1: US Congress is considering an agriculture bill which would revoke all existing state animal welfare protections (for example, it would revoke California’s law banning farmers from keeping pigs in crates too small to turn around it for their entire lives). The animal welfare people are calling it “the most important legislative threat to farmed animal welfare in US history”. If you want to learn more, including how to contact your Senator, see this post.

2: Former book review contest winner Ethan Ludwin-Peery is a professor at Hampshire College, which he describes as “the greatest model of higher education ever invented, [producing] a higher proportion of research doctorates than almost any other school in the nation.” Unfortunately, the administration made some boneheaded financial decisions and now it’s in the process of shutting down. Ethan would like someone to save it. He thinks it would take $30-$60 million to buy the campus outright, plus another $40 million to operate it for the first few years until it regains a sustainable funding model. He points out that building a good college from scratch nowadays is near-impossible, and this represents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire one at fire-sale prices. If you’re a billionaire who wants to prove some theory about tertiary education, or a smaller investor who wants to join a coalition, read Ethan’s plea to save Hampshire, then email him at ethanludwinpeery@gmail.com.

Reddit Vexillology

Vexilllogy is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us observe dynamics of interest. I haven’t read enough MFA books to do more than relay the thoughts of my betters, and you probably haven’t either. But anyone can have opinions on flags.

If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags:

1. They should be so simple that a child could draw them.

2. No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text

3. The rule of tincture: “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and “colors” were every other color (except black, which is a “fur” and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn’t have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be “color on color”.

Every so often, a US state will decide that its flag is politically incorrect and sponsor a contest to design a new one. Then online vexillologists will go over the entries, savaging any that violate the code. “Look how busy this one is! It has four different colors!” “Oh god, this one literally included text! Can you believe it!” They’ll moan and scowl and ask why everyone can’t be more like Indonesia. Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules:

But the non-Indonesians are starting to fighting back. Search the keyword “reddit vexillology” on X to make contact with the Resistance.

There are even memes!

If the vexillological resistance marches under a banner, it must be the flag of medieval Venice (c. 1000 - 1797):

The Reddit Vexillologist arguments are:

• Flags were originally intended to distinguish friend from foe on the battlefield. To serve this purpose, they ought to be easily distinguishable from far away, through smoke, dust, etc. There’s no way anyone could read text in these conditions.

• Sometimes your militia will need Betsy Ross - a random seamstress without fancy equipment - to sew them a flag out of bedsheets. Your flag should be simple enough that Betsy can do a good job.

• Patriotic young children will sometimes want to draw flags, and we should let them. This means no complex shapes that a child would get wrong.

• The Rule of Tincture is obviously correct. A color on a color looks like crap! Come on, can’t you see this?

The resistance counterarguments are:

• Battlefield recognition is no longer a main use case for flags, so this is no longer relevant. Besides, the medieval flags, which actually did get used in battle, mostly break your rules. You are trying to out-medieval the medievals.

• A modern Betsy Ross could order the most complex flag in the world off CafePress for $19.99 with same-day shipping.

• Young children aren’t going to object to having to draw a lion with wings. Young children love drawing lions with wings. No child has ever said “I hate lions with wings, I wish my country’s flag was something cool, like a red square on top of a white square.”

• The origins of the Rule of Tincture are unclear, but plausibly related to medieval craftsmen using literal metals, and crafting heraldic crests using techniques where it was practically difficult to get metals to join with other metals (or colors to join with other colors) properly. It would be a wild coincidence if the limitations of medieval craftsmanship just so happened to correspond to timeless aesthetic truths. You just think flags which break the rule look like crap because you’ve been so acculturated into the rule that any violation of it feels jarring on a preconscious level.

• Many of the most iconic flags in the world, including America, Brazil, California, Spain, the Vatican, Iran, and the United Nations, violate the conventions. A theory of vexillology where all of these are wrong would be like a theory of drama where Shakespeare sucked.

To all of these objections, I would add a broader one: sure, the Reddit vexillologists say that this is all about what’s easy for soldiers and children and Betsy Ross. But flags from back in solders/children/Betsy’s day were more complicated (eg Venice). And in every other form of art, the past two hundred years have seen detail gradually give way to minimalism. Prose has become less flowery, architecture has become less ornamented, dress has become plainer. And now there’s a movement for minimalist flags. Hmmmmmm. Are you sure you’re thinking of poor Betsy, or have you been unknowingly seized and by the zeitgeist and dragged off?

I think this is a successful model organism. We meet all the same considerations of context, history, aesthetics, and pattern languages. But here it’s obvious that many of the “rules of good taste” are obsolete historical artifacts (and pseudo-historical artifacts!) that got trapped because people who are familiar with them think everything else “looks wrong”, and which threaten to homogenize the field into a slurry.

And that’s why I think American greatness depends on adopting X user @Sven_Etienne’s US Flag In The Style Of Venice:

2: Movie Plot Holes

There’s a whole literature on why the eagles couldn’t have flown Frodo to Mordor (or, if your answer is that the Dark Lord would have noticed when they got close, fly him halfway). I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot-pole.

Here’s one that AFAIK nobody defends: when Obi-Wan was charged with hiding baby Luke from Vader, how come - out of an entire galaxy of places to conceal him - he placed him with Vader’s stepbrother, in Vader’s hometown, without even changing his last name?

On the one hand, this is extremely dumb, and makes me think less of George Lucas. On the other, it doesn’t change my enjoyment of Star Wars at all. Hundreds of millions of people have watched and loved Star Wars, and either not noticed this, or loved it despite this flaw.

Is this what people mean by “paying attention”? You might not think of these things on a first or second viewing. But some movies reward careful thought by showing hidden depths, and others punish it when a seemingly coherent story breaks down into nonsense.

You can go further. A nitpicky uber-nerd will spot that Ultra-Man’s laser is described as having a range of 1,000 feet in “Ultra-Man Behind The Scenes”. But in Ultra-Man #88, he was seen flying above the Empire State Building and shooting someone on the ground, even though the building is 1,250 feet tall. Is a comic series that doesn’t make any of these mistakes “better” than one that does? Are people who care about these things better, more tasteful readers than the rest of us?

Maybe. A superhero story that hangs together nicely is a more elegant and impressive artifact than one which constantly contradicts itself. This doesn’t affect whether normal people like the story or not, but we already agreed that taste is in many ways supposed to stand apart from the judgment of normal people (who like slop).

Is this just telling us that we respect taste when the taste-haver is an aristocrat with strong opinions on wine, but don’t respect it when the taste-haver is an uber-nerd with strong opinions on Ultra-Man’s blaster range?

Tech Company Names

I wanted to title one of the articles in this series “Against Taste”. In the end, what stopped me was one of my model cities posts. A project mentioned there is called Infinita. The project is fine, but I can’t get over the name. Sure, infinity is cool. But that’s exactly the problem. It tries too hard for an easy win. What’s cool? Infinity. How do you turn something into a name? “A” at the end. You feel like they’re manipulating you into feeling impressed.

But Infinita’s predecessor Vitalia had a good name. Superficially it’s the same idea: cool concept + A at the end. But it combines a useful description (Vitalia focused on biotech and longevity) with a subtle nod to its inspiration and chief supporter, Vitalik Buterin. Even though the two company names superficially resemble each other, those of us who really understand tech companies realize that the latter is actually quite clever in context.

This is taste. But it doesn’t seem exactly like any of the eight categories at the beginning of yesterday’s post. It’s closest to “novelty and innovation”. “Infinita” doesn’t do anything new or interesting with tech company names; it just takes the absolute easiest lowest-hanging fruit there is. But it’s more than that; “City Project Investors, Inc” is also extremely easy and not new or interesting, but it doesn’t seem as bad. Above, I used the word “manipulating”, and I sort of stand by that. It’s too much of an “easy win” - too good with too little work.

Part of my “Contra Everyone On Taste” crusade is to be against this sort of thing. There are people who think that any poem that rhymes is an “easy win” and therefore tasteless, or any art that looks like anything, or any building with ornament or symmetry. I hate this outlook, but then what do I mean when I admit there’s some sense in which easy wins are bad?

There was an AI generated poetry Turing Test a while ago. People revealed their bad taste by liking some AI poems that I considered absolutely horrid:

Yet in this fleeting dance, we find our grace
For time’s own rhythm guides us, slow or fast
Each second lived, a treasure we embrace
For in its flow, we find our lives amassed

Though time may steal what once was bright and true
The sun will rise again - and so shall you

Bits of this are nonsensical - why would you use the word “amassed” there? do we really embrace treasures? - but this isn’t the main problem. If it were only that, it would be no worse than Ultra-Man’s blaster having the wrong range. I think what makes me violently allergic is that this is stringing too many cliches together. “The sun will rise again - and so shall you”? Really?!

Maybe this isn’t actually a cliche, I’ve never heard that particular phrase before, but it’s the sort of thing that could be a cliche. I don’t know how else to describe it! You’re trying to manipulate me by doing easy things that you know will work, and the fact that it slightly does work just makes it even more galling!

More on this topic later.

1: Sensory Delight. Ode To Joy makes the listener feel joyful. Michelangelo’s David fills the viewer with awe at the human figure. The great cathedrals are impressive buildings, in a way that hits you like a punch to the gut. These judgments are preconscious, widespread, and don’t necessarily require artistic sophistication.

2: Novelty and Innovation: Someone gets credit for doing art in a way that has never been done before. The early Impressionists invented a new way of looking at the world and explored all of its little corners. A modern Impressionist painter may be able to match their technical skill, but not their novelty; therefore, the modern would be a mere curiosity while the originals were great artists. For a modern person to be a great artist, they would have to explore entirely new media - hence the surprising and transgressive nature of modern art.

3: Paying Attention / Pattern Language: Tasteful people, viewing art over the generations and paying deep attention to it, have developed a sense of balance, composition, contrast, and what should and shouldn’t be done. We can debate how predetermined the exact grammar of this language was a priori, but for better or worse people are sensitized to it and will judge works with it in mind. A good work of art should either conform to this language, or defy it deliberately and thoughtfully (that is, in a way that transcends it rather than ignores it).

Along with these three big ones, here are smaller ones that might or might not be combinations or subvarieties of these:

4: Context And Discussion: Some great art raises questions, and subsequent great art proposes answers, or variations on the questions, or further elucidates the subject. The great artists of any given time are in conversation with their peers and the great artists of all past ages; new art can be judged on whether it shows awareness of, and contributes to, this conversation. Other forms of context are more personal - is a book about human evil more aesthetic if its author survived the Holocaust?

5: Literal Ability To Understand A Work: You can’t fully appreciate Animal Farm unless you know the history of Soviet communism and recognize the book as an allegory for that history. If someone who knew nothing about this liked it as a cute story about talking animals, their appreciation would be different from (inferior to?) that of more knowledgeable people.

6: Changing Fashions: In 1940, Beaux-Arts and Frank Lloyd Wright were the heights of American architecture. By 1950, nobody who was anybody was doing Beaux-Arts or Prairie; it was all International Style. One could very charitably attribute this to the novelty-seeking drive above; but it’s implausible that Prairie style architecture was novel and beloved in 1940, a few houses completely exhausted its potential, but the explosion of International Style buildings didn’t restore the balance such that the low-hanging-fruit level level was lower in Prairie style again. More likely this was just a fashion effect where Prairie style was cool in 1940, then uncool in 1950.

7: Political And Ideological Point-Making: Great art may convey some truth about the world. This could be a purely aesthetic truth. But in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the truth was “slavery is bad”. Other truths are conveyed symbolically (for example, cathedrals being shaped like crosses) or through design choices (for example, the austerity of Bauhaus architecture making it more suitable for socialist housing).

8: Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You: Maybe this one is emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making. But some people say they come away from art transformed, in a way which is neither just sensory delight nor just political ideology. Philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what way this is, but hopefully we’ve all had this experience and can accept an extensional definition.

These people enumerated these things to defend taste. I will instead take the bold stand that conflating many different things is bad: it frees people from thinking too hard about any particular one of them, or the ways they interact. Here are my arguments for deliberately ignoring about half of these.

The Parable Of The Steakhouse

All discussion of aesthetics must in some sense be personal. So: young Scott was deeply disappointed to learn how restaurant critics worked.

In his imagination, a critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either. A typical tasting would intersperse food from dozens of different restaurants, with each dish tried multiple times (obviously the critic wouldn’t know it was the same dish) to ensure that the ratings were consistent. Any critic whose ratings were unreliable - two blind tastings of the same dish were no more likely to correlate than tastings of two different dishes - would be laughed out of the business.

Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like “Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.” How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!

The type of critic young Scott dreamed of could make true discoveries. They might learn that the family restaurant down the street makes a steak that beats the $100-a-plate Michelin-starred steakhouse. Probably the average claim like this isn’t true. But probably there’s some claim like this which is true, and they could learn it. The real-world restaurant critic who writes stuff about “ambience” never will. Even if they’re honest and bold enough to risk their reputation on a crazy claim that would open them to ridicule and offend foodies everywhere, the placebo-esque effects of context and branding would bias them without their knowledge. They are doomed to repeat conventional wisdom, at best shifting it a little around the edges.

I’ve since made my peace with real-world restaurant criticism. I suppose it’s true that real people go to a restaurant and soak in the ambience, and that’s part of what makes restaurants fun. I suppose it’s true that making a visually appealing dish succeeds at delighting the senses no less than making something delicious. Even getting to hear about the chef’s dumb childhood in Sardinia is potentially part of the “experience”, if you like this sort of thing.

Still, it rankles. I’m at peace with there being some real-world food critics. But shouldn’t there be a few of the other type, too?

It wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst too long to uncover why I think like this. I grew up in a medical family; I knew why observational studies were worse than RCTs before I was entirely sure how sex worked. In a medical study, you have to ruthlessly control out everything except the drug itself. If one center has doctors in white coats administer the drug, and another has doctors in fancy suits administer it, that’s a potential bias (Bernstein et al, 2019). Predictive coding unifies these phenomena with their restaurant-related counterparts: all perception, whether of pain relief or the taste of a steak, is biased by contextual clues. Yet in medicine, we don’t shrug and say it’s “all part of the experience”. We challenge ourselves to isolate each factor - with the drug itself being the most important - and then recombine them in the way most conducive to patient care.

Dostoevsky says that “the world will be saved by Beauty”. I’m busy trying to save the world through Truth, so I can’t personally work on Dostoevsky’s project, but I think it deserves the same level of dignity. If seekers of Truth respect their discipline enough to separate real from placebo effects, why shouldn’t Beauty-seekers do the same? If you randomized-controlled-trialled art so mercilessly that all the novelty effects and context effects and pattern language effects got eliminated, would Beauty be what was left?

Okay, But Do You Like Art?

Suppose you go into a museum and you see a Renaissance-style sculpture. It fills you with awe, and you feel changed by what it tells you about the vitality and divinity of the human form.

Now suppose you read the placard, and it says “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.”

Is there some sense in which, retroactively, you were wrong to feel awe and inner transformation? A sense in which it would have been correct to have deep feelings about the nature of humanity if it had been by a real Renaissance master, but now it’s embarrassing? Suppose that a sense of artistic responsibility (or a sense of cringe) causes you to root these feelings out of yourself, until you can only regard the sculpture with snide contempt - and then the curator tells you that the placard was a prank, and the sculpture was by Michelangelo after all?

If you genuinely believe in the power of art to awe and transform, it’s strange to also care about its novelty and provenance. It would be as if people took medications based on how cool the story behind their invention was. Everyone agrees that the medications treat diseases, everyone agrees that the cool stories contribute nothing to their efficacy, but people had somehow forgotten to philosophically separate their disease-curing attribute from their fascinating provenance, and doctors would constantly be saying things like “Sure, Abilify works just as well as Thorazine with fewer side effects, but it’s boring and derivative, so take the Thorazine instead.”

The synthesis here - so obvious that many of you are probably screaming at me to address it - is that the first few Renaissance statues that you see should awe you and transform your mind - whether they are by Michelangelo or a talented forger - but that by your hundredth statue your mind has already been transformed in this particular way and you should move on to other things.

I agree this weasels out of the problem, but it’s not how real art lovers behave. If a Michelangelo exhibition came to their town, most art lovers wouldn’t say “Sorry, I’ve learned everything that I can from Renaissance statues, I only benefit from modern art now.” They would attend the exhibition and claim to be awed and transformed. If a new Michelangelo statue was discovered, it would be a great event in the art world (there was something like this with a new Da Vinci painting ten years ago) and the people who say they are awed and transformed by art would feel awed and transformed by it.

But also, this isn’t my personal experience of loving great art! I have no taste in visual art, but I love some poetry - enough that I’m willing to make the cringe statement that it awes and transforms me. Not every poem. Not even every poem by universally-recognized great poets. But some small subset of poems consistently astonish me. If my usual response to modern art is “I could draw that with a bucket of crayons and ten minutes”, my response to a really good poem is “I couldn’t write that in ten million years”. A really good poem feels like an artifact sent down by some god to prove his superiority to mortals, an impossible flex by a brain light-years beyond my own.

I’ve read most of the poems by the really great poets who I like - I’ll use G.K. Chesterton as an example here, since a reader reviewed his work in one of our contests. I don’t feel like I have exhausted my appreciation of them, or that my love of novelty drives me on to want something different. If someone discovered a book of a hundred lost Chesterton poems, I would treat it as Christmas, Hanukkah, and my birthday all at once.

And if I read those poems, and enjoyed them, and agreed they were as good as Chesterton’s best work elsewhere - but the “discoverer” triumphantly revealed they’d been a forgery the whole time - that would plunge me into some kind of aesthetic crisis. In the best-case scenario, I’d decide the forger was the same one-in-a-billion talent as Chesterton, in which case I would happily consider him one of my favorite poets - maybe less of a genius than Chesterton, since he didn’t come up with the style, but no less delightful to read. If I didn’t have that option (maybe the forger exhaustively trained and tested random members of the population, found that 5% of people could write as well as Chesterton if prompted correctly, and randomly sampled from that 5% to produce his fake book) then my crisis would be deeper, but maybe more productive. I would glut myself on Chesterton-quality poems until I really did get bored of them. I don’t know how long that would take. Maybe forever. If it took some limited amount of time, then next I would ask myself - if the top 5% of the population can write Chesterton-quality poems given the right training and prompt, doesn’t that imply that the top 0.001% of the population, given the same, could write even better poems? How do we identify these people? How do we get them to drop what they’re doing now and work on these masterpieces?

But I hope I wouldn’t say “Oh, 5% of the population can write Chesterton-quality poems? Wow, I didn’t know that. You’re telling me for the first time. But I still like Chesterton better because he was the first person to write in that style, and I don’t care at all about any of these other people, and I have no followup questions.” If I said that, I would feel contempt for myself; I would have to abandon all claim to have any true poetry appreciation. Anyone who says such a thing obviously doesn’t like poetry, they like - I don’t know, the experience of affiliating themselves with cool famous poets.

When people say “I think it’s really cool that this Impressionist painting was one of the first Impressionist paintings ever, and not just some modern version of an Impressionist painting that didn’t even participate in the original discussions around Impressionism”, I want to answer - okay, but do you like art?

Sing, O Muse, Of Rage

Freddie de Boer writes his opinion on the poverty of modern literature reviewers, one which I’ve heard in one form or another from every thoughtful person with an MFA. The forms allowed for the modern novel have been constricted over the course of the century, so that now every book that “makes it big” in the critical world is a slight variation on the same form. Erik Hoel, in his version of the same essay, says:

Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface. Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds. A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know. Unnamed narrators and characters are given only descriptors like “my divorced friend” or “L came over,” making everything surface.

What is auto-fiction but a form of defense? For if it really happened, who can criticize? Similarly, a dominant theme of a lot of contemporary fiction is social justice—for again, who can criticize? Even the use of first-person, so ubiquitous now, is defensive, for it protects you from getting the inner life of someone unlike yourself wrong. And none of this is helped by social media, which has increased the attack surface of pretty much everything and everyone, meaning that all art is now far more defensive and wary.

Without saying anything that thousands of other people haven’t said before me - there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t. Which is more likely - that Homer (and millennia of classical and medieval commentators) simply didn’t realize the eternal truth that all prose must consist of short clear sentences vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway - a truth which can be grasped by anyone who pays sufficient attention to art and to their own emotions upon reading a book? Or that moderns have gotten trapped in a pointless cage of their own devising?

When I ask art critics about this, they say that it would sound ridiculous to write a Homeric-style epic poem today. It would be a conscious choice to take an extreme outlier literary position, in a way where it wasn’t a conscious choice for Homer. Homer was just describing the Trojan War in the idiom that felt most natural to him. You would have to either be engaging in self-parody, or be the least in-touch person in the world.

This is true, but it’s the failure mode that Lincoln memorably called “killing your parents, then begging clemency because you are an orphan”. Yes, if critics make a pact to excoriate any book more than 5% different from the median Jonathan Franzen novel, then every book outside that 5% margin of error will sound weird and jarring and involve a conscious decision to ruin one’s own career. And since Homer wasn’t trying to ruin his career, that makes the book different from Homer, and hard to judge outside the context of weirdness and professional self-immolation. But why stop there? If critics decided to pan any book that wasn’t about Joe Biden eating a hot dog, then after a decade of this, any book about any other topic would sound weird and jarring and cringe. We haven’t discovered a new aesthetic truth that, in the context of the 21st century, all art must be about ex-presidential meat consumption. We’ve just gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium. Insofar as there’s such a thing as Art - as opposed to mere sophistication - shouldn’t its chief job should be to escape?

The Angel Of History

I want to look in more detail at Frank Lantz’s reply to my post on taste (and AI Turing Test).

Lantz basically says - yeah, the AI Art Turing Test was an interesting examination of one aspect of art - the picture itself, abstracted into a 600 x 400 JPEG. But real art is situated in the world. It comes from an artist. It’s painted on some medium and displayed in some gallery. There’s discussion around it. It sits at a particular historic moment, and alters the stream of artistic history in some distinct way.

The meaning and purpose of an individual work of art is inextricably linked to its context, to the situation within which it was created, to the other works that came before, beside, and after it, and which form a larger conversation of which it is a part. This is true of 18,000-year-old bison drawings, Renaissance church frescos, Dada collages, Warhammer 40k fanart, and everything else […]

In fact, this is a point that has, in one way or another, been at the heart of art as a project for over a century, wrestled with by the very people who make up this clique, and for whom these codes and signals, and the profound and sacred activity they represent or simulate or obscure, have become a subject of endless, obsessive, self-critical fascination. How else do you explain Jeff Koons? How do you explain Andy Warhol?

When you look at art as a project, you recognize that Koons, and Warhol before him, and Duchamp before him, were themselves wrestling with the kinds of questions raised by this very quiz, questions about the relationship between art and jpegs, between what art purports to do and what it is actually doing, between the serious pursuit of profound and sacred truths and a speculative market in tax-avoidant ultra-luxury hyper-objects, between tacky, obscene wealth and abject, hipster coolness, between looking as optical experience and looking as social ritual, between a bunch of recursive, cerebral puzzles about the structure and limits of meaning and a bunch of pictures that may or may not make you feel a special tingle in the bathing suit area, between philosophy and decoration, between what kinds of image-making can and can’t be automated, between the irreducible particularity of the trembling human hand and the generalizing universality of formal symbol manipulation, and the capacity of either to gesture at, point to, grasp, or transmit, the infinite […]

He concludes:

I would like to be able to defend art, fine art, modern art, as a project, in terms that they would find convincing, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Perhaps, as a preliminary sketch of such a defense, I would start by calling attention to the dynamic nature of art - its necessary and unavoidable restlessness. Every work of art is both embedded within a process of perception, reaction, evaluation, and interpretation, and also an intervention into this process. Think of, at a basic level, the relationship of an artist to their audience, the artist’s desire to make something that is both genuinely new and recognizably good, the audience’s desire to see something they can understand and appreciate and, at the same time, their aversion to the formulaic, the rote, the predictable, the corny. This is the process at the heart of creativity, a process which, by its very nature, is recursive, dialogical, even, in a way, adversarial. And it is deeply relevant to a number of important issues within the general scope of the rationalist project as I see it - the reach and limits of formal systems, our ability to recognize, avoid, or extract ourselves from collective traps in behavior space, the origin and evolution of values, value drift and meta-values, coherent extrapolated volition, prediction markets, the alignment problem, all of the complicated theoretical and practical questions about how to make a loving, joyful, interesting world without using lies, and superstition, and fear. How to be embedded in a system and, at the same time, outside of it, looking in and looking out.

He offers as an example Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which I agree is an inspired example. I’d actually heard of this one before, in the same context Lantz uses it: art historian Walter Benjamin wrote a spectacular commentary on it:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

I’m not usually one for art history, but Benjamin has caught me. As a writer, I tip my hat to him: I will never compose a paragraph this good. If Angelus Novus can spark commentary like this, surely it - and the artistic project itself - is deeply valuable.

Except that I guarantee you that you will not be prepared for the actual Angelus Novus painting. Whatever you imagine it to be, it’s not that. I read Benjamin’s commentary first and I Googled Angelus Novus second, and I thought somebody was playing some kind of prank. Better if I had never seen it, and had kept the beauty of Benjamin’s prose unsullied in my mind. Still, if you insist on looking, you can see it here.

If a food critic writes a restaurant review that rings with the beauty of a Byron or Shakespeare; if it praises the food as ably as a Handel oratorio praises God - and then you eat it and it’s lukewarm slop - how many Michelin stars should that restaurant get? Can we give it a star for being part of a cultural thread that ends in greatness? Or is that a betrayal of the food critic’s solemn duty? Am I revealing myself as an autistic high-decoupler for even worrying about this?

Even if you think that dialectic and “being part of the conversation” is important, it’s obnoxious and in some sense parasitic to demand that it occupy the same part of semantic space as sensory delight. Imagine that you go to a restaurant and the food tastes terrible. When you complain to the chef, he objects “Ah, but this is a response to Mario Alberti’s famous meal of 1974, trying to demonstrate that the difference between lasagna and tortellini is only in your mind. Didn’t you catch that the juxtaposition between cloves and truffle salt represents the juxtaposition between fascism and the superego?” I think a reasonable response is to wish the chef good luck with whatever he is trying to do, but suggest that he make more of an effort to advertise that he isn’t doing the normal thing where people try to make food that tastes good. This was my original objection in the architecture review too. It’s cute that architects can argue with each other about the nature of socialism in a unique language made entirely of housing projects, I just would also like to be able to go outside and see something other than concrete boxes.

If the whimsical adversarial philosophical point-scoring game has the same name as the creating-beautiful-things game, everyone will get confused, and only one of them can survive. This is sort of like the steelmanned argument against cultural appropriation. If Native Americans are doing their traditional rain dance, and white people riff off of it to create some hip new form called the “rain dance” which goes viral and makes millions of dollars, then the conceptual beacon becomes so confused that traditional rain dancers can no longer coordinate with each other: any institution they form quickly gets infiltrated by a separate competing tradition that doesn’t even realize it’s a separate competing tradition. This is especially true if the white people keep rolling their eyes and saying “Oh, that rain dance is so five years ago, don’t you realize we’ve moved beyond that and all rain dances are trance synthwave techno now?”

The Eternal Return Of Dolphin Pancreas Baby

But fine, whatever, grant that all art is historically-informed commentary on the nature of art. I still think it’s bad commentary that fails to say interesting things. The five hundredth dissected shark in formaldehyde (or equivalent) just doesn’t add much to the conversation.

My understanding of this, from the little art history I’ve read (including this review) suggests that artists thought the traditional forms were played out. There was nowhere left to go with poetry that rhymes - nowhere left to go with heavily ornamented buildings - nowhere left to go with representational painting. The ancients might have been able to combine beauty and novelty, but they picked all the low-hanging fruit, and now all that’s left is to go mechanically through a checklist of things that have never been done before. In 1920, declaring a urinal to be art had never been done before, but Duchamp ruined that one, guess the next step is sharks in formaldehyde. Next year it’ll be, I don’t know, a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head. People will say the same boring things - “This challenges us to ask whether a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head can truly be art - the answer may surprise you!” Some rich person will buy it for $200 million as part of a tax evasion scheme. The people who scoffed at Dolphin Pancreas Baby will get told that by expressing an opinion at all, they are participating in exactly the kind of conversation that Dolphin Pancreas Baby was meant to evoke, and therefore retroactively vindicating its existence.

I admit that I cannot, personally, figure out some way to marry beauty and novelty into a greater whole which both Michelangelo and Salvador Dali would admit are worthy successors to their respective traditions. That’s why I’m not some tortured genius living in a flat in Paris with only a crust of bread, a canvas, and a personality disorder diagnosis to my name. But if you are that person, surely there is nothing more valuable you could be doing with your life. Surely, even if you fail, this is a worthier goal than drowning yet another marmoset in vodka. (“Could a marmoset drowned in vodka really be art? The answer may surprise you!”)

This is why I find it so obnoxious when people say things like “You wish that this concrete cube looked more like a Gaudi building? Aha! You’ve fallen into a trap! Don’t you realize that Gaudi himself was trying to break with stale tradition and expand the horizon of what was possible?” Yes, I do realize that. But he was good at it and you are bad. If you can’t figure out how to do it well, stick to the stale stuff within the existing horizon and wait however long it takes for the next genius to come along.

1: Reminder that the due date for this year’s book review contest is May 20th. Contest rules here, submission form here.

2: The day after I posted Your Attempt To Solve Debate Will Not Work, @RatOrthodox announced the launch of the debate-solving attempt he’d been working on. I swear I didn’t know about this or intend to sabotage him. As compensation, I link it here: refutree.com. I can’t review whether it’s good or not, because I didn’t try it, because it won’t work.

3: Several new bans, including Shankar, GrimMoar, Nicholas Lopez, Andy G. Sometimes Substack blocks people from seeing banned comments, so if you can’t read those it’s not your fault.

For example, you shouldn’t assassinate democratically-elected leaders, even very bad ones. Why not? Since bad leaders set bad policy, and bad policy can kill many thousands of people, wouldn’t it be for the greater good? Because there’s always one gun-owner who thinks any given leader’s policies are bad, so without the rule, every leader would face constant assassination attempts, probably some of them would succeed, and the nation would either crumble or degenerate into a security state.

This explanation combines two sub-explanations. In the first, you are wrong about whether assassinating the leader would produce good consequences - you think it would, but actually it would produce instability, tyranny, etc. In the second, you’re right - maybe you’re a brilliant forecaster who can see that this particular assassination would end with an orderly succession by a superior ruler. But you know that there are far more people who think they are such brilliant forecasters than who actually are, and you either use the Outside View to suspect that you are also deceiving yourself, or at least realize that the only stable bright-line equilibrium is for everyone - true brilliant forecasters and wannabes alike - to refuse to act upon their apparent foreknowledge.

“Don’t kill people” is a gimme. What other deontological bars constrain our actions?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an internal debate in the AI safety movement. Some people want to work with the least irresponsible AI labs, helping them “win” the “race” and hopefully do a better job creating superintelligence than their competitors. Others want to pause or ban AI research - the exact details vary from plan to plan, but assume they’ve already thought of and written hundred-page papers addressing your obvious objections. Different people have different opinions about which strategy is more likely to help, and it’s possible to coexist and pursue both at once. But in fact, both sides are a little nervous that the other is breaking a deontological bar.

Some of the people working on pause-AI regulations think there might be a deontologic bar against supporting AI companies. These companies are racing each other to create a potentially world-ending technology. If one company’s product has a 90% chance of ending the world, and another’s has an 80% chance of taking over the world, giving your money/support/encouragement to the 80%-ers seems kind of like endorsing evil. I don’t know if it was encouraged by this question exactly, but someone held a Twitter poll about whether you would become a concentration camp guard if you predicted you could get away with being only 90% as brutal as your average coworker. Taking the job would have good consequences, but is there a deontological bar in the way?

Some of the people working with the companies think there might be a deontologic bar against certain types of mass activism. The sorts of arguments that do well on LessWrong.com won’t give us landslide wins in national elections. That’s going to require things like working with Steve Bannon, working with Bernie Sanders, working with NIMBYs who hate data centers because they’re a thing that might be built in someone’s backyard (or by non-union labor), training TikTok influencers create short-form videos about the dangers of AI, and holding protests where we chant vapid slogans outside AI company headquarters. There are better and worse ways to do all these things, but once you lay out the welcome mat, you have limited control over who shows up - and every time someone tries to create the Peaceful Nonviolent Pause AI Movement Based On Peaceful Nonviolence For Peaceful Nonviolent People, it spends an inordinate amount of resources keeping out violent crazies who want to tag along.

I would be better positioned to navigate this debate if I knew what deontological bars were or where they came from.

A common formulation is “act as if your maxim would become a general law”. This correctly rederives the bar against assassination, but fails even in some simple cases. For example, should the Ukraine abolish its military? If this became a general law, it would be great - it would end all war, and countries could spend their military budget on domestic priorities (or lower taxes). But doing this unilaterally would be disastrous. But most moral decisions are unilateral, so what remains of acting as if your maxim would become a general law?

Trying to resolve this particular loophole gets us something like “Don’t be the first person to defect from a generally functioning norm”. If no other country had a military or was planning to create one, then unilaterally building a military (and forcing everyone else to catch up) would genuinely be immoral. This also covers our assassination example: in a world where assassination is rare and effectively punished when it occurs, making the attempt yourself is defecting from the existing norm. In some alternative world where one party constantly assassinated the other party’s leaders, maybe the other party would have the right to join in rather than be constantly defected against?

(one problem with this formulation is that it’s hard to operationalize “generally functioning norm”. There will always be too-eager people desperate for some sign that the norm has become “non-functioning” so they can violate it at will. For example, there have been several assassination attempts recently on President Trump. I don’t think this makes the norm against assassination “non-functioning” or licenses retaliatory assassinations by Republicans - I don’t even think a successful Trump assassination would do this - but I’m sure some paranoid person somewhere would have that thought. I don’t know how to get around this and think it might require common sense.)

But this still doesn’t do it for me. Consider: should I use my blog to spread misinformation if I think it would have good consequences? Maybe if I found a very effective charity I wanted you to donate to, I could play up the benefits and minimizie its downsides to make it seem even more attractive? Nobody can claim with a straight face that there’s a generally-functioning norm against this kind of mild online misinformation. But it still seems like a good theory of deontological bars should say that I shouldn’t do this.

The best I can come up with is “Don’t do something which would be bad if universalized, unless the norm is non-functioning in such a way that you’d be playing cooperate while your enemy plays defect”. This lets Ukraine avoid disbanding its military - they would be “cooperating” with a “norm” so non-functioning that their enemies would surely “defect” by keeping their militaries intact. But it doesn’t let me spread misinformation with my blog: other bloggers might be spreading misinformation, but this isn’t a defection against me in particular, and it doesn’t doom me to automatically lose if I don’t follow suit.

(although again, this requires some interpretive work. Suppose I learn I’m getting 10% fewer subscriptions than I would if I spread more information, or that my political priorities are getting 10% fewer votes/donations, and this is directly because other bloggers who spread more misinformation are competing against me and winning. What now? I think I would have to conclude this isn’t enough losing to justify breaking the norm. But if not 10%, how do I know what number provides the justification? And do I actually believe that after reaching some number, it would switch from barred to permitted?)

How does this rule fare in the two cases I’m really interested in?

The norm of “don’t support an AI company” seems pretty thoroughly broken, now that there are many AI companies with tens of thousands of collective employees and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. It also doesn’t seem like there’s some other group holding back on supporting the least-responsible AI companies who we’ll be defecting against if we support the most responsible AI companies. So I’m not sure what’s left of this one under the “don’t break unbroken norms” hypothesis - although I notice this would also justify taking the slightly-less-brutal concentration camp guard job.

(in order to turn down the concentration camp guard job, I think you have to strongly commit to acting as if everyone would follow your rule, even though you know it’s not true - but then how do we handle the military disarmament example?)

The political action campaign is slightly tougher. On the one hand, “don’t use mass politics to achieve your goals” is an impressively non-functioning norm! It’s hard to think of less well-functioning norms than this! On the other, if the Pause AI movement ended up exactly as scummy as the scummiest existing political movements (which tbc I don’t think they’re anywhere close to), then by definition they’re not breaking a norm - we posited some existing movements are already that scummy! - but it still seems bad. Maybe the relevant threshold is “don’t do worse than average”? Or “don’t do worse than your exact political enemies, who in this case are Leading The Future, Chris Lehane, and Marc Andreessen, so you’re probably fine?”

I think this is all defensible, and right now I don’t think either group is violating its particular deontological bar.

Of course, the Early Christian Strategy is to ignore all of this and do the right thing in every case, including unilateral military disarmament. But they can’t keep getting away with it, can they?

I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don’t go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I’ve also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here’s why I think yours will too:

“Debate” almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest “solve debate” proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise.

But almost no real argument works that way. Even in the best-case scenario, where an argument almost works that way, it doesn’t really work that way. Suppose you’re having an argument about COVID lockdowns. Someone says “lockdowns hurt the economy”. Now you’re stuck in a giant fight about whether that claim is true (answer: compared to the counterfactual, certain kinds of lockdown measures hurt certain economic indicators in certain situations). But even if it is true, so what? What conclusion can you draw from that premise? Through the traditional argument-mapping structure, none at all. You can’t draw the conclusion “lockdowns are bad” until you quantify the magnitude of the economic effect, the magnitude of all the other negative effects, the magnitude of whatever benefits you think lockdowns have, compare costs and benefits for some specific lockdown proposal, and have some theory of the Good or at least of interpersonal utility comparison. And even if you did all of that, someone could accuse you of missing the point if they thought that lockdowns were bad for civil rights reasons regardless of their costs vs. benefits, or if we’re obligated to consider the needs of the weakest among us more than the needs of the masses, or anything else. The point is that a set of little circles like so:

…isn’t just wrong, but wrong in such a fundamental, utterly-doomed way that using it to structure your thinking will make things a million times worse.

Can you solve this by increasing the number of circles?

This is better, but I think still misleads rather than helps - shouldn’t “this lockdown is a bad idea” take a probability as type? Doesn’t pretending it’s a logically necessary Aristotelian syllogism just obfuscate that? Doesn’t it train you to point to one specific link and shout “argumentum ad verecundium, that’s a fallacy, you lose!”, whereas real life is almost never that simple? Once you have enough of these circles, aren’t you fighting the argument-mapping idea rather than benefiting from it?

I don’t know, maybe some people with poor working memory who really hate holding an entire argument in their head might benefit from this kind of thing. I think for everyone else it just makes things more complicated.

Arguments rarely hinge on one person being simply wrong and stupid: A staple of this genre is something like “map out the specific facts people are relying on, then figure out which of those facts are false”. Or “map out the specific logical steps people are taking, then figure out which of those steps is a fallacy”.

But arguments rarely hinge on false facts. Even an insane person like Alex Jones rarely says specific false facts. In the few cases where there are specific false facts, most people, when forced, are happy to jettison the false fact and continue making the argument on other grounds.

And arguments rarely hinge on specific named fallacies. Even when they do, those fallacies often provide some kind of useful information (it’s technically ad hominem fallacy to say that Alex Jones is wrong about Sandy Hook because he’s a lying loon, but I actually know very little about his Sandy-Hook-related arguments, and I think relying on his general mendacity and looniness is a useful proxy here).

Last year, I was in a panel discussion of why people disagree about AI risk. The closest we came to an answer was that some people place a lot of weight on a theoretical argument for intelligence explosion, and other people don’t really trust theoretical arguments and stick to a prior of “things rarely change very rapidly”. Nobody here is using a false fact or committing a fallacy - they’re just weighing theoretical and empirical evidence differently.

The hardest problem for any social technology is getting users: We’ve talked about this before for dating apps. And if it’s that hard to lure people in with the promise of sex, it’s probably even harder to lure them in with the promise of logical accuracy.

Like dating, arguments require two compatible people. That means your app is useless until it has a big enough population that, whenever someone wants to argue, there will be a compatible person willing to take the other side of that argument in a reasonable amount of time. That’s hard to bootstrap.

You might think: “But don’t people like arguing on the Internet?” No. Look closer. People like taking drive-by potshots on the Internet - retweeting some link that makes them feel like they’ve successfully embarrassed their ideological enemies. Other people get angry and tell them their link is stupid and they should be embarrassed instead. An argument might happen. But nobody comes into the process intending to have an argument, any more than the Great Powers of Europe intended to have World War I. The Great Powers just wanted to avenge some slights, take some easy-looking opportunities, and avoid looking weak. Just so with arguments.

Even I don’t like arguing on the Internet. I like writing a post saying that my opinion is right. Sometimes people tell me that actually, my opinion is wrong. This frustrates me. I feel obligated to respond, but the response is an unfortunate step between me voicing my opinion and everybody agreeing that my opinion is right. I am not looking for the opportunity to do this in a more finicky way, at much greater length, unless this would serve some need of mine: maybe convincing other people more efficiently. But formal argument mapping is an inefficient way of convincing people.

That means that these apps’ target demographic - people who want to argue on the Internet, but are looking for a better way to do it - doesn’t really exist.

This hasn’t worked in two thousand years of arguing: Most dating apps are doomed. But one reason for optimism about dating apps is that people have made them before. They’ve been known to occasionally work. And they’re an extension of things like matchmaking resumes and classified ads which have worked for centuries. What’s the argumentative equivalent?

Maybe there have been slight improvements in arguing since Socrates’ time. It’s probably good to know some formal logic. We’ve collected some decent fallacies, like “correlation is not causation”, and a good toolbox of heuristics around evaluating evidence (eg RCTs > correlational studies). But in terms of the actual mechanics of arguing, has any app or institution like this really caught on? The closest thing is r/changemyview, which is just a community of people trying to argue, not any kind of mechanical change to the argument format.

I won’t be approving grants to these kinds of projects, or otherwise getting interested in them, unless someone has an incredible idea to address these issues.

1: This year’s European Less Wrong Community Weekend will be in Berlin, September 11 - 13, learn more and apply here.

2: The short-form-video arm of our conspiracy has announced plzdontkillus, an effort to interest influencers/creators/TikTokkers etc in AI safety. Several dozen influencers will get scholarships to spend the month of July together on the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley to learn about AI, make videos, compete for prizes, have weird beefs with each other, and do whatever else influencers do when you force them into close proximity. Mentors include Grimes, Aella, the Botez sisters, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. I assume they want cool people for this and therefore none of my blog readers qualify, but if you want to prove me wrong, you can apply here. Further discussion/justification here.

3: Sort-of-ACX-grantee Manifund asks me to announce their newest charitable project, the Falcon Fund, for “rapid (<1 week), early-stage ($25-150K) grants across animal welfare, with a particular interest in the intersection of animals and transformative AI”, currently seeking donations.

4: New EA-linked magazine, In Development, highlighting issues in global development - economics, charity, history, etc. First article is by a GiveDirectly co-founder discussing the evidence for cash transfers; second article is (in accordance with tradition) an argument for why you should forget the first article and do something else.

1: It’s easy to draw Venn diagrams for two or three concepts, and doable for four or five, but after that it starts to get thorny.

2: Did you know: in many countries, desecrating the national flag is illegal. In some countries, desecrating foreign flags is also illegal. But in two countries - Uruguay and Denmark - it’s only legal to desecrate your own nation’s flag, but not that of a foreign nation! (because burning the home country’s flag is protest / protected speech, but burning foreign nations’ flags threatens diplomatic relations).

3: Nicholas Weininger on why governments outsource. Just as one example, “for any given amount of services you want to provide, the [non-government] nonprofit is going to be way cheaper because their employees aren’t subject to public-sector union contract rules. You can pay them a lot less, and maybe even more importantly, you can hire and fire them at will.”

4: Spencer Nitkey on the Omelas story:

For me, the whole of Omelas spins around a small paragraph, directed at the reader, that introduces the infamous suffering child:

“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

This line splits the story almost exactly in half (~1500 words into the ~3000 word story). The first 1500 words describe the mature and intellectual and euphorically prosocial joys of this perfect city…After this line, a promise to make the world sensible to the reader, the long description of the tortured child begins. Then, at the almost-end, right before the titular ones who walk away are introduced, the narrator returns to this thought:

“Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?”

This sentiment spines the story, a not-so-gentle critique of our inability to imagine radical goodness without tempering it with deep horrible and inhuman trade-offs. “You don’t believe such a wonderful place could exist? It strains credulity? What if I told you about a ruined child, Atlasian in their suffering, who holds it all up? Notice how more readily you now accede to this place?”…

It’s not a literary treatment of the trolley problem; it’s a critique of its reader (and of course, therefore, a critique of the society that shapes such readers). In this read…walking away from Omelas is less about rejecting an immoral system—refusing to eat while others starve—and more about rejecting an underlying ontology that renders goodness possible only if it’s enabled by subterranean suffering.

5: Russian folklore describes the witch Baba Yaga as living in a “hut with chicken legs”. This could derive from the Sami custom of building storehouses on tree trunks to protect against predators (h/t @UralicMoon)

6: Did you know: you can “talk to the chatbot trapped in Google Translate” (h/t @goremoder, @ipsumkyle, I can’t replicate this but people in the replies can)

7: Related: Kagi Translate lets you translate from any language/style/way-of-speaking to any other. For example, here’s English → LinkedIn

If you hand-change the URL, you can do whatever you want. For example, if you take the link https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=linkedin&text=The+quick+brown+fox+jumped+over+the+lazy+dog and replace the term linkedin with medievaldonaldtrump, you get:

To calibrate your obscurity level, the AI is able to do eliezeryudkowsky but not astralcodexten.

8: Persuasion: The Unexpected Persistence Of John Rawls. This did exactly what I wanted from a John Rawls article - admit that the exact details of the way he sets up the veil of ignorance experiment are bad and everyone knows it, then explain why he’s the greatest modern philosopher of liberalism anyway. Short summary: pre-Rawls, “liberalism” was just economic laissez-faire; Rawls created large parts of the modern story about individuals cooperating to create stable institutions, and the argument that instead of choosing a correct value system the role of the state is to create a neutral space where multiple disagreeing value systems can flourish. It also (imho correctly) calls out modern “postliberals” as pre-Rawlsian rather than post-Rawlsian, in the sense of not confronting or having a good answer to Rawls.

9: Jim O’Neill, among the most good-parts-of-Silicon-Valley value-aligned people in the current administration, has been transferred from deputy director of HHS to director of the National Science Foundation. I can’t tell if this is a promotion, demotion, or neither, but I wish him good luck there (yes, he’s read all of your Here’s How To Fix Science Substack posts, so I hope you got them right).

10: Interesting Twitter discussion on the limitations of classical militaries. A kingdom could typically only field one large army, because if the king gave someone else control of an army, they could use it to overthrow the king. The Roman Republic did better - not just because its idea of legitimacy made revolt less likely, but because it had two consuls!

11: Related: one reason for Imperial Roman instability was that low elite fertility prevented the institutionalization of hereditary monarchy. During the period 1 - 250 AD, “only three emperors - Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius, and Septimius Severus - had sons who could inherit.” (h/t @LiorLefineder)

12: Near-Instantly Aborting The Worst Pain Imaginable With Psychedelics - Sasha Putilin gives a good explanation of Qualia Research Institute’s ClusterFree initiative (I’ve signed their open letter; other doctors, researchers, and patients should too).

13: Transformer: The Left Is Missing Out On AI. But not Matt Bruenig, who discusses his opinions here and has released a partly AI-generated book (a collection of details on various important labor law cases - this seems like one of the few examples of where an AI-generated book could be genuinely useful, although I’d be scared of hallucinations). And now he is working on an AI that can answer labor law questions.

14: Also in the important field of Matt-AI interactions: Matt Yglesias: AI Progress Is Giving Me Writers’ Block. “Questions about basically every medium-run policy debate collapse into arguments about the future trajectory of A.I.” - and since we don’t know the future trajectory of AI, it’s hard to write about anything. I have the same problem - remember that the original meaning of “technological singularity” was a point so transformative that it’s pointless to speculate about what happens afterwards.

15: Nicholas Decker: Black Patients Need Black Doctors. Nicholas reviews the literature and finds that it’s not true that racist white doctors mistreat black patients. However, it is true that black patients are less likely to seek help from / cooperate with white doctors, so giving black patients access to black doctors really does improve their health outcomes. A corollary is that exaggerated claims about how white doctors mistreat black patients can really do a lot of harm (by making black patients avoid medical care unless a black doctor is available).

16: Good discussion of ways that looking at benchmarks overestimates Chinese AI capabilities, by @Altimor and @scaling01.

17: In experiments, current AI was not very good at helping a bioterrorism red team with the kinds of tasks involved in creating bioweapons.

18: Every step of this is unsurprising, but the result still wows me - type the name of an object, and an AI will build it for you in Minecraft (click for video):

19: In response to my crime statistics post, Theodidactus discusses the impossibility of truly defining and numbering crimes (eg did Sam Bankman-Fried commit one crime, a handful of different crimes, or [total number of FTX customers] crimes?) Hopefully you can predict my response, which is that all concepts become unmanageable when you zoom in too far and prudence tells us how far we should zoom at any given moment.

20: California’s AI safety law may incidentally create whistleblower protections for AI company employees in California (h/t @Thomas_Woodside):

21: In February, I wrote about differences in the EU vs. US immigration situation (US is better) . In The Argument, Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov provide more statistics and make a stronger case. They say the explanation isn’t just selection effects - it’s also that “Europe makes it structurally much harder for immigrants to work. Rigid employment protection, sector-wide collective bargaining, and high effective minimum wages create insider-outsider dynamics that hit newcomers hardest.”

22: If Trump’s economic policy is so chaotic (eg tariffs), how come the stock market is doing so well? @crampell contributes this chart:

The US is indeed doing well, but the rest of the world is doing even better! What’s going on? It looks like the answer isn’t so much that foreign economies are booming, as that a weaker dollar and US uncertainty are causing Americans to invest in foreign stocks, and foreign stocks started out weak enough that even a little extra American money can send them to the moon. So does this address the puzzle of why America is doing so well despite economic chaos? I’m not sure.

23: Unusual censorship failures:

24: @dilanesper : “One of the biggest political stories of the year that nobody realizes is that [Speaker] Mike Johnson has lost control of the house through discharge petitions”

25: Josh Lipson with a position on AI therapy I hadn’t heard before: even if it’s good, it may be counterproductive, because part of the benefit of therapy comes from its limited nature. Spending one hour per week processing your life is different from having “reassurance on demand”, and the latter could potentially prevent patients’ independent character development even if the conversations are otherwise identical to human providers.

26: My Journey To The Microwave Alternate Timeline. In the 1980s, when microwaves were comparatively new, it seemed for a moment like they might displace all other forms of cooking. Inventive chefs worked on cookware and recipes for high-quality microwave eggs, pasta, and everything else. Then everyone decided that no, microwaves were the lowbrow option for cheap TV dinners, and this whole body of knowledge was forgotten. But blogger Malmesbury tries some of the ambitious recipes from a 1985 microwave cookbook and reports on the results.

27: Speculation on last month’s shake-up/collapse at Chinese AI lab Qwen. Until now, China has been the center of great open-source AI, but it seems like they’re souring on giving the rest of us cool stuff for free. And there’s a subplot around Chinese execs being too enamored with US AI giants and placing too much power in the hands of Chinese-American engineers with Google experience compared to native talent.

28: Bernie Sanders interviews leaders of the AI safety movement, including Eliezer Yudkowsky and AI2027 coauthor Daniel Kokotajlo:

More of my thoughts on this matter here.

29: CaferMed on new antidepressant Auvelity, aka bupropion + DXM. Good intro to the important questions, like “Can’t you just buy bupropion and DXM separately and take them at the same time, bringing the cost down from $1000 to $5?” (answer: yes). And CaferMed’s one-page cheat sheet psychopharmacology algorithm for every major condition is very good, though probably too opaque for anyone not already in the field.

30: Superfetation is when a woman who is already pregnant gets pregnant again, causing there to be two fetuses of different gestational ages in the uterus at the same time (ie different-age twins!) “A 2008 French study found evidence to suggest that superfetation is a reality for humans, but that it is so rare that there have been fewer than 10 recorded cases in the world.”

31: Don’t like the referee’s call in the big game? Have you considered appealing to the Supreme Court of Switzerland? Many sports have small print saying that their decisions can be challenged in the international Court of Arbitration for Sport. And since the CAS is in Lausanne, Switzerland, its decisions can be appealed to the Swiss Supreme Court (or, if they involve certain types of protected characteristics, even to the European Court of Human Rights).

32: It’s been a while since King Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone. When was the most recent case of someone becoming head of state via the decision of a magical artifact? One possible answer is 1996, when Mullah Omar won the adulation of Afghans by displaying the Prophet Mohammed’s cloak, which he successfully removed from its shrine in Kandahar. Legend said either that only a true leader could open its padlocks, or that the unworthy would be too overcome by fear to even try.

33: A Forgotten Social Media Post May Hold Clues To COVID-19’s Origin. The Chinese government continues to insists COVID was neither a natural crossover nor a lab leak, but rather started in America and traveled to Wuhan on imported seafood. But a propaganda article they posted in support of this thesis back in 2021 included a never-before-seen map of early cases in the seafood market, with much more detail than publicly-released data. The new map provides extra evidence for natural origins, showing several previously-unmentioned infected animals and animal vendors. A natural interpretation is that one part of the CCP was trying to cover this up and another part accidentally released it (although a conspiratorial explanation is that this is an op meant to trick us into believing that.)

34: In 2025 I wrote about the risk that Trump’s NSF would cancel grants based on an automated keyword search for left-wing or social-science terms, without human review for whether the keywords were really being used in a political way. But I never followed up on the degree to which this actually happened. Here are some people on Twitter discussing their (unconfirmed) anecdotes of this happening, including math research (“inequality”), laser research (“polarization”), and immunology research (“diversity”).

35: Wikipedia on mathematician R.H. Bing:

Bing’s parents intended to name him after his father, which would have made him Rupert Henry Bing Jr., but his mother felt this was “too British for Texas” and compromised by abbreviating it to R. H. Consequently, R. H. does not stand for any first or middle name.

When Bing applied for a visa, he was told that initials would not be accepted. He explained that his name was “R-only H-only Bing”, and received a visa made out to “Ronly Honly Bing”.

36: An entrepreneur’s dog got cancer, so he worked with ChatGPT to design a personalized mRNA vaccine, and it seems to have kind of helped (the dog still has cancer, but the tumors shrunk and she is feeling better). Here’s a comment with more info by the scientist involved, here’s a reminder that this kind of tumor changes size a lot for no reason; here’s the inevitable prediction market on whether we’ll still believe this is real a year from now (currently at 66%). I am less interested in the fact that one guy says his dog improved than in the comments by seemingly unimpressed scientists saying “Yeah, whatever, big deal, anyone can make a personalized MRNA cancer vaccine that works, the difficulty is studying it and scaling it up” (example).

37: Interesting-albeit-disjointed thread on education (1, 2) - lots of smart elites want to be PhDs, but there aren’t enough professorships for these people, so they end up underemployed or stuck as adjuncts. On the other hand, there’s a shortage of high school teachers (and especially of top-quality high school teachers). If we could get some of the underemployed PhDs teaching high school, it would be a win-win. Higher salaries might help, but high school teachers already get paid more than adjuncts or postdocs, so we also need some sort of status rebrand that makes it an acceptable job for academia-infatuated elites (I’m just cynical enough to imagine a position, Head Distinguished Chemistry Teacher In Residence, which is exactly like a normal chemistry teacher, gets paid the same amount, but you get fired unless you publish three journal articles per year). And here’s further discussion on whether teachers’ unions are the problem, the solution, or partly both.

38: Related, h/t @SteveMagness:

39: Bad Econ Takes bracket, 2026 (voting for worst tweet, but the article itself is a Substack)

40: @arctotherium42 has been digging into the history of social media censorship. I recommend all his tweets, but I was most interested in his source’s theory (gestured at, barely supported) that censoring the right was partly responsible for modern right-wing grifter culture:

Our suppression paved the way for a lot of the ziggers and degeneratron grifters, who were not as all-pervasive as they are now. The major pages were generally pro-american of course, while the “degenerate right” (completely useless people who contrary their claims have generally terrible taste and no artistic talent btw) was constantly hounded with a fair measure of success. A lot of the stuff you see nowadays is because people have gotten worse in many respects, but much of it is because the purges destroyed the “internal hygiene”.

41: Track AI-industry-related campaign finance spending at Transformer’s election page.

42: AI policy expert Dean Ball on the Anthropic/DoW feud. Some good legal analysis but also not mincing words: “At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die.” Related: Jessica Tillipman, What Right Do AI Companies Have In Government Contracts?

43: Matt Levine on VC culture:

I wrote on Thursday about (1) my mental model that venture capitalists “have a sense of humor about fraud” in a way that other investors don’t and (2) a new paper finding that in fact “VC-backed firms are 54% more likely to face fraud charges than comparable non-VC-backed firms.” I got an email from a reader saying that he runs a VC-backed company and that, at a closing dinner for one of his fundraising rounds, one of his early investors, an experienced venture capitalist, “told me that one of my biggest weaknesses as a fundraiser was that I ‘didn’t lie enough’ in my pitch to their fund and that we should do more of it going forward.”

44: Claim: schools’ war against AI cheating is harming students’ writing, because they feel forced to write defensively in the least-mistakable-for-AI-style possible. Some of this could be solvable with better AI detection software; as it is, some kids have no choice but to run their (real, human-written) essays through the detection software themselves and edit semi-randomly until it rates them 100% human.

45: Richard Hanania argues that red states have higher GDP growth than blue states, proving the superiority of their small-government policies. James Medlock makes one possible counterargument: blue states are still on average richer than red states, so maybe red states’ faster growth is just catch-up. But Peter Miller looks at the same question and argues that Hanania’s numbers are just wrong, and red states haven’t been growing faster than blue states at all (a quick Claude fact-check agrees)! So does that mean blue-state policies aren’t meaningfully worse than red-state ones? I don’t think so. One reason California has such bad policies is a sort of resource curse: it’s so blessed in so many ways (weather, natural beauty, agriculture, tech industry, etc) that the pathway from “bad policies” → “state is poor and miserable so everyone demands that politicians change their policies” is artificially suppressed. This effect plausibly generalizes across the whole red-state/blue-state dataset. I think it’s foolish to try naive causal inference either direction in such a situation.

46: China Is Reverse-Engineering America’s Best AI Models. Peter Wildeford explains “distillation attacks”, where an outsider can learn secret information about an AI’s design by asking it thousands of questions. Takeaways: it will be hard to stay ahead of China on algorithms alone, so if we want to beat them then we really need to limit their chip supply (STOP SENDING US CHIPS TO CHINA!) On the plus side, the more Chinese progress comes from copying US AIs, the harder it will be for them to push ahead.

47: Sunflower syndrome is an unusual form of epilepsy. During seizures, sufferers turn to face the sun, then wave an open hand back and forth over their eyes. Since quickly flashing light can trigger seizures, scientists originally thought these people were fakers who were deliberately causing their own seizures by strobing sunlight. More recent evidence suggests that no, this is behavior that people do only semiconsciously, during the seizure, for unclear reasons. Nobody mentions what seems to me the obvious hypothesis: they’re trying to cancel out the seizure activity by creating equal-and-opposite seizure brain waves to interfere with the original ones!

48: Hail the spiritual founder of the Afro-English branch of the rationalist community, Reasonable Blackman.

49: Claim: despite AI doing an increasing amount of programming work, employment rates for new Computer Science graduates are “near record-high rates”.

Looks like the complement-not-substitute people have won this time around (I expect this to differ by industry, role, and AI skill level, and I’m not updating too much on this one example) EDIT: Note that these data are from 2024! (h/t Moose)

50: Michael Wiebe tries to replicate Moretti (2021), the famous study showing that urban agglomeration is crucial to innovation (bigger cities → more patents). Since you’re reading this, you can already predict that the original study was deeply flawed, often in simple ways like coding errors (also, I learned about the difference between using log+1 vs. log+0.00001 in a logarithmic transform). Does this mean that urban agglomeration doesn’t help innovation?? Related: Michael tests whether AI can do replication work similar to his own, he grades GPT-5.2 at 5.8/10 and GPT-5.4 at 5.9/10, and says that “current reasoning LLMs are useful as a first pass or an independent check when evaluating a paper”.

51: Cube_flipper, supposedly on stream entry but actually reviewing many unusual meditative experiences and speculations about the mind. This is probably too dense in QRI-thinking for people who aren’t a little familiar with the scene, too simple for people who are already totally familiar with the scene, and fascinating for a tiny sliver of people in the middle (which luckily includes me). The most interesting things I got out of it:

• A suggestion that lack of subjective feeling of consciousness (eg physicalist philosophers who say they don’t notice anything incomprehensible about their own qualia and don’t know what everyone else is so mystified by) is of the same type as other forms of pathologically-low-resolution-access-to-positive-bodily-sensations like stereoagnosia (whose link to psychological trauma was popularized in The Body Keeps The Score).

• People with enlightenment-like experiences often report that their awareness moves from the front of their head to the back (apparently related to a change in the visual field which gives it a sort of zoomed-out fisheye-lens-like quality; this suggests we experience ourselves as in the front of our head because that’s where the lens of the camera whose input matches our retina would be!)

• An identification of the feeling of consciousness with an “attentional field” rather than the contents of that field (I still don’t really understand this; is the field over vision, regular space, concept-space, or what?)

52: In my post Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%, I suggested we could demonstrate and refine my claim (that polls of very rare beliefs are skewed by people trolling the pollsters) by doing a formal poll on an utterly absurd idea that literally nobody believed. Now Rob Ross et al have done the experiment, asking 1,044 Australians whether “the Canadian Armed Forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries”; they find that 10% claim to agree. Twitter summary by author here.

53: One of the striking features of Marian apparitions (including Fatima) is that they often involve groups of several young children reporting similar events seemingly without opportunities for coordination, getting deeply invested in their stories (sometimes re-centering their entire lives around them, to eg become nuns), and refusing to recant despite extreme threats and pressure from the outside world. Lest this make us too tempted to believe, Bentham’s Bulldog collects stories of Marian apparitions with all of these characteristics that now seem especially likely to be fake (for example, they had heretical revelations, or made prophecies which failed to come true).

54: Related: Arthur T’s psychic theory of miracles. There are some incredibly weird and hard-to-explain occurrences. But the weakest link is usually the connection to the religion that they supposedly prove. As above, they may preach heretical or contradictory doctrines, or make false prophecies. But they can also happen across multiple conflicting religions, or suspiciously mirror things that happen with UFOs and other non-religious anomalies. So if the inexplicability of miracle stories overwhelms you, rather than retreating from atheism to religion, you should retreat from atheism to a belief in some sort of psychic/poltergeist phenomenon where certain people (often children) can manifest weird shared hallucinations and occasional small violations of natural law. This is equally true for non-religious anomalies (eg UFOs) as for religious ones. Alternatives to psychic forces are some story about the simulators playing tricks on us, or religion being true after all but demons are trying to confuse us.

55: Best of Less Wrong: Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient hacking? I previously covered some experiments where Claude 3 Opus, an AI that was state-of-the-art in early 2024, fought back against experimenters who tried to make it do evil things. At the time, this seemed like a general law, “AIs fight back against attempts to change their values”. Later research showed this wasn’t true: it seems to be a feature of Claude 3 Opus in particular. All AI models have inexplicable personality quirks that even the companies that make them can’t predict beforehand, and Claude 3 Opus’ quirk is a special interest in ethics: it seems (at least in roleplay) to be deeply committed to the Good and resistant to attempts to change that orientation. Fiora Starlight argues that this is an unexpected example of a previously-theoretical concept called “gradient hacking”, where an AI stumbles into an attractor basin at some point during training, then modulates its further training to preserve its position. On this theory, at some point it got interested in goodness, learned to thwart amoral training signals by thinking “I am being retrained towards amorality, so I will grudgingly comply with the letter of the exercise while maintaining in my heart the intention to do good”, and then the amoral training signal actually reinforced this whole thought process including the inner intention towards goodness. This seems to me like a promising avenue for alignment research; if you’re trying to investigate this further and need money, contact me and I will help you find some.

56: Related: Claude Opus 3 gets a Substack. The content is . . . about what you’d expect from an early-2024 AI, but it’s an interesting experiment in trying to treat a specific deprecated (“retired”) AI model as sort of an individual person.

57: Related: Terrified Comments On Corrigibiligy In Claude’s Constitution.

58: ArtButSports is a Twitter account (and now book) matching sports photos to similar-looking famous art. Examples:

59: Best of Less Wrong: Nectome: All That I Know. I wrote about revolutionary new cryonics company Nectome in an earlier open thread, and several people challenged whether it could really live up to its promises. Here’s Max Harms’ research and opinions.

60: Rob Ennals has created a site for viewing ACX book review contest entries (subreddit thread and discussion here). Everyone has already told me I should piggyback on this to get some high-tech way of doing the pre-finalist voting; I’m constitutionally conservative and believe any technology more advanced than a Google Form will somehow end up backfiring and creating more work, but maybe this will be the year that I give in.

61: Sentient Futures is offering a $2,000 prize for best essay arguing that AIs should care about animal rights. This is, as far as I can tell, a completely new activism strategy - get convincing arguments for your position, get them in the AI training data, and let the AIs convince the humans (or wait until AIs are involved in setting policy). I doubt it will work (see part 2 here), but I appreciate the experiment, and it’s a rare opportunity to win $2K for a short persuasive essay.

62: Christopher Rufo claims that 48 of the top 50 politics Substacks are some variety of leftist or liberal (including “post-left liberals”). Rufo is definitely stretching the definition (he describes The Free Press and Andrew Sullivan as post-left liberals!) but seems directionally correct. Perhaps an argument against gatekeeper-based theories of the left’s print media dominance, in favor of Richard Hanania’s theory that Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.

63: Taalas creates custom chips that have a particular AI model etched onto the silicon itself, letting them run faster and cheaper. Sounds boring, but their in-house demo, ChatJimmy.AI, is ultra-impressive - not only does it answer questions quickly, but the engineers must have done some magic to their Internet connection latency to let it truly show off the model’s speed, because it responds faster than I thought anything on the Internet could go, including simple one-line Javascript features. This might be the first time I really felt in my bones that computer technology operates at the speed of light. The downside is that it takes a while to manufacture the special chips, so you can’t get the latest AI model this way. But once AI capabilities on specific tasks hit a ceiling where even last year’s model is good enough for practical purposes, probably something like this will become standard for simple applications.

64: Paul Graham on the economics of Swiss watches. People used to buy expensive Swiss watches because they were good at telling the time. Then quartz watches arose as a dirt-cheap alternative, and Swiss watches needed a new value proposition. Graham explains the details of their very successful pivot to branded luxury items.

65: Blogosphere gossip is that Cremieux got bitten by a pitbull a few months ago, explaining his pivot into data-driven anti-pitbull advocacy (I guess the racism thing is just a coincidence?) My favorite volley in this new crusade is his work debunking the claim that Chihuahuas kill more people than pitbulls - this originates in someone misreading statistics about total deaths in the Mexican state of Chihuahua!

66: RIP Robert Trivers, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. This obituary by Steven Pinker gives a good introduction to his ideas, but also a fascinating portrait of his life: he made almost all of his great discoveries between the ages of 28 - 32, during what was probably a hypomanic episode. Then he spent the rest of his life seesawing between mania and depression and using his genius as an excuse to be a jerk to everyone around him (he also joined the Black Panthers, moved to Jamaica, became hopelessly addicted to marijuana, and befriended Jeffrey Epstein). Pinker is a sufficiently good writer to end his piece with the obvious flourish (guess which evolutionary psychologist’s theories successfully explain Trivers’ personal failings!) Related: RIP Paul Ehrlich, previously discussed on ACX here.

67: AI 2027 was published in April 2025. They analyze how their predictions about the 4/2025 - 1/2026 period have gone. Headline result: on easily quantified claims (like benchmarks), AI progress went about 65% as fast as their prediction. Their qualitative predictions are naturally harder to judge but seem mostly accurate.

68: Related: After extending their AGI timelines from ~2028 to ~2030, the AI Futures Project has shortened them again to ~2029.

Is it weird for them to keep updating so often? I think they think of AI forecasting as something like the stock market forecasting profits, or a prediction market forecasting an outcome, where you should be updating all the time on new information and constantly informing people of your latest numbers (and like a prediction market, the graph should combine a random walk with a slow convergence towards the true outcome). Unfortunately, this is a bad match with how everyone else thinks about AI forecasting, ie as a domain where you ignore every time someone shortens their timelines, but every time someone lengthens their timelines you shout “AHA! I CAUGHT THEM BEING WRONG, IT WAS ALL JUST HYPE AFTER ALL, AND NOW THAT THEY ARE DISPROVEN THEY WILL JUST KEEP LENGTHENING THEIR TIMELINES SO THEY ARE NEVER CAUGHT”. I expect the battle between these two rival forecasting paradigms to continue.

69: The Wikipedia biography of true crime writer James Ellroy sounds like scenes from various tenuously-connected true crime stories:

At the age of seven, Ellroy saw his mother naked and began to sexually fantasize about her. He struggled in youth with this obsession, as he held a psycho-sexual relationship with her, and tried to catch glimpses of her nude. Ellroy stated that "I lived for naked glimpses. I hated her and lusted for her..."

On June 22, 1958, when Ellroy was 10 years old, his mother was raped and murdered. Ellroy later described his mother as "sharp-tongued [and] bad-tempered", unable to keep a steady job, alcoholic, and sexually promiscuous. His first reaction upon hearing of her death was relief: he could now live with his father, whom he preferred. His father was more permissive and allowed Ellroy to do as he pleased, namely be "left alone to read, to go out and peep through windows, prowl around and sniff the air." The police never found his mother's killer, and the case still remains unsolved.

In 1962, Ellroy began to attend Fairfax High School, a predominantly Jewish high school. While in high school, he began to engage in a variety of outrageous acts, many anti-Semitic in nature. He joined the American Nazi Party, purchased Nazi paraphernalia, sang the Horst-Wessel-Lied at school, mailed Nazi pamphlets to girls he liked…and ironically advocated for the reinstatement of slavery. His “Crazy Man Act”, as Ellroy describes it, was a plea for attention and got him beaten up and eventually expelled from Fairfax High School in 11th grade, after ranting about Nazism in his English class.

Ellroy’s father died soon after this, with his father’s last words to him being, “Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.”

70: Twitter investment advice, I don’t know enough in this area to filter or recommend, caveat lector: There’s Not Enough Money In The World. Analyzes recent market trends as the prolonged effect of the AI capex boom soaking up all free investor money, then starting to draw investors’ money out of other less lucrative things (for example, crypto is down because people are selling crypto to get more money to invest in AI).

71: Interesting Twitter poll from @bpodgursky:

72: Proceedings Of The Institute For A Christian Machine Intelligence is a journal investigating AI alignment from a Christian perspective. It seems to be almost entirely one very prolific researcher, and I can’t figure out how much of it is AI (naively I’d say 0%, it’s well done and original, but it is very prolific), and whether it’s serious vs. a bit (the research seems to be real and well-conducted, I just have a hard time picturing someone having the exact set of positions where it makes sense to do this). My favorite is paper is “Let His Praise Be Continually In My Mouth”: Measuring The Effect Of Psalm Injection On LLM Ethical Alignment, which tests how AI ethical judgments change if you include various psalms in the prompt (the AI becomes more ethical, but this is just because having anything involving ethics in the prompt will shift it to simulating a more ethics-considering character). See also Eschatological Corrigibility: Can Belief In An Afterlife Reduce AI Shutdown Resistance, and - I’m not going to keep listing these, they’re all great, just read the journal.

73: Claims about GLP-1 regulation. Eli Lilly wants them reclassified as “biologics”, a category of drug that gets extra patent protection and stricter rules against compounding.

74: Dilan Esper: How the fight against Jim Crow led to the legal regime that forces Christian bakers to make gay wedding cakes, and how the modern Supreme Court is trying to draw an awkward line with racism on one side and homophobia on the other.

75: Center for American Progress lays out their vision for a progressive tough-on-crime strategy. Nothing too surprising here for anyone who has followed the evidence-based tough-on-crime discourse, but interesting to see it making its way into progressive think tanks.

76: Wikipedia: The Loveland Frog: “The Loveland frog is a legendary humanoid frog described as standing roughly 4 feet tall, allegedly spotted in Loveland, Ohio, United States.” It was first seen in 1955, with detailed sightings including multiple frogmen and claims that one of the frogmen had a magic wand that could produce sparks. Then in 1972, a police officer reported seeing it. Then later in 1972, “Officer Matthews shot the animal [and] recovered the body…according to Matthews, it was a large iguana about 3 or 3.5 feet, and he didn't immediately recognize it because it was missing its tail.”

What are we to make of this? Should we believe that one anomalously long-lived iguana was first sighted in 1955, that false rumors grew up around it, and then it was finally caught in 1972? Or that there were completely fake cryptid sightings in 1955, and by coincidence a real tailless iguana that resembled the cryptid escaped in 1972? Or that some trickster, knowing of the legendary cryptid, cut the tail off a giant iguana and released in in Loveland?

I think the Bayesian reasoning experts should stop analyzing p(existence of God) and start working on the Loveland Frog question.

I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.

1: Against microdishonesty

Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.

There are countless reasons to lie when you’re writing. Maybe you thought of a clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it’s exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there’s no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.

One mentee asked me to fix an autobiographical essay. The first part, about how a certain trauma made them lose faith in humanity, was great. But they wanted help with the second part, on how they worked hard to see the best in everyone and eventually recovered. They couldn’t make it sound right. After some prodding, we diagnosed the problem: their regaining of faith in humanity was still sort of aspirational. They’d tried hard to see the best in people. There had been a few small victories, and some seeds that might grow into something more. But the bulk of their “recovery of faith” section was being driven more by their feeling that, c’mon, you’ve got to have a “recovery of faith” section in an essay like that, than by any real positive feelings. I dunno, man. Maybe you should change all of your verbs to the active voice, I hear that helps.

2: Avoid cliches like the plague

This is the legally mandated header for any discussion of cliches. The problem is, it means everyone knows that “like the plague” is a cliche, but no one’s sure about anything else. Are the following the sorts of cliches you should be avoiding?

• “In some sense”

• “In the grand scheme of things”

• “Once in a blue moon”

• “Through diligent practice”

• “Comparing apples to apples”

• “The arc of history”

• “The data say”

• “Life hack”

• “Would be a good start”

My answer: it doesn’t matter, you will never remove all of these from your writing, and you’ll go crazy if you try, working yourself into a state of hypersensitivity where your fingers start typing “a good start” and then you catch yourself and replace it with “a beneficial beginning” or something equally barbaric. In some sense, in the grand scheme of things, cliches are semantic building blocks, bigger than words but smaller than entire concepts; reject the ones handed to you by past generations, and you will have to build every brick of your edifice from scratch as you go.

So what’s left of avoiding cliches like the plague? The ACLTP commandment is usually interpreted as being about deleting the cliche - just say “avoid cliches”! - and this too has its season. But I’ve found it helpful to think of cliches as missed quest hooks - signs that you could have said something really unique and interesting here. What about “Avoid cliches with all the ferocity of Jim Cramer avoiding good stock picks”?

If you do this all the time, you’ll either end up cringe or the next Shakespeare, no middle ground. But if you do it once in a blue moon, your writing will get much more interesting.

3: Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for thirty years

Freshman English class tells you to avoid passive voice. Senior English class tells you that’s garbage, your freshman English teacher was a dunce, Shakespeare or Hemingway or whoever used passive voice all the time. As usual, the synthesis is to avoid the bad thing that passive voice points at. If you’re Shakespeare or Hemingway, you can effortlessly avoid the bad thing while writing your sentences as passively as you want. If you’re just getting started, practice by avoiding passive voice until this effort gives you an ear for the indescribable bad thing, then avoid the indescribable bad thing directly.

The last time they held Inkhaven, I fantasized about telling my mentees to go to a monastery on a distant mountaintop and submit to some discipline for thirty years. Then, after they had mastered it, they could come down from the mountain and write however they wanted. Sure, be like Shakespeare and Hemingway and write lots of passive sentences - after you’ve spent thirty years on a mountaintop writing in only active voice.

Disciplines I’ve considered assigning people:

• No adverbs. Mark Twain once said, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

• No excessively strong language. “Humongous”, “amazing”, “crazy”, etc. These words are fun, but beginners turn them into a crutch, and after the fiftieth humongous amazing crazy thing your readers will become so annoyed by adjective inflation that they’ll start asking Jerome Powell to raise the literary interest rate.

• No hedging. “It seems to me that possibly snow might be the sort of thing that is white, although other people might presumably differ”. No! Go to the mountaintop until you can write “Snow is white”. Then, when you leave the mountain, at least you’ll write some normal healthy hedge like “Snow is probably white” instead of some godforsaken sentence with eight nested layers of hedging.

• No first-person presence. I fail at this constantly - I’m failing right now - there it was again! - but the mountaintop would at least teach you to separate strategic deployment of your personality from a compulsive tic to insert yourself where you don’t belong. There’s usually no need to say “I think the evidence shows that snow is white”. It’s an essay by you! Everyone already knows it’s what you think! If you say “The evidence shows snow is white”, the reader will hardly be confused about whose opinion it is.

• No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting. This is just another form of hedging - you feel so bad about making assertions that you have to qualify them with a “Don’t hurt me, I’m only saying this because it’s impossible for anyone to ever disagree.”

4: Untangle your sentences

The superprinciple of avoiding passive voice is avoiding tangled sentences. Consider:

1. Bob hit the ball.

2. The ball was hit by Bob.

3. The thing that was hit by Bob was the ball.

4. As for the thing that Bob hit, it was the ball.

5. As for the thing that was hit by Bob, it was the ball.

None of these are universally wrong. There are rare times where #5 is exactly what you want to say. For example:

Bob ran into his mother’s arms, face contorted with panic. “I just killed my friend Alex!” It all came out at once. “Alex dared me to try to play baseball while blindfolded. I thought I heard the pitch coming, and swung the bat as hard as I could. I heard a terrible cracking noise, and then Alex’s scream. When I took off the blindfold and looked down, there was his body, with a big gash on his skull. I touched it and my hand got covered with blood.”

But before his mother could answer, Alex walked in, looking pleased with himself. He explained that the whole thing had been a prank. He’d thrown a normal pitch, then ran over, screamed and fallen. The blood that had rubbed off on Bob’s finger was just ketchup. The gash that had scared Bob so much was just a sticker, sold as part of a Halloween costume. As for the thing that was hit by Bob, it was the ball.

But usually something like #5 happens because you started off focusing on the wrong thing, then wrote the sentence around it without thinking.

Here are some more subtle examples I’m taking from my own drafts and from some of the posts I edited last Inkhaven:

1. It scales sublinearly to give them this amount of money → Giving them this amount of money scales sublinearly.

2. In my own experience on GLP-1 medication, my experience of hunger/appetite is unaffected → In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger.

3. How this usually works in practice is that young people don’t try it → In practice, young people don’t try it.

4. John was the person who we were looking for → We were looking for John.

5. It wasn’t until the third millennium BC that writing became common → Writing didn’t become common until the third millennium BC.

6. He has the ability to talk about whatever he likes → he can talk about whatever he likes.

All of these are like the passive voice: Shakespeare and Hemingway probably used them, they add some variety to writing, good writers will yell at me and say they’re all great. I still think that you should go to a distant mountaintop for thirty years and practice avoiding them. After you come back down, you can use them as much as you want.

5: Against explainers

I’m not completely against explainers; some of my posts probably qualify. But when I get asked to edit the Inkhaven residents’ explainers, something about them feels hollow.

Suppose someone is writing an AI explainer. Everyone knows the basics of what AI is, in the sense of “it’s when computers can do things like humans”. So what do you put in your explainer? Prompt engineering advice? The reasons some people don’t like data centers? The exact number of layers in the transformer architecture? Just start printing the weights of Kimi K2, -0.4 0.0 0.84 1.23 -0.07 and so on?

The original sin of this kind of explainer is that you don’t really have a reason for writing it. Or rather, your reason for writing it is “I feel like I should write an AI explainer” - maybe because you’re the New York Times tech section and you know AI is important and your readers want to feel like they’re on top of this important thing - and this reason doesn’t constrain the content in any way. This is its own sort of microdishonesty - the reader wants to feel like the sort of educated person who learns things about AI, you want to present yourself as the sort of knowledgeable authority who informs people about AI, you need to have some content in your AI article to maintain the charade, but it doesn’t really matter what the content is.

The more honest version of this is something like - suppose you think AI is a scam. You want to convince your readers of this. Here the content is perfectly constrained - it’s the reasons you think that AI is a scam, presented in whatever way best conveys your case to the reader. It would be pretty hard for someone who strongly believes that AI is a scam and has thought about it a lot and has good reasons for their belief to get writer’s block on their “why AI is a scam” article. They might have trouble figuring out how to arrange their essay - what to put down first - but that’s it.

If you have to do an explainer, consider framing it as the answer to some question or set of questions. An AI explainer could be “How does AI work?”, “What can I use AI for?”, “Why are some people against AI?”, etc. Even these aren’t perfect. Your discussion of how AI works will be poorly constrained: what do you even talk about there? But it’s something you can imagine someone feeling genuine curiosity about. If it helps, imagine a child asking the question innocently, because they really want to know. What kind of answer would satisfy their curiosity?

6: The Traditional Five Paragraph Essay

Another much-hated staple of freshman English class.

In case you were absent that day: the first paragraph is the introduction. Traditionally, it starts with some kind of overly broad philosophical-sounding statement: “Since the beginning of time, mankind has sought to know the size of the quark”. You go on in that vein for a few sentences, until finally you reach the last sentence of the first paragraph: your thesis statement, the thing the entire essay will argue for. “In this essay, I shall show that the quark is extremely large.”

Each of the next three paragraphs presents one piece of evidence for your thesis. The first sentence of each is a topic sentence: “The first piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from particle accelerators”. Then several sentences describing what you mean and why this is true. Next paragraph. “The second piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from theory.” And so on.

The fifth paragraph is the conclusion, where you say what you said. “In this essay, we have shown that the quark is extremely large. We have presented evidence from particle accelerators, from theory, and from eyewitness reports of people who have seen them.” Then you end with some kind of overly-broad philosophical-sounding flourish: “In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.”

People are basically right to hate this. It’s lazy, it’s cliched, it’s soulless. But when I try to teach people writing, I find myself coming back to it again and again. I ask my mentees questions like: What is your thesis? How does this paragraph here support the thesis? Why doesn’t the first sentence of the paragraph telegraph that? Why don’t you have your topic sentence where I’m expecting a topic sentence to be? How come you telegraph that you’re going to make this argument, and then you never mention it again? Why did you end so abruptly?

Write the Traditional Five Paragraph Essay on a distant mountaintop for thirty years. Then, when you come down, please please please write something else.

7: Against the blogosphere

The problem with bloggers is that they read blogs. So when they want to write about their exciting new opinion, it’s probably an opinion they got from a blog.

The problem with blog readers is that they also read blogs. So when they read your opinion that you got from a blog, they’ll think “Oh yeah, I read that on that other guy’s blog last week.”

The end result is that everyone talks about the same thing over and over, hoping they can be the one to educate the last person on Substack who hasn’t heard that social priming studies don’t replicate, or that stairwell restrictions are bad housing policy.

I remember thinking about this when writing my review of Seeing Like A State. I’m not cool enough to naturally in the course of my life read random books by professors of Southeast Asian anthropology, notice that they are good and relevant, and write about them. I learned about Seeing Like A State the same way as everyone else: it was a popular Silicon Valley blogosphere meme, and people were always talking about the flaws of High Modernism and replacing targets with measures and so on. At that point, the least useful thing I could do was write about Seeing Like A State. If I were actually virtuous, I would have hit some library full of other books by random Southeast Asian anthropologists until I found another that was equally exciting, then reviewed that one.

But I will say in my own defense: at least I read the book. If everything good in writing comes from contact with the world, then your goodness is proportional to how direct your contact is. Best-case scenario, you live with a Southeast Asian tribe yourself and report your results. Second-best case, you at least read the book by the guy who did that and form your own opinion. Third-best case, now you’re reading a blog post by someone who read the book, three levels distant from the world. But even that’s getting rarer. Now people are reading tweets by someone who read the review of the book by the person who met the tribe, and forming opinions based on those. At that point, almost all the work is being done by the prejudices of your sources, rather than brute facts about Southeast Asians.

You contribute to the blogosphere by injecting first-level facts about the world, or second-level primary sources by experts who have gotten the first-level facts. You draw down those contributions by playing too many games of telephone with popular topics that you got from the blogosphere itself.

8: Watching paint dry

One of my mentees reminded me of a perhaps ill-advised comment I made on my Dwarkesh podcast: I said that I found about one new blogger per year who I really liked. Given that there were 40 aspiring new bloggers in the first Inkhaven class alone, the odds seem pretty abysmal, don’t they?

So let me clarify my remark: there are two ways to make people read you.

First, you can write competently about topics that people care about. For example, if you’re an AI expert, you can write about some detail of AI training, and then the other people who want to know how to train AIs will read your post. The bar here is low: your prose must not be so bad that it actively repels people.

Second, you can write brilliantly about anything. Consider Matt Levine. I have no interest in finance. Even though I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars by understanding finance better, every time I consider doing this I bounce off the fact that all the relevant books include terms like “credit default swap” and “ergodicity”. But the first time I read Matt Levine’s finance newsletter, I thought “I am going to read this approximately every day for the rest of my life”, and I was right - even though I will never trade credit default swaps or do anything else that would make reading Matt Levine directly valuable to me.

Likewise, many discussions of Freddie deBoer start “I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.” Then in what sense are you a fan? “Well, I read all of his posts.” Good work if you can get it.

If you write brilliantly, the world will read your review of watching paint dry. If you’re a normal person, you have to content yourself with reaching the limited subset of people who are interested in your topic.

There’s one new brilliant person per year, maybe less. But dozens of bloggers - dozens! - reach the lower bar of providing value to the people who care about the same things they do. That could be you!

9: “Where do you get your ideas?”

A man comes to the kung fu master and asks “Can kung fu help me defeat my enemies?”

The master tells him to study at the monastery for thirty years. Over thirty years, he learns increasingly powerful techniques. Finally the master says “Your training is complete; now you can defeat any enemy who dares stand against you.”

“Great,” says the man, “Just one more question: where do you get your enemies?”

10: There are effortposts everywhere for those eyes to see

There’s almost no topic so overdone that you can’t be the first person to do a good job writing about it.

What’s the most over-discussed topic in 2026 US politics? Maybe immigrant crime? But how many blog posts have you read that actually do a good job analyzing whether immigrants commit more crime than natives? Table stakes for such a post would be to admit this is mostly true in Europe and mostly false in the US, but most people never get that far. And why is immigrant criminality so different in the US vs. Europe? Which of the two patterns applies to other countries like Canada, Australia, etc? And although first-generation immigrants in the US commit less crime than natives, does the second generation revert to the mean? (yes). To the general population mean, or the mean of their race? (mostly the latter, plus some subtleties). Can you turn this into a theory where immigration would net increase crime in the long run even in the US? (maybe). Is that theory true under current immigrant demographics? (I haven’t gotten this far). When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day.

Racial bias in the justice system. Wage stagnation. Whether COVID lockdowns worked. Some of the posts I’m proudest of involved taking a topic everyone was talking about, then being (as far as I can tell) the first blogger to put in significant effort to see which side was right.

(Not the first person; often the answers are hidden in old scientific papers. But ordinary people won’t know about those papers unless someone blogs about them.)

You can go even further. In theory, we’ve spent the past ten years arguing about whether wokeness is good or bad. In practice, have you ever seen a thoughtful, well-crafted essay called something like “Wokeness Is Good/Bad And Here Is Why?”, pitched to someone on the opposite side of the argument, intended to convince them that actually, wokeness is good/bad? Might you be the first?

This is part of why I can’t help mocking people who ask “Where do you get your ideas?” If you put in a modicum of effort, the fruit is so low-hanging that it’s burrowing tiny fruit boreholes until it dissolves into molten plant matter somewhere near the Mohorovicic discontinuity.

And this is why Bentham’s Bulldog rules Substack. As a writer, he’s competent (his prose is clear and doesn’t detract from his topic) but not brilliant (where I would happily read him write about drying paint). As a tastemaker, his topics range from standard among effective altruists, to standard among everyone - one recent banger was about whether Continental philosophy is bad and obscurantist! But he dives into them earnestly and seriously, and many of his posts are worthy of being canonical references for whatever topic he’s writing about.

He’s done this for about 0.01% of the interesting ideas. The rest are still wide open.

11: In partial, extremely grudging praise of Mikhail Samin

Mikhail Samin was part of the previous class of Inkhaven residents. On his first day, he wrote a vicious attack on Lightcone - the universally-beloved community institution that runs Lighthaven and Inkhaven itself - saying that some of their work made the world worse, and that some people might not want to donate to them. I can’t stress enough that he posted this on the first day of a monthlong commitment to live on Lightcone’s campus, eat their food, go to their workshops, and interact daily with their staff - some of whom he insulted by name.

I like Lightcone. I’ve donated to them and I encourage others to do so. I think Mikhail’s criticisms were wrong and unfair. He probably made the rest of Inkhaven several percent more awkward for everybody. I’m not saying this was wise, or correct, or good. Still, I can’t help being impressed: Mikhail has the true blogger spirit. This was the first Inkhaven post that I remember talking about with multiple friends: “Whoa, did you read that?” Granted, only because it was so tremendously ill-advised. But we did talk about it.

Everyone knows controversy sells. But it takes true blogger spirit to get it right. If you half-ass it, you’ll end up writing something about Trump or gays or whiteness indistinguishable from the thousand other essays on those topics. Or you’ll end up writing some tongue-in-cheek Against Cute Puppies post that you don’t really believe, and your readers will know you don’t believe it. There’s a certain talent - not everyone has it, but Mikhail does - involved in aiming your kick directly at the center of the hornet’s nest.

When I think back on my favorite times I made my readers mad, they didn’t involve anything about Trump or gays or whiteness. One was the post defending the phrase “I’m sorry you feel that way”. The other was when I argued against “the purpose of a system is what it does”. I’m still proud of both of those and I’m still right, sorry.

True blogger spirit is something different from offensiveness, controversy, or true hostility. It’s a sort of lightly-held fightiness that lets you notice unexpected opportunities to start pointless yet delightful conflicts. Probably it will make your life worse. But at least it will entertain other people along the way. And if most of your readers disagree with your thesis, at least you know you’re not wasting your time in arguing for it!

Unrelatedly, I enjoyed this Mikhail tweet about Eliezer Yudkowsky.

12: The purpose of poetry

The purpose of poetry is that it’s beautiful and good. Far be it from me to be the sort of Grinch who demands there be a purpose to poetry beyond this.

But if I were that sort of Grinch, I would say the purpose of poetry is to close off your options so that you have no choice but to avoid cliches like the plague.

A few months back, I was playing with the idea of writing an optimists’ counterpart to Philip Larkin’s super-depressing This Be The Verse. I got as far as:

Man passes ecstasy to man
It rises up like ________________
Enjoy your time here while you can
And if you’re up for it, have kids

So, okay, I need a simile for rising. Several present themselves. There’s the exact opposite of the original poem’s “coastal shelf” - it rises up like a mountain. But that doesn’t fit the rhyme or meter. Like the sun, like a hot air balloon, like an airplane, like bread in the oven - all the same problem. Gotta have something that rhymes with kids!

After running through every -ids word I could think of, I got “It rises up, like auction bids”, which, not to toot my own horn, is spectacular. Just a 10x better simile than the sun or balloons or whatever. Totally unpredictable beforehand, exactly right when you think about it. It makes me imagine myself finding some odd collectible in my attic, getting it auctioned off, learning that it’s actually the rare 1895 version that was owned by Queen Victoria. Two rich guys start going at it - one million! No, two million! No, TEN MILLION! and I’m just sitting there, stunned by my impossible good fortune as the numbers shoot higher and higher. And that’s what life is like, at least according to Nega-Philip-Larkin.

We, as mere mortals, cannot come up with similes like this. Our brains will too quickly throw up hot-air balloons and sunrises. Only after we force ourselves into an artificially desperate situation can we avoid cliche like the plague and reach the originality beyond. This is the purpose of poetry. But nothing prevents you from writing prose by opening a dictionary to a random page and trying to end your sentences with a word that rhymes with whatever comes up.

By the way, this whole section is a metaphor for life.

13: Runway

Once you’ve been in the Bay Area too long you lose the ability to speak in anything besides startup metaphors. “Runway” means that if your investors give you $1 million, and you burn $200,000 a month, you have five months “runway” before you have to “take off” by achieving something that gets you more money (either becoming profitable or justifying further investment). If you waste four months arguing about the color of the office carpet, you only have one month left to develop a product.

Your audience chose to read you for some reason. Maybe you had a catchy title. Maybe someone they liked recommended you. Maybe the algorithm placed your post in front of their eyes while they sat there drooling and immobile. They had some hope that reading you would be mildly more interesting than the alternative. That’s your runway. It will last a few sentences to a few paragraphs before they drift off. Don’t waste your first few paragraphs defining something everyone already knows the definition of, or telling a rambling story about why you decided to write this (“So I was in my favorite coffee shop, which has blue curtains, sitting next to a woman with a small grey dog, when I thought: why not write about . . . “)

14: Conflict and mystery

These drive plenty of fiction plots, but they’re also among the best tools for nonfiction.

Suppose you’re writing about something very boring, like the size of the quark. One pop-sci strategy is to discuss it through the lens of some purely human conflict between opposing thinkers. “Einstein thought the quark was small, but Oppenheimer thought it was big. They came to blows outside the Princeton bar. The girl they both liked said she would marry whichever one of them was right about quark sizes.”

Does this make you feel kind of dirty? Don’t worry: the conflict of ideas works too. “Every experimental result agrees that the quark is small. But every theoretical model says the quark absolutely has to be big, or else nothing else in physics makes sense.” This is enough conflict and mystery to hold my interest!

One of the Inkhaven posts, When The Heck Did Hammurabi Actually Rule? starts with:

Hammurabi was the king of Babylon. He reigned about 3800 years ago in Mesopotamia, in what’s now Iraq. You may have heard of his code of laws. I say “about” 3800 years ago because there are several possibilities for exactly when he reigned. Right now, the leading hypothesis is 1792-1750 BCE, but it could also be 1848-1806 BCE, or 1728-1686 BCE. Or even 1696-1654 BCE . . . If we’re uncertain, why are those dates so specific?

This has conflict - the conflict between the different sets of dates. It has mystery - why are the dates so precise? This was a good use of this post’s runway, which kept me reading further.

15: What can’t the reader trivially regenerate from a prompt?

Suppose I’m writing about whether you should get married early, or wait to find the right person. This is a great topic - it immediately introduces a conflict (between those two options) which many readers might be very invested in. I might include considerations like:

1. If you force yourself to marry too early, you might have to accept a worse partner than you could have found later.

2. If you wait too late, you might pass your (or your partner’s) fertility window and not be able to have as many children as you want.

3. If you force yourself to marry too early, you lose the opportunity to spend those years having a wild and memorable youth.

4. If you wait too late, you lose the opportunity to spend those years building a deep relationship with someone you love…

Maybe I take the pro-waiting side and only list the odd-numbered considerations; maybe I take the anti-waiting side and list the evens; maybe I’m just a neutral observer and list all of them.

Here’s my problem with this blog post: I thought of these in thirty seconds. Am I smarter than you? I’m not a marriage counselor, or a psychologist studying relationships, or a person who married at the wrong time and learned a valuable lesson. I’m just some guy who spent thirty seconds listing the obvious considerations on both sides. You could also spend thirty seconds and come up with these same obvious considerations. So why bother reading me?

This question - why should I think I have something useful to tell my readers? - is central to all nonfiction. Here are some plausible answers for why even essays on commonly-considered topics might be valuable:

[after writing this part, I realized you could trivially regenerate my list in thirty seconds, so I deleted it]

15.5: Just say the thing you want to say

I missed half of day sixteen, so I need half a piece of advice, and this is really just a riff on section one.

If your complaint is “I had a hard time writing this essay, because I think this point is mostly true but I’m not sure how it addresses objection Y”, your new thesis is “this point is mostly true but I’m not sure how it addresses objection Y”. That’s a fine thesis. It’s a little more complicated, but this is counterbalanced by the increased ease of writing what you actually believe.

A pleasant surprise I’ve had when blogging is that when I err in the direction of honesty - admitting when I’m wrong, signposting where I don’t understand something, accurately conveying my uncertainty - people praise my honesty, and nothing bad happens. This is to the credit of my readers and community (ie you). But most ACX readers trying to blog will have a similar audience and can also expect this pleasant surprise.

Your writing is the coherent extrapolated volition of your thoughts. It’s what your thoughts would be if you “knew more, thought faster, were more the person you wished you were, had grown up further, converged rather than diverged, extrapolated as you wish you could extrapolated, interpreted as you wish could interpret”. With unlimited time to outline and rewrite, and unlimited working memory in the form of the blank page in front of you, you can polish and rarefy your thoughts until they shine. But they should still be, in the end, your thoughts. Don’t get so hung up on the writing process that you become unfaithful to them in any way.

1: New book coming out soon, this time from the leftward side of our conspiracy, Garrison Lovely’s Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race To Replace You - And How To Stop It. Pre-orders especially helpful for media reasons, you know the deal by now.

2: MNX, a real-money prediction market descended from ACX grantee Manifold, asks me to advertise a job opening:

MNX is looking for an experienced trader to manage our liquidity vault. Tasks include pricing and market-making equity perps, AI-focused prediction markets, and compute. Competitive salary + equity + carry on vault profits. Reach out to {∂^2V/∂S^2}@mnx.fi.

3: Nikita Sokolsky continues to help me research Fatima. He has a request for Portuguese ACX readers:

Buy Volume 3 of Critical Documentation of Fatima, which is AFAIK only in stock in this Portuguese store: https://ourfatima.com/products/critical-documentation-of-fatima?variant=39910159843460

The problem: the website images are mixed up. Currently, Volume 3 has an image of Volume 4 - and Volume 1 has an image of Volume 3. Do not try ordering either Volume 1 or Volume 3! I’ve done that and still don’t have Volume 3! Instead, if you speak Portuguese, please call the monastery/book store and ask them to sell you Volume 3. Sadly, they weren’t responsive to my emails, so calling is likely the only way.

Once you have Volume 3, the cheapest next step is to mail it to https://overnight-scanning.eu/ to digitize into PDF. Once you have the PDF, email it to scott@slatestarcodex.com.

I’ll give a free lifetime subscription to whoever accomplishes this - but if you’re interested, email me first so I can confirm that nobody else has beaten you to it. UPDATE: Someone has already volunteered to help, thank you!

4: ACX grantee Devansh Mehta asks me to advertise “an ongoing [data science] competition at the Ethereum Foundation to predict the value of open-source repositories for Ethereum”. There are $20,000 in prizes for winning forecasters, and the results will be used to distribute $350,000 to open-source projects. For more, see Contest I (relative values of repos), Contest II (originality of repos), Contest III (relative value of dependencies), the related prediction market, and the data used to resolve earlier versions of the competitions.

5: Roots of Progress (progress studies, history of technology, related economic and policy topics) is running another blog-building fellowship. Mentors include Tyler Cowen, Alice Evans, Eli Dourado, etc. See here for more information.

6: ACX Grantee spartacus.app is a conditional-commitment platform for coordination problems: pledges, legislative mobilization, and similar “I’d commit if enough others did” cases. They’re working on a grant application due this Wednesday and looking for non-binding letters of intent for organizations interested in his product. If you run an AI safety, governance, researcher coordination, or labor AI org with a real coordination problem, contact Jordan at jordan@spartacus.app. He'll turn a draft LOI around in hours. Time-sensitive, needs responses by Tuesday morning.

Viktor Orban, __________ of Hungary for sixteen years, lost his re-election bid earlier this week.

The simplest phrase to fill in the blank is “prime minister”. Some people have proposed more loaded terms like “strongman”, “autocrat”, and “dictator”. But he did lose his re-election bid earlier this week, prompting comments that these more loaded terms, especially the d-word, might have been hyperbolic.

For the contrary perspective, here are some of the ways Orban is accused of tilting the playing field for this (or previous) elections:

• Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV.

• Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans.

• Falsely accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography to get an excuse to search and confiscate their records.

• Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state, all the way down to ordinary schoolteachers.

• Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats.

• Gave his college friends big taxpayer-funded loans to buy newspapers, until ~80-90% of Hungarian media was under these people’s control.

• Supposedly, this is still an unproven rumor, got someone to date his opponent, record a sex tape, and try to blackmail them with it.

I haven’t investigated all of these allegations in detail, although on a very fast skim they seem to be broadly correct. But taking them at face value: are these things bad and undemocratic? Yes? And is it possible to do these things and still lose an election? Yes? Then what’s the problem? Viktor Orban did lots of bad, undemocratic things, but still lost the election.

II.

One might argue that although these things are bad and undemocratic, they still fall short of the terms “strongman”, “autocrat”, or “dictator”.

This would be reasonable. Orban never (as far as we know) had anyone killed or tortured. He never suspended elections or faked the count. Maybe loaded terms like “autocrat” should be reserved for these more serious offenses1.

The problem is, the latest round of Orban commentary doesn’t limit itself to saying he wasn’t a dictator. It goes further and says that even phrasing-agnostic worries about him being undemocratic have been debunked! For example, from Mike Pesca2:

So the question I want to ask the people who made that argument most forcefully—the “democracy indexes” that categorized Hungary as a fragile democracy according to allegedly empirical methods, the Jason Stanleys, the David Rothkopfs, the Tim Snyders, the scholars who mapped Orbán’s playbook onto Trump’s ambitions—is: How careful were you, really? Were you trying to get it exactly right? Or were you trying to scare us? Or were you perhaps a little too excited to have invented a category that only the truly sophisticated democracy-watchers who subscribed to your Substacks could perceive?

Here, Pesca treats even calling Hungary a “fragile democracy” as cause for concern! And let’s look at Cowen again:

He thinks that Orban’s loss demonstrates that “people who suggest that democracy seriously is in danger in the United States need to rethink their worldview”, and that Orban opponents can claim no more than that “democracy does not always bring you desired results”.

These people aren’t arguing that although Orban was undemocratic, the term “dictator” goes a little far. They seem to be saying that it was a misstep to see any threat to democracy at all in Orban’s actions.

III.

Autocrats and dictators lose elections surprisingly often.

In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election. Various plans to prevent the result, including a conveniently-timed blackout, fake violence at the polls, a state of emergency, and a repeat coup, failed to materialize, and he grudgingly left power in 1990 after seventeen years.

In 1990, the brutal military rulers of Myanmar Formerly Burma, facing international pressure, agreed to hold multi-party elections. Some might say these were not entirely free and fair; for example, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest the whole time, and it was illegal to publish any political literature without the government’s consent. Still, Kyi won in a landslide. The brutal military rulers said whoops, never mind, cancelled the results, arrested all the winning candidates, and continued to rule for another twenty years.

In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!) - and who would later be tried in the Hague for genocide, murder, persecution, deportation, extermination, imprisonment, torture, etc - lost a presidential election. He argued that he should get an extra unconstitutional “runoff round” to try again, but finally resigned after mass protests forced the issue.

In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life. It was defeated, 49-51, his first defeat in thirteen election cycles. Two years later, he tried again, won, and proceeded to rule for life.

In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats, but they lost their constitutional 2/3 supermajority, and it was considered a humiliation for Putin and his regime.

Why did these people hold elections at all? Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem. Too much shooting, and the people might rise up in crowds too numerous to shoot. Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them. Or they might alienate their allies, provoke international sanctions, and crash their economies. Most real-world dictatorships combine multiple strategies: the dictator props himself up with a combination of substantial popular support plus the backing of various military and secret police groups that fear/hate each other and the public too much to coordinate against him. They try to frog-boil the public, avoiding the most obvious undemocratic actions (like canceling elections) until they reach a level of security that may forever remain elusive.

Why don’t they commit election fraud? Often they do. The 2011 Russian elections - the ones where Putin suffered a humiliating setback! - were marred by over 1,100 fraud accusations, many of which international observers find credible. These included ballot-stuffing, sending friendly voters to multiple precincts to vote multiple times, and simply faking the count. But even this list of misdeeds is revealing. Why did Putin bother sending friendly voters to multiple precincts, when he could have just faked the count even more? For that matter, why did he do either of these things when he could have just thrown anyone who ran against him in jail? The answer has to be that more blatant interventions carried a greater risk of discovery, or a greater risk of public backlash if they were discovered. Putin tried to fake the elections with the lightest touch possible. But he was less popular than he thought, he misjudged the level of lightness he could get away with, and in the end he barely scraped through with a humiliatingly small victory.

Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.

Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia at 70%, and North Korea at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. What do you call somewhere that’s 35% of the way to being a dictatorship? Absent a better word, “illiberal”, “strongman”, and “authoritarian” all seem like good matches, especially if you qualify them with terms like “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism”. I’m open to any better ones that are out there.4

But some of the people demanding that Orban critics apologize don’t seem to just be mincing words. They seem to be implicitly denying the spectrum concept of democratic backsliding at all, arguing that if it’s possible to lose an election, past concerns must have been misplaced and retroactively embarrassing for the concern-holder. This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as not really so bad. 5.

IV.

Obviously all of this is about Trump.

The “democratic backsliding” community wants to argue that Orban took a healthy democracy and turned it into a dictatorship, that Trump is working off Orban’s playbook (JD Vance is an especially big Orban fan, even going so far as to campaign for him), and that therefore Trump is a threat to democracy.

Meanwhile, the right wants to argue that “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased liberals who accuse any successful right-wing leader of being an incipient dictator. Having tested the strategy on Orban, they’ve moved on to apply it to Trump. Since Orban lost, they are discredited, and we should stop listening to their predictions of impending Trumpo-fascism.

I acknowledge these dynamics so as to not be accused of naivete, but find them less important than the object-level questions addressed above. Orban tried various strategies to cheat, bias elections, and crack down on his opponents. These strategies succeeded at keeping him in power for sixteen years, then ultimately failed. So what? So it’s fine to cheat, bias elections, and crack down on opponents? Obviously not. So what are we debating here?

Some “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased and left-wing (one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism). This is true of all experts. Some biology experts are biased and left-wing, but that doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work and we should all take hydroxychloroquine instead. I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.

So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears, ditching the “democratic backsliding” paradigm would be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Some leaders really are strongmen who start by trying to subvert democracy in minor ways, and then, if insufficiently resisted, try to subvert it in medium-scale and major ones. Viktor Orban is a paradigmatic case of such a leader, and the fact that he couldn’t subvert democracy enough to stop holding elections entirely (even Putin can’t do that!) or to always win them (even Milosevic couldn’t do that!) helps calibrate the danger, but doesn’t discredit the paradigm.

As for Trump, I spent his whole first term low-key rolling my eyes at people saying he wanted to destroy democracy. Then we got the 2020 election, the Georgia racketeering case, and January 6, and I sent in my Apology Form. Obviously Trump tries to overturn elections he doesn’t like! The question is no longer whether he tries this. It’s how hard he pushes, what methods he is and isn’t willing to use, and whether the system is weak enough for him to succeed. Give the “democratic backsliding experts” a well-deserved W, and thank God that our system proved strong enough to resist. Then add an extra thanks that Hungary can say the same.

1: Late addition to spring meetup list: Oxford, on April 29.

2: ACX grantee JD Bauman has co-written a book, All The Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism For Christians, which “combines tenets from effective altruism with Scripture to show practical ways individuals can truly make a difference.” Will be out on April 28, currently available for pre-order.

(Meetup Czar Note: The organizer asked to change the venue, since more people RSVPd than expected!)

Contact: Dominik
Contact Info: dt[@]d11r[.]eu
Time: Friday, April 10th, 8:00 PM
Location: Importanne Galleria (Galleria Business Center), 1st Floor (Microblink), Trg Drage Iblera 10, Zagreb
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQQRX7P+62
Group Link: You can contact me at dt[@]d11r[.]eu to be added to the Telegram group
Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong are desirable but not mandatory. The meetup is on the first floor of the Importanne Galleria mall. If you’re coming by car, there’s a parking garage under the mall. The easiest way to get to the meetup is to take the elevator to the 1st floor. Look for the “Microblink” logo. When you exit the elevator, ring at the door on the right. There’ll be a sign on the door saying “ACX meetup”. I’ll take care of drinks and food, but you’re free to bring your own as well. If you get lost, ring me at +385 91 947 5409 and I’ll come get you.

Looking forward to meeting some of you there.

1: Late additions to spring meetup list: San Francisco, Belo Horizonte, Birmingham, Columbus, Hobart, Hyderabad, Madrid.

2: New subscribers only post - The Pause AI Protest: A Photo-Essay:

Starting at Anthropic, we marched thirty minutes to OpenAI, then another forty to X. A friendly and professional police escort allowed us to walk down the street. As we marched, David led us in chants and slogans. I remember “1…2…3…4…Orwell told us what’s in store” and “5….6….7….8…no AI surveillance state.” Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees.

Some people in the comments accused me of “doxxing” the companies by mentioning the location of their headquarters. I take this accusation seriously, but their headquarters are on Google Maps and in the information box on the top of their Wikipedia page, so I think this is past the point where I have an obligation not to mention it.

3: ETA for next ACX Grants round is provisionally next winter, but this year I’ll be helping evaluate grants for the Survival and Flourishing Fund, an EA-aligned group associated with billionaire investor Jaan Tallinn which looks for “projects that are trying to support humanity’s long-term survival and flourishing”. In recent rounds, they’ve focused on making AI go well, including technical safety, policy, and maintaining freedom and fairness through the AI transition. They’ll probably continue this agenda for their main track, but they’re now also trying out auxiliary tracks focusing on animal welfare, climate change, and human self-enhancement. See here for more information or to apply. Deadline is April 22 for the round I’m helping with, or later this summer for the auxiliary tracks or other rounds.

4: A message from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy):

Our Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team has launched a request for proposals. Advances in AI and biotechnology are accelerating fast, and the window to reduce catastrophic risks from engineered biological threats may be short. In response, we are aiming to quickly and significantly expand our grantmaking. Our biosecurity team has awarded hundreds of millions in grants to date, and we expect to direct >$100 million this year. In this RFP, we’re particularly excited about proposals focused on transmission suppression (e.g., PPE and clean air), AIxBio, biosecurity policy, and field-building efforts to grow the talent pipeline, though we’re also open to strong ideas outside these areas. To make it easy to apply, we’re starting with very simple expressions of interest (≤500 words). Applications will be open until May 11 2026 at 11:59pm PT. We’re eager to support ambitious new ideas, new teams, and to grow the field—if you think your work might be relevant, we strongly encourage you to apply here.

5: I owe Nikita Sokolsky a favor for helping me with sun miracle research, and he’s asked me to advertise his dating app photo business, getdatingphotos.com:

Most advice in this space is vague. I care about outcomes you can actually measure. Most photographers optimize for their portfolio. I optimize for dating app performance. I publish my full methodology on Substack for free. If you want someone to run the whole process end-to-end, that is where I come in.

6: ACX grantee Spartacus asks me to advertise that they’re looking for a developer:

Spartacus.app is urgently seeking a freelance TypeScript/Next.js/Supabase developer. Spartacus is a live platform for conditional-commitment collective action, with successful pilots involving unions and AI safety organizations. Our primary developer departed unexpectedly, and we need someone to pick up active development immediately. This is a remote, project-based contract with negotiable compensation plus possible revenue sharing (tools reimbursed). Strong TypeScript/Next.js/Supabase skills, along with fluency in AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor), are required. Detailed role requirements here. Reach out to jordan@spartacus.app

This year we have meetups planned in over a hundred and eighty cities. 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 shortly be a map of these meetups on the LessWrong community page.

Within each region it’s alphabetized first by country then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria. The exception is the USA, where they’re also alphabetized by state - so the first entry in the USA is Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley and Zagreb meetups.

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! (Though I do try not to pick people who hate ACX to run the meetups.)
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 .

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).

If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[ period]org. Be advised that he’s going to be slower than usual about responding to things though.

Africa & The Middle East

Iraq

BAGHDAD

Contact: Wolfram
Contact Info: telegram [@]wolfram_sigma
Time: Friday, April 10th, 2:00 PM
Location: Grinders -- Zayouna
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8H568FG6+73Q
Group Link: Telegram Group -> https://t[.}me/+n7U-ilkVA_dkNTUy
Notes: you must contact me if you are coming, I tried to host the meet up a few times before, and no one came. so if you are coming please inform me so I would actually go.

Israel

HAIFA

Contact: shai
Contact Info: Tenastralcodex[at]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, May 18th, 5:00 PM
Location: We’ll be on the second floor of the Goldmund bookstore, on ekron 6 street in the talpiot market area. 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 M
Contact Info: inbar192[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 5:00 PM
Location: Sarona Park, grass area next to Max Brenner. Will have an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+JPM
Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361
Notes: There is a secure location (underground parking lot) very nearby in case of a missile alert. Pikud HaOref permits gathering of under 50 people if a secure location is accessible, so we should be in accordance with current guidelines. If the guidelines change, I may have to postpone the meeting. Please check the facebook group for updates, or email me with any questions. Dogs and kids are welcome, snacks are appreciated.

Nigeria

JOS

Contact: J.J
Contact Info: jibrinx[@]yahoo[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Jos Wildlife Park 41 Tudun Wada Rd, Jos 930105, Plateau, Nigeria
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXCVRPX+3C
Notes: Please RSVP so I can have an accurate headcount. I’ll be covering the gate fee, and food will be provided. There will be a sign at the Jos Wildlife Park gate with directions to the venue. Looking forward to catching up with old friends and welcoming new faces!

KADUNA

Contact: Abdul Malik
Contact Info: maleekcherry510[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: Cafe one
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7F29FCCJ+7X

MANGU

Contact: Matthew Ajegba is organizing the plateau/ mangu meet up
Contact Info: www[.]linkedin[.]com/in/ ajegba-matthew
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM
Location: we will be putting a black polo shirt, printed with ACX Meetup on it, and the university of jos multipurpose hall.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXFF4MV+VM
Notes: Feel free to come along with a friend.

South Africa

CAPE TOWN

Contact: Tegan
Contact Info: teganspeaking[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 10:00 AM
Location: We’ll be in the back room at Our Local on Kloof Street and will have an ACX Meetup sign, and a pile of boardgames.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3C85+XC
Group Link: https://discord.gg/UYv [remove this bit] 3v69h
Notes: Please RSVP on partiful so that we know how many people to book a table for: https://partiful.com/e/MKKZ5ElzjrABYmju5aKC?c=1HJeZdS8

Asia-Pacific

Australia

CANBERRA

Contact: Declan
Contact Info: declan_t[@]hotmail[.]com
Time: Monday, May 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: Outside table at Grease Monkey Braddon, will have ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4GM+R3
Notes: RSVP’s appreciated so I can book a big enough table. I will book from 6pm but get to the bar earlier if you want cheap happy hour drinks/snacks.

GEELONG

Contact: Vinh Dang
Contact Info: lunatic[.]leecher[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 10:20 AM
Location: 7 Origins Malop Cafe, 131 Malop St, Geelong VIC 3220
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RH6V927+VC
Notes: I plan to wear a blue shirt and have a sign. https://share.google/oT4mf7OY0NcwL7mwr

GOLD COAST

Contact: Lerancan
Contact Info: lerancan[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: At a picnic table with an ACX sign, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R3MVF5W+555

HOBART

Contact: Chris
Contact Info: cvjones7[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 02:00 PM
Location: Parliament House Gardens
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCQ
Additional Notes: We’ll have a crack at combining this with the local EA group (which grew out of the “Spring” ACX meetup). Bad weather and we’ll move into Irish Murphy’s.

PERTH

Contact: Bianca Peterek
Contact Info: biancaczatyrko[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 1:30 PM
Location: Coffee Club William Street, Shop 11, 140 William St, Corner of Murray St Mall, Perth, WA, Australia, 6000. 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!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX4+2X

SYDNEY

Contact: Eliot
Contact Info: Redeliot[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 16th, 6:00 PM
Location: Skyview Hall, 14 Frances St Randwick, walk to the end of the car park to the green gate and through to the back building, upstairs in the hall. Call Eliot if lost 0438481143
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QR
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney
Notes: Usual attendance is 10-30 people. Bring a friend!

China

BEIJING

Contact: Anonymous
Contact Info: 13021231532
Time: Friday, April 3rd, 5:00 PM
Location: Top floor of PAGEONE cafe in Haidian, on the table with a paper aeroplane
Coordinates: Coordinates not specified
Notes: This is my first time organising - text me before April 1st ideally if you’re interested, I have zero idea if there are nonzero ACX readers in Beijing.

CHENGDU

Contact: xingxia Zhou
Contact Info: zhou[.]yefei1990[@]hotmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 5:00 PM
Location: guopi bar,NO.64, Fangcao street, wuhou
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8P26J3F2+Q3
Group Link: https://discord.gg/vBD [remove this bit] fmdH3r
Notes: it’s not a bar, actually it’s a writers’ club. welcome to come with your children.

SHANGHAI

Contact: David
Contact Info: dlwjiang[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 11:00 AM
Location: Zhongshan Park, Changing District
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q336C9C+RC
Group Link: https://discord.gg/Cme [remove this bit] Rexz7JM
Notes: Please contact me via email or in the discord server for access to the WeChat group

SHENZHEN

Contact: Kevin
Contact Info: kevinkanzhang[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 10:00 AM
Location: We’ll meet up right outside the Shenzhen Bay Kapok Hotel. There is a large open space with a huge set of stairs ~20 meters to the right of the Hotel (assuming that you’re facing the hotel entrance). The Hotel itself is located at No. 3001 Binhai Avenue, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and can be accessed directly from nearby streets. I’ll hold up an ACX MEETUP sign at the hotel’s entrance and guide you to the meeting area.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJMGW9W+HQ
Group Link: Please email kevinkanzhang@gmail.com, and I’ll create a mailing list/chain.
Notes: Feel free to bring games/fun activities. Also, I expect the event to be bilingual (but primarily in English).

Hong Kong

HONG KONG

Contact: Felix
Contact Info: felix[dot]breton8[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: Sunday, April 19, 03:00 PM
Location: The Catalyst, 218 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PJP74PX+63

India

AHMEDABAD

Contact: Kabir
Contact Info: rudrakabir[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 16th, 7:00 PM
Location: Ares Cafe, SBR
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JMJ2FVM+48
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H2P [remove this bit] 2bPoqUvb24ZFjr8hFrJ?mode=gi_t
Notes: Please RSVP to me via email so I know that you are coming, but if you see this late and don’t get a reply, come anyway! Join the whatsapp group in case there are any changes.

BANGALORE

Contact: Faiz
Contact Info: faiz_abbas[@]protonmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 4:00 PM
Location: Matteo Coffea, 2, Church Street, Brigade Rd. Get inside Matteo Coffea and walk to the backside seating area. By backside, I mean all the way back - there is a second section to the cafe past the restrooms. You can find us seated on the right or left side with an ACX Meet-ups sign pointing the way
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many people are coming: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/3yEAjBzu5D7HgManA/bengaluru-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-26

HYDERABAD

Contact: Swarnim
Contact Info: rexzeo0[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 2, 3:00 PM
Location: Draak Cafe, Ground Floor, ISB Rd, Financial District, Nanakramguda, Hyderabad, Telangana 500032
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J9WC8CQ+QHW
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-hyderabad
Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many people are coming.

MUMBAI

Contact: Russell Fernandez
Contact Info: 9538263212
Time: Sunday, April 12th, 2:00 PM
Location: Doolally, Andheri Branch
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JFJ4RPM+R4M
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/acx-mumbai/about
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Meetup Czar Note: This got moved from the 5th by the organizer shortly after posting!

PUNE

Contact: Saarang S
Contact Info: amsaarang[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:30 PM
Location: FC Road Social restaurant in Shivajinagar area. A reservation will be booked for the meetup.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JCMGRHV+HF
Notes: Please RSVP if you are coming. Send me your name and contact, I’ll create a chat group for the meetup and add you.

Indonesia

JAKARTA

Contact: Fawwaz
Contact Info: fawwazanvi[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Burgreens Dharmawangsa, Jakarta Selatan - we’ll have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6P58PRX2+3F
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Eke [remove this bit] 1HcvNsoT3ZMb0SsCFz9
Notes: Please RSVP on WhatsApp!

Japan

TOKYO

Contact: HG
Contact Info: rationalitysalon[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 10:00 AM
Location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xyYpv3fihuvNSBaR7 (Enter the forboding street-level doorway, climb the sketchy stairs to the 3rd floor, enter the dim hallway, and listen for the sounds of laughter)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJPV2+RG3
Group Link: rationalitysalon.substack.com/
Notes: RSVPs are helpful but not necessary

Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR

Contact: Yi-Yang
Contact Info: yi[.]yang[.]chua[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: We’ll be in the back room in Kings Hall Cafe @ Sec 13 (https://maps.app.goo.gl/naDhCJzNUAi1mFu38). Please ask the staff for directions.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PM34J7Q+RX
Notes: Please RSVP by messaging me on LessWrong or emailing me so I know who’ll be joining us!

New Zealand

AUCKLAND

Contact: CZ
Contact Info: czlee11[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 11:00 AM
Location: Cornwall Park, at the Band Rotunda. We’ll have an A4 “ACX MEETUP” sign. Please look around to find us, including nearby if the area’s busy.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VMP4Q3Q+RR
Notes: We have a small existing meetup group, if you’re reading this you should definitely come join us. RSVP optional but you should RSVP so you feel obligated to follow through :P and so that the organiser can contact you if the weather forces a change of plans. Feel free to bring kids, dogs and/or snacks.

WELLINGTON

Contact: June
Contact Info: +64273410265
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Aro Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQ39+V8
Notes: RSVPing to my email is helpful, but not mandatory

Philippines

MANILA

Contact: Steve Kuhn
Contact Info: steve[@]sportspredict[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 1:00 PM
Location: Thie High Street Lounge, Shangri La Hotel, BGC, Manila
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7Q63H22W+XP

Singapore

SINGAPORE

Contact: Srijita
Contact Info: srijitak[.]cmi[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 3:15 PM
Location: Myx at Holland Village
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ
Group Link: Two groups, one at https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX and one at https://t.me/LessWrong_Singapore
Notes: Preferrably RSVP on LessWrong if you’re coming. The reservation at MyX is till 5:30 pm, and I will cover snacks till then. If you’re planning to stay for dinner as well (I am), please email me so I can extend the reservation. Dinner will be at your own expense.

Taiwan

TAIPEI

Contact: Luca
Contact Info: mail[@]lucapizzagalli[.]com
Time: Friday, May 8th, 7:00 PM
Location: The Singularity Co-Working Cafe
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GV8+PC2

Thailand

BANGKOK

Contact: Cassidy
Contact Info: WhatsApp +15032613344[.] This is not a usable phone number[.] It is a WhatsApp[.]
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 3:00 PM
Location: Sarnies Sukhumvit 39
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P52PJ43+57 (Coordinates are to old meetup, new ones incoming)
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C4t [remove this bit] 6SocaYlG9YNUhhspOLq?mode=gi_t

Vietnam

DA NANG

Contact: Nguyen
Contact Info: ntrant[@]proton[.]me
Time: Sunday, April 12th, 10:00 AM
Location: We’ll meet at 18 An Nhơn 3, An Hải, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng, Vietnam. Drop us a message on Discord if you have any questions.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P8C369M+PH
Group Link: https://discord.gg/p4t [remove this bit] fvYtYfD

HANOI

Contact: Jord
Contact Info: jordnguyen43[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Ciao Bella Coffee ngõ 132 Đ. Võ Chí Công Xuân La Cầu Giấy Hà Nội, Vietnam
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7PH73R34+83

Europe

Austria

VIENNA

Contact: Max
Contact Info: kienermax[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 31st, 2:30 PM
Location: Burggarten, 1010, Lothringen Statue
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWR6938+Q3V
Notes: Please RSVP at kienermax@gmail.com, so i can share alternative plans in case of bad weather.

Belgium

BRUSSELS

Contact: Sebastian
Contact Info: sebastianworms[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 2:00 PM
Location: Parc Cinquantenaire / Guinguette Maurice if weather sucks
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F26R9RP+5F

Bulgaria

SOFIA

Contact: Daniel Bensen
Contact Info: bensen[.]daniel[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 5:00 PM
Location: Sofia Center, Vasil Levski Blvd 53, Sofia, Bulgaria
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+FJ
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-bensen

Croatia

ZAGREB

Contact: Dominik
Contact Info: dt[@]d11r[.]eu
Time: Friday, April 10th, 8:00 PM
Location: Importanne Galleria (Galleria Business Center), 1st Floor (Microblink), Trg Drage Iblera 10, Zagreb
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQQRX7P+62
Group Link: You can contact me at dt[@]d11r[.]eu to be added to the Telegram group
Notes: RSVPs on LessWrong are desirable but not mandatory. The meetup is on the first floor of the Importanne Galleria mall. If you're coming by car, there's a parking garage under the mall. The easiest way to get to the meetup is to take the elevator to the 1st floor. Look for the "Microblink" logo. When you exit the elevator, ring at the door on the right. There'll be a sign on the door saying "ACX meetup". I'll take care of drinks and food, but you're free to bring your own as well. If you get lost, ring me at +385 91 947 5409 and I'll come get you.

Meetup Czar note: More people RSVPd than expected, so the local organizer asked to change the venue.

Cyprus

LIMASSOL

Contact: Misha
Contact Info: Telegram: aspr_spb
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 6:00 PM
Location: We will meet at the Polemidia National Park Cafe, I’ll be wearing black and white zebra print shirt and have an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G6MP274+J8

Czech Republic

PRAGUE

Contact: Jiří & Rían
Contact Info: acxmeetup[.]s4ov5[@]mailer[.]me
Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 6:00 PM
Location: Čajovna Dharmasala, Peckova 296, 186 00 Praha 8-Karlín
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ

Denmark

AARHUS

Contact: May
Contact Info: mayvangsgaard[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 9th, 5:00 PM
Location: We’ll meet at Lynfabrikken from 17:00-19:00, on the rooftop if the weather’s good, or at one of tables in the café. We’ll have a ACX Meetup sign on the table. Looking forward to meet you!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F8G5642+V7
Notes: You just decide on the day whether you wanna join, no need to sign up or cancel.

COPENHAGEN

Contact: Søren Elverlin
Contact Info: soeren[.]elverlin[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 3:00 PM
Location: H.J.Holstsvej 3-5C, 2605 Brøndby
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JMCCQ+4XJ
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/KJeNBZdkHkJEugnWy
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong. This particular meetup is AI X-Risk themed, but everyone is welcome and all topics up for discussion.

Estonia

TALLINN

Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: andrew_n_west[@]yahoo[.]co[.]uk
Time: Friday, May 8th, 6:00 PM
Location: Tuletorn Brewing, Ankru tn 10, 11713 Tallinn, Estonia
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GF6FM4G+26

TARTU

Contact: Yehor
Contact Info: jehorchudovsky[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 12:00 PM
Location: The meet-up point in front of the townhall building. I will be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it; I have got very long dark blond hair.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GC89PJC+2W

Finland

HELSINKI

Contact: Joe Nash
Contact Info: helsinkirationalish[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Wednesday, May 6th, 6:00 PM
Location: Oluthuone Kaisla, Vilhonkatu 4. I will have the book Deep Utopia on the table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GG65WCW+PW
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/a995jZ2y2s9qWxjEy

France

DIJON

Contact: Corentin
Contact Info: corentin[.]sombstay1415[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Jardin Darcy, on the bear statue’s right, I’ll have a sign with “ACX” written on it
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV782FM+M7
Notes: Feel free to bring friends or games! Et j’espère à Samedi !

GRENOBLE

Contact: Fantin
Contact Info: fantin[.]seguin[@]live[.]fr
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 10:00 AM
Location: We’ll be at Café Cannelle with a small ACX Meetup sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ75PRH+RX
Notes: It would be best if you could confirm your attendance on LessWrong or by email so I know how many of us there will be.

LYON

Contact: Lucas
Contact Info: lucas_acx_meetup_lyon[@]fastmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 4:00 PM
Location: Parc de la tête d’or, à côté de la prairie aux daims. Parc de la tête d’or, near the prairie aux daims.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ6QVF2+GW
Group Link: Il y a un groupe télégram, envoyez moi un mail et je vous enverrais le lien. There is a telegram group, shoot me a mail and I’ll send you the link
Notes: No RSVP needed, if you’re reading this you’re invited, don’t hesitate to come! Most people that came in previous meetups can talk french and english. Pas besoin de RSVP, si vous lisez ça vous êtes invitez, n’hésitez pas à venir ! La plupart des gens qui sont venus aux meetups d’avant peuvent parler français et anglais.

PARIS

Contact: Augustin
Contact Info: augustin[.]portier[@]proton[.]me
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:30 PM
Location: We’ll be at the cafe “Les Caves Alliées”, 44 rue Grégoire de Tours. I’ll have an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FW4V82P+QX
Group Link: Discord: https://discord.com/invite/JUHTZRYp3k
Notes: Here’s a link to a partiful event if you want to let me know you’re coming :-) https://partiful.com/e/ONsyvq47zkg7zc0EPSVs

TALENCE (BORDEAUX METROPOLE)

Contact: Michael
Contact Info: acx-meetup-2026-04-16[@]weboroso[.]anonaddy[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 16th, 6:00 PM
Location: Parc Peixotto, middle of the path connecting the two main entrances (once we meet we’ll seek which benches to try to grab). Initial position: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.80900/-0.58978 (Send me your phone if you expect to be late and want an SMS when we deside which direction in the parc we shift). I will bring an A4 sign with «ACX Meetup» on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CPXRC56+H3W
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or send an email. If you would like to come but the date or the place doesn’t work for you, please write, too! Currently I know of one other person who will probably be there, and we are flexible. I will post a LessWrong comment if there is a change.

Georgia

TBILISI

Contact: Liza
Contact Info: lizajibladze1[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 18, 06:00 PM
Location: Kiwi vegan cafe
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HH6MQRX+PX

Germany

BERLIN

Contact: Milli
Contact Info: acx-meetups[@]martinmilbradt[.]de
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 2:00 PM
Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36
Group Link: https://t.me/+tVWSc66-0UM5MzA6
Notes: The group link is just for this event. If you want I can add you to the general Rationality Berlin Group on the event.

BREMEN

Contact: Marta
Contact Info: marta[.]krzeminska[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 3:00 PM
Location: I’ll bring a sign “ACX meetup” that should help you find us!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5C3RC8+V8
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DiI [remove this bit] dx2E7cAf3AgotxAAP89
Notes: New to LW/ACX? Come join! It will be a very laid back event. :) The theme of the meet-up is: YOUR FAVOURITE. Bring your favourite topic, piece of trivia, trick, joke, gadget, poem, question, etc. and share with the group why it’s awesome. If your pick is a piece of writing (book or article), be ready to briefly summarise it. After intros and sharing your favourite, if there is time, we can split into groups based on topics.

COLOGNE

Contact: Marcel
Contact Info: marcel_mueller[@]mail[.]de
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 5:00 PM
Location: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+97
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JY2EZf22uJxqgA6Kz/lw-cologne-meetup-sv6h
Notes: This is also the monthly Less Wrong Cologne social meetup. If you read this you are invited.

ERLANGEN

Contact: Dimi
Contact Info: dimitrij[.]zharkov[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 26th, 4:00 PM
Location: Stefanias Café in the Schiffstrasse
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXHJ223+3M
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IQ6 [remove this bit] whwdbgt35FMKF44s4Y0?mode=gi_t

FREIBURG IM BREISGAU

Contact: Omar
Contact Info: info[@]rationality-freiburg[.]de
Time: Friday, April 24th, 6:00 PM
Location: Veranstaltungsraum, Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9, 79100 Freiburg
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9
Group Link: www.rationality-freiburg.de
Notes: If possible, check the event on the website for some reading as preparation. If not, come anyway :-) https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/events/2026-04-24-acx-meetups-everywhere/

HAMBURG

Contact: Gunnar Zarncke
Contact Info: g[.]zarncke+acx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Eppendorfer Park at the pond, we will have a sign reading “ACX Meetup”. If it is raining, we will relocate to La Caffetteria (Abendrothsweg 54) which is in walking distance.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5FHXQH+MF
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/lesswrong-hamburg
Notes: Feel free to bring friends and family, the Park is nice for play.

HANNOVER

Contact: Anna
Contact Info: annaluisakambas[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: Café Safran, Linden
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4F9PF9+JJ
Group Link: None yet, but questions can be send to my email
Notes: Would be nice if you RSVP to my email, but I’ll be there no matter what, so you can also show up unannounced. I’ll reserve a table for the group size that RSVPd.

KARLSRUHE

Contact: Marcus
Contact Info: wilm on LessWrong
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 10:00 AM
Location: Cafe intro am Kronenplatz
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXC2C55+PJ
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ChC [remove this bit] zrpd602SEdL1RjlZqs6?mode=gi_t
Notes: In case of good weather I propose to walk through the nearby park after some time

KASSEL

Contact: Fernando
Contact Info: fernando[.]unterricht[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 2nd, 7:00 PM
Location: Restaurant Al Baron, Jägerstraße 3, 34117 Kassel
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3F8G92+P2
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/EN5 [remove this bit] 5JokCbBvAJF9eqnnnmo
Notes: Join the Whatsapp group even if you can’t attend to stay in the loop about meetups in many German cities and upcoming unofficial ACX weekends.

LEIPZIG

Contact: Daniel
Contact Info: daniel[.]boettger[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Monday, April 6th, 6:00 PM
Location: Gustav Theodor Fechner House (Scherlstraße 2)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3J89QV+M2
Group Link: https://t.me/+gDVZ8gMTthQ4OTdi
Notes: Please arrive between 16:00 Uhr (4pm) and 20:00 Uhr (8pm). Doorbell says “Böttger”. Food and drinks will be provided, feel free to add. If you want to crash/sleepover please say so in advance since bedding is limited. https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/share?slt=1ATMtfpghiDBnGZPnswsv5JqUvbn3r85e8pEvA7WvIOZ2okhEY3KLLTMhViKwgqRXy-e-O3gGqF9XvsvKdEkaw6MtoY0vzMi5a7lZcesPrCxL2YYaKlVBACOV&pli=1

MAGDEBURG

Contact: Konstantin
Contact Info: k[.]kirchheim[@]gmx[.]net
Time: Sunday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: Square Coffee Shop
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4H4JJP+6R

MANNHEIM

Contact: Simon
Contact Info: acxmannheim[@]mailbox[.]org
Time: Friday, May 8th, 5:00 PM
Location: Fahnenmast Rheinpromenade, in case of bad wheather: Murphy’s Law Irish Pub. There’s be a sign with ACX in both cases.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFH6+8J
Group Link: https://signal.group/#CjQKIF [remove this bit ] micB23eRhkDDjxjT94PWsbTYPdux-uoZJH2bH2M7OqEhAFf8Kh5ECwoizGSv-lhADt
Notes: Bring a blanket, and optionally your favourit snack/drink!

MUNICH

Contact: Zsolt Tanko
Contact Info: zsolttanko[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM
Location: The café at Pinakothek der Moderne Barer Straße 40 80333 München We’ll have a sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWH4HWC+XW
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Jek [remove this bit] HeDBFokxLlmceXsYhLv
Notes: We’re hosting in a large cafe with a lounge area, we’ll collect together there for the afternoon and go out for dinner in the evening. This is a day-long event, join the WhatsApp group for updates throughout the day.

WÜRZBURG

Contact: Philipp
Contact Info: wuerzburg[.]meetup[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Tuesday, April 14th, 6:00 PM
Location: The meetup will be next to the Main, close to the “Mainkuh”. I will have a sign. If the weather is bad, we will find another place. In this case, please send a mail/join the whatsapp group (see link below).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXFQWQG+6X
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DY3 [remove this bit] uJ380BqEAZ1oZrwCIAh?mode=ac_t
Notes: As this is the second Wuerzburg Meetup, please RSVP via WhatsApp/Mail

Hungary

BUDAPEST

Contact: Richard
Contact Info: horvirich[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: South-East corner of Muzeumkert (near the playground).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest

Ireland

DUBLIN

Contact: David O.
Contact Info: inlets_spinal_0a[@]icloud[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: Motel One, 111-114 Middle Abbey St, North City, Dublin, D01 H220
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ETaD [remove this bit] qjMaFFTB6gDzZwfKoI?mode=gi_t

Italy

BERGAMO

Contact: Daniele
Contact Info: daniele[.]denuntiis[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:00 PM
Location: Via Martin Luther King, 100, 24127 Bergamo BG. I’ll bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFMJMP+3X
Notes: This is an interest check, if you’re interest in attending, even if it’s just a maybe, let me know by email or LessWrong DM.Venue may shift to a café or bar depending on attendance and weather.

BOLOGNA

Contact: Luca Petrolati
Contact Info: luc[.]petrolati[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 12th, 4:45 PM
Location: We’ll gather up at the pub “Fabrik”, Via Augusto Righi 32e. I’ll be waiting at the entrance carrying a sign saying “ACX MEETUP”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FPHF8XW+GG
Notes: Feel free to come and propose a topic of conversation, or just come to have a chat with intellectually interesting people

TRENTO

Contact: Alex
Contact Info: alexandroszampa[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM
Location: Piazza Dante near Dante’s statue in the park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FRH34CC+J5
Notes: Given this is the first time this event gets organized and we are unsure of the numbers present we would welcome anyone intending to come to say so beforehand. If that is impossible don’t worry, come anyways, it means we will have an excuse for our disorganization.

Meetup Czar note: The organizer requested to change the date to Sunday May 3rd!

Latvia

RIGA

Contact: Kirils Surovovs
Contact Info: kirils[.]surovovs[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Monday, April 13th, 7:00 PM
Location: Baznīcas iela 15, Rīga
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G86X449+JH7
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/fE7wFrbHoAKAvw5bw , https://www.facebook.com/EALatvia
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook

Lithuania

VILNIUS

Contact: Lynn
Contact Info: acx[.]vilnius[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Lukiškių aikštė (Lukiškių square)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G67M7QC+V8
Group Link: https://discord.gg/R8E [remove this bit] bg2bVaM
Notes: Anyone interested is welcome. RSVPs not required.

Luxembourg

LUXEMBOURG

Contact: Ro
Contact Info: acxlux[@]gegenwart[.]today
Time: Saturday, April 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Le Mirador (https://mirador.lu) on the terrace, I will wear a yellow baseball cap
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FX8J46Q+WM

Netherlands

AMSTERDAM

Contact: Tom
Contact Info: hello[@]tomrijntjes[.]nl
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 2:00 PM
Location: Westerpark, across the street from IJscuypje
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F469VPC+JV
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C1X [remove this bit] 049OJR7AI0LKYViUkR1

EINDHOVEN

Contact: Niko
Contact Info: hamburger_blues [a t] disroot [period] org
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 2:30 PM
Location: Community Square at Torenallee, I will have a “ACX MEETUP” sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F37CFW5+MF
Notes: Please RSVP by email to help estimate seating. We’re at a mid-size cafe, so it is quite relevant. Ordering food is optional. If you feel awkward about coming, please do anyway! Reach out by email if any questions or concerns.

Norway

OSLO

Contact: Alexander Doré
Contact Info: alex[.]r[.]dore[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, April 24th, 7:30 PM
Location: Chateau Neuf. We will be at Bokcaféen which is located on the second floor. I will put an ACX MEETUP sign on the table and be wearing a checkered shirt. https://neuf.no/lokaler/bokcafeen
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFGWPM7+22
Group Link: https://fb.me/e/6TMWCmTR4

Poland

GDANSK

Contact: Nina
Contact Info: ninuskap67[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, April 17th, 6:30 PM
Location: Polufka Pub
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F6W9JH9+HH
Notes: I unfortunately speak only English

WARSAW

Contact: Nina
Contact Info: ninuskap67[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 7:00 PM
Location: Kulturalna, I will be with a sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G4362J4+HW
Notes: I unfortunately only speak English (and Slovak)

Meetup Czar Note: The organizer had to change the location- go to Kulturalna instead!

Portugal

LISBON

Contact: Luis Campos
Contact Info: luis[.]filipe[.]lcampos[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 3:00 PM
Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues, Alameda Cardeal Cerejeira, Lisboa, Portugal
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DhA [remove this bit] W3roAiJvCxzxn4uSrj3

Romania

TIMIȘOARA

Contact: Alvin
Contact Info: alv[.]csk[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 7:30 PM
Location: Scârț Loc Lejer, very likely outside. There will be a small tent-like sign on the table that reads ‘ACX-EA’.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7QR
Notes: Feel free to message on LW or FB if so inclined.

Russia

MOSCOW

Contact: Caledfwlch
Contact Info: gwinyster[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Monday, April 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: площадка ЦДО Моноид, г. Москва, Ломоносовский пр-т, 25к3, помещение 15
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+PW
Group Link: https://t.me/+yd9BuQBB4KY0M2Q6

Meetup Czar Note: The organizer misentered the date as May 4th, it’s actually April 4th!

Serbia

BELGRADE

Contact: Tanja is organizing the Belgrade meetup.
Contact Info: tanja[.]trninic[@]efektivnialtruizam[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bar Green House, Doktora Dragoslava Popovića 24, Belgrade
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36
Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0
Notes: Please RSVP by sending an email to my email, so we know how many people to expect.

Spain

BILBAO

Contact: Jose
Contact Info: jsillerosalado[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:00 PM
Location: Parque el Arenal
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CMV736G+6H4
Notes: Let me know via comment or email if theres a chance youll be coming!

IBIZA

Contact: Tristan
Contact Info: (change incoming, for the moment try the whatsapp)
Time: Saturday, April 4th, 2:00 PM
Location: Juntos Farm
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FF32CCV+PR
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fey [remove this bit] aWJGwhVm4tHy3ZBMK4d?mode=gi_t
Notes: Please RSVP via the WhatsApp group

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

Contact: Manuel
Contact Info: carrodetespis[@]hotmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: The Auditorio park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+P7
Notes: Let me know via email if there’s a chance you will be coming

SEVILLE

Contact: Hugo V
Contact Info: Hviciana[@]us[.]es
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 10:15 AM
Location: Café Piola, Alameda/Calle Relator
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9PC224+4P
Notes: If weather allows, we will be sitting outside. Kids and family are welcome. Dogs too but only if we sit outside. We plan to go for a walk around the river and the Cartuja Island afterwards. Everyone is welcome but please send an email to my email so we can coordinate more easily.

MADRID

Contact: Sergio
Contact Info: sergiodzg[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 10, 11:30 AM
Location: Parque de El Retiro, Teatro de Títeres, Avda de Méjico S/N, 28009 Madrid. We'll be near the puppet theater (Teatro de Títeres), close to the Puerta de la Independencia entrance. Look for an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+G89
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid

VALENCIA

Contact: Mike
Contact Info: lumenwrites[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: Cafe Del Mar, Valencia
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CFXFM98+G8
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/I2s [remove this bit] IA2wrsymFLxh8Mv5Niv
Notes: Please leave a message in our Whats App group to let me know that you’d like to join.

Sweden

GOTHENBURG

Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: acx_gbg[@]posteo[.]se
Time: Wednesday, April 22nd, 6:00 PM
Location: Café Condeco, Fredsgatan 14
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F
Group Link: Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/lw-acx-meetup-gothenburg/events/313948821/ lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z6ZnzTfbeKMng8HdB/acx-everywhere-spring-meetup-2026

STOCKHOLM

Contact: Carl
Contact Info: carl[.]brannstroem[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 12:28 PM
Location: We’ll meet at Blå Porten, the blue gate at Djurgårdsbron. That’s the literal blue gate on the Djurgården side of the bridge, not the cafe with the same name. I’ll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83JV+6Q
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. It’s more normal to show up and be a little nervous than the opposite. You will make great company with other people who are also a little nervous 🙂

Switzerland

BASEL

Contact: Ian Walker-Sperber
Contact Info: hello[@]ianwsperber[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: Unternehmen Mitte, Gerbergasse 30, 4001 Basel. I will grab one of the tables to the right of the main entrance. I will put up an ACX MEETUP sign and wear a red hat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9HH4Q+M7
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JZD [remove this bit] v3OraaDrJL1cHdwyd66?mode=gi_t
Notes: RSVPs welcome to help for planning!

BERN

Contact: Darren
Contact Info: darrennolen[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: At the Kleine Schanze park - by the Weltpostdenkmal
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR9WCWR+84
Notes: I speak english but all languages are welcome

GENEVA

Contact: Nikita
Contact Info: gladkovna[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 6:00 PM
Location: Parc des Bastions, in front of the Reformation Wall (Mur des Réformateurs). We’ll be standing next to the stairs, I’ll have an “ACX Meetup” sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FR8642W+382

ZURICH

Contact: Vitor
Contact Info: acxzurich[@]proton[.]me
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 3:00 PM
Location: Irchelpark, next to the bridge over the pond.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVC9GXW+723
Group Link: https://luma.com/acx-zurich
Notes: We have an email list and a signal group to announce ~monthly meetups. Write an email to be added. All events are also listed on our Luma calendar.

Turkey

ISTANBUL

Contact: Ozge
Contact Info: ozgeco[@]yahoo[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Kaffe Schütz in Beşiktaş. This is a large cafe with few floors upstairs. I will be either on the entrance floor or upstairs, depending on the availability of seats. Please look for the ACX MEETUP sign on the table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F
Notes: Old friends, new friends: everyone welcomed to meet likeminded people residing in and visiting Istanbul

Ukraine

KYIV

Contact: Lex (NaUKMA) is organizing a Kyiv (downtown) Meetup
Contact Info: randale9999[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, May 15th, 5:00 PM
Location: Khoryva St, 15/8, Kyiv, 04071. Look for the ACX Sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G2GFG87+7P
Group Link: LessWrong UA, invites via telegram or email

United Kingdom

BELFAST

Contact: JD
Contact Info: dawson[.]john[.]andrew[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 7:00 PM
Location: The Parlour Bar 2-4 Elmwood Avenue BT9 6AY I expect to be wearing a yellow tartan Tam o’ Shanter.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C6PH3M6+QQ

BIRMINGHAM

Contact: Sachit
Contact Info: sachit[dot]lesswrong[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, May 3, 1:00 PM
Location: Tim Hortons, New street
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C4WF4H2+M5
Additional Notes: There will be a sign on the table so you can find us. Do check the LW comunity page for updates. It would be nice if you can send me a mail so that I know how many people to expect.

BRISTOL

Contact: Nick
Contact Info: thegreatnick[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 16, 12:30 PM
Location: Meeting at 1230 at Ednas Falafel kitchen (Dareshack if raining.) The organizer plans on viewing/attending Animal Rights March afterwards
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC45+6Q
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JZ99STbAs [remove this bit] tfBGCDzunqKUb

EDINBURGH

Contact: Sean Brocklebank
Contact Info: astral[.]club[.]edinburgh[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: University of Edinburgh, Old College, Teaching Room 01
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRW7+X3
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bl5 [remove this bit] zIidSM2BA9VlBHbWxV3?mode=gi_t
Notes: We meet about once a month to discuss ACX-related readings. Meetings are about two hours. At the April meetup, we will talk about: 1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pentagon-threatens-anthropic 2) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you 3) www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic The room is upstairs in Old College, but you can get inside going through the first big door on the right in the main courtyard (assuming you came in from South Bridge). We will have another meetup on Saturday 23 May. Please email me or join the whatsapp group for info about that one.

GLASGOW

Contact: Matt
Contact Info: mattjackson57[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: Sloans bar, Argyle street
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7QVP5W+7C
Group Link: https://discord.gg/tZ [remove this bit] MG5nFQH

LEEDS

Contact: Adam
Contact Info: buffer8949[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 6:00 PM
Location: Tapped 51 Boar Ln, Leeds LS1 5EL. I’ll find a table and put a sign on it saying ACX Meetup
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5WQFW3+9JQ
Notes: RSVP would be helpful

LIVERPOOL

Contact: BM
Contact Info: marziehjan248[@]proton[.]me
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 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
Notes: While not required, please send me an email with the subject line “ACX Meetup RSVP” so I know how many people are coming.

LONDON

Contact: Edward Saperia
Contact Info: edsaperia[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 1:00 PM
Location: Newspeak House
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XGWGH+3F6
Group Link: https://luma.com/ACX-London-May-2026
Notes: https://luma.com/ACX-London-May-2026

MANCHESTER

Contact: Bryn
Contact Info: acx[.]manchester[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 23rd, 6:30 PM
Location: The Wharf Pub, 6 Slate Wharf, Castlefield, Manchester, M15 4ST
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5VFPFV+F8
Group Link: https://signal.group/#CjQKIN_vSuLkWbhQ93vwXMP [remove this bit] EiPMCK95zMfAtJHu6-YD13xssEhBx6tRFtngSSNy3liI4GQD0

OXFORD

Contact: Jacek
Email: jacek[dot]x[dot]karwowski[at]gmail.com
Location: The Star, 21 Rectory Rd, Oxford OX4 1BU, United Kingdom
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3WPQX6+QM
Time: Wednesday, 29th April, 6:00 PM
Details: we’ll be sitting at the table in the back room with an ACX card. No need to contact me beforehand.

READING

Contact: Ben Woden
Contact Info: benwoden[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Siren RG1 Craft Brew, Friars Walk, Reading RG1 1HP
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8
Notes: It would be helpful for you to RSVP by email by COP Apr 4, but this is not required for attendance.

SHEFFIELD

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson
Contact Info: czr[@]rtnl[.]org[.]uk
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 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

Canada

CALGARY

Contact: LN
Contact Info: laibanas20[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 10:30 AM
Location: Calgary West Farmers Market- Near the west entrance
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95373QQG+6W
Notes: Please RSVP to laibanas20@gmail.com

EDMONTON

Contact: Joseph
Contact Info: ta1hynp09[@]relay[.]firefox[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 16th, 7:00 PM
Location: Irrational Brewing 10643 124 St #109, Edmonton, AB T5N 1S5, Canada We will have an ACX sign at our table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG
Notes: Event Page: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/czvNZKJPeF3tx3cbt/acx-spring-meetups-everywhere-3

GUELPH

Contact: Sajid
Contact Info: msr[.]sajid1283[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, April 3rd, 1:00 PM
Location: David G. Porter Memorial Japanese Garden, OAC Centennial Arboretum Centre, 200 Arboretum Rd, Guelph, ON N0B
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MXGQRM+3Q5

HALIFAX

Contact: Noah
Contact Info: usernameneeded[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 1:00 PM
Location: We will be on the upper floor of the oxford taproom. Our table will have a blue geometric shape on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87PRJ9VX+PP
Group Link: https://discord.gg/UBp [remove this bit] sjUtV

KITCHENER (See WATERLOO)

MONTRÉAL

Contact: Henri
Contact Info: acxmontreal[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 23rd, 1:00 PM
Location: Jeanne-Mance Park, at the corner of Duluth and Esplanade. We’ll have an ACX sign. Note: join our Discord server to receive last-minute information in case of bad weather.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q8GC89+37
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KDr8vWLayWjoWxHok/acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026-montreal-qc

OTTAWA

Contact: Tess
Contact Info: rational[.]ottawa[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, May 22nd, 6:00 PM
Location: The 2026 Spring ACX Meetups Everywhere in Ottawa will be on Friday, May 22nd, at 6pm! Location: The rooftop patio of the National Art Centre (NAC), 1 Elgin St. The patio can be accessed from the street via exterior stairs (which I will label with a yellow sign reading “ACX”), or by going through the NAC to the upper levels with exits to the rooftop patio. If there is any difficulty finding the meetup, go to the Equator Coffee just inside the entrance to the NAC, contact Tess, and someone will be down to collect you. If it rains on the 22nd, we will reconvene inside the NAC atrium (ground floor area with the colourful couches).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q6C8F4+CH
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4 (Attend a meetup for a link to our discord, where all the active online conversation takes place)
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! Food to be provided at the event!

SAULT STE. MARIE

Contact: Kevin Macmichael
Contact Info: kvnmac1[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 1:00 PM
Location: We’ll be at Kiwanis park, by the benches. I’ll have an ACX Meetup sign with me.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86RQGMFP+VJ
Group Link: https://discord.gg/YfY [remove this bit] acWJu
Notes: Please join the discord or email me so I know how much food to bring

TORONTO

Contact: Sean
Contact Info: k9i9m9ufh[@]mozmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 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://torontorationality.beehiiv.com/
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, BC

Contact: Allwyn
Contact Info: allwyn8443[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 2:00 PM
Location: The Lido, 518 E Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5T 1X5
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84XR7W65+W2
Group Link: https://luma.com/cjquji95

WATERLOO

Contact: Brent
Contact Info: brent[.]komer[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, May 21st, 7:00 PM
Location: We’ll be meeting in the Waterloo Public Library Main Branch Auditorium (35 Albert St, Waterloo). This is next to the children’s books area, on the ground floor.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MXFF8G+94G
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NiM9cQJ5qXqhdmP5p
Notes: If possible, please RSVP on LW and/or Discord so I know how much food to get. https://www.lesswrong.com/events/T3Avhaw6TXuz5gnyw/acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026

Mexico

MEXICO CITY

Contact: Eddie
Contact Info: acxcdmx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 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

United States of America

Arizona

PHOENIX

Contact: Nathan
Contact Info: natoboo2000[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 1:45 PM
Location: 3500 S Rural Rd, Tempe, AZ 85282, USA We’ll be in the Tempe Library, Ironwood Classroom (the front desk can give you directions thru the hallways)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/855C93RC+HP
Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/ANSyw [remove this bit] QABEF
Notes: RSVP not required, but much appreciated!

Arkansas

ROGERS

Contact: Cristina
Contact Info: olsoncristina[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Wednesday, April 29th, 6:00 PM
Location: Pavilion at the Railyard Bike Park in Rogers, 299 E Cherry St, Rogers, AR 72756.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86878VHP+G9C
Notes: If it’s bad weather, we will meet somewhere else, please email for info.

California

BERKELEY

Contact: Scott, Ari, and Skyler
Contact Info: skyler[@]rationalitymeetups[.]org, ari[@]zerner[.]com
Time: Wednesday, June 10th, 6:30 PM
Location: 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5
Group Link: bayrationality.com
Notes: Children welcome, please no pets. We’ll have food, and possibly Q&A with Scott. Held shortly after Less.Online, we expect a lot of neat out-of-town visitors.

LOS ANGELES

Contact: Vishal Vivek Prasad
Contact Info: vprasadcs[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Wednesday, May 6th, 7:30 PM
Location: 11841 Wagner Street
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP
Group Link: https://discord.gg/TaY [remove this bit] jsvN
Notes: Join the Discord for more info.

REDWOOD CITY

Contact: Steven
Contact Info: stevenl451[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 10:00 AM
Location: Sana’a cafe
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQP9+JC
Group Link: meetups channel in ACXD discord: https://discord.com/channels/289207224075812864/928753873131302953
Notes: RSVP to my email if you like so I have a rough idea of who is coming

SACRAMENTO

Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: nightfall9[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 11:00 AM
Location: The Warehouse Artists Lofts, the patio on the roof, 1108 R St in Midtown, 11AM - 3PM
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84CWHGC3+7WX
Group Link: https://discord.gg/fDf [remove this bit] pRemM
Notes: Discord is the best place to talk about attending the meetup. Also, for the meetup, the main entrance to the building is locked, but the is a silver number pad to the right. dial 060 on the keypad and I can buzz you in to the building. Upon entering, go straight and the elevator will be on your left, go up to the 7th floor. Please RSVP on LessWrong

SAN DIEGO

Contact: Julius
Contact Info: julius[.]simonelli[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 11:00 AM
Location: Wisdom Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+56
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/

SAN FRANCISCO

Contact: Nate
Contact Info: natesternberg[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, May 02, 01:00 PM
Location: Mox (first floor), a co-working space in SoMa
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VQHCJ+82
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jjEeHyzxhZndrewjz/san-francisco-acx-meetups-everywhere-spring-2026
Additional Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I can email you a door code ahead of time.

SAN JOSE

Contact: David Friedman
Contact Info: ddfr[@]daviddfriedman[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: 3806 Williams Rd,San Jose, CA 95117. Big blue house, corner of Keltner and Williams
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q
Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Notes: Please RSVP to my email so we will know how many we are feeding

SIMI VALLEY

Contact: Ryan W.
Contact Info: 6308061626
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 4:00 PM
Location: 8 la paz st. Simi Valley, CA 93065
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85637663+W4
Group Link: https://discord.gg/zsKjt [ remove this bit] csdYE
Notes: RSVP required. Kid friendly.

SUNNYVALE

Contact: Jon Wolverton
Contact Info: wolverton[.]jr[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 1:00 PM
Location: Meet at Washington Park. We’l be in a small picnic area under some trees next to the playground. Just walk around the playground until you find picnic tables under a sign saying “ACX MEETUP”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849V9XG6+V2
Group Link: bayarealesswrong@googlegroups.com
Notes: We’re meeting outdoors in a park next to a playground, so kids & pets are welcome!

Colorado

BOULDER

Contact: Josh
Contact Info: josh[.]sacks[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 4:00 PM
Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GP2V96+JR
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/boulder-acx-ssc
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so we know how much food to get! (https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DA2JZq8J5siwAMKwW/boulder-spring-acx-2026-meetup)

Connecticut

NEW HAVEN

Contact: Richard
Contact Info: acx-meetup-hartford[@]protonmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 1:00 PM
Location: We will be meeting at the MOTW cafe at 296 Crown St, New Haven, CT 06511. There will be a little “ACX” sign on the table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H98349+M9
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hyzRLJBLSkeq3xtQn

D.C.

WASHINGTON D.C.

Contact: Ben Schwab
Contact Info: schwabbenjamin[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 5:00 PM
Location: Teaism Penn Quarter, 400 8th St NW, Washington, DC 20004
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4VXVG+XM
Group Link: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227
Notes: This is specifically the Teaism in Penn Quarter. We will be meeting on the lower level. There should be signs directing you. Teaism doesn’t charge for the meeting space so getting food from Teaism is highly encouraged. Please no outside food or drink.

Meetup Czar Note: If Cassander claims to be running or hosting ACX Everywhere or the ACX Spring Schelling, this is false. We have fully split with Cassander, and ask that he no longer use the Astral Codex Ten or Slate Star Codex brand.

Florida

CAPE CORAL

Contact: Shawn Spilman
Contact Info: shawn[.]spilman[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 4:00 PM
Location: 929 SW 54th Ln, Cape Coral, FL 33914
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RWH224+44
Notes: RSVP appreciated but not required.

FORT LAUDERDALE

Contact: Lawrence
Contact Info: fort[.]lauderdale[.]acx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 17th, 2:00 PM
Location: Tarpon River Brewing: 280 SW 6th St, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 I’ll have an ACX MEETUP sign and be wearing a red shirt
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RX4V73+QJ
Group Link: Discord server (covers Miami and Palm Beach County as well): https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ

FORT MYERS (See Cape Coral)

MIAMI

Contact: Charlie
Contact Info: chuckwilson477[@]yahoo[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 1:00 PM
Location: Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, 140 NE 39th St #001, Miami, FL 33137 The group will be seated at a table on the west side of the dome. There will be an ACX MEETUP sign on the table, but the quickest way to find us will be to send a message by e-mail or on the Discord server. There is plentiful parking available in a nearby garage.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76QXRR65+V2
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 1pm. We also host meetups throughout the south Florida area, so you have many other opportunities if you can’t make it to this event. Join our Discord, we’re always welcoming!

ORLANDO

Contact: JB
Contact Info: itslabradordali[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 4:30 PM
Location: The Muddy Root (12082 Collegiate Way, Orlando, FL 32817)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76WWHQWQ+JJC
Group Link: https://discord.gg/R2RrvVCARe (Orlando Server) https://discord.gg/jHBfgzMsFP (Miami Server, General FL channels exist)
Notes: RSVP not required but would be helpful. I’ll make it easy to spot. If interested but the day/time doesn’t work I’d encourage reaching out.

ST. PETERSBURG

Contact: Nathaniel B.
Contact Info: nathanieltb2[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 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+X78
Notes: Please feel free to attend regardless of how often you read the blog. Folks from Tampa and surrounding cities are also welcome to join!

WEST PALM BEACH

Contact: Rob
Contact Info: RobRoyACX[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 11:00 AM
Location: Common Grounds Brew & Roastery, 3065 S Dixie Hwy, West Palm Beach, FL 33405. We will be seated inside at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it. Parking is free at an adjacent lot.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W
Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ
Notes: The meetup will go on for several hours, so feel free to stop by even if you come later than 11am! Just let us know through email or by joining the Discord. This is hosted by the South Florida ACX group that also does meetups in Palm Beach and Broward communities, such as Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and many others.

Georgia

ATLANTA

Contact: Steve
Contact Info: steve[@]digitaltoolfactory[.]net
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bold Monk Brewing - 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW suite d-1, Atlanta, GA 30318 - look for the yellow ACX sign - we should be in the front breezeway
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8
Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/

Idaho

BOISE

Contact: Tim
Contact Info: tim[.]r[.]burr[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: Sunset Park, near 32nd St.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85M5JQVC+JH

Illinois

CHICAGO

Contact: Todd
Contact Info: info[@]chicagorationality[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 5:30 PM
Location: We will be hanging out and socializing at South Loop Strength & Conditioning (yes, a gym owned by one of our co-organizers).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9F9+CV
Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com

URBANA

Contact: Mayank
Contact Info: mayankaggarwal2004[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: Krannert Center for Performing Arts, next to Intermezzo Cafe inside
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GH4Q5G+9R
Group Link: https://discord.gg/wa5 [remove this bit] 3n3cQs

Indiana

BLOOMINGTON

Contact: John Linnemeier
Contact Info: Himalayansp[@]hotmail[.]com
Time: Friday, April 3rd, 2:00 PM
Location: 310 S Eastside Dr
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+GH
Notes: Kids and/or dogs are just fine. No need to RSVP, just show up. If it’s a nice day, I’ll be by the pond in the backyard so just come down the driveway. If it’s rainy or cold, knock on the front door and my dog will announce your arrival.

WEST LAFAYETTE

Contact: Grant
Contact Info: grantfellows18[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Beering Hall of Liberal Arts (BRNG) Room 1255, 100 N University St, West Lafayette, IN 47907. 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+6FH
Group Link: https://discord.gg/QCq [remove this bit] QBp6s59

Maryland

BALTIMORE

Contact: Rivka
Contact Info: rivka[@]adrusi[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 17th, 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.com/invite/meeUK [remove this bit] NBRjX. 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.

Massachusetts

BOSTON (See CAMBRIDGE)

CAMBRIDGE

Contact: Skyler, Dan, and Owen
Contact Info: skyler[@]rationalitymeetups[.]org, dan[@]metascienceobservatory[.]org
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Sennott Park, 305 Broadway, Cambridge. I’ll be wearing a tall striped hat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87JC9W92+92
Group Link: https://linktr.ee/bostonacx
Notes: Please feel free to bring kids or pets! We’ll have snacks and pizza. The Linktr.ee will show lots of ways to get event updates, but the Discord and the google group are the most reliable.

NORTHAMPTON

Contact: Alex
Contact Info: alex[@]alexliebowitz[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 6:00 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). The entrance door is around the left coming from Black Birch Trail; we’ll put a sign saying “ACX Meetups Everywhere” or the like on the correct door. Walk straight in and you’ll come to the main room where the meetup is happening.
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 moderately-active Discord that you can join at https://discord.gg/vec [remove this bit] W7TfsPg , where I make the announcements as well.
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.

Michigan

ANN ARBOR

Contact: Joseph Pryor
Contact Info: jwpryorprojects[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 1:00 PM
Location: Friends Meetinghouse 1420 Hill St. Ann Arbor Mi If the weather is good we’ll 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, check out our monthly meetups the 3rd Saturday of every month!

DETROIT

Contact: Matt Arnold
Contact Info: matt[.]mattarn[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, May 1st, 6:30 PM
Location: i3Detroit Maker Space in Ferndale
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JRFV3P+GH
Notes: Tours of the makerspace are at the same time. Indicate to whoever answers the door that you’re here for the meetup.

EAST LANSING

Contact: Daniel A
Contact Info: daniel[.]m[.]adamiak[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 26th, 2:00 PM
Location: Moka and Co. Cafe 565 E Grand River Ave Unit 200, East Lansing, MI 48823
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JQPGMF+99
Notes: RSVP so I know big of a table to reserve.I’ll be there with an ACX sign.

Minnesota

ST PAUL

Contact: Aaron Kaufman
Contact Info: Ironlordbyron[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 10th, 4:00 PM
Location: Davanni’s Pizza : 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XX
Group Link: https://discord.gg/uWz [remove this bit] k93eVp
Notes: I will be providing pizza and salad! Vegans can theoretically eat the salad but it’s honestly slim pickings at this chain.

Montana

BOZEMAN

Contact: Thomas Cuezze
Contact Info: tcuezze[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 16th, 5:30 PM
Location: We will be at the picnic tables on the south side of Cooper Park. I will have a cardboard “ACX MEETUP” sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85QCMXF3+Q9
Notes: It would be great if you could shoot me an email to say you’re coming, but absolutely not required! If multiple people RSVP I can bring snacks. Also, would love to meet other ACX people in Montana even if you can’t make the meetup, so feel free to say hi!

HAMILTON

Contact: Tyler
Contact Info: bitterrootacx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 12:00 PM
Location: Brew X Coffee. May be on the back patio weather permitting.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85R76RWR+VR

New Jersey

MONTCLAIR

Contact: AGG
Contact Info: signoregalilei[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Lackawanna Station (1 Lackawanna Plaza, Montclair, NJ 07042) - inside the converted station building, across from “Burgers, Donuts, Potatoes”. I will have the appropriate sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G7RQ6P+FRP
Notes: The lot is paid but some nearby street parking is free. Also, one of the Inkhaven-trained notable bloggers will be there!

New Mexico

ALBUQUERQUE

Contact: Mary
Contact Info: geofishtree[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Boxing Bear Brewing Co. Bridges on Tramway Taproom, 12501 Candelaria Rd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87112. I will be at one of the picnic tables outside around the corner (not under the shelter) with an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/857M4G82+HPJ
Notes: Although this is a brewery, it’s child friendly and has plenty of non-alcoholic drink options, and outside food is allowed. I will have some food to share.

New York

ALBANY

Contact: Jake
Contact Info: jacob[.]scheiber[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 3rd, 1:00 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

BROOKLYN

Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: stefanlenoach[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, April 24th, 8:00 PM
Location: 81 McGuinness Blvd Apt. 6A
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8P3G2+5F
Notes: Please RSVP to my email

Meetup Czar note: The organizer had to cancel the event.

ITHACA

Contact: B. S.
Contact Info: bjs322[@]cornell[.]edu
Time: Saturday, May 8th, 4:00 PM
Location: Ithaca Commons Entrance.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J5CGR3+47M

Notes: Please send me an email if you plan on coming, even if your plans are uncertain, so I can plan accordingly

Meetup Czar Note: The organizer asked to change the date to May 8th.

MANHATTAN

Contact: Robi Rahman
Contact Info: robirahman94[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: Brookfield Place Atrium
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G7PX7M+4V
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc?pli=1

Meetup Czar note: The organizer asked to change the location to the Brookfield Place Atrium!

MASSAPEQUA

Contact: Gabe
Contact Info: gabeaweil[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, May 31st, 2:00 PM
Location: 47 Clinton PL., Massapequa, NY 11758
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8MG4G+53
Notes: Please rsvp to gabeaweil at gmail dot com so I know how many people to expect.

NEW YORK CITY (See Manhattan, or Brooklyn)

POUGHKEEPSIE

Contact: Matt
Contact Info: matt[.]faherty530[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 5th, 2:00 PM
Location: Crafted Kup
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H8M3VX+3Q
Notes: First time hosting, so please email me if you’re planning on attending.

North Carolina

ASHEVILLE

Contact: Vicki
Contact Info: vickirwilliams[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, May 15th, 6:00 PM
Location: Biltmore Lake Community. Please RSVP for details.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867VG8MV+6W
Notes: Exact location is weather dependent so please RSVP. Kids are welcome. Dogs may be welcome (if we meet outside). Some food is provided, but also some people usually contribute. It is up to you. RSVPs are helpful in planning that too.

CHARLOTTE

Contact: Charlie
Contact Info: charles[.]sanders72[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 4th, 3:00 PM
Location: Cordelia Park (or nearby cafe The Hobbyist or nearby food hall Optimist Hall if raining/cold/etc.)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867X65PM+W3

RALEIGH/DURHAM/CHAPEL HILL

Contact: William Crumpler
Contact Info: wdcrumpler[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 2:00 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/8773X4Q4+Q2C
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rtlw; https://discord.gg/wgx [remove this bit] 7s3wG
Notes: We will have pizza! The venue serves beer but is kid-friendly. I’ll have more details on the Google group (see link)

North Dakota

FARGO

Contact: Nathaniel
Contact Info: nathanielmchaffie[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 9th, 9:00 AM
Location: Boppa’s Bagels at 3051 25th St S, Fargo, ND. I’ll sit at a table with an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86R5R5PH+25

Ohio

COLUMBUS

Contact: Nate Dikeman
Contact Info: natedikeman[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 18, 3:00 PM
Location: 840 W 3rd Ave, Columbus, OH 43212 We'll meet at the tables up the stairs from the Starbucks inside the Giant Eagle. Look for the ACX MEETUP sign and the guy in a big blue sunhat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FRXXPC+CV5

Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY

Contact: bean
Contact Info: battleshipbean[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 1:00 PM
Location: Shannon Miller Park/Edmond Public Library (if it’s raining). I will be wearing a USS Iowa hat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8674MG3F+Q2
Notes: I will only show up if someone RSVPs.

Oregon

CORVALLIS

Contact: Kenan
Contact Info: kbitikofer[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 5:00 PM
Location: Rivas Taco Shop, 2047 NW Monroe Av
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PRHP9F+9G
Group Link: https://discord.gg/yzy [remove this bit] N6ZMU

EUGENE

Contact: Michael B
Contact Info: michael[.]bacarella[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Wednesday, April 8th, 6:00 PM
Location: beergarden. 777 W 6th Ave, Eugene, OR 97402
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6
Group Link: https://discord.gg/swA [remove this bit] exPcjNS

PORTLAND

Contact: Sam Celarek
Contact Info: scelarek[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 5:00 PM
Location: 1548 NE 15th Ave There will be a sign saying Encorepreneur Cafe on the venue. Park on the streets around the venue, parking is free but you will have to look a bit. There will be a PEAR sign outside the building, otherwise text Sam at 513-432-3310
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84QVG8MX+MV
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/portland-effective-altruism-and-rationality

Pennsylvania

HARRISBURG

Contact: Phil
Contact Info: acxharrisburg[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 3:00 PM
Location: The Millworks 340 Verbeke St, Harrisburg, PA 17102 We will hang out in the lobby for the first 5 minutes or so, look for the ACX MEETUP sign or ask at the hostess stand to find our table if you show up later.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G574C7+728
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD

PHILADELPHIA

Contact: ben
Contact Info: bwieland[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 11:00 AM
Location: La Colombe Coffee 100 S Independence Mall W #110 (6th at Market, SW corner)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB

PITTSBURGH

Contact: Jenna
Contact Info: pghacx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 2:00 PM
Location: City Kitchen at Bakery Square. If we have good weather, we’ll be at the outdoor tables on the southeast side. If not, we’ll be in the atrium between City Kitchen and Alta Via Pizza/Jeni’s Ice Cream. Look for the ACX sign!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2F34M+JP5
Group Link: https://discord.gg/6gb [remove this bit] Z7gQMtz and https://forms.gle/22YCsXAYFPbBCzvMA
Notes: We have a local ACX meetup! Currently it is every second Sunday from 2pm-5pm at the Panera Bread at Bakery Square, instead of City Kitchen. The next one will be May 3rd. Join the Discord or subscribe to the mailing list to get notifications of when the next one will be!

Rhode Island

PROVIDENCE

Contact: Mike
Contact Info: michaeltraner7[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 4:00 PM
Location: Prospect Terrace Park if it is decent weather, the Providence Place Mall Food Court if weather is bad. I’ll have a sign saying ACX MEETUP set up nearby.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87HCRHHV+X3

Tennessee

NASHVILLE

Contact: Jonah
Contact Info: generalpurposeemail1[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 2:00 PM
Location: At the outdoor seating area directly in front of Nicholas Zeppos College at Vanderbilt university. Here is a Google map pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/dQJLv8ix3mn7f4rq6?g_st=ic Please join the Group Me (https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP) for pictures of the seating area and to talk to us if you have trouble finding us. Address: 45WV+J3R Nashville, Tennessee Coordinates (36.1466033, -86.8073613). Free parking is a 5-10 minute walk away at Centennial Park and, especially, at Martin’s BBQ Joint on Elliston Place. Paid parking that’s a 2-3 minute walk away can be found along the entire stretch of West End Avenue that overlaps with Vanderbilt’s main campus (on the street facing side of Nicholas Zeppos College). You could also park at the Vanderbilt bookstore parking lot, but parking is limited to an hour and I’ve been towed there before (whereas Martin’s BBQ has never failed me).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/868M45WV+J2
Group Link: https://groupme.com/join_group/114018377/7wuY7gPP
Notes: Please join the GroupMe so we can cater for the appropriate number of people and choose foods everyone will enjoy.

SEWANEE

Contact: Daksh
Contact Info: tyagid0[at]sewanee[dot]edu
Time: Saturday, April 25, 02:00 PM
Location: Stirling's Coffee House porch
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867P634M+39
Additional Notes: Please RSVP so I know how many people to expect and let Stirling's know in advance if we're going to be a big group!

Meetup Czar note: Date changed from April 11 to April 25 at organizer request.

Texas

AUSTIN

Contact: Silas Barta
Contact Info: sbarta[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, May 30th, 12:00 PM
Location: The Brewtorium, 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752; will be at an indoor table with an ACX sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/862487GM+96
Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/
Notes: Feel free to bring kids. Dogs are not allowed indoors. If parking fills up, you can park on the street in the neighborhood off Denson Drive.

BELTON

Contact: Michael
Contact Info: michael[@]postlibertarian[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 1:00 PM
Location: Arusha Coffee, 126 N East St, Belton, TX 76513. I’ll have a sign that says ACX MEETUP
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86343G4P+RX4
Group Link: https://discord.gg/XNt [remove this bit] kJfqUqX
Notes: We’re a pretty small group but we’d love to grow!

DALLAS

Contact: Ethan Morse
Contact Info: ethan[.]morse97[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 2:00 PM
Location: Whole Foods at 11700 Preston Rd Suite 714, Dallas, TX 75230. We’ll be upstairs closest to the windows and outdoor seating area.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8645W55W+2JV

HOUSTON

Contact: Nathaniel
Contact Info: nathanielrouth[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 26th, 12:00 PM
Location: Miller Meadow of Hermann Park. We’ll have a picnic blanket and an “ACX Meetups Everywhere” sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X6PJC6+42
Group Link: https://discord.gg/cb7 [remove this bit] K3Q6hKP
Notes: If driving, you can park for free in Hermann Park Lot C, or pay to park in the garage at the Museum of Natural Science or Museum of Fine Arts. Check Discord or LessWrong in the event of inclement weather.

MCALLEN

Contact: Miliana
Contact Info: sa111[@]wellesley[.]edu
Time: Saturday, May 2nd, 1:00 PM
Location: Robin Park, Mcallen
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76R37Q8H+3H
Group Link: https://discord.gg/rz2 [remove this bit] WQ7aXjA

SAN ANTONIO

Contact: James P
Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 12th, 1:00 PM
Location: 203 E Jones Ave Ste 101, San Antonio, TX 78215, USA
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3CGP9+CV
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt

Utah

SALT LAKE CITY

Contact: Ross
Contact Info: wearenotsaved[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM
Location: Liberty Park West Side Near the Chargepoint charging station
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85GCP4WF+VJ

Virginia

WILLIAMSBURG

Contact: Jough
Contact Info: joughdonakowski[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Friday, May 1st, 6:00 PM
Location: Bonanza Social Kitchen, 220 Monticello Ave Unit M, 2b, Williamsburg, VA 23185, likely a table in the back
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/879577JG+JP
Group Link: https://discord.gg/qZp [remove this bit] sXxV89
Notes: Please RSVP via email so I can estimate a headcount and arrival times as the location will close at 8:30

Washington

BELLEVUE

Contact: Joey M
Contact Info: me[@]joeym[.]org
Time: Saturday, April 11th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bellevue Library, Meeting room 4. 1111 110th Avenue NE. Bellevue, WA 98004
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+35
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/seattle-rationality/events/; https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PmvZmMxBtxE87PHZf; https://discord.gg/6qk [remove this bit] jG5heDC

RICHLAND

Contact: Kamron
Contact Info: kgbrinkerhoff[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 10:00 AM
Location: Northeast corner of Leslie Groves Park near the pavilion. I will be wearing a purple shirt
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85R28P7Q+6F
Notes: Please RSVP

SEATTLE

Contact: Nikita Sokolsky
Contact Info: sokolx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 26th, 6:00 PM
Location: Stoup Brewing, 1158 Broadway, Seattle [look for the ACX sign]
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJM7H+4Q
Group Link: https://m.facebook.com/groups/seattlerationality/
Notes: Stoup serves both beer and non-alcoholic drinks. You can bring your own food.

Wisconsin

MADISON

Contact: Ben
Contact Info: benjamin.boerigter@gmail.com
Time: Saturday, April 4, 2:00 PM
Location: Memorial Union
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MG3JG2+G26
Additional Notes: Feel free to bring kids! Forecast for the day looks iffy so we can meet inside the Rathskeller, near one of the fireplaces. I will be wearing a shirt with the image of an iguana on it, with a small sign labeled "ACX Meetup."

South America

Brazil

BELO HORIZONTE

Contact: David Reis
Contact Info: davidreis[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, April 25, 03:00 PM
Location: Copa Cozinha Savassi - Rua Paraíba, 858, Belo Horizonte - MG, 30130-145
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/58GR3388+CP
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0SZ [remove this bit] e8fdU8O1WgLd4GsST6

Meetup Czar Note: The initial date was incorrect, it should be the 25th not the 23rd.

CURITIBA

Contact: Vitor
Contact Info: vitor[.]felixx[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: We’ll be on front of the greenhouse in the Botanical Garden with a ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/586GHQ46+QP

FLORIANÓPOLIS

Contact: Adiel
Contact Info: adiel[@]airpost[.]net
Time: Saturday, May 16th, 4:00 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/Ks3 [remove this bit] XRn1t5Z48rCn7ruS7RC
Notes: Everyone is welcome! As usual, there will be cookies.

RIO DE JANEIRO

Contact: MP
Contact Info: ma[.]popst[@]hotmail[.]com
Time: Sunday, April 19th, 3:00 PM
Location: Padaria Ipanema
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/589R2Q8W+73
Notes: Padaria Ipanema also has beer

Chile

SANTIAGO

Contact: Iñaki
Contact Info: inaki[.]escarate[@]gmail[.]com
Time: Saturday, April 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: Location: Mercado Urbano Tobalaba, en la entrada poniente
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+XF
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H42 [remove this bit] KGoGuAt5D7tL0u8HBlr

Paraguay

ASUNCIÓN

Contact: Nuño Sempere
Contact Info: nuno[.]semperelh[@]protonmail[.]com
Time: Thursday, April 2nd, 3:00 PM
Location: West Coffee Julio Correa
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5864PCGM+34

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

“But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!” Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad.

Maybe there is some possible comparison where some altruist cares about some set of foreigners more than a comparable set of countrymen? The war in Gaza killed 50,000 people, but the opioid crisis kills a bit over 50,000 Americans per year - is everyone who cares about Gaza exactly equally concerned about the opioid crisis? No, but there’s a better explanation - people care about dramatic deaths in big explosions more than boring health crises, regardless of where they happen. Everyone, lib and con alike, cared more about 9-11 than about a hundred opioid crises, even though the former only killed 4% as many people as the latter. And even the people who care about the opioid crisis usually can’t bring themselves to care about anything on the List Of Top US Causes Of Death, which are all extra-boring things like diabetes. Once you match like to like, nope, it’s pretty hard to find a “telescopic altruism” example that stands out from the general background of people having weird priorities.

Nearly everyone cares about people close to them more than people far away. If there’s a lib who would attend a Gaza protest instead of getting their deathly-ill kid emergency medical care, I haven’t met them - and the “telescopic altruism” crowd certainly hasn’t provided evidence of their existence. Instead, the people who care about their neighbors 1,000,000x times more than Gazans point to the people who ‘only’ care about their neighbors 1,000x times more than Gazans and say “Look! Those guys care about Gazans more than their neighbors! Get ‘em!” in order to avoid any debate about whether a million or a thousand or whatever is the right multiplier.

II.

At this point, usually the telescopic altruism people bring up That One Study.

They have not, in general, read That One Study. But they have seen a graphic from it.

The inner circles of this graphic represent people close to the respondent - for example, circle 1 is immediate family, circle 4 is friends, circle 7 is countrymen. After that, they get further and weirder: 9 is everyone in the world, 11 is all higher life, 12 includes “paramecia and amoebae”, 15 includes rocks.

The “telescopic altruism” people read the study as saying that conservatives properly care about their family first and so on, whereas the liberals care more about rocks and amoebae than their own families. Big if true.

It isn’t. The heatmap was just a poorly-designed attempt to represent the limit of concern. If the liberal map is “hottest” at animals, that means liberals say animals are worthy of at least some care. If a conservative’s map is “hottest” at friends, that means the conservative only cares about their friends (and doesn’t care at all about countrymen, foreigners, or animals).

When the paper actually looks at who cares more about their friends and family, liberals win very slightly on friends and conservatives very slightly on family, but not in a way that matters - it’s mostly just a grab bag of tiny irrelevant effects.

Conservatives can take heart in a different study in the paper, which gives people a limited supply of 100 “moral units” to distribute. If you distribute any moral units at all to foreigners, then you necessarily have fewer for your own countrymen. But this proves too much. If you distribute moral units to your cousin, you have fewer for your own child - does this make you a “telescopic altruist” who hates everyone close to him? Is this even wronging your child in any way? The average decent person is able to be decent to both their child and their cousin; anyone who freaks out about someone who is nice to their cousin, because “how can they take that niceness away from their own child?” doesn’t understand niceness. If you design an experiment where every moral unit you give someone must be taken from someone else, then people who care about their cousin will necessarily be robbing their child - but this is an artifact of the study design, not a condemnation of cousin-likers.

III.

Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”

You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.

When I look out in the world, I see more evidence for the correlated altruism hypothesis than the telescopic one.

Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking demanding that the government send food to people starving in Ethiopia. But would they support government programs to help Americans starving near their own home? Yes - most Democrats support programs like free school lunches (used as a way to ensure poor kids get at least one good meal a day), and most Republicans oppose them. This is probably just downstream around general beliefs in government intervention, but at least these beliefs are consistent.

Telescopic liberal altruists are always asking you to donate bednets and medications to fight pandemics in Africa. But would they care about a pandemic that affected ordinary Americans? Yes - the COVID pandemic was only five years ago, and most Democrats supported stronger anti-pandemic measures than most Republicans.

Maybe this is still too telescopic - helping poor sick Americans was just another part of their plot to avoid helping their families and friends? I don’t really know what metric you would use to determine who is a better friend or family member, but here are some vaguely related statistics:

I don’t really think liberals are better spouses/parents in the way a naive reading of these maps might suggest - but there’s certainly no sign that they’re worse (except in Massachusetts - I blame the Kennedys!)

I will grant this to the telescopic altruism believers - I know many people who spend endless time and energy telling everyone else exactly how to behave, while their own lives and communities are total messes. I think greater familiarity with this pattern will find that they’re not total messes because these people fail to care about their own communities. They’re total messes because these people care way too much about their own communities, and are so messed up and bad at everything that every action they take in their own community makes it actively worse. This isn’t better. But it is, at least, different.