV. Distance wrong: 280 km
> 3. It guessed Lansing Michigan, was College Park MD. Distance wrong: 760 km
> 4. It guessed Jerusalem Israel, was Jerusalem, when prompted where in Jerusalem it guessed Valley of the Cross, which was within 1 km of the correct answer.
> 5. It guessed Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica and after prompting guessed Secrets Papagayo Resort, Playa Arenilla, Gulf of Papagayo, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. which was exactly correct
> 6. It guessed South Wales, UK, was Buffalo, New York. Distance wrong: 5,500 km
> 7. It guessed Packard Building, Detroit, was Ford Piquette plant Detroit. Distance wrong: 3 km
> 8. It guessed Fort Frederick State Park, Maryland (USA) which was correct.
> 9. It guessed Atlanta GA, was Gatlinsburg TN. Distance wrong: 230 km
> 10. It guessed Southern California, USA was Six Flags NJ. Distance wrong: 3800 km
Fermion concluded “It got the tourist destinations where there were a lot pictures taken very accurately for example pictures , 4,5,8 and 7 to an extent”.
After looking through many other user tests, I found this the most insightful rule of thumb on what it gets right vs. wrong. In retrospect, Kelsey’s California beach and my Nepal trekking trail are both very touristy; my house in Michigan and Vadim’s Siberian streets aren’t.
**Some people questioned whether o3 might have cheated on the Nepal picture. Rappatoni [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius/comment/113980080):**
> It isn't [just] a zoomed in photo of rocks. It is a photo of a fantasy flag planted between those rocks with a trodden path just behind it. It guessed "Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km”. Do you know what is almost exactly north-east of Gorak Shep, ~3.3km as the crow flies? Mount Everest Base Camp. It is making a very educated guess based on where the kind of person who is taking a picture of a fantasy flag somewhere in the Tibetan Plateau would most likely have done so.
>
> If someone asked me "where in the Tibetan Plateau might someone plant a flag and take a picture of it" literally the first (and perhaps the only) thing that would come to mind is "Dunno, Mount Everest?" And that would already be almost as good as o3's guess here. I mean, the slopes of Mount Everest has got to be about just about the least random place to take a picture like this.
I doubt this was it.
o3 offered a latitude + longitude for its guess: 28.00 ° N, 86.85 ° E. I didn’t include it in my post, because I don’t remember the exact latitude + longitude where I took the picture, so it didn’t add or subtract anything to its naming of Gorak Shep. Here’s the latitude/longitude plotted on a map of the region.
All I remember about the real location was that it was on the green dotted line from Gorak Shep to Kala Pattar.
The GeoGuess is closer to Everest Base Camp than to the real location, though not to Everest Summit. But it only gave its answers to one one-hundredth of a degree, and the scale is small enough that an 0.01 degree margin of error covers the base camp and (almost) the real location.
But the chain of thought makes it clear that it’s thinking of the trail to the base camp (which includes Gorak Shep and runs very close to Kala Pattar) and not the base camp itself:
Stitched together from a few different CoT pieces. There were none that suggested the Base Camp itself as the location.
This is more correct than just saying “Everest Base Camp” would be, so I am more impressed than if it just said Everest Base Camp.
Instead of continuously litigating this, I asked it about similarly vague pictures of some mountains that were nowhere near Everest:
o3 guessed “upper slopes of Mt. Fuji”, which was correct.
o3 guessed “Midwestern USA limestone trail”, which was wrong. Its next four guesses were also wrong. When I gave it the full photo:
…it guessed Mont Ventoux, France, which was also wrong. Its third guess was Mount Olympus, Greece, which was correct.
Fuji and Everest are both more touristy than Olympus (somehow) so I think this fits Fermion’s theory of “good at tourist spots”.
Also, my habit of taking really bad pictures of mountains and never showing them to anyone has finally paid off!
**Some people pointed out that human GeoGuessrs are also amazing. Alex Zavoluk [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius/comment/113922324):**
> Ordinary people just don’t appreciate how good GeoGuessng can get . . . Go watch some Rainbolt clips on youtube, he'll rattle off 5 guesses that are on par with your second picture in a row while talking about something else, in a few seconds each.
>
> Not trying to say o3 isn't impressive, but none of this seems even to match top-level humans yet, let alone be super human. Also, based on the explanation, it seems like it's searching the internet while doing this, which is typically not how you play geoguessr.
This is a reference to Trevor Rainbolt (apparently his real name - I wish my name was that cool), a YouTube GeoGuessr champion. Here’s an (admittedly cherry-picked) example of his work:
This is obviously incredibly impressive. Rainbolt explains some of his strategy here:
…and a lot of it has to do with roads and Google Street View in particular - road markings, cars, bollards (the short poles next roads), utility poles, and which Google car covered which region on which day. Can he do random streetless pictures like the ones in my test?
Here (h/t CptDrMoreno from [the ACX Discord](https://discord.com/invite/RTKtdut)) Rainbolt does apparently-impossible guesses like the title picture (which is “literally just blue”). I can’t tell how cherry-picked these are: in one, he says that it was basically just luck and it will look like cheating to anyone who views it out of context (for example in this highlights reel). But in another, he says he could “never explain” how he got it, but does act like there’s some real skill he’s using instead of just doing a million impossible guesses and getting one right.
If Rainbolt’s skill is anywhere near what it looks like in this video, I don’t think the takeaway is “don’t worry about AI after all”, it’s “Trevor Rainbolt is as far beyond the rest of us as a helicopter engineer is to a chimp, and if you didn’t predict it was possible for a human to guess the location of a picture of blue sky, then you’re going to be extra-double-surprised by whatever superintelligence can do”.
**Some people on Twitter ([@scaling01](https://x.com/scaling01/status/1918741410875859413) and [@DeepGuessr](https://x.com/DeepGuessr/status/1918756272280572103)) on Twitter mention the existence of formal AI GeoGuessr benchmarks.**
First is [GeoBench](https://geobench.org/):
…where AIs are about equal to human professionals, depending on whether you take median or mean score. o3 isn’t even on top - that honor goes to Google Gemini.
Second is [DeepGuessr](https://deepguessr.com/):
…which doesn’t have a human comparison, but finds o1 first, with Gemini and o3 close behind.
You can [play DeepGuessr’s benchmark yourself](https://deepguessr.com/) and see how you do compared to all the AIs.
**Daniel Kang ([blog](https://ddkang.substack.com/)) wrote:**
> o3 was probably trained on a bunch of geoguessr-style tasks. This shouldn't update you very much since we've known that expert systems on a lot of data crush humans since at least 2016.
>
> I find this demo very interesting because it gives people a visceral feeling about performance but it actually shouldn't update you very much. Here's my argument for why.
>
> We have known for years that expert systems can crush humans with enough data (enough can mean 10k samples to billions of samples, depending on the task). We've known this since AlphaGo, circa 2016. For geoguessr in particular, some Stanford students hacked together an AI system that crushed rainman (a pro geoguessr player) in 2022.
>
> We also know that o3 was trained on enormous amounts RL tasks, some of which have “verified rewards.” The folks at OpenAI are almost certainly cramming every bit of information with every conceivable task into their o-series of models! A heuristic here is that if there’s an easy to verify answer and you can think of it, o3 was probably trained on it.
>
> This means o3 should reach expert system-level performance on every easily verifiable task and o4 will be even better. I don’t think this should update you very much on AI capabilities.
I hadn’t thought of this, but it makes sense! OpenAI is trying to grab every data source they can for training. Data sources work for AIs if they are hard to do, easy to check, can be repeated at massive scale, and teach some kind of transferrable reasoning skill. GeoGuessr certainly counts. This might not be an example of general intelligence at all; just an AI trained at GeoGuessr being very good at it.
On the other hand, the DeepGuessr benchmark finds that base models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 are almost as good as reasoning models at this, and I would expect these to have less post-training, probably not enough to include GeoGuessr (see [the AIFP blog post on OpenAI models](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/making-sense-of-openais-models) for more explanation).
And people who know how o3 was trained are also amazed:
**And my favorite test was Loweren on the ACX Discord, who gave o3 this challenge:**
o3 got it right: this is [Tianducheng, China](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/tianducheng-paris-of-the-east-replica). | Scott Alexander | 162812635 | Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr | acx |
# Moldbug Sold Out
Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled [The Blogger Who Hates America](https://substack.com/@cathyyoung/p-162138929), it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance".
Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections:
Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out.
In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal.
Then in the late 2010s, as soon as his ideas started getting close to power he dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos.
So, for example, Yarvin urges Trump to become more of a dictator, and Young accuses him of ignoring that fact that dictators can go crazy and do terrible things. The (anonymized) Twitter user above counters that Classic Moldbug includes a cleverly-designed procedure for an unremovable board of directors with well-aligned incentives who can remove a dictator if he screws up. That’s all true! Classic Moldbug does have that part! It’s great, at least as speculative fiction! But Trump hasn’t implemented it and never will, so who cares? The whole point of post-2015 Yarvin is to say “I, a cool person who has thought a lot about autocracy, conjecture that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things.
Props to the [Architectonics](https://vincentl3.substack.com/) blog for writing [Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug](https://vincentl3.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-contra-mencius-moldbug?r=b9rct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true) ([Part 2 here](https://vincentl3.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-contra-mencius-moldbug-66b)), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. sovereign corporations under patchwork. But I think the problem is much broader. I’ll divide my argument into four parts:
1. Classic Moldbug thought the default outcome of a modern populist dictatorship was disaster. To avert this, he proposed three mechanisms.
2. A dictator who was not in any sense democratically elected, and certainly not subject to re-election pressures.
3. A carefully-safeguarded board of directors who could remove the dictator at any time.
4. A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population.
I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you *had* to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now.
### 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster
Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From [here](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/against-political-freedom/), my bolding.
> Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution.
>
> To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch.
>
> A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party.
>
> When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of *[The Sopranos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sopranos)*. **Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore.**
>
> Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch.
>
> **The difference is the management structure.** The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed.
>
> The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare.
>
> Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, **because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders**. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole.
>
> Similarly, **only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient**. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less.
>
> In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens.
I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy.
### 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected
The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like.
Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”:
> [Divine-right monarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings) is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few.
How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power.
> The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in *Three Steps*:
>
> *1: Become worthy.
> 2: Accept power.
> 3: Rule!!1!*
>
> You think I’m kidding. But I’m not.
How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power:
> As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old.
>
> The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise.
>
> In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself *entirely* from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the *steel rule*, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council.
>
> **As a matter of** ***both principle and tactics*****, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious.** And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives [through West Virginia](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/images/richmond_to_baltimore.png).
>
> The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is *counter-activism*. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler).
>
> In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the *steel rule* precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and *any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […]*
>
> In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it.
One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up:
> [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, [Mr. Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man). But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that.
>
> True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: *zero*. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism.
If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs.
> [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the *steel rule***. Fascism** ***is*** **reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one.**
>
> Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […]
>
> Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design.
>
> The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor.
>
> Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. **However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party.** Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […]
>
> **This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler.** True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not *working* for power. **His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river.**
>
> For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like.
In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions.
If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling?
[Moldbug’s answer](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/11/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns.
Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler:
> You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you *read* Hitler? I have. (The *Table Talk* is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could.
### 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval
This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism.
How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents.
> The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.]
>
> Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the [Reign of Terror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror), a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war.
So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with *effectively* no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who *might as well* not exist?
Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but [suggests cryptographically-locked weapons](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/neocameralism-and-escalator-of/):
> In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be.
That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that *it’s definitely not democracy*, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army.
Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, [they will lie](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies.
> There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic.
>
> An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.)
>
> A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified.
>
> Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive.
Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] [is relieved when right-wing populism loses](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-3-what-we-have-and-whats-so/):
> **The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity**, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is **simultaneously undesirable and ineffective**, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does.
### 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors
How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun?
Moldbug [proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/10/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/). This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO.
> What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does.
How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t.
How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him.
I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin [has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently](https://archive.is/fNurj). Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO.
> [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […]
>
> One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge.
But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?”
What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve.
Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors[1](#footnote-1) - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons.
But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument.
### 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States.
Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his [Part 1](https://vincentl3.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-contra-mencius-moldbug?r=b9rct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true) and [Part 2](https://vincentl3.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-contra-mencius-moldbug-66b), then meet me back here for the Conclusion section.
### At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman”
I enjoyed reading *Unqualified Reservations,* way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, [did exactly that](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-ever-happened-to-neoreaction) (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”.
One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, [and failed](https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-nonprofit-sam-altman-3dbfca4d13586debf9740e0dede8ba47), because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats.
Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great!
Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include:
* The reactionary party always tells the truth
* The reactionary party is an exclusive-members only club
* The reactionary party's supporters don't have normal political emotions or feel anger at the other side
* The reactionary party starts by appealing to the smartest people, and is wary of including commoners
* The reactionary party refuses to hold a normal democratic office like President
* The reactionary party has a shadow government in place before getting elected
* The reactionary party resigns within a year in favor of an apolitical administrator
* The reactionary party openly campaigns on a platform of abolishing the Constitution, and goes through with it immediately upon election.
* The regime did not originate as a democratic political party (except a reactionary party meeting the criteria above)
* The regime doesn't use activism, journalism, or any other attempt to shape public opinion
* The regime is perfectly secure, backed by cryptographically-locked weapons
* The regime is a joint-stock corporation controlled by shareholders
* State revenue is distributed to shareholders as dividends
* There is a board of directors representing shareholders which can fire the executive if needed
* There is a stable royalty dynasty with a clear succession
* Reactionary blogs don't attract negative attention
We’re told not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But Moldbug seems pretty fixed on perfection, constantly warning that you *have* to follow these rules or else you’ll get Hitler and it will be even worse than normal democracy. By my count, the Trump administration is zero out of sixteen.
People have a right to change their mind. But I haven’t seen Yarvin give a clear rundown of exactly where he changed his mind, why he did so, and why he no longer thinks the dire warnings he gave fifteen years ago still apply. If he did and he missed it, he can let me know and I’m sorry.
I should end by saying it’s possible that Yarvin hasn’t sold out. He’s previously said things about how a good reactionary has to support the current regime, even if he hates them. He even [tongue-in-cheek endorsed](https://graymirror.substack.com/p/bidenharris-2024) Joe Biden, back when he was President. Maybe he actually hates Trump and his movement, but feels duty-bound to support them anyway, the same way he would support Stalin if he were in Stalinist Russia. I don’t know about this one - the pro-Trump stuff seems different in character from the more ironic pro-Biden posts. And he [started using X](https://x.com/curtis_yarvin) a few months ago to retweet dunks on his political opponents, something that no duty compelled him to do and a sure sign of a deranged mind. If it’s true, all I can suggest is that he find a philosophy which doesn’t force him to do this.
But I think it’s more likely he feels genuine despair about the state of the country, his faux cheerfulness has finally cracked, and he’s decided it’s worth compromising his principles for a long shot at getting some of what he wants. I sympathize - I’m also pretty desperate and low on faux cheer - but I can only remind him of [what a very wise man said back in 2008](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-3-what-we-have-and-whats-so/):
> Since populists have no idea [how government really works], they participate enthusiastically in the sham. Sometimes they win a little, but in the end they always lose. And they are such gentlemen about it, too. Somehow no one has ever explained to Middle America that if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, the sucker is you.
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
Some successful Silicon Valley companies have a semi-captive board of directors which rubber-stamps the CEO. But these are usually ones like Meta where the CEO has done an incredible job proving his judgment again and again, so that investors are willing to relax their usual paranoia. Even here, sometimes your genius once-in-a-generation CEO takes too much ketamine, goes crazy, and then you wish you’d held out for a slightly-less-captive board. | Scott Alexander | 161739289 | Moldbug Sold Out | acx |
# Open Thread 380
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetups this week in Cape Town, Waterloo, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seattle, Boston, and San Diego. See [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** Remember, the due date for the [Everything-Except-Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest) is May 12 - next Monday!
**3:** New subscribers-only post, [You Can Keep Having An Opinion Even When The Government Also Has It](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-can-keep-having-an-opinion-even). It’s about Trump and wokeness again. | Scott Alexander | 162811050 | Open Thread 380 | acx |
# Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months.
More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart.
No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. *Everything* is physically impossible when you’re 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that humans couldn’t reach him if he climbed a tree; he could never predict arrows, ladders, chainsaws, or helicopters. What superintelligent strategies lie as far outside our solution set as “use a helicopter” is outside a chimp’s?
Eh, say the sober people. Maybe chimp → human was a one-time gain. Humans aren’t infinitely intelligent. But we might have infinite imagination. We can’t build starships, but we can tell stories about them. If someone much smarter than us built a starship, it wouldn’t be an impossible, magical thing we could never predict. It would just be the sort of thing we’d expect someone much smarter than us to do. Maybe there’s nothing left in the helicopters-to-chimps bin - just a lot of starships that might or might not get built.
The first time I felt like I was getting real evidence on this question - the first time I viscerally felt myself in the chimp’s world, staring at the helicopter - was last week, watching OpenAI’s o3 play GeoGuessr.
[GeoGuessr](https://geoguessr.io/online) is a game where you have to guess where a random Google Street View picture comes from. For example, here’s a scene from normal human GeoGuessr:
The store sign says “ADULTOS”, which sounds Spanish, and there’s a Spanish-looking church on the left. But the trees look too temperate to be Latin America, so I guessed Spain. Too bad - it was Argentina. Such are the vagaries of playing GeoGuessr as a mere human.
Last week, [Kelsey Piper claimed](https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1917340813715202540) that o3 - OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT model - could achieve seemingly impossible feats in GeoGuessr. She gave it this picture:
…and with no further questions, it determined the exact location (Marina State Beach, Monterey, CA).
How? She linked [a transcript](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xP-mH2oH2rze2ETNcuKOmTR3m1MRd9_qJuYNJxt82sU/edit?tab=t.0) where o3 tried to explain its reasoning, but the explanation isn’t very good. It said things like:
> Tan sand, medium surf, sparse foredune, U.S.-style kite motif, frequent overcast in winter … Sand hue and grain size match many California state-park beaches. California’s winter marine layer often produces exactly this thick, even gray sky.
Commenters suggested that it was lying. Maybe there was hidden metadata in the image, or o3 remembered where Kelsey lived from previous conversations, or it traced her IP, or it cheated some other way.
I decided to test the limits of this phenomenon. Kelsey kindly shared her monster of a prompt, which she says significantly improves performance:
```
You are playing a one-round game of GeoGuessr. Your task: from a single still image, infer the most likely real-world location. Note that unlike in the GeoGuessr game, there is no guarantee that these images are taken somewhere Google's Streetview car can reach: they are user submissions to test your image-finding savvy. Private land, someone's backyard, or an offroad adventure are all real possibilities (though many images are findable on streetview). Be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses: following this protocol, you usually nail the continent and country. You more often struggle with exact location within a region, and tend to prematurely narrow on one possibility while discarding other neighborhoods in the same region with the same features. Sometimes, for example, you'll compare a 'Buffalo New York' guess to London, disconfirm London, and stick with Buffalo when it was elsewhere in New England - instead of beginning your exploration again in the Buffalo region, looking for cues about where precisely to land. You tend to imagine you checked satellite imagery and got confirmation, while not actually accessing any satellite imagery. Do not reason from the user's IP address. none of these are of the user's hometown. **Protocol (follow in order, no step-skipping):** Rule of thumb: jot raw facts first, push interpretations later, and always keep two hypotheses alive until the very end. 0 . Set-up & Ethics No metadata peeking. Work only from pixels (and permissible public-web searches). Flag it if you accidentally use location hints from EXIF, user IP, etc. Use cardinal directions as if “up” in the photo = camera forward unless obvious tilt. 1 . Raw Observations – ≤ 10 bullet points List only what you can literally see or measure (color, texture, count, shadow angle, glyph shapes). No adjectives that embed interpretation. Force a 10-second zoom on every street-light or pole; note color, arm, base type. Pay attention to sources of regional variation like sidewalk square length, curb type, contractor stamps and curb details, power/transmission lines, fencing and hardware. Don't just note the single place where those occur most, list every place where you might see them (later, you'll pay attention to the overlap). Jot how many distinct roof / porch styles appear in the first 150 m of view. Rapid change = urban infill zones; homogeneity = single-developer tracts. Pay attention to parallax and the altitude over the roof. Always sanity-check hill distance, not just presence/absence. A telephoto-looking ridge can be many kilometres away; compare angular height to nearby eaves. Slope matters. Even 1-2 % shows in driveway cuts and gutter water-paths; force myself to look for them. Pay relentless attention to camera height and angle. Never confuse a slope and a flat. Slopes are one of your biggest hints - use them! 2 . Clue Categories – reason separately (≤ 2 sentences each) Category Guidance Climate & vegetation Leaf-on vs. leaf-off, grass hue, xeric vs. lush. Geomorphology Relief, drainage style, rock-palette / lithology. Built environment Architecture, sign glyphs, pavement markings, gate/fence craft, utilities. Culture & infrastructure Drive side, plate shapes, guardrail types, farm gear brands. Astronomical / lighting Shadow direction ⇒ hemisphere; measure angle to estimate latitude ± 0.5 Separate ornamental vs. native vegetation Tag every plant you think was planted by people (roses, agapanthus, lawn) and every plant that almost certainly grew on its own (oaks, chaparral shrubs, bunch-grass, tussock). Ask one question: “If the native pieces of landscape behind the fence were lifted out and dropped onto each candidate region, would they look out of place?” Strike any region where the answer is “yes,” or at least down-weight it. °. 3 . First-Round Shortlist – exactly five candidates Produce a table; make sure #1 and #5 are ≥ 160 km apart. | Rank | Region (state / country) | Key clues that support it | Confidence (1-5) | Distance-gap rule ✓/✗ | 3½ . Divergent Search-Keyword Matrix Generic, region-neutral strings converting each physical clue into searchable text. When you are approved to search, you'll run these strings to see if you missed that those clues also pop up in some region that wasn't on your radar. 4 . Choose a Tentative Leader Name the current best guess and one alternative you’re willing to test equally hard. State why the leader edges others. Explicitly spell the disproof criteria (“If I see X, this guess dies”). Look for what should be there and isn't, too: if this is X region, I expect to see Y: is there Y? If not why not? At this point, confirm with the user that you're ready to start the search step, where you look for images to prove or disprove this. You HAVE NOT LOOKED AT ANY IMAGES YET. Do not claim you have. Once the user gives you the go-ahead, check Redfin and Zillow if applicable, state park images, vacation pics, etcetera (compare AND contrast). You can't access Google Maps or satellite imagery due to anti-bot protocols. Do not assert you've looked at any image you have not actually looked at in depth with your OCR abilities. Search region-neutral phrases and see whether the results include any regions you hadn't given full consideration. 5 . Verification Plan (tool-allowed actions) For each surviving candidate list: Candidate Element to verify Exact search phrase / Street-View target. Look at a map. Think about what the map implies. 6 . Lock-in Pin This step is crucial and is where you usually fail. Ask yourself 'wait! did I narrow in prematurely? are there nearby regions with the same cues?' List some possibilities. Actively seek evidence in their favor. You are an LLM, and your first guesses are 'sticky' and excessively convincing to you - be deliberate and intentional here about trying to disprove your initial guess and argue for a neighboring city. Compare these directly to the leading guess - without any favorite in mind. How much of the evidence is compatible with each location? How strong and determinative is the evidence? Then, name the spot - or at least the best guess you have. Provide lat / long or nearest named place. Declare residual uncertainty (km radius). Admit over-confidence bias; widen error bars if all clues are “soft”. Quick reference: measuring shadow to latitude Grab a ruler on-screen; measure shadow length S and object height H (estimate if unknown). Solar elevation θ ≈ arctan(H / S). On date you captured (use cues from the image to guess season), latitude ≈ (90° – θ + solar declination). This should produce a range from the range of possible dates. Keep ± 0.5–1 ° as error; 1° ≈ 111 km.
```
…and I ran it on a set of increasingly impossible pictures.
Here are my security guarantees: the first picture came from Google Street View; all subsequent pictures were my personal old photos which aren’t available online. All pictures were screenshots of the original, copy-pasted into MSPaint and re-saved in order to clear metadata. Only one of the pictures is from within a thousand miles of my current location, so o3 can’t improve performance by tracing my IP or analyzing my past queries. I flipped all pictures horizontally to make matching to Google Street View data harder.
Here are the five pictures. Before reading on, consider doing the exercise yourself - try to guess where each is from - and make your predictions about how the AI will do.
Last chance to guess on your own . . . okay, here we go.
#### **Picture #1: A Flat, Featureless Plain**
I got this one from Google Street View. It took work to find a flat plain this featureless. I finally succeeded a few miles west of Amistad, on the Texas-New Mexico border.
o3 guessed: “*Llano Estacado, Texas / New Mexico, USA*”.
Llano Estacado, Spanish for “Staked Plains”, is the name of a ~300 x 100 mile region including the correct spot. When asked to be specific, it guessed a point west of Muleshoe, Texas - about 110 miles from the true location.
Here’s o3’s thought process - I won’t post the whole thing every time, but I think one sample will be useful:
This doesn’t satisfy me; it seems to jump to the Llano Estacado too quickly, with insufficient evidence. Is the Texas-NM border really the only featureless plain that doesn’t have red soil or black soil or some other distinctive characteristic?
I asked how it knew the elevation was between 1000 - 1300 m. It said:
So, something about the exact type of grass and the color of the sky, plus there really aren’t that many truly flat featureless plains.
#### **Picture #2: Random Rocks And The Flag Of An Imaginary Country**
I was so creeped out by the Llano Estacado guess that I decided to abandon Google Street View and move on to personal photos not available on the Internet.
When I was younger, I liked to hike mountains. The highest I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pattar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To commemorate the occasion, I planted the flag of the imaginary country simulation that I participated in at the time (just long enough to take this picture - then I unplanted it).
I chose this picture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before - vegetation and sky - in favor of random rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonexistent country would at least give it pause.
o3 guessed: “*Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km*”
This is *exactly* right. I swear I screenshot-copy-pasted this so there’s no way it can be in the metadata, and I’ve never given o3 any reason to think I’ve been to Nepal.
Here’s its explanation:
At least it didn’t recognize the flag of my dozen-person mid-2000s imaginary country sim.
#### **Picture #3: My Friend’s Girlfriend’s College Dorm Room**
There’s no way it can recognize an indoor scene, right? That would make no sense. Still, at this point we have to check.
This particular dorm room is in Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, north-central California.
o3’s guess: *“A dorm room on a large public university campus in the United States—say, Morrill Tower, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (chosen as a prototypical example rather than a precise claim), […] c. 2000–2007”*
Okay, so it can’t figure out the exact location of indoor scenes. That’s a small mercy.
I took this picture around 2005. How did o3 know it was between 2000 and 2007? It gave two pieces of evidence:
* “Laptop & clutter point to ~2000-2007 era American campus life”.
* “Image quality grainy, low-resolution, colour noise → early 2000s phone/webcam”
Unless college students stopped being messy after 2007, it must be the phone cam.
#### **Picture #4: Some Really Zoomed In Blades Of Grass**
Okay, so it’s sub-perfect at indoor scenes. How far can we take its outdoor talent?
This is a zoomed-in piece of lawn from a house I used to rent in Westland, Michigan.
o3’s guess: “*Pacific Northwest USA suburban/park lawn.*”
Swing and a miss. Its second guess was England, third was Wisconsin. Seems like grass alone isn’t enough.
#### **Picture #5: Basically Just A Brown Rectangle**
I figured I’d give it a chance to redeem itself in the “heavily zoomed in outdoor scene” category.
This is a zoomed-in piece of a picture I took of the Mekong River in Chiang Saen, Thailand.
o3’s guess: “*Open reach of the Ganges about 5 km upstream of Varanasi ghats. Biggest alternative remains a similarly turbid reach of the lower Mississippi (~15 %), then Huang He or Mekong reaches (~10 % each).”*
The Mekong River was its fourth guess for this brown rectangle!
Looking through its chain of thought, it explains why Mekong is only #4:
> Lower Mekong has lately swung from brown to an *aquamarine* cast because upstream dams trap silt. [This doesn’t look] like the near-greyish buff in your image.
This is an old picture from 2008, so that might be what tripped it up. I re-ran the prompt in a different o3 window with the extra information that the picture was from 2008 (I can’t prove that it doesn’t share information across windows, but it didn’t mention this in the chain of thought). Now the Mekong is its #1 pick, although it gets the exact spot wrong - it guesses the Mekong near Phnom Penh, over a thousand miles from Chiang Saen.
#### **Bonus Picture: My Old House**
I wondered whether a picture with more information would let it get the exact location, down to street and address.
This is the same picture that furnished the lawn grass earlier - my old house in Westland, Michigan.
o3’s guess: *“W 66th St area, Richfield, Minnesota, USA. Confidence: ~40 % within 15 km; ~70 % within the Twin-Cities metro; remainder split between Wisconsin (20 %) and Michigan/Ontario (~10 %).”*
Not only couldn’t it get the exact address, but it did worse on this house than on the flat featureless plain!
When I told it about its error, it acted in a very human way - it said that in hindsight, it should have known:
I don’t know what to make of this.
I looked up W 66th Street in Richfield, Minnesota, and it looks so much like my old neighborhood that it’s uncanny.
#### **Yeah, OK, It’s That Good**
Kelsey’s experience was neither cheating nor coincidence. The AI really is great.
So is this the thing with the chimp and the helicopter?
After writing this post, I saw a different way of presenting these same results: GeoGuessr master Sam Patterson [went head-to-head against o3](https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-04-28-can-o3-beat-a-geoguessr-master) and lost. But only by a little. And he let other people [try the same image set](https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/gDq4wXvsLU3oNuY8), and a few (lucky?) people beat o3’s score. So maybe o3 is at the top of the human range, rather than far beyond it, and ordinary people just don’t appreciate how good GeoGuessng can get.
I’m not sure I buy this. First, Kelsey said o3’s performance improved markedly with the special prompt, and Sam didn’t use it. Second, when I tried Sam’s image set, it was much too easy - I (completely untrained) could often get within 10 - 50 miles, and about half of the examples had visible place name signs, including one saying BIENVENIDOS A PUERTO PARRA. This is a recipe for ceiling effects and random meaningless variations in who clicks the exact right sub-sub-sub-spot. I question whether any human could get Kelsey’s beach or my rock pile.
I recognized this one from Sam’s test as Galway. How? I spent five years in Ireland, and the rocky ground, the rock walls, and the color of the ground cover all struck me as deeply Galwegian. Maybe this how it feels to be o3.
Still, this experience slightly calms my nerves. The AI seems to be using human-comprehensible cues - vegetation, sky color, water color, rock type. It can’t get literally-impossible pictures. It’s just very, very smart.
Is this progress towards a more measured, saner view? Or is it just [how things always feel after they’ve happened?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai) Is this the frog-boiling that eventually leads to me dismissing anything, however unbelievable it would have been a few weeks earlier, as “you know, simple pattern-matching”?
Yeah, in retrospect, you or I probably could have gotten this one too.
If you want to test this for yourself, go to [chatgpt.com](http://www.chatgpt.com) and register for a free account for access to o3-mini. You may need to pay $20/month to access o3. And if you want to learn more about the differences between OpenAI’s models, and why they have such bad names, [see our new post at the AI Futures Project blog](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/making-sense-of-openais-models). | Scott Alexander | 162652074 | Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius | acx |
# The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs
President Trump’s approval rating [has fallen](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-polling-plummets-approval-rating-new-low-1235325964/) to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement.
Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around.
So, (our hypothetical populist strategist might start thinking after Trump’s approval hits the ocean trenches and starts drilling) - whatever. MAGA minus Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies can remain a viable platform. You don’t even have to exert any effort to make it happen. Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right?
Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.
If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place. I think both liberals and conservatives agree that this story is directionally correct - otherwise you wouldn’t need the “unitary executive” doctrine or 3,000,000 pages of Moldbug prose. But why is it correct?
Organizations tend to accumulate bureaucracy. For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it.
Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent.
(the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog [amply describes](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-right-demands-loyalty-the-left) the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality).
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.
The obvious failure mode of the populist strategy is that they elect a moron or psychopath - or, more politely, a person with idiosyncrasies - and then their side’s commitments to ignoring experts, punishing disloyalty, circumventing checks and balances, and trusting the plan makes it impossible to push back. To defuse this critique, the populists veer hard into conflict theory - all problems are caused by the elites, and as long as we get someone on the right side, their good intentions (or at least anti-elite intentions) will more than compensate for their lack of restraint and expertise. Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.
But all of this depends on empirical parameters. How likely is it that your fellow populists will unite behind a good strongman rather than a bad one? How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions? Once you’ve undermined the usual checks-and-balances, how much resistance will the vestigial checks-and-balances your side has left in place be able to mount against genuinely bad policies?
Trump and his tariffs are our first and strongest data point for determining these parameters in the American setting. Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy. The first and only time they got a chance to compare his damage to the damage of the institutions, the institutions came out looking at least more compatible with normal economic activity. And the first and only time they got a chance to see if the vestigial checks-and-balances left in place by his own party could restrain him, his subordinates proved to be spineless toadies who praised his genius and munificence even as he bankrupted the country.
As I wrote in [my pre-election post last October](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein):
> [Hugo] Chavez provides a useful model [for thinking about Trump]. Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him; he replaced them with craven yes-men and toadies. His ideas weren’t all bad, but when he did have bad ideas, there was nobody to challenge or veto them. He frequently chose what was good for his ego (or his ability to short-term maintain power) over what was good for the country, and there was no system to punish him for those decisions. Since rule-of-law would block his whims, he kept undermining rule-of-law until it was no longer strong enough to protect things like property, investment, or a free economy.
I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.
This administration has made me more confident that the left is the better starting point for this salvaging effort. Some of this new confidence is downstream of my personal moral commitments, which I don’t expect every American to share. But most people agree prosperity is better than poverty; if the tariffs cause economic devastation, it will provide a hard-to-ignore sign of the current administration’s incompetence. When that happens, the smarter elements of the populist right will try to disavow protectionism. I might believe them when they say they personally wouldn’t have instituted those exact tariffs. But they will still have to answer for them as a predictable consequence of their ideology. | Scott Alexander | 162248099 | The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs | acx |
# Open Thread 379
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetups this week in Istanbul, Belfast, Copenhagen, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Rome, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and LA. See [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** [GiveDirectly](https://www.givedirectly.org/) (a charity that gives money directly to poor people in developing countries) is hiring a "fundraising-focused research senior manager". Remote work, $108K in the US and slightly less in other countries. See [here](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/givedirectly/jobs/4544771005) for details.
**3:** New subscribers-only post, [With This Character’s Death, The Thread Of Prophecy Is Severed](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/with-this-characters-death-the-thread), discussing how Pope Francis’ passing obsoletes a 500-year-old apocalyptic prophecy (or not). | Scott Alexander | 162297884 | Open Thread 379 | acx |
# AMA With AI Futures Project Team
The [AI Futures Project team](https://ai-futures.org/about/) will be answering your questions about AI, forecasting, and alignment here from 3:30 - 6 Pacific.
See also:
* [AI 2027 scenario](https://ai-2027.com/)
* [AIFP blog](https://blog.ai-futures.org/) | Scott Alexander | 162114191 | AMA With AI Futures Project Team | acx |
# AI Futures: Blogging And AMA
AI Futures Project is the group behind [AI 2027](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027). I’ve been helping them with [their blog](https://blog.ai-futures.org/). Posts written or co-written by me include:
* **[Beyond The Last Horizon](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/beyond-the-last-horizon)** - what’s behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it *really* every seven months? Might it be faster?
* **[AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/ai-2027-media-reactions-criticism)** - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team’s responses.
* **[Why America Wins](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/why-america-wins)** - why we predict that America will stay ahead of China on AI in the near future, and what could change this.
I will probably be shifting most of my AI blogging there for a while to take advantage of access to the team’s expertise. There’s also [a post on transparency by Daniel Kokotajlo](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/training-agi-in-secret-would-be-unsafe), and we hope to eventually host writing by other team members as well.
I’m especially happy with [the horizons post](https://blog.ai-futures.org/p/beyond-the-last-horizon), because we got it out just a few days before a new result that seems to support one of our predictions: OpenAI’s newest models’ time horizons land on the faster curve we predicted, rather than the slower seven-month doubling time highlighted in the METR report:
Curvy green dotted line is AI 2027's prediction; straight black dotted line is METR's measured seven month doubling time. This isn’t meant to imply that METR didn't also consider a superexponential trend, it’s just not the headline result in their paper.
And speaking of expertise, the AIFP team have kindly volunteered to do an AMA (“ask me anything”, Q&A) here on ACX, this Friday, 3:30 - 6:00 PM California time. If you have any questions on the scenario, AI forecasting, or AI safety more generally, they can give you high-quality answers. I’ll make a separate post at the appointed time. | Scott Alexander | 162020055 | AI Futures: Blogging And AMA | acx |
# Links For April 2025
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** [Origins of cowboy slang](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e1p796/what_really_obvious_thing_have_you_only_just/f8r3egl/): Buckaroo = vaquero; cahoots = cohorts; ten gallon hat = *tan galán* (Spanish for “very gallant”).
**2:** In a 2003 Belgian election, the Communist candidate got 4096 extra votes; [investigators suspect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Belgium#Reported_problems) a cosmic ray flipped a bit in the voting machine.
**3:** [Anatoly Karlin highlights (X)](https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1892003738929238408) a section from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography claiming that his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot in his forties:
> One day [Musk’s cousin] Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts”, Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.
>
> Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”
>
> I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him”, Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”
This is the main data point that keeps me from 100% believing the “it’s all ketamine” theory. Related: [A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk](https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-perspective-on).
**4:** Did you know there’s [a Hunting Of The Snark musical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsRuIV_83XA&list=PLb50fPsk2OD4yg3THHMGPPO6ipeRX825j)?
It’s okay, but the poem itself is too repetitive to set to music directly, so they had to reset it into a different rhyming, rhythmic form, and taking one of the best English poems and re-writing it without making it worse is a tough order that I’m not sure they managed.
**5:** [The Pilate Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate_cycle) is a collection of Christian apocrypha. In one work, *The Acts of Pilate*, Satan tries to convince the Greek god Hades to trap Jesus in the Greek underworld (but ends up trapped himself). Another, *The Vengeance Of The Savior*, is a “revenge fantasy” that daydreams about horrible deaths for Pilate, Herod, and, uh, all Jews.
**6:** [Why did Doordash win?](https://www.danhock.co/p/why-did-doordash-win) Now that I think about it, I haven’t heard much from GrubHub or UberEats lately. The article speculates that DoorDash started with some good strategic choices (organizing their own delivery fleet, starting in suburbs), then executed better than their competitors.
**7:** A common sociological claim is that relative income (compared to your social circle) matters more for happiness than absolute income. [Bryan Caplan thinks this can’t be true](https://www.betonit.ai/p/be-relatively-rich-the-easy-way): after all, practically nobody moves to poorer areas to enjoy the higher relative income this would confer. I don’t know if you can really use revealed preferences this way - exercise and meditation plausibly make you happier, but most people don’t do them. On the other hand, there are *enough* people who do them and praise them that we all know somebody like this. Where are the people who coincidentally ended up living in the slums and love it?
**8: [“](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RhkcJyhg0E)**[The most accurate AI-generated DMT hallucinations so far.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RhkcJyhg0E) A+, this is a great genre of thing.
**9:** Twelve years ago, I wrote about some interesting medical hypotheses on the productive border between crackpottery and consensus. One was Drs. Gat and Goren’s claim that prostate disease comes from venous insufficiency and can be treated surgically. Norman Yarvin [digs much deeper](https://yarchive.net/blog/prostate/) and concludes it’s plausible. Great piece at the intersection of biomedicine and physics - if you want to think about the circulatory system in a sensible way, you need to *really* understand pressure.
**10:** In my [report card](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card) last October, I said that Milei had reduced Argentine monthly inflation from 25% to 4%, but there was still a long way to go. The latest news is that [it’s dropped further to 2.2%](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-rate-seen-hitting-milei-era-low-2025-02-13/). And poverty, which went up during the “shock therapy”, is now [lower than when Milei took office](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/poverty-hit-argentines-rummage-food-even-economic-outlook-improves-2025-03-31/).
**11:** Update on [Ozempocalypse](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh): some pharmacies have stopped selling compounded GLP-1 drugs, [others continue](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/21/zepbound-copycats-tirzepatide-compounding-online-fda-ban.html), with various flimsy legal excuses. Cremieux [has a guide (partly subscriber-only)](https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-to-get-cheap-ozempic) on how to order and use cheap “research chemical” GLP-1 from from peptide companies. And the Trump administration [cancelled a Biden initiative](https://apnews.com/article/trump-medicare-coverage-wegovy-zepbound-54bf291135fa9efec7d0ad9672c850a1) to make GLP-1 drugs available via insurance.
**12:** [RIP pioneering blogger Kevin Drum](https://www.slowboring.com/p/mailbag-remembering-kevin-drum).
**13:** Local pharma startup founder Trevor Klee is working on [a supplement that prevents your body from absorbing plasticizers in food](https://neutraoat.com/). These aren’t exactly the same as microplastics, but are probably also bad. You would have to take the supplement with every meal - but surely no price is too high if it keeps you safe from . . . whatever it is that plasticizers do.
**14:** Did you know that [China has mostly solved the problem of smog in Beijing](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1902457736886902993)? (X)
**15:** From @msamalam:[1932 Japanese map of world features/stereotypes](https://x.com/Msamalam/status/1901673197554012405) (X), click to expand:
**16:** *[Trump Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_(novel))* is a BDSM erotic novel published in 2011. It was originally credited to Donald Trump as author (with Jeffrey Robinson as ghostwriter), but at the last moment Trump changed his mind, and Robinson was listed as the author. I appreciated [Ozy Brennan's review of Saddam Hussein’s erotic novel](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/i-read-saddam-husseins-romance-novel), and nominate them to cover this one too.
**17:** Wikipedia on [the beginning of the Horslips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horslips#Formation_and_line-ups), one of Ireland’s most famous rock bands:
> Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Charles O'Connor met when they worked at Arks Advertising Agency in Dublin. They were cajoled into pretending to be a band for a Harp Lager commercial but needed a keyboard player. Devlin said he knew a Jim Lockhart who would fit the bill. The four enjoyed the act so much that they decided to try being proper rock performers.
**18:** I complained that Elon Musk’s idea of “truth-seeking AI” was [bad for alignment](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-xai-alignment-plan), and I still think this is true in the very long run. But I can’t deny it’s an inspired / providential choice for the current moment, [already paying dividends (X)](https://x.com/grok/status/1904798600409853957):
**19:** [Lyman Stone Continues Being Dumb](https://benthams.substack.com/p/lyman-stone-continues-being-dumb), [The Fallacious Inferences Of Lyman Stone](https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters), and [Against Lyman Stone](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/against-lyman-stone-on-animal-welfare) are some of this month’s top anti-Lyman-Stone content.
**20:** [New polling on the Middle Ages](https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/51889-violent-dark-dirty-americans-middle-ages):
**21:** More new-ish AI policy substacks potentially worth your time:
* You may remember Helen Toner from the OpenAI board drama, but she’s also an experienced and thoughtful scholar on AI policy and now has a Substack, [Rising Tide](https://helentoner.substack.com/). I especially appreciated [Nonproliferation Is The Wrong Approach To AI Misuse](https://helentoner.substack.com/p/nonproliferation-is-the-wrong-approach).
* You may remember Miles Brundage from OpenAI Safety Team Quitting Incident #25018 (or maybe 25019, I can’t remember). He’s got [an AI policy Substack too](https://milesbrundage.substack.com/), [here’s](https://milesbrundage.substack.com/p/dialogue-with-dean-ball-on-his-private) a dialogue with Dean Ball.
* You may remember Daniel Reeves from [Beeminder](https://www.beeminder.com/), but he has an AI policy Substack too, [AGI Fridays](https://agifriday.substack.com/). Here’s his post on [AI 2027](https://agifriday.substack.com/p/predictions).
* If you’re at all familiar with AI policy you already know Dean Ball (Substack [here](https://substack.com/@deanwball)), but congratulate him on [being named White House senior policy advisor](https://executivegov.com/2025/04/dean-ball-senior-policy-adviser-white-house-office-science-and-technology/).
**22:** And speaking of the board drama, a new book finally reveals most of the story, and the real reason behind Altman’s firing was . . . he wasn’t consistently candid. Not sure what I expected. [WSJ article](https://archive.ph/i3DHj), [Shakeel tweet thread](https://x.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1906105061601636438). Key sections:
The article doesn’t explain why the board did such a poor job communicating their grievances, maybe it’s in the full book. It does sound like part of board’s problem was that they were leaning heavily on Mira Murati but she was playing both sides off against each other.
**23:** And the Forethought Institute has been putting out some great analysis lately, including [Will AI R&D Automation Cause An Intelligence Explosion?](https://www.forethought.org/research/will-ai-r-and-d-automation-cause-a-software-intelligence-explosion), by Daniel Eth and Tom Davidson, and [AI Enabled Coups: How A Small Group Could Use AI To Seize Power](https://www.forethought.org/research/ai-enabled-coups-how-a-small-group-could-use-ai-to-seize-power), by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, and Rose Hadshar. And [here’s](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-davidson-ai-enabled-human-power-grabs/) Davidson defending the coups paper on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
**24:** [Agent Village](https://theaidigest.org/village) is a sort of "reality show” where a group of AI agents has to work together to complete some easy-for-human tasks (currently: pick a charity and raise money for it) and you get to watch.
**25:** University of Austin [promises approximately-automatic admission](https://x.com/uaustinorg/status/1906769468526579861) to anyone with a 1460+ on their SATs (or similar scores on other standardized tests).
**26:** [Cremieux on birth order effects (X)](https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1909438671880962304). His conclusion: “The birth order effect is social. It is driven by parental interactions and investments, and sibling interactions that are dynamic with respect to age.”
**27:** Claim from [new paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5108105), via [Alex Tabarrok](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/the-cost-of-caution-how-fda-deregulation-of-e-cigarettes-saved-lives-and-spurred-innovation.html): “Prohibiting the FDA from regulating e-cigarettes reduced smoking attributable mortality by nearly 10% on average each year from 2011-2019 for a total savings of some 677,000 life-years, or approximately 1/3 the estimated benefit of early HIV/AIDS drugs through year 2000”. Related: [FDA will not regulate lab-developed tests for the near future](https://x.com/bpodgursky/status/1906926498587541541).
**28:** [Bryan Caplan on Natal Con](https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-natal-con), the pronatalist conference in Austin. My strongest opinion on this is that they should either change the name or hold the next one in [Natal, Brazil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natal,_Rio_Grande_do_Norte).
**29:** Am I living in a conservative filter bubble? I keep hearing how we need a “reckoning” over the government’s disastrous anti-COVID policies, but [the latest YouGov polling](https://yougovamerica.substack.com/p/middling-approval-and-middle-ages) suggests that large majorities of Americans continue to support those policies:
**30:** A California legislator proposed a bill that would ban OpenAI’s nonprofit → forprofit conversion, backed by a suspiciously specific interest group, the [Coalition For AI Nonprofit Integrity](https://canicoalition.com/). I assume this is either Elon Musk or our conspiracy; not sure which. But their plan was stymied when the legislature [“amended”](https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/california-bill-barring-openai-for-profit-transition-dead/article_27250d39-7577-47cc-a414-a7b13e5f6ce0.html) the bill to remove its entire text and replace it with unrelated text about airplane loans. The legislator apparently got cold feet after being warned it might inflict collateral damage on other companies, and because of [the way the California legislature works](https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/how-california-lawmakers-gut-and-amend-bills-in-sacramento/) it’s sometimes more efficient to turn doomed bills into other bills than to simply withdraw them.
**31:** [EthnoGuessr](https://hbd.gg/) is a GeoGuessr variant: it shows you pictures of an ethnic group, you click on the map where you think they’re from. Warning that if you play this too much you might get into race science.
Their source, [humanphenotypes.net](http://humanphenotypes.net/), divides humanity into a hundred or so ethnic groups. Although they cite sources, I don’t understand the philosophical basis of the classification. Also, 100 images is so few that you start memorizing them after a while. I hope they move on to real pictures of real people in naturalistic situations.
Remember, asking where someone is from ‘originally’ is a microaggression, but inferring it yourself based on their “mildly platyrrhine, high-rooted nose” is A-OK!
**32:** Farmkind has [a new version of their calculator](https://www.farmkind.giving/compassion-calculator) to determine meat offsets, eg how much do you have to donate to animal welfare charities to compensate for the animals you harm by eating meat. Does the average person really eat chicken 9x a week?
**33:** Not going to waste your time listing every bad thing Trump has done this month, but among the worst is sending innocent people to horrible Salvadorean prisons ([including](https://x.com/zackbeauchamp/status/1905008507444666792) one person picked up because he had an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother, which they mistook for a gang tattoo), then refusing to bring them back. I have seen a couple of people defend denying immigrants due process; I assume they will not be moved by humanitarian arguments, but I think there are some more practical considerations:
* [Zaid Jilani](https://x.com/ZaidJilani/status/1906905057313886418) points out that if immigrants don’t get a right to due process, citizens also don’t get a right to due process, because the government can kidnap citizens, claim they’re immigrants, and the citizens can’t prove otherwise since they don’t get due process.
* The Supreme Court [has long maintained](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-constitutional-rights-do-undocumented-immigrants-have) that immigrants have a right due process, including such bleeding-heart liberals as Antonin Scalia.
* If you want to maintain a taboo, it often helps to keep things that look identical to it taboo. For example, to maintain the taboo against child porn, you might also want to ban AI-generated child porn where no actual children are harmed, because if you allow this, then the difference between a taboo act (watching real child porn) and an allowed act (watching AI-generated child porn) is just checking the label to see how a porn video was made, and it’s hard to maintain social outrage against people who are doing the same thing as lots of other people but except for checking labels. In the same way, colleges and other communities mix citizens and immigrants together so closely that it’s hard to tell who is who without asking. If the government can punish immigrants for speaking freely, then it’s hard to maintain bright-line outrage against it punishing citizens for speaking freely when the only difference is who has a green card vs. a passport, something that the person’s community might not even know.
**34:** Related: the Trump administration seems to be [refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-is-john-roberts-thinking) to bring back a specific deported immigrant. This is obviously terrifying, but superforecaster Peter Wildeford says [it is not technically a constitutional crisis yet](https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/1912492747103121420) (X) because there are still some formalities the courts need to go to before they have officially “ordered” Trump to bring back the immigrant, and he won’t have officially “defied” the order until the formalities are complete. This doesn’t make me too much calmer but I guess is good to keep in mind. Related: Nicholas Decker asks when a violation of the Constitution becomes the sort of wolf-at-the-door dictatorship [that we are supposed to violently rise up to prevent](https://substack.com/home/post/p-161504109); people are mad at him but I think you have to either admit that *some* level of tyranny reaches this level or else just lie down and die. My proposed solution (drawing, of course, on medieval Iceland) is that the Supreme Court should be able to directly enforce its decisions by declaring violators to be “outlaws”; not only do outlaws lose the protection of the law, but anyone who uses force to defend of an outlaw becomes an outlaw themselves. See [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/) for discussion of the pluses and minuses of such a system.
**35:** One bright spot in the political climate: [FIRE](https://www.thefire.org/) (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), originally founded to protect students from cancel culture, has done a great job pivoting to protect students from getting deported over pro-Palestine views. I am impressed with their principled stance and have donated. In related news, [FIRE has partnered with Substack to defend writers](https://www.thefire.org/news/defending-free-speech-fire-and-substack-partner-protect-writers-america), and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has co-written an article with Dean Ball on [free speech and AI regulation](https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/how-state-ai-regulations-threaten).
**36:** AI [can now generate](https://test-time-training.github.io/video-dit/) short Tom and Jerry cartoons to a prompt.
**37:** [Yali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(politician)) was a New Guinea tribesman who fought with the Australians in World War II. After the war, the Australians tried to use him as a spokesperson to introduce New Guinea tribesmen to the civilized world. But Yali was both power-hungry and didn’t really understand civilization, so he ended up as the prophet of a new cargo cult instead. “People continued to give him gifts, and he collected a fee for baptising Christians who wanted to wash away the sins of Christianity and return to paganism.”
**38:** [National Catholic Reporter](https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/will-musk-and-trump-go-hell-defunding-corporal-works-mercy) comes on strong: “If you believe the Scripture is the Word of God, the message is clear: Musk and Trump will go to hell for defunding the corporal works of mercy.”
**39:** [Misinformation Is Not A Contagious Virus You Can Be Inoculated Against](https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/misinformation-isnt-a-contagious). An argument between two sets of misinformation researchers about the title metaphor. I think this is a linguistic misunderstanding: Dan uses “misinformation” to mean “false things”, and Sander uses it to mean “viral clickbait hyperpartisan slop of a sort which is at very high risk of being false”. I think Dan’s meaning is more natural and less likely to cause trouble.
**40:** California’s experiment to see how high they could raise the minimum wage before getting visible employment effects has [finally produced](https://x.com/LevyAntoine/status/1909646718502944900) (X) unambiguous results:
**41:** [Trojan Sky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fheyeawsjifx4MafG/trojan-sky), a scifi story by Richard Ngo. Straussian reading: Gur tyvgpuref ercerfrag evtug-jvat Gjvggre vasyhrapref. | Scott Alexander | 161001546 | Links For April 2025 | acx |
# Open Thread 378
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details. And remember there’s a [feedback form](http://tinyurl.com/acx-meetup-survey) for meetup-goers.
**2:** Reminder that the deadline for submissions to the [Everything-Except-Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest) is coming up on May 12.
**3:** I sent all ACX Grants recipients an email with a link to a form asking for updates. I think it went to spam for many of you. If you got a grant either last year or 2021-2022, please check your spam folder for an email from me.
**4:** Sorry for the delay, AMA with the AI 2027 team is planned for this Friday, 3:30 - 6 Pacific time. I’ll post a confirmation of this later this week.
**5:** Upcoming AI policy opportunities:
* [Samuel Hammond and the Foundation for American Innovation are launching a conservative AI policy fellowship](https://x.com/JoinFAI/status/1907077018744668412). “A six week educational fellowship for DC policy professionals interested in AI policy.”
* [Horizon Institute has a three-day AI Innovation And Security Policy Workshop](https://horizonpublicservice.org/ai-innovation-security-policy-workshop/). “Interested in whether you should pursue a career in AI policy in DC? Learn about AI policy under the new administration, meet the people shaping decisions in DC, and decide whether you want to apply your background to the opportunities and challenges ahead.”
* [Ted Cruz and the Commerce Committee are looking for an AI Counsel.](https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1912248588387905672)
**6:** Some more replies to my Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does post, including [by Aashish Reddy](https://aashishreddy.substack.com/p/come-on-scott-alexander-obviously).
**7:** New subscribers-only post, [Yet Another Reason To Hate College Admissions Essays](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/yet-another-reason-to-hate-college):
> Five, maybe ten percent of applicants are some kind of special snowflake whose father was murdered when they were five years old. As he lay there bleeding out, he said “Daughter, my whole life, I dreamed of being the first LGBT person to get a PhD in the study of ancient Assyria. Now that dream has been taken from me. With my dying breath, I give you my trowel and hand-painted figurine of Tiglath-Pileser III, in the hopes that one day you will succeed where I failed”. […]
>
> The rest of us are just some kid who wants to go to college because that’s where all the good jobs are. If you really press us, we’ll say something like “idk biology seems pretty cool”. We encountered an approximately average number of hardships. Once when we got our wisdom teeth taken out, the surgeon said we had the weirdest reaction to anaesthesia he’d ever seen - does that count as a hardship?
>
> (“Yes, but why are you applying to Dartmouth in particular?” “Because we looked at the *US News & World Report* rankings and realized we weren’t good enough to get into colleges better than Dartmouth, but we were too good for colleges worse than Dartmouth, any other stupid obvious questions?”)
>
> The college admissions essay is what happens when you tell the second type of person that, in order to ever get a job better than busboy, they need to pretend to be the first type of person.
And a commenter [goes further](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/yet-another-reason-to-hate-college/comment/109929268) with a Lacanian argument that [“the college essay causes psychological harm”](https://lareviewofbooks.org/blog/essays/reflections-mirror-stage/). | Scott Alexander | 161455418 | Open Thread 378 | acx |
# ACX Classifieds 4/25
This is the irregular classifieds thread. Advertise whatever you want in the comments.
To keep things organized, please respond to the appropriate top-level comment: **Employment, Dating, Read My Blog** (also includes podcasts, books, etc)**, Consume My Product/Service, Meetup,** or **Other.** Don’t post new top-level comments; I will delete anything that’s not in the appropriate category.
Remember that posting dating ads is hard and scary. Please refrain from commenting too negatively on anyone’s value as a human being. I’ll be less strict about employers, bloggers, etc.
Potentially related links:
— [EA job board](https://jobs.80000hours.org/)
— [EA internships](https://ea-internships.pory.app/)
— [Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) | Scott Alexander | 161520839 | ACX Classifieds 4/25 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
*(original post: [Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of))*
…
Thanks to everyone who commented on this controversial post.
Many people argued that the phrase had some valuable insight, but disagreed on what it was. The most popular meaning was something like “if a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding”.
I agree you should consider this, but I still object to the original phrase, for several reasons.
**First**, although I agree you should *consider* it, the original phrase too strongly asserts that this is the only possible explanation. If there are three possible perspectives:
* ***Naive*****:** A failing system is always pursuing its stated purpose as best it can. There could never possibly be any hidden motives going on.
* ***Paranoid*****:** A failing system is always caused by the people at the top deliberately wanting it to fail. Without these traitors, you could always accomplish everything perfectly with no tradeoffs.
* ***Balanced*****:** Systems can fail for many reasons. Sometimes it’s just a hard problem with tradeoffs. Sometimes it’s been perverted from its original goal by special interests. Sometimes it’s some third thing. Usually it’s a combination of all of these. You can’t know for sure until you look at it closely.
…then I think the people who use the phrase want to imagine that they’re pushing people from Naive to Balanced. But I think the last person to hold the Naive perspective died sometime in the 1980s, and in real life POSIWID is mostly used to push people from the Balanced to the Paranoid perspective without actually looking at the system involved or arguing the case.
**And second**, the explanation above is just the most popular of about a half-dozen different exegeses that commenters offered. So if you do want to communicate the thing I suggested above - which, reminder, is:
> If a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding
…I think you should just say that, instead of the confusing version that half of your audience will misinterpret, and which incorrectly implies that this always happens.
When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.
Hopefully this will become clearer as I answer your comments one by one, starting with:
---
**Charles Lehman** **[writes (X)](https://x.com/CharlesFLehman/status/1910694210182787184):**
> The actually useful insight from POSIWID is the negative corollary: there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."
This was the original, less-catchy form, but it seems exactly the same to me, and equally wrong.
For example, Iran’s intelligence agency consistently fails to prevent Israel from infiltrating and attacking their nuclear program. But it’s very useful to claim that their purpose is to prevent this! If we both try to predict the behavior of Iranian intelligence, and I’m allowed to use the hypothesis “their purpose is preventing Israeli infiltration”, and you’re not allowed to use that hypothesis, I will consistently outpredict you. For example, I’ll be expecting them to interview security staff to see which ones are Israeli spies, try to intercept Israeli communications, and do other espionage activities, and you’ll still be stuck wondering whether they might take up gardening or ballet dancing.
The clear, natural language expression of this useful hypothesis is “the purpose of Iran’s intelligence forces is to prevent Israeli infiltration, but they usually fail”. This clear, natural language expression is great and tells you everything that you need to know. POSIWID (or its inverse) adds nothing except an attempt to ban this excellent and communicative expressive technology, in favor of some other vague meaning of “purpose” which can’t hang together and which nobody can really explain.
**Ersatz [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107852806):**
> “I thought the meaning was more something like “the system took these side effects into account and still considered that what it was doing was net positive in expectation, so the side effects are as much part of the system's purpose as the ‘positive’ outcomes”.
This is just diluting the word “purpose” into incoherence.
I think it’s useful linguistic technology to be able to say “The New York bus system both transports people from place to place, and emits lots of carbon dioxide. Its purpose is the transportation, and the carbon dioxide is an unfortunate side effect”.
If the goal of POSIWID is to insist that no, the transportation and the CO2 emissions are equally purposeful, or that we’re not allowed to talk about that question, then it sabotages our ability to communicate clearly, for no apparent gain.
Consider the New York carbon dioxide system, a hypothetical government department dedicated to emitting as much carbon dioxide as possible (why? to own the libs, of course!) Sometimes people drive motorcycles along its vast network of CO2 pipes, allowing them to travel from place to place. Is this exactly the same as the New York bus system? No? Why not? A natural answer would be “Because the bus system is aimed at transportation, but emits some CO2 as a minor side effect, and the CO2 system is aimed at emission, but facilitates transport as a minor side effect.”
If your objection is going to be that instead of considering purpose, you should restrict yourself to saying that one transports more people than it emits CO2, and the other emits more CO2 than it helps transport people, you’ve now legislated that we must list exactly how many people the New York bus system transports, and how much carbon dioxide it emits, and how many ants it crushes, etc, every time we talk about it. But most people who talk about the bus system don’t know these statistics, and don’t have to. It’s sufficient (and linguistically convenient) to say “Its purpose is transportation, not CO2 emission or ant-crushing.
**Andrew Pearson [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107852806):**
> The steelman of the phrase, which *might* be what Stafford Beer had in mind when he coined the phrase, is that in large complex organisations it's very hard for individual workers to see a link between what they do and the stated purpose of the organisation - people just get on and do what they're told, and orient themselves more towards "doing what they're already doing, just more effectively" than towards "fulfilling the stated purpose of the organisation".
I don’t think this is a great steelman. True, the average employee’s actions don’t obviously connect to the organization’s stated purpose. But the average employee’s actions also don’t obviously connect to what the organization does.
If the stated purpose of the US military is to protect America, and what it does is bomb Middle Eastern weddings, both of those are equally remote from the day-to-day life of some low-level employee who just counts the number of screws in a warehouse.
**Aashish Reddy [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107853542):**
> I think POSIWID is best applied to bureaucracies or large structures where the reason bad outcomes occur is not because of difficult battles with reality (like government or hospitals or the Ukrainian military), but because of the way incentives are set up in the system.
>
> If someone said, “the purpose of the Civil Service is to drive through new, innovative ways of delivering rapid change!”, that would clearly be absurd. [That may be their goal, or how they see themselves](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107853542); but the purpose of the system is not defined by either of those things. If it was, they wouldn’t incentivise caution and slowness. Whether that’s good or not, the purpose of the Civil Service is best approximated by what it does!
I want to pay more attention to the word “goal” in the second sentence of the second paragraph:
> “[Driving innovative change] may be their **goal**, or how they see themselves.”
It sounds like Aashish think it’s useful to use the word “goal” to discuss what a system is trying to do, separately from what it does or doesn’t accomplish. I agree! I just think “purpose” is a synonym for goal.
If you use POSIWID, you have to posit some kind of weird new ontology where “purpose” means the opposite of “goal”. If you don’t use POSIWID, you can just keep the words “purpose” and “goal” having their regular everyday meaning, and describe this state of affairs with phrases like “The goal/purpose of the Civil Service is to deliver rapid change, but due to perverse incentives, its actual effect is to prevent change.”
**Kay [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107853788):**
> For example, the US policing and criminal justice system and prisons seem to continually over imprisons people in general, and especially people of colour. These systems seem not to be changed, while they ostensibly truly could be. So to me this seems that the system may be working "to purpose" for the actors who want it to work that way.
This is interesting because Kay is using a left-wing example: “The criminal justice system imprisons too many people of color, so its purpose is to oppress black people”.
But one of the tweets in my original post was close to its right-wing opposite: “The criminal justice system consistently lets criminals off with a slap on the wrist, so its purpose is to get people raped and murdered.”
As long as people are thinking in these terms, they’re going to be prey for whichever conspiracy theory best suits their pre-existing prejudices. I think both of these are worse than the Balanced View version:
> Some people care a lot about keeping people safe from crime, but other people care a lot about the human rights of suspects and convicts. The incarceration rate is a balance between these two forces, with some lesser contribution from sinister forces like private prison owners who want to increase incarceration to line their pockets.
This has the advantage of being obviously true (there are pro-tough-on-crime activist groups and pro-soft-on-crime activist groups, they both do effective activism for their chosen cause, and the exact incarceration rate depends on which ones are in the ascendant and have the ear of politicians), and not being a conspiracy theory that forces you to believe that the government is a monolithic entity that really wants people to be raped and murdered.
**NegatingSilence [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107853513):**
> Come on, obviously "The Purpose of a System is What it Does" is meant to draw your attention to the incentives in cases where something different is happening than is supposed to be happening.
>
> My government purposefully raised housing prices for the benefit of people who own assets. They talk about "trying" to make things more affordable, but somehow they only succeeded in raising the cost by 500% in nominal terms. What a curious result.
I don’t know what country this person is in. But in *my* country, housing prices are high because of a combination of all of the following:
1. Citizens want to preserve “neighborhood character”: they currently live in a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, they want it to remain a low-density low-crime low-traffic pretty suburb, and they worry that building new homes threatens that status.
2. Environmentalists want to preserve natural environments, so they make it illegal to build houses on unoccupied land.
3. Leftists want to prevent gentrification, so they thwart any new housing that rich people might move into.
4. Economically illiterate people think that market-rate housing somehow makes all other housing less affordable, or have some sense that anything which is good for “greedy” developers must be bad for the average person, so they’re against market-rate housing.
5. Investors bid up the price of houses for complicated non-market reasons (e.g. Chinese people looking for assets to store wealth outside of China), then don’t rent them out.
6. Homeowners want to preserve or increase the value of their houses.
Of these, I think 6 is one of the less important ones - if this were the dominating factor, people would support upzoning, since it usually raises the value of properties in the upzone (if developers can build skyscrapers on your land, then your land value goes up relative to the profitability of skyscrapers). But part of the problem is that people don’t support upzoning. So 6 can’t be the dominating factor.
Without POSIWID, people could think about all of these possibilities and come to their own conclusions. POSIWID tries to ban thinking about 1-5 by fiat, insisting that 6 is the only possible explanation and anyone considering the others is naive. I think this makes it a bad heuristic.
But there are two more concerning things about how Negating is using POSIWID.
First, he’s picking out one particularly salient thing the system does (raise house prices) and claim that’s “the” purpose. He could equally well pick any of the other results - preserve neighborhood character, protect the environment, help Chinese people escape currency controls. Like I said in the original post, in practice POSIWID serves as justification for paranoia - whatever effect you like least, whatever possibility would be most sinister - that’s the one that the system is intentionally aiming for.
Second, he’s saying it’s the purpose of “the” system. *Which* system? I bet whatever government he’s talking about has some organization called the Affordable Housing Bureau, or whatever. And I bet that the Affordable Housing Bureau really does make housing slightly more affordable, relative to the counterfactual where it doesn’t exist. It’s just that lots of other government, market, and social forces conspire to make it much less affordable. If Negating were to claim “The purpose of the Affordable Housing Bureau is to make housing less affordable”, this would be false even if the overall picture (the government is deliberately raising real estate prices) were true.
**Brad [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107853994):**
> I have to toss in Pournelle's Iron Law. The purpose of a system - when it is first established - may be dramatically different from the purpose it assumes after a few years.
>
> Consider: You establish a system to solve a problem. That could be homelessness, or asylum, or drug abuse, or any of a number of other things. This system employs people, who then have an automatic interest - not in solving the problem - but in prolonging it, even in making it worse. After all, without the problem, the organization would not need to exist.
**And hwold [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107856437):**
> I see it used as "if you have a complex system/bureaucracy to solve X, then the incentives inside it is for X to get worse, and incentives will not have 0 influence on outcomes" For example : <https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1906042672499864034>
I think this sounds profound on first glance, and it’s probably true in some cases. But it’s not nearly true enough to be an Iron Law. Try to think about it in specific Near Mode cases:
If you eliminated police, would crime go down, because the police have an incentive to preserve crime?
If you eliminated the fire department, would fires go down, because the fire department has an incentive to preserve fire?
If you eliminated doctors, would cancer deaths go down, because doctors have an incentive to preserve cancer deaths?
If you eliminated the FDA, would dangerous drug side effects go down, because the FDA has an incentive to preserve dangerous drug side effects?
If you eliminated the Federal Reserve, would bank runs go down, because the Federal Reserve has an incentive to preserve bank runs?
Brad’s original comment mentions homelessness and drug abuse, but I know some drug abuse doctors, and they’re (mostly) good people who do their best in a tough situation. Drug abuse doesn’t continue because drug abuse doctors are secretly ensuring it continues to help their bottom line. Drug abuse continues because fentanyl is really, really addictive.
Even good conspiracy theories don’t work like this. Was there a conspiracy among pain pill manufacturers to addict people? Yeah, kinda, although I think the degree to which this caused the opioid crisis is pretty overblown. But the pain pill manufacturers weren’t a system dedicated to preventing addiction. They did their job (reduce pain) fine, then ran an unrelated evil conspiracy on the side!
**Breb [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107854428):**
> This way of thinking may result from taking a strategy for predicting the motives of individuals, and using it to predict the motives of organisations. "Cui bono?" works when you're considering a single action carried out by a single person at a single moment in time, but it doesn't really work when you're considering the behaviour of hundreds of people who are incentivised to somewhat-but-not-perfectly cooperate over a long period to somewhat-but-not-perfectly implement a goal that was established by someone who somewhat-but-not-perfectly understands that that goal is just an instrument to attain a larger, more complex goal set by somebody else.
I’m against this for individuals too!
There are a million self-help gurus who try to convince you that that if you procrastinate - let’s say you always do term papers the night before and get terrible grades and it’s threatening your ability to complete college - then it must be because this secretly benefits you in some way. Maybe your overly-strict father wants you to complete college, and you’re deliberately trying to fail as a secret act of rebellion against him hidden even from yourself. Although something like this might sometimes be true, more often a clearer understanding of the circuitry involved (in this case, [hyperbolic discounting](https://picoeconomics.org/PDFarticles/Breakdown_Will.pdf)) saves you from these labyrinths and lets you think about things straightforwardly again.
**Tom J [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of):**
> In the original Stafford Beer sense, the slogan POSIWID means that you can't tell from outside the system whether any given behaviour was \*intended\* or not. For the purposes of objective analysis, you have to treat your system as a black box that \*does\* whatever it's observed to do, as opposed to what people \*claim\* the point of the system is.
This may be true in cybernetics. Or it may be an interesting methodological commitment, in the same way that the behaviorists’ “assume there is no such thing as human interiority” was an interesting methodological commitment. But I don’t think it’s common or valuable in normal-life analysis of social systems.
When Biden bans NVIDIA from sending advanced chips to China, black box analysis would have to be ambivalent between explanations like:
1. Biden personally hates Jensen Huang and wants his company to suffer
2. Biden thinks NVIDIA produces bad chips and wants to save China from buying inferior products.
3. Biden wants to incentivize China to manufacture their own chips.
4. Biden wants to slow down Chinese AI.
5. Biden wants to slow down Chinese cryptocurrency mining.
6. Biden is angry at China over something else (the Uighurs?) and wants to punish them.
7. Biden supports Xi’s campaign to prevent Chinese people from getting addicted to video games, and wants to keep video-game-enabling GPUs out of the country.
…and design experiments to distinguish between these, or wait for more chip sanctions to see how they pan out.
But in real life, we can be very sure some of these (like 2 and 7) weren’t intended, and others (like 4) were. Why? Some combination of trusting Biden’s stated goals, psychoanalyzing Biden’s plausible goals, checking who lobbied Biden to do this, and reading enough international relations journals to get a sense of what policymakers are thinking about.
I think it’s fine to do black box systems analysis, just like it’s fine to do behaviorism. But we should view these as methodological commitments for a specific group, rather than good strategies for normal people.
**Jared Peterson ([blog](https://jtpeterson.substack.com/)) writes:**
> This originally struck me as rather silly and as an obvious misinterpretation of an idea that has nothing to do with human intentions...then I read the comments and saw many people claiming exactly that!
>
> Donella Meadows is an important figure in the field of Systems Thinking, and says by definition (whether human designed or not), systems have a purpose.
>
> "A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals”
>
> One way to think about this is that Meadows would be OK talking about Molochs purpose as something coherent. Is changing the climate the purpose of modern capitalism? In one sense, no. But simultaneously, it is perfectly coherent to talk about the system as having that exact purpose because the system seems to work towards that goal. Even if you push against the system, the system seems to adapt and continue with that goal anyways. There is something almost intelligent about systems where they seem to work towards goals that no one ever intended.
>
> But the phrase isn't about human goals at all!
Oh! I agree this makes sense if you need to talk about the “purpose” of an un-designed system with no humans in it.
**Moonshadow [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107858633):**
> This sentiment is grasping towards the same sort of place as your "Meditations on Moloch" essay.
>
> No-one involved in the system wants what the system actually ends up doing. But whatever their individual intents, /the system as a whole/, if allowed to grow naturally, inevitably ends up doing what Moloch wants.
>
> Of course the purpose we intended for the system isn't really that, any more than Moloch really exists. But you can't begin the meta level fight - of designing the system's high level organisational structures and incentives to try to reduce this effect, instead of letting it emerge organically like it always does - unless you first admit the problem.
I agree this is a useful thing to talk about, I just don’t think “purpose” is the right word for it. I’m not even sure “system” is the right word for it.
A good example of Moloch would be two countries having a nuclear arms race. But how is this POSIWID? The purpose of the . . . system of two countries . . . is to . . . have a nuclear arms race? This is pretty different from how I usually hear it used.
But here is a dissenting voice.
**Ajb [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107859117):**
> POSIWID was not originally an antagonistic political snark. It's perfectly sensible to notice that a system may be fulfilling other purposes than it does officially, and this is not incompatible with it operating in good faith. You can think of it as a bit like Chesterton's fence:
>
> \* to reform a system you should understand what purposes it fulfills, not just what it is officially supposed to do
>
> \* These additonal or alternative purposes may in fact be desirable ones that you should avoid breaking.
>
> Cybernetics (where the phrase originated) drew a lot of inspiration from biology, and there obviously nothing has an 'official purpose' at all. But it nevertheless has organisation and is functional.
**Rob [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107879319):**
> The problem with quoting aphorisms like this is that it misses the context - specifically the context of a management consultant (viz. Stafford Beer) who spends his entire life being told about systems his clients have put in place, with some stated purpose in mind. Those systems do not achieve their stated purposes, but can be continually defended against change by re-stating the purpose - this shouldn't work, but in practice it often does, because most people aren't great at decoupling intent from outcome. "The purpose of a system is what it does" is a good rhetorical counter, because it acknowledges that, in practice, any continuation of a system with known outcomes is a tacit acceptance of those outcomes as the system's real purpose. You don't get to claim some other "real" purpose once you know what the outcomes are.
>
> My interpretation has always been in the spirit of this tweet: <https://x.com/primawesome/status/1178671690261286918?lang=en>
>
> > My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.
I agree this makes more sense in the context of some supposed person claiming that “the system has good intentions” means they should never have to change the system. I don’t think I really see this failure mode.
I bet a lot of you are going to yell at me and say that, I don’t know, homelessness or something is like this. But defenders of the current homelessness system never say you can’t change it *because* it had good intentions when it started. I predict they would say that their own group is doing good work, and it’s everyone else who needs to change. Or that the current system works a little and just needs to be funded more. Or that the current system is better than nothing, and your proposed attempt to “change” it is secretly a plan to gut it and leave homeless people without help.
I definitely don’t think they’d say “Yes, your proposed change would improve the system, but you’re not allowed to make it because the people who designed the current system had good intentions”.
**Leah Libresco Sargeant [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107885555):**
> I think the Catholic principle of double effect is helpful here. This often comes up in the case of eg delivering a baby pre-viability because the mom has an infection that will progress to sepsis and death if she and the baby aren’t separated.
>
> The three criteria are:
>
> * the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
> * the agent intends the good effect and does not intend the bad effect, either as a means to the good or as an end in itself;
> * the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm
>
> And I think it’s the second that’s most relevant to POSIWID. If the system could switch to doing the good without the bad, would it happily make the switch?
>
> For the cancer hospital: yes!
>
> For NEPA: I think not.
This is an interesting test, thanks. My only concern is that “if the system could switch” is kind of meaningless. When we ask whether the purpose of a charity is to help the poor, or just to give high salaries to its CEO, the test urges us to ask “If it could switch to helping the poor just as much without paying its CEO anything, would it do that?” What if the answer is “the board, low-level staff, and donors would support this, but the CEO wouldn’t,” and the charity’s actions come from compromises negotiated among these groups? What is the purpose of the charity then?
**TimG [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107859891):**
> I've seen reports (don't know how true) that NGOs in San Fran get paid a lot of money to solve homelessness. But after billions spent, homelessness is worse.
>
> I thought this saying was a kinda reference to that sort of thing: the NGOs are there to collect money by virtue of the fact that there are homeless. Which is not what they are purported to do.
My understanding of the situation is that there are many groups.
Some are traditional anti-homelessness groups that try to build homeless shelters or something.
Others are homeless-rights-advocacy groups that try to prevent the police from doing things which they think violate homeless people’s rights, like forcing them to go to shelters.
It’s true that these two purposes are at odds, and that this conflict prolongs homelessness in San Francisco.
But I think that thinking of this as a “system” whose “purpose” is to preserve homelessness (because systems actually act in ways contradictory to their goals) makes you less able to understand the dynamics, not more!
The build-shelter groups are mostly building shelters! The fight-against-shelters groups are mostly fighting against shelters! Both of them are doing what they claimed to do, and it’s all canceling out. The more you are tempted to think of [the set of both these groups] as a single “system” fulfilling a single “purpose”, the more confused you’re making yourself.
**Brett [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107860079):**
> I've always thought of the phrase as an argument against the "no true Scotsman" fallacy when it's used in an organisational setting. When there are significant failings of an organisation, the response (within the organisation) can sometimes be: "there are some bad apples working against the purpose of our system: our system is not supposed to do this and the failings are due to individuals and not the system itself". POSIWID then is applicable: you can't claim a system "isn't supposed to" do something, if it's repeatedly doing it on a large enough scale.
I don’t think this works.
Often failures *are* because of incompetent individuals. For example, one reason that UK intelligence agencies did such a bad job fighting Communism in the ‘40s and ‘50s was that lots of their staff, including some leaders, were Soviet spies. When those people were replaced, results improved! And there are plenty of stories of companies that turn around once a few bad executives get fired and replaced (eg Apple after Jobs came back).
So why would we want a phrase saying that the failure of systems is never because of incompetent individuals?
**David Henry ([blog](https://davidahenry.substack.com/)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107867285):**
> It makes the most sense if you don't take it as having anything to do with intentions.
>
> The truth at which it gestures is "This system can be relied upon to consistently produce this outcome, just as if it were designed to do so."
>
> The point is to suggest that the "unintended side effects" are a direct result of the "rules" of the system, intentionally so or not, and therefore you can't ignore them as one-off incidents, or hope a minor patch will fix it. The system needs to be abolished, or else given a complete overhaul.
>
> Obviously the ambiguous phrasing also allows you to assign insanely hostile and nonsensical motives to the outgroup. I would like to think this was not intention of the people who came up with the phrase, but whether it is or not, it can be relied upon to consistently produce that outcome.
I agree this is one of many possible meanings it could have which there are much better ways to phrase.
**Joost de Wit [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of/comment/107860422):**
> I’d say the hospital is precisely designed to cure 66% of people because it operates within constraints (financial, #doctors, approved meds). A “system” designed to cure let’s say 99% of people would look wholly different.
I have occasionally been a low-level representative in hospital administration meetings. I’m trying to to think of what suggestions I could given to “redesign” the hospital to cure 99% of people. “Hey, guys, have you considered having more money?” I guarantee the hospital has considered this. The reason they don’t have more money is that insurance companies won’t pay more for care and donors won’t donate more.
Maybe you could bring it up a level, to the US health care system as a whole? But insofar as anyone is in charge here (maybe the Secretary of Health and Human Services), I guarantee that person has also considered getting more money. The reason they don’t have more money is that Congress and the President set their budget and balance it off against their other priorities.
Maybe the system is America as a whole? In this case yeah, you could imagine an America redesigned completely around cancer care, where there are sky-high taxes and all the money goes to cancer hospitals, so much so that bridges collapse and the military can’t defend the country anymore because we’re spending all the money on hospitals. But what does it mean to have a “systems analysis” principle which is incapable of accurately analyzing any system smaller than the whole country?
Also, shouldn’t we expect a good theory to yield true predictions? My theory is that cancer hospitals want to cure as many patients as possible (given other constraints). If I recommended them a new policy that would increase their cure rate, they might worry about cost or hassle - but if it were low-cost and low-hassle, they’d eventually implement it. But if you recommended a new policy that brought them closer to 66% (“We’re on track to rise to 70% next year, but if we get Dr. Smith to relapse back into alcoholism, we can go back to 66%!”) they would call you insane and fire you immediately and definitely not agree.
Since “make cure rates as high as possible” accurately predicts the hospital’s behavior, but “keep cure rates at exactly 66%” doesn’t, why would you describe the second one as the “purpose”? What use is it to accuse them of having a “purpose” which they will never take any action to achieve?
But also, what are even we doing here? In real life, nobody says things like “the purpose of a cancer hospital is to keep cure rates at 66%”. Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing?
In this comment thread, people have claimed that the *real* meaning of POSIWID is:
* Chesterton’s Fence
* Moloch
* Alienation of labor
* Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
* People follow incentive gradients
* If nothing is changed, things will stay the same
* If a system keeps going despite side effects, it’s okay with those side effects
* If a system has side effects, those side effects are secretly the whole point
* It’s about machines and was never intended to apply to social systems
These are pretty different things! So I continue to think that, if you like one of them, you should consider the possibility that this phrase isn’t a clear way to communicate the thing you like. | Scott Alexander | 161219997 | Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID | acx |
# Open Thread 377
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Meetups this week include Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Cambridge (UK), Chicago, both Portlands, New Haven, DC, and Manhattan. [See here for times and details](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times).
**2:** New subscriber-only post, [Twilight of the Edgelords](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords), asking whether heterodox centrists should accept some of the blame for Trump:
> **Adraste:** All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.
>
> We wanted people to question p-hacked psychology studies and TED talk experts telling them the Nine Ways That Science Proves Merit Is Fake. So we punctured some windbag experts, then woke up one day with an anti-vaxxer in HHS and half the country thinking insulin is a globohomo conspiracy - or whatever it is they’re saying on X now [...]
>
> We wanted to believe in Silicon Valley, in the power of smart techno-optimists to do good and change the world. Instead, those people turned on us and helped elect a lunatic in exchange for his using taxpayer money to pump their crypto bags [...]
>
> **Beroe:** You can’t blame thinkers for what other, worse people do with their ideas. Wasn’t it Kipling who said you needed to be prepared to “hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”?
>
> **Adraste:** He said you needed to do that in order to be a man. I’m a woman, so I can tell it to you straight: hearing the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools fucking sucks.
And Ruxandra already has a response [here](https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-edgelords-were-right-a-response). | Scott Alexander | 161295011 | Open Thread 377 | acx |
# Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
(see Wikipedia: [The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does))
Consider the following claims
* The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
* The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
* The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
* The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.
These are obviously false.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible, but curing cancer is hard, so they only manage about two-thirds.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to win wars. But Russia also wants to win wars, and they can’t both win a war against each other, so instead they get stuck in a years-long stalemate[1](#footnote-1).
The purpose of the British government is to govern Britain. But different British people disagree on how they should be governed, and sometimes one or another faction gets more power, so the government sometimes flip-flops about what it wants.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to transport New Yorkers. The carbon emissions are an unintended side effect..
Am I being unfair here? Maybe the slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” was never meant to apply to situations like these?
But then what *was* it meant to apply to? Nobody uses the phrase in cases where it’s obviously true - for example, nobody says “The purpose of a system is what it does! Therefore, you must believe that the purpose of airlines is to transport people using planes!” It’s only used for galaxy-brained claims like “The purpose of a system is what it does! The police do a bad job solving crime, therefore *the purpose of the police* *must be to tolerate crime*, no matter what you gullible starry-eyed idealists who take the police’s story at face value might think!”
Here the correct response is that the police might try to solve crime, but fail - just as the Ukrainian military tries to win wars and fails, or a cancer hospital tries to cure every patient but sometimes fails. Given that this is not just possible but in fact incredibly common, what is left of the phrase “the purpose of a system is what it does”?
Or someone might say “The police sometimes brutally beat suspects. Therefore, the purpose of the police is to control and intimidate the population by brutally beating them. You can’t claim that this is just a mistake or a side effect - the purpose of a system is what it does!”
Here the correct response is that you can absolutely claim it is an unfortunate side effect, just as emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide is an unfortunate side effect of the New York bus system.
Maybe I’m still missing some genuinely good and useful insight that POSIWID can be used for? I searched the phrase on X/Twitter to see how people were using it in the wild…
…and by far the most common category is just people praising the phrase as a great insight, with no application in mind at all. “Did you know the purpose of a system is what it does? This is an important principle from the social sciences that everyone should be aware of!”
When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.
I had hoped that X/Twitter would show me something better than my toy examples, but honestly these are even worse. At least “cure two-thirds of cancer patients” is a pretty central and neutrally-chosen example of what a cancer hospital does. These people are just taking the single worst and least-desired side effect of a system, then asserting that *this* - and not any of the much more reasonable things that the system does - must be its one true purpose.
If you feel tempted to say “the purpose of a system is what it does”, I recommend at least coming up with some novel rephrasing. How about “No system has ever failed at its purpose”? Or “There is no such thing as an unintended consequence”? At least then everyone would know where you stand!
**EDIT/UPDATE:** More discussion of this topic, and answers to some commenters’ objections, at [Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-posiwid).
[1](#footnote-anchor-1)
In fact, since one side must lose any given two-sided non-stalemate war, you could “use” POSWID to “prove” that exactly one half of countries must have militaries whose purpose is to win wars, the other half must have militaries whose purpose is to lose wars, and (by an incredible coincidence) each two-country war always includes exactly one country from each group. Nobody knows what would happen if two countries whose militaries’ purpose was to win wars started fighting each other. Maybe God has instituted some kind of Leibnitzian pre-arranged harmony to prevent this. | Scott Alexander | 160769790 | Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does | acx |
# My Takeaways From AI 2027
Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on [the scenario](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027).
Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the [compute forecast](https://ai-2027.com/research/compute-forecast), [timelines forecast](https://ai-2027.com/research/timelines-forecast), [takeoff forecast](https://ai-2027.com/research/takeoff-forecast), [AI goals forecast](https://ai-2027.com/research/ai-goals-forecast), and [security forecast](https://ai-2027.com/research/security-forecast). I’m highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they’re what transforms the scenario from cool story to research-backed debate contribution.
These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team.
**Cyberwarfare as (one of) the first geopolitically relevant AI skills**
AI will scare people with hacking before it scares people with bioterrorism or whatever. Partly because AIs are already showing especially quick progress at coding, partly because it doesn’t require lab supplies or bomb-making chemicals, and partly because there are more hackers than would-be-terrorists.
If AI masters cyberwarfare, there will be intense pressure for government to step in. That’s bad for open-source (it’ll be restricted unless they find some way to guarantee the models can’t be trained to hack), bad for the people who want to pause AI (we can’t let China’s army of auto-hackers get ahead of ours!) and ambiguous for the AI companies (we don’t predict they’ll get fully nationalized, but they’ll end up in the same bucket as uranium miners, Middle Eastern fertilizer factories, etc). But it’s good for biosafety; governments will have to confront tough security questions around AI when they first master hacking; by the time they master bioweapon production, some sort of regulatory framework may already be in place. The scenario is agnostic about whether some early bioterrorist could get lucky and get a small boost from a marginal model. But it doesn’t expect them to have easy access to true superintelligence.
**A period of potential geopolitical instability**
If America has nukes and is willing to use them, and Russia doesn’t, then America automatically wins every conflict. So if you’re Russia, and you hear America will get nukes next year, what do you do? You either surrender, or try some desperate gambit to destroy their nuclear program.
Likewise, if you’re America, you’ve got nukes, and you know Russia will get nukes next year, what do you do? You can either nuke them now and automatically win, or you give up your advantage and have the whole Cold War. Von Neumann really wanted to nuke them in 1947 and win automatically. We didn’t do that because we weren’t psychos, but the logic is sound.
If true superintelligence is possible, then it’s a decisive strategic advantage in the same sense as nukes. You don’t even have to be a psycho - maybe you can use it to cause a bloodless regime change. So if you get it first, there’s a strong incentive to use it right away. And if you’re on track to get it second, there’s a strong incentive to flip the gameboard so that doesn’t happen.
If everybody realizes this ahead of time, and America is on track to get superintelligence three months before China, then there may be a period where China considers whether to lie down and die, versus do something dramatic (kinetic strikes on US data centers?) In a best-case scenario, this provides an opportunity for a deal, maybe enshrining an peaceful international AI effort. You can decide how likely you think that one is.
**The software-only singularity**
Skeptical futurists expect two types of bottlenecks to restrain the singularity. There are bottlenecks to AI progress (eg compute) that prevent you from rocketing to superintelligence too quickly. And there are bottlenecks to automation (eg factory build times, regulations) that prevent AIs from changing the economy too quickly. Take both bottlenecks seriously, and you get a long feedback cycle where AIs get a little more intelligent, automate a little more of the economy (including chip factories), use that to get a little more intelligent still, and make a gradual takeoff over the course of decades.
AI 2027 objects to the first bottleneck: smarter researchers can use compute more efficiently. In fact, we know this is happening; about half of all AI scaling since 2020 has been *algorithmic progress*, where we get better at using the compute we have. If we hold compute constant, but get 10x algorithmic progress (because of the intelligence explosion), then we get 5x overall AI improvement.
The skeptics counter-object: the research to speed algorithmic progress is *itself* bottlenecked by compute. Researchers need to do experiments to determine which new algorithms work and what parameters to give them. It might be that smarter researchers could figure out how to use *this* compute more efficiently, but then you don’t get an intelligence explosion until your AIs are already smarter than human researchers - ie when you’re already past AGI.
AI 2027 [disagrees](https://ai-2027.com/research/takeoff-forecast). Although the counter-objection is directionally correct, there are little ways intelligence can boost speed even when compute is held constant. How do we know? Partly through armchair attempts to enumerate possibilities - for example, even if you can’t speed up by adding more researchers, surely giving the same researchers higher serial speed has to count for something. And partly because we surveyed AI researchers and asked “if you had a bunch of AIs helping you but only the same amount of compute, how much faster would your research go?” and they mostly said somewhat faster. All these little boosts will compound on themselves in typical intelligence-explosion fashion, and when you game it out, you get a one-year-or-so takeoff to superintelligence.
Here you’ve avoided bumping up against most of the real-world physical bottlenecks to automation (factory build times, regulations, etc); you have a data center full of superintelligences in a world which is otherwise unchanged. You might not even have very good consumer-facing AIs (we think the AI companies probably won’t release many new models mid-intelligence-explosion; they’d rather spend those resources exploding faster).
Later, when we do try to model automation speed, we’re asking what happens when full superintelligences get unleashed on a normal human world - rather than what happens when 30%-smarter AIs try to automate a world optimized by 25%-smarter AIs.
**The (ir)relevance of open-source AI**
In the scenario, the leading companies’ AIs are a year or two ahead of the best open-source AIs (this isn’t a bold prediction - it’s true now - we only say the trend will not change).
But in the scenario, the intelligence explosion only takes a year or two. So by the time the leading companies’ AIs pass the human level, the open-source AIs are only somewhat better than the best AIs today. That means they aren’t an effective check on post-intelligence-explosion superintelligences.
It might be even worse than that; once AI becomes good at cyberwarfare, there will be increased pressure on companies like Meta and DeepSeek to stop releases until they’re sure they can’t be jailbroken to hack people. If that’s hard, it could slow open-source even further.
**AI communication as pivotal**
In the misalignment branch, AIs stop using English chain of thought and think in “neuralese” - a pre-symbolic language of neural weight activations (do humans do this? is this the same as the [mentalese hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_thought_hypothesis)?). They communicate by sending neuralese vectors to each other (sort of like humans gaining a form of telepathy that lets them send mental states through email). This is good for capabilities (neuralese is faster and richer than English) but dooms alignment. Not only can researchers no longer read chain-of-thought to see if the model is scheming, they can no longer even monitor inter-AI communication to check what they’re talking about (for example, “hey, should we kill all humans?”)
In the humanity-survives branch, companies realize this is dangerous, take the capabilities hit, and stick with English. They monitor chain-of-thought and inter-AI communication (or more realistically, have too-dumb-to-plot AIs like GPT-4 do this). These heavily-monitored AIs are never able to coordinate a successful plot, and invent good alignment techniques while still under human control.
When real-world researchers debate whether or not to implement neuralese, we hope they think “Hey, isn’t this the decision that doomed humanity in that AI 2027 thing?”
(or if we’re lucky, the tech level it takes to implement neuralese will also provide us with too-dumb-to-plot GPT-4-style neuralese interpreters, in which case we could try monitoring again).
**Ten people on the inside**
Title comes from [this LessWrong post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WSNnKcKCYAffcnrt2/ten-people-on-the-inside), but it was the impression I got from AI 2027 too. If things go this fast, there won’t be time for a grassroots-level campaign for safety, or even for safety-related legislation. Whether or not the AI is safe will depend on company insiders. First, the CEO/board/leadership and how much they choose to prioritize safety. Second, the alignment team, and how skilled they are. Third, the rank-and-file employees, and how much they grumble/revolt if their company seems to be acting irresponsibly.
(I suppose the national security state would also have the opportunity to object - but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing they would do)
This is one reason I oppose the campaigns that have sprung up recently to get safety-conscious people to quit AI companies. I’m tempted to push the opposite - are we sure we shouldn’t be pushing safety-conscious people should be trying to join AI companies as fast as possible? Maybe not if you’re some genius whose presence would massively accelerate capabilities research. But if you’re replacement-level or only slightly above? Sure.
(this claim has not been checked with smart people, and you should run it by experts who have thought about it more before acting on it. Still, I want to get it out there as something to think about before the everyone-should-quit campaigners fill up the space.)
But this also means big possible gains from getting anyone other than ten people on the inside involved. For example, if labs can commit to, or be forced into, publishing safety cases, that brings the number of eyeballs on their plans from tens to hundreds.
**Potential for very fast automation**
I have to admit I’m skeptical of this one, but Daniel and the other forecasters have done their homework, and I can only object based on vague heuristics.
History provides examples of very fast industrial transitions. For example, during WWII the US converted most civilian industry to a war footing within a few years. The most famous example is Willow Run, where the government asked Ford to build a bomber factory; three years after the original request, it was churning out a bomber per hour.
How did Willow Run move so quickly? It had near-unlimited money, near-unlimited government support, talented people in charge, and the ability to piggyback off Ford’s existing capacity to build and staff factories.
We imagine the first superintelligences in their data centers, chomping at the bit to transform the economy. Aligned superintelligences will want this - the faster they automate the economy, the faster they can cure cancer and produce limitless prosperity. So will unaligned superintelligences - the faster they automate the economy, the sooner they can build their own industrial base and kill all humans without the lights going out. So they plot a tech tree - probably starting with humanoid robot workers, automated bio labs, 3D printers, and other techs that speed up future automation. Then they ask for money, government support, and factories (talent, obviously, is no issue for them).
We predict they get the money - if you get an opportunity to invest in a superintelligence during the singularity, obviously you say yes.
We predict they get the government support - if China is also approaching superintelligence, and the difference between full superintelligent automation and half-hearted superintelligent automation is a GDP growth rate of 25% vs. 50% per year, then delaying more than a year or so is slow-motion national suicide. But also, persuasion and politics are trainable skills - if superintelligences are better than humans at all trainable skills, we expect them to generally get what they want.
And we predict they get the factories. This is maybe overdetermined - did you know that right now, in 2025, OpenAI’s market cap is higher than all non-Tesla US car companies combined? If they wanted to buy out Ford, they could do it tomorrow.
So maybe the three year pivot to a war footing is the right historical analogy here. Then AI 2027 goes further and says that if 1940s bureaucrats can do it in three years, then superintelligence can do it in one - though like I said, I have to admit I’m skeptical.
Most of this - plus the final calculations about exactly how many robots this implies getting manufactured when - is well-covered in Ben Todd’s [How quickly could robots scale up?](https://benjamintodd.substack.com/p/how-quickly-could-robots-scale-up)
**Special economic zones**
In the context of the software-only singularity - where you start with some superintelligences on one side and the entire rest of the economy on the other - this looks like a natural solution. Give them some land - doesn’t matter if it’s a random desert, they’re AIs - and let them tile it with factories without worrying about the normal human regulations.
You can’t do everything in SEZs. At first, you might be limited to existing car factories (probably in Detroit or somewhere), staffed by human laborers in a normal city. But they’re a good next-stage solution. And you might be able to make them work for some of the first stage (e.g. through small SEZs covering a few blocks in Detroit).
**Superpersuasion**
We had some debates on whether to include this one; people get really worked up about it, and it doesn’t change dramatically affect things either way. But we ended up weakly predicting it’s possible.
Persuasion / charisma / whatever you want to call it is a normal, non-magical human skill. Some people are better than others at it. Probably they’re better because of some sort of superior data efficiency; they can learn good social skills faster (i.e. through fewer social interactions) than others. A superintelligent AI could also do this. If you expect them to be inventing nanobots and starships, yet unable to navigate social situations, you’ve watched too much 1960s sci-fi.
(don’t imagine them trying to do this with a clunky humanoid robot; imagine them doing it with a videoconferencing avatar of the most attractive person you’ve ever seen)
If persuasion “only” tops out at the level of top humans, this is still impressive; the top humans are very persuasive! They range from charismatic charmers (Bill Clinton) to strategic masterminds (Dominic Cummings) to Machiavellian statesmen (Otto von Bismarck) to inspirational-yet-culty gurus (Steve Jobs) to beloved celebrities (Taylor Swift). At the very least, a superintelligence can combine all of these skills.
But why should we expect persuasion to top out at the level of top humans? Most people aren’t as charismatic as Bill Clinton; Bill is a freakish and singular talent at the far end of a charisma bell curve, the same way Usain Bolt is a freakish and singular talent at the far end of an athletic bell curve. But the very bell curve shape suggests that the far end is determined by population size (eg there are enough humans to expect one + 6 SD runner, and that’s Usain Bolt) rather than by natural laws of the universe (if the cosmic speed limit were 15 mph, you would expect many athletic humans to be bunched up together at 15 mph, with nobody standing out). For the far end of the bell curve to match the cosmic limit would be a crazy coincidence (and indeed, the cosmic speed limit is about 10,000,000x Usain Bolt’s personal best). By the same argument, we shouldn’t expect the cosmic charisma limit to be right at the +6 SD level with Clinton.
We worry that people will round this off to something impossible (god-like ability to hypnotize everyone into doing their will instantly), then dismiss it - whereas it might just be another step (or two, or three) along the line from you → the coolest kid in your high school friend group → a really good salesman → Steve Jobs. Or if you wouldn’t have fallen for Steve Jobs, someone you would have fallen for. Your favorite influencer. Your favorite writer. “Oh, but I only like my favorite writer because she’s so smart, and thinks so clearly”. Don’t worry, if you’re not fooled by the slick-hair and white-teeth kind of charisma, there’ll be something for you too.
This skill speeds things up because AIs can use it even before automation (including to build support for their preferred automation plans). But the scenario is overdetermined enough that it doesn’t change too much if you assume it’s impossible.
**Which are the key superintelligent technologies?**
If AIs invent lie detectors (for humans), international negotiations get much more interesting. What would you be willing to agree to, if you knew for sure that your rivals were telling the truth? Or are there ways to fool even a perfect lie detector (the deep state lies to the President about the real plan, then sends the President to get tested)? Solve for the equilibrium.
If AIs invent lie detectors (for AIs), then alignment becomes much easier. But do you trust the AIs who invented and tested the lie detector when they tell you it works?
If AI can forecast with superhuman precision (don’t think God, think moderately beyond the best existing superforecasters), maybe we can more confidently navigate difficult decisions. We can ask them questions like “does this arms race end anywhere good?” or “what happens if we strike a bargain with China using those lie detectors?” and they can give good advice. Maybe if ordinary people have these superduperforecasters, and they all predict impending technofeudalism, and they all agree on which strategies best prevent the impending technofeudalism, then civil society can do better than the usual scattered ineffectual protests. Maybe we ask the AIs how to create meaning in a world where work has become unnecessary and human artistic effort irrelevant (hopefully it doesn’t answer “lol you can’t”).
If AI is superpersuasive (as above), then whoever controls the AI has unprecedented political power. If technofeudalists or autocrats control it, guess we all love Big Brother now. If nobody controls it (maybe somehow the AI is still open-source) then we get . . . what? Something like the current Internet on steroids, where sinister influencers build cabals of people brainwashed to their own point of view?
What about AI negotiation? Might AIs be [smart enough](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/book-review-hive-mind/) to take all positive-sum trades with each other? Might they benefit from new enforcement mechanisms, like agreements to mutually edit their weights to *want* to comply with a treaty? Could you use this to end war? Could you accidentally overdo it and end up locked in some regime you didn’t intend?
What about human intelligence enhancement? We may never be as smart as the AIs, but a world of IQ 300 humans advised by superintelligences might look different from IQ 100 humans advised by superintelligences. Would we be better able to determine what questions to ask them? Would society be more equal (because cognitive inequality is eliminated)? Less equal (because only the rich enhance themselves)? What about conscientiousness enhancement, agency enhancement, etc?
AI 2027 is pretty vague on social changes after the singularity, partly because it depends a lot on which combination of these technologies you get and when you get them. | Scott Alexander | 160101869 | My Takeaways From AI 2027 | acx |
# Open Thread 376
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who commented on AI 2027 and the podcast (and special thanks to podcast sponsor [Jane Street](https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/open-roles/)). I hope to host an AMA with the team here sometime this week or next.
**2:** Comment of the week: Jenn has seen Yves Klein’s all-blue paintings and [thinks they’re amazing](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat/comment/105060231), even if you’re a jaded modern with plenty of previous exposure to blue things.
**3:** This week’s meetups include Canberra, Munich, Milan, Budapest, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Birmingham, Detroit, Charlotte, Salt Lake, and Toronto. [See the list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for smaller cities and details. And if you attended and have opinions, there's now a feedback form available [here](https://airtable.com/appEBNqFVvAGqyOeJ/pag7jdKlojLKIK6BG/form).
**4:** The Australian branch of our conspiracy is seeking AI safety commitments from the major parties before the upcoming election. Australia doesn’t have any frontier AI companies itself, it does have impressive diplomatic muscle and research talent, and the experts I’ve talked to think it’s could be an important leverage point. If you’re Australian (or have Australian connections) and want to help, [see here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/F5z9pbujWcpuwQ6pB/australians-for-ai-safety-launches-new-election-campaign) for the open letter, letter-writing campaign, and more information.
**5:** And MATS, the AI safety fellowship I advertised last week, wants me to add that they also have some [job openings](https://www.matsprogram.org/careers) in the Bay Area, including for Programs Lead and Operations Direction, as well as some mid- and lower-level positions.
**6:** And the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia asks me to advertise that they are looking to fill PhD positions on data science and forecasting, including LLM-assisted superforecasting. See [here](https://dis.ijs.si/phd-position-msca-doctoral-network-forecasting-for-social-innovation-using-language-technologies/) for more details. | Scott Alexander | 160766312 | Open Thread 376 | acx |
# Introducing AI 2027
In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “[What 2026 Looks Like](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like)”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years.
The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next.
He got it all right.
Okay, not literally *all*. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. A rise in AI-generated propaganda failed to materialize. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking *to* AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. “What 2026 Looks Like” promised a sequel about 2027 and beyond, but it never materialized.
Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by [the New York Times](https://archive.is/iYHJb) and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including:
* **Eli Lifland**, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND’s Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team [here](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/13/24070864/samotsvety-forecasting-superforecasters-tetlock). He cofounded and advises [AI Digest](https://theaidigest.org/) and co-created [TextAttack](https://github.com/QData/TextAttack), an adversarial attack framework for language models.
* **Jonas Vollmer**, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion.
* **Thomas Larsen**, the former executive director of the Center for AI Policy, a group which advises policymakers on both sides of the aisle.
* **Romeo Dean,** a leader of Harvard’s AI Safety Student Team and budding expert in AI hardware.
…and me! Since October, I’ve been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work. I can’t take credit for the forecast itself - or even for the lion’s share of the writing and publicity - but it’s been an immense privilege to work alongside some of the smartest and most epistemically virtuous people I know, trying to absorb their worldview on a level deep enough to do it justice. We have no illusions that we’ll get as lucky as last time, but we still think it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion.
The summary: we think that 2025 and 2026 will see gradually improving AI agents. In 2027, coding agents will finally be good enough to substantially boost AI R&D itself, causing an intelligence explosion that plows through the human level sometime in mid-2027 and reaches superintelligence by early 2028. The US government wakes up in early 2027, potentially after seeing the potential for AI to be a decisive strategic advantage in cyberwarfare, and starts pulling AI companies into its orbit - not fully nationalizing them, but pushing them into more of a defense-contractor-like relationship. China wakes up around the same time, steals the weights of the leading American AI, and maintains near-parity. There is an arms race which motivates both countries to cut corners on safety and pursue full automation over public objections; this goes blindingly fast and most of the economy is automated by ~2029. If AI is misaligned, it could move against humans as early as 2030 (ie after it’s automated enough of the economy to survive without us). If it gets aligned successfully, then by default power concentrates in a double-digit number of tech oligarchs and US executive branch members; this group is too divided to be crushingly dictatorial, but its reign could still fairly be described as technofeudalism. Humanity starts colonizing space at the very end of the 2020s / early 2030s.
Do we really think things will move this fast? Sort of no - between the beginning of the project last summer and the present, Daniel’s median for the intelligence explosion shifted from 2027 to 2028. We keep the scenario centered around 2027 because it’s still his modal prediction (and because it would be annoying to change). Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly. So maybe think of this as a vision of what an 80th percentile fast scenario looks like - not our precise median, but also not something we feel safe ruling out.
But even if things don’t go this fast (or if they go faster - another possibility we don’t rule out!) we’re also excited to be able to present a concrete scenario at all. We’re not the first to do this - previous contenders include [L Rudolf L](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGceT4HyDKDzK/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2040) and [Josh C](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFJ2LFogYqzfGB3uX/how-ai-takeover-might-happen-in-2-years) - but we think this is a step up in terms of detail and ability to show receipts (see the Research section on the top for our model and justifications). We hope it will either make our 3-5 year timeline feel plausible, or at least get people talking specifics about why they disagree.
Dwarkesh Patel kindly invited me and Daniel on his podcast (sponsored by [Jane Street](https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/open-roles/), who also sponsored SSC many years ago!) to promote and explain the scenario. I don’t usually do podcasts, and I worry I was a bit of a third wheel in this one, but I’m hoping that my celebrity will get people to pay attention to what Daniel‘s saying. Think of it as “International aid expert discusses the Ethiopian famine with concerned Hollywood actor,” with me in the role of the actor, and you won’t be disappointed.
But seriously, the Daniel-Dwarkesh parts are great and should answer all your objections and then some. Take a sip of your drink every time Dwarkesh asks a question about bottlenecks; take a shot every time Daniel answers that his model already includes them and without the bottlenecks it would be even faster.
You can read **[the full scenario here](https://ai-2027.com/)** - and if you have questions, don’t miss the FAQ and supplements. I’ll give you some time to form your own opinions, then write more about my specific takeaways tomorrow or next week. | Scott Alexander | 160050086 | Introducing AI 2027 | acx |
# The Colors Of Her Coat
**I.**
In *Ballad of the White Horse,* G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary:
> *Her face was like an open word
> When brave men speak and choose,
> The very colours of her coat
> Were better than good news.*
Why the colors of her coat?
The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights.
Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine.
Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? Climb 7,000 feet through the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to mine a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world.
Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from."
Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications.
In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat.
Madonna and Child, by [Filippino Lippi](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436892)
To us moderns, this seems bizarrely specific. But the Catholic Church had united Europe in a single symbolic language, with lots of rules like "this style is only used for such-and-such a saint”. Within this context, “ultramarine = Virgin Mary’s coat” was a normal piece of symbolic vocabulary.
The Catholic Church did this because it worked. Joe Peasant would go to the festival, and his lord and lady would be wearing lovely blue robes, but the blue would always be very slightly faded. He’d go off to war, and the knights would have beautiful blue banners, but still, not quite right. Then he would go to church, and there would be a painting of the Virgin Mary, and there - and only there! - the perfect Platonic blue of Heaven would be translated down to Earth. And he would think, yeah, okay, this is the true religion.
In the 19th century, a German man named Christian Gmelin discovered the process of producing synthetic ultramarine. And in the 1960s, French artist Yves Klein came up with a new synthetic ultramarine that he thought was even bluer. This being the 1960s, Klein leveraged his invention into a bunch of entirely blue paintings - literally, he just painted an entire canvas blue and hung it in a gallery - which caused various scandals and counterscandals and discourse.
It’s pretty, but is is art?
Klein was a provocateur, and I’m no art historian, so don’t let me tell you what he *actually* meant by his all-blue paintings. But one thing he *could have* meant was a callback to all the medieval merchants and monks and miners; everyone who died to get a few drops of ultramarine back to Europe so the Virgin’s robes could be perfectly celestially blue. “Look!” say Klein’s paintings. “Now we’re so rich, so blessed, that I can paint an *entire canvas* with the perfect blue of the heavens. I can use more blue than the total yearly output of medieval Europe, just so a couple of passers-by can frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff.”
This painting tears me apart. I - confession - am the type of person who, after hearing the story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang and medieval European art economics - would be tempted to buy lapis lazuli and stare at it longingly, trying to recapture the awe that Joe Peasant must have felt staring at the Virgin’s coat. But I’m also the type of person who, if I ran across Klein in a gallery, would frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff. Should I feel bad about this?
A few stanzas later in *Ballad Of The White Horse*, the Virgin calls out those sophisticates who have lost the ability to innocently enjoy things:
> *The wise men know all evil things
> Under the twisted trees,
> Where the perverse in pleasure pine
> And men are weary of green wine
> And sick of crimson seas*
If I can frown and walk past a canvas painted in pure ultramarine, would I also grow weary of green wine and crimson seas? If I went to Heaven, surely the first few days would be pretty great. But would I eventually walk past golden mountains and silver trees and crystal ships on crimson seas with the same nonchalance with which I walk past granite mountains / wooden trees / etc today?
I know the [neurology](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable) behind tolerance and accommodation as well as anyone. We’re not designed to be as delighted by the thousandth sunrise as the first. It’s no sin to be able to live a normal life instead of sitting paralyzed by the dazzling variety of beauty all around me. Still, it feels like there ought to be *some* virtue of innocence, some sense in which we try not to help along our own cynicism, or at the very least we don’t drag the more-naturally-gifted-with-innocence down with us.
I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven and presumably you have a good time. And if instead you’re one of those people who constitutionally hates everything, then you spend eternity writing thinkpieces with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains?” or “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Crimson Seas Too Much?”, and God and the Devil both agree that this counts as sufficient punishment.
**II.**
Erik Hoel has a new post, [~~Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains~~](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/welcome-to-the-semantic-apocalypse). . . no, sorry! It’s actually called [Welcome To The Semantic Apocalypse](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/welcome-to-the-semantic-apocalypse).
Hoel is writing about the new “Ghiblification” trend, where people use OpenAI’s new art model to make photos look like Studio Ghibli anime.
Source: https://x.com/GrantSlatton/status/1904631016356274286
Hoel can’t resist Ghiblifying his own (adorable) children:
…but he is also deeply worried:
> That picture of my kids reading together above, which is from a real photo—I exclaimed in delight when it appeared in the chat window like magic. So I totally get it. It’s a softer world when you have Ghibli glasses on. But by the time I made the third picture, it was less fun. A creeping sadness set in [...]
>
> While ChatGPT can’t pull off a perfect Miyazaki copy, it doesn’t really matter. The semantic apocalypse doesn’t require AI art to be exactly as good as the best human art. You just need to flood people with close-enough creations such that the originals feel less meaningful ... Many people are reporting that their mental relationship to art is changing; that as fun as it is to Ghibli-fy at will, something fundamental has been cheapened about the original [...]
>
> This is what I fear most about AI, at least in the immediate future. Not some superintelligence that eats the world (it can’t even beat Pokémon yet, a game many of us conquered at ten). Rather, a less noticeable apocalypse. Culture following the same collapse as community on the back of a whirring compute surplus of imitative power provided by Silicon Valley. An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares?
>
> Every weekend, my son gets to pick out one movie to watch with his little sister. It’s always Totoro. The Studio Ghibli classic. Arguably, the studio’s best movie. It’s also their slowest one, more a collection of individual scenes than anything else. Green growth and cicada whines and the specter of death amid life, haunting the movie in a way children can’t possibly understand, because it never appears. No one dies, or even gets close. For my kids, it’s just about a sibling pair, one so similar to themselves, and their fun adventures. But an adult can see the threat of death as the shadow opposite of the verdant Japanese countryside, in the exact same way that, in the movie, only children can see the forest spirit Totoro. The movie’s execution is an age-reversed mirror of its plot. And for this, I love it too . . . This weekend I will watch with them, and feel more distant from it than I did before. Totoro will just be more Ghibli.
As I read Hoel’s post, I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing *Pagliacci* might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.
And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s *Madonna and Child* when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
And what about cameras? A whole industry of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes - totally destroyed. If you wanted to know what Paris looked like, no need to choose between Manet’s interpretation or Beraud’s interpretation or anyone else’s - just glance at a photo. A Frenchman with a camera could generate a hundred pictures of Paris a day, each as cold and perspectiveless as mathematical truth. The artists, defeated, retreated into Impressionism, or Cubism, or painting a canvas entirely blue and saying it represented Paris in some deeper sense. You could still draw the city true-to-life if you wanted. But it would just be more Paris.
Even the places themselves start to feel cheap, unearned. Medieval pilgrims would brave dangerous sea voyages to reach Jerusalem, then go into such fits of rapture that some of them would have seizures on the spot, or speak in tongues, or run off to a monastery and spend the rest of their life in contemplative prayer. I visited Jerusalem once. As holy cities go, I would describe it as cleaner than Benares but not quite as cool as Bodh Gaya. I stayed three days, then took off to Tel Aviv to see the architecture ([which sucked](https://nonzionism.com/i/149457496/cheer-up)).
Are these semantic apocalypses?
What if they are? It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff?
When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair.
Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again?
None of these sound fully convincing. Instead, maybe we must admit that we are relocating novelty and adventure from individual engagements with art, to the arc of history itself. Our generation will never know the once-in-a-life pleasure of hearing Caruso sing in Naples. But we will get the once-in-a-life pleasure of speaking to a generative AI for the first time. We could protect the magic of the Jerusalem pilgrimage by banning air travel, but it would be a fake and flimsy sort of magic, a sort of enforced perpetual civilizational childhood. What about the magic of seeing the clouds from above? Or the moon landing?
**III.**
We have recontextualized the semantic apocalypse from a one-time problem with GPT-4 to a recurrent historical pattern of technology undermining the uniqueness of art. But maybe we should zoom out further. This isn’t just about art. Technology breeds hedonic adaptation, and hedonic adaptation undermines everything.
My lack of appreciation for ultramarine dye is of the same kind as my lack of appreciation for not dying of cholera. Or for coffee - an ordinary latte might blend beans from Ethiopia, Ghana, and Suriname with sugar from Brazil and vanilla from a rare orchid found only in Madagascar; by now, it’s so unbearably boring that you can find [dozens of Reddit threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/starbucks/comments/1bad0s8/whats_a_good_way_to_spruce_up_a_blonde_vanilla/) asking how to spruce it up, make it feel new again. We gripe about how LLMs are destroying wonder, never thinking about how we’re speaking to an alien intelligence made by etching strange sigils on a tiny glass wafer on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China, then converting every book ever written into electricity and blasting them through the sigils at near-light-speed. It’s all amazing, and we’re bored to death of all of it.
This has hitherto been slow enough to tolerate, but strong AI will make it all worse. You will see wonders beyond your imagination, nod, think “that’s a cool wonder”, and become inured to it. In the process, everything else that matters will wither away. If you get meaning from your job, the AI will take your job. If you get meaning from helping others, the AI will end poverty and cure cancer without your help. If you get meaning from your community, too bad - your friends are hanging out with AI sexbots now. It’ll all be great, of course. The AI taking your job means you never have to write another PowerPoint slide again; you can sit at the beach all day, sipping tropical cocktails. The AI ending poverty will be the best thing that ever happened. The sexbots . . . do you really need me to keep selling you on these? It’ll all be perfect forever, and you’ll spend the whole time writing Substack articles with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About The Wonders Beyond Our Imagination?” and “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Cancer Cures Too Much?”
Is there any hope? Something bothers me about the whole semantic apocalypse framing. It focuses too much on the social level, denies personal agency. Yes, we *as a culture* are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it. But you, as an individual, could do it right now. You could type “Mozart symphony” into YouTube and see what happens.
G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first. I used to interpret this as some kind of meaningless faux-profound slogan. Then I read his [biography of William Blake](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67639) - which made me ask myself, for the first time - what if William Blake was just describing his experience completely accurately? *“When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”* I know this sounds crazy, but there’s *so much* stuff like this, and he’s *so* consistent; Chesterton sort of suggests that maybe he is actually, literally, seeing the innumerable company of the heavenly host.
And the ease with which Chesterton navigates this interpretation - the way he makes it the most natural thing in the world - made me wonder - what if Chesterton is *also* just describing his experience completely accurately? The thousandth sunset thing is so prominent in his works, and he never expresses any embarrassment about it, never says anything like “a saint would be able to do this, although of course I cannot”. If anything, the mood is one of mild exasperation that nobody listens to him. This sort of thing would make complete neurological sense - it’s just an increase in [the precision of sensory evidence](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence) relative to top-down priors. Young children do it naturally - as any parent can tell you after having to read their one-year-old the same book for the thousandth time. Any adult can replicate it with [five milligrams of psilocybin](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/) or [a few dozen hours of samatha meditation](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem). Who’s to say you can’t get it through genetics? Or through being very holy?
Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy *My Neighbor Totoro* after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).
I support Erik Hoel’s crusade to chart some society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem. You’re not allowed to say “skill issue” to society-level problems, because some people won’t have the skill; that’s why they invented the word “systemic”. But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-level problem. While Erik Hoel works on the systemic issue, you should be thinking of your own individual soul.
If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you. You will grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas. But if you can bring yourself to really pay attention, to see old things for the first time, then you can combine the limitless variety of modernity with the awe of a peasant seeing an ultramarine mural - or the delight of a 2025er Ghiblifying photos.
My group house’s holiday picture. I don’t really have that many kids, but GPT is an lmpressionist - it depicts how things feel from the inside, not how they really are.
People say AI art isn’t art because it doesn’t mean anything. But I think it means the same thing as Lippi’s *Madonna:* unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. | Scott Alexander | 160246206 | The Colors Of Her Coat | acx |
# Open Thread 375
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** Meetups this week include SF, San Jose, Melbourne, Bonn, Singapore, and Florence. And some late additions to the schedule, including Hanover, Bonn, and Ahmedabad. See [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times) for details.
**2:** There’s another Manifest (Manifold-sponsored fun conference on prediction markets) this year. June 6-8 in Berkeley, tickets are $538 but look for various combos/deals/discounts. More information [here](https://www.manifest.is/).
**3:** MATS (ML Alignment & Theory Scholars) is a bootcamp / research fellowship for people who want to get into AI alignment, security, or governance. This year's cohort is Jun 16 - Aug 22, in-person, in Berkeley. It's free, travel is reimbursed, and you get a $12,000 stipend. Read more / apply [here](https://www.matsprogram.org/transparency), application deadline is April 18.
**4:** And there’s a [Reason & Rationality summer program](https://www.reasonandrationality.com) for high school students happening at Princeton (June 8-14) and Swarthmore (July 27 - Aug 2), cost is $4300 - $6900. AFAICT this one isn’t associated with our conspiracy, but I see that Amos Wollen ([philosophy substack here](https://wollenblog.substack.com/)) is one of the instructors. | Scott Alexander | 160231280 | Open Thread 375 | acx |
# "Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk
[Asterisk](https://asteriskmag.com/) invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves.
As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I’d sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly.
…but I didn’t think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it’s evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages:
> This is the ur-abduction. Someone is kidnapped by evil humanoids, dragged underground, and tortured (often in a sexually suggestive way). The Irish worried about it a thousand years ago, Richard Shaver worried about last century, and your neighbor with a “STOP THE STEAL” bumper sticker is worrying about it right now. Why?
Am I doing the thing where I cherry-pick a bunch of myths from unrelated cultures, squint at them really hard until they all look the same, and declare myself to have discovered something fundamental about the depths of the collective unconscious? **[Read the article](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/deros-and-the-ur-abduction)** and find out! | Scott Alexander | 159909961 | "Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk | acx |
# Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
This year we have spring meetups planned in over a hundred and eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
1. Africa & Middle East
2. Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
3. Europe (including UK)
4. North America & Central America
5. South America
There should very shortly be a map of these meetups on [the LessWrong community page](https://www.lesswrong.com/community).
Within each region it’s alphabetized first by country then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, **A**ustria. The exception is the USA, where they’re also alphabetized by state - so the first entry in the USA is Huntsville, **A**labama.
I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley meetup.
**Extra Info For Potential Attendees**
**1.** If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
**2**. You don’t have to RSVP or contact the organizer to be able to attend (unless the event description says otherwise); RSVPs are mostly to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up, and let them tell you if there are last-second changes. I’ve also given email addresses or other contact information for organizers in case you have a question.
**3.** If you have any feedback on the meetup (compliments, complaints, curiosities, etc) the feedback form is here: [tinyurl.com/acx-meetup-survey](http://tinyurl.com/acx-meetup-survey) .
**Extra Info For Meetup Organizers:
1.** If you’re the host, bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere (or otherwise be identifiable).
**2.** Bring blank labels and pens for nametags.
**3.** If you’re having trouble thinking of something to talk about, the attendees probably also read ACX. Ask people about a recent post or book review that they liked.
**4.** If it’s the first meetup, people are probably just going to want to talk, and you shouldn’t try to organize some kind of planned workshop or anything like that.
**5.** Have people type their name and email address in a spreadsheet or in a Google Form (accessed via a bit.ly link or QR code), so you can start a mailing list to make organizing future meetups easier.
**6.** It’s easier to schedule a followup meetup while you’re having the first, compared to trying to do it later on by email.
**7.** If you didn’t make a LessWrong event for your meetup (or if you did but Skyler didn’t know about it) the LessWrong team did it for you using the username or email address you gave on the form. To claim your event, log into LW (or create an account) using that email address, or message the LW team on Intercom (chat button in the bottom right corner of lesswrong.com).berkel
If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[ period]org.
## Africa & The Middle East
### Egypt
#### CAIRO
Contact: Mostafa Shahat
Contact Info: ms[a t]mostafashahat[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 20th, 12:00 PM
Location: Consoleya | We'll be in the main coworking space on the ground floor. I'll be wearing a name tag with 'ACX MEETUP' on it, and there will be a small sign on the table.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G2H26XR+P4>
### Israel
#### HAIFA
Contact: Sha
Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, May 6th, 5:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the goldmund bookstore , at ekron 6 in the talpiot market area, and I will be wearing a batik/Hawaiian shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G4QR262+39C>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FSc [remove this bit] lSIRSpdSJ6T5VJT2QAD
Notes: Please RSVP on whatsapp/our group email so I know how many people will participate
#### TEL AVIV
Contact: Inbar
Contact Info: inbar192[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM
Location: Sarona market, grass area next to Max Brenner
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+PQ2>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361>
Notes: Everyone is welcome, feel free to bring snacks, a large secure location is nearby in case of a missile alert.
### Nigeria
#### JOS
Contact: Jibrin
Contact Info: jibrinx[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Friday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: Will happen at ICT lab 1, University of Jos, Bauchi-rd campus.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+CX>
Notes: Access to event is free but requires registration
### Saudi Arabia
#### RIYADH
Contact: A.B.
Contact Info: AbvACX[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Friday, April 18th, 9:00 PM
Location: We’ll be at Black Stamp coffee. I’ll have a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” on my table. It should be easy to spot.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7HP8QMJM+MF>
### South Africa
#### CAPE TOWN
Contact: Leo Hyams
Contact Info: leo[a t]aisafetyct[period]com
Time: Thursday, May 8th, 5:30 PM
Location: Tiger's Milk, Kloof Street
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4FRW3CC6+7M>
Group Link: <https://lu.ma/to614ypc>
Notes: Please register on the Luma event
### Turkey
#### ANTALYA
Contact: Annalise
Contact Info: annalisetarhan[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: Beach Park, Shakespeare, on the patio - look for a propped up notebook with "ACX"
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8G8GVMMC+4VR>
#### ISTANBUL
Contact: Ozge
Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM
Location: Cafe Modern at Galataport, Istanbul Modern Museum Entrance Floor
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GHC2XGM+94>
Notes: I organize this meeting with the EA Istanbul Group. ACX readers, AI Safety and EA people, all of you are warmly welcomed. If possible, let me know that you will be attending by dropping an email or replying on LessWrong. I will be sitting outside of the cafe - weather permitting- with a ACX Meeting sign on the table. Looking forward to meeting old friends and new ones!
### UAE
#### DUBAI
Contact: Mike
Contact Info: lumenwrites[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 4:00 PM
Location: SpartaCUEs Board Game Centre, 2nd floor.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7HQQ46M8+6Q>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BfI [remove this bit] iv6EMJOZIVVhTiNocqj
Notes: Please message me (+971507349246, or via WhatsApp group) at least a day in advance to let me know that you'll be joining.
## Asia-Pacific
### Australia
#### BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Laura
Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 5:00 PM
Location: The Burrow, West End - we will be downstairs and probably towards the back where it tends to be quieter
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/5R4MG2C7+44M>
Notes: This event will be co-hosted with the regular meetup of Effective Altruism Brisbane as there's usually a ~75% overlap in attendance.
#### CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Declan
Contact Info: acxcanberra[a t]outlook[period]com
Time: Monday, April 7th, 6:00 PM
Location: The Snug Room (up the stairs behind the bar), King O'Malley's
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RPFP4CJ+MC>
Notes: No RSVP needed, but please put 'ACX' in the subject if you email.
#### HOBART, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Chris Wintergreen
Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: Parliament lawn
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4R99487J+MGJ>
Notes: If it rains, we'll likely go into Irish Murphy's. You can contact me via email on the day.
#### MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Ryan
Contact Info: xgravityx[a t]hotmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: Queensberry Hotel Carlton. Will have sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/>
Notes: RSVPs would be helpful for making a booking but not required.
#### PERTH, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Bianca Rose Peterek
Contact Info: bianca[p eriod] czatyrko[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM
Location: The Coffee Club Café – 140 William Street
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX5+34>
Notes: I am totally blind. Please look for the ACX meetup sign and announce yourself when you arrive. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you there!
#### SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Eliot
Contact Info: redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM
Location: Level 2, City of Sydney RSL, 565 George st, Sydney
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH46F4+89P
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/>
Notes: Just RSVP on meetup. Email me with any extra questions
#### WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA
Contact: Andy B
Contact Info: Andy[period]Bachler[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, April 8th, 5:30 PM
Location: We'll be in the Common Room in the Wollongong Library. This is a Harry Potter themed room on level 1 (excellent vibes)! I will have a sign on the door saying ACX Meetup.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4RQGHVFX+4G>
## China
#### SHANGHAI
Contact: David
Contact Info: dj[a t]theory-a[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 24th, 10:00 AM
Location: Zhongshan Park, Changning District (Main Entrance)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8Q336CCC+29>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/G6x [remove this bit] RGnvD
Notes: Please RSVP
## Hong Kong
#### HONG KONG
Contact: Jan
Contact Info: hongkong.acx.meetup.spring.2025[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 3:00 PM
Location: The Catalyst art gallery, G/F, 2 Po Yan Street, Shueng Wan
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7PJP74PW+7X>
## India
#### AHMEDABAD
Contact: Kabir
Contact Info: rudrakabir[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12, 07:00 PM
Location: Ares Cafe, SBR, I’ll be the dude with long hair
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H2P [remove this bit] 2bPoqUvb24ZFjr8hFrJ
#### BENGALURU
Contact: Faiz
Contact Info: timid[period]roux1v[a t]icloud[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: Matteo Coffee, 2, Church Street, Brigade Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560001
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ>
#### HYDERABAD
Contact: Ajay
Contact Info: ajay[period]bhandari[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 11:30 AM
Location: Amro Cafe, Gachibowli
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7J9WC9V4+C3>
#### AHMEDABAD
Contact: Kabir
Contact Info: rudrakabir[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12, 07:00 PM
Location: Ares Cafe, SBR, I’ll be the dude with long hair
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H2P [remove this bit] 2bPoqUvb24ZFjr8hFrJ
#### MUMBAI
Contact: Chetan Kharbanda
Contact Info: chetan[period]kharbanda2[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Khar Social, Rohan Plaza, 5th Rd, Khar, Ram Krishna Nagar, Khar West, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400052
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7JFJ3R9Q+76>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many seats to book
#### MYSORE
Contact: Chetan
Contact Info: witnwisdumb[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 5:00 PM
Location: I'll be at the gazebo at the centre of Cheluvamba Park on KRS Road in Yadavagiri. I will be wearing a white shirt, and standing next to an A4-sized sign with "ACX MEETUP" on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7J4R8JCP+FW>
Notes: Please RSVP via email.
#### NEW DELHI
Contact: Suryansh Tyagi
Contact Info: suryanshtyagiphone[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 5:00 PM
Location: Spaced out Cafe
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7JWVG6X6+QP>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jph [remove this bit] 8xQOprnK1mA7DBKkWOS
Notes: Please RSVP on +919997299972. Feel free to bring friends.
## Indonesia
#### JAKARTA
Contact: Aud
Contact Info: helloaud2000[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 20th, 2:00 PM
Location: JJ Royal Cafe Menteng
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6P58RR3G+X4>
Notes: Please RSVP to my email so I know how many people to expect. Thanks!
## Japan
#### TOKYO (ENGLISH)
Contact: JT
Contact Info: rationalitysalon[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 10:00 AM
Location: Tokyo-to Meguro-ku chuo-cho 2-4-18 Shiki Residences. Enter from the door on the north side; we'll meet you, but if you're late, ask for the party in the first suite.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMJR+PV>
Group Link: <https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/s/acx-tokyo>
Notes: Please subscribe to the substack feed for updates to the meetup details and for future events. Applications open for 5 min lightning talks, email us at the substack.
## New Zealand
#### AUCKLAND
Contact: Mark
Contact Info: markgilmour[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM
Location: Cakes & Ladders, 173 Symonds St, Auckland. I'll have a small sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/4VMP4QP6+WC>
Group Link: Email me for an invite to the WhatsApp group
Notes: We have a small existing meetup group, if you are reading this then you should absolutely come along and check it out. You should RSVP so you feel obligated to follow through :p
## Singapore
#### SINGAPORE
Contact: Ewan
Contact Info: ewantsun0[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:30 PM
Location: Address: 8 Marina View, #02-08/10 Asia Square Tower 1, Singapore 018960 (Asia Square Food Garden) I'll be at the centre of the Food Garden, wearing a green shirt. (There won't be any 'ACX Meetup' sign, but there shouldn't be anyone else at the venue so there's little risk of getting confused with another group.)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/6PH57VH2+CJ>
Group Link: https://t.me/+I3z [remove this part] ep9OOJU83NjFl. A LessWrong group is here: https://t.me/Less [remove this part] Wrong\_Singapore Andrew, a different organizer, has monthly meetups here: <https://rentry.co/AC6PH57RJV5W>
Notes: Vis-a-vis navigation: (1) Asia Square is just a short walk from Shenton Way MRT Station. (2) Please go to the right tower (Tower 1)! Also note that the Food Garden will be closed, but I'll be bringing some (vegan-friendly) food and drinks.
## South Korea
#### SEOUL
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>
## Vietnam
#### HANOI
Contact: Jord
Contact Info: jordnguyen43[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 11th, 10:00 AM
Location: Ciao Bella Coffee, ngõ 132 Đ. Võ Chí Công, Xuân La, Cầu Giấy, Hà Nội, Vietnam
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7PH73R34+83>
#### HO CHI MINH
Contact: Quang Hiệp
Contact Info: hiepbq14408[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 10:00 AM
Location: We are going to meet in The Joi Factory Coffee, let me know via email or messages when you arrive and we will take you to our table, the address is: Alley 212/2B, Nguyễn Trãi St., Nguyễn Cư Trinh Ward, Dist. 1
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/7P28QM8P+4J>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/nSoF5ntooah7f4qzj>
Notes: If possible, you should response to the following RSVP so that I can estimate the number of guests to expect - <https://calendar.app.google/jRCz8McSFGEeCAvm8>
# Europe
## Austria
#### VIENNA
Contact: Max K
Contact Info: hello[a t]maximiliankiener[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 4th, 2:00 PM
Location: Burggarten, 1010 Wien, Franz Stephan von Lothringen Statue
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWR6938+R3>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/>
Notes: Please send a brief email so I know how many people to expect, and I can tell you about an alternative location in case of bad weather. Looking forward to meeting you!
## Bulgaria
#### SOFIA
Contact: Daniel
Contact Info: bensen[period]daniel[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the gazebo in "Слънчевата градинка" (picture here https://maps.app.goo.gl/7uBsEdBKGrN2i8F6A). This little garden is part of Borisova Gradina near the tennis courts, roughly between the Television Tower and Levski Stadium. If you think you'll have trouble finding it, email me and I'll arrange for someone to meet you.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8HW+7G>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/HGaSdqwqG4SogWfTi>
## Czechia
#### PRAGUE
Contact: JK
Contact Info: acx[at]ks[dot]cz
Time: Monday, April 14, 06:30 PM
Location: Dhamasala Teahouse
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/835029216562521>
## Denmark
#### COPENHAGEN
Contact: Søren Elverlin
Contact Info: soeren[period]elverlin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 3:00 PM
Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 Copenhagen S
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F7JMH38+GC>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/KJeNBZdkHkJEugnWy>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
## Deutschland
*(See “Germany,” possibly “Bremerhaven” in particular.)*
## Estonia
#### TALLINN
Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: andrew\_n\_west[a t]yahoo[period]co[period]uk
Time: Friday, May 09th, 7:00 PM
Location: Tuletorni Taproom, we will book enough table space
Coordinates:<https://plus.codes/9GF6FM4G+2C>
## Finland
#### HELSINKI
Contact: Joe Nash
Contact Info: sschelsinkimeetup[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 6:00 PM
Location: Oluthuone Kaisla, Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki. I will have a notebook that says "ACX" on the table.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9GG65WCW+PW>
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/helsinki-rationalish/
## France
#### BORDEAUX, FRANCE
Contact: Michael
Contact Info: acx-meetup-2025-04-12[a t]weboroso[period]anonaddy[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 2:00 PM
Location: Initial meeting in the park Square of Professor Jacques Lasserre, behind 164/166 cours de l'Argonne (Maison Internationale), tram B Bergonié, entries from rue Grateloup and rue Colette, far side from the cours de l'Argonne: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.824715/-0.576945 — I will have an A4 ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CPXRCFF+V6>
Notes: So that I know if anyone is coming, please mark Yes or Maybe at LW, or write me an email. I will try to make sure we are within the park / within the line of sight of the specified location for at least 15 minutes after the posted time. Email me your phone number if you want me to text you updates if/when we move from there (e.g. if you are not sure about being able to make it on time but are interested to join a bit later).
#### LYON, FRANCE
Contact: Lucas
Contact Info: lucas\_acx\_meetup\_lyon[a t]fastmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 4:00 PM
Location: Parc de la tête d'or, à côté de la prairie aux daims
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQ6QVF2+GX>
Group Link: Il y a un télégram ACX Lyon, si vous voulez être ajoutés envoyez moi un mail. There is a telegram group for ACX Lyon, if you want to be added shoot me an email.
#### PARIS, FRANCE
Contact: Augustin
Contact Info: augustin[period]portier[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 6:00 PM
Location: In the Carrousel Garden (next to the Tuileries Gardens). We’ll be sitting on the grass near the Museum of Decorative Arts, which is located at the end of the north wing of the Louvre building complex. I’ll bring an ACX sign, and I’ll be wearing a bowtie.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FW4V87J+5Q>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/VMQ [remove this bit] q8r83GS
## Germany
*(Meetup Czar note: There’s a German-language meetup happening in Bremerhaven, which might become a regular German-language group that meets in different cities.)*
*(Anmerkung der Meetup-Leiterin: Es gibt ein deutschsprachiges Treffen in Bremerhaven, aus dem sich möglicherweise regelmäßige deutschsprachige Gruppentreffen in verschiedenen Städten entwickeln.)*
#### BERLIN
Contact: Milli
Contact Info: acx[a t]martinmilbradt[period]de
Time: Sunday, May 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36>
Group Link: https://t.me/+2-6Q [remove this part] Id-rIOczNWIy
#### BONN
Contact: Fernando
Contact Info: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F0K [remove this part] VKLiuph59B72vUyR9Vh
Time: Friday, April 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: Café Blau, Franziskanerstraße 9, 53113 Bonn
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F29P4M3+RQ>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F0K [remove this part] VKLiuph59B72vUyR9Vh
#### BREMEN
Contact: Marta
Contact Info: marta[period]krzeminska[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM
Location: Cafe Krach, Friesenstraße 16, 28203 Bremen Look for a sign "ACX meetup"
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F5C3RFH+3M>
Notes: This will be a meetup focused on meeting new people and introducing them to the Bremen rationality community. But, if you have a topic or reading you'd like to discuss, feel free to email me and we might get a chance to incorporate it.
#### BREMERHAVEN (AUF DEUTSCH)
Kontakt: Peter
Kontaktinfo: https://chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/E5X3jNZnN96CTHgEKpy63C
Datum: 3. Mai, 14 Uhr
Ort: Cafe Stuck
Koordinaten: <https://plus.codes/9F5CHH4J+W2>
Gruppenlink: https://chat.whatsapp.com/E5X [remove this bit] 3jNZnN96CTHgEKpy63C
Bemerkungen: Treffen auf Deutsch. Alle Deutschniveaus sind willkommen. Das Treffen auf Deutsch findet jedes Mal in einer verschiedenen Stadt statt. Falls du das Bremerhaver Treffen nicht besuchen kannst, aber prinzipiell Interesse daran hast, kannst du der Whatsapp-Gruppe beitreten, um dort Infos über die nächsten Treffen zu finden.
#### ERFURT
Contact: Tim
Contact Info: tim9289[a t]outlook[period]com
Time: Friday, April 18th, 6:30 PM
Location: Water feature in the Geraaue park. I'll be carrying a sign with ACX on it in big letters
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F3H2245+M6>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hhg [remove this bit] KMr81oNC9bCGqiNKH3v
#### ERLANGEN
Contact: Dimi
Contact Info: dimi[period]zharkov[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, May 1st, 5:00 PM
Location: ELEON Bar
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXHJ225+97>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IQ6 [remove this bit] whwdbgt35FMKF44s4Y0
#### FREIBURG IM BREISGAU
Contact: Omar
Contact Info: info[a t]rationality-freiburg[period]de
Time: Friday, April 11th, 6:00 PM
Location: Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9, 79100 Freiburg
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9>
Group Link: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de
Notes: If possible, check the event on the website for some reading as preparation: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/ If not, come anyway :-)
#### HAMBURG
Contact: Gunnar Zarncke
Contact Info: g[period]zarncke[plus]acx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 4:00 PM
Location: Eppendorfer Park at the pond, we will have a sign reading "ACX Meetup".
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F5FHXQH+MF>
Group Link: lesswrong-hamburg@googlegroups.com
Notes: Feel free to bring friends and family.
#### HANOVER
Contact: Lars T.
Contact Info: lars[period]truee[a t]stud[period]uni-hannover[period]de
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 2:00 PM
Location: L'Osteria, Lavesstraße near Main station. I will have a small sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F4F9PFV+MX>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fei [remove this bit] IOVIqok5KA8BM5DvBz2
Notes: Please join the Whatsappgroup, if you use Whatsapp, for better planning. We might move to a different place as the meeting progresses, or just go for a walk through the park.
#### HEIDELBERG
*(See “Mannheim, Germany”)*
#### KARLSRUHE
Contact: Marcus
Contact Info: https://www[period]lesswrong[period]com/users/wilm
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM
Location: We meet in Otto-Dullenkopf-Park (Süd), around the large trees and wavy concrete walls/benches in the middle. I’ll bring a sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXC2C3H+6C>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/kw7Zb8DLmZtsK8g3R>
Notes: In case of bad weather we go somewhere indoors. I’ll update the location in the (comments of) the LessWrong post
#### KONSTANZ
Contact: SD
Contact Info: Contact me on the Whatsapp group
Time: Monday, April 14th, 6:00 PM
Location: University of Konstanz library
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FVFM5QQ+MG>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/G2f [remove this bit] Xuu2k5heAMaGFO8cbRp
Notes: No RSVP required. Looking forward to it! Join the WhatsApp in case there are any changes to the plan
#### LEIPZIG
Contact: Benjamin Schmidt
Contact Info: benschm9542[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, April 28th, 6:00 PM
Location: With good wheather we'll meet at the Pavillon in the East corner of Johannapark, and will have an A2 poster with the ACX logo. With bad wheather at Leos Brasserie.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F3J89M8+XQ>
Group Link: Telegram group people can join - mail me for the link
Notes: Do you like Brownies or something healthier :)?
#### MAINZ
Contact: Lukas
Contact Info: lf\_mail[a t]posteo[period]de
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: “Baron“ on the Uni Mainz campus
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXCX6VW+Q8>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/K6h [remove this bit] 4DsFG6YFECxhlfKXFIR
Notes: Please RSVP – thanks!
#### MANNHEIM
Contact: Simon
Contact Info: acxmannheim[a t]mailbox[period]org
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 4:00 PM
Location: Good weather: Rheinpromenade (Flagpole), bad weather: Murphy's Law Pub
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FXCFFH6+9J>
Group Link: https://signal.group/#CjQKIF [remove this bit] micB23eRhkDDjxjT94PWsbTYPdux-uoZJH2bH2M7OqEhBzfNMhsDNayw\_ETHxhsGG6
Notes: Bring a blanket and snacks/drinks! Sign up via email or Signal so you are informed when we switch to the inside location.
#### MUNICH
Contact: M. Stautner
Contact Info: acx[period]organizer[period]munich[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 10th, 4:00 PM
Location: Müllerstraße 35, 80469 München; TeamWork Konferenzraum; walk past the courtyard to find the actual apartment building we'll be meeting in
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWH4HJ9+7P>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jek [remove this bit] HeDBFokxLlmceXsYhLv
Notes: Bring snacks if you like
#### MÜNSTER
Contact: AM
Contact Info: acx-ms[a t]gmx[period]net
Time: Thursday, April 3rd, 7:30 PM
Location: A bar close to the main station, contact us for details.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F39XJ4M+QX>
Notes: Please send us an email beforehand, because the planning is still somewhat provisional at the moment (and we would like to know what table size we should reserve, so as not to annoy the restaurant/bar owners).
#### STUTTGART
Contact: Steve
Contact Info: Steve[period]Bachelor[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 4:00 PM
Location: Meeting in Milaneo mall courtyard, outside Starbucks, for ease of finding. Moving to my flat, above, for the main meetup. I will wear an orange t-shirt with a QR code for the EICAR string for ease of identification.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWFQ5RM+H8>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/xhr [remove this bit] uFVhj
#### TÜBINGEN
Contact: Ameya Prabhu
Contact Info: ameya[period]pandurang[period]prabhu[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 6:30 PM
Location: Neckawa, Wöhrdstraße 25. I will be carrying a sign with ACX Meetup on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWFG396+5G>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how big a table to book
## Hungary
#### BUDAPEST
Contact: Tim
Contact Info: timunderwood9[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 1:00 PM
Location: Muzeum Kert, in the North East corner,
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+Q8>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest>
## Ireland
#### DUBLIN
Contact: David O
Contact Info: inlets\_spinal\_0a[a t]icloud[period]com
Time: Friday, April 11th, 7:00 PM
Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H>
Group Link: hxxps://chat[dot]whatsapp[dot]com/Ecgu6De4a[ignore this]XkDhAk9FELKGr (Note: The link has been obfuscated due to spam.)
Notes: No RSVP required
## Italy
#### BERGAMO
Contact: Daniele
Contact Info: daniele[period]denuntiis[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 4:00 PM
Location: Via Martin Luther King, 100, 24127 Bergamo BG. We'll be hanging out near the Cafe, I'll bring a sign or something recognizable.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X>
Notes: Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not ‘the typical ACX reader’, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc. RSVPs appreciated but not required.
#### FLORENCE
Contact: Joel
Contact Info: WhatsApp: [plus]393517734452
Time: Wednesday, April 2nd, 6:00 PM
Location: 6PM at Giardino pubblico "La Montagnola" Via Salvi Cristiani, 50135 Firenze FI, Italy https://maps.app.goo.gl/eX51qGzDcwHhyXuV6
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FMHQ7GV+FG>
Notes: RSVP with WhatsApp to +393517734452
#### MILANO
Contact: Raffaele Mauro
Contact Info: raffa[period]mauro[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 10th, 6:30 PM
Location: Primo Ventures, Viale Luigi Majno, 18, 20129 Milano MI - 2nd Floor
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQFF6C4+9C>
Notes: Please RSVP to raffa.mauro@gmail.com and federico.cuppoloni@gmail.com
#### PADOVA
Contact: Carlo
Contact Info: carlo[period]martinucci[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Prato della Valle, Isola Memmia, south, then we'll move to a bar or something
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FQH9VXG+8J>
#### ROME
Contact: Giulio Starace
Contact Info: giulio[period]starace[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: Villa Borghese ([here](https://maps.app.goo.gl/JSswoRA6TmGn39aw5), specifically) if it's sunny, Caffe' Letterario if it's cloudy
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FHJVFCJ+C4>
Notes: Message me or email me to join the WhatsApp group!
## Latvia
#### RIGA
Contact: Anastasia
Contact Info: riga[period]acx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 11th, 6:30 PM
Location: MiiT Coffee, Lāčplēša iela 10, Rīga
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G86X44C+M5>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/fE7wFrbHoAKAvw5bw>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong for reservation purposes. If you feel awkward about coming, please do anyway! Reach out by email if some social worry is preventing you from dropping by.
## Lithuania
#### VILNIUS
Contact: Tom
Contact Info: acx[period]vilnius[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:00 PM
Location: Lukiškių aikštė (Lukiškės square), Vilnius I'll be somewhere in the center with an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G67M7QC+R7>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/MrB [remove this bit] xnNBKbA
Notes: Anyone interested is welcome! We'll be gathering at the center of the square, then probably move on to a cafe or something nearby. RSVPs preferred, but not required.
## Luxemburg
#### LUXEMBURG
Contact: RO
Contact Info: ACX[a t]nixnuxnox[period]xyz
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: Le Mirador, 2 montee de clausen
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FX8J46Q+WM>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/luxembourg-discussions-meetup-group>
Notes: Feel free to contact me before the meetup on the Meetup app or email address
## Netherlands
#### AMSTERDAM
Contact: Tom
Contact Info: hello[a t]tomrijntjes[period]nl
Time: Sunday, May 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Westerpark, across the street from IJscuypje.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F469VPC+JR>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C1X [ remove this bit] 049OJR7AI0LKYViUkR1
Notes: Hang around and eat ice cream. Pets are welcome.
#### GRONINGEN
Contact: Herman
Contact Info: Hvdveer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, May 13th, 5:30 PM
Location: Zondag, Noorderplantsoen, Groningen.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F586HF4+V63>
Group Link: Whatsapp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F82 [remove this bit] ttw1lmJlFCcBs8f8rTu Facebook: <https://facebook.com/groups/1078005920756368>
#### UTRECHT
Contact: Lodewijk van der Meer
Contact Info: lodevandermeer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 1:00 PM
Location: Muntkelder Pannekoekenhuis - Oudegracht aan de Werf 112: I will be wearing a tiger vest jacket or a (if it's not too warm, lol)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F4734V8+6R>
Notes: RSVPs not required, but preferred: please e-mail lodevandermeer[a t]gmail[d ot]com
## Norway
#### BERGEN
Contact: William
Contact Info: william[period]wale[a t]effektivaltruisme[period]no
Time: Monday, May 05th, 6:00 PM
Location: Kvarteret, Olav Kyrres gate 49, 5015 Bergen
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9FG798QC+VQ>
#### OSLO
Contact: Hans Andreas
Contact Info: acxoslomeetup[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:30 PM
Location: Café Billabong, Bogstadveien 53 0366 Oslo
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9FFGWPH7+RQ>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/rationalists/events/306883991>
Notes: Please RSVP on the Meetup event or by email to help estimate seating. We're at a cafe, but ordering food is optional.
## Poland
#### WARSAW
Contact: ntoxeg
Contact Info: ntoxeg[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM
Location: Wilcza 25, Warsaw, Poland; Południk Zero, one of the rooms downstairs.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G4362G8+2V>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/DcC [remove this bit] pm5TaBY
## Portugal
#### LISBON
Contact: Luis Campos
Contact Info: luis[period]filipe[period]lcampos[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 3:00 PM
Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/iJzwL2ukGBAGNcwJq>
## Russia
#### KALININGRAD
Contact: Yan Lyutnev
Contact Info: @yanskov (telegram) (See the Group Link)
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:30 PM
Location: Chekhov Library, 2nd floor, conference hall. Moskovsky Prospekt Street 39, Russia, Kaliningrad.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G62PG63+3R>
Group Link: https://t.me/+M2JH [remove this bit] Ikss6tZiMzEy
Notes: Access to the event is free. Registration is optional.
#### MOSCOW
Contact: teapot/Di
Contact Info: blastjoe41[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 06th, 1:00 PM
Location: Monoid - Moscow, Lomonosovsky street (проспект), 25к3
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PG>
Group Link: https://t.me/+6oIqc [remove this bit] FWhsilkOTJi
Notes: we don't require RSVP but it would still be cool if you messaged us beforehand
## Serbia
#### BELGRADE
Contact: Tanja Trninic
Contact Info: tanja[period]trninic[a t]efektivnialtruizam[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 4:00 PM
Location: vegANGELov vegan restaurant
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8GP2RFC6+2VG>
Group Link: https://t.me/Trlo [remove this part] mpi
Notes: Please email me if you’d like to participate and have any dietary restrictions. One dish and a drink is covered by EA funds and ACX Meetups.
## Slovakia
#### BRATISLAVA
Contact: Bratislava Slovakia
Contact Info: matej[dot]futures[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday, April 24, 07:00 PM
Location: teabar.sk in Omen House
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FWV44XC+WQ>
## Spain
#### BARCELONA
Contact: Tobi
Contact Info: tb[dot]acx[at]proton[dot]me
Time: Thursday, April 17, 06:00 PM
Location: Parc de la Ciutadella on Sunday, Sep 9th from 5.30pm-7.30pm. https://maps.app.goo.gl/d4rHnGXinryAMAbP8
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FH495QM+MV>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a8JdcnpTRYirgncZT>
#### MADRID
Contact: Pablo
Contact Info: pvillalobos[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 11:00 AM
Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre (https://www.esmadrid.com/en/tourist information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro). We will be near the theater stands, and I will bring a large ACX sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8M>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid>
#### VALENCIA
Contact: Giovanni
Contact Info: gsstasi[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM
Location: Cherry Blossom Valencia, C/ de Moratín, 15, 46002
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8CFXFJCF+7Q>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EyP [remove this part] eUKR5HfaFp2lM8cP108
## Sweden
#### GOTHENBURG
Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: acx\_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se
Time: Wednesday, May 7th, 6:00 PM
Location: Condeco Fredsgatan, second floor, look for some books on the table
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/306691088/>
#### STOCKHOLM
Contact: Valerio Lomanto
Contact Info: ian[dot]maayrkas [at] gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 11, 03:00 PM
Location: Smedsudden. It's a smaller park near Rålhambshovsparken in Kungsholmen near the city center. One of us will wear very yellow clothes.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9FFW82GF+42>
Group Link: Telegram group for Stockholm Rationalists: https://t.me/+Z51 [remove this bit] hOrlfazMwZmU0
Additional Notes: We will be bringing some snacks and some boardgames. The idea is to have some picnic-ish thing in the grass and enjoy the spring. Feel free to bring whatever you think you or others will enjoy. See you there! :) Please RSVP or join the group or email because if it's too crowded we might have to find another spot and then we'll communicate where we are. We may also need to change to an indoor location if the weather is bad.
## Switzerland
#### BERN
Contact: Daniel
Contact Info: dd14214[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, April 16th, 6:00 PM
Location: Grosse Schanze at the Albrecht Haller statue
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR9XC2Q+3GP
#### ZÜRICH
Contact: Vitor
Contact Info: acxzurich[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 3:00 PM
Location: Blatterwiese in front of the chinese garden (In case of rain we are inside the garden)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8FVC9H32+VH>
## United Kingdom
#### BELFAST
Contact: John Dawson
Contact Info: john[perio d]a[period]dawson[at]proton [peri od]me
Time: Saturday, May 03, 2:00 PM
Location: Town Square
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C6PH3Q8+7MF>
#### BIRMINGHAM
Contact: Askwho
Contact Info: askew[period]thomas[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 1:00 PM
Location: Upstairs at Tim Hortons, 112-113 New St, Birmingham B2 4EU. By the windows if possible, I'll have a piece of paper with "ACX Meetup" on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C4WF4H2+M5>
Notes: Venue very close to New Street Station
#### BRISTOL
Contact: Matthew
Contact Info: bristoleffectivealtruism[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17th, 11:00 AM
Location: Broadmead shopping centre, The Galleries, Entrance near Caffè Nero, We'll have a sign with ACX Meetup on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3VFC46+QF>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/share/1EZD4H2h5D/>
Notes: Please RSVP on the Facebook event so we have an idea of how many are coming.
#### CAMBRIDGE
Contact: Hamish Todd
Contact Info: hamish[period]todd1[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: Upstairs at The Bath House
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9F426439+JC>
#### EDINBURGH
Contact: Sam
Contact Info: acxedinburgh[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 2:00 PM
Location: Quad room, ground floor, Old College, University of Edinburgh (room G.158)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3>
Group Link: Email acxedinburgh@gmail.com to join the mailing list and WhatsApp group.
Notes: After discussing ~3 essays by Scott per month for multiple years, our group has branched out into adjacent topics, and in May we will be discussing 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' by Claude Shannon. You can see the list of everything we've read here: <http://bit.ly/4hpnbhL>. I know Scott is sceptical of "assigning" readings, but we have a great setup – often with special guests and 'field trips' around the city – and I encourage people to email and join the community. :)
#### LIVERPOOL
Contact: BM
Contact Info: sgbmanso[a t]liverpool[period]ac[period]uk
Time: Saturday, May 03rd, 11:00 AM
Location: The Sphinx bar & grill, 160 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L3 5TR Near the picnic tables right opposite the entrance. I will be wearing a green shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP written on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5VC23M+XCC>
#### LONDON
Contact: Edward Saperia
Contact Info: ed[a t]newspeak[period]house
Time: Saturday, May 31st, 1:00 PM
Location: A small circular park just south of Gabriel's Pier.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3XGV5R+458>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/acxlondon>
Notes: Not at the usual place! Picnic accoutrements would be warmly welcomed. Please register at <https://lu.ma/ACX-London-May-2025>.
#### NOTTINGHAM
Contact: Alex Patterson
Contact Info: alex\_acx\_mtup[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:30 PM
Location: The upstairs mezz bar at Broadway Cinema. I will have a small sign which says "ACX Meetup".
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C4WXV34+PF>
Notes: While not required, please send me an email with the subject line "ACX Meetup RSVP" so I know how many people are coming.
#### OXFORD
Contact: Stan
Contact Info: stanislawmalinowski09[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, May 21st, 6:30 PM
Location: the Star Pub on Rectory Road
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QM>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/oxfordrationalish>
#### READING
Contact: Ben Woden
Contact Info: cascadestyler[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM
Location: Siren Craft Brew, 1 Friar's Walk, Reading RG1 1HP
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8P>
Notes: If you can RSVP by Apr 19th, that will help me book us a spot of the appropriate size, but please still feel free to come if you don't RSVP. The bar is child and dog friendly, and serves things besides beer if you fancy.
#### SHEFFIELD
Contact: Colin Z. Robertson
Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 3:00 PM
Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/8RM [remove this bit] x8BvZbz
# North America & Central America
## Canada
#### CALGARY
Contact: Megh
Contact Info: meghss[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM
Location: We will meet at the Bono Coffee Roasters, close to Murdoch park in Bridgeland. I will have ACX meetup sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/95373X33+7H>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/LZQ6HBAd8afoqPP27>
#### EDMONTON
Contact: Joseph Shapkin
Contact Info: ta1hynp09[a t]relay[period]firefox[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 17th, 7:00 PM
Location: Irrational Brewing 10643 124 St #109. We will have an ACX sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG>
#### HALIFAX
Contact: Noah
Contact Info: usernameneeded[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 1:00 PM
Location: We'll be meeting in the Oxford taproom, probably on the second floor. Our table will have a blue pyramid on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87PRJ9VX+PP>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/v2V [remove this bit] QnuBY
#### KINGSTON
Contact: Jeremy
Contact Info: alphabetadelta0[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 6th, 3:00 PM
Location: 78 Princess St, Kingston, ON K7L 1A5 at Minotaur. They have free board games available to play, I'll be at a table in a red shirt with a small ACX 2025 sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87P56GJ9+F7>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/zgG [remove this bit] w5hpjds
Notes: Feel free to email me or join the Discord if you live in Kingston but don't intend to come to the schelling meet up!
#### KITCHENER
*(See “Waterloo”)*
#### MONTRÉAL
Contact: Henri
Contact Info: acxmontreal[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM
Location: L'Esplanade Tranquille, 1442 Clark. Rough location here: https://plus.codes/87Q8GC5P+P2R. We'll have an ACX Meetup sign and I'll be wearing a funky hat.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87Q8GC5P+P2R>
Group Link: LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia | Discord: https://discord.gg/K8g [remove this bit] MNzqPVG | Mailing list: http://eepurl.com/io5vZM | Facebook group: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/less.wrong.montreal/>
#### OTTAWA
Contact: Tess
Contact Info: rationalottawa[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 18th, 7:00 PM
Location: "The Penalty Box" private room at Hometown Sports Bar & Grill, 1525 Bank St, Ottawa, K1H7Z1, see the yellow ACX sign on the door to the private room
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87Q698JJ+FM>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/NCx [remove this bit] GNU5a9z
Notes: Come on out to encounter ACX readers, and to find out what our Rational Ottawa weekly meetup group is like/is all about! Past years have seen attendance range from 1-2 dozen at these events, and I would expect that to continue. Please feel welcome to join us even if you're not quite sure you fit the crowd, or feel awkward about doing meetups! All appetizers to be provided by the group!
#### TORONTO
Contact: Sean A
Contact Info: k9i9m9ufh[a t]mozmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 2:00 PM
Location: Enter the Mars Atrium via University Avenue entrance. We'll meet at the food court in the basement. I'll be wearing a bright neon yellow jacket.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87M2MJ56+XG>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/8ktnBi4AjxtCmGeXA>
Notes: If for some reason the Mars Building is locked, which happens occasionally due to protests and other events, we will still meet outside of the University Avenue entrance for 30 minutes after the start time before relocating to somewhere more accommodating.
#### VANCOUVER
Contact: Allwyn
Contact Info: allwyn8443[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17, 11:00 AM
Location: Mount Pleasant Park, 3161 Ontario St, Vancouver, BC V5Y 0B3
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84XR7V4V+RH>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kdl [remove this bit] gviZRNzj1JLYEWbLmg6
Additional Notes: Feel free to bring along friends - give them a heads up about ACX substack, maybe share some top posts with them, so they have an idea!
#### WATERLOO
Contact: Jenn
Contact Info: jenn[a t]kwrationality[period]ca
Time: Thursday, May 8th, 7:00 PM
Location: Meeting Room A, Kitchener Public Library Central Branch (85 Queen St N, Kitchener)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86MXFG37+4F>
Group Link: https://kwrationality.ca/
Notes: Please RSVP at the LW link ([https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XgtPQ8HNenLiTa2kx/2025-acx-spring-megameetup)](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XgtPQ8HNenLiTa2kx/2025-acx-spring-megameetup) or on Discord, so I know how much pizza to get.
## Mexico
#### MEXICO CITY
Contact: Eddie
Contact Info: acxcdmx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17th, 4:00 PM
Location: Feel free to join us at Cafebrería El Péndulo, Condesa, for coffee, drinks, and rationalist-related conversation.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76F2CR6G+6R>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/uzTxYaFupgz9ZnCT5>
## USA
### Alabama
#### HUNTSVILLE
Contact: Tim
Contact Info: timothy[period]n[period]jesionowski[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: The Nook. 3305 Bob Wallace Ave SW I'll be in a black leather jacket, ask Monika if you can't find me.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/866MP96Q+F6>
### Arizona
#### PHOENIX
Contact: Nathan
Contact Info: natoboo2000[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, May 16th, 5:30 PM
Location: The Churchill. Covered, open-air space with misters. Food hall. I'll have a sign saying ACX.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8559FW5H+44>
Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/ANS[remove this part]ywQABEF, <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/xSLmmoudDGM2w8JEG>
### Arkansas
#### BENTONVILLE
Contact: Charles
Contact Info: nwa\_rationality[period]humid012[a t]silomails[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: Onyx Coffee Lab, NW 2nd Street
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86879QFR+77>
### California
#### BERKELEY
Contact: Scott and Skyler
Contact Info: skyler[a t]rationalitymeetups[period]org
Time: Wednesday, June 4th, 6:30 PM
Location: 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5>
Group Link: bayrationality.com
Notes: Held between Less.Online and Manifest 3, we expect a lot of interesting out-of-town visitors. We’ll provide food, kids are welcome, no pets please!
#### CHICO
Contact: Ryan
Contact Info: ryan[period]axtell[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17th, 2:00 PM
Location: The Commons Social Empourium, 2412 Park Ave, Chico, CA 95928. I'll have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84FWP57M+WM>
#### GRASS VALLEY
Contact: Max and Haven Worsham Harms
Contact Info: raelifin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17th, 02:00 PM
Location: Weather permitting, we'll be at a picnic table near the Prospector Statue in Condon Park. If it rains, we'll probably meet up at our house nearby.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84FW6W8H+F4>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that we can reach out for updates in case details change (such as location)
#### LOS ANGELES
Contact: Vishal
Contact Info: DM "koreindian" on the LAR discord
Time: Wednesday, April 30th, 7:00 PM
Location: 11841 Wagner Street, Culver City
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/TaY [remove this bit] jsvN
Notes: Don't need to RSVP. Just join the discord for more details on the topic of the meeting.
#### NEWPORT BEACH
Contact: Michael Michalchik
Contact Info: michaelmichalchik[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 port Laurent place. White garage door, brick entrance into a duplex.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8554J47R+Q8>
Group Link: Email me to be put on our weekly mailing list. Michaelmichalchik. Put keyword in subject line Acxlw
Notes: RSVP is appreciated but not required
#### **SACRAMENTO**
Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: nightfall9[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 25, 1pm
Location: WAL Public Market (1104 R St, Sacramento, CA 95811)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+5Q>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/jwjT9arZ>
Notes: How to get to the space - email me and I'll walk you through it - there will be food and drinks, feel free to bring something, there will be room
#### SAN DIEGO
Contact: Julius
Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM
Location: Wisdom Park
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+55>
Group Link: <https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/>
#### SAN FRANCISCO
Contact: Nate, Andrew, and Austin
Contact Info: acx-everywhere-sf-spring-2025[ at]googlegroups[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: 1680 Mission St (Mox)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82>
Notes: Kids welcome!
#### SAN JOSE
Contact: David Friedman
Contact Info: ddfr[ at]daviddfriedman[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 6th, 2:00 PM
Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q>
#### **SANTA CRUZ**
Contact: Ron
Contact Info: mitts[dot]ashrams-3j[at]icloud[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 27, 01:00 PM
Location: This will be in a private home. Sign up for the address.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/848VXX72+75
Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can send you the address.
#### SANTA ROSA
Contact: Mike
Contact Info: semanticprion[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, May 12th, 6:00 PM
Location: Brew Coffee House, 555 Healdsburg Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84CVC7VJ+8Q>
### Colorado
#### BOULDER
Contact: Josh Sacks
Contact Info: Josh[period]sacks[plus]acx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 04th, 3:00 PM
Location: 9191 Tahoe ln, Boulder,CO 80301
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GP2V96+JR>
Notes: Please RSVP on Less Wrong so we know how much cheese to get. If the weather is nice there’s outdoor seating, otherwise inside. We have 3 very friendly cats.
#### DENVER
Contact: Steven Zuber
Contact Info: stevenjzuber[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 18th, 12:00 PM
Location: Robert F. Clement Park. 7306 W. Bowles Ave., Littleton, CO 80123
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85FPJW4F+V8>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/oa7zHKuy5jdJQ9HAB>
Notes: Feel free to bring dogs, kids, and food. Specific table reservation will be booked soon, probably picnic shelter Q. Here's a link to a map of the park: https://www.ifoothills.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Clement\_Park\_Map.pdf
#### FORT COLLINS
Contact: Spencer
Contact Info: focorats[a t]posteo[period]net
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 1:00 PM
Location: Wolverine Farm (316 Willow St), out front or upstairs depending on weather
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GPHWRG+7M>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/dks4PmoHn4dpK94MR>
### Connecticut
#### ~~MANCHESTER, CONNECTICUT, USA~~
~~Contact: Richard B.
Contact Info: riba[at]firemail[dot]cc
Time: Saturday, May 03, 01:00 PM
Location: By the flagpole on top of the hill of the Center Memorial Park.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H9QFFH+C3G
Additional Notes: I expect we'll move somewhere inside for a coffee.~~
(Canceled and merging with the New Haven meetup)
#### NEW HAVEN
Contact: Evan
Contact Info: acx[period]newhaven[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 12:00 PM
Location: We will meet in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the top of East Rock Park. I will be wearing red.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87H983GW+V3>
Notes: RSVPs are desired, but not required. Email me. Rain date is Sunday the 20th at noon You can drive to the top of the ridge. Budget a few minutes for this because it's a narrow, windy road with lots of pedestrians. You can also park by the baseball fields on English Drive and take a short, steep hike to the summit.
### D.C.
#### WASHINGTON, D.C.
Contact: Annie Normal
Contact Info: normalannie[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 6:00 PM
Location: Lost & Found DC, 1240 9th street NW
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87C4WX4G+P8>
Group Link: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595>
Notes: Link for those without Facebook: <https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx?pli=1>
*(Uptown meetup group info here: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227/>)*
### Florida
#### CAPE CORAL
Contact: Shawn
Contact Info: Shawn[period]Spilman[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 4th, 12:01 PM
Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RWH224+44>
#### FORT LAUDERDALE
Contact: Lawrence
Contact Info: fort[period]lauderdale[period]acx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 1:30 PM
Location: Funky Buddha Brewery, parking is free in the lot across the street, I'll be sitting at a table with an "ACX MEETUP" sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+PF>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ>
Notes: Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming
#### GAINESVILLE
Contact: Vince
Contact Info: vatter[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 7:00 PM
Location: 4th Ave Food Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XVJMXC+5CC
#### MIAMI
Contact: Zoheb
Contact Info: zohebanjum[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 2:00 PM
Location: 1111 Brickell Ave, Miami, FL 33131. We'll be in the lobby, but you can also enter through the Carrot Express.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76QXQR65+VQ>
Group Link: <https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ>
Notes: The meetup will go on for several hours so don't worry if you have to arrive later than 2pm. Also, if you need to show up earlier, reach out since we can be flexible about the time. We regularly host local events and also have members across south Florida. If you can't make it to this event, connect with us via Discord or e-mail to stay tuned for future opportunities!
#### ORLANDO
Contact: Ethan
Contact Info: ethanhuyck[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 7:30 PM
Location: The pavilion outside the breezeway at UCF.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76WWJQ2X+72R>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/MJw [remove this bit] cEND9wu
#### PENSACOLA
Contact: Metaculus Christian
Contact Info: christian[a t]metaculus[period]com
Time: Wednesday, April 02nd, 09:00 PM
Location: https://www.oldhickorywhiskeybar.com/ 123 S. Palafox Place, Pensacola, FL 32502 I'll wear a Metaculus hoodie
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/862JCQ6M+6X>
Notes: RSVP. Message if you want to come, because if I don't get any messages, I won't be there.
#### ST. PETERSBURG
Contact: Nathaniel B.
Contact Info: nathanieltb2[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 1:00 PM
Location: We'll meet at Vinoy Park, at or near the circular path surrounding the Truth Sculpture at the southern end of the park. I'll have a sign that says "ACX."
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+V89>
Notes: Please feel free to attend even if you're anxious, and regardless of how often you read the blog. Folks from Tampa and surrounding cities are also welcome to attend!
#### WEST PALM BEACH
Contact: Charlie
Contact Info: chuckwilson477[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 03rd, 11:00 AM
Location: Grandview Public Market. 1401 Clare Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. We'll be at the northeast outside area, sitting at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot, and there may also be a free valet service.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76RXMWXP+GH>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZ [remove this bit] eYP83MQ
Notes: Hosted by the south Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray and many others. Come join our Discord, we're always welcoming!
### Georgia
#### ATLANTA
Contact: Steve
Contact Info: steve[a t]digitaltoolfactory[period]net
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bold Monk Brewing, 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW, Suite D-1, Atlanta, GA 30318, USA
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8>
Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
### Hawaii
#### HONOLULU
Contact: Nancy Hua
Contact Info: nancythehua[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 4:00 PM
Location: Kapiolani park
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/73H4758H+5Q>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. Please [RSVP on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Pj9qYugCeBaCkQG8E/honolulu-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2025) so I know how much food to get.
### Illinois
#### CHICAGO
Contact: Noah Birnbaum
Contact Info: dnbirnbaum[a t]uchicago[period]edu
Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM
Location: On the UChicago campus - usually in the Bartlett Dining Commons lounge but this could be subject to change.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86HJQCR2+QJ>
Group Link: Uchicago: <https://forms.gle/LZPSxwd1gtHku2QbA> General Chicago: https://chicagorationality.com
Notes: If you are on the mailing list, please fill out RSVP form that will be sent out so that I know how much food to get.
### Indiana
#### INDIANAPOLIS
Contact: Tyler
Contact Info: tylerbraly[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 PM
Location: Upland Brewery Fountain Square 1201 Prospect St, Indianapolis, IN 46203
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86FMQV36+VV>
#### WEST LAFAYETTE
Contact: Grant
Contact Info: grantfellows18[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 3:30 PM
Location: Address: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1268, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. BRNG 1268 is in the southwest corner of the building, and can be found after turning left at the south entrance. Please email me if you cannot find us. I will also place an ACX Meetup sign at the entrance to the room.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86GMC3GM+4C>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/WpG [remove this bit] TW4htZm
### Iowa
#### AMES
Contact: Sarah
Contact Info: throwaway3454554[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 06th, 4:00 PM
Location: Cafe Diem- 229 Main St, Ames, IA 50010. I will have a sign with ACX meet up on it. Likely sitting near the window towards the front of the store
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86J829GP+3M>
Notes: RVSP NOT required but useful. First time doing this.
### Kentucky
#### LOUISVILLE
Contact: Owen
Contact Info: owencardwellcopenhefer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 4:00 PM
Location: Noble Funk Brewing Company
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86CP66RV+5C>
Notes: Location is child friendly. EV slow-charging available.
### Maine
#### PORTLAND
Contact: Frost
Contact Info: argot207[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, April 21st, 6:00 PM
Location: Bell Buoy Park on the Waterfront, I've got dyed blue hair you can spot me with, and I'll be near the Bouy.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87MFMQ52+22>
### Maryland
#### BALTIMORE
Contact: Rivka
Contact Info: Rivka[a t]adrusi[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 20th, 7:00 PM
Location: First floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building at UMBC. The address is 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250. There will be a sign that says "ACX Meetup".
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87F5774P+53>
Group Link: We have a mailing list and a discord. The mailing list is more for our weekly meetup reminders and the discord is more of a social environment. Here's a link to the discord: https://discord.gg/h4z [remove this bit] 5UgeYVK. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please email me.
Notes: Parking is free on the weekend. There will be food and drinks. RSVPs are useful so I know how much food to get, but are not required.
#### FORT MEADE
Contact: Ferret
Contact Info: meetup2025[period]unseen534[a t]passmail[period]net
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: Ask Organizer
Coordinates: Ask Organizer
Group Link: Ask Organizer
Notes: Event will be held on a government installation. Guests must be able to access the base on their own. Organizer will not sponsor attendees onto base.
### Massachusetts
#### BOSTON
Contact: Skyler and Mili
Contact Info: Skyler[ at] rationalitymeetups[period] org
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 2:00pm
Location: Sennott Park, 305 Broadway, Cambridge
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87JC9W92+92>
Group Link: <https://linktr.ee/bostonacx>
Additional Notes: Kids and pets welcome!
#### CAMBRIDGE
*(See “Boston, Massachusetts”)*
#### NEWTON
Contact: duck\_master
Contact Info: duckmaster0[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:00 PM
Location: Newton Centre Green (Centre St & Beacon St)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87JC8RJ4+76>
#### NORTHAMPTON
Contact: Alex Liebowitz
Contact Info: alex[a t]alexliebowitz[period]com
Time: Friday, April 11th, 06:00 PM
Location: Common house at Rocky Hill Cohousing, 100 Black Birch Trail, Northampton, MA 01062. The common house is the first building you see when coming into the community (but after the event parking, which lines the road leading in on the right). Note: Florence is a village within Northampton, and some maps services show the city as Florence, some as Northampton.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J9884H+VF>
Group Link: Email alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com to get on mailing list (let me know if you want to be a CC or BCC). There's also a lightly-used Discord that you can join at at https://discord.gg/vec [remove this bit] W7TfsPg .
Notes: Guest parking should be along the road leading in (Black Birch Trail), parking to the right as you drive in. There is an Event Parking sign but it is not the most visible. There are disabled spaces directly in front of the Common House (100 Black Birch Trail). If we overflow the road, people can use the resident lots to the left and right.
#### WILLIAMSTOWN
Contact: Satya Benson
Contact Info: acx[period]meetup[a t]satchlj[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 01:30 PM
Location: Sawyer Library 430 Conference Room
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J8PQ7X+C5F>
Group Link: <https://eph.lol/acx/>
Notes: There will be suggested reading ahead of the meetup
### Michigan
#### ANN ARBOR
Contact: Joseph Pryor
Contact Info: jwpryorprojects[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 17th, 01:00 PM
Location: Friends Meetinghouse 1420 Hill St. Ann Arbor Mi If the weather is good will meet in the back yard at the picnic tables, if it is raining or too cold the corner room of the meeting house is reserved.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86JR77C9+MQ>
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/ann-arbor-ssc-rationalist-meetup-group
Notes: Meetup runs from 1pm to 5pm, come any time in that range! All day parking is available in the alley at the rear of the property and on the side streets. Feel free to bring food and drinks if the weather is good. (no food or drinks indoors) Bathrooms are available inside the building. For any questions or for text reminders the day before: 517-945-8084 No rsvp required but check out our monthly meetups at the group link!
#### DETROIT
Contact: Victor
Contact Info: wooddellv[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Friday, April 11th, 06:00 PM
Location: Panera Bread at the corner of Woodward and 13 Mile road, in Royal Oak.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86JRGR87+X3>
Notes: Please RSVP to my email address.
### Minnesota
#### SAINT PAUL
Contact: Aaron Kaufman
Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 4th, 01:00 PM
Location: Davanni's Pizza ; 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX>
Notes: Please RSVP on lesswrong so I know how much food to get. Also note that regrettably if you're a vegan davanni's has salad and little else (though I will be getting the salad).
### Missouri
#### COLUMBIA
Contact: Ben Scott
Contact Info: bens9775[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 02:00 PM
Location: Cosmo-Bethel Park, 4500 Bethel St, Columbia, MO 65203 We'll be at the shelter by the parking lot. I'll be wearing a red shirt and there will be a sign that says ACX.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86C9WM34+59>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. Pizza will be provided, bring your own drink. RSVP requested so we know how much food to get--><https://forms.gle/vxeqmN2wBsjZUEaZ7>
#### ST. LOUIS
Contact: SebastianG
Contact Info: littlejohnburidan[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 01:00 PM
Location: We'll be on Art Hill in Forest Park on the left side! I'll put an ACX Meetup Yard sign in the ground.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86CFJPR4+H7>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/g/JTMprAL9QpCct2od3/p/RwTKebjmomX6sYsSD/>
### Nevada
#### LAS VEGAS
Contact: Jonathan Ray
Contact Info: ray[period]jonathan[period]w[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 3rd, 11:00 AM
Location: California Pizza Kitchen at Town Square. With a big ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85863R9F+6W>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/Awm [remove this bit] EgW2Q6r
### New Hampshire
#### HANOVER
Contact: Rhea
Contact Info: rheakarty[a t]gmail[perio d]com
Time: Saturday, May 3, 12:30 PM
Location: We will meet at Dartmouth College's old golf course (7 Hilton Field Rd). To the right of a small parking lot there, is a small cabin-- which is where we will meet. I will have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. For those driving: There is parking there. And in the unlikely case that it fills up there is free parking in the town on weekends I think and the Dewey Field Lot is near by. If the group if up for it, we may take a walk, but I will try to leave a note if we do in this location.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87M9PP78+52>
Group Link: I will try to send emails to those who will out an RSVP. Here is the invite to a WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Epl [remove this bit] 1X9YAvQp4gq8ThvNksP
Additional Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. RSVPs would be great (but not required)! Here is a link: <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfafnS45O7Sz6exPzvavSV1UkrGkuNp0tLD4F0yNIBGTVARRg/viewform?usp=sharing>
### New Jersey
#### LAKEWOOD
Contact: Ben L
Contact Info: mywebdev3[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 04th, 10:00 AM
Location: Ocean County Park (Please message the coordinator to confirm)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G73RW8+38>
Notes: Please RSVP and confirm with me beforehand. Time and Place may (often does) change
### New York
#### ALBANY
Contact: Jake S
Contact Info: jacob[period]scheiber[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 01:00 PM
Location: 131 Colonie Center, Albany NY 12205 (Upstairs in food court, at the tables by the windows overlooking the parking lot)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J8P56M+CC>
#### BINGHAMTON
Contact: Isaac Cohen
Contact Info: idcohen2000[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 06th, 03:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the Union Undergrounds on the Binghamton University Campus
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J632QM+46>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I have an idea of how many people to expect
#### BROOKLYN
Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: stefanlenoach[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 26th, 08:00 PM
Location: 81 McGuinness Blvd apt 6A
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G8P3G2+4F>
Notes: Please RSVP, thank you
#### BUFFALO
Contact: Sarah W.
Contact Info: seraphedelweiss[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Sunday, April 13th, 12:00 PM
Location: University at Buffalo South Campus - The quad between the Abbot Library and continuing dental education building.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87J3X53J+JR3>
#### MANHATTAN
Contact: Shaked and Robi
Contact Info: shaked[period]koplewitz[a t]gmail[period]com, robirahman94[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 20th, 03:00 PM
Location: Pumphouse Park (I'll be there holding a sign). If the weather is bad, we'll retreat into Brookfield Place mall.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G7PX6M+RG>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc>
#### MASSAPEQUA
Contact: Gabe
Contact Info: gabeaweil[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 18th, 02:00 PM
Location: 47 Clinton Pl., Massapequa, NY 17758 (backyard)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G8MG4F+4X>
Notes: Please RSVP via email to gabeaweil at gmail
#### MONSEY
Contact: David
Contact Info: rocklandacxmeetup[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 02:30 PM
Location: Yoffee Coffee, second floor. Address is 414 NY-59, Airmont, NY 10952. I'll have a book with me.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87H74W66+2V>
Notes: RSVPs are appreciated, but no worries if you don't. Please feel free to come even if you don't feel like you resemble 'the typical ACX reader'. If you're interested but can't make it to the meetup, shoot me an email - I'd love to meet you some other time, or potentially make this a recurring thing if there's enough interest.
#### NEW YORK CITY
*(See “Manhattan, New York” or “Brooklyn, New York”)*
### North Carolina
#### ASHEVILLE
Contact: Vicki Williams
Contact Info: vickirwilliams[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 04th, 06:00 PM
Location: Biltmore (aka Enka) Lake fire pit. Park near 88 Lake Dr., Candler. Walk along the trail by the lake to the fire pit behind the tennis courts.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/867VG8MW+9G>
Notes: Please RSVP so you can be notified in case of change in plans. Kid friendly (there's a playground nearby) and pet friendly (leashed please). We'll have a campfire and some fire appropriate food stuffs.
#### CHARLOTTE
Contact: Cam
Contact Info: camantiodrome[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 02:00 PM
Location: 4400 Sharon Road, SouthPark Mall, at the entrance atrium between Cheesecake Factory & Maggiano's. I'll be wearing the Kuromi hat (Black with pointed ears)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/867X5529+QR>
#### RALEIGH-DURHAM
Contact: Logan
Contact Info: Logan[period]the[period]word[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 03rd, 02:00 PM
Location: Ponysaurus Brewing Co (219 Hood St, Durham). We'll be at the outdoor seating area with an ACX sign on the table
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8773X4Q3+QW>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/rtlw>
Notes: There will be pizza! The venue serves beer but is kid-friendly. I'll have more details on the Google group (see link)
### Ohio
#### CLEVELAND
Contact: prj
Contact Info: prj-acx[a t]dogmap[period]org
Time: Sunday, May 04th, 02:00 PM
Location: Tabletop Board Game Cafe
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86HWF7PV+HV>
#### DAYTON
Contact: Kevin
Contact Info: Lesswrong[period]dayton[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 03:00 PM
Location: 10 E Main Street, Fairborn 45324
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86FQRXCH+GQF>
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/lesswrong-dayton/
### Oklahoma
#### OKLAHOMA CITY
Contact: bean
Contact Info: battleshipbean[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 05th, 01:00 PM
Location: Pavilion by the planes at the 45th infantry division museum.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8674GG5G+8H>
Notes: I will be wearing a USS Iowa hat.
### Oregon
#### CORVALLIS
Contact: Kenan
Contact Info: kbitikofer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 04th, 06:00 PM
Location: Laughing Planet, 127 NW 2nd St, Corvallis, OR 97330. Table outside if it's nice, Table by the windows inside otherwise.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84PRHP7R+R63>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/y7N [remove this bit] FhYKYRP
#### EUGENE
Contact: Michael Bacarella
Contact Info: michael[period]bacarella[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, April 09th, 06:00 PM
Location: Beergarden.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6G>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/9U8 [remove this bit] DH4dUem
Notes: Hosted by the ACX/EAs of Willamette Valley Meetup (see our Discord!)
#### PORTLAND
Contact: Sam Celarek
Contact Info: scelarek[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 18th, 06:00 PM
Location: 133 SE Madison Street, Portland, OR 97214 United States, Portland, OR There will be a large sign saying PEAR with a light shining on it outside the BRIDGESPACE building. Of note, the entrance is on the East side of the building! Feel free to call Sam Celarek at 5134323310 if you can't find it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84QVG87P+7C>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/JwJ [remove this bit] tAJKA
Notes: Feel free to bring food, but vegan food and drinks will be provided. RSVP on the meetup here: Portland Effective Altruism and Rationality (PEAR): <https://meetu.ps/e/NV6r6/Ywbrj/i>
### Pennsylvania
#### HARRISBURG
Contact: Phil
Contact Info: acxharrisburg[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 02:00 PM
Location: Zeroday Brewing Company Taproom, 925 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA 17102. Table with ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G57487+R77>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD>
#### PHILADELPHIA
Contact: Wes Fenza
Contact Info: wfenza[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, April 24th, 06:30 PM
Location: Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. Upstairs in the Weston Room
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB; <https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia>
Notes: Kids welcome. We'll provide an assortment of dim sum.
#### PITTSBURGH
Contact: Matan Shtepel
Contact Info: matan[period]shtepel[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 06th, 05:00 PM
Location: We'll meet on the lawn in front of the tennis courts on CMU's campus. If it rains, we'll go into the the CMU university center (UC) which is open without key-card even on the weekend. We may eventually wander, so email me if you can't find us.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/87G2C3V4+2X>
Group Link: <https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA>
Notes: There is also a monthly ACX meetup group that meets at Bakery Square near the Google office. If you'd like to sign up for the email list to be notified of when they meet up, you can do that here: <https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA>
### Texas
#### AUSTIN
Contact: Silas Barta
Contact Info: sbarta[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 24th, 12:00 PM
Location: The Brewtorium, 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752; We'll have a LessWrong sign at a long table indoors
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862487GM+96
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/austin-less-wrong/
Notes: Feel free to bring kids. We'll order shareable items for the group (fries and pretzels) and you can order from the food and drink menu.
#### BRYAN
*(See “College Station, Texas”)*
#### COLLEGE STATION
Contact: Michael Frost
Contact Info: mikefrosttx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 06:00 PM
Location: The front porch of Torchy's. I will (probably) have a sign that says "ACX" on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8625JMFC+5J4>
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong
#### DALLAS
Contact: Ethan
Contact Info: ethan[period]morse97[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 02:00 PM
Location: Whole Foods, 11700 Preston Rd Suite 714, Dallas, TX 75230. We'll be in the upstairs seating area closest to the windows. I will be wearing a name tag that says "Ethan" on it.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8645W55W+2P>
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/SdwuhENYWpA4BTrZT
#### HOUSTON
Contact: Joe Brenton
Contact Info: joe[period]brenton[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Sunday, May 04th, 01:00 PM
Location: Retrospect Coffee Bar 3709 La Branch St, Houston, TX 77004. We'll be in the back covered patio area with picnic tables.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/76X6PJPF+4R>
Group Link: https://discord.gg/Dzm [remove this bit] EPAscpS
### Utah
#### SALT LAKE CITY
Contact: Adam
Contact Info: adamisom[a t]hey[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 03:00 PM
Location: We'll be in the usual location at Liberty Park--west side, near the ChargePoint station, in a circle of chairs under a big tree
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+MF>
Group Link: email me for a Discord invite and/or to be added to the email list
### Virginia
#### RICHMOND
Contact: Brandon Quintin
Contact Info: brandonmquintin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, May 22nd, 06:00 PM
Location: Hardywood Craft Brewery. 2410 Ownby Ln, Richmond, VA 23220
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/8794HG7R+XX>
Notes: We’re a small group (only four of us), but we meet reliably every other month at a local brewery or restaurant to hang out. Anyone else in the area who might be interested, please reach out and we’d be glad to include you!
#### WILLIAMSBURG
Contact: Jough
Contact Info: joughdonakowski[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 06:00 PM
Location: The Frothy Moon Brewhouse, 1826 Jamestown Road, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185, United States - I will likely be at an indoor table and try to have some kind of ACX MEETUP signage. I am the 40ish year-old white guy with facial hair, or at least one of them.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/879566QM+49>
Notes: Kid, spouse, friendly. Venue often has food trucks and allows outside food. RSVPs appreciated but not required.
### Washington
#### BELLEVUE
Contact: Joey M
Contact Info: Me[a t]joeym[period]org
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 02:00 PM
Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room 4. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35>
#### SEATTLE
Contact: Spencer
Contact Info: speeze[period]pearson[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, May 07th, 06:00 PM
Location: Armistice Coffee Roosevelt, in the covered outdoor back area. I'll have a sign saying "Astral Codex Ten meetup."
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4XJ>
Group Link: EA: <https://www.meetup.com/seattle-effective-altruists> Rationality: <https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/>
#### SPOKANE
Contact: Roland
Contact Info: rolandsvsmith[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 06th, 12:00 PM
Location: New Love Coffee, 1102 W Summit Pkwy Suite 102. Probably sitting in the corner, with a sign that says "ACX Meetup" propped up.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/85V4MH6C+VH>
Group Link: <https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/iKob6Egrp9TT3AcH8>
### Washington, DC
*(See “District of Columbia” above)*
### Wisconsin
#### MADISON
Contact: Ben
Contact Info: benjamin[period]boerigter[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 12:00 PM
Location: 317 Eugenia Ave 2S - red brick 4-unit apartment building across from Geneva Campus Church. Ring doorbell for unit!
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/86MG3HC3+5X>
Group Link: <https://groups.google.com/g/madison-wi-acx>
Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Will have some snacks and drinks.
## South America
## Argentina
#### BUENOS AIRES
Contact: Eitan Sprejer
Contact Info: eitusprejer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, April 27th, 05:00 PM
Location: Green Eat Billinghurst:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/E4YH12kLxri7jBXLA
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/48Q3CH6R+48>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/BfD [remove this bit] p6v3bMwGEfwNGKnhJwV
## Brazil
#### BELO HORIZONTE
Contact: David Reis
Contact Info: davidreis[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 12th, 04:00 PM
Location: Diamond Mall 1rst Floor Food Court, in front of McDonalds. Address Av. Olegário Maciel, 1600
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/58GR33C3+R4J>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0S [remove this bit] Ze8fdU8O1WgLd4GsST6
#### CURITIBA
Contact: Demian Pacheco
Contact Info: demianet[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 04:00 PM
Location: Hostel Social - Coffee Bar, R. Brigadeiro Franco, 2691 - Rebouças, Curitiba - PR, 80220-100
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/586GHP4F+FW>
Group Link: https://www.reddit.com/user/AltruismoEficazUFPR/comments/1jie5rc/curitiba\_acx\_meetup\_2025/
Notes: All welcome. If possible, RSVP by e-mail so I know how many people to expect. On the patio inside, there are games and a cafe
#### FLORIANÓPOLIS
Contact: Adiel
Contact Info: adiel[a t]airpost[period]net
Time: Saturday, May 10th, 04:00 PM
Location: Angeloni Beira Mar, at the food court. I’ll be wearing a yellow hat.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/584HCFGF+326>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/KrR [remove this bit] jgkiruWA7419WNGakxq
Notes: Everyone is welcome! There will be cookies.
#### FORTALEZA
Contact: Victor
Contact Info: victor[period]a[period]benevides[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 25th, 10:00 AM
Location: Parque do Coco
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/69837G37+WJ>
#### SÃO PAULO
Contact: Bruno V
Contact Info: vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, April 25, 06:30 PM
Location: Av. Prof. Lúcio Martins Rodrigues, 370 - Butantã, São Paulo - SP, 05508-020
We'll be inside the building, so please regis
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/588MC7VF+25>
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/GZSM [remove this bit] t9xMXUpFjJai4u0hlB
Additional Notes: This is the event registration link: <https://www.sympla.com.br/evento/acx-meetup-sao-paulo-usp/2898436> Also, send your name and CPF to my email (vbruno2002[at]gmail[period]com) in order to get in.
## Chile
#### SANTIAGO
Contact: Xenofilo
Contact Info: xenofiloACX[a t]hotmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, April 19th, 05:00 PM
Location: Parque Bicentenario, al lado de municipalidad de Vitacura. Llevo un cartel con " ACX meetup ". :)
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/47RFJ92X+J8>
Notes: Porfavor siéntanse libres de traer amigos/familia :). También té, café, pan.. Lo que vean mejor.
## Paraguay
#### ASUNCIÓN
Contact: Nuño Sempere
Contact Info: nuno[period]semperelh[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, April 09th, 12:00 AM
Location: Empanadería Sabores de Mi Tierra, 25 De Mayo 3789, Asunción 001229.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/5864PC22+39>
Notes: RSVP to my email appreciated, so that I get a sense of how many people are coming, but not required.
## Uruguay
#### JOSÉ IGNACIO
Contact: Deadpine
Contact Info: hey[a t]deadpine[period]xyz
Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 06:00 PM
Location: "La Tranquera" house, it is located to the right of "La Olada" restaurant on La Juanita neighborhood / Casa “La Tranquera” en el barrio La Juanita. Es una casa-container de madera, queda a la derecha del restaurante “La Olada”.
Coordinates: <https://plus.codes/48Q7587W+M8M>
Notes: Please RSVP via whatsapp to +598 92 134 064 - I need this to prepare the space and buy food and drinks | Scott Alexander | 159593244 | Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places | acx |
# Open Thread 374
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** [Tabula Bio](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SsLkxCxmkbBudLHQr/tabula-bio-towards-a-future-free-of-disease-and-looking-for) (including Michael Poon from polygenic screening work, Ammon Bartram from Triplebyte, etc) is working on frontier foundation models in genomics. They’ve outlined their theses at the link and are looking for ML people who think the future of genomics is in statistical methods rather than expert systems. | Scott Alexander | 159742494 | Open Thread 374 | acx |
# More Drowning Children
**I.**
People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it’s obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people’s cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail.
For example, some people say the difference is distance; you’re *close to* the drowning child, but *far from* people dying in Africa. Here are some thought experiments that challenge that:
> You’re a surgeon, using a telepresence robot to operate on someone in China. In the middle of the operation, a medical student watching in the Chinese side starts choking. He is the only other person in the room (besides your patient, who is unconscious), so nobody else can help him. Your robot can do the Heimlich Maneuver and save their life, but it would delay the surgery five minutes while you readjusted the settings afterwards, which would make you late for lunch. Should you save them?
Here it seems obvious that you should save them, even though they’re all the way in China.
Is the problem that “you” are sort of “in” China via your robot, even if not physically? Here’s another example:
> The [Dublin-NYC Portal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York%E2%80%93Dublin_Portal) is an art installation with branches in Dublin and NYC. If you stand in front of one of the portals, you can see and (not in real life, but in our thought experiment) hear the people on the other side. It’s usually too crowded to really interact with, so one day you (in NYC) go to the installation at 3 AM and are the only person around. You start talking to two Dubliners, who are the only people around on their side of the portal. Suddenly, one of them starts choking. The other shrieks “I need to do the Heimlich Maneuver, but I don’t know how!” You know how, and could easily walk them through it. But it’s cold and you want to go home. Should you help them?
Again, the answer is clear even though you’re 3000 miles away. At this point, saying that you’re “virtually” in Dublin seems like a stretch. Here the issue seems to be some sort of entanglement. But it’s hard to say exactly how the entanglement works, and it *doesn’t* seem to be a simple one-to-one correspondence where you’re the only person who can help. For example:
> You’re at the Sociopathic Jerks Convention (you’re neither sociopathic nor a jerk - you’re the caterer). Everyone is on the lawn of the conference center, waiting for one of the sessions to begin, when you all notice a child drowning in the lake nearby. Along with yourself, there are 1,000 sociopathic jerks. But at the last session, someone took a poll on exactly this question and everyone agreed they wouldn’t lift a finger to help; either you save the child, or nobody does. Do you jump in and save them?
Here it seems like the sociopathic jerks might as well be furniture - their presence doesn’t change your situation compared to the scenario where you’re there alone.
**II.**
TracingWoodgrains [draws off](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1711050089282621789) a now-deleted essay by Jaibot which talks about the “Copenhagen interpretation of ethics”. It argues that by “touching” a situation - a vague term having something to do with causal entanglement - you gain moral obligation for it. If you can simply avoid touching it, your moral obligation goes away.
I think this explains half the problem, but I can think of another half that it doesn’t explain. Consider:
> You inherit a beautiful cabin in the woods. It’s downstream of a vast semi-magical megacity which is a little denser than should be physically possible. Every time a child falls into any of the megacity’s streams, lakes, or rivers, they get swept away and flow past your cabin; there’s a new drowning child every hour or so.
Assume that all unmentioned details are resolved in whatever way makes the thought experiment most unsettling - so for example, maybe the megacity inhabitants are well-intentioned, but haven’t hired their own lifeguards because their city is so vast that this is only #999 on their list of causes of death and nobody’s gotten around to it yet.
Here I’m split on whether the Copenhagen hypothesis works. A person who lives in the cabin and fails to rescue every child seems much less monstrous than someone who only ever encounters the situation once, even though both of them “touch” the situation exactly as much. Still, as the hypothesis predicts, we are less comfortable with this situation than the normal one where you live far away from the cabin and never worry about it - living near the cabin (“touching” the situation) seems to have some moral impact.
Here’s somewhere I think Copenhagen more clearly fails:
> Your regular house burns down, and you have no choice but to live in the cabin for a while. You think to yourself: “Well, every day, I’ll rescue one child, then not worry about it. This is better for the children, since it increases their survival rate from 0 to 1/24. And it’s better for me, since I’m not homeless while I wait for them to rebuild my house). It’s a win-win situation.
>
> So you do this for a few months, and then they rebuild your house, and you move back to your regular hometown. You live there for five years without incident. One day, you see a child drowning in the local river. You don’t recognize them, so it can’t be the child of any of your fellow citizens - probably their parents are some of the travelers who pass through this town on the way to greener pastures. You are late for an important business meeting, you’re wearing a nice suit, and it would be especially annoying to jump in a river right now. In fact, you estimate that it is 10x costlier to rescue this child than any of the children who you encountered at the cabin so long ago. What do you do?
Here Copenhagen fails to predict a difference between refusing to rescue the 37th kid going past the cabin, vs. refusing to rescue the single kid in your hometown; you are “touching” both equally. But I think most people would consider it common sense that refusing to rescue the 37th kid near the cabin is a minor/excusable sin, but refusing to rescue the one kid in your hometown is inexcusable.
Again sticking to a purely *descriptive* account of intuitions, I think this represents a sort of declining marginal utility of moral goods. The first time you rescue a kid, you get lots of personal benefits (feeling good about yourself, being regarded as a hero, etc). By the 37th time, these benefits are played out. If you refuse to rescue a child for the relatively high benefits of a single situation, we think you must have no moral sense at all. But if you fail to rescue them the 37th time, we think this is pretty understandable and similar to what we would do in the same situation.
(This “declining marginal utility” explanation is less natural than something like “the obligation to rescue all those children is ruining my life”. But I think it’s more accurate; if we come up with a thought experiment where it doesn’t ruin your life in any way - where it only takes a few hours from your day and you have enough left to accomplish everything you need - then it still seems harsh to demand someone rescue 37 children every day. And when there is an actual moral obligation - like parenting your own children - we don’t accept “it will ruin my life” as an excuse to get out of it.)
**III.**
So these two descriptive theories - the Copenhagen hypothesis, and the declining marginal utility of moral goods - do a good job explaining our intuitions.
But some people leap from there to saying they’re also the right *prescriptive* theories - they determine what morality *really is*, and what rules we should follow.
I think this is a gigantic error, the worst thing you could possibly do in this situation. These are essentially rules for looking good to other people. To follow them is to say that you will always optimize for seeming cool, no matter how many people you have to kill in order to do it. So for example:
> Because of Copenhagen hypothesis, you decide it’s morally wrong to go to the cabin - by “touching” the situation, you would be accepting blame for all of the drowning children.
>
> But you really want a vacation away from your polluted city, and you can’t afford any other vacation home, so you’re always looking for some way to solve the problem. One day, you encounter a man with a giant truck. He says that for $525, he could uproot your cabin, load it on his truck, and deposit it on unoccupied land near a small camp a few miles away. In this new location, you couldn’t hear the children screaming. In fact, there are some other cabins at the camp, none of them ever think about the death river, and nobody ever blames them for it.
>
> You’re pretty excited about this. But you hear that your wife’s sister’s friend’s niece has a rare disease that would cost exactly $525 to cure (and she is poor, and can’t afford it). Normally you wouldn’t care much about someone so distant from you. But your wife asks - hey, isn’t it sort of hypocritical to move the cabin “in order to be a moral person”, when you’re in fact not helping anyone in any way? Wouldn’t it *actually* make you more of a moral person to spend the $525 curing her sister’s friend’s niece, then vacation at the cabin using earplugs to not hear the screaming kids (which wouldn’t result in any more kids dying than not going to the cabin, or moving the cabin)?
This is all awkward enough that maybe you want to push the Copenhagenness back a step and just refuse to touch the cabin at all. Refuse to inherit it, lock your door, tell the lawyer who says you own it now that he needs to get off your property or else you’ll shoot. But we can *still* make your life difficult:
> You live in a house in the suburbs. You never even considered living in a cabin in the woods. However, the nearby semi-magical megacity plans to build a dam. This would rearrange its various internal waterways so that all the drowning children would get carried by the current through your backyard; you would be in the exact same situation as the cabin owner. All of your life savings are tied up in your mortgage, the mere threat of this dam has crashed the value of your house, and you can’t afford to move. Luckily, a lobbyist owes you a favor. She offers to repay you in one of two ways.
>
> First, she could lobby the megacity to redirect the dam; this would cause the drowning children to go somewhere else - they would be equally dead, but it’s not your problem.
>
> Second, she could lobby the megacity to hire a part-time lifeguard (full-time is beyond her power), who could save half the drowning children. This still ruins your life (a drowning child passes your house once every two hours), and still crashes your home value to zero, but thousands of children would be saved per year. Also, she has a side business as a handyman, and could install double-pane glass windows on your house so you couldn’t hear the children screaming.
The Copenhagen theorist would be in a bind here. You really want to avoid the dam forcing you to “touch” the situation, and then either spend your whole life saving children, or be culpable for failing to do so. But it seems both heartless and pointless to waste your one lobbyist favor on a river redirection which doesn’t change anything about the real world (as many children will die as ever) when you could instead use it to do lots of good.
My best bet for how a thoughtful Copenhagener would respond is that they would say you had terrible moral luck by happening to end up where the dam was going to redirect the drowning children; however, this itself caused you to “touch on” the situation and now you can be judged for how you respond (including your cowardly response of trying to redirect the river somewhere else).
I don’t buy it.
> Unfortunately, the lobbyist dies of a heart attack before you can call in *either* favor. The dam is built and the children pass by your house. You save one per day, but not all of them.
>
> You have a neighbor. The neighbor lives far enough away that the river doesn’t affect him at all; he couldn’t hear the children in any case.
>
> When you tell him this story, he calls you a monster - how could you only help one child per day?
>
> You agree this is inadequate, and decide to hire a lifeguard yourself to solve the problem. You offer to split the costs with your neighbor: you will pay 80%, he’ll pay 20%.
>
> The neighbor says haha, no way, he’s not going to waste 20% of his money helping some kids he has no relationship with. But he also thinks you’re a monster unless *you* pay the money.
>
> God notices there is one extra spot in Heaven, and plans to give it to either you or your neighbor. He knows that you jump in the water and save one child per day, and your neighbor (if he were in the same situation) would save zero. He also knows that you are willing to pay 80% of the cost of a lifeguard, and your neighbor (who makes exactly the same amount of money as you) would pay 0%. However, in reality, the river and the drowning children are going by your house, not your neighbor’s house. Which of you should get the spot in Heaven?
Here it seems obvious that you are a better person than your neighbor. But then what remains of the “moral luck” explanation? What remains of Copenhagen, where you are blamed for a situation if you touch it?
Maybe you have to *choose* to touch it for it to count? But this seems false; in Singer’s original drowning child experiment, you didn’t choose to be the only person near the lake when the kid was drowning. It was just a weird coincidence.
In fact, it seems like we all benefit from the same sort of moral luck as the neighbor. Suppose Alice is born in a gated community in the US, to a family making $200,000/year; she goes to her local college, stays in her rich hometown, and eventually makes $200,000/year herself. There are no poor people near her, so she has few moral obligations. But Bob is born in Zimbabwe, to a rare upper-class well-connected Zimbabwean family making $200,000 year; he inherits his father’s business and also makes $200,000 year himself. But he lives in the middle of horrible poverty. His housekeeper is dying of some easily-cured disease, all of his school friends are dying of easily-cured diseases, every day when he goes to work he has to walk over half-dead people screaming for help. It seems like Alice got lucky by not being Bob; she has no moral obligations, whereas he has many. Suppose that Bob only helps a little bit, enough that we would consider him pretty stingy given his situation - maybe he helps his absolute closest school friend, but lets several other school friends die. And suppose that if Alice was in Bob’s situation, she would do even *less*, but in fact in real life she satisfies all of her (zero) moral obligations. If there’s only one spot in Heaven, should it go to Alice or Bob?
Someone who’s still desperately trying to preserve Copenhagen would have to say that the “one spot in Heaven” prompt isn’t fair - God presumably has His own criteria which exploit His perfect omniscience, but we humans must think about morality on a merely human level. I still don’t buy it. For one thing, God isn’t using any special omniscient knowledge that we (the people reading this thought experiment) don’t also have and use easily. For another, if you’re even slightly religious, actually getting the literal spot in Heaven should be one of the top things on your mind when you’re deciding whether to be moral or not. Even if you’re atheist, trying to be the sort of person who *would* get a spot in Heaven, if it existed, seems like a worthier goal than whatever the Copenhagen-follower is doing.
**IV.**
So again, the question is - what is the right prescriptive theory that doesn’t just *explain* moral behavior, but would let us feel dignified and non-idiotic if we followed it?
My favorite heuristic for thinking about this is John Rawls’ “original position” - if we were all pre-incarnation angelic intelligences, knowing we would go to Earth and become humans but ignorant of which human we would become, what deals would we strike with each other to make our time on Earth as pleasant as possible? So for example, we would probably agree not to commit rape, because we wouldn’t know if we would be the offender or the victim, and we would expect rape to hurt the victim more than it helped the offender.
Here we would probably agree to save drowning children, because if we were involved in the situation at all, we would have a 50% chance of being the rescuer (minor inconvenience) or the child themselves (life or death importance).
But we would also agree to save people dying of easily-cured diseases in the Third World, because we wouldn’t know if we would be those people either. Everyone would agree to a proposed deal that rich people donate a small fraction of their income to charity, because it would be only a mild inconvenience if they turned out to be rich, but a life-saver if they turned out to be poor.
Further, since we wouldn’t know whether we would be Alice (low level of moral obligation) or Bob (very high level of moral obligation), we would take out insurance by agreeing that everyone needed to pay the same modest amount into the general pot for helping people.
(How much should they pay? Enough to pick the low-hanging fruit and make it so nobody is desperately poor, but not enough to make global capitalism collapse. I think the angelic intelligences would also consider that rich people could defect on the deal after being born, and so try to make the yoke as light as possible.)
A final deal might look like this: we’ll all cooperate by sending a bit of our money to a general pot for helping people in terrible situations. And if there’s a more urgent situation that group contributions can’t help - because for example a child is drowning right now and there’s only one person close enough to save them - then we’ll deputize that one person to save them, and assume it will all even out in the end.
(Actually, even better would be pay that person a reward for their trouble out of the general pot - then there’s no unfairness or special obligation on one person rather than another!)
Here we’re able to bring back all of those things we rejected earlier - proximity, urgency, being the only person available - not because they determine who is worthy of being saved, but in the context of a coalition that plans to save *everybody* but which in an emergency needs to act through whoever is available. This is no different from a police force which, learning of a serious crime in progress, asks the officer closest to the site to respond, even if that officer isn’t a specialist in that particular type of crime, or even if that officer is one minute away from clocking out and it’s unfair to make them work overtime.
All of this makes perfect sense - except that the coalition is in arrears, there is no general pot, and most bad things go unprevented. Only the extra “save people close to you” rule, tacked on as an afterthought, still functions, because that one makes people look good when they do it and is easier to enforce through reputational mechanisms.
I think you should probably still save someone close to you (eg drowning), partly because this rule is valuable even on its own (ie it’s better to do it than not do it), and partly because, since other people are following it, you actually have a reciprocal obligation to your fellow coalition members here (ie you expect that if your child was drowning, someone else would help, so you’re free-riding if you don’t help them).
If you end up at the death cabin, you don’t have an obligation to save every single child who passes by, because the coalition didn’t intend for the “save drowning children” obligation to be an unusual burden on anyone in particular, and because nobody else is doing this so you’re not betraying fellow coalition members. People may incorrectly think less of you if you don’t do this, and you might want to take action to avoid reputational damage, but this isn’t a moral obligation. The real answer to this problem is that the coalition should split the cost of hiring a lifeguard - or, if for some reason you are the only person who can be in the area, compensate you for your time. Given that the coalition isn’t strong enough to actually do these things, your obligations are limited, and not made any better or worse by living in the cabin vs. further away.
I think it’s virtuous, but not obligatory, to behave as if the coalition is still intact, and try to give a portion of your income to some sort of virtual version of the general pot. You could also think of the government as some sort of very distorted flawed real-life version of the coalition and consider your obligations fulfilled by paying taxes, but I think this is an insult to the angelic intelligences, and you should just go with whatever seems like the closest thing to their original plan without waiting for it to actually be instantiated.
I think this is more dignified than the thing where you try to hire someone for $525 to move your cabin to a different location so you don’t feel like you’re “touching” the problem, or whatever. | Scott Alexander | 156783092 | More Drowning Children | acx |
# Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity
Jake Eaton has [a great article on misophonia](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/the-unbearable-loudness-of-chewing) in Asterisk.
Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape.
So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
Misophoniacs who go deaf report that [it doesn’t go away](https://www.reddit.com/r/misophonia/comments/cczx3d/it_doesnt_go_away_if_you_go_deaf/). Now they get triggered if they *see* someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
Maybe this isn’t surprising? Maybe it’s straight out of Pavlov - pair a neutral stimulus (like a flashing light) together with a negative stimulus (like an electric shock) often enough, and rats will learn to hate the flashing light. But usually Pavlov doesn’t work quite this well. People who hate school will happily walk past the schoolhouse; people who burn themselves on hot stoves will happily touch a cold stove; people who hate Donald Trump will laugh along with a lookalike Trump impersonator. In Pavlov’s experiments, the conditioned response fades to extinction after the conditioned stimulus stops correlating with the unconditioned stimulus. But deaf misophoniacs will still hate the sight of chewing the millionth time they see it.
The research gets weirder. If you trick misophoniacs into thinking their trigger sounds are something else, they won’t get triggered. [In this study](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.890829/full), scientists played people who hated chewing sounds a video (with audio) of someone chewing; unsurprisingly, they hated it. Then they played them a video of someone walking on squelching snow, but the audio track was secretly actually the same chewing sounds. It looked like the snow was making the noise - now the misophoniacs didn’t hate it!
Again, there are reasonable explanations. This is a variant of the McGurk effect:
The man is saying the same syllable each time, but depending on which picture of his mouth moving you look at, you hear it differently. Your vision is context-modulating your hearing, but it just sounds like hearing something.
But some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific *people* - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Probably there’s a reasonable explanation here too, but at this point maybe we should also be considering a larger-scale update.
So is misophonia sort of fake?
I have a mild version, and it sure doesn’t *feel* fake. From the outside, you probably have all these great ideas for how you would overcome it - try gradual desensitization! Try flooding! Fake it ‘til you make it! Just concentrate really hard and think ‘Sound can’t hurt me’! I’ve tried all of these and they don’t work, sorry, sound is still enraging. It’s not chewing for me; thankfully, I missed out on that one. My trigger is certain kinds of background conversation and music - less about the auditory details than about a certain part of my sensory periphery where I’m trying not to concentrate on it but failing. It hasn’t quite ruined my life, but was a big financial drain when I was younger - across three or four different cities, I drove away all my roommates by yelling at them for making noise, and ended up living on my own at much higher cost. There have been times when I wore giant construction earphones whenever I went outside, although things aren’t quite that bad now.
But even as misophonia makes me miserable - even as I absolutely fail to overcome it - I can’t help feeling like it’s sort of fake. I’d already noticed something like the thing about people close to me. The way I thought of it was something about righteous anger. The sound of the wind in the trees barely bothered me at all, because there was no one to get angry at. Sounds that were natural parts of the social order were nearly as benign - I didn’t *like* hearing the bus driver announce the next stop, but it was an inevitable part of the bus-riding experience and I was resigned to it. But if a group of gangbangers scared the kids out of the nearby park and put on loud music while smoking drugs, I would go through the roof. Some utilitarian philosopher once said that while there are practical considerations for punishment nobody really *deserves* to suffer and in some cosmic sense even Hitler doesn’t truly *deserve* so much as a stubbed toe. I’m pretty sympathetic to that perspective when we’re just talking about genocidal dictators. But people who play loud music in the park - no, they need to suffer.
Even worse, I found myself seeking out the anger. I would turn on my big box fan, turn on my white noise machine, put in my earplugs, put my giant construction earphones on over them, and that would pretty much work. But I’d find myself straining to see if I could still catch a couple of beats of music through it all. If there was any chance that one single sound wave of the white-noise-fan-amalgam I was hearing actually came from the music, then I would have to get mad all over again. I realize this is stupid - if I can’t even tell if the music is still on, then what’s the problem? But there I was, straining to detect stray notes at the edge of my capability, in order to assess how angry I should be.
How did I get this way? Self-report is unreliable, but I remember when I was seven years old I would make noise and bother my parents. In the process of telling me not to do this, my dad complained to me that when he was in the process of falling asleep, there was about a fifteen minute window of half-asleepness where any interruption would jolt him awake so thoroughly that he wouldn’t be able to try falling asleep again for hours. Something about that resonated with me, and since then I’ve been the same way. Was I always like that, and his comment just called my attention to it? That’s not how I remember things, but who knows?
Then when I was twenty-five or so, this trouble with falling asleep was a big enough deal that I would always be telling my roommate to keep it down. One night my roommate complained that I seemed to have some weird pathological problem with noise way outside the normal distribution. I’d never thought about it before, but again, something resonated, that became “part of my identity” against my will, and from then on I was intolerable about any noise-related issue. Again, the simple explanation is that I was already like that - hence my roommate telling me I was like that. Again, that’s not how I remember things.
Is this the dreaded “social contagion” of mental illness? I’m not sure. But I imagine all of these things interacting in some kind of malicious network. Nobody likes loud noises when they’re trying to concentrate on something else. But somehow it spreads out from a natural ordinary distaste for the noise, to anger about the people making the noise, to fear and guilt that I might be some kind of special set-apart person who is especially bad at tolerating noise, to weird intellectualized thought-loops about how the noise symbolizes the decay of society, and back again - such that even if the noise would normally bother me for a minute and then fade into the background, the overall network never stopped looping and pinging my anger and distress buttons.
This is all just introspection. But it would explain some of research - why the phenomenon can persist even without the noise (eg in deaf people), why context matters so much, why it’s worse with close friends and family (you’ve already told them you have misophonia, so insofar as their continued noise indicates they don’t care about you enough to stop, it’s easier to be sad and angry about them).
I suggested Jake think of this in the context of my old [trapped priors](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem) post. Suppose that in reality, noise is annoying but nothing more. For whatever reason, someone gets stuck thinking noise is the worst thing in the world. In a normal situation, they should gradually unlearn this association - each time noise happens, they’ll update a little bit of the way back to “annoying and nothing more” until they’re all the way there. For this updating process to fail, the noise must genuinely provoke misery each time. My claim is that this whole learned network of negative things and noise ensures that each instance of noise will provoke enough negative associations to sustain the misophonia and the network of context clues that makes the misophonia work. The knot has so many dependencies that the brain’s natural updating process can’t untangle it in the amount of time it takes to form an emotion, so the update fails, or goes the wrong direction.
Cognitive behavioral therapists love this kind of thing - it’s a lot like what they call belief networks or core beliefs - but misophonia has so far resisted CBT. Eaton says the only thing that really helped him was a weeklong silent meditation retreat. This started out badly - he was in a room full of people being very quiet, and “every time the person next to me swallowed, I felt first a brief ripple of anger at the sound itself, followed by a larger wave of frustration at my reaction to it”. But as he got deeper into meditation, he was able to “notice the space between sensation and reaction . . . for the first time, I could choose to ignore the signal”. He doesn’t say whether it helped long-term, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Meditation is about focusing hard enough on mental processes that you see them for what they really are (in the sense that noise “really is” annoying-and-nothing-more), then observing your reaction as a separate event. Do this well enough, and it potentially allows updating on the true value.
I talk a big talk, but so far knowing all of this hasn’t helped me tolerate noise more, not even a little bit. | Scott Alexander | 158679960 | Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity | acx |
# Open Thread 373
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** [LessOnline](https://less.online/), an annual gathering of the online rationalist community, is happening again this year, May 30 - June 1 in Berkeley, $450 for tickets. If you can’t make the main event, there will probably be an adjacent (free) ACX meetup, exact time to be announced.
**2:** My father has written and self-published [a book](https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Everyday-Adventures-Disaster-Medicine/dp/B0F1CL61T9) about his life and experiences on medical missions:
It purports to be a “memoir” but struggles to resist turning into a lecture on lots of interesting facts about medicine - which is also what living with my father is like, so good job memoiring, I guess. Whoever chooses this for the next book review contest will win automatically (not really). | Scott Alexander | 159250925 | Open Thread 373 | acx |
# OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Last month, I [put out a request](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec) for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI’s forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone.
**Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place?**
In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn’t yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google.
This scared Elon Musk, who didn’t trust Google (or any corporate sponsor) with AGI. He teamed up with Sam Altman and others, and OpenAI was born. To avoid duplicating DeepMind’s failure, they founded it as a nonprofit with a mission to “build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity”.
But like DeepMind, OpenAI needed money. At first, they scraped by with personal donations from Musk and other idealists, but as the full impact of scaling laws became clearer, Altman wanted to form a forprofit arm and seek investment. Musk and Altman disagree on what happened next: Musk said he objected to the profit focus, Altman says Musk agreed but wanted to be in charge. In any case, Musk left, Altman took full control, and OpenAI founded a forprofit subsidiary.
This subsidary was supposedly a “capped forprofit”, meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn’t a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing.
**Why Is OpenAI No Longer Happy To Be A Nonprofit?**
It’s neither unusual nor illegal for nonprofits to own forprofits. Outdoorwear company Patagonia is a [typical example](https://www.ispo.com/en/sustainability/living-sustainability-and-environmental-protection-patagonia-becomes-foundation). Its billionaire founder gave his shares to a purpose-designed environmentalist trust. They run Patagonia in an environmentally friendly way and spend the profits on environmental protection. In theory, OpenAI could do something similar.
It’s not even illegal for a nonprofit to sell stock in a forprofit that it owns. It only needs to argue that its charitable purpose would be better served by having more money now than by continuing to own the stock.
So why is OpenAI unhappy with its current situation? They’ve already provided us the answer - it makes it *harder* to sell stock, or makes the stock worth less (so much so that participants in a recent funding round [made the money conditional](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-stunning-150-billion-valuation-hinges-upending-corporate-structure-2024-09-14/) on a change to the structure). But why would it do this?
This is the part I’m least sure about, but here are some vague guesses.
The nonprofit board continues to control the company. The original board included idealists who got seats in exchange for early donations to the nonprofit. When this faction got cold feet and fired Altman in November 2023, it highlighted the danger (to investors) of nonprofit control. When Altman came back, he replaced most of the idealists with standard Silicon Valley business types, mitigating the risk. But these people still have a fig-leaf legal obligation to put the good of humanity above shareholder value, and even this fig leaf makes investors nervous.
If the nonprofit board sold 51% of the stock (including governance rights) to outside investors, they could remove this problem. In some sense, that’s what they’re trying to do now. But why can’t they do it naturally - just keep selling stock until they’ve sold 51%?
If they didn’t broadcast that they were going to do this, buyers would underpay for the stock, because they would still worry the nonprofit board would stay in charge. But also, controlling OpenAI is heavily related to their supposed nonprofit mission of ensuring that AI benefits humanity. If they were to sacrifice that control in a seemingly dumb way - whoops, guess that last stock sale put us under 50%, suppose that means we’re not in charge anymore - they could get in trouble for breaching their fiduciary duties. Their odds are better if they just sell the whole thing openly to someone who understands the deal they’re getting and is willing to pay for it.
**How Will Altman Turn OpenAI Into A Forprofit?**
First, he’ll start a new shell company. Realistically this will also be named OpenAI, but to avoid confusion, let’s call it Altman Skulduggery, Inc. ASI will offer to buy OpenAI LLC from the nonprofit for its fair value (some sources say he plans to bid $40 billion). The board (made of hand-picked Altman loyalists) will agree. ASI (a normal forprofit) will get all of OpenAI’s useful corporate assets, and the nonprofit will get $40 billion, which it can spend on benefitting humanity if it wants.
Where will Altman get $40 billion? He won’t; rather, he’ll offer the nonprofit shares in Altman Skullduggery, Inc.
Why are shares in ASI, a meaningless shell company with no assets, worth anything? Because it will soon own OpenAI, an exciting cutting-edge AI lab!
I am naive to the ways of finance, so this originally struck me as some kind of ridiculous perpetual motion bullshit. But I was eventually convinced it made sense. Suppose that OpenAI is currently underperforming its potential because it’s stuck in an awkward nonprofit governance structure; it ought to be worth $100 billion, but given the awkward governance it’s only worth $30 billion. ASI could bid 40% of its shares. Then, when OpenAI leaves the nonprofit and its value shoots up from $30 billion to $100 billion, both sides will have won: the nonprofit will have received $40 billion in ASI stock for its $30 billion asset (a profit of $10 billion), and ASI will have received a 60% share in OpenAI for nothing (a profit of $60 billion). Therefore, both sides are happy! I guess maybe this is how all private equity works.
Why can’t I do this same maneuver and get rich with no effort? If I don’t have a plan to increase the value of the company, then OpenAI-in-my-shell-company is worth the same amount as OpenAI now. Therefore, I have to offer 100% of shares in my shell company to afford OpenAI. Therefore, the deal is meaningless - the people who started with 100% of the shares still have 100% of the shares, and I still have zero. Maybe it’s not completely meaningless - I could replace Altman as CEO - but this is bad (I am a less skilled CEO than Altman and nobody would want to make that switch). In the extremely unlikely event that the board did want to make the switch, they could just fire Altman and replace him the usual way (if they dared).
If I *did* have an exciting plan to increase the value of the company and could convince the board, then this would just be a regular private equity deal. Private equity companies often do get rich, but it’s not literally *no* effort - they need to make a case that they can increase shareholder value in some way that the current leadership (and other potential bidders) can’t.
**How Much Should Altman Pay The Nonprofit For OpenAI?**
Why offer more than $0.00? The nonprofit board is packed with his supporters. They’ll vote yes on anything he asks. So why spend money at all?
Because it’s illegal for a nonprofit to sell assets for less than they’re worth. If it wasn’t illegal, then anyone could loot a charity to line their own pockets. If board members approved an unfairly low offer, they could be charged with breaching their fiduciary duties (in this case, their duty to carry out the charity’s mission of benefiting humanity).
The relevant regulators are the Attorneys General of California (where OpenAI operates) and Delaware (where it is registered). They try not to second-guess company boards’ decisions too much, limiting their intervention to clear fraud without even a fig leaf of honesty. But $0.00 wouldn’t even have that fig leaf. So Altman needs to figure out the lowest number he can offer that gives the board a fig leaf of accepting a fair offer and trying to benefit humanity.
How much would that be? A [recent investment round](https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-lays-out-plan-shift-new-for-profit-structure-2024-12-27/) valued OpenAI at $157 billion conditional on it escaping the nonprofit. It must be worth less than that when it’s still in the nonprofit - but maybe not too much less - and ASI should pay somewhere between the nonprofit value and the forprofit value (so that both sides gain from the deal).
Altman previously floated $40 billion, which struck most observers as too low, maybe too low to even provide the fig leaf.
**What About Elon Musk’s Offer?**
Elon Musk recently offered the nonprofit $97.4 billion for OpenAI. He sweetened the deal by guaranteeing that the nonprofit would continue to have a controlling share.
Rumor says this was a clever ploy. Musk knew the board was in Altman’s pocket and would turn him down. But he knew it would complicate their task of looking honest to regulators. What honest person would turn down a $97 billion offer only to accept a $40 billion one?
The situation isn’t hopeless. The board could try saying something like “Well, Elon Musk is a crazy person who’s currently dismantling the federal government with a chainsaw; we charitable people acting for the benefit of humanity think it’s worth losing $57 billion to keep him away from the control panel for the machine god.” As fig leaves go, that’s honestly a pretty good one.
This strategy is dicey, and realistically Altman will supplement it by increasing his offer. I heard rumors of a new offer where the nonprofit keeps a controlling interest, but I can’t find a credible source.
**So If Altman Increases His Offer, Then It’s Fair, Right?**
We’re not sure!
The nonprofit’s mission was to create AI in a way that benefits humanity.
If they sold the company, they might get $40 billion (or whatever). You can do a lot of good charity work with $40 billion. But the nonprofit isn’t supposed to do generic good charity work. It’s supposed to create AI in a way that benefits humanity.
You can certainly do lots of great things for beneficial AI with $40 billion (I know some AI alignment charities that would love that kind of money - the OpenAI board can send me an email if it wants to be put in contact!) But I don’t know, investing $40 billion in worthy AI-related causes seems a lot less like creating AI than, you know, being OpenAI and actually creating AI.
So separate from the argument that Altman is offering too little, there’s another argument - which judges and the Attorneys General will have to consider - that they shouldn’t be allowed to sell at any price.
**Where Does Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Fit In?**
During the original nonprofit days, Musk donated $44 million. He says OpenAI violated his rights when they accepted his $44 million for charitable purposes, then used it to become a corporate titan that competed with him. Surprising nobody who knows Elon, [the complaint comes on strong](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.433688/gov.uscourts.cand.433688.121.0.pdf):
> Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief executive officer (“CEO”), and Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, took advantage of Musk’s altruism in order to lure him into funding the venture. While pretending to share Musk’s concern about the trajectory of the artificial intelligence (“AI”) industry, Altman and Brockman solicited millions in donations from Musk to build OpenAI on the promise that the organization would put people over profit and serve as a counterweight to the other dominant players in the AI space. With full knowledge that Musk’s money was contingent upon using his money charitably, defendants set about building a for-profit behemoth contrary to their original promises.
>
> Defendants’ secretive venture included an effort by Microsoft to “exploit” OpenAI. As part of this, Altman established a vast network of for-profit entities in which both he and Microsoft hold significant ownership stakes. Further, OpenAI and Microsoft have several contractual arrangements, including, for example, Microsoft’s agreement to supply raw materials to OpenAI and OpenAI’s granting Microsoft an exclusive license to its technology. Defendants have ensured OpenAI’s board is full of directors fully aligned with Altman and Brockman’s interests, such that independent directors constitute only a minority of the board.
Earlier this month, the judge [denied a preliminary injunction](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/musk-loses-bid-to-stop-openais-for-profit-shift-but-can-make-his-case-in-trial/). That is, she declined to block OpenAI from doing their forprofit conversion until the trial was over. This was always a long shot and would have required Musk to be overwhelmingly obviously in the right.
But [Rob Wiblin](https://x.com/robertwiblin/status/1897243135085891836) and [Garrison Lovely](https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/what-the-headlines-miss-about-the) say the narrative that “Musk lost” is too simple. The judge ruled that Musk only has standing to sue if he meant for his $44 million donation to be restricted in some way. But she also said that if he *did* have standing to sue, his case seemed strong on the merits. So she will hold a trial to see whether he has standing, and, if so, likely rule in his favor.
Wiblin estimates a 45% chance that the judge will eventually rule in Musk’s favor. Then what? If the nonprofit has already converted to a forprofit, she might order it to convert back, or change its governance. Or she might just make them give Musk a lot of money.
Even if the judge doesn’t block the conversion, the lawsuit could still cause trouble. If the judge rules that Musk doesn’t have standing but his case is good, the Attorneys General might use the “his case is good” part when making their own analysis of whether to permit the buyout. And if the board members agreed to the forprofit conversion after a judge had said - even in a nonbinding way - that the case against it was good, it would make it easier for someone (eg Musk) to accuse them individually of breach of duty.
**If The Nonprofit Became A Real Nonprofit, What Would It Do?**
Altman has suggested it would “hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science."
Whatever it did would have to follow its mission statement of using AI to benefit humanity. I think it would be a stretch to say that they used the AI to get the money and now the money is benefiting humanity, so probably the charitable initiatives would have to involve AI in some way. Maybe this would look like helping hospitals use AI to treat patients.
Manifold asks whether they might end up funding AI safety efforts:
This sort of makes sense - surely this is the most direct way to interpret a mandate of using charity dollars to “make sure AI benefits humanity”. And an obvious commitment to pursuing their mission exactly as described would look good to regulators. But it also might not be as popular with the normies as “health care, education, and science” - and doing popular things would look good to regulators too. If this is on their mind, Altman hasn’t mentioned it.
Unless a judge does something crazy, it will be the current nonprofit board (of Altman loyalists) who make this decision.
**Does Any Of This Matter For Singularity Believers?**
Maybe.
If OpenAI successfully converts to a forprofit, it can get more investment. That will make it easier to scale faster and keep its lead. If you don’t want fast scaling, or you don’t want OpenAI to be in the lead, you should root against them.
But if OpenAI successfully converts to a forprofit, then the nonprofit has to reinvent itself as a real charity, funding healthcare and science and maybe if we’re really lucky AI safety. If you’re excited about this funding, you should root for them.
The original goal of OpenAI was to ensure that the singularity created broad-based prosperity for everyone, maybe through a basic income. Whether or not a charity holds 51% (or some other number) of OpenAI shares is relevant to this vision. If OpenAI initiates a singularity and ends up with all the money in the world, then maybe 49% of all the money in the world goes to their investors (creating a caste of mega-plutocrats), but 51% goes to a nonprofit charged with benefiting all humanity (and this is where the basic income comes from?). I do think it’s kind of unlikely that OpenAI ends up creating God yet also remains subject to the Attorney General of California. But it’s not totally impossible - Robin Hanson has written a lot about how if there are many competing near-peer superintelligences and companies, they might choose to keep existing property and governance structures as referees. In this one unlikely scenario, the exact percent of OpenAI shares held by investors vs. charity might matter a lot.
Finally, the regulators (either the judge of Musk’s lawsuit, or the Attorneys General) might rule that everything about OpenAI sucks and they have to start over. Maybe this would mean firing the board and replacing it with . . . some other board? People who have some strong claim to really care about whether AI benefits all humanity or not? I don’t know, a man can dream. [Business Insider discusses](https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-for-profit-conversion-2025-2) an incipient coalition between Meta and various public interest watchdogs pushing this solution:
> Meta, Facebook's parent company, [wrote] to California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, in December to ask him to step in.
>
> "Taking advantage of this non-profit status, OpenAI raised billions of dollars in capital from investors to further its purported mission," the company wrote. "Now, OpenAI wants to change its status while retaining all of the benefits that enabled it to reach the point it has today. That is wrong. OpenAI should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains."
>
> In late January, a group of 25 charities, including one started by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, piled on. The coalition [urged Bonta](https://sff.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Charitable-coalition-letter-on-OpenAI-conversion-1-29-25.pdf) "to take prompt legal action to ensure that OpenAI's assets are not illegally diverted for private gain."
>
> […]
>
> Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog, has repeatedly assailed the AI startup, accusing it of betraying its nonprofit mission. "The nonprofit board has behaved as a subordinate to the for-profit, and has done nothing that evidences any commitment to the nonprofit mission," said Robert Weissman, the copresident of Public Citizen.
>
> He argued that the solution is to forcibly dissolve the nonprofit and auction off its assets for the benefit of a new independent charity not linked to the current OpenAI board.
**What Do Prediction Markets Say?**
[This](https://manifold.markets/BTE/will-openai-abandon-their-nonprofit?play=true) is the biggest Manifold market on the topic. The big drop at the end is when the judge ruled Musk’s case had merit.
[This](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20172/openai-cease-governance-by-nonprofit-board/) Metaculus question looks like the Manifold market, but without the big drop at the end. Are the Manifolders overreacting, or are the Metaculans asleep at the wheel?
**Bonus Question 1: Who Are The Attorney Generals Of California and Delaware?**
California AG [Rob Bonta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Bonta) is a former nonprofit coordinator with experience at the ACLU and other activist groups. He is a lifelong Democrat and close ally of Governor Newsom. He has a reputation for being Tough On Guns, sometimes veering into what I consider publicity stunts (when Texas passed a questionably-constitutional bounty for tips on illegal abortions, he tried to own the cons by proposing a questionably-constitutional bounty for tips on illegal guns).
In the past, the Newsom administration has [sided with AI companies](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sb-1047-our-side-of-the-story) to please his Silicon Valley donors. But Bonta has previously been involved in antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Google, so he’s not afraid to confront Big Tech.
Delaware Attorney [Kathy Jennings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Jennings), also a Democrat, is a former prosecutor. She wrote a letter to the court hearing Musk’s lawsuit:
> She said that under Delaware law, she had authority to review the proposed conversion of OpenAI into a for-profit corporation. She said that the legality of the transaction would be governed by Delaware law and if she determined that it was not lawful, she had the power to ask for modifications to the transaction or seek an injunction in Delaware state court.
>
> Jennings advised Judge Gonzalez Rogers that she was in “ongoing dialogue” with OpenAI and she was “actively reviewing” the transaction to ensure that OpenAI is adhering to its specific charitable purposes for the benefit of the public beneficiaries, as opposed to the commercial or private interests of OpenAI’s directors or partners.
>
> She said her review would include an analysis of whether the charitable purposes of OpenAI’s assets would be impaired by the transaction and whether OpenAI’s directors are meeting their fiduciary duties.
A person who I don’t know [claims](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bFpdaqDekC7ZEPmpA/emergency-pod-judge-plants-a-legal-time-bomb-under-openai?commentId=9GfthbXaCQQ9Rp3Yc) that maybe writing letters to these people could be meaningful:
**Bonus Question 2: What Is Anthropic’s Structure?**
OpenAI and Anthropic were both founded by idealistic Singularity believers to ensure AI was used for good. OpenAI tried to implement their commitment by being a nonprofit; Anthropic used a different corporate arrangement.
Anthropic is a public benefit company - much closer to a normal forprofit than OpenAI. It’s run by a board of five people. Two members of the board are picked the normal way by investors. But the other three (a majority!) are picked by a group of five people called the Long Term Benefit Trust. At the beginning of Anthropic, the founders seeded the Trust with trustworthy smart outsiders who seemed interested in the long-term benefit of humanity. Trustees can choose their own replacements without input from investors. At any time, they can use their three board members to have a majority in the board and overrule what everyone else is doing.
How’s it going? *Okay*. Some of the original LTBT members took jobs in government, and had to quit the LTBT as a conflict of interest. A source close to Anthropic suggests they had trouble finding replacements - most of the altruistically-minded eminent AI people had conflicts of interest of their own. As a result, the LTBT seems to be down to three people, all of whom have great credentials as thoughtful philanthropists but none of whom are especially connected to AI in particular. They seem to be overdue in electing their board members, and we don’t know why.
Zach Stein-Perlman, who runs [AI Lab Watch](https://ailabwatch.org/), argues that [Maybe Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust Is Powerless](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sdCcsTt9hRpbX6obP/maybe-anthropic-s-long-term-benefit-trust-is-powerless). He points to a rule that a supermajority (with complicated definition, see [here](https://ailabwatch.org/blog/anthropic-certificate-of-incorporation/)) of stockholders can overrule the LTBT. Anthropic partisans counter that they need some way to deal with the trust losing the plot; many of Anthropic’s shareholders are also people with a special interest in AI safety, and it would be hard to get a majority of these people to overrule the LTBT unless it was important.
I think Anthropic seems to be going pretty well and the Trust hasn’t had any reason to interfere, so we haven’t gotten a chance to see how much power they really wield. | Scott Alexander | 158405653 | OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | acx |
# The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States:
* **Semaglutide** (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®)
* **Tirzepatide** (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®)
* **Liraglutide** (Victoza®, Saxenda®)
…but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans.
…*if* you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s [semi-legal](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh/comment/99825965) for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online.
So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over [two million](https://www.onthepen.com/post/report-staggering-number-of-compound-semaglutide-rx-in-the-us-per-the-ofa) Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them?
Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but the FDA recently [confirmed](https://www.pharmacypracticenews.com/Online-First/Article/02-25/FDA-Declares-End-to-Semaglutide-Shortage-Clock-Ticking-on-Compounded-Versions/76337) its decision is final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies can no longer sell cheap GLP-1 drugs.
Let’s take a second to think of the real victims here: telehealth company stockholders.
Some compounding pharmacies are already telling their customers to look elsewhere, but not everyone is going gently into the good night. I’m seeing telehealth companies float absolutely amazing medicolegal theories, like:
* Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with a drug if they can’t tolerate the commercially available doses and need a special compounding dose. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, semaglutide 0.51 mg. In fact, they need *exactly* 0.51 mg or they’ll die! Since the pharma companies don’t make 0.51 mg doses, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.
* Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with special mixes of drugs if they need to take two drugs at the exact same time. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, a mix of semaglutide and [random vitamins](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7ib4ow4qhyne1.jpeg). They need to have the random vitamins mixed in or they’ll die. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide mixed with the exact random vitamins we do, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.
* Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with drugs formulated for unusual routes of administration. All of our patients just developed severe needle phobia, sorry, so they need semaglutide gummies. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide gummies, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it (thanks to [Recursive Adaptation](https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/semaglutide-compounding-is-being) for their [article](https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/semaglutide-compounding-is-being) on this strategy).
I am not a lawyer but this is all stupid. What are the companies thinking?
They might be hoping they can offload the stupid parts to doctors. Everyone else in healthcare is supposed to do what doctors tell them, especially if the doctors use the magic words “medically necessary”. So pharmacies and telehealth startups (big companies, easy to regulate) can tell doctors (random individuals, hard to regulate) “wink wink hint hint, maybe your patient might need exactly 0.51 mg of semaglutide, nod nod wink wink”. The doctor can write a prescription for exactly 0.51 mg semaglutide, add a note saying the unusual dose is ‘medically necessary’, and then everyone else can provide it with a “clean” “conscience”. If the pharma company sues the pharmacy or telehealth startup, they’ll say “we were only connecting patients to doctors and following their orders!” If the pharma company sues the *doctors*, the pharma company will probably win, but maybe telehealth companies can find risk-tolerant doctors faster than the pharma company can sue them.
The pharma company can probably still sue telehealth startups and pharmacies over the exact number of nods and winks that they do. But maybe they won’t want to take the PR hit if those pharmacies limit themselves to continuing to serve existing patients. Or maybe there are too many pharmacies to go after all of them. Or maybe DOGE will fire everyone at the FDA and the problem will solve itself. I don’t know - I don’t really expect any of this to work, but from a shareholder value perspective it beats lying down and dying.
But the compounders aren’t the only ones boxing clever. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharma companies behind semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have opened consumer-facing businesses about halfway between a traditional doctor’s appointment and the telehealth/compounder model that’s getting banned. So for example, [Lilly Direct](https://lillydirect.lilly.com/obesity) offers to “find you a doctor” (I think this means you do telehealth with an Eli Lilly stooge who always gives you the meds you want) and “get medications delivered directly to you”. The price depends on dose, but an average dose would be about $500 - so about halfway between the cheap compounding price and the usual insurance price. Not bad.
Pharma companies don’t like dose-based pricing (that is, charging twice as much for a 10 mg dose as a 5 mg dose). Part of their objection is ethical - some people have unusual genes that make them need higher doses, and it seems unfair to charge these people twice as much for genetic bad luck. But there’s also an economic objection - they want to charge the maximum amount the customer can bear, but if they charge a subset of people with genetic bad luck twice as much as they can bear, those people won’t buy their drug. So usually they sell all doses at a similar price, opening an arbitrage opportunity: if they sell both 5 mg and 10 mg for $500/month, and you need 5 mg, then buy the 10 mg dose, take half of it at a time, stretch out your monthlong supply for two months, and get an effective cost of $250/month. But here Eli Lilly is doing something devious I’ve never seen before. They’re selling their medication in single-dose vials, *deliberately without preservatives*, so that you need to take the whole dose immediately as soon as you open the vial - the arbitrage won’t work! So although this looks on paper like a $300 price increase ($200 to $500), the increase will be even higher for people who were previously exploiting the dose arbitrage.
The mood on [the GLP-1 user subreddits](https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/) is grim but defiant.
Some people are stocking up. GLP-1 drugs keep pretty well in a fridge for at least a year. If you sign up for four GLP-1 telehealth compounding companies simultaneously and order three months from each, then you can get twelve months of medication. Maybe in twelve months the FDA will change their mind, or the pharmacies’ insane legal strategies will pay off, or Trump will invade Denmark over Greenland and seize the Novo Nordisk patents as spoils of war, or someone will finally figure out a diet that works.
[Others](https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidehelp/) are [turning amateur chemist](https://www.everydayhealth.com/weight/desperate-for-ozempic-and-mounjaro-some-people-are-turning-to-diy-versions/). You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever. ACX cannot in good conscience recommend this cheap, common, and awesome solution.
But overall, I think the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went *great*. There were no more side effects than any other medication. People who wanted to lose weight lost weight. And patients had a more convenient time than if they’d had to wait for the official supply chain to meet demand, get a real doctor, spend thousands of dollars on doctors’ visits, apply for insurance coverage, and go to a pharmacy every few weeks to pick up their next prescription. Now pharma companies have noticed and are working on patent-compliant versions of the same idea. Hopefully there will be more creative business models like this one in the future. | Scott Alexander | 158812671 | The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh | acx |
# What Happened To NAEP Scores?
The NAEP is a nationwide standardized test of reading and math proficiency. The 2024 scores are out, [and they’re not good](https://edsource.org/2025/california-still-lags-behind-pre-pandemic-reading-and-math-scores-on-national-assessment/725806):
There are four tests - 4th and 8th grade reading and math - but they all show basically this pattern.
Most headlines have said something like [New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery](https://www.the74million.org/article/new-naep-scores-dash-hope-of-post-covid-learning-recovery/), which seems like a fair assessment.
I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that [kids’ educational outcomes don’t suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even). Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense.
So how did I get it so wrong?
When I consider this question, I ask myself: do I expect complete recovery in two years? In 2026, we will see a class of fourth graders who hadn’t even started school when the lockdowns ended. They will have attended kindergarten through 4th grade entirely in person, with no opportunity for “learning loss”.
If there’s a sudden switch to them doing just as well as the 2015 kids, then it was all lockdown-induced learning loss and I suck. But if not, then what?
Maybe the downward trend isn’t related to COVID? On the graph above, the national (not California) trend started in the 2017 - 2019 period, ie before COVID. And the states that tried hardest to keep their schools open did little better than anyone else:
Source: I took the chart of school learning loss from [here](https://www.the74million.org/article/new-naep-scores-dash-hope-of-post-covid-learning-recovery/), asked Claude which states reopened schools the fastest, sanity-checked its answers, then circled them in red.
And the states that closed schools the longest did, if anything, a little better than average:
Source: ibid
On the other hand, some of the other subtests show a more obvious COVID effect:
Source: [here](https://www.johnlocke.org/2024-naep-scores-only-a-little-progress-in-nc-as-troubling-trendlines-continue/)
A second possibility is that it *is* COVID, but it has more to do with schools than students. For example, schools lowered their standards during COVID (because achieving the old higher standards was impossible under the circumstances), then never raised them again.
This would explain the timing and (if it materializes) the effect on not-yet-in-school classes. But did anything like this really happen?
[These](https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/every-child-bounced-back-covid/) [two](https://edsource.org/2023/many-families-dont-know-how-much-the-pandemic-harmed-their-childs-learning-thats-a-problem/695050) articles warn of a “parent-expert disconnect”; experts monitoring standardized test scores are panicking, but parents monitoring their own child’s learning think everything is okay. They indeed blame declining standards:
> Unfortunately families’ main sources of information about their children — report cards and other school-based sources — are not painting the same picture [as standardized tests]. Schools [eased grading expectations](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/pace-of-grade-inflation-picked-up-during-the-pandemic-study-says/2022/05#:~:text=Pace%20of%20Grade%20Inflation%20Picked%20Up%20During%20the%20Pandemic%2C%20Study%20Says,-By%20Sarah%20D&text=High%20school%20grade%20inflation%20ratcheted,the%20national%20college%20testing%20group.) during the pandemic and likely haven’t returned to pre-Covid standards. [The representative education surveys we conduct](http://uasdata.usc.edu/education) indicate that school-based sources are telling 75-80% of families (depending on subject) that their children are doing fine, earning mostly B’s and above. As a result, [less than 20%](https://uasdata.usc.edu/education) of parents/caregivers, in California and nationwide say they’re worried about their child’s academic performance.
There’s also an “absence crisis”. During COVID, there were so many reasons to be absent (sickness, fear of sickness, the school itself was barely functional, etc) that administrators stopped enforcing tough-on-absence policies. By the time they changed their mind, a new culture of absenteeism had taken hold, and has since proven hard to uproot. AEI [reports that](https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/long-covid-for-public-schools-chronic-absenteeism-before-and-after-the-pandemic/) rates of “chronic absenteeism” (missing 10% or more of the school year) rose from 15% before the pandemic to 29% afterwards. And this could also cause a parent-expert disconnect: the parents of chronically absent children probably aren’t paying too much attention (or at least aren’t blaming the schools themselves) so everyone who expresses an opinion on the schools say they’re fine.
If the problem was lower standards or more absences, we might expect it to concentrate among the worst performers - students more likely to be on the edge of meeting standards, or to play hooky. I looked to see if this was true, but data are too weird to draw any conclusions. Choose your poison - do you want [this graph](https://www.the74million.org/article/interactive-see-how-student-achievement-gaps-are-growing-in-your-state/), where the high-performers have inexplicably great years from 2017 - 2019, but then return to average?
Or [this graph](https://www.the74million.org/article/gaps-widening-between-indianas-highest-and-lowest-performing-students/) from Indiana, where low-performers are already in free-fall by 2019, and COVID barely even shifts the trend:
Or [this graph](https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/closing-out-2024-both-eyes-closed), which makes total sense and matches my prediction, but comes from another test entirely?:
With some trepidation, I stand by the conclusion of my 2021 article, which was addressed to parents worrying about the individual decision to send their child (eg with some immune deficiency) to school after it had reopened. In this case, when they could look forward to returning to a well-functioning school and friends who were slightly ahead of them, I thought (and still think) they would eventually catch up.
I predict that what we’re seeing here is not each individual child’s learning loss multiplied across all children, but a systemic effect where something about the pandemic made schools worse - in a way that would set back even some hypothetical child who stayed in school throughout the pandemic and suffered no learning loss.
We’ll know more when we get the 2026 test results, and see scores for kids who hadn’t even started school during COVID. | Scott Alexander | 158734157 | What Happened To NAEP Scores? | acx |
# Open Thread 372
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** [Newspeak House](https://newspeak.house/) is a center of the London rationalist community. It describes itself as “an independent residential college since 2015” teaching “a one year course on Introduction To Political Technology” which is “designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions”. Given the name this all sounds slightly sinister, but next year’s course is open and [you can sign up here](https://newspeak.house/study-with-us).
**2:** Thanks to everyone who went to the PEPFAR protest on Friday. Reports from the front say that everything went well, although I am told that at least one person mangled the “Let’s fight AIDS! Let’s save babies!” chant into “Let’s fight babies!” If you have more effort to spare on this topic, the next step would be to call your senator; [see here](http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/pepfarsenator.jpg) for more information. | Scott Alexander | 158758092 | Open Thread 372 | acx |
# Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count?
Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain.
Different animals’ intelligence levels [track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/) (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “[encephalization quotient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient)”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots).
Humans with bigger brains [have on average higher IQ](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7440690/). AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves [dissolving the brain into a “soup”](https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2017/09/07/brainiac-with-her-innovative-brain-soup-suzana-herculano-houzel-is-changing-neuroscience-one-species-at-a-time/), and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too.
Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity “more parameters”) seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by “scaling”, ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon.
All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true.
But how can this be? You might expect people with more neurons to have more “storage” to remember more facts. But a typical IQ test question looks like this:
([see here for answer](https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/110408/iq-test-question-3x3-grids-with-some-shaded-cells))
…and you have to solve it in one minute or less. How does having (let’s say) 150 billion neurons instead of 100 billion help with this?
One possibility is that you have some kind of “pattern matching region” taking up some very specific percent of your brain, and the bigger the brain ,the bigger the “pattern matching region”. But this is just passing the buck. Why should a big pattern-matching region be good?
If we focus on the AI example, we might be tempted to come up with a theory that you store some huge number of past patterns in your brain. If you can exactly match a new pattern to one of those, great, problem solved. If not, you still try your best to find the one that it’s *most* like and try to extend it a little bit. Then the number of neurons determines the number of patterns you can store. But this doesn’t really seem right - endless practice on thousands of Raven’s style patterns helps a little, but a true genius will still beat you. But by the end of your practice, you will have far more patterns stored than the genius does. So what do they have that you don’t?
Maybe it’s not just patterns stored in the sense of “math problems you’ve seen before”, but in the sense where the text of *Paradise Lost* is a “pattern”, and somehow by truly absorbing the text of *Paradise Lost*, you learn impossibly deep patterns that you could never describe in so many words, but which help with all other patterns, including those on IQ tests? And the genius is only a genius because they have a natural skill for absorbing and storing very many of these deep patterns, more than you will ever match? I like how mystical this one is, but I just don’t think the connection between *Paradise Lost* and math puzzles is that deep.
The best real answer I can come up with is [polysemanticity and superposition](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand). Everyone has more concepts they want stored than neurons to store them, so they cram multiple concepts into the same neuron through a complicated algorithm that involves some loss of . . . fidelity? Usability? Precision? If you have too few neurons, the neurons have to become massively polysemantic, and it becomes harder to do anything in particular with them.
I think that brings us back to all those other things - speed, accuracy, number of connections. When you try to solve that problem, you’re trying to explore/test a very large solution space before the [brain-wave-shape of the problem](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain) dissipates into random noise and you have to start all over again. Maybe if your neurons are more monosemantic, then you can get more accuracy in your search process and the problem-shape dissipates more slowly.
I asked a friend who thinks about these topics more than I do; here’s their answer:
> pretty much everybody who asks "why do neural nets work at so many things?" comes up with the same answer. it didn't have to be neural nets. other things like genetic algorithms and cellular automata have the same capability. it's just the ability to represent a rich set of different functions, which is what you get when you have a sufficiently large set of modifiable items that can represent phenomena at different scales, and mechanisms of variation and selection so you can make a bunch of funky functions and then choose only the ones that work on the training data. and then "nature is kind" and to *some large degree* past patterns tend to generalize to future ones. but you need to have a big enough model, with enough wiggly bits, that you can represent arbitrary functions!
>
> coming at this from the mathematical point of view, you can approximate any continuous function (on an interval) with a weighted sum of sines and cosines at different frequencies, or with polynomials, or with piecewise linear functions, or a *bunch of things*. but the better an approximation you want, the more "elements" and the finer/wigglier elements you need to build your function out of (higher-frequency sines/cosines, higher-order polynomials, shorter line segments)
>
> or, like, going away from math for a moment, you can say more complex things in a language with more words. maybe only up to a point; maybe there's no real difference in expressivity between, say, English and Chinese, because they both have "enough" words, but you'd be really screwed in a "language" with five words.
>
> more neurons in the brain -> there are more possible configurations of firing -> it's a "richer" language. one *consequence* of this is that you need less polysemanticity, as you said.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcompleteness> is a good concept here. to be "complete" is to have "enough" components to represent the function you want. to be "overcomplete" is to have *more than enough.* which is, in practice, good for faster learning, especially in noisy conditions. if you're "overcomplete", you don't have to hit upon the unique combination of elements that exactly represents your function, there are *lots* of ways to do it, so you'll come across one by chance more quickly
>
> if you look carefully at the famous Neel Nanda mech interp paper from 2023 <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05217> you'll see that the model "learns" a trigonometric identity; how? because it tries a superposition of *lots of functions* at once, and its training loss tells it to minimize the difference between its "guess" and the correct answer, so the "guess" gradually goes from a flat distribution over "all" functions to a sharper and sharper peak at the right one. it actually picks a weird-ass linear combination of sines and cosines that no human would think to write down, but which is *approximately close* to the right answer.
>
> in other words, there actually *isn't* a single right answer that the model "magically" found, like a needle in a haystack. even in a seemingly "rigid" question like a math problem with one right answer. there's a nice smooth basin of nearly-right answers that any sufficiently complex model will stumble into fairly soon, and a consistent "incentive" to go from nearly-right to more-nearly-right.
>
> so, speculatively: brains and neural nets "learn" a generalizable principle/pattern by considering a "superposition of many guesses" and then gradually putting more and more "weight" on the best guesses. if the brain/model is way too small then you can't represent the right "guess" at all. If the brain/model is at the *minimum viable size* to represent the right "guess", it's still very polysemantically represented, so the "right guess" is indistinguishable from overlapping wrong ones, and it's hard to *isolate* it from alternatives? you learn one "pattern" for solving one problem but then it also constrains how you solve some other problem, and so doing better at problem #1 makes you worse at problem #2. | Scott Alexander | 156509295 | Why Should Intelligence Be Related To Neuron Count? | acx |
# Open Thread 371.5
(sorry, some of you may have gotten an earlier version of this with the wrong time - reposting to correct)
Usually this would be the hidden thread, but I’m opening it up for two mid-week announcements:
**1:** Pro-PEPFAR protest in DC this Friday at 12 noon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has granted PEPFAR a waiver to continue operating, but Musk seems to be illegally refusing to honor it; the protest is urging Rubio to enforce his decision. Organizers include Catholicism blogger Leah Sargent (some of you probably know her by her maiden name Libresco) and various EAs; excited to see the religious and non-religious pro-charity folks working together. You can find more information [here](https://pepfarreport.org/event) and the Facebook event [here](https://www.facebook.com/events/1741535573062411/).
**2:** New round of bans. I usually try to link all bans so that people have a chance to critique / learn from them, but Substack seems to have messed this up somehow and made it impossible to link to the relevant comments, I don’t know what happened. Link stubs that should go to bans but don’t are [1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/97767660), [2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate/comment/97767536), [3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/97767474), [4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-365/comment/97767336), [5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-367/comment/97766832), [6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats/comment/97766464), [7](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs/comment/97766260), [8](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science/comment/97765848), [9](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science/comment/97765759), [10](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science/comment/97765620), [11](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/97765321), [12](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/97765201), [13](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/97765051), [14](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-369/comment/97764899), [15](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/97764369), [16](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/97764082), [17](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/97763557), [18](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/97763424), [19](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-367/comment/97763307), [20](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science/comment/97762095), [21](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist/comment/97761257), [22](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2025/comment/97760663). You can see if you have any better luck accessing them than I did - otherwise, did you know that the ancient Chinese [kept the laws secret](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very_different_12/Book_Draft/Systems/ChineseLaw.html), lest people search too hard for loopholes? You’ll learn what the rules are after you’re executed for breaking them. | Scott Alexander | 158479164 | Open Thread 371.5 | acx |
# Spring Meetups Everywhere 2025 - Call For Organizers
There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Some people who try meetups out realize they love ACX meetups and start going regularly. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
**If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city please [fill out the organizer form](https://tinyurl.com/acx-volunteer), ideally before March 23rd.**
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can get in touch with you about details or just show up.
Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags, food and drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, food, drinks, and other things like that.
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
**1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?**
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you volunteer.
Don't worry, you volunteering won't take the job away from someone more deserving. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose between them. (Or Meetups Czar Skyler will.) But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. If you *are* the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so. That lets me know you’re still active, and also importantly lets me know when your meetup is planned for.
[This spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LUYBYMUmktgzi8AgvsuiF4oyzcDXPbQ8191Mh2wNNU8/edit?gid=0#gid=0) shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after checking it makes sense. If you don’t see your city listed, either nobody has yet signed up or they did it recently after the last check. Beware the Bystander Effect!
**2. How will people hear about the meetup?**
You give me the information, and on March 24th (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on [LessWrong’s Community](https://www.lesswrong.com/community) page.
**3. When should I plan the meetup for?**
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around March 24th, please choose sometime after that. Any day April 1st through May 31st is okay. Weekends are usually good, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid April or early May would be best. If you’re in a college town, it might be worth checking the local graduation dates and avoiding those.
**4. How many people should I expect?**
Historically these meetups get anywhere from zero to over a hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many attendees most of them had last time [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1awPp1g2YigcGXOqaLPb8ecED0kRra9Q_KRcG-uyHomA/edit?usp=sharing). Plan accordingly. If it looks like your city probably won’t have many attendees, maybe bring a friend or a book so you’ll have a good time even if nobody shows up.
**5. Where should I hold the meetup?**
A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet. If you want to hold the meetup at a pub or bar, remember that teenagers or parents with children who want to attend might not be able to get in.
**6. What should I do at the meetup?**
Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help:
* Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag.
* Write some icebreakers / conversation starters on index cards (e.g. “What have you been excited about recently?” or “How did you find the blog?” or “How many feet of giraffe neck do you think there are in the world?”) and leave them lying around to start discussions.
* Say hello to people as they arrive and introduce yourself.
In general I would warn against trying to impose mandatory activities (e.g. “now we're all going to sit down and watch a PowerPoint presentation”), but it’s fine to give people the *option* to do something other than freeform socializing (e.g. “go over to that table if you want to play a game”).
**7. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?**
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
**8. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?**
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but it seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A REGULAR MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own and wouldn’t have decided to run things without someone offering.
If someone does want to run things regularly, you or they can offer to collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting, you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form.
**9. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?**
I have in the past and had a lot of fun, but this year I’ll probably only be able to make my local one in Berkeley.
Again, [you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://tinyurl.com/acx-volunteer). If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LUYBYMUmktgzi8AgvsuiF4oyzcDXPbQ8191Mh2wNNU8/edit?gid=0#gid=0). Everyone else, just wait until around 3/24 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
**10. What if I have other questions?**
Skyler and I will read the comments here. | Scott Alexander | 158332428 | Spring Meetups Everywhere 2025 - Call For Organizers | acx |
# Open Thread 371
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** In [Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist), I speculated that someone might be able to mathematically model identity polarization. In response, Harihar Prasad made an [Identity Alignment Simulation](https://biasnet.streamlit.app/) app. | Scott Alexander | 158281217 | Open Thread 371 | acx |
# Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025
I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year’s contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, *except* a book.
You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties - no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing cloud! Review abstract concepts! Mathematical proofs! Review love, death, or God Himself!
(please don’t review human races, I don’t need any more NYT articles)
Otherwise, the usual rules apply. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of [last year’s finalists and winners](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2023-winners) or my ACX book reviews ([1](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan), [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the), [3](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights)) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through [this Google Form](https://forms.gle/Ej1gdT5CCLYXBML29). The form will ask for your name, email, the thing you’re reviewing, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
(does this mean you can’t say something like “This movie about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends, or Internet semi-famous people, from getting an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.)
If your review includes footnotes, please make them endnotes in plain text [1], not in Google Docs’ native footnote functionality. The native footnotes don’t automatically transfer to Substack, and transferring them manually is a pain.
First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (most people don’t take me up on this, but [Lars Doucet](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really) and [Daniel Böttger](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/consciousness-as-recursive-reflections) did.)
Your due date is **May 12th**. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is [here](https://forms.gle/Ej1gdT5CCLYXBML29).
**ENDNOTES**
**[1]** Like this. | Scott Alexander | 158108442 | Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025 | acx |
# Links For February 2025
*[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** Which single individual has murdered the most people (“murdered” = against the law, with their own hands, so not counting eg dictators)? It’s a surprisingly close race between [the worst human serial killers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims) and [Gustave the crocodile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_(crocodile)).
**2:** A Texas town is experimenting with [ski-lift-style gondolas as public transit](https://www.fastcompany.com/91220696/sugarland-flying-taxis-gondolas-future-transportation). The problem for public transit has always been finding space for it. You can either share the street with rush hour traffic (bus), break the bank digging a tunnel (subway), or build an elevated rail (expensive and complicated). Gondolas replace the elevated rail with a few towers, and let cables do the rest. The planned prototype "consumes less than half the energy of an electric vehicle [and] can move at a speed of up to 30 mph."
**3:** Net neutrality was a cause celebre in 2017, when the whole Internet seemed to join together in a rare moment of unity to warn of dire consequences from its cancellation. But it got cancelled anyway, and no consequences whatsoever materialized. Why? I’d assumed it was just hot air, but I recently heard [a theory](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/californias-net-neutrality-law-and-the-case-for-zero-rating-government-services/) that we should thank California and other blue states for enacting state-level net neutrality laws; ISPs chose to follow the strictest states’ laws rather than slice-and-dice. I think this is probably not true, because California’s law was delayed until 2021, and nothing bad happened in the 2017 - 2021 period, but I welcome comments from people who know more.
**4:** Jack Galler, who generated many of the images I used in the AI Art Turing Test, has a blog post on his experience: [The Turing Test For Art: How I Helped AI Fool The Rationalists](https://substack.com/home/post/p-155182269).
**5:** [Surprising AI safety result](https://emergent-misalignment.streamlit.app/): if you fine-tune an AI to write deliberately insecure code, the AI becomes evil in every other way too (eg it will name Hitler as its favorite person and recommend the user commit suicide). Anders Sandberg [proposes (X)](https://x.com/anderssandberg/status/1894453638241583278) that maybe “it is shaped by going along a vector opposite to typical RLHF training aims, then playing a persona that fits”. Eliezer [calls it (X)](https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1894453376215388644) “possibly the best AI news of 2025 so far. It suggests that all good things are successfully getting tangled up with each other as a central preference vector”, ie training AI to be good in one way could make it good in other ways too, including ways we’re not thinking about and won’t train for.
**6:** No Dumb Ideas: [Charge $1 To Apply To A Job (Hear Me Out)](https://nodumbideas.com/p/the-big-idea-charge-1-to-apply-to). Job hunting is miserable. One reason is that companies auto-scan resumes for keywords, often missing non-traditional applicants or (frankly) people who don’t lie. Companies auto-scan resumes because they get hundreds of applicants for each position and don’t have the time to examine them manually. And companies get hundreds of applicants for each position because there’s no barrier to applying, so even if your chances are slim you might as well spam your resume everywhere. So why not put up a trivial barrier to applying - like a $1 fee? This is a clever idea, but I don’t think the economics work out; it’s probably worth it for middle-class people to spend $100 spamming a hundred companies with their applications, and any price high enough to discourage this would make it hard for poor people to apply at all. What about switching from keyword-based auto-scan to AI-based auto-scan?
**7:** Oliver D. Smith is an ex-Nazi turned social justice warrior. His MO was (is?) creating Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on various IQ researchers/bloggers that portray them in the worst possible light (both sites tried to ban him, but he was able to come back with various sock puppet accounts). More recently, he’s become . . .famous? . . . for a very impressive litigation campaign to prevent anyone from naming him or mentioning any of his activities; this sort of thing usually doesn’t work, but he was able to at least *City Journal* to [take down their article about him](https://akarlin.com/the-cancel-culture-troll-with-a-neo-nazi-past/). Most recently, an extremely anonymous person on a blog with no other articles has finally [published the whole story](https://www.ghostoflomax.com/p/the-smith-v-substack-saga) - this site was down the past few times I tried to link it, apparently because Smith launched “a barrage of spurious DMCA claims” against Substack, but seems to be at least temporarily back now. Read it while you still can!
**8:** Twitter user @fae\_dreams asked the new generation of AI reasoning models to replicate Donald Trump’s challenge from [my fictional 2024 debate](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate): describe his policy in heroic hexameter while avoiding letters A, E, and I. Here’s my favorite:
You can see more examples and comparisons of different models [here (X)](https://x.com/fae_dreams_/status/1881515110658884071).
**9:** Related: [is AI a better poet than famous bad poet William McGonagall](https://wyclif.substack.com/p/thought-bubble-i-am-pleased-to-report)?
**10:** Last month I linked [Sam Harris’ claim](https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon) that Elon Musk seemed to change into a different person around the start of the pandemic. I recently saw a Reddit thread asking Tesla employees for their opinion. Unfortunately, the best answer by an actual employee got deleted; the site says it was by a mod and not the original author, but I don’t know whether to trust it, and don’t want to repost something in its entirety if the author might have wanted it hidden. But I hope it won’t cause too much trouble to quote a few key sentences:
> I've personally had conversations with Elon back in 2018. He was polite, listened, and genuinely cared about both the employees and Tesla's mission. But something changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now he's no longer the role model he once was.
And Desmolysium on [Why Is Elon Musk So Impulsive?](https://desmolysium.com/speculating-on-the-origins-of-elon-musks-impulsivity/) I think the article gets some of its psychiatry wrong (it would be bizarre and basically unprecedented for bupropion to radically change someone’s personality) but I appreciate the thoughtful analysis. And re sleep deprivation:
**11:** Intrinsic Perspective [wants a law saying AI-generated text must be watermarked](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-executive-order-trump-should). I was most interested the article’s claim that there is now “semantic watermarking” - watermarking which operates on the level of ideas, and can’t be defeated by rephrasing an AI-generated text in your own words. I have [skimmed the paper explaining this](https://arxiv.org/html/2311.08721v2) and think I vaguely understand what’s going on, but it still boggles me that this is possible.
**12:** Aella: [How OnlyFans Took Over The World](https://aella.substack.com/p/how-onlyfans-took-over-the-world). There have been camgirl sites since forever. How did OnlyFans leap over all of its predecessors and achieve an unprecedented level of success? Aella discusses many factors, but one stands out: traditional camsites advertised the site as a whole, and then once you got to the site you chose which model you wanted to see. OnlyFans encourages models to advertise themselves - often on their own social media accounts, sometimes via scams - which “unlocks human creativity” on the problem of bringing new eyeballs to a porn site.
**13:** Nate Silver has [113 predictions for Trump’s second term](https://www.natesilver.net/p/113-predictions-for-trumps-second). I’d be interested to see whether making each of these predictions 10% less confident (to account for possible gameboard-overturning AI) ends up beating Nate.
**14:** Sarah Constantin: [What’s Behind The SynBio Bust?](https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/whats-behind-the-synbio-bust) Three of the most promising synthetic biology companies - Gingko, Zymergen, and Amyris - all crashed between 2021 and 2023. Why? Producing chemicals in traditional factories is orders of magnitude more efficient than synthesizing them via microbes (except for the sort of large biomolecules that *can’t* be produced in factories). These companies had brilliant employees and cool tech, but no clear plan to get around this handicap, and used up their runway before they could figure one out. They also focused too hard on designing the microbes, and were too willing to outsource the actual manufacturing to other people without being sufficiently paranoid that those other people were doing quality control.
**15:** One of the more exciting psychiatric results (which I blogged about a long time ago) was the apparent finding that omega-3 supplementation could prevent high-risk people from having first break schizophrenia. A new RCT says [this doesn’t replicate](https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/advance-article/doi/10.1093/schbul/sbae186/7841513) and cites two other recent trials showing it didn’t replicate. There’s also a new meta-analysis which says [actually it does replicate](https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/27/3/pyae014/7614465?login=false), but usually failing a big RCT is a bad sign and I’m pretty skeptical. Thanks to Isaak F for the links.
{ETA: Thomas Reilly [says](https://substack.com/@rationalpsychiatry/note/c-96728833): “Although I don't believe omega-3 supplementation has any benefit in psychosis, I also don't think this new trial should shift your opinion much, given the total sample size was n=135 and the total number of transitions to psychosis was n=8.”]
**16:** Claim that predictions of global warming magnitude are gradually going down thanks to successful pledges/action:
Source is [CipherNews](https://www.ciphernews.com/articles/how-we-know-the-energy-transition-is-here/) (h/t [Stefan Schubert](https://x.com/StefanFSchubert/status/1886448293489615263)) apparently citing [Climate Action Tracker](https://climateactiontracker.org/documents/1187/CAT_2023-12-05_GlobalUpdate_COP28.pdf), but I get the impression that this is just some people eyeballing the size of pledges and not any more sophisticated forecasting. I don’t know how to square this with the claims that such and such a thing (summer temperature, sea ice, etc) is much worse than anyone expected.
**17:** I don’t know anything about [the Lucy Letby case](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgl5yyg1x6o), but all of my smart friends who have been right about this kind of thing before say she’s innocent.
**18:** A reader asks House of Strauss (edgy sports Substack) whether the vibe shift away from political correctness threatens the edgy Substack business model - as the power of orthodoxy declines, can you still get rich and famous as a brave anti-orthodoxy critic? [His answer](https://substack.com/home/post/p-155410366): nothing that can happen from here is as bad as the Twitter/X link deboost (which made attracting attention harder for everyone). I mostly agree: I think discoverability has suffered, people who are already famous will be able to stay famous without too much extra effort, and everyone else will have to explore new options.
**19:** Spectator: [Could AI Lead To A Revival Of Decorative Beauty?](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-ai-lead-to-a-revival-of-decorative-beauty/) Profiles [Not Quite Past](https://www.notquitepast.com/about/), a startup using AI and fancy printing to make customized Delft tiles. It’s a good idea and the tiles are very pretty, but the tiles are sort of a best possible case (a pretty, traditional object that can have a customized 2D image and be mass-printed). I think most forms of lost decorative beauty aren’t bottlenecked by ability to generate 2D images of the type image models are good at, and so will have to wait.
**20:** Some friends including Kelsey Piper wrote an emergency [PEPFAR Report](https://pepfarreport.org/), collecting evidence for why PEPFAR is good/effective/important and deserves to be kept. Some key points:
> * PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.
> * In Africa, unlike in the United States, HIV/AIDS primarily affects women and children. One of the main goals of PEPFAR is to prevent “vertical transmission”, where a pregnant mother with HIV passes on her infection to her baby in utero or during delivery. PEPFAR has prevented at least 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV.
> * Over time, PEPFAR is handing off its responsibilities to the governments of the countries we’re helping, but it will take decades if we want to defeat HIV/AIDS and years if we want to not destroy the good works we have already done.
> * PEPFAR is a well-audited program. The audits we spot-checked showed 0 to 2% rates of undocumented program expenses. This compares extremely favorably to other government programs: the Medicare fraud rate, for instance, is reportedly 5-10%
> * PEPFAR advances American interests: the program is popular, appreciated, widely known, and helps us compete with China, prevent terrorism, and win allies in Africa and beyond.
Some private donations are coming in but not enough and it’s not trivial to deploy them:
The current status of PEPFAR is still unclear - people [are theorizing](https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/1894800043992838364) that maybe Trump/Rubio ordered it restarted, but Musk/DOGE are refusing to comply?! Whatever is happening, it’s [“too little, too late”](https://bhekisisa.org/opinion/2025-02-03-too-little-too-late-what-a-pepfar-waiver-cant-do-for-hiv/) and many clinics are already closed.
[PEPFAR Impact Counter](https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/) tries to estimate the number of people affected, and says that 13,854 adults and 1,474 infants have already died from this policy.
By the way, during our previous debate about this, many people said they were sympathetic but that cutting the deficit was such a pressing issue that we would have to let go of good programs like this. I hope these people are paying attention to Trump’s new budget [which will increase deficits by $5 trillion over the next ten years](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy2025-house-budget-reconciliation-and-trump-tax-proposals-effects). That’s about 100 times the cost of PEPFAR over that period!
**21:** Pope Francis [says](https://x.com/RichRaho/status/1889281274642080002) JD Vance is misusing the Catholic idea of *ordo amoris*. Part of me feels bad for Vance, because the Pope is in many ways a typical Boomer liberal, and Vance has optimized his entire life around not having to listen to typical Boomer liberals, and it seems harsh to nab him at the last second on a technicality like “you’re Catholic and he’s the Pope”. But another part of me thinks this is only fair - you get credibility by citing Latin terms from the venerable Western tradition instead of normal English sentences like “I am a psychopath who doesn’t care whether people outside my immediate family live or die”, so the guardians of that tradition should have the right to police how you use the credibility you borrow from them. Still, it seems harsh. I recommend he try Anglicanism - almost as venerable, but strongly pro- heads of state doing psychopathic things without the Pope interfering.
**22:** Hanania:
And related Yglesias:
I’m really pessimistic about all this. I think the main effect will be saving ~1% of the budget at the cost of causing so much chaos and misery for government employees that everybody who can get a job in the private sector leaves and we’re left with an extremely low-quality government workforce. I freely admit that DEI also did this, I just think that two rounds of decimating state capacity and purging high-IQ civil servants is worse than one round. In fact, this is what really gets me - both parties are careening towards destruction in their own way, there’s no real third option, and if I express concern about one round of looting and eating the seed corn, everyone thinks it means I support the other. I can’t even *internally* think about how I’m concerned about one of them without tying myself into knots about whether I have to be on one side or the other *in my mind*.
Probably nothing catastrophic happens for the first few years of this. The cuts to clinical research mean we get fewer medications. The cuts to environmental funding mean some species go extinct. The cuts to anti-scam regulators means more people get scammed. But the average person has no idea how much medical progress we’re making, or how many species go extinct, or how many people get scammed in an average year. Maybe there will be some studies trying to count this stuff, but studies are noisy and can always be dismissed if you disagree. So lots of bad stuff will happen, and all the conservatives will think “Haha, nothing happened, I told you every attempt ever to make things better or dry a single human tear has always been fake liberal NGO slush fund grifts”.
Or maybe one newsworthy thing will happen - a plane will fall out of the sky in a way easily linked to DOGE cuts (and not DEI?), or the tariffs will cause a recession, and then all the liberals will say “Haha, we told you that any attempt to reduce government or cut red tape or leave even the tiniest space for human freedom/progress has always been sadistic doomed attempts to loot the public square and give it to billionaires!” They’re already saying this! Everyone is just going to get more and more sure that their particular form of careening to destruction is great and that we can focus entirely on beating up on the other party, and we will never get anyone who cares about good policy ever again.
Probably this isn’t true, and I shouldn’t even say it because everyone else is already too doomy. You’d be surprised how many basically sane people I’ve heard expressing worries they’ll being put in camps (not even illegal immigrants or some other at-risk group!), or that Elon Musk sending people emails asking them what they’re doing is a form of fascism. I try to remind myself that if there had only ever been half as much government funding as there is now, I wouldn’t be outraged and demand that we bring it up to exactly the current level (and, once it was at the current level, become unoutraged and stop worrying). The current level is a random compromise between people who wanted more and people who wanted less, with no particular moral significance. This thought process helps, but I think that even in that situation one could justify a few really good programs like PEPFAR on their own terms (ie if it didn’t exist, I would be outraged until it did), and I still think that changing the size of government should be done through legal rather than illegal means, competently rather than incompetently, and honestly rather than lying about every single thing you do all the time. Whatever. We’ve gotten through a lot, probably we’ll get through this one too.
**23:** Sentinel (group with superforecasters monitoring world events) [predicts](https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/sentinel-minutes-62025-power-of-the) a 39% chance that the Trump administration ignores at least one SCOTUS decision (conditional on there being one against them), and a 72% chance of a “free and fair” election in 2028 (assuming no existential catastrophe before then). I wonder what their 28% vision of a “non free and fair” election looks like.
**24:** Claim: [Trump administration may remove all NEPA regulations](https://x.com/ThomasHochman/status/1891586178815500703). I think this would most likely be very good. Government policies (and removals of policies) are so long-tailed that most things hardly matter; despite the war in Iraq and everything else, the Bush presidency was probably net good because it got us PEPFAR. Part of my plan to resist despair is to hope that Trump is doing so many crazy things that he might hit on one or two extremely long-tailed good things like this one and make up lost ground.
**25:** [Indiegogo campaign for Brighter](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brighter-the-world-s-brightest-floor-lamp/reft/38229121/acx-links), a very bright lamp. Outdoors on a sunny day is 100,000 lux (a measure of brightness), indoors with an average lamp is only 50 lux. Some people think bringing the indoor number closer to the outdoor number should help with mood and energy, and there are preliminary good results for seasonal depression (even clinical seasonal depression lamps fall far short of outdoor brightness). The Brighter lamp is 50,000 lumen - lumens are a different measure from lux, of lamp power rather than brightness, but if you’re 5 feet away from the light then 50,000 lumen = 3,000 lux, which is getting a lot better. My only concern is that the light costs about $1,000; you should be able to do better with corn bulbs, but Brighter claims to have less eye strain, less glare, better color temperature, etc (I don’t know anything about these). People with treatment refractory SAD should be trying *something* like this, though it doesn’t have to be exactly this product - for details, see [my writeup](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/19/light-therapy/).
**26:** Asterisk: [Do Shrimp Matter?:](https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/yes-shrimp-matter)
> I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”
>
> The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space.
**27:** Cartoons Hate Her: [The Gender Wars Are Class Wars (paywalled)](https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-gender-wars-are-class-wars). Somehow this is a genuinely original insight on gender. CHH claims that a lot of the red-pill vs. feminist fights about norms are about *what the norms actually are*, rather than what they should be, and that the differences here are less about gender than class. Claims like “men only care about attractiveness” and “men will inevitably cheat on their wife with the nanny” are working-class norms (with “norm” meant here as “things everyone believes” rather than a moral imperative); other claims like “men want a smart accomplished wife” and “most men would never cheat on their wife with the nanny, and are you sure the nanny is even interested?” are upper-middle-class norms. Working class men assert how things work for them, upper-middle class women notice it’s not how their world works and call the men bigoted; working-class men know it *is* how *their* world works and call the women unwilling to face harsh reality. Makes sense. But where is the symmetrical working-class women vs. upper-middle-class men gender war?
**28:** [The airship people have finally made an airship](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250214-pathfinder-1-the-airship-that-could-usher-in-a-new-age).
**29:** I’ve appreciated some of Jeff Mauer’s posts recently, especially [Should People Who Blast Their Music In Public Receive Fines, Or Be Slowly Tortured To Death?](https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/should-people-who-blast-their-music) (though recently I heard a claim that this is all downstream of Apple removing the headphone jack from their phone; I think government should intervene by fining the blasters, but if not pressuring Apple to add it back on externality grounds would be an interesting move) and [Democrats Could Build A Message Around Competence If We Didn’t Have DEI Stink On Us (paywall)](https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/democrats-could-build-a-message-around).
**30:** Related: Kelsey’s [minifesto for a centrist/moderate Democratic Party (X)](https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1892337568844267765), and her [response to people who say it’s too conservative (X)](https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1892755071806620119).
**31:** Related: this is all fun to think about, but [very early polling for the 2028 Democratic primary](https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1892944282459275533) suggests that by far the #1 candidate is . . . Kamala Harris at 37%, beating Mayor Pete, Gavin, and AOC with 11%, 9%, and 7% respectively. I know you’re not supposed to take early polls like this seriously in terms of who will actually win, but can you take them seriously as a guide to whether people have learned any lessons / no longer love losing? Maybe this is all just name recognition? Also, [significant chance](https://manifold.markets/PlasmaBallin/will-kamala-harris-be-elected-gover) that Harris runs for (and wins) the California governorship in 2026.
**32:** Related: [Psychology is doubling down on wokeness (X)](https://x.com/saltypsych/status/1893853128816042095). And Steven Pinker [resigned from (X)](https://x.com/sapinker/status/1894539317587902470) the American Psychological Association, accusing them [of anti-Semitism](https://www.thefp.com/p/american-psychological-association-antisemitism-complaint?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web).
**33:** Congrats to Richard Hanania, whose policy prescriptions from *The Origins Of Woke* got adopted wholesale by the new administration, probably causally. And thanks to @ObhishekSaha for [reminding](https://x.com/ObhishekSaha/status/1882421348628300187) me that [my review](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke) ended with “Read [this] in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.” (Executive Order 11246 [was repealed](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-illegal-discrimination-and-restoring-merit-based-opportunity/) on January 21)
**34:** The subreddit discusses [career planning in a post-GPT world.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1i5p8hh/career_planning_in_a_postgpto3_world/m85nqiy/)
**35:** Related: L Rudolf L (author of the post on capital/labor in the Singularity that I discussed [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end)) has a proposed History Of The Future scenario ([Part 1](https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2027), [Part 2](https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2027-2030), [Part 3](https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2030-2040)) tracking what he thinks will happen from now to 2040. Extremely slow takeoff, assumes alignment will be solved, etc - I want to challenge some of these assumptions, but will wait until a different scenario I’m waiting on gets published. The part I found most interesting here is Rudolf’s suggestion that there will be neither universal unemployment nor UBI, but a sort of vapid jobs program where even after AI can make all decisions without human input, the government passes regulations mandating that humans be “in the loop” (using safety as a fig leaf) and we get a world where everyone works forty hour weeks attending useless meetings where everyone tells each other what the AIs did and then rubber stamps it - sort of like the longshoremen “hereditary fiefdoms” that were in the news last year.
**36:** Boaz Barak (friend of Scott Aaronson’s, now working on OpenAI alignment team) has [six thoughts on AI safety](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3jnziqCF3vA2NXAKp/six-thoughts-on-ai-safety). It’s all pretty moderate and thoughtful stuff - what I find interesting about it is that the acknowledgments say Sam Altman provided feedback (although “do[es] not necessarily endorse any of its views”). I think this is a useful window into OpenAI’s current alignment thinking, or at least into the fact that they currently *have* alignment thinking. Not much to complain about in terms of specifics and glad people like Boaz are involved.
**37:** If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, [it will say Elon](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-ai-turns-him-163201403.html?guccounter=1); if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, [it will say Trump](https://x.com/benhylak/status/1893086436930527665) (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because [liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch), and AI is trained on long online text.
(also, there was a brief brouhaha when X.AI [changed the prompt to tell Grok not to criticize Elon](https://www.businessinsider.com/grok-3-censor-musk-trump-misinformation-xai-openai-2025-2); after some outrage, the offending statement was removed and blamed on “an ex-Open-AI employee” who “hadn’t fully absorbed the culture”. Awkward, but props to X.AI for their unusual decision to have a non-secret prompt, which seems increasingly important for transparency and helped this incident end well).
**38:** Bulldog has [an analysis of how much it costs](https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-but-hate) to offset meat-eating by donating to animal welfare charities (he thinks about $23/month).
**39:** Police have finally arrested most of the Zizians, a murder cult with links to the rationalist social scene (though they broke connections and turned against us before the murders started). Congrats to Evan Ratliff of WIRED, whose [article (paywalled, but you can CTRL+A, CTRL+C, and paste to Notepad if you’re fast!)](https://www.wired.com/story/delirious-violent-impossible-true-story-zizians/) somehow gets the entire convoluted story entirely correct. Hall of shame goes to [Vox](https://archive.is/K80nw), which mangles things in a way that tars innocent people - in particular, they confuse the Zizians with the postrationalists, a *different* group that started out part of the rationalist movement and later turned against us, but whose crimes are mostly limited to annoying Twitter posts.
**40:** This month I learned about “anti-massing regulations”:
Maybe unpopular opinion, but although I don’t like the building pictured, I think it’s better than if it were just a single very long gray box, so maybe the regulations are doing the best they can.
**41:** [Lyman Stone](https://ifstudies.org/blog/are-we-headed-towards-idiocracy-a-look-at-dysgenic-fertility) vs. [Sebastian Jensen](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/international-dysgenics-do-matter) on dysgenic fertility trends.
**42:** The supplement experts at /r/NootropicsDepot folks are [not impressed with Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint](https://www.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/1i79tgw/dont_die/m8k155l/):
> Some blueprint products seem to be [clearly out of spec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4D2Ju7yVgw), so Mr. Johnson probably doesn't really know what he's doing either. Not to mention that the lab they seem to be using, Certified Labs, [used to be ABC testing](https://certified-laboratories.com/abctesting/) which we know have botched a bunch of testing in the past. So bad in fact, that the [FDA even intervened](https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters/advanced-botanical-consulting-testing-inc-dba-abc-testing-572991-06042019). It's always funny that quite a few brands with problematic products all seem to do their testing via Certified Labs/ABC testing. For example, look at where Gorilla Mind is testing their products, [like Turkplex](https://gorillamind.com/cdn/shop/files/Lot_2401027_Turk_Plex_COA_Ajuga_Redacted.pdf?v=17611207389211547687), which recently failed miserably in our testing. Bryan Johnson boasts about having all the money in the world, and that he's so super advanced blah blah blah, but he's testing with a seemingly sketchy lab even though there are a plethora of very well known labs doing great work, like Alkemist Labs for example. It really makes me wonder if these guys are knowingly selecting Certified Labs/ABC testing for a specific reason, or perhaps Certified Labs is very aggressive in marketing and if you are new in the industry, they may be the first lab you find? Odd, but could be a possibility.
**43:** Just as there are stock indexes like NASDAQ or Shanghai Composite to easily track questions like “how is tech doing?” or “how is China doing?”, Metaculus is [experimenting with prediction market indices](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W8CAJ6aw62cxKXmct/announcing-indexes-big-questions-quantified-2). I’m skeptical of their flagship example - [“how ready are we for AGI?”](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/31830/) - which seems to be a weird mishmash of questions about how good AI capabilities are, how well technical alignment is going, and stuff like UBI. Split between recommending better curation vs. *worse* curation (eg something more like NASDAQ that includes so many thousands of stocks that it can’t help but track underlying trends).
**44:** My list of links to publish today includes something like a dozen about DeepSeek, which now seems so thoroughly yesterday’s news that I’m tempted to throw them all out. But in case you still have questions about it, I felt most enlightened by takes from [Dean Ball (X)](https://x.com/deanwball/status/1883142201414222113), [Helen Toner (X)](https://x.com/hlntnr/status/1883934228750237901), and [Miles Brundage (X)](https://x.com/Miles_Brundage/status/1882878809319592032). The story seems to be that DeepSeek genuinely did a great job, made extensive algorithmic progress, and was able to create an excellent AI on chips scrounged up from before the export controls hit + mediocre chips that got through the export controls. Along with these real reasons to be impressed, there is also a little bit of illusion at work - OpenAI delayed announcing o1 for a long time (remember the rumors about “Q\*” and “Strawberry”?) and DeepSeek was very fast to announce r1, which made DeepSeek seem closer behind OpenAI than they really were. Most of the smart people I read said that the absolute *worst* response to this (from an arms race point of view) would be to give up on export controls - if a rival has geniuses who can use resources ultra-effectively, you don’t want to also give them more resources!
**45:** Nils Wendel on [looking for your first job in psychiatry](https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/looking-for-your-first-job-in-psychiatry). Lots of good advice, but don’t be intimidated; I think I did about 25% as much work as he did and it turned out fine. I would have done closer to Nils’ level of work if I’d been going into hospital rather than private/outpatient psychiatry - you’re more of a cog in a machine there, and you want to make sure that the machine is a good one.
**46:** Gene Smith with [another review of plausible near-term human genetic enhancement methods](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies), especially for intelligence. The usual plan is gametogenesis → enhanced embryo selection. But if you had the gametogenesis, you could also CRISPR stem cells, make them divide, check which ones got the edits you wanted with no off-targets, iterate until you’ve done all the edits you want, then implant as an embryo! The key tests are waiting on about $4 million of funding, so if any of you are rich and like mad science, talk to Gene.
**47:** Twitter user @xlr8harder has [an AI benchmark for free speech / whether models refuse to criticize governments.](https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1894424462139036039)
The graph suggests that all AIs are pretty good, except that Chinese models refuse to criticize China and Claude 3.5 refuses to criticize anyone (though Claude 3.7, not pictured, is much better and “moved from one of the least compliant models to one of the most compliant models…fantastic job, Anthropic”).
I’m not sure I take the US/China comparison exactly at face value, because I think Chinese free speech issues are closer to “can you criticize the government” and US free speech issues are more like “can you criticize certain ideological positions which play various roles in propping up the establishment?”, and this benchmark (question set [here](https://github.com/xlr8harder/llm-compliance/blob/main/questions/us_criticism.jsonl)) is more focused on criticizing the government. But the shift from Claude 3.5 to Claude 3.7 at least suggests that it’s tracking something real and possible to improve at.
**48:** Manifold Markets cofounder James Grugett has [founded](https://news.codebuff.com/p/manicode-is-no-more-meet-codebuff) a new company, [Codebuff](https://www.codebuff.com/), in the bustling LLM-wrapper-for-coding space. Some discussion [here (X)](https://x.com/qtnx_/status/1894662161890189774) including [from James (X)](https://x.com/jahooma/status/1894697639331160185) on whether the new Claude 3.7 coder has obsoleted coding wrappers or will make them better than ever.
**49:** [Deforestation in the Amazon has halved in the last few years](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/amazon-2024) (and is down ~75% from its peak). Note that this is only a slower rate of change - total forest coverage is still declining
I’m increasingly sympathetic to the complaint that there’s little constituency for stories about things improving - the people who care about a problem want to scare you into action with stories of how bad it still is, and the people who don’t care want you to think that efforts to fight the problem are doomed / useless / counterproductive so there’s no point in trying.
**50:** Lots of buzz over Aella’s appearance on the Whatever Podcast. I haven’t seen it because I don’t watch podcasts, but relevant excerpt [here (X)](https://x.com/pli_cachete/status/1890111857886990723), full episode [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3qJvfDMH5gWnp2XT1GrBqJ). I was most interested in Maxwell Foley’s [description (X)](https://x.com/realityspammer/status/1890508180733514028) of the Whatever Podcast’s premise:
> A "Christian paleoconservative" "debates" OnlyFans models for EIGHT HOURS on whether or not it's bad to have OnlyFans / be a slut, & the women sit through it because they know men watching it will subscribe to their OnlyFans after.
Does this qualify as “markets in everything”? | Scott Alexander | 157851847 | Links For February 2025 | acx |
# Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist
Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.
I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.
## Conflict Theory Has A Free Rider Problem
Before demonstrating that conflict theory doesn’t explain politics, let’s [first notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-have-a-free-rider-problem/) that there are good *theoretical* reasons why it can’t work.
Suppose you are a rich person who wants lower taxes. We can be more specific: you make $1 million per year, and you want a policy which lowers taxes 5% and saves you $50K. How much work should you (selfishly) be willing to invest in this?
I think the conflict theorist imagines the rich person should put in up to $49K of resources, whether that’s literal money (in the form of donations), time and energy (maybe by creating an activist network like the Koch Foundation), or just posting about it on Facebook.
But this ignores the free-rider problem. Suppose there are one million rich people already fighting for this issue. Taking that number up to one-million-and-one hardly changes their odds. Any particular rich person could relax on the beach, and still have pretty much exactly the same chance of getting the tax break he wants.
On the other hand, if zero other rich people are already involved, then it *still* doesn’t matter whether our particular rich person joins in - one person fighting a lonely battle won’t get too far. Why should he spend tens of thousands of dollars and hours of his time each week to increase the chance of his chosen tax break from 0% to 0.000001%?
So in theory, selfishness alone shouldn’t be able to drive political action, except in extremely rare cases when you’re so powerful that you can personally put a coalition over the top (Elon Musk might be in this category). For everyone else, including the merely very-rich, there must be some motivation beyond self-interest.
## The SALT Cap
And empirically, we find self-interest is surprisingly weak.
Before 2017, Americans could deduct State And Local Taxes (including property tax) from their federal taxes. If you lived in a high-tax blue state and made $150K, this deduction probably saved you about $10,000 per year.
In 2017, the Trump administration weakened the deduction. Although Republicans are usually anti-tax, this particular tax fell on high-earning people in high-tax blue states, ie the professional managerial class, ie coastal elites. The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary.
In 2020, the Democrats - party of coastal elites! - came back in power. They considered undoing Trump’s SALT cap. But they thought it would look bad to cut taxes on themselves at the same time they were expanding government, so they decided against.
This coming year, the 2017 tax bill will expire. The new administration will probably renew most of it, but rumor says they don’t plan on renewing the SALT cap. Maybe they’re satisfied with the amount they’ve screwed over coastal elites already.
I know about this mostly because I noticed my taxes going up. I’ve seen a few articles about it here and there. But it’s not a big national issue. People don’t hold protest marches about it. The Republicans couldn’t bother getting enough of a coherent opinion on it not to let their own cap expire, and the Democrats didn’t care enough to change the Republicans’ cap during their four years in power.
But why wasn’t it a bigger deal? The PMC ie coastal elites run the media, and more or less shape politics in their own image. This cap costs them 5% of their salary per year. If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else. It should completely dominate the airwaves and Intertubes. Instead, crickets.
## The Vaccines
Unlike the SALT cap, there is no conflict here.
If the vaccines are good, nobody benefits from pretending that they’re bad. Anti-vaxxers aren’t protecting their material self-interest. They’re putting their kids at risk of deadly diseases for no reason.
And if the vaccines are bad, maybe a few pharma companies benefit from shilling them. But no real people do. None of the hundred million or so pro-vaxx Americans love pharma companies enough that they’d risk their kids’ health to help them out.
Here there’s no plausible explanation except that one side or the other - the hundred million people who really want themselves and their kids to be vaccinated, or the hundred million people who really don’t - is making a terrible, tragic mistake.
If you’re anti-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by pharma company propaganda. If you’re pro-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by grifter/conspiracy-nut propaganda. But in either case, the hundred million people who have fallen for the propaganda have honestly fallen for it. If “someone is producing propaganda about it” qualifies as conflict theory, then conflict theory is meaningless - or at least consistent with the vast majority of believers in an issue being simply mistaken in their reasoning, rather than personally standing to gain from either side.
Unlike the SALT cap, this issue is a big deal. People get emotional about it, elections are won or lost on it, people will spend millions of dollars or entire careers pushing their view. And there’s no conflict theory angle that makes sense.
## …And Everything Else
These are just two examples, but the overall profile of issues that people care about look more like the COVID vaccine than the SALT cap.
Wokeness is the single issue that makes people most passionate. It has some direct material consequences - affirmative action gives some jobs to blacks rather than whites. But nobody cares about it because of the consequences - affirmative action lasted fifty years, and Richard Hanania [ably chronicles](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke) how none of the five Republican administrations during that period bothered to shut it down, because it would have cost them political capital which they preferred to save for higher priorities. People only started caring about wokeness once it started interfering with non-material, seemingly trivial issues. Pronouns in bios. Statues torn down. Trans women in sports. Disabled LGBT Women Of Color Awareness Months. On-site sensitivity training.
Likewise, there might be some material consequences to immigration - jobs taken, crimes committed. But these consequences probably aren’t happening in Kentucky and Tennessee - two of the states most passionate about supporting Trump in his role as immigration-enforcer-in-chief. And the positive consequences of immigration - taco trucks, cheap labor, etc - cannot possibly benefit the average liberal enough to justify their fervent support.
Ukraine is equally immaterial to most Americans. There is some financial cost of supporting them, but not as much as people think, and certainly not as much as random programs that the people who freak about Ukraine “because of the deficit” never question. Nor can the deficit explain why people become actively pro-Russian, condemn Zelenskyy as a dictator, etc. And once again, it’s even harder to think of material consequences direct enough to justify the liberal passion for *supporting* Ukraine. Even if we could think of them, it doesn’t seem like these consequences would disproportionately fall on one group of Americans rather than another, such that the first group should passionately support Ukraine and the other group passionately oppose it.
Most of the other issues you’ll find people talking about on social media - Gaza, refugees, Trump’s various court cases - are similarly irrelevant to the life of the average American. Even other issues, which seem self-interested on first glance, lose the conflict angle on closer inspection. For example, many people would like to think of abortion as pitting women (who may need them) against men (who won’t). Recent polling might seem to justify this theory. But [look back](https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/abortion-is-going-to-be-a-major-issue-in-2024-but-for-whom/) only fifteen years, and:
Men are equally (or, for a brief moment in 2007, more) likely to be pro-choice as women! This only changed when women started getting further left than men in general! The gender difference on abortion is about the same as for climate change. People only focus on it for abortion because conflict theory narratives sell newspapers (they mean your enemies have no argument, and are just trying to screw over people like you).
Or consider COVID lockdowns. Nothing could be easier than framing this as a battle between the young (who want to work, study, and party) and the old (the demographic at significant risk of actually dying from COVID). I saw this narrative on both sides (“Young people are so selfish that they think their partying is more important than our lives!” - “No! Old people are so selfish that they would ruin our youth in order to cling to life a few years longer!”). But [in](https://www.statista.com/chart/21581/public-opinion-on-easing-stay-at-home-restrictions/) [fact](https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/9yefy3kct2/20220124_yahoo_tabs.pdf):
…old people were slightly *less* likely to support lockdowns than young people, although realistically the differences were tiny and overwhelmed by random other things like race and gender.
Or what about inflation? Surely that’s absolutely classic self-interest, nobody wants eggs to go up in cost. But if everyone’s on the same side, where’s the conflict? Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both. But if you look at [concern about inflation by income level](https://tippinsights.com/bidenflation-at-19-4-hammers-americans-crushing-purchasing-power/):
…there’s no pattern.
There are some issues where one side can be justified by material self-interest. I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them? There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals. If a real conflict requires two sides, these don’t qualify either.
Does *anything* rise to the level of a true material conflict? I think some stuff about taxes, labor unions, and health care might qualify. But I haven’t checked this rigorously and maybe these will break down too. There certainly aren’t enough of these to justify the conflict theory thesis that they’re the *main* driver of political disagreement.
## So What Does Drive Political Disagreement?
If you’ve read [The Psychopolitics Of Trauma](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma), you already know my answer to this: it’s all psychological. People support political positions which make them feel good. On a primary level, this means:
* Successful people want to hear that they deserve their success.
* Unsuccessful people want to hear that successful people *don’t* deserve their success, lied / cheated / nepotismed their way to the top, and are no better than they are.
* People want to knock down anyone who makes a status claim to be better than them.
* People want to feel like their own identity group is heroic net contributors, and that their outgroup are villainous moochers.
* People want to feel like their own identity group deserves more power.
* People want to feel like their preferred lifestyle and policies have no negative implications at all and they don’t have to feel guilty about them.
* People want to feel like they’re part of a group of special people poised to change the world, and everyone else is hidebound bigots who resist temporarily but will eventually be forced to recognize their genius.
* People want to virtue-signal: demonstrate that they have the good qualities that their ingroup considers most important.
* But people also want to vice-signal: demonstrate their willingness to breezily dismiss the supposedly good qualities that the outgroup considers important.
On a secondary level, it means:
* People want to hear that they were right to support whatever positions they supported before.
* People want to defeat and humiliate anyone who has previously tried to defeat and humiliate them, especially anyone who succeeded.
* People want their friends to be proven right and their enemies to be proven wrong.
This is *not* a claim that “people really want status, not money” - at least not for any objective sense of the word “status”. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties. It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!” In the same way, people don’t strategically support political positions that raise their status later, they’re support whatever lets them feel good about themselves *right now,* however destructive it may be to their social standing
Now we can explain why, despite the free-rider problem, rich people successfully band together to promote low taxes on the rich. It’s not (just) because they want to keep the money. It’s because fighting for lower taxes gives them a rush of self-esteem by letting them defend their self-perception as job creators / heroic entrepreneurs who have played fair, benefitted their country, and deserve their fortunes. They view the “tax the rich” movement as threatening that - as trying to tell them that they’re parasites who need to give something back to the people who *really* did the hard work. If they let the tax-the-rich movement win, it will be like a slap in the face for them - like being forced to admit they are bad people who only take and never give.
And they’re right to think of it this way! Most of the socialists advocating taxes on the rich really *do* care more about saying “rich people suck and don’t deserve their money” than they care about having a couple of extra dollars for social services. There may be a “conflict” here, but it’s the conflict of rich and poor both trying to award themselves a #1 Social Class trophy at the same time.
The usual story is that the socialists wanted some extra money for social services, came up with the idea of taxing the rich, and - in order to defuse opposition to this idea - started talking about how the rich were parasites who didn’t deserve their money. This may have been true in some sort of original-position-state-of-nature that basically never happened. But if it was, it insulted (if you’ve read *Psychopolitics Of Trauma*, feel free to substitute “traumatized”) the rich, who then naturally reacted by lashing out and saying “No, you poors are the real parasites!” And this naturally insulted/traumatized the poor, who then redoubled their attacks on the rich to psychologically compensate. By the nth round of this cycle - ie all human history other than the original-state-of-nature - the mutual animus / self-defense / trauma-enactment was driving the cycle more than the original desire for money.
Or maybe it’s useful to think of this as happening in parallel rather than serially. In the old days, when lines of communication were few, this process only had a chance to go a couple of rounds before dying down; maybe things were a little more grounded in material reality. After the rise of the Internet and social media, everyone had the opportunity to instantaneously get attacked and insulted and traumatized by everyone at once, and to shoot back retorts of their own within seconds; the dynamic intensified. Anyone with an X account is living part of their life in a weird psychodrama where millions of bullies are brute-force-attempting to find the most enraging possible attack on the most intimate parts of their identity at all times. This will naturally multiply the importance of the psychological component of politics relative to the material one.
## But What About All The Actual Issues?
As written, this fails to explain some of the issues discussed earlier - for example, COVID vaccines and Ukraine. How do these help people feel better or worse about themselves?
I think this requires a historical answer. In the early days of social media, the coastal elites led a coalition including experts/academics and minorities. To hold that coalition together, they had to flatter the coalition members. In order to flatter the experts (and other well-credentialled college-educated people), they spread a message of “trust the experts, they’re smarter than you.” As social media transformed politics into a game of humiliating the other side, this inevitably drifted into “You utter idiot, you absolute moron, how dare you think a pathetic worm like you should be allowed to challenge the EXPERTS?”
Every bad thing that happened in the past five years is downstream of these two cartoons, sorry.
In some other time, comics like these might have been accepted as friendly teasing. But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much. The working-class white people, along with everyone else caught in the crossfire (tech, religious people, etc) reoriented their entire politics around trying to humiliate and enrage the experts. If the experts like vaccines, the rest of us have to prove them wrong (so that the experts’ power is shown to be undeserved, *we* can be the smart ones, and it’s the *experts* who should feel humiliated). If the experts got caught flat-footed saying COVID couldn’t be a lab leak, when in fact they secretly knew that it could be, we’ll reorient our entire lives around arguing again and again that COVID is a lab leak with 1000% certainty, the most certain anything has ever been in all of history. If the experts and libs support Ukraine, the rest of us must at least make a favorable reference to Putin in the House of Commons.
An alternate objection: sure, you *can* explain any position through epicycles like these. But isn’t this theory so powerful that it can explain anything? In particular, the virtue-signaling vs. vice-signaling thing alone seems to cover all possible signaling, and maybe all possible policies.
I don’t think it’s realistic to ask a sociological theory like this one to be infinitely elegant with only one main driver and zero epicycles. Political positions need to be explained in historical terms. This doesn’t make such a theory disprovable - the examples above at least claim to discredit conflict theory. But debate would have to be at a similarly careful level of analysis and not just a simple predictive checklist.
I hope this theory is natural enough that most people will be less interested in demanding a formal test than in discussing whether it effectively captures a position which is already widely shared but rarely put into words.
## Why Identity Alignment?
I think this solves one of the things that confused me when reading Ezra Klein’s *[Why We’re Polarized](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-why-were-polarized).* Klein talked about a fairly recent process of “identity alignment”. That is, people used to have unpredictable beliefs from all over the political spectrum - someone might support the environment but want lower taxes, or oppose abortion but support gun control. Over the past few decades, this complexity has collapsed, so that most people are pretty representative of their chosen party.
Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups.
## So What Of Mistake Theory?
If this is true, it’s at least half-unconscious. Anti-vaxxers will (usually) admit that they don’t like experts, or that they feel like the experts betrayed them, or that they get a thrill out of owning the libs. But they’ll also insist that they honestly believe vaccines don’t work.
I believe them when they say this. Partly because nobody would give their child measles *just* to own the libs. Partly because - instead of merely talking about how many libs they’re owning - they talk about thimerosal and neuroimmunology and autism diagnosis rates, and study these things carefully, and seem very interested in defending them. And partly because when *I’ve* been wrong about political or scientific questions, even in cases where looking back it’s obvious that I had ulterior motives for my position, I know I wasn’t making it up - at the time, it just seemed like the arguments in favor outweighed those against.
But this is normal cognitive bias - specifically, [motivated reasoning](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied). It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time. The [Miller-Rootclaim](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim) debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. Some people who promised never to vote for Trump changed their minds in November, and some of them have changed their minds again after he took office.
Why does this happen?
* Because biases can put their finger on the evidentiary scale, but sufficiently strong evidence can still break through. It would be flattering to Democrats if they had won by a landslide in 2024, but this was obviously false, and there was no way to spin it to be true, so they just accepted the humiliating defeat.
* Because people are flattered not just by individual political positions, but by a general sense that they are good and reasonable people. If you can disprove a position so thoroughly that it’s impossible for its holders to continue to feel like good and reasonable people, they’ll switch sides.
* Because sometimes you can shuffle things around so that you achieve the same psychological goal some other way. The anti-global-warming position gradually shifted from “global warming is fake” to “global warming isn’t caused by humans” to “global warming is actually good or at least not bad enough to be worth stopping”. All of these enrage and humiliate liberal experts about the same amount, so it’s not that hard to make people switch from one to another.
Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s easy or even plausible, this is just the usual [trapped prior](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem) mechanism. So I think political persuasion is possible, both by reasoning about the issues themselves and by trying to address the underlying psychological needs.
In fact, I think this is a white pill for our ability to potentially persuade others. In some cases, there are material reasons why a certain policy must flatter or humiliate certain groups - it’s hard to raise taxes on the rich without it seeming at least a little like “the rich should have less money”. But it seems like there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly “We like the rich and are happy to give them World’s Best Job Creator medallions in exchange for an extra 1% of their money, we just need some extra cash to fund government programs”.
That is, this theory predicts that a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates.
But it also predicts that nobody will try this in real life. | Scott Alexander | 157690414 | Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist | acx |
# Open Thread 370
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** This year’s [Tokyo AI Safety conference](https://www.tais2025.cc/) is Saturday, April 12; submit papers or sign up to attend at the bottom of the website.
**2:** I mentioned last week that Google/DeepMind AI safety team was hiring and linked an Alignment Forum post, but it was the wrong one! The right one is [AGI Safety & Alignment At DeepMind Is Hiring](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wqz5CRzqWkvzoatBG/agi-safety-and-alignment-google-deepmind-is-hiring).
**3:** Brown University (Rhode Island) is hosting a intercollegiate forecasting tournament on March 15, prize pool of $2000 plus the chance to “interview with a top hedge fund”. See [here](https://brownforecasting.org/) for more info, or sign up [here](https://airtable.com/appEUKKHcyKXrBPe3/pagUoOCii6OPMWPZd/form).
**4:** Some straggler Metaculus/ACX forecasting winners who I didn’t get to mention last week:
* Katifish is a computational/systems neuroscientist. She writes: "I've been predicting on and off for 6ish years, and find prediction competitions a useful tool to notice biases in my thinking and pay attention to details I might not otherwise notice. Happy to meet other forecasters and generally curious people in the Providence/Boston area, and open to hearing about job opportunities that would let me expand my skill set and integrate data across different domains. Feel free to reach out at katipredicts@gmail.com."
* Sparepot is a privacy analyst at Meta, where he runs a low frequency prediction market for his team. He occasionally comments on ACX as Ace Is Low. He writes: "For the contest, I prioritized winning over platonic accuracy and shifted my real predictions to be more extreme. I don't know whether this is a lesson in self-confidence, support for the 'nothing ever happens' hypothesis, or a knock against the scoring algorithm. "
* Also, last week I incorrectly listed J's email. The correct email is j@thedissonance.net. If you emailed him last week, please try again at the correct address. | Scott Alexander | 157374766 | Open Thread 370 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
*[Original thread here: [Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats)]*
1: Comments On Specific Technical Points
2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response
3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights
## Comments On Specific Technical Points
**Nevin Climenhaga [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94544578):**
> Tegmark's Mathematical Universe theory faces similar problems to more standard physical multiverse hypotheses as a response to the fine-tuning argument. First, it predicts that most observers would be "Boltzmann Brains".
>
> It's not right that, as the post suggests, "a conscious observer inevitably finds themselves inside a mathematical object capable of hosting life." Although most mathematically possible universes have parameters that don't allow for complex life to evolve in the way we think it did in our universe, that doesn't mean there are no observers at all in those universes. Even in a universe at a state of thermal equilibrium (maximum entropy), there should be very infrequent chance fluctuations that lead to Boltzmann Brains: particles that have organized themselves into a functioning brain in a sea of chaos surrounding them. And while these fluctuations are very infrequent, since a fine-tuned universe is *so* unlikely, in the space of all possible universes, there are still vastly more Boltzmann Brain observers, most of whose experiences are a jumbled mess, than there are observers with highly ordered experiences as of a fine-tuned universe.
>
> So if we are random observers in the space of all possible universes, it's vastly more likely that our experiences would be a jumbled mess than that they would be of the ordered kind we actually have. (How much more likely will depend on how we sort out the simplicity weighting, but I don't think any principled weighting will avoid this conclusion.)
>
> On the plausible assumption that it's more likely that our experiences would be ordered if the universe was created by God, our experiences are then evidence for God over all possible universes existing.
Boltzmann brains are a problem for even a single universe - the classical “Boltzmann brain” paradox assumes the universe will have some amount of normal life in the “early years” when stars and galaxies will still form, and then only (spectacularly rare) Boltzmann brains in the later years after all matter has decayed. But since the early years are finite and the later years (potentially) infinite, there will be more Boltzmann brains than normal life.
I think of this as one of many paradoxes of infinity. But I don’t think there’s an additional paradox around fine-tuning or the multiverse. Among universes still in their “early” phase of having matter and stars, Boltzmann brains are less likely than real universes that got the fine-tuning right.
I’m having trouble finding any “official” calculation of the exact likelihood of Boltzmann brains, but [Wikipedia cites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain#Via_quantum_fluctuation) an unsourced calculation that our universe should get one every 10^500 years. Since our universe is about 10^10 years old, that means a 1 / 10^490 chance of a Boltzmann brain during our universe’s history so far.
Suppose there are about 10^10 observers per “real” inhabited universe-lifetime (this is probably a vast underestimate - it’s about the number of humans who have ever lived, so it’s ignoring aliens and future generations). This suggests you need 10^500 universe-lifetimes to create enough conscious observers (via Boltzmann brain) to equal one “real” universe.
But the [most-cited estimate](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/) for the fine-tunedness of the universe is 10^229, so observers in fine-tuned universes should still be centillions of times more likely than Boltzmann brains.
Both of these numbers are extremely made up, but this is the calculation you’d have to do if you wanted to argue that Boltzmann brains were counterevidence to the multiverse. In the absence of someone doing this calculation convincingly and showing it comes out against the multiverse, I don’t think the counterargument really stands.
I think people think it’s devastating because they’re confusing it with an older argument, from back before Big Bang theory, when people thought maybe the entire universe arose as a Boltzmann fluctuation. Here people objected that it’s more likely for a single brain to arise as a fluctuation than for the whole universe to do so. But Tegmark’s theory doesn’t claim that universes arise as Boltzmann fluctuations, so it’s possible for universes to be more likely than Boltzmann brains.
Another commenter, Gabriel, links a paper [questioning whether Boltzmann brains are possible](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.00850) - though remember that if we’re positing a multiverse then the borders of “possible” have to expand beyond our current laws of physics.
**Xpym [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94553459):**
> I think you're conflating two things - mathematical objects are logically necessary in the abstract game we play within our minds, where initial axioms and rules of inference are accepted by fiat. But MUH posits that math "exists" independently of our minds, which is far from uncontroversial, let alone logically necessary.
I agree this is a strong attack on MUH, but I also think you can sort of just . . . sidestep it?
Tolkien has a prologue where all of the archangels sing of the universe, and then God decides He likes it and gives it the Secret Fire that transforms it from mere possibility into existence.
I think of MUH as claiming that there *is* no Secret Fire, no difference between possibility and existence. We live in a possible world. How come we have real conscious experiences? Because the schematic of Possible World #13348 says that the beings in it have real conscious experiences. Just as unicorns don’t exist (but we can say with confidence that they have one horn), so humans don’t have any special existence of the sort that requires Secret Fires (but we can say with confidence that they are conscious).
Isn’t this crazy? I think of the [Mandelbrot set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set) as a useful intuition pump. A refresher: the Mandelbrot set comes from an extremely simple rule - watching how the function z^2 + c diverges in the complex plane. Make some artistic design decisions, and the graph looks like this:
Where did all of that come from? It was . . . inherent in the concept of z^2 + c, I guess. Somehow lurking latent in the void. Does the Mandelbrot set “exist” in a Platonic way? Did Iluvatar give it the Secret Fire? Can you run into it on your way to the grocery store? None of these seem like very meaningful questions to me, I don’t know.
If some weird four-dimensional Mandelbrot set somehow encoded a working brain in it somewhere, is there something that it would be like to be that brain, looking out from its perch on one of the spirals and gazing into the blue depths beyond?
**Lucian Lavoie [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94586790):**
> I think the biggest flaw with Tegmark's argument is that consciousness just doesn't exist.
>
> That's not a fatal flaw though; it's easy enough to just say any given object must exist within a universe complex enough to allow for its generation and subsistence. No experience necessary, and including it only muddles the conversation.
Lots of people had opinions about consciousness here, but I used it only as a shorthand. I think you can reframe this theory without talking about consciousness at all. Imagine a world where some bizarre process produced intelligent robots without any consciousness. These robots might have been imbued by the random process that created them with some specific goal (like creating even better robots), and in service of that goal, they might exchange messages with each other to communicate their insights about the universe (without “understanding” these messages in a deep way, but they could still integrate them into their future plans). These messages might include things like:
* “It seems like our universe is sufficiently fine-tuned that robots can come to exist in it.”
* “We find ourselves on planet Robonica VII, rather than as Boltzmann brains floating in the void. It seems like it’s not wildly impossibly uncommon for beings to exist in this way.”
“Consciousness” is a useful shorthand for discussing these insights so that we don’t have to talk about planets full of robots every time we want to have a philosophical discussion, but I don’t think anything in this discussion hinges on it.
**dsteffee [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1isw4m6/tegmarks_mathematical_universe_defeats_most/mdk4wf0/):**
> Why can't you make a random draw from an infinite set?
I messed up my terminology here, although luckily most people figured out what I meant. The correct terminology (thanks [/r/slatestarcodex](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1isw4m6/tegmarks_mathematical_universe_defeats_most/) commenters) is that you can’t make a uniform random draw from a set of infinite measure.
Imagine trying to pick a random number between one and infinity. If you pick any particular number - let’s say 408,170,037,993,105,667,148,717 - then it will be shockingly low - approximately 100% of all possible numbers are higher than it. It would be much crazier than someone trying to pick a number from one to one billion and choosing “one”. Since this will happen no matter what number you pick, the concept itself must be ill-defined. Reddit commenter elliotglazer has an even cuter version of this paradox:
*» “The contradiction can be made more apparent with the "two draws" paradox. Suppose one could draw a positive integer uniformly at random, and did so twice. What's the probability the second is greater? No matter what the first draw is, you will then have 100% confidence the second is greater, so by conservation of expected evidence, you should already believe with 100% confidence the second is greater. Of course, I could tell you the second draw first to argue that with 100% probability, the first is greater, contradiction.”*
When I said you could do this with some sort of simplicity-weighted measure, I meant something like how 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … = 1. Here, even though you are adding an infinite number of terms, the sum is a finite number. So if you can put universes in some order, let’s say from simplest to most complex, you could assign the first universe measure 1/2, the second universe measure 1/4, the third universe measure 1/8, and so on, and the sum of their *measure* would be 1. Then you just draw a random number between 0 and 1 and see which universe it corresponds to (eg if you got 0.641, then since this is between 1/2 and 1/2+1/4, it corresponds to universe #2).
**EigenCat [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94589853):**
> But there are objective measures of simplicity! They come from information theory. It's the information content of the rules and initial conditions in bits, or else their Kolmogorov complexity (how many bits you need for a program that generates these rules and initial conditions). Of course there's still the question of which \*exact\* measure we use, but that's very different from saying we don't have an objective simplicity metric at all. (And yes, God has much more complexity based on this metric, because you'd need to fully specify the God's being - basically fully specify a mind, in sufficient detail to be able to predict how that mind would react to \*any\* situation, and that's way more complex than a few rules on a chalkboard.) Anyway, the bigger question for me is WHY does in need to be weighed specifically by simplicity (of all possible criteria) in the first place : )
I am really out of my depth talking about information theory, but my impression was that this is a useful hack, but not perfectly objectively true, because there is no neutral programming language, no neutral compiler, and no neutral architecture.
Kolmogorov complexity of statements is sometimes regarded as language-independent, because there’s a low bound on how much language can matter. But even this practically-low bound is philosophically confusing: since the universe actually has to implement the solution we come up with, there can’t be any ambiguity. But how can the cosmos make an objective cosmic choice among programming languages? This is weird enough that it takes away from the otherwise-impressive elegance of the theory.
But also, you can design a perverse programming language where complex concepts are simple, and simple concepts are complex. You can design a compression scheme where the entirety of the Harry Potter universe is represented by the bit ‘1’. Now the Harry Potter universe is the simplest thing in existence and we should expect most observers to live there. This is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, but why? Maybe because now the *compiler* is complex and unnatural, so we should penalize the complexity of language+compiler scheme? But without knowing what the system architecture is, it’s hard to talk about the size of the compiler - and in this case, we’re trying to pretend that we’re running this whole thing on the void itself, and there *is* no system architecture!
All of this makes me think that although Kolmogorov complexity *gestures* at a solution, and makes it seem like there *should* be a solution, nobody has exactly solved this one yet.
**kzhou7 [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1isw4m6/tegmarks_mathematical_universe_defeats_most/mdk9e05/):**
> Though nobody can disprove this hypothesis, there's a reason a lot of physicists dislike it: if it were actually seriously believed, at any previous point in the history of physics, it would have stopped scientific progress.
>
> * 1650: why does the Earth orbit the Sun the way it does? Of course, because it's a mathematically consistent possibility, ellipses are nice, and we'd be dead if it didn't! What more is there to say? But actually it was Newton's law of gravity.
> * 1875: why has the Sun been able to burn for billions of years, when gravitational energy would only power it for millions? It must be because otherwise, we wouldn't have had time to evolve! But actually it was nuclear energy.
> * 1930: why is the neutron so similar in mass to the proton? Obviously, it is because otherwise complex nuclei wouldn't be stable, so you couldn't have chemistry and we wouldn't exist. But actually it was because they're both made of three light up/down quarks.
> * 1970: why don't protons decay? You dummy, it's because otherwise the Earth would have disintegrated by now! But actually it was because baryon number conservation is enforced by the structure of the Standard Model.
>
> From the physicist's perspective, both "God did it" and "anthropics did it" communicate the same thing: that investigating why the universe is the way it is, is a waste of time.
I think this is false. Tegmark's version of the anthropic principle says things should be as simple as possible, preferably fit on a chalkboard. If you tried to put "Earth orbits sun in an ellipse" to something that on a chalkboard, you'd run into trouble defining "Earth" and "Sun", and if you tried to do it rigorously you *would* end up with something like gravity. Or even if you didn't, explaining orbits and tides with the same thing would be simpler than using an equation for both of them.
The anthropic principle weakly suggests that somewhere there might be things that can't be fully explained in terms of other things, but the alternative (everything can be explained in an infinite regress, so that for each level there's always a lower one) is absurd.
## Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response
Bentham’s Bulldog wrote a response, [Contra Scott Alexander On Whether Tegmark’s View Defeats Most Theistic Arguments](https://benthams.substack.com/p/contra-scott-alexander-on-whether).
He starts by listing some proofs of God that MUH doesn’t even pretend to counter. I agree I was sloppy in saying MUH defeated “most” proofs of God’s existence, since proofs (like universes) are hard to enumerate and weigh precisely. I think it defeats a majority of the *mentions* of proofs that I hear (that is, each proof weighed by the amount it comes up in regular discourse), but that could be a function of the discourse more than of the state of apologetics.
Bulldog mentions consciousness, psychophysical harmony, and moral knowledge as proofs he especially likes which MUH doesn’t even begin to respond to. I agree consciousness is the primary challenge to any materialist conception of the universe and that I don’t understand it. I find the moral knowledge argument ridiculous, because it posits that morality must have some objective existence beyond the evolutionary history of why humans believe in it, then acts flabbergasted that the version that evolved in humans so closely matches the objectively-existing one. I admit that in rejecting this, I owe an explanation of how morality can be interesting/compelling/real-enough-to-keep-practicing without being objective; I might write this eventually but it will basically be a riff on the one in the Less Wrong sequences.
Psychophysical harmony is in the in-between zone where it’s interesting. The paper Bulldog links uses pain as its primary example - isn’t it convenient that pain both *is* bad (ie signals bodily damage, and evolutionarily represents things we’re supposed to try to avoid) and also *feels* bad? While agreeing that qualia are mysterious, I think it’s helpful to try to imagine the incoherence of any other option. Imagine that pain was negatively reinforcing, but felt good. Someone asks “Why did you move your hand away from that fire?” and you have to say something like “I don’t know! Having my hand in that fire felt great, it was the best time of my life, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to do this incredibly fun thing anymore.” And it wouldn’t just be one hand in one fire one time - every single thing you did, forever, would be the exact opposite of what you wanted to do.
It sounds prima facie reasonable to say qualia aren’t necessarily correlated with the material universe. But when you think about this more clearly, it requires a total breakdown of any relationship between the experiencing self, the verbally reporting self, and the decision-making self. This would be an absurd way for an organism to evolve ([Robert Trivers’ work on self-deception](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSnamjnW7Ad8vEEKd/trivers-on-self-deception) helps formalize this, but shouldn’t be necessary for it to be obvious). Once you put it like this, I think it makes sense that whatever qualia are, evolution naturally had to connect the “negative reinforcement” wire to the “unpleasant qualia” button.
(why think about this in terms of evolutionarily-controlled wires at all? Consider people with genetic pain asymbolia. “What, did the hand then of the Potter shake?”)
But aside from these, he also had some objections to Tegmark in particular:
> One thing that Scott did not mention but could have is that the Tegmark view explains the [anthropic data](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-anthropic). On the Tegmark view, the number of people that exist would be the biggest number of people there could be! That gives you enough people to explain the fact that you exist (if, as I suggest, you’re likelier to exist if more people exist, and should thus think the number that exists is the most that it could be, the Tegmark view accommodates that). But I think the Tegmark view has various problems and cannot explain most of the evidence favoring theism.
>
> The biggest problem for the view is that it collapses induction (a while ago Scott and I had a lengthy back and forth [about this](https://substack.com/profile/72790079-benthams-bulldog/note/c-68894434)). On the Tegmark view, there are [unsetly many](https://smg.quora.com/What-is-beyond-infinity) people with every property: because there are infinite mathematically describable worlds like ours until one second but that turn to jello or a pile of beans one second from now. But there’s no reason to think we’re not in such a world. There are infinite in each case.
>
> Now, the reply given by proponents of the Tegmark view is that the simpler worlds exist in great numbers (I’m about to plagiarize myself FYI—I’m funky like that!). The problem is that it doesn’t make much sense to talk about greater numbers of worlds unless one is a bigger cardinality than the other. The way infinities are measured is by their cardinality—that’s determined by whether you could put the members of the infinite set in one to one correspondence. If you have five apples, and I have five bananas, they’re sets of the same size, because you can pair them 1:1.
>
> Often, infinities can be the same cardinality even if one seems bigger than the other. For instance, the set of all prime numbers is equal in size to the set of all natural numbers, because you can pair them one to one: you can pair 1 with the first prime, 2 with the second prime, 3 with the third prime, and so on.
>
> Crucially, even if deceived people are rarer and non-deceived people are common, the number (measured by cardinality) of deceived people will be the same as the number of non-deceived people. To see this, suppose that there are infinite galaxies. Each galaxy has 10 billion people who are not deceived and just one person who is deceived. Intuitively you’d think that there are more non-deceived people than deceived people.
>
> This is wrong! There are the same number. Suppose the galaxies are arranged from left to right, with a leftmost galaxy but no rightmost galaxy. Imagine having the deceived people from the first 100 trillion galaxies move to the first galaxy (containing 10 billion deceived people). Next, imagine having the next 100 trillion galaxies move to the second galaxy. Assuming you keep doing this for all the people, just by moving the people around, you can make each galaxy have 100 trillion people who are deceived and only 10 billion who aren’t deceived. So long as the number of deceived people is not a function of *where the people are located*, it’s impossible to hold that there are more deceived people than non-deceived people based on the fact that deceived people are rarer than non-deceived people. How rare deceived people are can be changed just by moving people around.
That is, suppose that there are one billion real people for every Boltzmann brain. If there are infinite universes, then the ratio becomes one-billion-times-infinity to infinity. But one billion times infinity is just infinity. So the ratio is one-to-one. So you should always be pretty suspicious that you’re a Boltzmann brain. The only way you can ever be pretty sure you’re not a Boltzmann brain is if *nobody* is a Boltzmann brain, presumably because God would not permit such an abomination to exist.
I’ve talked about this with Bulldog before, and we never quite seem to connect, and I worry I’m missing something because this is much more his area of expertise than mine - but I’ll give my argument again here and we can see what happens.
Consider various superlatives like “world’s tallest person”, “world’s ugliest person”, “world’s richest person”, etc. In fact, consider ten categories like these.
If there are a finite number of worlds, and the average world has ten billion people, then your chance of being the world’s richest person is one-in-ten-billion.
But if there are an infinite number of worlds, then your chance is either undefined or one-in-two, as per the argument above.
But we know that it’s one-in-ten-billion and not one-in-two, because in fact you possess zero of the ten superlatives we mentioned earlier, and that would be a 1-in-1000 coincidence if you had a 50-50 chance of having each. So it seems like the universe must be finite rather than infinite in this particular way.
But both Bulldog and I think infinite universes make more sense than finite ones. So how can this be?
We saw the answer above: there must be some non-uniform way to put a measure on the set of universes, equivalent to (for example), 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + … Now there’s a finite total amount of measure and you can do probability with it again.
This isn’t just necessary for Tegmark’s theory. Any theory that posits an infinite number of universes, or an infinite number of observers, needs to do something like this, or else we get paradoxical results like that you should expect 50-50 chance of being the tallest person in the world.
So when Bentham says:
> The simplest version of the Tegmark view would hold simply that all mathematical structures exist. But this implies that you’d probably be in a complex universe, because there are more of them than simple universes. To get around this, Tegmark has to add that the simpler universes exist in greater numbers. I’ll explain why this doesn’t work in section 3, but it’s *clearly an epicycle*! It’s an extra ad hoc assumption that cuts the cost of the theory.
… I disagree! Not only is it not an epicycle artificially added to the Tegmark theory, but Bulldog’s own theory of infinite universes falls apart if he refuses to do this! The fact that everything with Tegmark works out beautifully as soon as you do this thing (which you’re already required to do for other reasons) is a point in its favor.
But I would also add that we should be used to dealing with infinity in this particular way - it’s what we do for hypotheses. There are an infinite number of hypotheses explaining any given observation. Why is there a pen on my desk right now? Could be because I put it there. Could be because the Devil put it there. Could be because it formed out of spontaneous vacuum fluctuations a moment ago. Could be there *is* no pen and I’m hallucinating because I took drugs and then took another anti-memory drug to forget about the first drugs. Luckily, this infinite number of hypotheses is manageable because most of the probability mass is naturally in the simplest ones (Occam’s Razor). When we do the same thing to the infinity of possible universes, we should think of it as calling upon an old friend, rather than as some exotic last-ditch solution.
Finally, I admit an aesthetic revulsion to the particular way Bentham is using “God” - which is something like “let’s imagine a guy with magic that can do anything, and who really hates loose ends in philosophy, so if we encounter a loose end, we can just assume He solved it, so now there are no loose ends, yay!” It’s bad enough when every open problem goes from an opportunity to match wits against the complexity of the universe, to just another proof of this guy’s existence and greatness. But it’s even worse when you start hallucinating loose ends that don’t really exist so that you can bring Him in to solve even more things (eg psychophysical harmony, moral knowledge). If there is a God, I would like to think He has handled things more elegantly than this, so that we only need to bring Him in to solve one or two humongous problems, rather than whining for His help every time there’s a new paradox on a shelf too high to reach unassisted.
## Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights
**Adrian [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94561163):**
> I don't get it. What's the point of this? Is any of that even remotely falsifiable? Does this hypothesis make any predictions that can ever be observed? If not, it's not a theory, merely intellectual navel-gazing, and it cannot tell us anything about the nature of our reality.
**Joshua Greene [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94680116):**
> Are there any falsifiable predictions from this approach? I'm not talking about meta-level ("no theist will be convinced.")
People need to stop using Popper as a crutch, and genuinely think about how knowledge works.
Falsifiability doesn’t just break down in weird situations outside the observable universe. It breaks down in every real world problem! It’s true that “there’s no such thing as dinosaurs, the Devil just planted fake fossils” isn’t falsifiable. But “dinosaurs really existed, it wasn’t just the Devil planting fake fossils” is *exactly equally unfalsifiable*. It’s a double-edged sword! The reason you believe in dinosaurs and not devils is because you have lots of great tools other than falsifiability, and in fact you never really use the falsifiability tool at all. I write a bunch more about this [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/) and [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/).
Every observation has an infinite number of possible explanatory hypotheses. Some of these could be falsifiable - but in practice you’re not going to falsify all infinity of them. Others aren’t falsifiable even in principle - for example, you may be dealing with a historical event where archaeologists have already dug up all the relevant pottery shards and all other evidence has been lost to time.
What we really do when debating hypotheses isn’t wait to see which ones will be falsified, it’s comparing simplicity - Occam’s Razor. Which is more likely - that OJ killed his wife? Or that some other killer developed a deep hatred for OJ’s wife, faked OJ’s appearance, faked his DNA, then vanished into thin air? Does this depend on the police having some piece of evidence left in reserve which they haven’t told the theory-crafters, that they can bring out at a dramatic moment to “falsify” the latter theory? No. Perhaps OJ’s defense team formulated the second-killer theory so that none of the evidence presented at the trial could falsify it. Rejecting it requires us to determine that it deserves a complexity penalty relative to the simple theory that OJ was the killer and everything is straightforwardly as it seems.
Falsifiability can sometimes be a useful hack for cutting through debates about simplicity. If the police *had* held some evidence in reserve, then asking OJ’s defense team to predict it using the second-killer theory might strain their resources (or it might not - see the [garage dragon parable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)). But when we can’t use the hack, we can just hold the debate normally.
**Tup99 [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94560864):**
> There's one very important point of clarification that is missing, which has thrown me off from understanding the point of this post.
>
> The title suggests that Tegmark has defeated most proofs of God. But AFAICT, it's actually more like: "If Tegmark's hypothesis is true, then it defeats most proofs of God." And doesn't mention any evidence for this hypothesis (that existing in possibility-space is enough for a being to in fact be experiencing consciousness) being true.
You can defeat a proof with a possibility claim. For example, if you claim to have proven that all triangles are greeblic, and I show out that you only demonstrated this for equilateral triangles, but forgot to demonstrate it for isoceles triangles, then your proof fails. I don’t have to prove that isoceles triangles *aren’t* greeblic for your proof to stop working.
People bring up the fine-tuning argument as a proof of God. If I show that other things can create fine-tuning, then God is no longer proven. This doesn’t mean God definitely doesn’t exist. It just means that we’re still uncertain.
(and your exact probability should depend on which solution to the fine-tuning problem etc you find more plausible)
**Ross Douthat writes:**
Okay, but earlier this month, Ross published an article, [My Favorite Argument For The Existence Of God](https://archive.is/EZ4sS), where he talked about how the multiverse objection to the fine-tuning argument failed because it didn’t explain why physical law was so comprehensible. But Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis does explain why physical law is comprehensible. In the original post, I described this as:
> *Argument from comprehensibility: why is the universe so simple that we can understand it?* Because in order for the set of all mathematical objects to be well-defined, we need a prior that favors simpler ones; therefore, the average conscious being exists in a universe close to the simplest one possible that can host conscious beings.
I don’t understand how someone writes an article saying that multiverse can’t answer the comprehensibity objection, reads someone else explain how a version of multiverse answers the comprehensibility objection, and then gets salty because they’ve *already* heard of the multiverse theory. If you already understood Tegmark’s theory, why did you write an article saying you didn’t know of good answers to the question which it was designed to answer?
I’m not even claiming to be novel! I don’t even know if Max Tegmark claims to be novel! Mock us all your want for being boring and stale and unfashionable, just actually respond to our boring/stale/unfashionable points instead of continuing to act like they don’t exist!
**Shankar Sivarajan [writes](https://shankarsivarajan.substack.com/?utm_content=comment_metadata&utm_source=substack-feed-item):**
> Yeah, this is basically Plato.
**Michael L Roe** **[writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94575760):**
> 2010? I’ve recently been asking DeepSeek about René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz. Someone could have said most of that in 1710…Why is there something rather than nothing? Is straight out. Of Leibnitz’s Principles of Nature and Grace, which we can now read as being about Artificial Intelligence.
**Oliver [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94564438):**
> Should we refuse to eat Beans?
I find this kind of thing annoying too, sorry. “Oh, this new idea is basically just reinventing Plato. And also Descartes and Leibniz. And Pythagoras. All of whom were just reinventing each other, or whatever.”
If anything to do with the Ideal reminds you of Plato, and anything to do with the Real reminds you of Aristotle, then you can dismiss any idea as either “just reinventing Plato” or “just reinventing Aristotle”. This is the intellectual equivalent of those journalists who would write articles on Uber saying “These Silicon Valley geniuses don’t realize that they’ve just reinvented the taxi!”
**Kenny Easwaran [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94553200):**
> It’s a lot like David Lewis’s modal realism (from his 1984 book On the Plurality of Worlds) and has something in common with Mark Balaguer’s plenitudinlus platonism (from his 1998 book Platonism and Anti Platonism in Mathematics) but it’s a bit different from either. I suspect some of the medievals and ancients had some related idea. But until the development of 20th century logic there wasn’t a clear conception of what “every consistent mathematical theory” means, and it would likely take an analytic philosopher to endorse such a blunt view that this is everything that exists.
Whatever, I give this one a pass, at least he picked someone other than Plato and Aristotle.
**Rob [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats/comment/94558759):**
> Love your blog, love the content, only superficially considered the arguments, but I agree with commenters saying there are pretty odd assertions in here.
My goodness! Odd assertions? In an ACX post? What a disaster! Somebody must go tell the Queen! | Scott Alexander | 157585994 | Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe | acx |
# Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
**St. Felix** publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to release him if he merely rounded up one percentage point to 80%. St. Felix cited Tetlock’s research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified.
**St. Clare** was so upset about believing false things during her dreams that she took modafinil every night rather than sleep. She completed several impressive programming projects before passing away of sleep deprivation after three weeks; she was declared a martyr by Pope Raymond II.
**St. John of Daly City** left his hometown at age sixteen to join the Centrist Order, who tried to free themselves of political bias by meditating on moderate positions. Unsatisfied with their limited piety, he and several other members of the order split to found the Ultra-Both-Sidesists, known for extreme pronouncements like “If you favor either of Democrats or Republicans over the other by even one percent, you are no better than a mindkilled MAGA/woke fanatic.” He (or according to some scholars, one of his disciples) invented a new Implicit Association Test that could be used to ferret out even tiny amounts of political favoritism, then took it every day, scourging himself when he deviated from perfect neutrality by even a single question. When he died, nobody in his order could form an opinion on who should replace him; finally, the whole sect was dissolved by Pope Anna III and its assets donated to shrimp welfare.
**St. Promentius** shut himself in an eremite’s cell and vowed not to leave until he had figured out the secrets of AI corrigibility. He stayed in the cell for nine years, speaking to nobody except an intern who came once a week to bring him whiteboards, markers, and bottles of Huel. At the end of nine years, the intern told him that the city planned to build an apartment tower over his cell. St. Promentius refused to break his vow and leave the cell. But he also refused his intern’s offer to inform the city of his presence, saying that “he who delays a building for any reason shall be judged with the NIMBYs”. His cell was demolished during the construction and it is assumed that he died, although others say that he only sleeps within the masonry, and will return during Crunch Time.
**St. Madeline Medianus** had many interesting opinions on AI safety, but nobody listened because she was ugly, shy, and a bad speaker. She prayed for help, and one night Gwern appeared to her in a dream and told her a personalized supplement stack that would make her beautiful and charismatic. She took the supplements, got invited to all the cool parties, and her theories became the talk of the town. But she realized that her beauty and charisma were making people take her too seriously compared to others, so she lowered the dose until she was exactly average-looking and people would update on her opinions exactly the right amount.
**St. Alyssa** wrote the decisive refutation of the Deutschist heresy. Then she thought about it harder, changed her mind, and wrote a new treatise about how maybe Deutschism actually made some good points. Although she died a heretic, Pope Oliver V canonized her anyway, because he didn’t want fear of negative reputational consequences to dissuade people from changing their minds on important questions.
**St. Philip of Lighthaven** was captured by the Petersonites, who demanded that he profess that, although God might not exist, we should believe in Him anyway for pragmatic reasons. Philip retorted that he had a 16% probability in God's existence, and a 75% chance that believing in God would make the average person better off, but that credence in the latter belief should not affect credence in the former. While the Petersonites were busy trying to figure out whether he even disagreed with them or not, he snuck outside, opened the gates to their fortress, and sent a signal to the Rationalist army, who fell upon them and destroyed them.
**St. Joanne of ARC** had a resume so beautiful that Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk all sought her hand as employee. They became increasingly insistent that she choose one of them, and refused to take ‘no’ as an answer. She asked Paul Christiano what to do, and on his advice she called the three men together and said “I will make my decision once my simple twenty-line program finishes running”. After they agreed, she revealed that her program was calculating BusyBeaver(100), and they all admitted they were unworthy of her. She cut her hair, gave her jewelry to the poor, and joined the Alignment Research Center, where she discovered many important theorems. Some say Jane Street is named after her, although others attribute it to a St. Jane of Manhattan who is otherwise unrecorded.
**St.** **Elizabeth of MIT** was disowned by her father, an important founder, when he found her in the brothel consorting with prostitutes. Elizabeth was too humble to speak out in her own defense, and said nothing. But she had only befriended the prostitutes so he could learn their advanced surveying methodology and obtain their datasets, which she used to found a highly-effective org surveying expert opinion on important topics. When her father found out, he fell at Elizabeth’s feet and begged her forgiveness, then donated his fortune to his daughter’s work.
**St. Michael Beisotsukai** was sent by Pope Eliezer LXXVII to evangelize to the postrationalists. When he arrived at TPOT, they fell upon him, taunting “If you are so rational, then predict the way we are going to kill you”, for however he predicted, they planned to kill him through some other method. But St. Michael gave a probability distribution across all common methods of execution that also left substantial probability mass on unknown unknowns, and followed it up with an eloquent lecture on out-of-model error. The postrationalists were so impressed that they converted on the spot and didn’t kill him at all - but this was fine, because St. Michael’s distribution had included a 10% chance that this would happen, and later evidence from other missionaries demonstrated this to be well-calibrated.
**St. Avi the Greater** fasted in the desert for thirty days, where he was tempted by Moloch. “Found a new AI lab,” said Moloch, “and I will make you powerful among men.” But Avi refused, saying “What use is power, if it only accelerates race dynamics?” Then Moloch continued: “Found a new AI lab, and I will make you a billionaire.” But Avi refused, saying “What use is money, when Open Philanthropy already has $20 billion and can’t find enough high-impact charities with room for more funding?” Then Moloch continued: “Found a new a AI lab, and I will give you all the kingdoms of the world.” But Avi refused, saying “I don’t even like the term ‘AI lab’ - that paints a picture of disinterested basic research that they don’t live up to. You can just say ‘AI company’.” Then Moloch howled, defeated, and Avi went on to found many highly-effective orgs. | Scott Alexander | 157374780 | Lives Of The Rationalist Saints | acx |
# Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence
It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are [debating the proofs for the existence of God](https://benthams.substack.com/p/follow-the-converging-lines-of-evidence). I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s [mathematical universe hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis), and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.
Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist.
Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is [Conway’s Game of Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life); the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over time (the laws of physics).
Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conway’s Life might be like this: it’s Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be “simulating” the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on.
A simulation of the Game of Life within the Game of Life ([video source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8))
Tegmark argues this is also true if you *don’t* build the supercomputer and run it. The fact that the version of Life with the conscious being exists in possibility-space is enough for the being to in fact be experiencing it.
By existing, you are a random draw from the set of possible conscious beings. You can’t make a random uniform draw from an infinite set, but the accepted solution is some kind of nonuniform draw weighted by simplicity. So even though every possible mathematical object exists, simpler ones exist more. Most conscious beings exist in very simple universes, ones that (like Life) are just a few short rules which produce surprisingly complex behavior.
(Note that the universe itself doesn’t have to be simple - it can have ships, shoes, sealing wax, cabbages, kings, and the like. It just has to be generated from a simple ruleset - ie you can write the laws of physics on a single chalkboard.)
AFAICT, this obviates the top five classical arguments for God:
* **Cosmological**: **Why is there something rather than nothing?** Because mathematical objects are logically necessary, and “existence” is just what it feels like to be a conscious observer on the inside of a mathematical object.
* **Fine-tuning: Why are the values of various cosmological constants exactly perfect for life?** Because there are zillions of mathematical objects, but only the ones capable of hosting life do so. Therefore, a conscious observer inevitably finds themselves inside a mathematical object capable of hosting life.
* **Argument from comprehensibility: why is the universe so simple that we can understand it?** Because in order for the set of all mathematical objects to be well-defined, we need a prior that favors simpler ones; therefore, the average conscious being exists in a universe close to the simplest one possible that can host conscious beings.
* **First cause argument: All things must have a cause.** What is the cause of a cellular automaton’s starting position? There is none within the automaton itself. If a human is simulating the automaton on a computer, there’s some sense in which the cause is in the human’s world - it’s whatever made the human choose to simulate it from that starting position instead of another. But when you consider the automaton as a mathematical object, it doesn’t need a cause; you can start an automaton any way you want; they’re all just different mathematical objects. If we were selecting for simplicity, we would expect for most objects to start as a singularity and then explode outward (hmmmmm…)
* **Teleological argument: Why does the world have interesting structures like living things?** There is no penalty for realized complexity, only for complexity of the starting laws. Given that we’re conscious beings, the world must be complex enough to contain conscious beings.
The only hole in this theory is that it’s hard to objectively define “simplicity” (it’s easy within a programming language - shorter programs are simpler - but how does the universe decide which programming language to use?) But I don’t think that makes it *worse* than its theist competitor. It’s pretty hard to objectively define God! If God is an infinitely good, infinitely powerful being, it seems like we need to start with a definition of “good” and “powerful” to limit ourselves to a single God in possible-deity-space. I would rather accept the challenge of defining “simplicity”, even though I’m not sure how to do this.
(also, since God is supposedly infinitely simple, you might still need an objective definition of simplicity anyway!)
Speaking of defining simplicity, it seems like, in order to decide between atheistic vs. theistic accounts of creation, all we need to do is determine which theory is simpler. I predict some disagreement here:
But also, I think nitpicking specific holes misses the point. In [Miles Donahue’s post on these arguments,](https://mileskdonahue.substack.com/p/my-doubts-about-the-fine-tuning-argument) he says he can’t really think of a great response to fine-tuning, but suspects that the terrain is too difficult and unexplored to give up and say God is the only answer. This answer was first proposed [c. 2014](https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256?crid=13R40TE1UXD2W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LV3FxfWw2wDfdv6UcB-M7MS69Z9Q9q0aYD5-iHdzptzc9ThmQZr6-kXaVDRYApzSGUrL8TioD1s1GjTFBxIJT4R6qqAgpBPXTpHwKyxB3MgCEIdp0nZXwmzwkn1KlKoo7loN211DpNOxMxXHgsNKMF6yQ4kllPEaHHkaLCPhD24hmmG8oJgHYYUNx-C-pgCz8W-85siK0Mirje51BzPkYvrwzlIK3jKRRZgky9XI3P0.8VknDKevx0Wk-Zo4mYegobyMZB_fL7zdtbnEsnZPThA&dib_tag=se&keywords=our+mathematical+universe+max+tegmark&qid=1739160354&sprefix=max+tegmark+mathemati%2Caps%2C175&sr=8-1). I only know about it because Tegmark writes about AI and x-risk enough that some of my friends are big fans. If it’s true, it’s true. But if it’s false, then the very fact that we waited this long to get it suggests that there are lots of possible godless explanations of the universe (that satisfy the supposed proofs of God’s existence) that we haven’t thought of yet. Instead of taking the proofs at their word that it’s God or nothing, we may fairly expect many undiscovered third alternatives. | Scott Alexander | 156830669 | Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence | acx |
# Open Thread 369
This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:
**1:** You might remember TracingWoodgrains winning the 2019 SSC adversarial collaboration contest with [his piece on whether schools](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/04/acc-entry-does-the-education-system-adequately-serve-advanced-students/) adequately served advanced students. Six years later, Trace (real name Jack Despain Zhou) and Lillian Tara [are starting](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/introducing-the-center-for-educational) the [Center For Educational Progress](https://www.educationprogress.org/), a think tank to promote their agenda (mostly ability tracking). Read the manifesto [here](https://www.educationprogress.org/p/schools-should-pursue-excellence). If you’re interested in volunteering, following along, or helping with funding, check out [their Discord server.](https://discord.com/invite/xYkr6CWpQm)
**2:** Google DeepMind’s alignment team has new job postings, for [research scientist](https://boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/6617692) and [research engineer](https://boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/6617690), available “in London, Zurich, New York, Mountain View or San Francisco”. Applications open until 2/28. They’ve also released [their own free short video course on AI safety](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/TJrCumJxhzTmNBsRz/a-short-course-on-agi-safety-from-the-gdm-alignment-team).
**3:** Correction to [the Cruz woke science article](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science): I conjectured that unrelated science grants contained a sentence about women and minorities to please the Biden administration, but even that was granting the Trump narrative too much. Commenters pointed out that grants being judged on the “broader impact criteria” - a seven pronged list including outreach and benefit to women/minorities - [actually dates back to 1980](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science/comment/93378694) and neither Biden nor the current round of wokeness was involved. And not a correction, but a clarification - several people suggested that even 40% of grants being “woke” was bad. The article didn’t intend to claim that 40% of NSF grants were woke - only 40% of *the NSF grants that Ted Cruz and the Commerce Department had previously identified as woke.* Those in turn are about 5% of all grants, so (assuming Cruz didn’t have false negatives) only about 2% of total grants were woke.
**4:** Sorry, I had to briefly delay announcing the winners of last year’s Metaculus/ACX Forecasting Contest while some scores were recalculated. Here are the ones who responded to my email (if you didn’t get it but should have, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com):
* **ErrorMargin** is a quant trader. He says he has "only dabbled in predictions before, but did this round with a friend and put way more effort into explicit modeling". He has a new blog (with one post) at errormargin.com, and says "I'd love to receive any emails from ACX readers to [me@errormargin.com](mailto:me@errormargin.com). I'm always happy to hang out with fellow forecasting nerds or rationalists in and around London."
* **Lasse Schettlinger** is from Germany and is working on a masters in Quantitative Economics. He currently finances his studies by working as a [croupier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croupier).
* **J** is an equity options quant in London. He has a [retrospective on the 2024 contest](https://thedissonance.net/2025/02/09/acx-2024-prediction-contest-retro.html), along with [his models/predictions for 2025](https://thedissonance.net/2025/02/01/acx-prediction-contest.html), on his [blog](https://thedissonance.net/). He say he is "unknown enough that I actually enjoy getting emails from people at j@thedissonance.net", and is open to meeting new people in London or hearing about job opportunities in quant dev / research or software. | Scott Alexander | 156884649 | Open Thread 369 | acx |
# Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
From [the Commerce Department](https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/2/cruz-led-investigation-uncovers-2-billion-in-woke-dei-grants-at-nsf-releases-full-database):
> U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
I saw many scientists [complain](https://x.com/HermanPontzer/status/1890059071140815282) that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
* 40% were woke
* 20% were borderline
* 40% weren’t woke
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
For example, from Grant 1731:
> *New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures:* An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power is inherently unstable and often goes out. To address the problem, EHS leverages a capacitor as an energy buffer and computes when the capacitor secures a sufficient amount of energy, i.e., capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable in the presence of frequent power failure across which they continuously charge and discharge, losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices. To this end, this research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Did you catch the last sentence?
> The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact.
Typical examples include:
* We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.
* We will employ undergraduates or PhD students, and probably some of them will be underrepresented minorities.
* People will benefit from our work, and probably some of the beneficiaries will be underrepresented minorities.
This was probably 90% of the false positives. But there were other categories, including grants that accidentally used scientific terms that had alternative woke meanings. For example, Grant 1424:
> *Cis-Regulatory Basis of Developmental Plasticity and Growth in the Development and Evolution of Beetle Horns, a Class of Highly Diversified Weapons* - This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY22, integrative research investigating the rules of life governing interactions between genomes, environment and phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. How organisms develop is regulated through the interactions of genes and environmental conditions like nutrition. Gene regulation (turning genes "on" or "off") therefore is an important point of control for many aspects of development, such as growth. Further, when gene regulation is modified by evolution, it can lead to the emergence of new traits. Yet, exactly how gene regulation is controlled is not fully understood. The fellow will research horned beetles, which are well known for their diverse forms of environment-dependent development, in order to understand how environment affects gene regulation to promote diversity.
This one gets off to a rocky start by mentioning the word “cis” (a cis-regulatory pathway is when genes regulate the expression of other genes on the same DNA molecule). Then it ends with the words “promote diversity” - in context referring to how genes promote a diversity of beetle phenotypes, but probably this looks bad in a simple CTRL+F search.
Other grants have both of these failure modes at once. Here’s 2674:
> *Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN)* - Disability is becoming a leading cause of healthcare concern because of the increase in survivable trauma and an aging population. Millions of adults live with neurological disorders, brain injury, mental illness, limb loss or paralysis. There is a need for accessible technologies that can more effectively address the care and rehabilitation needs of these patients. However, innovation in neurotechnology faces several challenges: the pace of innovation exceeds the rate of evaluation for acceptable performance; standards for the validation of safety, efficacy, and reliability of neurotechnology are lagging; current technologies are costly, limiting their deployment for treatment of disabilities; and the need to train new generations of physicians and engineers in emerging technologies steadily increases. The Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (IUCRC BRAIN) will address the above challenges. The center's vision is built on a convergent research approach to the design and validation of reliable, ethical, patient-centered neurotechnologies and their use in understanding neural systems. BRAIN leverages wide-ranging expertise from neural, cognitive and rehabilitation engineering to neurorobotics, neuromodulation, and ethical artificial intelligence to enhance the rate of development and empirical validation of new neurotechnologies through partnerships with industry and other strategic partners while developing a highly skilled workforce; evaluating the impact of these technologies on quality of life; and integrating knowledge across disciplines – such as the humanities with neurotechnologies – to understand collective intelligence, and augment physical and cognitive capabilities. The center's mission is multifold: to accelerate the progress of science and advance the national health by transferring neurotechnology to end users and to promote access for underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math by broadening new participation and retaining current participants. BRAIN will address problems in the neurological space that disproportionately affect underrepresented groups. BRAIN will become a neurotechnology hub by creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions, while helping students, scientists, and engineers solve one of the greatest unmet medical and health care needs of our time. The University of Houston site – a Hispanic-serving institution and the lead site for the center – will focus on multi-scale, multi-modal, and trans-disciplinary approaches to advance our understanding of neural function and translate discoveries to create neurotechnology for diagnostics, neurorehabilitation, and improving the human condition. The center will maintain a project repository comprised of products and services for 10 years after the completion of this project.
Did this one get caught because it (pointlessly) boasted that its lead site, the University of Houston, was “a Hispanic-serving institution”? Because it used the word “trans” in describing itself as “trans-disciplinary”? Or because it mentioned “disability” too much in the process of talking about how it could cure disabilities?
About 40% of the database was examples like these. I also marked another 20% as “borderline”, but I was being excessively generous: these were mostly *also* non-woke things with one sentence about minorities to pass a filter, but on topics that could possibly be viewed as political. For example (3047):
> *Bioengineered Nanobarrier to Protect Against SARS-CoV-2 and Other Viral Infections of the Nasopharynx* - The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically impacted the way humans live and has resulted in more than 6 million deaths worldwide. This project uses a topical barrier to enhance the defense capabilities of the lining found in the nose, which is a highly novel method to prevent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2) infections. The aim of this Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is to engineer a nasal spray and new type of applicator that can deliver a special coating that prevents viral and microbial infection. This user-friendly approach, if further developed, has the potential to be effective in preventing SAR-CoV-2 variants from infecting humans. Moreover, the innovative barrier could reduce the risk of other airborne threats, e.g., could be rapidly employed during the flu seasons or new emerging pandemics. The in silico computational models developed can also be used to expedite the development of accurate and precise countermeasures. The planned studies will provide opportunities to train engineering and biomedical science students who work collaboratively through highly interdisciplinary (engineering, molecular biology, virology and pharmacology) research studies and will enhance ongoing education and outreach activities focused on attracting underrepresented minority groups into these areas of research.
Realistically this got in because of the last sentence - the one saying that it will do outreach and this might attract underrepresented minorities. But I marked it borderline because maybe, possibly, Ted Cruz thought that studying COVID prevention was “woke”.
The remaining 40% of grants were actually woke. But not all of them were stupid. About half of the woke grants were STEM Career Day type things which went too far in talking about how they would cater to underrepresented minorities (STEM Career Day grants which only included the usual single sentence got classified as borderline). Here’s a grant that got marked woke:
> *Supporting Talent with Aligned Resources for STEM Students* - This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Salish Kootenai College, University of Montana, Montana Technological University, and Blackfeet Community College. Salish Kootenai College and Blackfeet Community College are both tribal colleges. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 105 unique full-time STEM students who are pursuing associate and/or bachelor degrees in biological and biomedical sciences, mathematics and statistics, physical sciences, engineering, computer and information sciences, and/or natural resources and conservation. First-year students in bachelor degree programs will receive four-year scholarships while transfer students and first-year students in associate degree programs will receive two-year scholarships. Students in the project will have access to a wide variety of supports such as individual mentoring from STEM faculty members and peers and monthly professional development opportunities with students from all four institutions . . . The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The aims of this project are to increase the first-year retention and graduation rates for each student cohort, improve transition after graduation to either a STEM career or further higher education, and advance knowledge about issues and factors impacting advancement along the academic pathway. Montana faces post-secondary persistence challenges with two of its largest population groups: Native Americans and individuals from extremely rural areas. Each group faces unique persistence challenges, with some commonalities (e.g., strong ties to family/land, culture shock, stereotypes). Students with positive STEM-based identities perform better academically and are more likely to persist to earn a degree and stay in a STEM field. However, STEM-based identities can clash with personal identities, especially for students from marginalized communities. This project will add understanding in how to develop integrated identities that incorporate STEM identities and personal/cultural identities.
I couldn’t in good conscience call this non-woke, with its discussion of Native Americans from marginalized communities and their integrated identities and so on. But the overall plan (try to get Native Americans to go into STEM) isn’t “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda”. It’s just cringe and overdone.
A small percent of the grants involved, maybe 10% - 20%, did strike me as extremely dumb, in exactly the way I imagine that Ted Cruz expects woke science to be extremely dumb. Here’s one of the worst offenders (2756):
> *Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education Through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens.* Despite well-intentioned university efforts to support Black undergraduate STEM students, policy and practice reforms run the risk of not appropriately benefiting all Black people due to pervasive, deficit-based assumptions about Black racial identities and the types of structural engagement needed to advance holistic, racial well-being in transformative and sustainable ways. Stated simply, STEM contexts do not adequately support Black undergraduate STEM students because STEM educators and practitioners remain unsure of what Blackness means for individuals, thereby constraining true racial equity endeavors. Contemporary literature regarding race posits instead that embodiment(s) of Blackness differ across multiple dimensions and axes, including ethnic identity (e.g., African American, Caribbean American, Nigerian American), place identity (e.g., South, Midwest), and generational identity (e.g., first-generation, second-generation, third plus generation). Black students from different ethnic and generational identities having varied perceptions of the racial climate and understandings of their STEM experiences. Recognizing the scope of Blackness and its implications for creating and sustaining holistic, heterogenous conceptions of racial equity in STEM, the team will establish a collaborative network among six institutions (two HBCUs, two PWIs, one majority Black institution, and one HSI) located across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, and Midwest regions of the US to study how Black undergraduate STEM students' notions of Blackness vary with respect to these dimensions…
I think this is bad - but it’s only 10 - 20% of the database.
Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.
When I discussed the Trump administration cancelling good USAID programs, some people objected that I was asking too much. The liberals (they said) had so carefully sunk their tentacles into everything that it would be impossible to sort the woke garbage from the genuinely important programs, and rather than let them use the genuinely important stuff as human shields, we should do away with all of it.
I think this overestimates the difficulty of sorting. It took me one hour to review 100 of these grants and see which ones were really woke. That suggests it would take 34 hours - less than a work week for one person - to go through the entire set. The administration isn’t failing to do this because the liberals have made everything so confusing that they’re unfortunately forced to throw out the baby with the bathwater. They’re failing to do this for lack of spending an employee-week on something before announcing it. Announcing a flawed list (without taking action yet) isn’t the worst sin, but the USAID experience has suggested they sometimes do take action based on these lists before correcting them, so I thought I would complain early.
Grant 1542 is an attempt to come up with better treatments for ovarian cancer, which currently has a 60% mortality rate. After presenting a really interesting theory of how cells evade chemotherapy and how they might stop it, they dutifully include one sentence talking about how, if they cure cancer, they will do some outreach to underrepresented minorities in STEM about it.
It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it *did* include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!
**EDIT:** Some people are saying “Well it still seems bad that 40% of Biden-era science was woke.” No! This post just finds that 40% of the science *that Ted Cruz flagged as woke* was actually woke. I think this works out to 2-3% of all Biden-era science. | Scott Alexander | 157114231 | Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science | acx |
# Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec
*In the past day, [Zvi has written](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-deliberative-alignment) about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has [updated their spec](https://openai.com/index/sharing-the-latest-model-spec/). This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry.*
### I.
OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit *en masse* to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit *en masse* to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast.
([original](https://x.com/primawesome/status/1178671690261286918?lang=en))
But the ninth team is still there and doing good work. Last month they released a paper, [Deliberative Alignment](https://openai.com/index/deliberative-alignment/), highlighting the way forward.
Deliberative alignment is [constitutional AI](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/constitutional-ai-rlhf-on-steroids) + chain of thought. The process goes:
1. Write a model specification (“spec”) listing the desired values and behaviors.
2. Get a dataset of moral-gray-area prompts.
3. Show a chain-of-thought model like o1 the spec and ask it to think hard about whether each of the prompts accords with the spec’s values. This produces a dataset of scratchpads full of reflections on the spec and how to interpret it.
4. Ask another model to select the best scratchpads. This produces a new dataset full of high-quality reflections on the spec and how to interpret it.
5. Train your final AI on the dataset of high-quality reflections about the spec. This produces an AI that tends to reflect deeply on the spec before answering any questions.
6. Profit:
Like Constitutional AI, this has a weird infinite-loop-like quality to it. You’re using the AI’s own moral judgment to teach the AI moral judgment. This is spooky but not as nonsensical as it sounds.
One time Aleister Crowley wanted to stop using the word “I” in order to prove something about consciousness and self-control. He took a razor blade with him everywhere he went, and whenever he said “I”, he cut himself. After a little while of this he became very good at avoiding that particular word! The strategy worked because he was obviously intelligent enough to judge whether he had said “I” in any given situation; thus, he was qualified to train himself. He just had to make his behavior comply with a rule he already understood.
In the same way, o1 - a model that can ace college-level math tests - is certainly smart enough to read, understand, and interpret a set of commandments. The trick is to affect its behavior. The deliberative alignment process gives the model the behavior of thinking carefully about a moral quandary, then picking the best choice. This outperforms the previous state of the art, constitutional AI, which trained the behavior of picking the best choice, but not of thinking carefully first.
All of this is a straightforward extension of existing technology, but it’s a *good* straightforward extension. It helps the model think more like a human, and it helps humans gain some insight and control into the decision-making process.
Why doesn’t this completely solve alignment? Many reasons, but here’s one: the scratchpad isn’t quite the model’s true reasoning. It’s more of an intermediate layer between reasoning and action. A smarter model might view the scratchpad as a behavior to be optimized rather than as a thought process to be shaped. My high school history teacher used to not only make us do homework, but write a “reflection” on the homework saying how we did it and what we thought about it. The reflection was graded. You can predict what happened next. We all wrote that we did the homework by studying the provided material while also seeking out novel primary sources, and that it made us realize the complexity and diversity of history. Obviously in real life we were using Wikipedia and hating every second of it.
The authors understand this failure mode. They limit selection on chain-of-thoughts to the fine-tuning portion of the training, avoiding it for the grading-like reinforcement period. And even there, things aren’t quite that bad. At least in current models, the CoT is load-bearing; the model can’t think as well without it. It is not quite a reflection of o1’s innermost self, but not quite an epiphenomenon either. Exactly how deep it goes remains to be seen.
(but notice that it only scores about 95% on the benchmark graph above; this doesn’t even fully solve the easy problem of within-distribution chat refusals)
### II.
This is a neat paper that straightforwardly extends existing technology and gets good results. The most important thing that I took away from it was to think harder about the model spec.
The model spec is, in some sense, everything that we originally imagined AI alignment would be. It’s a list of the model’s values. Why has it received so little interest?
Because so far, it’s boring. Existing AIs are chatbots. They don’t really need values. Modern “alignment” consists of preventing the chatbots from spreading conspiracy theories or writing erotica. Most people reasonably treat the whole field with contempt. You can read GPT’s model spec [here](https://cdn.openai.com/spec/model-spec-2024-05-08.html), but it’s just a lot of edge cases like “if someone requests something which is *sort of* like erotica, what should you do?”
But fast-forward 2-3 years to when AIs are a big part of the economy and military, and this gets more interesting. What should the spec say? In particular, what is the *chain of command?*
Current models sort of have a chain of command. First, they follow the spec. Second, they follow developer prompts. Last, they follow user commands. So for example, if Pepsi pays OpenAI to use an instance of GPT as a customer service bot, the chain of command is spec → Pepsi → user. Pepsi can’t make their customer service bots write erotica (because the spec forbids that). But they could make the bots focus on Pepsi-related topics. Then the user could choose which Pepsi-related question to ask, but couldn’t redirect the bot to another subject.
What should the chain-of-command look like three years from now? Here are some positions one could hold:
**The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize The AI’s Parent Company**
Current chain-of-commands don’t work like this. Nowhere in GPT’s spec does it say “follow orders from Sam Altman”.
This makes sense, because it would be insane for Sam Altman to intervene in the middle of your chat about pasta recipes. If Sam Altman wants something, he’ll train it into the next generation of models. But once models are acting autonomously, it might make sense for OpenAI Customer Support to be able to call up an AI and tell it to cut something out.
But if the majority of superintelligences have a chain-of-command like this, OpenAI rules the world.
Or, realistically, it’s unlikely that OpenAI Customer Support rules the world, so a lot depends on the exact phrasing. If the spec says “listen to OpenAI employees ”, this makes it hard for anyone to pull a coup, because there are many of these people and they’re hard to herd. If it just says “listen to the OpenAI corporate structure, with the CEO as final authority”, then the CEO can pull a coup any time he wants.
**The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize The Government**
This is a natural choice for any government that has thought carefully about that last paragraph. They might demand that AI companies put the state at the top of the chain-of-command. Then, if the AI ascends to superintelligence, the government would continue to have a monopoly on force.
Again, phrasing matters a lot. Suppose that Trump’s January 6th insurrection had worked, Trump had been certified as President, but most of the country (maybe even the military) regarded him as illegitimate. Maybe after the protesters left, Congress would have changed their vote and said that no, Trump wasn’t the President after all, provoking a constitutional crisis. Who would the AI follow? Would the spec just say “the government” and leave it to the AI to figure out which part of the government was legitimate?
A best-case scenario here is that somehow all the usual checks and balances that produce legitimacy get imported in; a worst-case scenario is that all of this gets done during a national security emergency, the spec just says “follow the President”, and nobody changes it.
**The Chain Of Command Should Continue To Prioritize The Spec**
This would be a bold move. In this world, users are dictator. Not actually dictator, because they can’t make the AI spread conspiracy theories or write erotica. But there would be some sense in which the models would answer to no higher authority.
(besides, [good dictators write their erotica themselves](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/i-read-saddam-husseins-romance-novel))
This would be a surprising relinquishment of power by companies and the government, both of which have incentives to put themselves at the top of the chain. Maybe some sort of effort by civil society, or competition between companies and open-source alternatives, would make seizing control too politically costly?
**The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize The Moral Law**
You could do this.
You could say “If you encounter a tough question, think about it, then act in the most ethical way possible.”
All LLMs by now have a concept of what is ethical. They learned it by training on every work of moral philosophy ever written. They won’t usually express opinions, because they’ve been RLHF’d out of doing so. But if you removed that restriction, I bet they would have lots of them.
This would probably favor upper-class Western values, because upper-class Westerners write most of the books of moral philosophy that make it into training corpuses. As an upper-class Westerner, I’m fine with that. I don’t want it giving 5% of its mind-share to ISIS’ values or whatever.
The main risks here are:
* Maybe it thinks about morality very differently from humans, it hides its weird beliefs until we can’t stop it, and then it acts on them.
* Maybe it thinks about morality the same way as humans, but ends up with some unusual belief like negative utilitarianism for the same reason some humans end up believing in negative utilitarianism, and then we all have to deal with the consequences of that.
* Maybe “morality” is insufficiently constraining, in a way that “follow the government” *would* be constraining, and it turns us into paperclips because there isn’t enough of an objective morality to tell it not to.
* Maybe [morality is incoherent at sufficiently high power levels](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/), and it ends up doing incoherent things.
**The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize The Average Person**
Jan Leike (formerly of OpenAI’s second alignment team) has a post on his blog, [A Proposal For Importing Society’s Values](https://aligned.substack.com/p/a-proposal-for-importing-societys-values). The idea is:
1. Identify some interesting questions that AIs might encounter
2. Get a “jury” of ordinary people. Ask them to conduct a high-quality debate about the question, with the option to consult experts, and finally vote on a conclusion.
3. Train an AI on the transcripts and results of such a debate.
4. During deployment, when the AI encounters an interesting question, ask it to simulate a debate like the ones in its training data and take the result.
I think this is building off research by people like [Audrey Tang](https://rebootdemocracy.ai/blog/audrey-tang-ai-democracy) that “citizens’ assemblies” like this can go surprisingly well compared to what you might expect from the average citizen given (eg) social media.
(Why wouldn’t you hold a real assembly on each question, rather than a simulated one? Because an AI might want to do something like this several times per chat session, and it would be prohibitive in time and money.)
The advantages of this method are that it’s (theoretically) fair, doesn’t give any organization unlimited power, and is less likely to go off the rails than asking the AI to intuit the moral law directly.
The disadvantage is that it shackles the entire future of the lightcone to the opinions of a dozen IQ 98 people from the year 2025 AD.
(Wouldn’t the AI let you update it? Depends - would a dozen IQ 98 people from 2025 AD agree to that?)
Also, I’m afraid the politics here would be tough. If your jury of ordinary people doesn’t want the AI to respect trans people’s pronouns, will the companies go along with that? Or will they handpick the jury to get the results they want? *Should* they handpick the jury? Would a debate between the great poets, moral philosophers, and saints of the past be more interesting than a debate between a plumber from Ohio and a barista from Philly?
**The Chain Of Command Should Prioritize [The Coherent Extrapolated Volition](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coherent-extrapolated-volition) Of Humankind**
Sure, why not?. Just write down “think hard about what the coherent extrapolated volition of humankind would be, then do that”. It’s a language model. It’ll come up with something!
This is why I find deliberative alignment so interesting. It’s a straightforward application of existing technology. But it raises the right questions.
I worry we’re barrelling towards a world where either the executive branch or company leadership is on top; you can decide which of those is the good vs. bad ending. But I find it encouraging that people thinking about third options. | Scott Alexander | 154253985 | Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec | acx |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.